Tag: coming-of-age

Before I Change My Mind

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

We never find a genuine answer to whether Robin (played by non-binary actor Vaughan Murrae) is a boy or a girl. It begins with them walking into their new classroom during a sexual education class: boys on one side, girls on the other. They sit purposefully in the middle, prompting derision from their peers.

The year is 1987. The country is Canada. The state is Alberta. Robin is an odd USA transplant adapting to a new life across the border. And while non-binary and trans people have existed since the beginning of humanity, schools in the era of homophobic John Hughes films and the weird homoeroticism of Top Gun (Tony Scott, 1986) don’t quite have the language to make Robin seamlessly fit in. When they join the saxophone ensemble, the teacher kindly says they can be whoever they want before handing them yet another saxophone: that’s the only instrument the school has.

Thus begins a coming-of-age story that is fresh in its representation but mostly derivative in every other aspect, a curious Locarno inclusion that would’ve felt much more at home in Berlinale’s generation section. Robin meets both boys and girls, develops intense crushes and gets into fights and gets bullied and fights back and sensitively draws the world around them. This is all shot in pastel colours with a handheld camera, sometimes inserting grainy VCR footage to immerse you in the era. The music is suitable synth-heavy too, although none of the needle cuts (Canadian bands?) are particularly memorable, probably due to budget issues.

And while some films might use their 80s setting of a way of easing you into a particular vibe, from Stranger Things (Duffer Brothers, 2016-) to Call Me By Your Name (Luca Guadagnino, 2018), Before I Change My Mind embraces its 80s tropes to the point of parody. Take West Edmonton Mall — the coolest 80s place on earth, a land where you can buy your multicoloured hairbands and leggings before going on a rollercoaster. Later, in perhaps a meta-commentary on the film’s music royalty budget, we are treated to a knock-off version of Jesus Christ Superstar — Mary Magdalene Video Star, an irreverent mash-up of 80s tropes that’s painfully cringe while actually surprisingly well-composed.

But this 80s vibe also allows for generic depictions of youth as well: the tree house in the forest, cycling around the suburbs, reading through porno mags, watching a VHS, and other tropes that have been played out hundreds of times. It’s certainly a pleasurable watch, thanks to solid performances from the kids in the film and the sensitivity with which their issues are handled, but nothing ever felt quite urgent or particularly intellectual. Non-binary and trans kids might welcome a film that is finally about them — especially at a time when schools report more children comfortably not slotting into a gender — but on an emotional and aesthetic level, there is nothing too special here.

Before I Change My Mind plays as part of the Concorso Cineasti del presente section of Locarno Film Festival, running from 3-13th August.

Astrakan

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

Astrakan — or, as I would call it, The 400 Woes — had me asking lots of interesting questions: where does the line between a chronicle end and a narrative start; how do diverse individual scenes actually accumulate into a final picture; and what is the line between representing something awful and genuinely exploiting the people in the story? Simply put, it had me asking lots of questions as I was never invested in the story, which ranges from slow to frustrating to ultimately sickening. There’s a lot of craft there, but the final result is really all over the place.

A thoroughly depressing picture that eschews genuine sensitivity in favour of a series of seriously unfortunate events, Astrakan is the kind of coming-of-age story that strains painfully for profundity but has such an over-abundance of ideas, images and things it wants to say, its forced pathos left me both bemused and repulsed.

It concerns a young boy named Samuel (Mirko Giannini), a foster child living with his adopted family in rural France. Ostensibly seen as a problem child, he is berated for his silly games and the fact he cannot seem to defecate naturally, often soiling his pants. That’s the first of many uncomfortable details that Astrakan — seemingly named after a type of lamb wool as opposed to the Southern region of Russia — revels in, subjecting Samuel to more pain and torture than any French person since Joan of Arc.

He meets a girl. She shows him porn. He goes to the cinema. He gets beaten up by guys we have never seen before. He goes skiing. He watches his teacher have sex with an Olympic skier. He throws up. He has more issues with going to the toilet. He is misunderstood and beaten with a belt while thrown between families and people he really shouldn’t be trusted with. The scenes are often randomly strung together, revealing little narrative cohesion while episodically stale and un-compelling.

He’s both your average 12-year-old and an enigma, revealing nothing, a poor wretch that we watch try and find something to enjoy in his poor life. A real child actor has been put in this position to depict these actions. It made me wonder whether putting a child in such scenes — however sensitively they might’ve been handled — is ever worth it. Certainly not when the finished product feels so irredeemable.

David Depesseville, working with cinematographer Simon Beaufils, is a fine image-maker; shooting on film, his depiction of rustic, untamed France brings to mind Maurice Pialat, often contrasting Samuel against an epic landscape with little hint of regular civilisation. We get the sense this is a land with its own rules, filled with hard people, living difficult lives. And his sense of observation is both keen — from a note being passed from child to child from a birds-eye-view to close-ups of bread being cut to small items being smartly hidden — and over-laboured, spinning into the surreal through unwittingly absurd cutting.

Things then really spin into left-field with the final reveal, a fantasia shot to the sounds of Bach’s St Mathews Passion, calling to mind everything from the mass murders of The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) to Andrei Tarkovsky’s poeticism to Terence Malick’s mysticism. It’s a neat calling card from the second-time director: a statement that he can also do this as opposed to merely layering on naturalist misery-porn. But once it reveals that this already sad story has an even deeper sadness behind it, like the whole thing is one sad onion with bottomlessly sad layers, this technical ability is ultimately wasted in the service of something absolutely no one needs to see. Miserable.

Astrakan has just premiered at the 75th Locarno Film Festival.

Stop-Zemlia

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM BERLIN

Is there any stronger feeling in the world than the flush of first love? There probably is, but try telling that to a teenager who finds themselves awkwardly infatuated, unable to hide the blushing in their cheeks? Masha (Maria Fedorchenko) is one such teenager, who has developed a crush on the quiet and sensitive Sasha (Oleksandr Ivanov) — in a pivotal scene, simply walking by this boy and trying to say “hi” is a moment of stress seemingly on par with living in a war zone.

A teacher explains how the stress activator in your brain turns on and admits that falling in love can create much the same effect. Stop-Zemlia has a similarly forensic approach to both the psychological and physiological emotions of being a teenager, when your hormones are rampant and your emotions impossible to fully explain. Masha finds comfort in the kind presence of her friends Yana (Yana Isaienko) and Senia (Arsenii Markov), who form a trio based more on platonic love than any potential for romance.

Coming in at an unwieldy two hours, Stop-Zemlia uses a longer-than-normal runtime for this genre to fully explore the contours of teenagehood, dipping in and out of musical sequences, magical realism and intersecting storylines; even allowing Masha’s love interest full autonomy instead of mere idealisation. Fictional scenes are intercut with documentary-style interviews, with characters asked questions by an unseen director, allowing for further development of their feelings and more mature development of their emotions. Characters’ names are almost the same or simply diminutives of their actors (Masha for Maria, for example), blurring the lines between performer and character to excellent effect.

Coming at a time when coming-of-age dramas are so saturated with copious smoking, drinking and shagging — such as Russia’s Everybody Dies But Me, UK’s Skins and USA’s Euphoria — Stop-Zemlia offers a far more thoughtful and sober take on the messiness of growing up. In this respect, it owes as much to recent trends in French documentary-making — the films of Sébastien Lifshitz and Claire Simon’s Young Solitude — than stereotypical coming-of-age films. There’s a great eye for dialogue that genuinely apes that way that generation Z teenagers talk — and not the way that many adults assume they talk — showing off the patient and workshopped approach of first time feature director Kateryna Gornostai.

The fluidity is sexuality is explored here with real sensitivity, showing the rise of a generation far more nuanced and mature than even my generation; in fact, what seems to matter more than sexual expression is simply being honest with yourself and understanding what you want to be. There is the larger context of growing up in Ukraine, one of the poorest countries in Europe, where opportunities are scarce and men have to join the army once they turn 18. In one touching scene, Senia recoils when he attends a class explaining how to load an AK-47, remembering his traumatic upbringing during the conflict with Russia. It’s a difficult place to be an adult, with these teenagers — thoughtful, kind, confused, learning as they go along — under no false impressions about what the future might bring. Stop-Zemlia captures them at this most precarious age with great empathy and precision.

Stop-Zemlia plays in the Generation section of the Berlin Film Festival, running from 1st to 5th March.

The World After Us (Le monde après nous)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM BERLIN

The conditions that made Paris such a hub for writers in the early 20th century — cheap flats, strong communities, endless time to put pen to paper — have been more or less swept away by the powers of gentrification. Faced with paying €1,200 in rent every single month, Labidi (Aurélien Gabrielli) is forced to come up with some unusual schemes, like low-key insurance fraud and cycling for Deliveroo, in order to meet the bills.

He is a promising young French-Tunisian writer with an award-winning short story under his belt. His agent secures him a meeting with a top literary firm, who enjoy the first three chapters of his Algerian-war focused novel. With only six months to finish the book, this decision is rather complicated by his romance with Elisa (Louise Chevilotte), who he picks up in true Frenchman-style on a Lyonnaise terrasse by asking for a cigarette. He didn’t smoke before; he will now.

She’s a younger penniless student while his home is in Paris; making the move to one of the world’s most expensive places — drained of the usual romantic clichés of walking along the seine or staring at the Eiffel Tower — difficult for the young, loved-up couple, who can barely rely on their working-class parents for help. The resultant film explores the pressures of being an artist in an increasingly capitalist world, existing without a connection to one’s roots, and trying to stay in love amidst the maelstrom of modern life. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, but neatly packaged in a smart, bittersweet yet ultimately optimistic package.

With a light, unaffected style with simple yet effective editing, The World After Us effortlessly brings to mind the films of François Truffaut, especially Antoine and Colette, as well as recent ‘novelistic’ French-speaking films like the work of Xavier Dolan, Being 17 and Next Year. While the New Wave is often parodied for its pretensions, it was filled with great humour; effectively communicated here when Labidi interviews for a job at a high-end optician. The comedy diffuses the self-seriousness of similar writer stories, rounding out Labidi as a man who feels like he actually exists off-screen.

As a portrait of a young man as a writer, a genre often tackled in French literature and cinema, The World After Us, partly based on director Louda Ben Salah-Cazanas’s own life, seems unconcerned with the weight of history, using its tightly-written characters and a condensation of time to easily absorb us into Labidi’s life. Aurélien Gabrielli carries his character with a deceptive simplicity, first appearing like a passive sponge before slowly turning into the hero of his own story without exhibiting any stereotypical or groan-worthy moments of growth. Accompanied by a few choice needle drops — “Knights of White Satin”, “Remember Me’ — The World After Us expertly sweeps us through these six months in a smooth 84 minutes. More novella than novel, this is a lovely slice of Francophone auto-fiction.

The World After Us plays in the Panorama strand of the Berlinale, running between 1st-5th March.

Cocoon (Kokon)

Posted on by Paul Risker

It’s a simmering Berlin summer, the hottest on record and in the middle of gym day, Nora (Lena Urzendowsky) has her first period in front of everyone. The incident embarrasses her older sister Jule (Lena Klenke) and her best friend Aylin (Elina Vildanova), who she tags along with as a third wheel. When student Romy (Jella Haase) rushes to help her, it’s the beginning of a life-changing moment, and as their friendship blossoms, Nora for the first time falls in love.

Cinema is populated with dramas about sexual awakening that prompts the question: why the continued interest – for storytellers and audience alike? In the case of the German drama Cocoon, the first reason is director Leonie Krippendorff confidently announces herself with this raw coming-of-age story. Beyond that, these tales of an intimate human experience must trigger impulsive emotional and intellectual pleasure. They must nourish our souls, providing us with something we crave that we may not necessarily be aware of, or we struggle to articulate. Deep down, we’re inherently fascinated by transformation that forms part of the cycle that defines our journey from life to death – the anxieties and the ecstasy. And in spite of our differences, this period of our lives is a traumatic experience that bonds us all.

You can feel the exuberant energy of youth that even the Berlin heatwave cannot quell. There are those bonds of friendship and love, an intimacy with a risk of vulnerability that adds intensity to the story of young people coming-of-age. Krippendorff understands the importance to create that intense feeling that comes with this period of abandonment – live for the day because the future has not yet arrived.

In an early scene, there’s a beautifully orchestrated sequence that acknowledges feelings exist even when not verbally articulated. We are who we are whether or not a side to ourselves is expressed.

Cinema allows for a silent visual expression between a character and the audience that makes storytelling in this medium special. This foreshadows much of the film because Nora is the silent type. She communicates with a mysterious look in her eyes or through her facial expressions, even the subtlety of her lips. While we must fill in these regular voids of silent uncertainty, we feel that we know what she’s thinking.

Later Nora confides in her teacher, “I sometimes find other girls really beautiful… But I think I look at them differently somehow, more like the way a boy would look at them.” The response of the teacher is the voice of the director saying we shouldn’t be so quick to define ourselves, because identity is made up of shades. Instead, we must be open to exploring all the crevices that characterises our persona.

Krippendorff keeps the focus on Nora, and refrains from deferring too much to her sister or any of her social clique, or to the drama of their absent mother. Nora’s silence is refreshing to her loud peers, who provoke a feeling of irritation at their immaturity. Here the exuberant energy of youth is like a flame, and we watch to see if Nora is drawn close enough to it that she will be burnt. The carefree youths fail to grasp the monotony of life and the existential crisis that will be their future. At some point, this chapter of their lives will come to a close, and adulthood and its responsibilities will set in. Unlike Nora, it feels that her peers are standing still and are failing to develop their self-awareness. Jule’s for example is frustrated at not being able to find a dependable boyfriend, while Aylin is full of lust not only for her boyfriend, but of living for the moment.

Nora sees life to be experienced, youth a stepping stone to adulthood, and the caterpillars she keeps at home become symbolic of her journey. She shares her wisdom with us when towards the end of her film she says, “Memories are all the butterfly keeps of its life as a caterpillar.”

The film is a snapshot of a specific period in a person’s life, but it’s more broadly about whether adolescent or adult, we must own our life story, the pain and the joy, and grow. At its simplest, Cocoon is a thoughtful story about how the journey of life is to learn about ourselves. We should not be possessive, but like the butterfly value memories and experiences over keeping alive moments or chapters.

Cocoon is out in cinemas and on VOD platforms on Friday, December 11th.

Goodbye Soviet Union (Hüvasti, NSVL)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

A coming-of-age story set against the waning years of the USSR, Goodbye Soviet Union is a nostalgic and heartfelt invocation of a unique time and place. Likely to be a hit in both Estonia and Finland (tickets were sold out for the public screening here in Tallinn), it breathes new life into the teen indie drama.

Johannes (Niklas Kouzmitchev) and his family are Ingrian Finns. Neither Russian or Estonian, they occupy a strange place in the multicultural patchwork of the ESSR. His mother (Nika Savolainen) never reveals the identity of Johannes’ father, leaving them to put none other than Lenin as the father. Johannes Leninovitch grows up with his parents in the closed city of Leningrad 3, an idealised Soviet space hiding a secret radiation facility. But they are kicked out and sent to Tallinn after a dangerous accident.

If Leningrad 3 felt like a remnant of the 50s, Tallinn in the 1980s is a land full of paradoxes, best expressed by Johannes’ beloved Lenin statues being defaced by punks wearing Kino jackets. This is a marked contrast with the earlier sweetness of Johannes playing with Gena the crocodile, an iconic figure of animation, whom he calls his best friend. After his Gena doll is destroyed, he becomes friends with a young Chechen with the same name and falls in love with his sister Vera (Elene Baratashvili). Together he must navigate between his new-found love and desire to discover the freedom of the West.

The drab colours one may associate with Western depictions of the Soviet Union are replaced by a bright and expressive ’80s palette: from the deep blue pioneer school uniforms to the yellow of a Gorbachev doll’s sweater. The soundtrack, a mixture of 80s Estonian punk like “Tere Perestroika”, the Soviet National anthem played on a music box, and Russian pop songs like Anne Veski’s “Love Island”, truly immerses you into the era, giving the film that authentic coming-of-age feel.

This is a deeply personal story from debut Finnish director Lauri Randla. Born in Estonia in 1981 before taking the boat to Helsinki, he revisits his youth with great tenderness. The use of voiceover gives the film an intimate feel, as if he is simply recounting this story in person. But this sense of nostalgia doesn’t cloak the difficulties of the time nor the importance of freedom for all people.

Eventually, Randla places love over any sense of country, Johannes boldly stating that with love, all you need in life is the air you breathe. With shades of youth classics like Submarine (2010) and Lady Bird (2017)— also contrasting bold children against a place they want to escape — Goodbye Soviet Union ups the stakes by situating this mostly comic genre within a dying republic and focusing on a marginalised ethnic group rarely seen in contemporary cinema. The Soviet Union might be on the way out, but the lessons learned are truly universal. Hopefully it sees the same recognition as the dozens of American and British bildungsromane we see every year.

Goodbye Soviet Union plays as part of the First Feature competition at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 13th to 29th November.

No Hard Feelings (Futur Drei)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Germany has a curious relationship with its non-white residents. You can be third or fourth-generation in the country, and still be referred to as an Ausländer (foreigner). Yet, connecting with your supposed homeland can be a perilous task if you have grown up in Germany your whole life. No Hard Feelings, centring around the experiences of a gay Iranian-German in a small town near Hanover, deftly explores this theme, providing a fresh, intersectional take on the coming-of-age story.

Parvis (Benny Radjaipour) is an aimless young man, who begins in the film in a gay club, stealing a bottle of champagne and hooking up with whoever will have him. His parents, Iranian exiles who run a supermarket, are disappointed in him, not necessarily because he’s homosexual, but because he has no real purpose in life. This changes when he’s suddenly forced to work in a refugee centre.

The job is surprisingly tough. When he is tasked with translating the Farsi of a woman scheduled for deportation, he can barely understand her regional accent. But this experience gives him an eye-opening insight into the plight of his fellow ausländer, who may not have German citizenship but share the discrimination he feels. These feelings come to the fore when he falls for the Iranian refugee Amon (Benny Radjaipour) and makes friends with his sister Banafshe (Banafshe Hourmazdi).

No Hard Feelings

No Hard Feelings deserves credit for the way it weaves systematic racism within a queer coming-of-age tale. For example, after a refreshingly graphic hook-up with an older white German man, he is immediately singled out by his race — the other man saying that he normally doesn’t go for hairy südlander (a term that usually refers to anyone dark from Balkans, Greece, Turkey and the Middle East), but that Parvis shouldn’t worry, as he “isn’t hairy”. The racist insult rolls off the tongue in such a way that the speaker has no idea that he’s being offensive, showing how embedded and unquestioned such views can be within German culture. Yet, among the refugees, also homophobia runs unchecked within the Arab/Iranian community, director Faraz Shariat skilfully aiming shots at both side of the cultural divide.

Utilising an Instagram friendly aesthetic, with a square frame and a popcorn-pastel colour palette, the style of the movie reflects the expressive nature of its characters. Stagier moments, scored to electronic music, contrast against the hand-held naturalism of dialogue or sex driven-scenes, showing both the world as these young people imagine it (or might stage it on their phone) and the way it really is. Later scenes of intimacy are shot with much more focus on emotion, later giving one of the best contrasts between merely shagging and actually making love.

While the scenes don’t flow together to create maximum effect, with random inserts or fantasy-esque sequences often undercutting the impact of the story, the style of No Hard Feelings asserts the strong sensibility of debut writer-director Shariat.

No Hard Feelings is out on Digital on Monday, December 7th.

Butterfly Kisses

Posted on by victorfraga

The first feature film by Polish filmmaker Rafael Kapelinski tells the story of a group of friends -Jake, Kyle and Jarred – who always hang out together and whose conversations almost inevitably centre on girls, sex, and pornography. And they always go to a club that is run by an odd guy called Shrek. The movie takes place in London.

Jake who is the most interesting and complex character within the film. He is quiet and sensitive, and still a virgin. Butterfly Kisses introduces the subject of peer pressure with a gripping hand: the teenager must lose his virginity at any cost. The movie depicts Jake’s journey towards self-discovery in a delicate and realistic way, and this path will reveal some disturbing secrets.

Jake apparently has a crush on his neighbor Zara, whose room he always spies from the top floor of his apartment.  The two get closer, but in the end Jake is hopeless. As the film goes on, the clues from the beginning of the story confirm the horrible truth: Jake has paedophilic tendencies. Butterfly Kisses touches gently on the inflammatory taboo subject, but then it moves away in a different direction.

Kapelinski’s sense of direction is remarkable: he uses the horse as an allegory that drives the story plus in the end it appears as an intermittent vision. Still, the movie is not perfect. There are also weaknesses. The story is not totally fluent and fluid and sometimes it ends up being slow and not convincing enough. Some of the characters are a bit contrived: for example, Zara can be perceived as the victim, but she is also merciless with Jake. Some of the protagonists are full of inconsistencies and do not grab out attention.

The cast delivers great performances. Humans’ Theo Stevenson is spot-on in the interpretation of Jake and Liam Whiting; Rosie Day and Byron Lyons are great counterparts. The shining star is the Thomas Turgoose whose presence adds a certain je ne sais pas quoi to the movie. Nick Cooke’s monochrome cinematography is adequate and coherent to this bleak narrative.

Butterfly Kisses may not enrapture you with its narrative, maybe because the characters aren’t entirely relatable. On the other hand, it will entertain you while still touching on complex and potentially incendiary topics. The movie will show in London as part of the East End Film Festival, which will take place throughout June.