Tag: drama

The Enemies (Doshmanan)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

A puzzling character study trafficking in loneliness, meanness and sadness, The Enemies is both a confounding and intriguing experience. Telling the story of a Zohreh (Roya Afshar) a 60-year-old Iranian woman in Tehran disliked by her family and hated by her neighbours, it asks deep questions of its central character without ever compromising on its singular vision.

Zohreh’s son Sharab, a drug addict, is missing. Her husband is supposedly working by the Caspian Sea. She lives with her daughter, a flight attendant, and her mother, critical in both health and temperament, never wasting a moment in telling Zohreh she has ruined her life.

In fact, Zohreh takes no interest in matters of family, doting upon her many cats and spending her free time stealing supermarket sweets and handing them out to schoolchildren instead. Meanwhile, someone has been sending the rest of the apartment block’s letters accusing Zohreh of terrible things. But is there more to these letters than initially supposed?

In describing this film I’ve had to deliberately misrepresent the plot. To describe the plot entirely accurately would be to give away some of its keenest pleasures. In this film, nearly everything you learn at the start is something of a misnomer, upending your expectations throughout. It’s best experiencing the film knowing as few twists and turns as possible, so you can guess alongside the characters as to what is actually going on.

Is she acting so oddly because her son has gone missing? Or is there something much deeper at the heart of The Enemies? An exciting tension runs throughout the movie, the character of Zohreh seemingly able to move in any direction. Credit must go to the brilliant Roya Afshar, who never gives too much away, suggesting huge amounts of sadness and even mischievousness behind her large eyes.

With many assistant directing credits to his name, this is Ali Derakhshandeh’s first time directing a feature fiction film. His enigmatic story is embedded within a measured and melancholic style, making use of long takes, slow pans and careful blocking. We are not told what to think or feel, having to engage critically into figuring out Zohreh’s inner-state.

This remove in both style and content makes the film difficult for emotional investment, even when it occasionally breaks from its alienating style and gives us brief glimpses into the real Zohreh. While individual scenes benefit from fine acting that combines awkwardness and offence in equal measure, it’s hard to say what Zohreh’s inner-conflict and relation to the outside world really is.

Perhaps it’s a metaphor for the status of women in Iran. With multiple references to the state of the country as well as video calls with relatives having a seemingly better life abroad, the film critiques the way Iranian society seems to pigeonhole and blame women for things outside of their control. Her flight attendant daughter, flitting between Iran and the wider world, is between both worlds, while her mother, in her last days, is fixed to the streets and culture of Tehran. Meanwhile drug dealers run rampant just outside the flat window; something is rotten all right, but the ultimate meaning remains frustratingly elusive.

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

Black Light (Bit-Gwa Cheol)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

In the aftermath of an accident, it is human nature to want to fully understand exactly what happened. But what can you do when the key witness is in a coma, unlikely to wake up soon? This is the key issue that haunts Korean melodrama Black Light, which starts with a seemingly simple premise before adding multiple, often contradictory, layers.

Heejoo (Kim Si-eun) returns to her former home and returns to the same job she had in a factory before she got married to her late husband. She doesn’t seem to have it all together: a quiet, nervous woman, her fear of the past often leads her scurrying away from fearful situations. Then when she meets a canteen worker at the factory and the wife of the other man in the accident, Youngnam (Yum Hye-ran), she is forced to uncover the hidden secrets of the car crash which killed her husband.

Black Light gets more interesting as it goes along — indicting the factory and the local police force, as well as multiple supporting players, in what may or may not have happened. By the end, it seems like nearly everyone in the town has a part in what went on, making the film a complicated exploration of how the truth can be a slippery beast. Yet, appearing to have more perspectives on the central death than all three seasons of Twin Peaks, this multifaceted approach is both the film’s strongest and weakest points.

How many key reveals should a drama have? Conventional screenwriting suggests that you should save your reveal for near the end, thus creating a clever twist that makes you rethink what has come before. Black Light rips up conventional wisdom, delivering more “a-ha” moments than a season’s worth of Poirot. But when the revelations seem to go in multiple directions, it blurs both women’s perspectives together to create a blurry picture of what the truth really is.

The problem with this technique is that, while interesting from an academic standpoint, it ends up stripping these reveals from having any emotional power. Repetitious to a fault, it deadens the plot instead of enriching it. This is reflected in the style of the film too, with many confrontations shot in almost exactly the same way. Characters meet and are framed in a traditional two-camera shot. Then near the end of the scene, cinematographer Cho Wangseob cuts to a wide medium shot, with both characters balanced on either side of the frame. The style functions as a metaphor for the movie, which offers up both perspectives at multiple times before mashing them together.

I found myself pulled towards and away the film throughout its 107-minute runtime. On the one hand it’s a clever investigation of what the “truth” could be, told by unreliable, knotty protagonists, and handsomely mounted and acted. On the other, its repetitious and often melodramatic tone left me with little investment in what was going on. Evoking Burning in its enigmatic approach, it ultimately lacks that film’s haunting and imperceptible tension.

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

Madly in Life (Une Vie Démente)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Life doesn’t care about your plans. Alex (Jean Le Peltier) and Noemie (Lucie Debay) want a child, but have to put their lives on hold when Alex’s mother Suzanne (a superb Jo Deseure) is diagnosed with dementia. The result is a bittersweet Belgian drama-comedy that provides an unconventional yet refreshing portrait of one of the world’s most heartbreaking diseases.

Madly in Life starts with the small things, a cancelled credit card here, an unfiltered comment about sex there, before rapidly snowballing into a non-stop avalanche of issues. It soon turns out that Suzanne owes the government nearly €30,000, as she continued her job as an artistic director despite filing for a pension two years ago. Furthermore, she finds herself doing bizarre things, like getting into other people’s cars and houses. At first, it seems that she has become simply uncaring in her old age; but a trip to a professional shows that she is suffering from semantic dementia.

Directors Ann Sirot and Raphaël Balboni understand that dementia need not be expressed in clichés of mere forgetfulness — so often told in American films through unconvincing dream sequences in which people start disappearing — but can manifest itself in strange and unexpected ways.

The French title Une Vie Démente literally means “a mad life”, but functions as a clever pun on the similar word démence, which means “dementia”. This double-meaning of complex madness is not only true for Suzanne, radiantly captured by Desuere, but the young couple as well, who differ dramatically on the ways in which Suzanne should be treated. Putting their hope for a new apartment and baby on the back-burner, Madly in Life navigates a variety of escalating crises that vary from cancelling a trip on the weekend to discussing end-of-life care.

A mostly-realistic approach is complicated and enriched by a few surreal flights of fancy. For example, a repeated non-naturalist motif features the characters wearing matching clothes against a plain background, talking to a professional — whether its a pre-conception counsellor, tax accountant or a doctor — we never see. In these moments we get a sense of order that intentionally seems to jar against the chaotic world of Suzanne’s condition.

Further dislocation comes through the film’s multiple use of jump cuts. Put in places where another film would’ve let the camera roll, they create a difficult environment where resolution is not easily found. But the cast, seemingly improvising within these situations, keep an authentic and touching atmosphere throughout.

Ultimately, the film shows that there are no easy ways to cope with a loved-one losing their mind: only different degrees of less bad ones. By utilising black humour as well as heartfelt drama, Madly in Life neatly catches the highs and the lows of both life and love. An extension of several shorts the two directors have worked on together — many of which combine social reality with elements of the fable — it sees them expertly expand their pallet to a wider feature film.

Madly in LIfe plays as part of the First Feature competition at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 13th to 29th November.

Poppy Field (Mooniväli)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

A member of the Romanian Gendarmerie faces up to the secrets of his personal life in the LGBT drama Poppy Field, a gripping, minimalist tale from first-time feature director Eugen Jebeleanu. Essentially comprised of two elongated scenes, it subtly refracts upon itself to deliver a fascinating tale of being closeted in a hyper-masculine society.

Cristi (Conrad Mericoffer) is hosting his French Muslim boyfriend Hadi (Radouan Leflahi) at his flat. They cannot keep their hands off each other, almost instantly falling into bed. Life outside of the bedroom isn’t so simple. When Hadi broaches the idea of visiting the mountains for a night, Cristi waves it away with a variety of weak excuses. There is the sense that he is hiding something, boiling over into an awkward encounter when his seemingly well-meaning sister comes over to visit.

The second, longer act of the film puts Cristi’s tortured complexity into context. On the police beat, he is called to the scene of a queer cinema screening that is being blocked by ultra-nationalist protestors. Based on the true story of the 120 BPM being blocked by religious protestors in Romania, we are shown this scene in realistic detail, Jebeleanu creating a sense of chaos and spectacle through handheld framing and overlapping dialogue. When Cristi meets a former lover at that same screening, he quickly spirals out of control, potentially causing controversy when the encounter turns violent.

The film is shot in a classic Romanian New Wave style: stripped of artifice and filled with elliptical dialogue. Cinematographer Marius Panduru employs multiple long, intense takes that don’t call attention to themselves while maintaining a tense and claustrophobic environment. This simple and unadorned approach creates a true sense of authenticity and specificity, allowing us to reflect on the particular environment Cristi is trying, and mostly failing, to navigate, indicting wider Romanian society in the process.

Some viewers may be put off by the single-minded approach of the film, which only uses a couple of locations to convey the conflicted inner state of its main protagonist. I found it absolutely engrossing, especially the way the other cops — who occupy a strange middle-ground between the LGBT friendly theatre-goers and the religious zealots — try and calm Cristi down through the use of monologues that are alternately sad, funny and a little strange. Often shot in just one take, they betrays a great amount of confidence in the cast to carry scenes with words and subtle facial gestures alone. Mericoffer, in particular, is brilliant, able to convey the difficult inner life of his protagonist without relying on any unnecessary or overblown gestures.

Simply put, this is an exciting, morally grey film tackling a complex topic within a country that is still in the process of fully recognising LGBT rights. Stressing realism over didacticism while realising the full humanity of nearly all its players, it’s more proof of the rich and exciting potential of contemporary Romanian film to make fascinating art out of simple premises.

Poppy Field played as part of the First Feature competition at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 13th to 29th November, when this piece was originally written. It premieres in the UK in March, as part of the BFI Flare London LGBT Film Festival.

Karnawal

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

The Malambo dance is both intense and mesmerising, setting the tone for the tumultuous ride of Karnawal. Inspired by the movements of horses, this folk cowboy dance, inherent to the Northern Jujuy region of Argentina, requires discipline and drive. And Cabra (Martin López) is so determined to be a great dancer that he is willing to do anything to get the money for the knee-length boots needed to dance; including running a gun over the Bolivian-Argentine border.

Karnawal starts right in the thick of things, with the young lad handed the gun in the midst of a celebration, and trying to sneak it over the border on a rickety bus. After narrowly escaping the hands of border police — in intense, intimate scenes shot with handheld cameras — he returns to his mother’s (Mónica Lairana) house, where she lives with her national guard boyfriend (Diego Cremonesi).

The film contains a real appreciation for the customs of the region, as shown by the pre-Hispanic rituals of the Carnaval de Humahuaca — locals dress up as bright devils, letting go of inhibitions to unearth and then bury the devil. These are some of the best scenes in the movie, where the personal interacts with history, showing how difficult it can be to break out of the place in which you’re raised. The narrative of the film maps itself onto and alongside these festivities, as his father (Alfredo Castro) is let out of prison, bringing his son along on an intense journey that combines the slice-of-life family drama with the crime thriller.

Growing up in such a harsh environment, only thing that keeps Cabra going is his love of dance, captured well by cinematographer Ramiro Civita and editors Luz Lopez Mañe and Eduardo Serrano, who know the right time to cut and the right time to let the dancing speak for itself. This leads up to the final competition, featuring a blistering performance by López that recalls the frantic drumming scenes in Whiplash.

Karnawal takes a long time to finally come together, layering on seemingly disparate elements that eventually loop back upon one another. But this ambitious narrative often comes at odds with the film’s thriller elements, stretching out its central themes instead of honing them. While boasting great scenery — including the harsh and rugged mountains of Northern Argentina — and a great eye for local detail, the sense of urgency found in individual scenes doesn’t quite work when viewed as a whole.

Additionally, despite López’s passion and strong dance moves, the young lad often seems like a bystander in his own story, overshadowed by the magnetic performance of Chilean veteran (and frequent Pablo Larraín collaborator) Alfredo Castro. Despite superficial criminal lifestyles, there feels like few similarities between the two characters, straining the father-son backbone of the film when it should be its tightest point. The supporting cast is also thinly drawn, including a mother with a paper-thick personality and an overly stoic step-dad, providing little contrast to the central duo. Debut director Juan Pablo Félix has obvious talent in creating and maintaining a tense atmosphere; here’s hoping his next film is just a little more focused.

Should the Wind Drop plays as part of the First Feature competition at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 13th to 29th November.

Around the Sun

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

Ever wonder if things may have turned out differently? Would a pithy remark with that boy or girl at the bar have changed anything? This is the power of first impressions, and it is a central notion of Around the Sun.

The film’s lean 89 minutes follows Maggie (Cara Theobold), an estate agent, and Bernard (Gethin Anthony), a film scout, as they walk and talk in a decrepit French chateau. They’re strangers to each other, yet they waste no time with small talk. Their wandering conversations mention everything from ex-partners to existential struggles, but their main topic is Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, a French author who penned Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds while a resident at the chateau.

As Maggie explains the book’s plot – which is a series of celestial conversations between a philosopher and an aristocratic woman – it becomes clear that life is imitating art. Indeed, Maggie and Bernard’s dynamic is reminiscent of Before Sunrise (Richard Linklater, 1995), and this conceit has a share of strengths and weaknesses.

The immediate problem lies with the performances; Theobold and Anthony’s dynamic just feels unnatural and scripted, especially when one or the other squirms to point out they meant no offence. However, the quality is redressed as the multiversal narrative unfolds, which splits and reimagines the story several times, presenting the characters with different traits and energies. This redrawing of Maggie and Bernard sees the actors’ performances come into their own, bolstering our hopes for their romance.

After all, these are characters of resonant, empathetic detail. They’re both wanderers without a calling: Maggie is far too learned for her job, while Bernard dropped law school to pursue a career with the meretricious hope of travel, “you can never just be in a place, you’ve always got to pay attention”. When their dynamic is at its strongest, we have a pair of urbane yet rudderless souls, and whether they will finally elope depends on the audience’s careful viewing of this detailed, erudite romantic drama.

Around the Sun is on VoD on Tuesday, August 4th.

South Terminal (Terminal Sud)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

A doctor (Ramzy Bedia) in an unnamed French-speaking Mediterranean country finds himself caught in the grip of endless violence in Terminal South, a meandering drama about trying to maintain dignity in a world gone wrong. Despite boasting solid performances, handsome cinematography and moments of sheer viciousness, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche’s sixth film has little to say and even less to say it with.

The opening sequence quickly shows what kind of country we’re in; a bus trip through the mountains raided by men in army uniforms who take everyone’s most precious belongings. Moments of bloodshed spark out of nowhere, any encounter containing the ability to erupt into a skirmish. When the bus driver reports the theft to a local newspaper, he cannot identify the men, unsure if they’re actually the army or simply bandits dressed up in their uniform. The chief editor agrees that it’s important, and promises to publish the story the next day. But when he goes to the office the next morning, a car pulls up and he is shot dead.

The shocking death of the doctor’s is treated as a watershed moment here, the traditional Islamic funeral given ten plus minutes to really soak in his tragic fate. Yet this is a guy we have only met a couple of times; making it difficult to really care that he’s gone. Making scenes like this longer than they need to be often achieves the opposite effect of what a filmmaker intended; causing me to lose interest just when my emotional investment should be growing.

Terminal South

Meanwhile, the doctor’s fate is a miserable one, caught up in a Kafkesque world where the line between police, terrorists and militia men has collapsed. There are no real good guys here, no epic signs of resistance, just ordinary men and women trying to do their best. Even he is sent death threats and told to stop his work, treating patients whose ailments have been exacerbated by living in such a society. But the doctor’s story randomly piles on the misery, giving Bedia little to work with dramatically. The predominately comic actor pulls in a decent shift here, yet he cannot overcome a fundamentally weak screenplay without any true central conflict to speak of.

There is a difference between being ambiguous and being vague. While ambiguity invites the viewer to search for different meanings, vagueness can often leave us scratching our heads. We never even find out where the film is set. Are we in the south of France or are we in North Africa? I assume this is the point, to display how any country has the capacity to steadily disintegrate. Yet without any real context, I found it hard to find a foothold in the story, its tale completely washing over me like the Mediterranean Sea.

A French Release date has been set for 13 November. Whether the film is released anywhere else remains to be seen.

Tell It To The Bees

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

In 1952, Jean Markham (Anna Paquin) returns to the small Scottish town where she grew up to take over her father’s medical practice as the local doctor. She left in her teenage years under scandalous circumstances which, we’ll learn later, involved falling in love with another girl in an age when such things were frowned upon. When young Charlie Weekes (Gregor Selkirk) turns up at her surgery with a minor injury, recognising he may be going through something of a hard time she takes him back to her house to show him the bee hives she keeps in her garden. She tells him you can share any secret with the bees and they’ll understand.

Charlie’s mum Lydia (Holliday Grainger) isn’t having an easy time of it either. Her husband Robbie (Emun Elliot) became a changed man during the war and their relationship is over. He has to all intents and purposes moved out of the family home. Lydia holds down a factory floor position at the mill where her less than sympathetic sister in law Pam (Kate Dickie) works, but is behind on the rent and eviction is not far off on the horizon. Lydia’s fury at the new doctor taking her son to his house is mitigated when she meets Jean and discovers the latter is a woman, not a man.

Once Lydia and Charlie are evicted, Jean gives them lodging. When Lydia is laid off, Jean gives her a job as housekeeper. On news of her eviction, Lydia – a keen dancer – heads to a local pub, hits the drink and is all over the first man to join her on the dance floor. Charlie spots her through the window and feels betrayed. If you’ve seen the trailer or publicity stills which accurately pitch the film as a lesbian romance you’ve got a pretty good idea where this is going – although the narrative has a few surprises in store towards the end.

Henrietta and Jessica Ashworth’s adaptation of Fiona Shaw’s novel proves effective for the most part, capturing the feel of a small town where everybody knows everybody else and no secrets stay hidden for long. In passing, it delivers believable portraits of bailiffs working for landlords and the harsh, shop floor working conditions of (mostly female) mill workers. Doctors working within the newly founded NHS find that patients can’t quite get used to the idea that medical treatment is free and consequently are slower in seeking advice or treatment than they might be today (at least, while we still have an NHS free to all at the point of need). Finally, in an unexpectedly harrowing subplot, a backstreet abortion goes wrong threatening to kill off a minor character.

Beyond the young Charlie, the few other male characters are deftly sketched if mostly on the fringes of the narrative. Lydia’s husband Robbie is a brute given to occasional bouts of violence, unable to relate to his wife yet still tragically in love with her. He contrasts sharply with Jean’s kindly solicitor friend Jim (Stephen Robertson) who proposes to her then remains genuinely interested in her well-being even after his advances have been rejected. Elsewhere the boy with whom Charlie plays in the woods talks to him about “a dirty dyke”, the only words on offer to describe Jean’s sexual preferences.

All the performances are top notch (why doesn’t Kate Dickie get more decent roles?). A mention should also go to the decision to shoot with real bees rather than special effects: the bee wrangling and cinematography yield spectacular results.

The one place the film trips up follows a scene in which the outraged Robbie plunges his fist through one of Jean’s hives. If you kept bees and discovered someone had done this, you’d most definitely have a reaction. But, inexplicably, Jean doesn’t ever appear to notice this has happened. (It may not be a script error – it’s possible this material was there and either not shot or cut out after shooting to bring down the running length.) It’s an irritating plot hole that knocks the film down at least a star on our rating. Which is a shame because, that sole misstep aside, the whole thing works as a serviceable, small town, post-war, lesbian, romantic drama. With a young boy’s perspective thrown in alongside those of the two women for good measure.

Tell It To The Bees is out in the UK on Friday, July 19th. On VoD on Monday, November 11th.

Gwen

Posted on by victorfraga

Poor Gwen (Eleanor Worthington-Cox) has the weight of the world on her shoulders. Sharing a bleak cottage with her mother Elen (Maxine Peake) and little sister Mari (Jodie Innes), the vulnerable trio, unprotected by a father absent at war (probably the Crimean War), are under threat to move out as the neighbouring slate mine has an eye on their property to expand its operations. Gwen’s mother is unsympathetic as she is so stressed, constantly shouting at her and, often unreasonably, ordering her about. Her only companion is little Mari and her only consolation the smile of a handsome boy, Harri Morris (Gwion Glyn), who fancies her at the local chapel, which they attend every Sunday.

The family is threatened by frightening incidents. A sheep’s heart is nailed to their front door and their sheep are killed in the night. The sinister Mr. Wynne (Mark Lewis Jones) takes Elen aside after chapel and tries to persuade her to give up her cottage and land. She refuses. It is her home for her and her daughters and will remain so to await the return of her absent husband (the whole family is shown briefly happily re-united in former times). The forces of greedy capitalism will not be assuaged. The film builds up to an horrific climax at which the two young girls must flee their home.

The film is set in the beautiful but harsh landscape of Snowdonia in Wales. Great storm clouds gather over the mountains and eventually break into loud thunderclaps and increase the sound of the moaning wind that constantly fills the air round the cottage. Mists shroud the atmosphere out of which occasionally emerge threatening figures. The film is self-consciously a horror movie as well as a piece of social documentation. The horror is not only the usual Gothic side-effects but the injustice which the family must endure. The mother cuts herself to let out “sin”, she turns around at Gwen in her bedroom, seemingly made hideous by some disease, a horse that has been injured must be put down and hacked to pieces for meat to feed the family. Gwen cannot bear to kill the horse, that has bolted off after being frightened by a clap of thunder, or chop him up, so it is done by the bad-tempered mother. Gwen presents a picture of innocence continually tormented by the cruelty and harshness of the world.

This story is continually bleak. Except for the smile of the boy in the chapel and occasional sympathy of the local doctor (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith), who, anyway, later falsely accuses Gwen of stealing some medicine, there is no relief from the depression and misery. Some may find this an overdrawn aspect of the Gothic effects of the film.

What Gwen does successfully convey, however, is the misery that befell so many of the peasantry in the United Kingdom in the mid-nineteenth century as the ways of capitalism and economic “improvement” strode across the country breaking up traditional ways of life, settled villages and family life. In the Highlands of Scotland, during the “Highland Clearances”, the Gaelic-speaking peasantry were thrown off their lands for the sake of more economic sheep farming. In Ireland (most of which was then part of the United Kingdom) the peasantry was evicted from their cottages, allowed to starve to death in ditches or flee to America in the wake of the Great Famine of the 1840’s. Not all of this was deliberate, but it was found to be highly convenient for the British government in clearing, what was then called, “rural congestion”. Likewise in Wales, the coal and slate mines broke up traditional communities to advance their ends.

Whether people were driven from their cottages quite in the way depicted at the end of Gwen may be debatable, but the horror motifs well convey the injustice of it all and the helplessness of those who tried to stand in the way of an all-powerful capitalism. Elen, if she had been less brave, would have sold her land to the powerful Mr. Wynne. She and her daughters, with a fairly small settlement, would have settled elsewhere in Wales, forgot their memories of their homestead, and become one of the numberless workers at the pitheads or slate mines of the Industrial Revolution. Such is the story of so many of the Welsh working class.

Gwen is in cinemas on Friday, July 19th. On VoD on Monday, November 11th.

Default (Gukgabudo-ui Nal)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The year is 1996. The news media are championing South Korea’s economy as it seemingly goes from strength to strength, never questioning whether financial institutions might in fact be pursuing practices which are sooner or later going to have disastrous economic results. Ms. Han Si-hyun (Kim Hye-su) who runs a fiscal policy unit at the Bank of Korea submits a devastating report to the Bank’s governor, explaining that she and her small department have procedures set in place to save the economy and protect ordinary Koreans from disaster.

The politicians have a very different agenda, however, specifically the smarmy Vice-Minister of Finance (Jo Woo-jin) who views financial collapse as a way to weaken the rights of the working class and restructure the economy in favour of large business interests. Although it’s not name checked, there are echoes here of Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine and the film based upon it. Against Han’s advice, the government secretly holds talks with the IMF in the form of Michel Camdessus (a suitably creepy Vincent Cassel).

While most of the government officials and the bank’s governor are male, Ms.Han’s small team comprises both genders in equal measure. At one point, she’s subjected to verbal abuse as to how women are emotional and shouldn’t be allowed to work in banks. At another, she bravely holds an unauthorised press conference to reveal to the press what’s going on, only for none of the papers to cover the story.

In a second plot strand, young, smart and hungry stockbroker Yoon Jung-hak (Yoo Ah-in) quits his established financial firm who are convinced the country is on a sure financial footing because, like Han, he can see the impending crash ahead. Unlike Han, however, he wants to play the market and help investors profit from it. The film doesn’t quite know how to handle Yoon. He’s shown as both the visionary who accurately predicts what’s coming and the ruthless predator who helps his clients profit from it – yet on one occasion he rails against his investor clients, suggesting that making money isn’t everything.

A third plot strand takes the proceedings closer to ordinary people as small business owner Gap-su (Heo Jun-ho) is paid for a lucrative deal with a promissory note rather than cash which later turns into a worthless piece of paper when he has creditors to pay. He reassures his workers that they will get the wages they were due two days ago while his wife who works elsewhere loses her job. He contemplates jumping off the balcony of the high rise apartment in which his family live as his two children sleep soundly in their room.

The relentless pace never allows itself to get bogged down in the radical ideas at the film’s heart, preferring instead to keep things moving. An audience-pleasing melodrama as exciting as any Western blockbuster, it successfully conveys a pivotal moment in recent Asian economic history.

Default played as a teaser for LKFF, The London Korean Film Festival. Watch the film trailer below:

Roma

Posted on by victor@dmovies.org

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!