Tag: comedy

The Civil Dead

Posted on by Paul Risker

Cinematic storytelling can be likened to a recycling centre, where ideas recur. While sometimes it’s an act of appropriation, other times we see ideas and character archetypes reimagined. The Civil Dead, directed by Clay Tatum and co-written with Whitmer Thomas, both of whom star in the buddy ghost comedy, is neither. It’s the type of film that has a certain indie charm that it’s easy to feel the impulse to like, but the experience quickly becomes a grind.

Set in Los Angeles, photographer Clay (Tatum) and his artist wife Whitney’s lives are uneventful, that is until she goes out of town. He’s told to not just lie around drinking beers and when he ventures out to do some photography, he crosses paths with Whit (Thomas). The pair spend the rest of the afternoon and night together, and the next morning, Whit shares the truth – he’s dead, and apparently only Clay is able to see and hear him. While Whitney’s away, the pair bond, but when she returns, Clay’s eager to drop his newfound friend like a bad habit. Only, Whit is less keen to say goodbye.

One can’t help but hear the echoes from the past, notably of Jim Carrey’s The Cable Guy (1996). Whit isn’t the hyper embodiment of Carrey’s character, but the dependency on their respective friends, in Whit’s case companionship to ease the loneliness of death, sees them both intrude on other people’s personal space.

Unlike the spiritual connection to the 1990s cult black comedy, the nod to Caspar (the friendly ghost) is intentional – appearing on television in Clay and Whitney’s lounge. It’s a direct nod to a tradition of pacifying ghosts, treating them with sympathy and revealing their friendly and eccentric natures.

The Civil Dead is always seeking to be its own thing, but it struggles to make an impression. Instead, it’s more likely to affectionately recall other films that have pacified ghosts, from director Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s gentle love story between the spirit of a sea captain and a single mother in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), to a quintessential troublemaking poltergeist in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (1988), and the ghosts of baseball’s past in Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams (1989).

Tatum and Thomas’ struggle to liberate the film from its concept is compounded by the plot’s framework. It’s as if the script has not fully metamorphosed into a film; its evolution stilted. Unlike Mankiewicz, Burton and Costner, who evolved the concept into stories that feel lived by their characters, Tatum and Thomas’ story feels more like a series of underwhelming moments threaded together. It doesn’t feel an exaggeration to say that the film was born from a script still in its infancy.

The 105-minute run time places unnecessary stress on pacing and the humorous and dramatic episodes. Ironically, just as Whit intrudes on Clay’s life, outstaying his welcome, so too does the film outstay its welcome. There’s no reason why The Civil Dead couldn’t have been a sprightly 80-85 minutes, ideal for this type of comedy. Still, this wouldn’t have been a fix to deeper-rooted problems.

In moments, Tatum and Thomas strike an emotional chord that shows promise, but these are too few and far between. Often pedestrian, the skill to manipulate time and infuse the story with energy is lacking, forcing the humorous verbiage and set pieces to overcompensate. Scenes such as a hustle at a poker game and Whit’s eventual confession quickly go from being a potential highlight to a bewildering what could have been. Even the playful back and forth as Clay tries to avoid Whit when his wife returns is rushed.

Ultimately, The Civil Dead is haunted by the film it could have been. Tatum and Thomas’ charm and good intentions aren’t enough to rescue a story that’s drawn to darkly humorous twists about friendship, and the dangers of dependency.

The Civil Dead is in cinemas and on VOD from Friday, January 19th.

The Good Person

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Hot shot film producer Sharon (Moran Rosenblatt) flies home from abroad only to discover that her husband won’t let her past the gate entryphone to their home on arrival. Furious, she borrows (or, technically, steals) his parked car so she can go about her business. On arrival at her empty office, her long-standing assistant Alma (Lia Barnett) informs her that the bailiffs have taken everything.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, so she takes a meeting with another producer who under normal circumstancea she wouldn’t touch with a barge pole but who is snowed under with projects and wants her to take one of them off his hands. Thus, she becomes the producer of a comeback movie by a notorious womaniser who gave it all up to become an ultra-conservative rabbi, Uzi Silver (Rami Heuberger), a star who hasn’t worked for several years, i. The money is already in place from the Film Fund, so the project should be a piece of cake. It all looks too good to be true. And, as so often in life, when something looks too good to be true, it usually is.

Her fears abut the rabbi are confirmed when she learns that he won’t allow any women on the set apart from herself, nor will he negotiate with her (female) line producer in the room. And there’s no script – well, adapted from 1 Samuel 18-31 (this refers to the Hebrew Bible, which is apparently chaptered and versed slightly differently from the Christian one), the script is the story of King Saul visiting the Witch at Endor prior to his military defeat and his falling on his own sword. All she has to do is get someone to write a script and he’ll rubber stamp it. He himself is to play King Saul while his wife, the star who played alongside him on the last film before they got out of the movie business, is to play the Witch of Endor. To write the script, Sharon enlists the help of her old friend Shai (Uri Gottleib).

To reveal what happens next would be to spoil the film, except to say that this is one of those films where if anything can possibly go wrong for the central character, then it does. Somewhat curiously, it was billed in the festival blurb as a screwball comedy, however, I personally wouldn’t apply that label to it and fear anyone seeing this with that expectation would be severely disappointed. Thinking about it in retrospect, there IS comedy here, but it’s black comedy of the wry observation variety which may make you smile after the event but won’t make you laugh at the time.

The film is shot in stylish black and white apart from occasional sequences in preview theatres watching parts of the movie (only the odd clip here or there makes it into the film that we, the audience, are watching) which are in colour. This is scarely a new trick (see, for instance, Belfast, Kenneth Branagh, 2021) but it’s a tried and tested one that does the job. Elsewhere, the piece is nicely paced: director Anner and his editor keep it moving along nicely and you’ll agonise alongside Sharon as she undergoes one terrible experience after another.

Set in present day Jerusalem, it presents the movie business as essentially areligious in a wider culture which is clearly steeped in one of the major world religions, i.e. Judaism. The movie business is almost portrayed as a religion with its own set of irrefutable tenets (no-one puts it in these terms, but, for example, thou shalt offer opportunities for employment equally to members of both sexes) which are challenged, for good or ill, by those of conservative Orthodox Judaism (men should not touch or even associate with women, for they are unclean – my paraphrase) with the members of the Film Fund just as shocked as Sharon with Uzi’s “no women other than you on the set” demand to the point where they momentarily consider cancelling the funding.

You could argue, though, that non-association with women is exactly what Sharon’s husband does to her at the start of the piece. You could also argue that the only way she gets her films made is because she has a rich husband who bankrolls her (until, at the start of this, he no longer does) which makes it quite a smart sideswipe at the idea of the film producer who has got there by dint of hard work and talent alone. No-one suggests Sharon isn’t talented (although she’s fallen on producer’s hard times and the Uzi Silver / King Saul project is clearly her selling out, making something in which she doesn’t really believe in order to get some easy money), but equally it seems that without her husband, she is (financially) nothing, itself an ultra-conservative idea.

There would apear to be many more layers to this film on reflection, which might reveal themselves on further viewing; on first watch, however, it comes across simply as a great ride.

The Good Person plays in the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

Arnold Is a Model Student (Arnon pen nakrian tuayang)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

Schools are paradoxical places: you learn about the benefits of democracy in a place which is essentially a dictatorship. The virtues of free speech and debate are praised in a world where you have to stick to a strict regimen and follow the rules otherwise you will be suspended or expelled. Additionally, as a young person, you are not even allowed to vote yet, meaning that while you learn about the freedom of the world around you, your impact on it is severely limited.

But in countries with an authoritarian bent, such as Thailand, which is a constitutional monarchy that allows no criticism of the King whatsoever and was ruled by a military junta until 2019, school doesn’t necessarily seem to contrast against the government itself; in fact, it compliments it. Within an authoritarian system, teachers are able to wield strict control over their students while the rot of corruption quickly seeps in.

It’s within this world that we meet the titular Arnold (Korndanai Marc Dautzenberg). Recently returning from an exchange in the USA, he is both a smart student — recently winning a maths olympiad — and a smart-aleck, feeling himself above and beyond the rest of his Thai contemporaries while sometimes toying with the idea of making of a difference. Like many coronavirus-set films recently, his rebellious streak is best complimented by the fact he rarely wears his mask, as well as taking naps in class and talking back to teachers. Think Max Fischer with a bald head and a passive attitude to life.

Director Sorayos Prapapan eases us into the material, giving us a great sense of school life — from the girlish games to the minutiae of classroom lessons to the boys sneaking in drinks in the backyard — before weaving in two distinct plot-lines: the rebellion of the students against corporal punishment in school — inspired by the real Bad Student movement in Thailand — and Arnold’s new job working for an exam-cheating service. Armed with exceptional talent, Model Student asks whether it’s worth trying to make a genuine difference within the system or to try and exploit it for your own ends.

If the two plot-lines don’t intersect as satisfyingly as they should, it suits the distanced, often-resigned tone of the film. Using static, planimetric frames, allowing the angles of the school building to intersect with the camera at 90 and 45 degree angles, the film has an ironic detachment that recalls the work of Aki Kaurismäki and Roy Andersson more than South Asian cinema. But Prapapan isn’t a slave to his own style either, knowing when to move the camera, switch to handheld, or insert some comic sound effects (which shouldn’t work but somehow do). The final result is an easily watchable satire that shows great confidence from a first-time feature director, as well as the kind of raw sincerity that often gets smoothed away by someone’s second and third films. It will be fascinating to see how this style is developed in further features. I hope there will be many.

Arnold is a Model Student runs as part of the Concorso Cineasti del presente section of Locarno Film Festival, running from 3-13th August.

Babysitter

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

The Quebecois Babysitter starts at full gallop and never goes down to a trot throughout its entire 90 minute runtime. It begins with men delivering dialogue out their mouths like they’re firing semi-automatics, annoying women in front of them by asking them inappropriate questions. They’re drinking, shouting, almost screaming, the camera cutting between them in a chaotic, oppressive fashion, cinematographer Josée Deshaies favouring intense close-ups and avoiding wide shots. They’re at an MMA match, which is bloody, two men on the floor almost killing each other. We’ve been airdropped in the land of toxic masculinity. No one will get out unscathed.

Cédric (Patrick Hivon) is living in the land of misogyny, so he doesn’t think it’s a big deal to harass a TV reporter outside the match with a hug and a kiss. But he lands in hot water straight away; suspended from his job, he has to do some soul-searching, 8 1/2-style (Federico Fellini, 1963), taking us on a surreal, overwhelming and frantic comedy that I found more irritating than thought-provoking.

It’s clear that Cédric is not a monster, but he’s definitely an asshole. The question you might ask yourself is: where does the asshole end and the monster begin? It’s worthwhile for all men, and women too, to do the necessary work to see how they might be misogynists, overt or otherwise. In a clever bit of plot-development, Cédric decides to write a letter to the aggrieved TV reporter, which he later develops into a narcissistic memoir. Masculinity is toxic, but its also a hot, marketable topic. Everyone loses under capitalism.

Meanwhile, Sonia Chokri, also directing, stars as his wife, refusing to fit into any conventional category of oppressed womanhood. Nonetheless, she is also taken on a journey of confused identity when the titular babysitter Amy (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), appears, tasked to help the two exhausted parents take care of a baby that simply doesn’t sleep.

22, big hair, and cleavage always on show, she is a parody of flush, young and readily available sexuality, provoking Cédric and his journalist brother while also defying conventional stereotypes of women as mere victims. Tereszkiewicz plays the part particularly well, imbuing porno clichés with uncertain menace.

It’s ripe for a clever and biting farce, but the overbearing atmosphere, replete with chaotic sound design and rapid cutting, makes for an experience as intrusive and as unwarranted as Cédric’s drunken advances. This is an all-woman show, with Chokri working alongside playwright Catherine Léger to make fun of both men and women alike. But the final result is all over-the-place, unable to corral the material into the deconstruction of masculinity the premise deserves.

I guess the #metoo movement and the surrounding debate over male norms is due a good satire. But they need to be a lot sharper and funnier than this. Babysitter starts with a clever enough idea and boasts a fresh enough style, but the movie never does enough in the first place to actually make this a satire worth sitting through. Don’t book a babysitter to go see this one.

Babysitter plays in Competition at TIFF, running from 17th-26th June.

How I Learned To Fly (Leto kada sam naucila da letim)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TRANSYLVANIA

A pre-teen comedy in the vein of Diary of a Wimpy Teenager (Thor Freudenthal, 2010) or Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging (Gurinder Chadha, 2008) that also manages to talk about the Balkan conflict in the 90s, How I Learned To Fly is a perfectly enjoyable film from Serbian director Radivoje Andric that tackles both serious and lightweight themes with ease.

Apart from the rocky beaches (I prefer sand) and the annoying British (myself included) and American tourists, there are hardly any better places to spend a summer holiday than the Croatian island of Hvar. For Serb Sofia (Klara Hrvanovic) however, she’s devastated that she’s not able to go camping with her best friend and her brother, who she has an immense crush on. Instead, she is saddled with her grandmother Marija (Olga Odanovic), who is returning to the island for the first time in 25 years. Odanovic plays the part well, constantly nagging the poor child to put on sun cream and wear appropriate clothing.

Sofia’s dreams and desires — kissing a boy for the first time, finding a crew to hang out with and avoiding her pestering “hitman” grandmother — are represented in an extremely broad style, with endless selfies, wipe cuts and whip pans, dream sequences, dodgy CGI insects and animated text overlays. It’s the kind of hyperactive style that seems in vogue today, with little separating it from the recent Ms Marvel (Bisha K. Ali, 2022) series. It’s fine for kids, and funny at times, but I found it mostly overwhelming.

Hrvanovic plays the part well, mixing voiceover and physical reaction comedy to convey the well-spring of emotions that pre-teen girls can feel, slowly coming to terms with both the world around her and her own intense maelstrom of feelings. Yet she remains more or less oblivious to the real reasons her grandmother moved to Belgrade all those years ago — or why she still refuses to talk to her brother, who remains on the island. From the perspective of a child, the conflict seems absurd; for her grandmother, these are old wounds she finds it intensely painful to re-open. For all the silliness, Andric manages to find a subtle way of navigating the pain of war without making it seem trite in the process. Playing here as part of the EducaTIFF programme, its the perfect introduction to this topic for young children.

Given how broad the comedy was, I’m easily the wrong demographic for the film, which is highly unlikely to play over in the UK. But judging from all the laughs from the children around me, this definitely has the potential to be a breakout hit in the Balkans (it’s already topped the Serbian box office) and other regions of Eastern and Southern Europe.

How I Learned to Fly plays as part of the EducaTIFF programme at TIFF, running from 17th to 26th June.

Sick of Myself

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Move over, The Worst Person in The World (Joachim Trier, 2021). From the same beautiful city of Oslo comes the genuine worst person in the world: Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp), a woman so self-involved, so breathlessly shameless, so incredibly terrible, you can’t help but root for her to succeed.

That’s the thing with narcissist conmen, stretching from Tom Ripley to Jordan Belfort to the gang of Ocean’s 11 (Steven Soderbergh, 2001): they can get away with anything, because ultimately they seem so charming. While Signe, with beach-blonde hair, darting, nervous eyes, and a mischievous look, has little of the smoothness of traditional conmen, she shares that same compelling desire to rise above her station and to have the whole world know her name. She’s awful and hilarious in equal measure.

Early on at a flat party — after escaping a fancy restaurant with a $2300 bottle of wine with her artist boyfriend Thomas (Eirik Sæther) — she tells someone that “narcissists are the ones that make it.” The rest of the film somewhat tests that premise, as she shamelessly competes with her boyfriend to be the centre of everyone’s attention. Individual sequences, including a faked nut allergy, pretending someone’s dead and goading a dog into biting her are handled with an excellent sense of cringe comic timing, making me laugh while holding my fingers over my eyes.

I won’t explain the scheme that makes up the centrepiece of the movie, but it is wonderfully perverse, the kind of move that tips the film into outright psychopathy. While there’s a lot of recent films out there — like the ultimately dull I Care a Lot (J Blakeson, 2020) or that Anna Delvey miniseries that was completely unwatchable — that sees women scamming with the best of the men, this one is unafraid to make its hero a complete mess while keeping the story itself relatively believable. By rooting the story within a naturalist setting, the con just keeps getting longer and longer, until the boundaries between reality and fantasy almost seem to collapse within themselves.

Actually boasting the same producers as Worst Person, it has a similar milieu, pretty yet unassuming cast and pastel-like colours. This is by far the more satisfying watch however because it takes the same millennial self-centredness and pushes it to its absolute extremes, making fun of media trends in diversity, victim narratives, and girl-boss stories all at the same time, tied together by a lived-in, effortless performance from Thorp.

Some bends into fantastical ideation, albeit diverting once or twice, get tiresome, repeating some of the worst excesses of the previous film. While there is nothing as misguided as Worst Person’s drug sequence, certain moments could’ve easily been cut out for a more leaner, punchier experience, in line with more successfully-executed Axiom (Jöns Jönsson, 2022).

Is there a reason why scammers across both genders seem to be having a renaissance at the moment? Perhaps one could tie it to the way even everyday parts of life seem to be becoming more and more unattainable, let alone glittering mansions and worldwide fame. Sick of Myself doesn’t seem to say that you shouldn’t be a scammer, but that you should come up with a foolproof plan. Knowing the tropes and playing with them brilliantly, this fine film shows off the difficulties of trying too hard. After all, cool people never have to try that hard. Signe doesn’t know that. She’s a loser. But she’s easy to love. This worst person deserves the world.

Sick of Myself played in Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It was out in the UK in October as part of the BFI London Film Festival. In cinemas on Friday, April 21st (2023). On BFI Player and also on Curzon Home Cinema on Monday, July 3rd

A E I O U – A Quick Alphabet of Love (A E I O U – Das schnelle Alphabet der Liebe)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM BERLIN!

A stands for Anna (Sophie Rois) and Adrian (Milan Herms).

E stands for Elocution: troubled teen Adrian has a problem with pronunciation, so it’s up to the past-it, middle-aged actress Anna to teach him how to project his words on stage for his high school play.

I stands for Inhibitions: while working together, they slowly lose them, resulting in a delirious, oddball romance.

O stands for “Oh My God”: words I uttered regularly as the film constantly engaged in cringe-worthy storytelling techniques.

And U stands for Udo Kier: Anna’s landlord and confidant who provided the biggest laughs simply by looking and reacting at things. He’s a great screen presence, but was mostly underused.

This is a quick alphabet of love, with only the vowels needed. It makes sense when you think about it: with one fricative notwithstanding, they are the vowels most commonly used while in the throes of love-making. But this is a talky, playful film, filled with consonants too, as the young boy and the older woman slowly navigate their sort-of inappropriate romance, taking them from the streets of Berlin to the beaches of southern France. At once enjoyable, pleasant and easy-going, as well as occasionally dipping into unearned, hands-over-eyes sentimentality, Alphabet of Love, or Licorice Flammkuchen, is unlikely to set the world on fire, but still is an interesting take on spring-autumn romance.

Y isn’t a German vowel, and it isn’t much of a question in the film either, which starts off as a conventional navigation of social mores before moving into pure fantasy territory, finally dipping into one of the most amiable of genres: the Cote D’Azur criminal con-man genre; glittering hotels and casinos galore. Director Nicolette Krebitz starts by the idyllic Mediterranean, Anna looking at a police-line up of five guys, each holding up one of the five German syllables. Adrian is in the line-up but Anna is giving nothing away, before the film cuts back to how they first meet, the young lad mugging her outside of Paris Bar, Berlin.

He’s a troubled child — although a psychologically vacuous one — and she’s an intemperate former star, once a marquee name but now forced to work as a speech therapist. Adrian comes from a foster family, with his odds stacked against him from the beginning, whereas Anna once had it all but suffered the same fate many women do once they go past a certain age. It makes for an interesting coupling, but the conversations and actions are more focused on quirky details — like where Anna hides her cigarettes, or Adrian’s pickpocketing skills — than bringing this conflict into view. I can’t say that I minded, with the film often working best in its final, more fantastical sequences than during the staid, clichéd parts earlier on. Ending on the use of one of my all-time favourite songs, this is the kind of love story that won’t change your life, but makes for a fun date night watch. Just don’t take your mother.

A E I O U – A Quick Alphabet of Love plays in competition at Berlin Film Festival, running from 10-20th February.

Zuhal

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Schrödinger’s cat might be rooted in ideas of quantum mechanics, but in popular culture it’s basically the idea of saying that something can’t be proven to either exist or not exist. In fact, it both exists and doesn’t exist at the same time! This conundrum is quizzically explored in Zuhal, where the film’s eponymous character (Nihal Yalçın) living in an apartment block is convinced that she can hear the meowing of a cat somewhere within its walls. The only problem is, no one else believes the cat even exists…

This is essentially a one-joke movie, thinly stretched out to feature length. Your mileage will vary on your love for cats and for the oddities of the film’s humour. Given that stray cats roam Istanbul with impunity — and are well beloved in Turkish culture — it’s no surprise that this type of story has emerged from the Eurasian nation. Elsewhere, Murakami, the patron saint of lost and mysterious cats, will be kicking himself he hasn’t written this first.

The cat can either be seen as a metaphor for Zuhal herself, who becomes increasingly more dogged (wink, wink) in her search for the mysterious feline, or as an excuse to explore the ins and outs of the unique apartment block. With rare exceptions, the vast majority of the film takes place within the building — covering block disputes, grating landlords, cabinets that can’t fit through walls, women who refuse to conform, and incredibly impetuous children. Credit must go to the production design, using simple photos, drawings, and furniture designs to give each individual room its own character.

At the centre is Nihal Yalçın, who comports herself and looks a little like Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, only without the severe breakdowns or asides to the camera, but still a fiercely independent woman and work-from-home lawyer who will stop at no end to make sure she uncovers the cat. Surrounded by a cast of self-absorbed, moody, obtuse neighbors, she is the both the sanest person around and the closest to a mental breakdown, Yalçın never quite giving us a true insight into how her character truly thinks.

To create a sense of semi-ironic distance, director Nazli Elif Durlu shoots medium-distance shots, often bifurcated by hallways and doors, with careful placing of furniture and characters. Shot on handheld, the frame is constantly moving, but only a little bit, making the viewer uneasy. While this type of idea could’ve got boring very quickly, this use of inventive framing and camerawork helps to keep things somewhat fresh.

Nonetheless, I couldn’t help but feel this would have been stronger and punchier as a short. At just under 90 minutes and the endlessly-explored basic premise needed to go somewhere else to be truly effective. But perhaps going elsewhere would ruin the joke. That said, I’m a dog person; maybe it’s all just a cat person thing.

Zuhal plays in the First Feature section of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 12-28th November.

Blind Love

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

A blind man and a deaf woman fall for each other in Blind Love, a Kenyan slice-of-life comedy-drama with oodles of oddball charm. Injecting great humour and verve into its depiction of disabled life, it enlivens and surprises the audience right until the final scene.

Brian (Mr. Legacy) is unable to see. His seeing dog has just died, unceremoniously run over by a car. Abel (Jacky Amoh) is deaf, and is tasked with taking him home one day. Despite their disabilities, they find innovative ways to communicate, empathetically and intuitively portrayed by both Legacy and Amoh. Brian then realises that if they drink a magic spirit, they are able to communicate unhindered in their dreams, caught in black-and-white fantasy sequences. But the liquor is as much a gift as a curse, resulting in many unintended consequences.

Director Damian Hauser directs, edits, shoots and composes the music, keeping a close authorial control of the film’s tone; which appears to freewheel along while underpinning the narrative with a much darker narrative pull. As it uses such poppy filmmaking method to tackle serious themes, Blind Love almost runs the risk of trivialising what it wants to portray, but eventually brings it all together in the shocking finale. It’s even more impressive when you realise that Swiss director Hauser was born in 2001.

It shows that violence begets violence, spurred on by ignorance, jealousy, lust and copious amounts of liquor. Neither man (alcoholic, ignorant, unfaithful) or woman (jealous, scornful, scheming) come out of it well, the film even ending with a postscript asking why people continue to have children when there is so much suffering in the world. Sprinkled in with a little black magic, it asks whether people are in control of what they do or if they become possessed by their emotions. This is not the hipster capital Nairobi, as seen in Rafiki (Wanuri Kahiu, 2018), but a place seemingly lost in time, with little government help, as seen when people take justice into their own hands.

It’s not a pretty depiction of rural Kenya, but the filmmaking has a vital feel at odds with its themes, mixing widescreen with academy ratio, long, detached pans with frantic handheld shots. It finds plentiful ways to move between past and present with ease, as well as smartly switching between plot and subplot before finding a truly tragic way to bring these two together. The non-actors and countryside setting keeps an authentic vibe, with Hauser able to coax out great performances that just feel like people living their own lives.

It’s great to see more sub-Saharan African stories making it to major European film festivals and that co-productions with countries like Switzerland are making them happen. Blind Love is the kind of small yet affecting film you want to find at a fest; surprising, unconventional and filled with a fine personal filmmaking touch.

Blind Love plays in the First Feature section of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 12-28th November.

Other Cannibals (Altri Cannibali)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

The gorgeous north Italian province of South Tirol is turned into a nefarious, ominous place in Other Cannibals, a black comedy that uses its strange premise to force an unusual sense of empathy from its characters. Genuinely unpredictable with a great sense of spontaneity and unforced performances, it keeps you guessing right until the final, deliciously absurd finale.

Other Cannibals starts in a factory, close-ups of machines — coupled with the name of the film itself — suggesting we are in for a straight-up horror experience, the first of many bait-and-switches throughout its runtime. Fausto (Walter Giroldini) finishes his shift then stops by his mother’s house, asking for the keys to his late father’s house. Then he drives to the train station and picks up the mysterious Ivan (Diego Pagotto). At first it looks like a hookup. Or perhaps Ivan wants to rent a room. It’s only when he makes a reference to tranquillisers and sleeping pills that we realise something strange is going to happen.

I refuse to ruin anymore of the plot, because this is one of those movies where you want to experience what’s happening along with the characters. Scenes stretch out beyond the bounds of conventional wisdom, often caught in long takes while using a Dogme-style approach to editing, keeping us in the dark as to what could happen next. The black-and-white photography seems to be more of a ploy to keep the film simple rather than a fully thought-through stylistic choice. And while it’s a bit of a shame not to see the Dolomites in their full glory, it does help to stress the film’s unadorned approach.

As the title suggests, Fausto wants to do something really odd, but along the way we discover that he cannot truly commit to anything in his life. When asked about his factory job, he says that it’s temporary, despite working there since 1998. He has been paying off his car loan forever. There are no women in sight. You start rooting for him without even knowing what he might do next. It’s the magic of cinema that we can feel for people with such perversions. In one brilliant moment, Fausto describes the elation he felt when Italy won the 1982 world cup, besting Maradona’s Argentina, the greatest ever Brazil team and even the Germans. Almost every man has a story like this, making Fausto just like us. Right?

There is a touch of Ben Wheatley here, both in the handheld camerawork and the adherence to naturalism while something more sinister is lurking beneath the surface. The landscape plays a strange role, showing off the unique nature of South Tirol, mixing Austrian and Italian cultures while maintaining a strong independent streak and individual customs. It feels like a landscape stuck in time, especially when the local men, wearing their funny hats with feathers in them, sing a gorgeous multi-harmony ode to mountain life. It’s a beautiful moment in a bizarre film, which blends disparate tones and moods with ease. Never has cannibalism seemed so endearing.

Other Cannibals plays in the First Feature section of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 12-28th November.

Occupation (Okupace)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Credit must be given to Occupation for answering a question I had never previously considered: is there actually a good reason to wear a Nazi uniform? A blend of satire and national inquiry, all wrapped up in a one-scene thriller-comedy, the Czech film zigs and zags through one dark and heavy night of the soul.

After Soviet control of Czechoslovakia in 1968, theatre is in crisis mode. Pre-1968, directors were putting on Beckett productions. Now theatre has turned to a more politicised mode, the film taking place entirely after a production of a play lionising the life and death of journalist-turned-resistance leader Julius Fučík. Imprisoned and executed for his communist beliefs, he was turned into a propaganda symbol for the controlling party.

For director Jindrich (Martin Pechlát), drowning his sorrows in the theatre bar, the play was a total failure, featuring “mediocre actors and mediocre direction.” He was once a revered playwright, as student Milada (Antonie Formanová) shows when asking him for help on her student thesis project. She wants to know who a hero is: unlike the Nazi uniform question, this one is left unanswered throughout this black comic thriller.

There’s a touch of Quentin Tarantino here, whether it’s the long dialogue scenes, mix of comedy and violence and the twangy guitars on the soundtrack. While the final twist can be seen a mile away (and is the kind of easy resolution Tarantino would avoid) it still pays off in a deeply satisfying way, showing how resistance is easy to talk about, and often impossible to put into genuine action. The other key influence is closer to home: Miloš Forman’s The Fireman’s Ball (1967), featuring a similar balancing act and an equally gratuitous level of heavy drinking. But while Forman had to sneak his critique under the censors, director Michal Nohejl, along with co-writers Marek Sindelka and Vojtech Masek, is far freer with his lacerating look at the era.

The party turns from a pity-fest into a taut thriller when a Russian commander appears and instantly spices up proceedings. While the Russians are heavily critiqued and stereotyped, the film sets much heavier targets on the Czechoslovakians themselves, who ultimately held little resistance against the Germans. The Russians on the other hand, liberated the country, and saw themselves at this moment of acting in their best interest. Still wearing their Nazi uniform from the earlier play, the film plays upon both Russian and Czech national nightmares. It’s bad taste that achieves fascinating results.

Occupation captures the era well, with colourful clothing, deep-hued lighting, reverb-heavy music and meticulous production design. Essentially a play in film form, the widescreen aspect ratio and careful blocking allow for variation in shots that all take place in the same room, complemented by a game cast who enjoy the opportunity to drink, dance, moan, tease, bully and fight in equal measure. While never reaching genuine hilarity, it’s still an entertaining night in the company of deeply miserable people during one of their most hopeless eras.

Occupation plays in the First Feature section of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 12-28th November.