The tides of gentrification cannot be quelled in The Last Black Man in San Francisco, a deeply felt exploration of the African-American experience in the USA. Mixing melancholy with naivety, beauty with desolation, this is a resounding and exciting debut from director Joe Talbot.
It stars Jimme Fails playing a fictionalised version of himself. As the last name tragically suggests, he isn’t doing so well. He has a job as a carer in an old person’s home, but still cannot afford a place of his own, so sleeps in the same room as his good friend Montgomery Allen (Jonathan Majors). He has his eye on somewhere to move in though, an old Victorian-looking house on Fillmore Street.
It used to be a predominantly Japanese area, until the WW2 internment camps left them empty. African-Americans then moved in (including Jimmy’s grandfather, who we are told built the house himself) leading the area to be dubbed “the Harlem of The West.” But Jimmie’s family split up, and for one reason or another, they lost the building completely. When the white couple who now occupy the house break up, Jimmie has a window of opportunity to restore to its former glory.
Gentrification pervades the entire movie. Black folk feel that the city no longer works for them. Although there are many obvious signifiers, such as a “party tram”, segway tours and annoying white girls, the effects of the tech boom are mostly absent. The fact it isn’t really tackled head on only strengthens the film, as it shows just how shut off locals have become from the city’s vast growth in wealth. Nonetheless, this isn’t a dictatic piece, a late in the game revelation turning simple political theses on their head. Instead, Talbot and Rob Richert, working from Fails’ story idea, zoom in on Jimmie himself (both literally and thematically), allowing the piece to grow in both complexity and universality.
After all, having your own place to live is a simple human right, currently unavailable to the vast majority of people in the Bay Area. This is an issue across the entire States, where there isn’t a single county where a minimum wage job can pay the rent for a two-bedroom apartment. Additionally, in cities as diverse as London, Berlin and Paris, rich white people move in, and non-white communities find their way of culture completely priced out. What’s remarkable about the film is that the director himself is white, yet, finds no need to insert a white perspective into the film. It’s rare to see so much humility in telling other people’s stories.
The Last Black Man in San Francisco is a quintessential debut film: deeply felt, ambitious and full of life, but also messy, structurally flawed and lacking spatial awareness. Talbot and Fails have put their heart and soul into this piece, always looking for the emotion in every scene, lusciously complemented by a clarinet and string-heavy soundtrack; at times it feels overdone and uneccessary, and interrupts the flow of the screenplay, yet at other times they hit on something truly vital. They have put absolutely everything into the film and it really shows.
It makes sense that A24 acquired and distributed this film, containing many of their trademarks: skateboarding, an obsession with faces, and neat musical moments that can easily be shared via Twitter. Yet The Last Black Man In San Francisco is not simply form for its own sake; ambitious camerawork and musical moments bringing the city to life, doubling up as a documentary of faces and places, culture and customs, a testament to a city on the precipice of irreversible change.
The Last Black Man In San Francisco premiered at the Locarno Film Festival, when this review was originally written. It’s out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 25th. On VoD in April!
The limited thriller has been growing in popularity in recent years. Whether its the police responder drama The Guilty (Gustav Möller, 2018)or the man-in-the-car-with-great-phone-reception talkie Locke (Steven Knight, 2013), the thriller has been pushed further and further in terms of doing more with less. You can now count 7500 — referring to the code pilots used when being hijacked —on that list, a German production that reinvents the wheel by trimming it down to the absolute barest essentials.
Bar a few opening scenes via CCTV, the entirety of the movie’s point-of-view is from the cockpit of the airplane. Once we are in the cockpit of a plane going from Berlin Tegel to Paris, it starts with almost rigorous realism; both the pilot (Carlo Kitzlinger) and his first captain (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) going over in fine detail about procedure that no one but a pilot or radio controller could understand. Taking place in almost real time, 7500’s premise isn’t very subtle. We know from the beginning that there will be some kind of Islamist threat, it’s how it goes about it that makes it such an entertaining, turbulent ride.
Patrick Vollrath and his cinematographer deserve credit for keeping things interesting inside such a close space, quick exchanges of point-of-view, insert shots and close-ups allowing momentum to continuously build. This is all edited with invisible precision, easily allowing us to go along with the plot despite the limited amount of scenarios that are possible. All extraneous cutaway scenes plane hijacking thrillers are known for — such as the control tower going haywire, the police chief facing a difficult decision, or the accompanying fighter jets — are completely missing, referenced only through radio and seen through the plane window. This works very effectively because a) these scenes are almost always completely rote anyway and b) they allow us to use our imagination instead, making the film far more unpredictable and enjoyable.
All in all, it’s an almost perfect pure thriller, with the extra thematic elements — such as the threat of Islamic extremism and German-Turkish conflict within cities like Berlin — almost completely unnecessary to the plot itself. These hijackers could’ve been far-right fascists, money-grabbing freeloaders, Quebec nationalists, or pro-Brexit extremists and the film would’ve worked in almost exactly the same way. It’s a little bit of a shame that in a post-9/11 world that the de facto plane hijackers are still Muslim when there are so many conflicting ideologies across the world ready for adaption, but this plot is really just a threadbare line to hang the enjoyable ride upon.
Ultimately this isn’t a film about themes; this is a film that rests purely upon style and succeeds tremendously. With Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the main role, 7500 has the potential to be a breakout hit. While his Americanness doesn’t add much to the screenplay — which in fact may have worked better if he were simply a white German — his recognisable face and over-the-top acting style perhaps tells us much more than a lesser name could. It also means that it has more potential to be seen. Let’s just hope its rollout isn’t as limited as its premise.
7500 debuted to strong acclaim in the Piazza Grande open-air section. Amazon Studios are helming this one in all territories apart from German-speaking regions. Expect it in a cinema near you!
What about this, a piece of British kitchen sink that continues the spirit of Bill Douglas and Terence Davies, without leaning on the crutch of miserablism or heavy-handed political metaphor. Ray & Liz does go to some difficult, dark places, but with a sense of humour, a generous spirit, and a dedication to recapturing the memories of youth. This is photographer Richard Billingham’s reminiscence of childhood in the Black Country, in the West Midlands. Two notable, heartrending stories tied together by present day Ray, who sits around his bedroom drinking himself to death while a neighbour provides him with homebrews. He thinks back to his ’80s home life with his wife Liz, raising kids while sinking into poverty.
But the first story barely features Ray and Liz at all. It’s mostly a two-hander between the amazing British character actor Tony Way as Ray’s simple but sweet brother, charged with looking after the kids, and Sam Gittins as a nihilistic punk who has other ideas. It’s a dynamic straight out of the great Mike Leigh’s Meantime (1984), Gittins channelling one of Gary Oldman’s breakthrough performances.
As played by Ella Smith, Liz is a sensational character, a force of nature who dominates every scene she’s in and whose presence hangs over the film when she’s offscreen. With a flick of the wrist or a well-timed wince, everything that’s going on inside her head comes across, Billingham’s tight photography capturing the air sucking out of a room. Often when a photographer turns to movies, the results can feel somewhat airless, but the style of Billingham’s work is part sitcom, part art-house, all coming together into a complete vision.
The result is the feeling of being told stories second-hand. It’s when you’re visiting an old family member and they tell you about what their cousin used to up to. It’s when you dig through the loft and find a shoebox full of old toys. Because when someone tells you about their past, the rarely contextualise it in a political era. They are far more likely to tell you about specific faces, places, and things. And that’s what Gillingham does. Bad art adorns the walls of this flat. Liz clearly loves pictures of animals, they’re all over her mugs, they’re the jigsaw puzzles she struggles with. This art provides a counterpoint to the events on screen, with effective cuts from a nosebleed to a painting of a caveman poking his own nose. It’s as though the room is speaking to the characters.
By packing so much detail into these memories, Ray & Liz manages to avoid the cliches of the genre. There are no clips of Thatcher on television or mention of the mines closing to set the scene. We don’t need it. Garish ’70s carpets, a cooker black with dust, even a squashed kitchen roll instead tell the viewer the entire socio-economic situation of the characters. In the final third of the film, the characters do come into more direct contact with the system, but it’s not trying to raise eyebrows or stir tweets in the way that recent Ken Loach tends to. It’s Billingham’s story, and the realities of that aren’t turned into melodrama or sermon. And it feels all the more like a remarkable depiction of Britain for it.
Ray & Liz showed at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, when this piece was originally written. On UK cinemas on March 8th. On VoD on Monday, July 8th.
Overwhelming, confounding, peerless. To watch Roma for the first time is to know that you’re in the presence of something special, an artist at the top of their game, a feat of formalist, analogue filmmaking, the kind of great movie that only comes along once or twice in a decade. It’s a year in the life of a family in Mexico City 1970-71, and particularly Cleo, their maid, as director Alfonso Cuarón takes the opportunity to provide the audience with an experiential roller coaster of set pieces, through high and low society, political upheaval and intimate chamber moments.
This approach has led to critical rapture (including 10 Oscar nominations, tied with the most ever for a foreign language film) but questions have also been raised about the minimisation of a largely silent maid by an upper-middle-class filmmaker. You might find those problems too, but this is a film searching for answers, rather than the open ignorance of your problematic fave. Every time Cleo seems to behave as an organic part of the family unit, by joining in conversation, or sitting with them while they watch TV, it’s stopped dead by someone giving her an order.
Cuarón never allows you to forget about the master/servant relationship, and that’s the point. Especially when the film’s exploration of Los Halcones and the Corpus Christi Massacre becomes the focal point of the narrative, these contexts of power are revealed to feed into each other. True, Cleo doesn’t talk much, but no one does. And when an outburst does finally come toward the end of the film, it is crushing, snapping Cleo’s entire psychology into place and questioning how much we have actually known about her interior life. Gladly, the Academy has seen enough in what Yalitza Aparicio and Marina De Tavira as the family matriarch do to reward their subtle work.
You have to look at this as less about a particular character than it is about the place, the time, the memory. You might think of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Weerasethakul, 2010), or Distant Voices, Still Lives (Davies, 1987), how the camera monitors these ghosts as though unbound by time. That distance is the major change in Cuarón’s style. Where he once relied on the Chivo driven, Steadicam heavy technique as means to immersion, here his distance, heavily detailed production design and costuming, and a well-timed cut creates, funnily enough, a stronger bond with the film than those twirling camera moves of his past few films.
And it’s the details that transport the movie into a poetic realm where we really do feel as though we are watching memories projected: like a man being shot from a canon, a car driving through marching band, children at a New Year party running from a man in a bear costume. The cinema scenes grabbed me. Curtains closing on a film as soon as it ends, so the credits still project onto velvet, is a little touch that puts you into the mind of a young Alfonso Cuarón. The director inserts you into his brain by inserting images from his other films, like locations from Y Tu Mamá También (2001) and a clip of an astronaut from Marooned (Sturges, 1969), which nods to Cuarón’s inspiration for Gravity (2013).
And then there’s the motif of water, from a bucket washing away dog poop to those climactic waves. Cuarón uses them like Woolf did, as a visual expression for bouts of pain and depression. But at times in Roma, water can mea n the very opposite. Because it’s a film of rhymes both visual and audible. The maximalist sound design plays a large part in how we experience and are immersed into this world. The direction is so muscular, it’s a vast undertaking of David Lean proportions where they’ve built full streets and inhabited them to create the most epic experience. That appeals to the Film Twitter bros, and Cuarón always has the tendency to lean into that stuff. But if we accept immersion as his aim, then each moment is imbued with an honest to God purpose that pays off in a way that his other similarly bloated compatriots, ‘The Three Amigos’ do not with their own recent grandiose epics. The Revenant (Iñárritu, 2015) delivers shot after shot of impact, without any camera motivation between shots. The Shape of Water (Del Toro, 2017) is like an episode of Riverdale, empty pop culture references softening the patronising social message. Roma is imposing, it loudly pronounces its cinematic lineage (the Neorealists shout loudest, Fellini and Pontecorvo especially). But it’s the real deal.
I have now seen the film three times: in the cinema, on television, and on my laptop. To complete the cycle, I really need to stream it on my phone, as Cuarón (or at least, Ted Sarandos) intended. I can’t pretend that there isn’t a best way to see it. As with any film, cinema is king. But see it wherever suits you, whenever suits you, just make sure you see it. Because this might be one for the history books.
Roma is available on Netflix and in Curzon Cinemas now!
ArteKino is back this month only. Until December 31st, you can watch 10 dirty gems* of European cinema entirely for free and without budging from the comfort of your sofa, chair, desk or bed! the selection includes five films made by women directors. Film-lovers from 45 European countries will be able to explore a rich selection of films by established directors and also nascent filmmakers, along with outstanding performances by a new generation of on-screen talent.
*Only eight films are available to view in the UK, and there are restrictions in other countries, too.
Image at the top by Bertrand Noel. Images below from Flemish Heaven and L’Animale, respectively.
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DMovies – When and how did Artekino begin? Where did the idea come from? What are the aims and objectives of the initiative?
Olivier Pere – The idea behind the ArteKino Festival was born three years ago, when ARTE was looking to increase its support for European cinema in an innovative way. We came up with a completely digital festival that would be free for internet users all across Europe. Over the course of three editions, we have refined the way in which the festival operates, but the initial principle and goals remain the same: promoting the distribution and recognition of independent European cinema by selecting 10 remarkable arthouse films from major international festivals that have not found their way into theatres outside of their home country.
DM – Tell us about the curatorship. How do you view and select the films each year?
OP – I am in charge of the artistic direction of the festival. I identify films at festivals and in international sales agents’ catalogues. I see some of the films at festivals, and most of the time sales agents send me links to films that I ask for in order to make my selection.
DM – You describe your selection as “10 bold films”. What’s your definition of “bold” and of “art cinema”, and what are the selection criteria for your films?
OP – I choose films according to their quality, their originality, and of course their availability. We try to offer a balanced selection that can include films of various genres, from fiction to documentary, while remaining very attentive to the diversity of European languages and cultures represented (generally one film per country) and to the gender balance of the directors. Artistic boldness can come from a film’s aesthetics or from its subject matter, and how those things relate to contemporary themes.
DM – According to an industry player, only 37% of European films are seen outside their home market. Does this reflect your experience? And what should we do in order to improve this figure?
OP – Yes, and that is why we have developed the ArteKino Festival. We look for films that have low visibility outside of their country of origin and the festival circuit. Some of these films enjoy success in their home country but have difficulty travelling beyond national borders. This is true of comedies, but also of other films. Our festival is a way of crossing borders while staying in the comfort of one’s home.
DM – What’s your message for aspiring filmmakers everywhere who’d like to see their film on ArteKino?
OP – Young directors often need international festivals to receive critical acclaim and to enable their films to travel, as well as to be sold. With the ArteKino Festival, we offer them a way of reaching new audiences by inviting viewers who don’t have easy access to new European arthouse films.
DM – What’s your message to film lovers everywhere overwhelmed by the vast choice of VoD everywhere? Why should they watch films on ArteKino?
OP – We should specify that we are campaigning for movie lovers to continue discovering films in their original birthplace – the movie theatre. ArteKino Festival acts as a complement, not a substitution. Unfortunately, due to their location, some people do not have access to movie theatres that screen arthouse cinema. And it is no longer possible to assume that all films can be distributed in theatres – there are simply too many films being made, and there is a lack of diversity in a number of countries. That is why we invite them to discover new films free of charge in this new festival format.
Aneesh Chaganty’s debut feature Searching in which a widowed father investigates his daughter’s disappearance, was released in cinemas two weeks ago, the latest film belonging to what producer Timur Bekmambetov has described as ‘screen life’, a genre or subgenre (or ‘language’ according to Bekmambetov) in which the story is told via computer screens, smartphones and webcams. Instant messages, internet surfing, Youtube videos, and social media often play vital roles in ‘screen life’ films, including the 2014 horror box office-hit Unfriended (directed by Levan Gabriadze and pictured above) and its 2018 sequel Unfriended 2: Dark Web (Stephen Susco).Both films were produced by Bekmambetov. Whereas the Unfriended films received mixed to negative reviews, critical responses to Searching have been largely positive. Nevertheless, Searching’s ‘screen life’ format and presentation, like that of the Unfriended films, has been referred to as a ‘gimmick’ by many critics and publications, in both negative reviews and positive reviews.
As something which is designed to attract publicity and attention, a ‘gimmick’ is something of a pejorative that dismisses the ‘screen life’ style of storytelling as having little intrinsic value. In the cases Searching and the Unfriended films, this is simply untrue. These ‘screen life’ films and their ‘language’ do have intrinsic value, the use of computer and smartphone screens complementing the subject matter and reflecting the very real notion that we now live much of our lives through these screens. Whether these films are good or bad is irrelevant to the value of their narrative techniques, and to dismiss these films as ‘gimmicky’ is to ignore a new, innovative way to tell stories and construct films.
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Gimmicks from the past
To be clear, the ‘gimmick’ of ‘screen life’ is not the same as other cinematic gimmicks. Cinematic ‘gimmicks’, it seems, can be split into two categories: on-screen and off-screen. Off-screen gimmicks, such as those in William Castle’s Macabre (1958, pictured above), House on Haunted Hill (1959), and The Tingler (1959) – respectively, life insurance for viewers should they die of fright when watching the film; plastic skeletons rigged to pulleys in theatres; and vibrating chairs that corresponded to the actions of the titular tingler (a parasite inside human beings that feeds on fear) – were gimmicks in the true sense of the word: marketing tools designed to attract attention and sell the film. Taking inspiration from Castle, Alfred Hitchcock employed a marketing gimmick in order to publicise Psycho (1960, pictured below), with audiences having to adhere to a ‘special policy’ preventing them from entering the theatre once the opening credits had finished. Needless to say, Hitchcock’s off-screen gimmick proved successful, generating plenty of hype and long lines of paying customers.
In comparison, the ‘gimmick’ of ‘screen life’ is not solely intended to sell the film. In Chaganty’s Searching, David Kim (John Cho) attempts to figure his missing daughter’s whereabouts by tracing her recent online activity. The use of computer screens, social media, and FaceTime calls makes narrative sense here, just as the use of social media and webcams makes narrative sense in Unfriended, in which a group of friends are terrorised by the spirit of their former friend, who committed suicide following an unflattering photograph of her going viral. Again, the ‘screen life’ style and structure is informed by the subject matter, and offers a degree of contemporary social commentary on how we live our lives. Evidently, the on-screen ‘gimmicks’ of Searching and Unfriended are not the same as the off-screen gimmicks of William Castle’s B-movies or Alfred Hitchcock’s marketing scheme for Psycho. In fact, when compared to these off-screen gimmicks, on-screen ‘gimmicks’ are not gimmicks at all.
Looking back, it’s not uncommon for innovative storytelling techniques to be disparaged as ‘gimmicks’. The found-footage subgenre – from which ‘screen life’ takes its cues – is frequently referred to as gimmicky, though interestingly the subgenre’s most famous example, The Blair Witch Project(Eduardo Sánchez/ Kevin Foxe, 1999; pictured below) – which implemented both an on-screen ‘gimmick’ in found-footage and off-screen gimmick in viral marketing -, was praised for its ‘mockumentary’ style upon release. The Paranormal Activity franchise, in contrast, has not fared quite so well.
Interestingly, a literary equivalent to found-footage exists in the epistolary novel, a novel written as a series of documents, such as diary entries, letters, or more recently emails. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula serve as examples of ‘literary found-footage’, though whether anyone would dismiss these pieces of work as ‘gimmicks’ is unlikely. Coupled with ‘screen life’s ties to genre cinema, perhaps there is an element of snobbery and elitism to regarding ‘screen life’ as a ‘gimmick’, a piece of ‘low art’ – at best – that is unworthy of serious critical analysis.)
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Another dimension
3D, repeatedly scorned as an overly-expensive money-making gimmick, was an essential part of the narrative in James Cameron’s Avatar (2009). The immersive 3D experience of the audience was intended to reflect that of Sam Worthington’s Jake Sully, as he embodies his Na’vi avatar and immerses himself in the culture of the Na’vi and their home world of Pandora. Just as Jake entered a new world when he is sealed within his link unit, the audience treated on a new cinematic world when donning their 3D glasses. Whether one enjoys the 3D experience is beside the point; the ‘gimmick’ has thematic relevance, Jake himself, like many film protagonists, acting as an avatar for the audience, our connection, our link, into the world of the film.
And in the same way, we are linked into Searching’s world through computer screens, Twitter trends, and viral videos. We see what David Kim sees. We are a voyeur, seeing into his life, viewing the world through his eyes. To an extent, we embody him, and the connection this creates with David allows for greater sympathy for his character and circumstance. There is far more to ‘screen life’ than ‘gimmick’ filmmaking. In the case of Searching, it is filmmaking at its most inventive, at its most thought-out, subject matter informing structure, art with purpose and meaning.
It may only be in its infancy, but the ‘gimmick’ of ‘screen life’ is likely here to stay. As it should be. As it deserves it.
Cinema and music are the two biggest passions of my life. Put the two of them together and the combination is explosive. Below is a very small list of five diegetic songs that make characters dance (“diegetic” is a very academic word meaning that the song is played within the film, and that it’s audible to the characters). But it isn’t just the characters that these songs have affected. They have literally changed my life.
These are not mainstream movies, and you may have not even heard of some of them. What they have in common is that they got me straight to the music shop to investigate and to buy the record. These films and songs have since become an integral part of my life.
This is a very personal list, which I’m honoured and thrilled to share with our amazing dirty readers. They are intense moments of catharsis and bonding. Either the characters connect with their inner selves or with other characters through music. Compiling this list and rewatching these vids was an extremely emotional experience to me. These songs are so deeply ingrained in my mind and heart that they came back to me almost instantly as soon as I decided to write this piece. I suggest that you turn the volume up and glue your eyes to the screen while you watch them!
What about you? Are there songs that had a similar effect on you?
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1. My Summer of Love (Pawel Pawlikowski, 2004):
I remember watching this at the Curzon Soho when it came out nearly 15 years ago. I always liked Edith Piaf, but La Foule was never amongst my favourite songs. This changed immediately after watching Pawel Pawlikowski’s very British and Lesbian romance My Summer of Love, where the two lovers divided by class finally bond in a very personal dance. Another key moment of the film includes Goldfrapp’s Lovely Head in a disco dance. Truly dizzying stuff. The Polish born and London-based director Pawlikowski has since a become a wizard of film music. His latest feature Cold War (2018) is almost entirely constructed around music. To astounding results.
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2. Beautiful Thing (Hettie MacDonald, 1996):
I was 19 years of age when I watched the British movie Beautiful Thing. I was still living in Brazil, and I had never been to the UK. It made me want to be 15 years of age and experience love for the first time again, but obviously that wasn’t possible: I was already a rather “experienced” gay man at the time. This tale of young homossexual love is a small masterpiece of LGBT cinema, and it catapulted many young actors to fame (including Tameka Empson). It made me run to the shop the next day in order to buy Mama Cass’s greatest hits (the film soundtrack consists almost exclusively of Mama Cass songs). The very public gay dance to the sound of Dream a Little Dream of Me at the end of the film became synonymous with unabashed coming-out (also pictured at the top of this article).
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3. Our Children (Joachim Lafosse, 2012):
This is a far less rosy film. This French-Belgian production is based on a real-life incident involving a woman (Genevieve Lhermitte), who killed her five children. It is impossible not to be moved by Émilie Dequenne playing the film protagonist (here called Murielle), as she cries, moans and sings along to Julien Clerc’s Femmes, Je Vous Aime inside her car. After this sequence, she proceeds to kill her offspring, one by one and at home. Her motive is never entirely clear, which makes the sequence far more ambiguous and powerful, as audiences attempt to decipher what’s going though the mind of the deranged lady about to commit such an unthinkable crime.
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4. Cría Cuervos (Carlos Saura, 1976):
Carlos Saura’s masterpiece is also the Spanish film that most accurately translates the transition back to democracy immediately after Francisco Franco’s death, and all from the perspective of a child. Eight-year-old, stoic and stern Ana observes the fast changing family and nation around her in 1976. But she’s no innocent child. She believes that she has psychic powers and can kill those around her with her thoughts. Ultimately, this is a film about suspicion and lack mutual trust at such turbulent times of fast change. The most striking moment of the film is when Ana dances with other children to the sound of Jeanette’s Por que Te Vas – this is probably the most puerile moment of authentic bonding in the film. The song became a hit in Spain, catapulting Jeanette’s vulnerable and frail voice with a slight British accent to fame (Jeanette was born and raised in London). Since watching Cría Cuervos, Carlos Saura became my favourite Spanish filmmaker and Jeanette a recurring guest in my lounge, my car and my earphones.
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5. Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999):
Claire Denis will be forever remembered for penetrating an all-male military world with an acute sensibility. Beau Travail is loosely based on Herman Melville’s lesser-known 1888 short novel Billy Budd. The action takes place in the tiny African nation of Djibouti (between Eritrea and Somalia), where French Foreign Legion soldiers are stationed. Parts of the film soundtrack are from Benjamin Britten’s opera based on Herman Melville’s novel. But the most beautiful and cathartic moment comes at the end when masculinity is expressed in a very solitary dance in front of the mirror. This happens to the sound of the well-known hit The Rhythm of the Night, performed by Italian eurodance act Corona. Simply unforgettable.
Professor Philip Goodman (Andy Nyman) is a sceptic who hosts a TV show named Psychic Cheats. Any paranormal activity can be explained away, as he demonstrates time and time again to his studio audience. But then, out of the blue, he receives a strange package containing an audio cassette recorded by his former mentor Charles Cameron who mysteriously disappeared some years ago. The latter’s rationalist world view was profoundly shaken after he encountered three paranormal episodes he couldn’t explain away, so he points the former in their direction.
Thus the good professor sets off in pursuit of three separate ghost stories, convinced he’ll be able to debunk them. But each of the three episodes defies explanation outside of the paranormal. In the first, night watchman Tony Matthews (Paul Whitehouse) of a supposedly unoccupied warehouse comes up against an unearthly presence. In the second, young man Simon Rifkind (rising star Alex Lawther) has some unnerving experiences in his car in a forest in the middle of the night. In the third, city trader Mike Priddle (Martin Freeman) experiences the terrors of becoming a father. And then there are matters relating to Philip Goodman himself and an enigmatic, hooded figure…
This movie began life as a theatre play inspired by writers Dyson and Nyman’s love of portmanteau horror movies, three men on stools telling scary stories to a live audience. It proved a huge hit so the offers to film it rolled in. The writer-director duo had other ideas, however, and have made it themselves, retaining a down-at-heel British sensibility to the proceedings. More impressively, while the original worked on the stage, the pair have taken their material, stripped it down to its essentials then rebuilt everything from scratch for the moving picture medium.
Adaptation can so easily be a recipe for disaster. Your scribe has lost count of the number of movies he’s seen adapted from great plays or books which fall flat in screen adaptation because they’re exactly that: filmed books or filmed theatre. Happily, Ghost Stories avoids that common pitfall to prove highly effective as a cinematic outing. Parts of it will creep you out even as it delivers its fair share of effective shocks and surprises. In short, it does everything it claims on the tin. The casting is spot on and you’ll find yourself completely caught up in the three stories and the elements that link them together. Don’t miss.
Ghost Stories is out in the UK on Friday, April 6th. It’s on all major VoD platforms on Monday, August 20th.
Appearing in a diverse array of acting roles in films from the likes of Submarine (Richard Ayoade, 2011) to Dead Man’s Shoes (Shane Meadows, 2004), Paddy Considine’s acting career is malleable to different moods and tones. After making the step up to director with the social realist Tyrannosaur (Paddy Considine, 2011), to which gained BAFTA’S 2012 ‘Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer’, he returns with a harder hitting piece, Journeyman.
A juxtaposition to atypical boxing films, Considine’s second feature as director, as well as writing and starring, goes past the point of a climactic fight. Selecting to focus his narrative towards the after effects of his fight with a younger, more arrogant fighter, Andre ‘The Future’ Bryte (Anthony Welsh), after retaining his title, Matty Burton collapses at home, thus suffering speech and motor impairment. Fighting to return to a healthy state for the sake of his loving wife Emma (Jodie Whittaker) and his baby girl Mia, Matty faces much more than having to deal with physical punches.
Embracing a similar colour palette and mood to Tyrannosaur, Considine, with the help of the innovative cinematographer Laurie Rose, tightens the emotional strands of his narrative in the initial scenes through mobile phone footage. Occurring just after his win for the world middleweight title, the expressions on Emma, Matty and his team are ones filled with pure delight. Absorbed in happiness, Matty poses for photos with his elderly father, who before his fight with Andre ‘The Future’ Bryte, passes away.
In the clean aesthetic of their house in Yorkshire, Emma and Matty’s relationship is as strong as his left-hand hook. Shining in the early moments, Considine’s script offers little flourishes of love between the couple, heightened by the two actor’s performances. Pivotal to believing in this world, the peak physical condition of the character, through the physique of the actor, was achieved through ‘’Dominic Ingle training me, who trains Kell Brook and Kid Galahad. It was a 10-12 week training camp, and I trained five times a week, sometimes six.’’
From the point Matty sustains his injuries, the glowing personality that the actor imbues into his protagonist disappears into thin air; only a shadow remains. The antithesis to Eddie Redmayne’s performance in The Theory of Everything (James Marsh, 2015), the impaired acting recalls the humility displayed by Benny Safdie in the kaleidoscopic Good Time (Josh and Benny Safdie, 2017). Aside from the magnetic performances given from Jodie Whittaker and Paddy Considine, the middle section of the script feels weighed down by the inevitable re-emergence of Matty’s friends and boxing team. Yielding a redemptive quality, the resurrection of his friendship with Jackie (Paul Popplewell) and Richie (Tony Pitts) feels too fictional, away from the veracity initially created.
Journeyman may leave you knocked out by its emotional weight or left standing after sucking up its emotive punches. Void of the magic touch present in Tyrannosaur, the film is a solid enough second hit for the directorial career of the writer and actor. Amongst audience and critics alike, it may float like a butterfly but lack the sting of a bee.
Journeyman was out in UK cinemas on March 30th. It’s out on VoD on Monday, July 23rd.
War is repugnant and grotesque, and so should anti-war films be. Violence should never be airbrushed, blood should never be removed, and the conflict should never be glorified, romanticised or celebrated in any way whatsoever. Otherwise it can easily slip into a military apologia. A genuinely anti-war movie should never be a feel-good movie. It should be harrowing and disturbing because at war there are no victors. It should meditate on the moral dilemma of the conflict, or mock the futility of the whole ordeal. Plus, patriotism should never be celebrated, as it’s often the very cause of war. And this is precisely where the three films mentioned above fail. They are war films. But they are not anti-war films.
Below is a list of 10 films released in the last 12 months or so, which are unambiguous in their denunciation of war. They are both documentary and fiction features with one characteristic in common: you will not leave the cinema thinking: “this is a cool movie!”. These films are invariably disturbing and realistic in their depiction of the conflict. Four of them deal with the Syrian War, but there are also films dealing with Israel, World War I, World War 2, the Ukraine, and also a movie with a stark warning of an “impending” nuclear war. To boot, there’s a very dirty surprise for you at the end of the list. So make sure you read it through.
Don’t forget to click on the film titles in order to accede to their respective dirty review. The films are listed in no specific order!
This Danish film is extremely successful at highlighting the pointlessness of WW2 in all of its bizarre territoriality and forged allegiances. You won’t leave the cinema feeling enchanted and elated. Instead you will feel shocked and outraged, which is exactly what a war film should do.
The film starts out with Danish Sergeant Carl Leopold Rasmussen (Roland Møller) leading surrendered German troops out of the country in May 1945 and beating a few soldiers in the process. He in then allocated to a beach where he has to supervise 14 German teenagers, who’ve been sent in order to clear some of of the 2.2 million mines placed by the German on the Danish coast – more than in any other European country. No slippery fingers, shaky hands, hesitant thoughts and vacillating minds are allowed; the consequences of any minor error are obviously disastrous, ranging from severe mutilation to a horrific death. And so these untrained and emotionally immature boys begin to die, one by one.
In City Of Ghosts, Academy Award winning director Matthew Heineman (Cartel Land, 2015), takes on the plight of a group of men fighting to have the cries of their once great city heard. In this shocking yet essential movie, Heineman follows the journey of the members of a group calling themselves “Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently”. This small coalition of anonymous-activists-turned-citizen-journalists managed to put themselves in the firing line by bravely exposing the barbarism of Islamic State. With intel from inside the occupied city, the men managed to run a website documenting what took place after a vacuum of power resulted in the occupation of Raqqa by Isil for years.
Offered incredible access to the men and, in some cases, their own family members, Heineman deftly allows his subjects to tell their own stories without injecting himself too much into their narrative. Stories of violence and murder coming out of the city are neither sanitised nor fetishised by the director. Using Isil’s own footage found online, the director allows his subjects to talk about the unimaginable ordeal they went through since the moment they started speaking out against their invaders.
For 85 minutes you will have to wear the shoes of Oum Yazan (in a rivetting performance delivered by the Palestinian actress and film director Hiam Abbass), as she does everything within reach in order to protect her family inside her flat in Damascus, as the Syrian War is just beginning to loom. You will be locked with Oum and seven other people in the relative safety of her middle-class dwelling, while a cannonade of bombs and machine gun fire explodes outside.
Urgent in its simplicity, the effective Insyriated will haunt you for some time. It’s a painful reminder that tragedy can strike at anytime, and that there is no such thing as a safe home. It’s also a call for action: every country should open their doors to Oum, Halima and their families.
The notion of futility has always been one in human history, still, in the events and dramatic modernisation of conflict during World War I, the supposed ‘war to end all wars’ brought the human race crashing into the 20th century in a monstrous fashion. Set during the final few months of the German armies’ ‘Spring Offensive’ in 1918, Saul Dibb’s cinematic adaptation of R. C. Sheriff’s 1928 playJourney’s End features powerful performances and a uniquely stifling portrayal of life on the Western front.
Slowly building to a mournful end, it is hard to not be moved at the futile nature of war, specifically to a younger generation, elicited throughout. Akin to the greatness of Oh, What A Lovely War(Richard Attenborough, 1963), the theatrical roots are expelled in favour of a cinematically aware film. Marking 100 years since the end of the War, one would be amiss to ignore its presence upon release.
This Israeli movie is a visual ballet divided in three acts: Michael Feldman (Lior Ashkenazi) is informed that his son Jonathan (Yonatan Sharay), a conscript in the Israeli Army, has died; Jonathan’s days of military service in the Israeli Defense Forces, and; a long conversation between Michael and Jonathan’s mother, Dafna (Sarah Adler). Each act has a distinctive touch, and all three are strangely pleasant to watch.
This is a fiercely anti-war movie, about the catastrophic consequences of army duty for those who have no choice but to enlist (military service is compulsory in Israel). It is also a mind-blowing film, likely to become both critically acclaimed and commercially profitable. It premiered last year in Venice, and our writer Tiago Di Mauro selected it as his top film of 2017 – click here for the full list. The image at the top of this article was taken from Foxtrot.
TThis film acts primarily as an exploration of war from the bubble of an EU perspective. This is both eye-opening and positively human, as each character displays an entirely familiar range of virtues and vices. It also broadcasts Ukraine and the Donbass crisis to an EU audience that have now largely forgotten about the fortunes of their largest European neighbours. Although Frostdoesn’t detail the experiences of the Donbass separatists, it leaves you with no doubt that the everyday allegiances of this war are arbitrary and ambiguous.
Frost is a unique piece of cinema in 2017. It focuses attention back onto a divided region that has become absent from the popular European imagination. Likewise, it provokes meaningful reflection on the moral dilemma of war, without being overtly instructive. Its slight tendency for tedious travel is punctuated by powerful prose in the three key interludes. It ends on a low-key whimper, but one that will explode through your thoughts long after the end credits.
Opening with hand held footage of Howe on patrol with British servicemen in Afghanistan, Monfils’s documentary throws the audience straight into the deep end. As the soldiers and Howe wonder through fields, tension within the frame is created through the claustrophobic and obscured shots of their surroundings; beyond the trees the Taliban could lay. Disaster strikes in the form of a soldier stepping on a concealed IED (improvised explosive device) warhead. Howe somehow manages to capture to the whole sequence in a clarity that is a stark juxtaposition to the surrounding world of ‘fake news’ and the POTUS’s bizarre “convfefe” tweet.
At a tight one hour and a half, A Good Day to Die, Hoka Hey interrogates the repercussions of authentic media coverage upon an individual. Howe’s haunting images linger in one’s mind long after the final scene. Unlike the suspenseful quality of another war film out in theatres right now, Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan), Harold Monfils’s film sincerely reflects his ambition to create a piece which portrays ‘the damage that happens to the soul when one is exposed to the horrors of war on the front line for 12 years’.
This is an anti-war film because it warns us of the catastrophic dangers of an “impending” nuclear war. Pilger shows how China has been progressively encircled by US military bases and nuclear weapons and how quickly this could escalate. The Obama administration has in fact clearly shifted the geopolitical focus of the US towards the Pacific, in an open challenge to China.
What can we expect from the future? Is President Trump going to follow an even more aggressive stance towards China than his predecessor, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Barack Obama or is he going to be an isolationist? Right now, this seems unpredictable. Trump has used a very aggressive stance towards China during his electoral campaign; but will he turn words into action or was it just hot air? Will there be another Cold War? What about apocalypse? Only time will tell. These are some of the questions that the film raises.
This is one of the most disturbing and heartbreaking films on this list. In March 2011, radio host Obaidah Zytoon and several friends joined the street demonstrations against the oppressive regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whose family has lead the country for 40 uninterrupted years. They decide to film every step of a very bleak journey that is nowhere near finding closure five years later. Obaidah’s voiceover narrates the story in retrospect, with the lugubrious tone of her voice suggesting from the start of the movie that the outcome wouldn’t be rosy.
The tragic imagery and the fatal conclusion of The War Show could haunt you for some time. Even if the film is sometimes a little disjointed, and the individual stories are difficult to follow. The War Show has won the top prize in the Venice Days strand at this year’s Venice Film Festival. A jury chaired by Canadian filmmaker Bruce LaBruce chose the film from the 11-strong selection.
Ok. We have cheated. This film has not been released yet. In fact, it’s still in the making. But it’s such a relevant one that we decided we should include it on this list anyway. Most literature and theatre fans would instantly recognise Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Schwejk, the most translated Czech novel in history, and a world-famous anti-war satire. Cinephiles less so. The book has indeed been adapted to the silver screen a few times – first in 1926 and then again in 1943 by Czech filmmaker Karel Lamač, in 1956 by the also Czech Karel Steklý and finally in 1960 by German filmmaker Axel von Ambesser. The problem is that these films are hardly available in the UK, and no other movies have been made since (except for television). This is about to change, as screenwriter and filmmaker Christine Edzard sets herself on a very ambitious mission.
Christina’s film will be neither an ordinary book adaptation nor a period drama selling a fake nostalgia. This is a very personal, audacious and groundbreaking endeavour spearheaded by a woman with a clear artistic vision and unambiguous peace ideology. The ball started rolling between July 7th and 17th, when Christine held seven live performances of The Good Soldier Schwejk at Sands Films in Rotherhithe (in Southeast London). The play was scripted as a live, cabaret-style performance, reflecting the background of Schwejk’s original creator: Hašek was a frequent performer of politically engaged cabaret in Prague. Christine explains: “the first Schwejk was written as a sketch several years before the novel existed, so I’m just going back to that original idea.”
So, what’s it that will be so special about The Good Soldier Schwejk? Well, it’s not a film set in the past. After years of research, Christine has added her very own personal twist to the play/film by blending in absurd quotes from very real, modern sources. The clumsy, ludicrous, wacky and preposterous words you will hear came from the mouths of Tony Blair, George W Bush, Colin Powell, Cofer Black and other wll-known figures. The conversation are sometimes so bizarre that they feel like five-year-olds squabbling, exposing the sheer absurdity of reality. There are also bits from George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde and Alfred Nobel.
This is one to keep to keep an eye on. Worry not, we shall bring the latest updates firsthand and exclusively for you!
The year of 2017 in British independent cinema saw a shift in perspectives on contemporary life distant from street lights and 24-hour takeaways. Their depictions of country life, God’s Own Country (Francis Lee) and The Levelling (Hope Dickson Leach; pictured above) simply do not just use their stunning vistas as a reflection of a character’s isolation, they interact with a filmic representation of rural life and class that has been prevalent in European cinema for years, specifically in the films of French duo Dardenne brothers and more recently, illustrated poignantly by JR and Agnès Varda’ in Faces Places (also from this year).
Forget Leigh and Loach; this was the year of Lee and Leach. Away from the defining voices of arthouse British film as Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, who have not released any films in 2017, first time feature length directors Hope Dickson Leach and Francis Lee construct tactile debuts that speak to a repressed and reserved sense of Britishness that currently results in suicide being the leading cause of deaths in men aged 20-49. Similarly, their underlying socio-political connotations, their films speak to contemporary Britain in Eastern European migration impact on the Brexit vote and a wide demographic of untraceable Conservative voters who helped keep the Tory’s in power during the 2015 and 2017 General Elections. Their emotionally unstable and insecure male characters speak to a present day society engulfed with a fake sense of nationality. By looking to European filmic influences, Leach and Lee speak to a class and themes deserving of their time in the cinematic spotlight.
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Long and winding country road
After gaining the ‘Star of Tomorrow’ Award by Screen International ten years ago for The Dawn Chorus, Hope Dickson Leach’s arduous task of getting a full feature film made speaks to an industry so consumed with an unwelcomed over assertive masculinity resulting in a gender imbalance worse in 2017 than in 1913, as The Guardian reported in September. Taking a focused look at The Levelling, its lead character is a young independent veterinary student who is faced to return home after she receives a tragic call informing of a family suicide.
The devastation caused by her brother’s death is embodied in a destructive flood, which has damaged the farmland and livestock. Such floods leave their physical devastation in the surrounding landscape, still Leach utilises a stark juxtaposition of animals filmed struggling for dear life behind a void of blackness and water to draw further attention to their damage. Adopting some cinematic panache clearly references Jonathan Glazer’s masterful Under the Skin (2013; pictured above) and Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice (1986; pictured below) , yet underlying this, is an innovative representation on an environmental crisis that left the local farming community in a state of sheer dismay.
Such a minimalistic and surrealist approach is rarely seen in contemporary British film, only serving to highlight Leach’s very creative filmic approach. Through this void of nothingness, the rural community are truly isolated from the rest of society; foreground outside the context of The Levelling in a report documenting the Environment Agency’s neglecting of Somerset rivers. The neglect held at Parliament transpires is filtered in an expression European influences. Reading the void in a psychological light, its blackness emphasises Elle’s brother’s fragility of mind, resulting in his decision to take his own life. The antithesis of the idyllic countryside, soon to be seen in Downtown Abbey’s jump to the big screen, The Levelling’ssetting and focus on a lower- middle class awash with a daily struggle evidently displays a Britishness which isn’t not so jolly, secure or pastoral after all.
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British boys don’t cry
The fragility of British masculinity and adoption of European styles comparably permeates God’s Own Country (in the two pictures below). Inviting an aesthetic compassion to Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights (2001),the cinematography captures the Yorkshire moors in an pure fashion; it evokes every human sense we hold through sight and sound. Chiefly in repressing his sexuality, Johnny Saxby (Josh O’Connor) forces himself into stealthy sexual acts and drinking his woes away.
Forced to take up his father’s position on the farm after a stroke, life is a constant slow movement in a sea of grey for Johnny. Employed as an additional pair of hands, Romanian worker Gheorghe Ionescu (Alec Secareanu) lives an unstable life of physical labour upon different farms across the county. Forced to work together, in order to preserve the farm, Johnny comes to adore Gheorghe in time through his loving care and attention. Escalated by an understatedly aggressive performance by O’Connor, God’s Own Country’s protagonist typifies the much too prominent reserved sense of British masculinity. In every movement, he appears to be exerting every sinew in his body. Failing to express his emotions freely has been detrimental to his life as whole, granted until Ionescu has entered it. Firstly, against his presence at the farm, clear racist and far-right ideologies are held towards Gheorghe. Johnny’s colloquial racial slurs are accentuated by the geopolitical context of contemporary Britain.
Not an outright Brexiteer, it’s not misinformed to suggest that the lead character could have easily been swayed by Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and et al’s promise of an extra £350 million a week to reinvested into the NHS, something which Farage himself has stated as a regretful pledge. Pre- and post- Brexit hence consume the undertones. Lee’s ultimate message of transforming hate to love is a message that should be embraced by all. Roger Ebert’s Glenn Kenny cites God’s Own Country a “a tricky movie, but not in a way that’s dishonest. Its first feet are in the school of miserablist realism” – thus linking to the verisimilitude of Bruno Dumont and his French contemporaries. Though a simple link in their approach to filmmaking, it cannot be ignored that God’s Own Country’s authenticity of working life, accompanied by a sound design which leaves one feeling cold, is pivotal to illustrating a class familiarly seen abroad and not in UK features.
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British and beautiful
The distinctions between fiction and reality are blurred in the deep focus God’s Own Country and The Levelling pay towards presenting a rural community who speak more to what Britain and Britishness is in 2017 than any UK produced film this year. Yes, they do use European styles and cinematic language, but what is created by Lee and Leach are entirely British and beautiful pieces of film. A sense of duality lingers over any final comment; beautiful creations have been made through illumining a class who hold some of the most prevalent problems in modern society.
Sean Martin’s essay ‘Seven Elements of a Tarkovsky Film’, states that “Tarkovsky is essentially proposing giving the audience time to inhabit the world that the take is showing us, not to watch it, but look at it, to explore it. A film, therefore, is not an escape from life, but a deepening of it”. And this is is precisely what Lee and Leach achieved in their two films, with such a poignant representation of British rural communities.
After God’s Own Country’s success at the BIFA Awards a week ago, taking home best sound (Anna Bertmark), Best Actor (Josh O’Connor), Debut Screenwriter (Francis Lee) and Best Film for 2017, it is welcomed acclaim for a film which deals which our socio-political time and British rural communities in such a nuanced and understated fashion, evidently resonating with BIFA voters.
