Are you proud? Are you proud to be gay, to be queer, to be lesbian, to be bisexual, to be transgender, to be non-binary, to be gender dysphoric, to be asexual, to be intersex, to be… whatever you wish? This question is dividing the contemporary LGBTQ+ community on campuses, in academia, on the streets, in the bars and wherever we gather, and it probably will be evident enough at the forthcoming Gay Pride in London on July 6. In short, the community in the United Kingdom is very much in the same place as such communities in many privileged part of the globe and this documentary fully chronicles and surveys this.
Ashley Joiner’s new documentary Are You Proud? describes, firstly historically and then issue by issue, the journey of the LGBTQ+ community in Britain from first tentative attempts at legal reform to the full panoply of the challenges that we now face. This includes the attack of Clause 28, the Aids/HIV crisis, the backlash from the police after the initial legalisation to the fevered debate nowadays, the meaning of sexual identity is and how it relates to all the other identities that are found in the LGBTQ+ community (racism being a prominent topic).
We are given an account of the life of one man who, from his days involved in WWII, to a pretended marriage, producing children, came out years after he knew he was gay. We are treated to charming footage of men dancing together shortly after homosexual acts in private between men aged 21 and over were made legal, looking so conventional it is comic. We see interesting footage about an early demonstration on Highbury Fields. Michael Cashman movingly describes how gay men who had died of Aids related symptoms were “reclaimed” by their conventional families, their gay identities were whitewashed away, and they disappeared suddenly without explanation from the gay community.
The UK community suffered the particular insult of Clause 28 from its own government in which schools discussing sexual issues with pupils were forbidden to “intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality”. The absurd assumption that homosexuality could be “promoted” demonstrated how nasty establishment residual prejudice could be.
Having climbed out from under the rock of oppression and the description as filthy, dirty, perverted and dangerous, the LGBTQ+ community has constantly sought to claim its own narrative as proud and out. This has led to, especially under the influence of sexual and gender identity politics, initially so valuable in getting rid of insulting narratives, to an obsession with identities, sexualities and life-style and the interactions between them. I think this is a pity, but we are going to be detained in this place for some time yet.
This documentary does full justice to the situation of the LGBTQ+ community, including some of the downsides such as the commercialisation of Pride, and it deserves to be seen widely. I wonder what the situation will be the situation in 50 years’ time.
Are You Proud? is out in cinemas on Friday, July 26th. On VoD Friday, September 20th.
Cinema, perhaps better than any other medium, has the ability to completely collapse time through the power of editing. Think the epic transition between the prehistoric era and space travel in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968), the non-linear structures of Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994), allowing viewers to experience cinema in terms of thematic connection and not simply A-to-B storytelling. Don’t Look Now is another classic example of how editing can transform material into something truly haunting and marvellous. Yet here, instead of freeing the story, Don’t Look Now’s editing chokes it, creating a sense of dread that is palpable from the very first frame to the last.
Nicolas Roeg had experimented with fragmented storytelling techniques before with editor Antony Gibbs with Performance (1970) and Walkabout (1971), yet this collaboration with Graeme Clifford represented a major step up in form; its use of fast-forwards, flashbacks and frequent, sometimes lightning-quick insert shots a true masterclass in form.
Everything is set from the very first frame, entombed in stone like Venice’s churches. While John (Donald Sutherland) and Laura Baxter’s (Julie Christie) daughter — clad in an iconic red mackintosh — is playing with a red ball outside a pond, John is working through some slides. As he spills water on the slide of a church, the scene turns completely red, linking his daughter’s drowning with his own eventual bloody demise.
They move to Venice, where John works on restoring a church. The city is treated as one giant mausoleum, emptied out and shrouded in mist. It’s wintertime, everyone is wrapped up in hats, scarves and coats, and there are endless shadows emanating from its tiny, winding alleyways. As the psychic blind woman says, expressing her sister’s view: “it’s like a city in aspic, wrapped over from a dinner party, where all the guests are dead or gone.” It’s a place, like John and Laura, stuck in time, seemingly unable to move forwards or backwards.
Their relationship suffers, as demonstrated by its now iconic sex scene. It is still rare to see a film use sex as a thematic point rather than simply plot advancement, Laura and John desperately writhing together as a means to cling on to the little spark of life they have left. Intercut with scenes of them getting dressed afterwards, it stresses both their togetherness and estrangement, showing the difficulty of maintaining passion after suffering such a momentous loss. Grief has this power to rent people apart, giving them little to cling onto other than the memory of their daughter.
When Laura meets fellow British tourists Heather (Hilary Mason) and Wendy (Clelia Matania) and Heather explains how she can communicate with her daughter, she is naturally intrigued by these odd yet mystical duo. In a common horror theme from Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polasnki, 1968) to Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018), her husband doesn’t believe a word she says. But when he starts seeing a little hooded figure in a red mackintosh who looks just like his daughter, mysterious happenings start to question his grounded and skeptical beliefs. Perhaps he has the ability to see things too.
The technicolour cinematography allows the red of his daughter’s jacket to really pop out, contrasting violently with all the other muted colours. It is perhaps one of the most famous uses of the colour in cinematic history, alongside the little girl in a red coat in the otherwise black-and-white Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993). To stress the murderous aspect of the colour, Roeg often uses dissolves, allowing red objects to bleed into one another with nightmarish regularity.
Things double and double, the use of repetition and doppelgängers constricting the narrative to its deadly eventuality. John’s hubris is in thinking he can make sense of what he sees in front of him. With bodies fished out of the river at regular intervals, and a sighting of his wife on a boat with the two women, John frantically searches for his wife despite the fact she has gone back to England to see her son, who has had a mysterious accident. What he has in fact seen is a premonition of his own funeral. The ending — which is either haunting or oddly bathetic depending on who you ask — then reveals that the red cloaked figure is not a phantom but a murderous dwarf, who quickly dispatches him with a knife. Then in a remarkably edited sequence, the whole film seems to pass before his eyes, revealing its narrative to be almost completely circuitous.
There is a religious component to the dazzling editing. If God exists, then He would not see the world in a linear fashion, but everything that has ever happened and everything that will ever happen simultaneously. Everything is predetermined, nothing happens by chance. This is the true horror: not jump scares or bloody mutilations, but the idea that nothing you can do can ever change your fate. Only the gifted such as Heather and John can see parts of the future, but this doesn’t mean they can do anything about it. A truly terrifying prospect indeed.
A 4k restoration of Don’t Look Now hits UK cinemas on Friday, July 5th (nearly half a century after its original release in 1973)
Virginia Woolf’s novels are wholly original, dazzlingly sensational texts that sing right off the page, able to conjure up whole worlds, smells and sensation through the innovative use of stream-of-consciousness. A woman able to carve out a literary career in a world in which men still had all the advantages, she is a true feminist icon and one of the greatest writers of all time.
A large part of her later success is down to the inspiration of Vita-Sackville West, her friend, confidante, fellow writer and lover. Famously Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992), featuring a gender-shifting protagonist, is based on her cross-dressing style. Like Scott and Zelda Fitzgerland, or Henry Miller and Anäis Nin, this is one of the great literary relationships, and ripe material for cinematic adaptation.
Literary biopics can go one of three ways. In the first two, they either take inspiration from the writer himself, and ape his style, such as in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Terry Gilliam, 1998), or have a completely different auteurial approach, like Alexei German Jr’s melancholic look at Sergei Dovlatov’s life in the eponymous 2018 film. Yet too many take the third route, in which the major events of a person’s life are simply lifelessly recounted. Vita and Virginia is perhaps one of the most egregious examples of this, yet considering the specifically lesbian subject matter, even more of a greater disappointment.
Love has rarely seemed more anodyne than in Vita and Virginia, which has a miscast Gemma Arterton and Elizabeth Debicki playing the two lovers. Here one of the most important women to have ever put pen to paper is reduced to a wholly passive, sickly, and sad woman, devoid of any true emotion, inspiration or true internalisation. Her lesbian lover, Vita Sackville-West fares no better, Gemma Arterton more focused on her aristocratic mannerisms than her transgressive personality or desire to shake the system. Together they seem like they’re still reading through the script.
Rent apart by circumstance and repression, the two women read their letters to each other looking straight to the camera Barry Jenkins-style (although without any of the same cinematic tenderness). Here one line-reading struck me as symptomatic of the film’s laziness as a whole. The text on the screen reads “We can live in the present moment – together”. There is a dash between the words “moment” and “together” yet Arterton rushes straight through the phrase, giving her plea no weight whatsoever.
Everything feels off. There is little at stake and even less to care about. In better hands, there might have been something vital to say about the role of women in society, the patriarchy, the coded nature of same-sex desire, the power of romantic inspiration and the relationship between life and art, but Vita and Virginia — based on the 1992 play by co-writer Eileen Atkins — is devoid of any nuance, allowing characters to simply say things out loud that another film would’ve played out through genuine conflict.
For the vast majority of people, passion and desire is a mixture of mental and sexual sensations. When you’re homosexual in a repressed society, this can result in a great conflict between the two — for example in the great Call Me By Your Name (Luca Guadagnino, 2017), which elegantly linked physical motifs with mental sensations to a highly sophisticated degree. Here, Vita and Virginia may spend a lot of time discussing the nature of desire — sometimes embarrassingly through a heterosexual mouthpiece who asks stupid questions like “How do women really have sex?” — yet is remarkably tame when it comes to the physical component; even recycling the same sex scene twice. It reflects the British biopic’s still reticent nature to portray homosexual relationships with any true spark or joy, resulting in a boring suffering-narrative that is potentially more damaging to homosexuals than truly helpful.
The overwrought score by Isobel Waller-Bridge, full of ahistorical synth nonsense, takes us out of the past and retrofits their romance to try and suit modern times. These aren’t helped by the cony sound effects, kisses bizarrely complemented by extremely kitsch ASMR breathing sounds. This Luhrmannisation is both annoying and alienating, elevating Vita and Virginia from the bland to the outright awful. Woolf deserves much better than this.
Vita and Virginia is in cinemas on Friday, July 5th. On VoD on Monday, November 4th. Stay at home and read a book instead.
Wendy (Lena Headley) is an immigration officer whose task is to reject as many refugees as possible. She’s recognised amongst her colleagues for her ability to spot bogus asylum seekers, promptly and efficiently rejecting the more dubious applications. Through her interrogation, she must figure out whether Haile (Ivanno Jeremiah) is telling the truth, or if his alleged predicament is but a concoction of an opportunistic economic immigrant.
This refugee drama takes sides straight away by noting that 70 million people have been forcibly displaced around the planet, more than the population of the United Kingdom and Ireland combined. It’s as if the entire population of the British Isles was fleeing war or persecution. Wendy does not seem to concerned about these figures, instead searching for loopholes preventing her applicants from settling in the UK. Haile’s case is a very straightforward one: he lied in his application, he does not have any dependants and he attacked two police officer upon being found in the back of lorry that crossed the Channel. All of the odds are against him.
Despite the difficulties, Haile is kind and serene, even affectionate. He tells Wendy that she shares the name with his mother. An officer interjects: “now that’s a new one”, suggesting that he is not telling the truth. The Home Office assumes that applicants lie by default. That’s a sheer perversion of justice.
At first, Wendy is the epitome of heartlessness. The perfect bureaucrat in a world where kindness and altruism are becoming increasingly rare. Or even criminalised, such as in the US and also right here in Europe, particularly in Italy. Helping others has become a criminal offence punishable with a lengthy custodial sentence. Ironically, Haile is also being penalised because of his humanity and solidarity. He refused to kill a rebel in homeland Eritrea, and he’s now wanted for “treason”. His selflessness also shows on his journey from Calais to Dover, where he risked his own life in order to save other refugees concealed inside the same lorry.
While very audacious in its message of solidarity in a world increasingly xenophobic and intolerant, The Flood is very conservative in its format. The narrative is formulaic and sanatised. All the right moral questions are asked, and yet the story lacks a little rawness, such as in the Wolfgang Fischer’s far more riveting Styx (released earlier this year). Some of the most dramatic moments (including an armed altercation between refugees and a death) feel banal and contrived. Plus the story is very predictable. You will work out in the first five minutes that the coldhearted Wendy will gradually sympathise with Haile and eventually switch alliances, culminating is a very noble gesture that could cost her her job. She is undergoing a “car-crash” acrimonious divorce involving a child, and being constantly reminded of her frailties and vulnerabilities. As a consequence, she feels compassion.
The Flood is out on demand and also in cinemas across the UK on Friday, June 21st, and then on VoD (Curzon Home Cinema) the following Monday. The film’s release coincides with World Refugee Week. Curzon is working with the Human Rights Watch in order to promote awareness of true-life stories. Worth a viewing.
In response to the ongoing recovery following the 2008 financial crisis, which saw Britain enter a period of austerity, former Prime Minister David Cameron’s message was that we were all in this together. Just shy of a decade later, Theresa May in her Brexit speech to the House of Commons in March of 2017 said, “…when I sit around the negotiating table in the months ahead, I will represent every person in the United Kingdom – young and old, rich and poor, city, town, country and all the villages and hamlets in between.”
What we hear in these disingenuous words are patriotic pandering to the masses. These are words chosen for effect, with the specific intent of convincing us that they are our champions or representatives. Yet of concern is how to the political elite, the diverse life experiences are an abstract concept, and their words or political spiel becomes a disingenuous version of the American Dream, better termed the “aspirational society”. And it is here that James Gardner’s feature debut Jellyfish is a scathing social and political indictment, bursting their proverbial bubble of a utopian dream of British unity.
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A stinging piece of filmmaking
Set in Margate, Jellyfish centres around 15-year old Sarah Taylor, who between struggling to get along with her school classmates and dealing with her overbearing boss at the amusement arcade, is forced to look after her unstable mother and two younger siblings. One day her drama teacher challenges her volatility, suggesting she look to devise a stand-up comedy routine for the graduation showcase.
From city bankers and financiers to Margate’s 15-year old vulnerable adolescent. From a former PM claiming we were all in it together, who owned shares in an off-shore investment fund, and May’s own financial interests secured in blind trusts, to a vulnerable young person giving hand jobs out the back of the amusement arcade to top up her part time wage, even conning men on the prowl late at night. While rich and poor, like so many words or phrases are abstract terms in political spiel, they have a real meaning for those they describe. Gardner’s film is a piece of socially conscious filmmaking, with its finger on the pulse of our contemporary society, that pierces the disingenuous.
So, is Jellyfish a fictional dystopia, or is it the truth beneath the lies of a disingenuous political system – one motivated by personal agenda and ideology?
Yes, Sarah is a fictional character played by an actress, but a film does not exist in a vacuum, especially cinema that leans towards social realist cinema. Similarly to the cinema of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, it captures a snapshot of genuine experiences of the impoverished in our society. What this hopefully achieves is to create a greater empathy for individuals whose lives are blighted by such struggles as Sarah’s, using visual storytelling in order to create a visceral emotional understanding.
With its finger on the pulse, Jellyfish is in a unique position to humanise what the mainstream news media struggles to – the latter prone to evoking shock and anger. However, by taking us inside of the experiences of the impoverished, Gardner allows genuine empathy to flourish. Sarah is not only a victim of her situation and an ineffective social infrastructure, she is also a human being that can empower herself if supported by her society, and her rousing performance at the graduation show, of teacher and student empowering one another, is a testament of this.
Brexit has become the proverbial blame game for Britain’s inadequacies, echoing U.S President Donald Trump’s pulling out of storage Ronald Reagan’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. Ironically, it was Reagan and Margaret Thatcher that would play a significant role in deregulating the financial sector, that led to the 2008 crisis. If history has taught us a lesson, it is that a nation’s pursuit of greatness or prosperity leads to a greater division between the rich and the poor. The pursuit of British independence from the European Union has created what is effectively a smokescreen for the Tory government to install the Universal Credit system, criticised heavily for its ineffectiveness. Taylor’s sexual activities echoes recent concerns raised in the tabloids of March this year, reports of “survival sex”, of women on Universal Credit forced to turn to prostitution in order to survive.
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Very Brexit problems
Gardner’s films shows a dystopian truth beneath the disingenuous political system – of a PM who on the one hand asserts she is champion of the poor, yet compounds their poverty by supporting a withdrawal from the EU’ that has seen Labour opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn unable to fully challenge the failings of the Universal Credit system.
In one scene, the camera pulls back and leaves Sarah her in the managers office, where she is sexually assaulted. A character leads us on the journey through a story, and this is important to consider in looking at Jellyfish as a political critique. Gardner has delivered a genuine message of a Britain fractured, and while as a nation or a union of four nations we are a part of the Brexit narrative, sub-plots divide the life experiences of a diverse population. The abandonment of Sarah should act as a reminder of how connections are a matter of convenience or necessity, and just as she is necessary to the story, and May and Cameron had to appeal to the country, this connection can be terminated at any point by the person or persons who hold the power in the relationship.
Gardner through his decision to abandon Sarah becomes a metaphor of the British government, echoing the manipulative political machinations, specifically how Brexit juxtaposed with Universal Credit, the current political Tory elite are uninterested in uniting the country. Yet more poignantly, Sarah’s unseen suffering taps into a deeper feeling that has followed Brexit – of individuals no longer represented by the system, left to feel essentially invisible, as the rich and wealthy leading Tories gamble with future stability, selling off parts of the NHS in trade deals with Trump’s America. And who will be the one’s that will pay the price for these choices? The Sarah Taylor’s of our country, whose life experiences are an abstract concept to those individuals in power.
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Redemption through creativity
Jellyfish by its conclusion is a mix of cautionary optimism, remaining cynical towards the political establishment. It is indeed a celebration of the creative expression of the individual, and how art is a unifying force. Sarah finds a means to express herself and connect with people in a way she had previously been unable to, but beyond the end credits, Jellyfish is a cautionary tale of aspiration. The question lingers on what follows this momentary success for Sarah? Will she be allowed to succeed, to overcome her social and economic status, or will she remain stranded in an impoverished existence? The creativity of her comedy as a means of expression, in this age of austerity in which arts funding and creative careers are facing increasingly difficult times, leaves one with the impression that there is caution to be applied to aspiration. It calls for cynicism towards the political system that represents a select few – arts and creatives often a justified sacrifice.
Not every one is represented, but like Sarah in that room, there are those of us that abandoned or overlooked, and in this adversarial era of Brexit, it is the political elite pursuing their own agendas and self-interest. Can they really be said to be representing us all, or even a majority? The main two parties fight inner battles amongst their ranks, while other parties including the Liberal Democrats and The Greens are fighting to get the message across that they hear our voice. Yet whose voice? Beyond Brexit, there are sub-plots impacting ordinary Britons, and the adversarial disagreement between ‘Remain’ and ‘Leave’ only threatens to increase the hardships of the most vulnerable in our society.
Jellyfish is available on digital HD on Monday, June 24th.
The story begins on New Year’s Eve in the streets of Glasgow. Office worker Elena (Spanish actress Laia Costa, best remembered for the lead role in Sebastian Schipper’s Victoria, from 2016) attempts to hail a cab, but marine biology PhD student Jake (Josh O’Connor, from Francis Lee’s 2017 God’s Own Country) succeeds to capture the driver’s attention first. Elena challenges Jake, and the kind and polite young man offers to share the cab and even to walk the intoxicated and crotchety woman home. He eventually visits her flat, and they bond over Elvis Costello’s raw masterpiece I Want You. What started out as a small quarrel soon develops into a full-blown romantic relationship.
The young and intelligent Jake moves in with the beautiful and yet vaguely dysfunctional Elena. He’s mostly unfazed when Elena tells him that she’s in reality five years older than him. Or nine even. Elena is 35, while Jake is a mere 26 years of age. The age gap does not seem to affect their relationship until Jake asks Elena to expand their family, and they encounter successive problems conceiving a child. Perhaps after Elena’s age (and particularly the age of her eggs) is indeed a barrier to a happy future together?
Jake never blames Elena for her inability to carry a pregnancy. Quite the opposite, he’s understanding and supportive. His father pays for private IVF, after they exhaust their attempts in the NHS. The first private IVF clinic turns them down in order to preserve their sterling stats (ie. a very high success rate). As a result, Elena feels increasingly insecure. She repeatedly challenges Jake, convinced that he will eventually abandon her in favour of a younger and broodier female. Despite her partner’s positive attitude, she feels the burden of a society that pressurises women into motherhood.
First and foremost, Only You is a film about the the vain attempts to create the elusive “perfect family”. Other families seem better than theirs. After all, the grass is always greener. Elena is perplexed to find out that their friends just separated because their offspring was unplanned, in what the father described as a “shock pregnancy”. They were not as happy as they seemed. Nevertheless, Elena grows increasingly touchy and apprehensive. She’s convinced that Jake will eventually leave her.
This is also film about the pressures to become a mother. The burden is almost always on the female. It’s never mentioned or even acknowledged that the difficulties conceiving might be related to the father’s sterility. Some people, however, might think there’s an element of sexism in how the female is portrayed as mostly irrational and distraught. I see it differently. I think that Harry Wootliff (who happens to be a female director) is rather compassionate towards the film protagonist, and she does not seem to blame her for her own internalised ageism. This is a very emotionally frank movie.
On the other hand, Only You is too long at 120 minutes of duration. Very little happens during the course of the movie. The repeated visits to IVF clinics and constant quarrelling get a bit tiring in the second half of the story. Plus, Elena and Jake’s ordeal might seem a little petty for LGBT and elderly childless couples, people who opt to adopt and those who are simply not interested in having a child. A little vanilla.
Only You is out in cinemas and also on demand on Friday, July 12th.
From the opening wide angle shot of Alan (Bill Nighy) standing on an empty beach under an open umbrella we are treated to a film of visual delight, dry wit and bitter sweet pathos. Alan’s son Michael stormed out of the family home when he was 19, made furious by a game of scrabble, and hasn’t been seen since. Alan’s life is consumed by his search for Michael. He says he doesn’t want to die until he has solved the problem. He roams over the country looking for places where Michael might be and can’t go to bed without a walk beforehand in search of the missing man. His remaining son Peter (Sam Riley), now married to Sue (Alice Lowe) with a son, Jack (Louis Healy), has given up on his father yet tolerates him when he turns at his home and has to share Jack’s bunk bed because there is no other room in the house.
You might think that this is a film of intense tragedy with deep feelings and ardent longing taking over all the characters. On the contrary, I think only in this country, Britain, would such a film be made where tragedy is treated as an extended joke. Rather in the manner of Harold Pinter, the script is littered with dry, witty little non-sequiturs, strange obsessions and the loving survey of the most banal objects that make up the texture of daily life.
This film is driven by, of all things, scrabble. Scrabble was the cause of Michael storming out of his home, scrabble provides clues as to where Michael might be (by tell-tale behaviour on online scrabble sites), the fact that Alan has an extra “Z” for making the word “jazz”, which might provide a link to Michael. That Michael always played to the other person – not the board – could provide clues as to where Michael is on scrabble sites.
You might think that Alan is a tragic obsessive but not at all. This passion for scrabble gives him an intense of observation which leads to him labelling everything, an understanding of the small nuances of life and even to being a very considerate lover in bed – so says Margaret (Jenny Agutter), with whom he briefly links up. He notices that Jack (Louis Healy), with his sloppy old beanie hat, dishevelled jacket and uninteresting trousers, is cutting no ice with Rachel (Alice-Grace Gregoire), a girl at the local bus stop, whom he deeply fancies. So Alan, his grandad, a tailor by trade, whisks him off to his shop, gets him a nice suit (he advises him about doing up the buttons – the titular “sometimes always never” is the rule for a line of three jacket buttons from the top downwards) and cuts his hair. In no time at Rachel is all eyes for Jack and snuggles up to him at the bus stop.
The delight of this film is its concentration on small details. The eating up of meals on a tray, shots of people talking to one another, banal transistors and clocks, the dampness of the windows in buses, the emphasis on large spaces in the country, emphasising the great gap of Michael’s absence in Alan’s life. It is all very English and in that, very true. Life’s tragedies are not swelling choruses in operas. They are objects left in the corner when someone leaves forever (Michael’s guitar with his name labelled on the case), exasperated looks from family members, the silliness of storming out of the house over a game of scrabble, the ticking of clocks, wide open landscapes. The film captures the obsessiveness of grief, the need to keep re-connecting with the loved one, the going-over of details, the constant remembering of habits.
Yet this film is not sad at all. It is very amusing at times because people are funny and deserve compassion. Peter decides to resolve Alan’s constant searching. I won’t tell you how and I won’t tell you if Michael is ever found. The only other point that needs to be mentioned is the appearance of Alexei Sayle (Bill) in a short cameo performance, which is not particularly necessary but is entertaining in its way. Alexei Sayle is incapable of being boring.
This film will live in your mind for a long time. It is a jewel of British filmmaking and should not be missed. Sometimes Always Never is out in cinemas on Friday, June 14th. On VoD on Monday, October 14th.
Eleven-year-old British Nigerian Olufemi (Tai Golding) lives his foster mother Mary (Denise Black) somewhere in rural Lincolnshire. He has a vibrant and peaceful infancy with white mother and school friends, as suggested in a cathartic opening scene. The young boy jumps and shouts with others around his age, the intensity of the moment emphasised by slow motion. One day, Olufemi’s biological mother Yinka (Gbemisola Ikumelo) decides to take him back to London.
Olufemi’s life changes overnight from a peaceful and unspoiled infancy in an idyllic middle-class environment to a rough and dysfunctional upbringing in a council flat in London. His mother regrets that Olufemi hasn’t embraced the traditions and values of Nigeria, which she claims to be his “spiritual home”. He doesn’t like his name, which means “God loves me” in Yoruba, instead preferring the shorter version “Femi”. She beats him up.
He also has a hard time at school, as the far more streetwise boys in his class (who also happen to be black) bully him, ridiculing his unusual and non-English sounding name. He challenges a black classmate with the very anglophone name Dean: “How would you feel if I mocked your name?”. He answers: “Well, my name name isn’t Olufemi”, exposing the sheer cruelty of his new environment.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Femi grows to become an introspective and insecure teen (now played by Sam Adewumi). His relationship to his mother has improved, and he now mingles with his previous bullies, who have become petty criminals. Male identity is often negotiated through violence and intimidation. He feels that his allegiances are very divided as his new associates bully a beautiful teenage girl with whom he’s infatuated. He bonds with her through music. They both love the The Cure, but they keep their “weird” taste to themselves, as their schoolmates seem to prefer Tupac.
Eventually, Femi gets into trouble. Could he become a revolving door criminal, another marginalised black youth? The school director Mr Williams (Nicholas Pinnock, pictured above) is determined to help Femi. He reveals that he too was a troubled teen, too, evoking both fury and affection from a confused Femi. They share an embrace. This is the film’s most powerful moment, when Femi attempts to reconcile his anger with his gentle humanity. Should he shed a tear, or should he heed the advice by his favourite band: “boy don’t cry”?
This semi-autobiographical film is a portrait of young black British whose allegiances are split between two countries and two races. He has fond memories of his infancy amongst white people, and he listens to “white” music. In the final third of this 100-minute movie, Femi travels to Nigeria in an attempt to reconcile his past with his present. He observes the chaotic streets of Lagos with awe. Perhaps after all this is his spiritual home. And his fatherland (in more ways than one). Or perhaps not. The final third of the movie also feels a little directionless, and I’m not entirely sure whether Femi managed to reunite his Britishness with his Nigerianness or not.
A heartfelt movie worth a watch, yet not without imperfections.
The Last Tree showed at the Sundance London Film Festival, when this review was originally written. It’s out in cinemas on Friday, September 27th. On VoD on Monday, January 27th (2020). On Netflix in October.
A few centuries prevented William Shakespeare from witnessing Nazi Germany first-hand. Had the Bard been in Berlin during WW2, he might have conceived a Romeo and Juliet with a black girl and a Hitler Youth boy in mind. Where Hands Touch, the new film from British Ghanaian filmmaker Amma Asante, does just that.
Our protagonist here is Leyna Schlegel (Amandla Stenberg), who, despite having a name as German as strudel, has Senegalese heritage (being the offspring of white German mother and a black African father), and suffers persecution in a nation where racial purity is the ultimate goal. Whilst trying to fit in working in a factory in Berlin, she falls for Lutz (George MacKay), a member of the Nazi Party youth forces. The consequences of the ensuing romance are dire.
The nuts and bolts of the forbidden love take up a generous amount of screen time. Amanda and George are competent in their roles and the blossoming of their relationships has all the colour and the saccharine you’d expect from your average Working Titles production. This generated controversy and sparked an outcry – especially in US, where the film premiered – due to claims that the film was romanticising Nazism.
I don’ think that this criticism is entirely fair. The film does seem to normalise Nazism, but that’s different from celebrating it. Quite the opposite. That’s what makes it disturbing. Asante is frank and honest in its depiction of everyday life in Nazi Germany, and people’s complacence. Teachers disseminate the ideology, guards publicly execute the local breadmaker found to be a Jew and decisions, lives are treated like a mere bureaucratic affair, and so on.
The moments when Where Hands Touch shines, however, are those that explore the crux of Leyna’s predicament: she feels German in a Germany that hates her and repeatedly casts her out. She’s forbidden for publicly showing love for a land that doesn’t recognise her as one of its children. This creates tension in her family when even her brother, having been enlisted in Hitler Youth trainings, starts doubting her status and when she finds out that her father was a soldier fighting against the country in WWI.
To her family’s dismay, she refuses to give up her German identity, with a Joan of Arc ardour and passion. These scenes have Brexit written all over. The arguments as to why Britain should leave the EU are also ardent and zealous, teeming with nationalism. In a nutshell, Where Hands Touch exposes the decadent side of those who wholeheartedly and unwaveringly embrace the exclusionary notion of national identity. Not bad for a WW2 Romeo and Juliet.
Where Hands Touch is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, May 10th. On VD Monday, May 27th.
Writer and director Tom Beard has stated that he wanted to write about voiceless British white youth in his debut feature Two For Joy. These adolescents may be invisible in our wider society but they are very much seen in this powerful film of child neglect, sorrow and loss.The film is a portrayal of two families dysfunction during a critical moment when their lives become intertwined.
Aisha (Samantha Morton) is drowning in a sea of depression after the loss of her husband, cared for by her teenage daughter Vi (Emilia Jones) who is also parenting her younger brother Troy (Badger Skelton). This family’s story collides with Lillah’s (Billy Piper) escape from her abusive partner to the caravan park where Aisha and her children have also sought refuge.
The two mothers are played with force and a total lack of vanity by Morton and Piper. Lillah is able to present a veneer of holding things together with make-up and clothes and a pretence at social niceties. Aisha, struggles to get out of bed, wash and dress herself or even provide food for her children. Her hair hangs in lank rats tails, she leaves her phone unanswered and is mostly unaware of her son or daughter’s whereabouts from day to day. Both women leave their offspring to fend for themselves too often and it is this that leads to the darkest chapter of the story.
As wonderful as the two female leads are, this film belongs to the children and it is through their eyes that we see a world that is letting them down. Skelton gives a natural and unaffected performance as a prepubescent teen looking for some anchor in a world that has become chaotic. The association with local ruffian Kyle (Adam Young) is inevitable given Troy’s lack of supervision and the area in which he lives. His lonely demeanour leaves him open to the manipulation domination of Miranda (Bella Ramsey) when they encounter each other at the scruffy seaside caravan park.
Miranda is a wonderful creation from the pen of Beard brought to Iife in vivid technicolour in a focused, committed and terrifying performance by Bella Ramsey. Miranda has a feral and dominating personality with no awareness of risk to herself or others. Her force of will dominates the story from the moment we meet her. She will go to any lengths to keep herself and her new friend amused, leading them on adventures that seem like a desperate attempt to block out what caused the bruises we can see on her back. Lillah tells her brother Lias ( a warm and endearing Daniel May) that Miranda “is a kid she will forget” what has happened. As the viewer follows the children’s journey of petty theft, anti-social behaviour and rule breaking, we can tell that this is very far from true.
The filmmaker Tom Beard employs simple and evocative imagery in order to integrate the themes of the story naturally into the world in which they take place. The cheap illuminated necklace that Miranda wears is both an image of her shining inner light and energy and a beautiful lighting effect when the two friends are lost in the darkness. The concrete, weed infested landscape of Troy’s neighbourhood is a reflection of the chaos at home.
The home-movie quality of the shots depicting a dejected seaside holiday quality to this trip away that is definitely not a vacation. Fish and birds flit in and out of the picture at key points, the cage containing two damaged birds that we glimpse at the beginning, the delicate way that Troy strokes a fish before releasing it back into the river. The animals in this story receive better care than the humans around them. Lias (the caged birds protector) is the only adult who shows any nurturing towards the children, driving them to the fun fair, giving them treats, teaching them how to fish.
As the adults drink cheap wine and eat the fish that has been caught on the fishing trip, we see shots of fish heads and blood in a bucket. As time ticks away everyone assumes that the two younger children are with Vi (Emilia Jones); the scene is set for the dark final act of the film. Vi constantly struggles to make sense and order, encouraging her mother to dress and start the day, complaining that she is left responsible for everything, attempting to study for exams while chases reigns around her. She blocks out reality with headphones, studying French phrases and distancing herself from the cruel behaviour of Miranda.
When tragedy strikes it is in part, because Vi has been left in charge of her brother and his friend.The pressure on her as a young carer is an essential element of the narrative. There are currently an estimated 700,000 young carers (some as young as five years old) in the UK, and their stories are rarely seen on screen. This is an important film in every sense, we need to see more stories that reflect all communities within our society portrayed with sympathy as they are here, rather than paraded as gargoyles of an underclass for the amusement of the intellectual.
This is one of the best, most distinctive, and formally stimulating films at Berlinale, while also a fully accessible, funny movie that draws unbearable tension out of pulling pints and nodding heads. Bait takes place in the height of Summer, though you wouldn’t know it from the murky black and white cinematography. As a Cornish fishing village is swamped by tourists tensions are on the rise after a rich city family has bought up a street’s worth of property and turned them into Airbnbs.
Like a modern-day A Day in the Country(Jean Renoir, 1936), Bait observes the tension between rural and city folk and sees the darkness to which such misunderstanding can lead. Edward Rowe’s increasingly desperate fisherman takes us along with him, as he lives hand to mouth and dreams of buying a boat to improve his catch. The tourists he was forced to sell his family home to, who repeatedly refer to themselves as a part of the community, keep trying to make his life even harder, though of course its all within their legal rights.
Bait is also great Brexit movie. But that’s not to say that it’s a single issue movie. This film will still be relevant long after we’ve got our blue passports, because these are battles that have always taken place, probably always will. But the way Jenkin relates past and present, generational and class divide, allows the film to take on mythic qualities.
That is motivated in part by the extraordinary formalism of the film, which features sustained use of extreme close-ups and rapid-fire editing. Rarely does a shot last more than 6 seconds. So when it does, you feel the stretch of time and movement across the frame. It controls you with that rhythm, toys with your heartbeat. Every cut manages to extend time by sort of starting again, a Bressonian method of separating people. Restricting perspective in this case actually spreads it, we see the community in snatches, views of the village through open doors or window panes. We hear things that we don’t see. This forces us to complete the village, to fill in the gaps.
One bravura moment has two conversations occur simultaneously, with each cut to a different face as the actor says their line. It almost moves too fast to follow, this constant dislocation between faces pushes you into the harsh anxiety within the pub, as you try to catch up on one conversation while falling behind on another. It’s a radical moment of sound design, I feel like I witnessed something akin to when M*A*S*H (Robert Altman, 1970)premiered, and audiences complained about its non-intelligibility. But this is almost the inverse of Altman’s maximalism, where the cacophony is achieved by stripping away elements from the scene.
This tableau approach to the framing of each shot means that the characters become figural, expressions of their status within the town, and the larger social class system. But within that, the actors give such spirited performances that mere gestures count for everything. When Simon Shepherd’s uber-Tory pulls a flat face at our fisherman to shut him down, his pout and sagging jowls belie an entire personality, an entire class of person who will keep on taking what they believe should be theirs.
Jenkin also uses this approach to turn his faces into the folkloric. The local pub is covered in statues of British insignia – so people look at the bust of Queen Victoria bust as though it’s a person, and Jenkin treats it as though that is the case. It’s a pub crowded with faces, British portraits in shadow, macabre and demonic, like faces in a Welles film.
Bait is real tactile cinema. The 16mm grain, the scratches and the flickers of light draw our relationship to these spaces. And those objects, which our characters have lived with all their lives and are seeing reappropriated for the sake of a holiday, become increasingly important to the film’s escalating sense of dread. When this film makes it into cinemas, it needs to be seen. Because nothing else coming out of Britain right now has the same rage or daring as this.
Bait premiered at the Berlinale in February, when this piece was originally written. It’s out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, August 30th. Available on various VoD platforms as of January 2023.
