Tag: film review

The Great Movement (El Gran Movimiento)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

At once a frantic city symphony in the style of Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (Walter Ruttmann, 1927) or Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929), a social-realist drama about poor living conditions in La Paz, and a surrealist fantasy, The Great Movement is a fiendishly difficult movie to classify in regular terms. Playful yet obtuse, thematically dense yet light on its feet, its mixture of documentary and fiction refuses simple classification in favour of multiplicity and expansion.

It starts with a slow zoom into the city, allowing us to arrive into a dusty metropolis, filled with high-rises, endless exposed wires, the hum and thrum of traffic, bustling market stalls, and the constant sound of tripped car alarms. And it ends with the flow of rivers, showing all these people and their stories seemingly dissolving into the same stream.

Within this circle of life enters Elder (Julio César Ticona), a miner with poor health who has walked for a week to protest against the government. But the journey has inevitably taken its toll on the middle-aged man, requiring him to look for alternative forms of medicine. This sets the film on its central contrast: rapidly sprawling urban development — signified by long-lines of burned out cars, chaotic construction work, and the criss-crossing of housing blocks — and its relationship to older, simpler ways of living.

Over two-fifths of Bolivia’s population is indigenous, the highest percentage in all of Latin America. The shaman Max (Max Bautista Uchasara), in a few patience-testing scenes, is seen living up in the woods, foraging for materials, unencumbered by the demands of modern life. But for the rest of the indigenous people in the city — like most people in the world — they have to make a compromise under capitalism, scuttling to and from work, engaging in back-breaking jobs while simply trying to get by.

The Great Movement

Thankfully, director Kiro Russo, allows space for joy: whether it’s the banter of the women in the markets, random musical interludes that display a clear eye for movement and choreography or the desperate drinking rituals of the impoverished men. This is all given a retro sheen thanks to the choice of grainy super 16mm film, Italo-disco-sounding needle drops and an unhurried and confident tone, as if this is a film that has always existed, rather than something that was purposefully created.

If the film doesn’t completely cohere, it might be due to the fact that it doesn’t seem to want to cohere, instead shoring up a variety of symbols, throwing them in your eyeballs and seeing what sticks. This is best summed up by a psychedelic montage near the end, which appear to play the entire movie again in just a couple of minutes. Both semi-profound yet semi-ponderous, its a hard film to love, but an easy one to appreciate; not only for the scope of its ambition, but also its refusal to be easily understood. After all, the story of any city is a story of overlapping, competing ideas, jostling for prominence. Russo cleverly lets them sit side by side, favouring the power of overwhelming images to create a genuine sense of cinematic reverie.

The film opens in UK cinemas on April 15th. You can pre-order your seat at the Institut Français today! On various VoD platforms on Monday, May 30th.

Alice

Posted on by Paul Risker

A happily married Parisian wife, the titular character of the drama, finds her life turned upside down when she discovers that her husband has emptied all of their accounts, they’re a year behind on their mortgage, and he has squandered all of her inheritance on prostitutes. Desperate to support herself and her son, Alice (Emilie Piponnier) begins working as a high-end escort.

When we allow someone to love us, we hand that person the power to irrevocably hurt us. Alice’s introduction portrays a seemingly picturesque life: apartment, husband, child and friends. But this is the proverbial calm before the storm, and when her perfect life is suddenly uprooted and she learns the truth, we feel her powerlessness, we feel her anger, we feel her sense of despair and hopelessness. She chose to trust her husband François (Martin Swabey) and she pays the price for it.

Director Josephine Mackerras and actress Piponnier, convey a dramatic moment with an emotional authenticity that reaches across the screen. We connect with Alice through an empathetic understanding, bonding with her through a shared vulnerability, a rooted fear of betrayal and dismissal. The actress’ skill is the delicate impression she first casts of Alice, who seems impervious to rage, but then her meekness gives way to anger, frustration and an ambivalent temper. Piponnier nurtures her character, but never loses touch of its delicate soul. The startling revelation feels genuine by the way she emotionally morphs, and throughout the drama, Mackerras and Piponnier sync Alice with the theme and idea of change – the Parisian housewife skin shed, yet whose aura remains unchanged.

The story is thematically centred around not only how one copes with adversity, but what one will do to survive. If the film successfully engages with the audience, it will provoke us to contemplate whether admiration for the strength to survive adversity supersedes social mores of acceptability? Mackerras offers us a litmus test, subtly asking, ‘How do you see Alice?’ When she first meets fellow high-end escort Lisa (Chloé Boreham), she’s told that the reason she’s chosen by the agency is, “It’s that good girl thing you have going.” As Alice sets on down this path, the question whether we see her is not framed by such extreme terms as either a moral condemnation or acquittal, but the nuanced question of whether we see her differently?

In one scene Alice says, “I don’t feel any different.” Lisa responds, “You mean now that you’re a fallen woman? If you’re in love, having sex may be the best experience of your life. If you are raped, maybe it’s the worst. But in our case, things are under our control, the exchange is fair. So why should you feel different?” Our experiences inevitably change us, but the film looks to whether we place too much emphasis on the idea of change, contemplating whether there is a core sense of self or identity that remains intact. If Alice does not feel any different from these new experiences, then should we see her as a different person? Alice challenges us to ask if our empathy is genuine, and whether we understand the complexities of identity, and do we apply that to how we engage with people outside of experiencing stories? Our response to this film may offer an insight into whether we are agents of humanity or slaves to judgement guided by naïve social mores, because as Alice says, “Prejudice is more powerful than logic.”

It often feels that we are living in an ignorant world, populated by cruelty and indifference. Mackerras’ Alice is a film aware of the black and white morality, because as the family lawyer, one of Alice’s first clients warns her, “When it comes to society’s morals and ethics, there will always be innocent victims.” It’s ironic in a world that is often missing its ethical spine that such distinctions should exist. Alice, who together with Lisa, offer a refreshingly mature and non-adversarial perspective that there are no victims, only players in a drama. Here we discover a humility, a momentary relief or escape from the hubris of our contemporary world.

At its heart, Alice is a story about empowerment, and it offers a thought about how one should live their lives that can resonate with all of us. Aside from the familiar notions of trust and love turning sour, the way in which the drama unfolds reminds us of the larger point that love is a privilege, it is not a right. Mackerras’ feature début is unassuming, mixing humour and anxious emotion with humanity and a little romanticism to good effect. Under her skilled direction it finds a way to be what it needs to be in any given moment, and effectively compromises the seriousness of drama with the lightness of comedy.

Alice is on Curzon Home Cinema, The BFI Player, Amazon Prime Video and Barbican Cinema On Demand from Friday, July 24th.

First Love (Hatsukoi)

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

From Ichi the Killer (2001) and Visitor Q (2001) to The Happiness of the Katakuris (2002) and Ninja Kids!!! (2011), Takashi Miike is amongst the most eclectic directors on the world stage. He is frequently described as bizarre and extreme, yet First Love is a mediocre headache of a film.

Much like Free Fire (Ben Wheatley, 2016) – that exercise in naff banter and dreary combat – First Love has a stale mix of harsh combat and pantomime comedy that fail independently and intertwined. Both films have a litany of swaggering, hollow characters who are so charmless and unlikeable that you just will for them to kill each other so you can leave the screening and get on with your life. Some compared Wheatley’s film to the quips and wisecracks of Quentin Tarantino, but it wasn’t even on par with Guy Ritchie – and neither is this frivolous nonsense from Takashi Miike.

There is a story to First Love, something about a drug deal gone wrong and a petulant young boxer called Leo (Masataka Kubota), whose fight scenes, it must be said, are filmed quite well. Anyway, the angsty boxer crosses paths with Monica (Sakurako Konishi), a young girl forced into prostitution due to her father’s debt to the Yakuza. These two, who apparently share the titular first love, become entangled in said drug deal, which involves so many parties it’s not worth repeating.

This is the main problem with First Love – it is a convoluted mess. Screenwriter Nasa Nakamura throws hordes of pinstriped Yakuza into the story and fails to make any of them interesting, and the performers’ wacky shtick only makes it worse.

It is here that a comparison to Tarantino is actually called for, and it isn’t favourable. True Romance (Tony Scott, 1993) is, as the trailer pithily summarises, a story of ’60 cops, 40 agents, 30 mobsters, and a few thousand bullets’. However, there’s one thing they missed in that summary – the chemistry of Clarence (Christian Slater) and Alabama (Patricia Arquette). Their relationship proves befitting of the film’s title and acts as a binding agent for the dynamite energy of Tarantino’s script and the ensemble of fantastically dirty performances from Dennis Hopper, Christopher Walken and Gary Oldman.

Alas, First Love is just adolescent carnage with no heart, no soul and originality; it’s one of those films where you spend the running time wishing you were watching an old favourite that did it so much better.

First Love is in cinemas Friday, February 14th. On VoD in March.

1917

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

When the trailer for 1917 debuted, it bore a similar aesthetic to Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan, 2017) – not an entirely bad thing, but not the preferred style, either. I had shared the minority view that Nolan’s film was, in the words of The Guardian’s David Cox, ‘bloodless, boring and empty’. The menace and spectacle of its opening quarter petered out into litany of tepid peril overcast by Hoyte van Hoytema’s gloomy cinematography.

Thankfully, 1917 makes a quick break from these facile similarities with its tight pace, raw emotion and staggering camerawork. It is one of those rare films where, as a reviewer, you risk getting stuck in a rabbit hole of superlatives – so here goes it.

Firstly, the performances, though good, are not what drive this film. It is instead an intensely sensory experience that demands to be seen on the biggest and best system. Roger Deakins’s masterful camerawork bobs and weaves through the trenches of the Western Front in seemingly one unbroken take, capturing the men of the British Expeditionary Force with a visceral fluidity. After ten years of excellent cinema, 1917 will be counted amongst the decade’s most impressive and absorbing.

Everyone in this film is under overwhelming pressure – few more acutely than Lance Corporals Blake (Dean Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay). The young men are ordered to carry a message across enemy territory that will prevent a British battalion of 1,600 men, which includes Blake’s brother, from charging into a death trap.

Chapman and MacKay both give strong performances. Blake is a chipper lad given to jocular anecdotes and crude jokes, while Schofield, apparently the more experienced of the two, has developed a war-weary reserve. There’s a mutual respect and affection for each other, though, and their extraordinary experiences only makes their bond stronger.

This tight, simple premise and character dynamic sets the stage for one of the most remarkable portrayals of combat in recent memory. It may not have the thematic depth of Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick, 1957), but Mendes conveys the all-consuming stress, misery and exhaustion of total war. Many of the men Blake and Schofield meet are in varying depths of hate and prostration, but most are driven by a stoic resolve to keep moving forward, whatever their dismal fate may be.

Key to the film’s immersion is Dennis Gassner’s epic set design. We follow the troops as they traverse yard after yard of dank trenches, and the scope becomes even more grimly arresting when they scale the parapet, entering a vast, ghoulish wasteland of sodden craters, splintered trees and mangled bodies. Indeed, there are moments across No Man’s Land that resemble the body horror of David Cronenberg; the attention paid to the grisly details of death and decay is disturbing as it is appropriate.

Inspired by the stories of his grandfather, director Sam Mendes and DOP Roger Deakins have made the biggest and best First World War film of the 21st century. This is important, because for better or worse, cinema has the power to reinvigorate history, to spread knowledge and awareness. After all, the First World War has been overshadowed by the conflict that followed, with its clearer moral compass and even greater level of destruction. Mendes’s film, while not a depiction of the war’s terrible stalemate, will nonetheless assault one’s senses and give them some idea of what their forebears endured in Britain’s deadliest war.

1917 is in theatres Friday, December 10. On VoD on Monday, June 1st. On Netflix on Friday, September 10th (2021)

Shooting the Mafia

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

Letizia Battaglia followed a most dangerous career path – capturing the life and crimes of the Mafia in Palermo, Sicily’s capital. John Gotti may have loved celebrity, but none of the Mafiosi from the old country appreciated a young, brazen woman confronting them with a Pentax. ‘If he could, he would have killed me’, Letizia remarked of Luciano Leggio, a leading figure of the Sicilian Mob.

Her work, presented in stark monochrome, depicts death and suffering in the arresting style of Don McCullin and Philip Jones Griffiths. Thematically, however, Letizia’s work may share more with that of Alexander Gardener, who used photography – then in its infancy – to confront the public with the horrors of the American Civil War.

This is what compelled Letizia to take some 600,000 photographs for the L’Ora newspaper – to shatter any romantic notions of the Cosa Nostra by depicting the rank brutality of their war on civil society. And it worked, her catalogue of dead men, women and children made a powerful impression on the people of Sicily, driving support for the heroic anti-Mafia judge Giovanni Falcone.

Shooting the Mafia isn’t just an organised crime documentary, though. It is the story of a girl and woman making her way in Sicily’s patriarchal society. Longinotto presents her subject in an intimate, engaging way, placing Letizia’s narration against a combination of stock and archival footage to tell her story.

However, this look into her personal life can overstay its welcome. Letizia’s early life is given a quaint, romantic quality, yet the continued emphasis placed on her later relationships can be of dubious interest. After all, it is her association with organised crime that makes her interesting, not her love life. Yet, despite this, there is a resonant tenderness about how she and her lovers talk about what their relationships meant. There is no acrimony, just an open discussion of why things transpired the way they did. It’s a reflection of the contentedness that can come with age.

Her work in public life makes for the most interesting viewing, though. Letizia states the importance of having a clean political system and she is absolutely right. Corruption is the harbinger of dysfunction, destitution and death. And the man who took the fight to the Mafia – Giovanni Falcone – was a hero. When asked about his life-risking commitment to the state, he answered, ‘it’s not about state, it’s about society’.

And the island society he was trying to save was wracked with terrible violence. ‘We’d never known violence like it, there were 1000 murders one year’, Letizia recounts. She confronted this menace head-on, documenting as many crimes as she could. Indeed, it was the photos she didn’t take that ‘hurt her the most’.

Shooting the Mafia is in UK cinemas on Friday, November 29th.

The Cave

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

The Cave opens with an establishing shot of Eastern Al-Ghouta, a dusty tableau of decrepit rooftops set against the mountains of the Syrian desert. Five to ten seconds pass before the scene is disturbed by a black object hurtling towards the ground, exploding in a billowing cloud of smoke. It’s a missile, and it’s followed by five more, causing untold terror and misery to the 400,000 people trapped in the devastated city.

This was the reality of the Siege of Eastern Ghouta, which the Syrian Government laid upon anti-government forces from April 2013 – April 2018, killing some 18,000 people and displacing 105,000 more. The Cave is a sobering depiction of the siege and the remarkable people who laboured to restore the threads of their crumbling society. Sadly, it is a struggle that continues in towns and cities across the ruined country.

The focaliser of the story is Dr. Amani Ballou, a young female paediatrician who managed a subterranean hospital known as the Cave with her colleagues Samaher, Dr. Alaa and Dr. Namour. We see bed after bed rush through the emergency entrance, the victims screaming in pain or sprawled out limply, clinging to life. Many of them are so young that they can barely articulate their suffering, they just cry or stare in confusion, covered with blood and detritus.

Dr. Amani is stoic and decisive in the face of this immense pressure, yet the carnage of the civil war is not the only thing she faces – she also receives attacks on her gender. The most notable example of this occurs when a man blames the medicine shortage in Al-Ghouta on her being a woman, ‘find someone who can help me… a male manager who can do a better job.’ What follows is a patriarchal spiel of how women should stay at home, but he is left stumped when Dr. Namour interjects, ‘as a doctor, has my work been bad in the presence of a female manager? Hospitals don’t rely only on one person, it’s teamwork.’

The filmmakers – led by director Feras Fayyad – observe this teamwork with skilful humanism. We see the chemistry between them amongst all the chaos; there are jokes, stories, bickering, but above all there is unerring purpose and perseverance. They make maximum use of the limited resources at their disposal and employ little rituals to keep them sane, such as the classical music Dr. Namour plays on his iPhone during surgery- ‘we don’t have anaesthetic, but we do have classical music!’, he tells one ailing patient.

For some, Syria has become a war rather than a country; a place of relentless violence, partisanship and religious fundamentalism. The Cave shows us the humanity of this awful conflict, immortalising the heroes who risk their lives to save thousands. And if you needed yet another reminder of the terrible loss this conflict has wreaked, four staff members lost their lives during filming of The Cave. They were: Abdul Rahman Alrihani, managing director; Wassam Albas, ambulance driver; Ezzedine Enaya, nurse; and Hasan Ajaj, nurse.

The Cave is out in UK cinemas Friday, December 6th.

Gipsy Queen

Posted on by victorfraga

QUICK SNAP: LIVE THE THE TALLINN BLACK NIGHTS FILM FESTIVAL

In this Austro-German production, 30-year-old Ali (Alina Serban) has to fend for herself in a hostile Hamburg with her two young children, after being evicted from her home in Romania by her father (presumably upon becoming an unmarried mother). She works as a cleaner in successive jobs, until one day she ends up in collecting gasses in the iconic nightclub Ritze.

The Ritze has a boxing ring in the basement. One day, Ali quietly practises with a punching bag while being observed by the club manager Tanne (played by German film veteran Tobias Moretti). Hamburg has an extensive underground boxing subculture. We learn that Ali used to train with her now estranged father as a child. She was taught to “fly like a butterfly and sting like a bee”. The nominative determinism speaks for itself: Ali shares her name with the greatest boxer of all time. Tanne invites her to get back into the ring, and she hesitantly agrees. Gradually, fighting becomes a powerful venting outlet for the hapless young woman. She becomes extremely successful, and begins to make a living out of boxing.

Meanwhile, Ali grapples with various issues at home. Her family has to share an apartment with a young German woman, and she does not have the means to rent a place for herself. Her daughter Esmeralda is doing poorly at school, and her mother constantly demands that she studies more. Ali’s parenting skills aren’t sterling, and she often comes across as aggressive and dysfunctional. The relationship between mother and daughter thus begins to collapse.

Alina Serban is extremely powerful in her debut performance. She is petite yet never fragile. Her latent rage is extremely palpable. The laconic character communicates very proficiently with her pearly eyes and powerful fists. She has to fight many physical as well as metaphorical battles: against her rival on the ring, against a racist society that constantly exploits and looks down on her (while offering limited opportunities for social ascension), against her family at home, and – perhaps more significantly – against her internalised anger and frustration. Ali has anger management issues, and she needs to ensure that no one gets hurt along her journey.

Upon learning that her father has passed away, she begins to communicate and make amends with him in her dreams and imagination, in a clear attempt to reconcile with her past and manage her temperament and frustrations.

The fourth feature film by Kurdish German filmmaker Huseyin Tabak is a complex psychological drama dotted with socio-political commentary. The narrative is very conventional: it’s very easy to work out what happens in the second half of the movie. It all wraps up with a momentous battle on the ring, in a fine example of physical acting. There’s just too much at stake: her humanity, her dignity, her career and even her motherhood. Can Ali afford to lose this fight?

Gipsy Queen just premiered in Competition at the 23rd Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

Clemency

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

A mood-driven piece about the morality of capital punishment, Clemency depicts the pernicious effect this macabre, bureaucratic practice has on those who implement it. Particular attention is paid to Bernadine Williams (Alfre Woodard), a death row warden who is prostrate with all manner of grief.

The film opens with Bernadine overseeing her latest execution – a lethal injection – as it goes horribly awry. We see the veneer of protocol and civility fall desperately apart as the prison doctor fails to find a vein in the inmate’s writhing body. Eventually, he manages to pierce his femoral artery, into which he pumps the three following chemicals – midazolam, to sedate; vecuronium bromide, to paralyse; and potassium chloride, to stop the heart. It is a genuinely visceral sequence that brings to attention the 75 botched lethal injections that have occurred since 1982, when the method was first implemented in the state of Texas.

However, the power of the opening belies Clemency‘s overall glacial pace – it is, to be frank, a portentous slog of a film. Of course, this is a subject that requires tact and solemnity, but Clemency has all the tiresome earmarks of a ‘serious’ indie – the staring, the drawn-out takes, the sparse dialogue. That’s not to say the film’s performances aren’t impressive – they are. As Bernadine, Alfre Woodard makes the best of the laconic script, imbuing her every fibre with barren anguish. Aldis Hodge brings a similar pain to his character Anthony Woods, who is scheduled to be Bernandine’s next execution. Both actors know how to command a static camera but their dramatic range is stunted by the coldness of Chukwu’s script and direction – they may be impressive, but they’re not involving.

The film is so lifeless, so torpid, that it feels like it’s taken a shot of midazolam with a dash of vecuronium bromide. But this is doubtlessly intentional, for Chinonye Chukwu’s film is very much a mood-piece that’s personified by Bernadine’s dejected malaise. She is, as her husband Jonathan (a charismatic Wendell Pierce) puts it, an empty shell. This mood and characterisation is all rather one-note, though. We can only be exposed to her lugubrious expression for so long, and the protracted sequence of her snotty nose towards the film’s end – in full 4K – is just beyond the pale.

All of this speaks to the myopia of Chukwu’s canvas and the brevity of her dialogue; she should have looked beyond Bernadine Williams and the procedure of capital punishment. Take the example of Dead Man Walking (Tim Robbins, 1995). It offers a more dynamic account of capital punishment for it considers perpetrators, victims and the state. The characters’ emotional range goes beyond glumness and apathy, too.

Clemency premiered at the BFI London Film Festival in October, when this piece was originally written. It’s out on VoD on Friday, July 17th.

Rambo: Last Blood

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

It’s been 11 years since we last saw John Rambo kill dozens of people with guns, arrows, knives and even his bare hands – and with good reason. Rambo (2008, Sylvester Stallone) was so genocidally violent that we needed this respite, this breather.

Stallone had seemingly gone mad, directing a film that was far more vicious than the previous three films combined. He lifted the stark, savage aesthetic of Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998) and applied it to the pulp of the action genre. There wasn’t a single memorable character in it, granted, but as a spectacle of murder it was something to behold.

So when the teasers for Rambo: Last Blood did the rounds, I had flashbacks of gore drenched .50 cal machine guns and all the other wanton gratuity that had so amused me as a 15-year-old boy. Surely Rambo had been a one-off, a moment of madness? After all, The Expendables 3 (2014, Patrick Hughes) was a 12A.

The BBFC’s issuing of an 18 certificate, then, came as a very welcome surprise. Not even the litany of negative reviews – or Rambo creator David Morrell’s abject disgust – could dissuade me from spending £8.50 at the Tottenham Court Road Odeon (there were no press screenings).

Well, the results are mixed. It starts off strongly with Rambo breaking a man’s clavicle, digging his finger into the wound and roughly fiddling with the bone until it breaks off. It’s nice – you don’t see that everyday.

Rambo then visits a brothel wielding not his signature 10” blade but a big metal hammer, which he proceeds to bury in the heads – and crotch – of several punters. This was a bold move to take, because whether it’s Drive (2011, Nicolas Winding Refn), Kill List (2011, Ben Wheatley) or You Were Never Really Here (2017, Lynne Ramsay), we live in a culture that’s saturated with hammer-based brutality. And I’m delighted to report that John Rambo, although being late to the party, decidedly holds his own here.

After remorselessly stabbing and even beheading a few more loathsome goons (he used his knife for that one), Rambo invites the cartel back to his ranch, which sits upon a labyrinth of weaponised tunnels. It is here that John reminds us of the full extent of his bloody ingenuity, using a variety of blades, tools and bombs to dislocate, dismember and destroy. However, while there’s some good stuff in there, it doesn’t match the sheer scale of Rambo’s Burmese massacre (perhaps that should have been the title?), and it’s for that reason that Rambo: Last Blood isn’t quite the send-off I had hoped for.

It is, even to the most nostalgic fan, a shockingly empty piece of work. The revenge plot is the tritest fodder imaginable and the dialogue was clearly written by someone in a catatonic state. Speaking of catatonic states – Sly Stallone’s performance borders on the inanimate. Of course, John Rambo has never been a character of great range, but Stallone’s work here is barely distinguishable from that of The Expendables, Escape Plan and his other recent, derivative efforts. In fact, the whole film is barely distinguishable – and that is a sure sign that John J. Rambo should go on permanent R&R.

Rambo: Last Blood is in theatres in September. On Sky Cinema and NOW on Friday, May 21st (2021).

Coup 53

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

I learnt of the 1953 Iranian coup d’etat during research for my masters dissertation, which considered British media coverage of the Suez Crisis. I viewed the Anglo-American staged coup, which came as a result of Prime Minister Mosaddegh’s nationalisation of Iran’s oil industry, as a precursor to President Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal 3 years later. However, the Iranian coup had far greater consequences. The toppling of the democratically-elected PM sowed lasting resentment not only in Iran but the wider Middle East. To understand the current state of Iran-US relations, one has to understand the Iranian coup of 1953.

Coup 53 certainly wants us to understand, but not in the BBC style of traditional, top-down history. Rather, filmmaker Taghi Amirani puts himself front and centre in the documentary’s opening half hour, inviting us into his personal 10-year journey of archives and interviews across the world. During this he brims with information and passion, yet there is a growing sense of self-indulgence – is this just an esoteric passion project, or is Amirani really going to contribute to the history of the coup? It is only when he begins to pursue the details of the UK’s involvement in Mosaddegh’s downfall that Coup 53 gains some traction. After all, only the US has begun declassifying relevant CIA documents – the UK remains officially cagey.

Amirani’s most pointed investigation centres around British operative Matthew Darbyshire, a mysterious quasi-Bond figure whose presence has been banished from tapes and snipped from archival transcripts. There is a moment of genuine curiosity and excitement when Amirani unearths a full transcript of Darbyshire’s account of the coup, but what is he to do with it? His solution couldn’t be better – ask Ralph Fiennes to play him. The passages with Fiennes, who delivers the transcript with a caddish charisma, gives Coup 53 a much needed theatrical and narrative boost, giving the project a greater sense of not only purpose but also intrigue and entertainment.

Ultimately, however, its most insightful moments come in the final stretch of summaries from the many distinguished talking heads. They pose one of the more probing questions of counterfactual history – what would Iran, a regional power of over 80 million inhabitants, look like today if secular democracy had been allowed to continue? Alas, we can only speculate.

Coup 53 premiered at the BFI London Film Festival in 2019, when this piece was originally written. It’s out in virtual cinemas across the UK, Ireland, the US and Canada from Friday, August 21st.

Hail Satan

Posted on by victorfraga

Political activism has never been this dirty and fun before! A small and yet very vocal and active group of political activists founded an entity called the Satanic Temple. They dress up in black and use a copious amount of iconography, as you would expect from a good evil-worshipper. Yet there is no religious connotation to their endeavour. They have simply found a very peculiar and effective way to make themselves visible and their progressive statements heard.

Their creepy-looking leader Lucien Greaves (who is seemingly blind in one eye, although it’s not entirely clear whether that’s just a clever ruse), explains that the “satanism” is an entirely random choice. They are not eagerly waiting for the arrival of some Antichrist. Instead, they stand against “arbitrary authoritarianism” and demand a separation between church and state, and they find very provocative ways of drawing attention to themselves. During the film climax, they request that a Ten Commandments monument is removed from a government building in Arkansas, and upon failing that, they proceed to install a statue of the demonic Baphomet facing the holy scripture. To the sound of Marylin Manson’s I Put a Spell on You!

Hail Satan is a register of a little-known subculture teeming with vivid and extravagant characters, who are seeking a cathartic outlet from their mediocre existence. They are male and female, of various ages, and come from many parts of the US. What they have in common is that they are seeking more personal freedoms. This is expressed in a variety of ways, ranging from a passionate pro-choice enunciation to a very naughty and demonic dance, where male nudity is prominently featured (thereby challenging old-fashioned sexist orthodoxies). They are also anti-aesthetic, refusing body fascism and mainstream beauty stereotypes (which might explain Lucien’s eye)

They have devised the Seven Fundamental Tenets, which include “One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason and “One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone”). Their principles are far more morally liberating than the Ten Commandments. They are also fiercely anti-violence (a member is promptly expelled after advocating) and very socially active (cleaning streets, educating children, etc).

All in all, Hail Satan is a devilishly fun documentary to watch. Ironically, it’s also a feel-good movie. It’s not anti-Christian. Instead, it challenges the autocracy of government of religion. Simply dirtylicious. Go see it!

Hail Satan is in cinemas on Friday, August 23rd, and then on VoD the following Monday,