Tag: film review

The Hole in the Ground

Posted on by victorfraga

Sarah (Seána Kerslake) and her young son Chris (James Quinn Markey) move to a very rural Ireland seeking to break away from a recent past of unfortunate events. Their large and creepy house is as remote as it gets, completely isolated in the middle of the woods. And there’s plenty of renovation work to be carried out, and Sarah looks determined to do it on her own. One evening, Chris disappears into the woods. Sarah attempts to fetch him but instead comes across a giant hole in ground. Given its shape, one would assume it was caused by a meteor crash. Despite its enormous dimensions, the titular hole remains hidden amongst the dense vegetation, and other human beings seen unaware of it.

Chris eventually returns home on his own, but is behaviour has changed. He has become distant and cold. Sarah begins to believe that the boy who returned isn’t her son at all. An eerie old lady called Mareen had a similar experience with her son decades earlier, and he ended up dead. As a consequence, Noreen lost her sanity and is now found aimlessly wandering the countryside roas most of the time. Her figure is scarier than most paranormal entities. Could Sarah’s fate be the same? Will Chris end up dead, and Sarah deranged and catatonic?

The Hole in the Ground uses a very conventional suspense formula. Borderline supernatural events (such as Noreen’s bizarre appearances in the middle of the road) take place, repeatedly raising the question: is our protagonist going mad or is something truly supernatural taking place? Females are historically associated with hypersensitivity, hysteria and madness. They are the perfect victims of gaslighting. Plus, females are inherently ambiguous. The narrative arc of Hole in the Ground is effectively constructed upon this ambivalence (madness versus reason).

In the second half of the movie, the apparently supernatural events escalate. Chris has become so strong that he’s able to throw his mother across the kitchen. But did that really happen or was Sarah just dreaming? The director skilfully blends reality, dream and allegory in order to avoid answering this question and many others too soon. As you result, you will remain at the edge of the seat until the final resolution is unveiled. The film ending might raise some eyebrows and it certainly won’t answer all questions, but it’s worth sitting through the 90 minutes in order to find out what it is.

The excellent sound engineering and montage deserve a mention. The climaxes are cut just at the right point to something very trivial such as Chris slurping pasta and a cup of coffee being stirred, bringing your adrenaline level constantly up and down. The cinematography is quite impressive, and the sequences in the woods are particularly sombre and elegant.

The Hole in the Ground premiered at Sundance on Friday, January 25th. It is in cinemas across the UK on Friday, March 1st.

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!

Buffalo Boys

Posted on by victorfraga

This is the story of two brothers Suwo (Yoshi Sudarso ) and Jamar (Ario bayu) and their uncle Arana (Tio Pakusadewo) who left Java in order to live in exile in the US. They fled a brutal massacre carried out by Dutch Captain Van Trach (Reinout Bussemaker) and his soldiers, which culminated in the assassination of their father Sultan Hamza. The action takes place in 1860.

The two men work on the railways and they have learnt the cowboy way of life. In the beginning of the film, we see them win a very realistic fight on board of a speeding train in California. Their uncle informs them that it is finally time to return to their homeland and get the revenge that they have been waiting for their entire lives.

Upon arriving in Indonesia, the trio encounter a country devastated by an authoritarian regime led by Van Trach and his henchmen. Villagers are routinely tortured and executed. There is also a good amount of fighting, and the martial arts scenes are very well-crafted. Yet, I wish there were more fighting and less torture scenes. At times, it reminded me a of Mandingo (Richard Fleischer, 1975). I felt that the exploitation element was a little too prominent.

The narrative arc is quite conventional, and Westerns fans will work that it’s just a question of final before the final duel between the two brother and Captain Van Trach takes place.

Indonesia has produced quite a few martial arts and fight films in the past decade or so, including The Raid (Gareth Evans, 2011) and Headshot (Kimo Stamboel and Timo Tjahjanto, 2016). The director of Buffalo Boys Mike Wiluan is no stranger to the genre: he was one of the producers of last year’s The Night Comes for Us (Tjahjanto) – a real wild wild ride of a movie. The Thai film Tears of the Black Tiger (Wisit Sasanatieng, 2001) is a fine example of a Western taking place in Asia, balancing action and visuals, Eastern and Western themes, and hitting all the right buttons. Buffalo Boys just about scratches the surface.

Still worth a watch, particularly for the magnificent Indonesian scenery and top-notch acting. Buffalo Boys is out on most VoD platforms from Friday, January 18th.

Revenger

Posted on by victorfraga

After the release of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny (Yuen Woo-ping) back in 2016, Netflix has produced or distributed just a handful of martial arts-driven action-adventure original films, and fewer still in their country of origin’s native language. Looking through Netflix’s back catalogue of original releases it seems only Timo Tjahjanto’s Indonesian crime-thriller The Night Comes for Us (Timo Tjahjanto, 2018) and, now, Seung-Won Lee’s South Korean action flick Revenger are categorised as both ‘international’ (read ‘foreign-language’) and ‘martial arts’. Though its recent release doubles this narrow on-demand subgenre, Revenger also dilutes its already middling quality.

Lee adopts Tjahjanto’s approach to narrative, using what little there is of a plot as a framework to exhibit highly-choreographed action sequences. Indeed, Lee opens his film in an almost identical manner to Tjahjanto, a mother and daughter at the mercy of criminal goons before they are saved by each film’s respective protagonist. (Come to think of it, the beach on which this opening scene takes place looks suspiciously like that of the opening scene to The Night Comes for Us).

However, the action sequences are progressively undermined by the continual lack of character development: Bruce Khan’s Yul Kim – a former police detective looking to avenge his murdered wife and daughter, introduced wearing a straightjacket and Hannibal Lecter-type bite mask – remains mute and passive for much of the film, his character defined almost entirely by a desire for revenge. This lack of a personality makes it difficult to invest in the outcome of Yul Kim’s many fights, a shame given Khan’s exceptional martial arts skills.

But it’s difficult even to appreciate Khan’s phenomenally-fast handwork and gravity-defying kicks on an aesthetic level given the intermittently shaky camerawork and distracting CG blood splatter. Lee’s camera is repeatedly intrusive, moving to within such an intimate distance of his actors or cutting at certain moments as to miss parts of the action. Even when employing a simple two-shot, Lee finds it necessary to add superfluous zooms every couple of seconds.

With no main character to invest in and the martial arts spectacle often spoiled by stylistic choices, all that’s left of Revenger to engage with is its barebones story – a combination of elements from Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale (2001) and John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981) with a supplementary revenge angle. One early scene, in which Yoon Jin-seo’s Maly recognises Yul Kim as the unscrupulous police officer who sent her to the prison island on which they both now find themselves, promises to elevate the narrative beyond mere framework, though any potential future conflict and self-reflection fails to materialise.

Likewise, a post-credits sequence, in which Yul Kim braves an unfinished-CG sandstorm as an incongruously spirited score builds, promises Yul Kim’s return. Given the success of other foreign-language martial arts series like The Raid (Gareth Evans 2011) and Ip Man (Wilson Yip, 2008), a sequel to Revenger isn’t an impossibility. In fact, if Netflix can convince Iko Uwais and Joe Taslim to join Bruce Khan for Revenger 2 (maybe snag Donnie Yen for Revenger 3), they’ll quickly expand their foreign-language action repertoire. Better yet, retcon The Night Comes for Us as a Revenger prequel and Netflix could start their very own on-demand martial arts extended universe – Netflix Revengers Assemble!

Revenger is available on Netflix from Wednesday, January 15th.

Pity

Posted on by victorfraga

Taking a cue from that woe-is-me friend we all had when we were teenagers, the new film from Babis Makridis, Pity, follows the life of a very square lawyer (Yannis Drakopoulos). Our protagonist develops a taste for the kindness of strangers while his wife is in a coma. This being a Greek film, however, things eventually spiral out of control in quiet yet shocking ways.

The concept explored in the script, penned by Makridis and Efthymis Filippou, is born out of the farcical technique of blowing up a trope to absurd proportions – in this case, a man that actually find joy and satisfaction on being pitied by everyone around him. Once his wife comes out of the coma, that situation is shattered and the man sets out to win his misery back.

If you’re familiar with productions associated with the Greek New Wave movement, you know what’s in store for you: symmetrical and clinical camerawork, deadpan and deliberately stiff acting and pervasive dark humour. The tone here is particularly reminiscent of Filippou’s work with his most famous collaborator, Yorgos Lanthimos, although completely devoid of laugh out loud moments that he allowed for in previous screenplays.

Despite feeling at times too reliant on style, Pity works because of the ingenuity of its core idea and Drakopoulos’s pitch-perfect delivery. On his hands, there’s something about the lawyer that’s quite relatable.

In a world that grows apathetic by the minute and suppresses a lot of human connections, especially in big cities, he gets an emotional and physical response from people that wouldn’t otherwise give him a second glance. His neighbour bakes him a cake everyday, his launderette’s attendant gives him discounts, even his father seems to treat him more kindly.

In his thoughts, which funnily appear on screen in elaborate intertitles, he argues at one point that “everyone needs a hug” – and he might be onto something. It’s that connection, prompted by pain, that he becomes addicted to, and it’s startling how grounded that sounds when put in those terms. That these strangers are being kind out of mere politeness doesn’t seem to matter to him and, in all honesty. If someone comforts us in a moment of deep need, we wouldn’t question their reasoning either.

I wouldn’t call this a comedy even for Greek standards, who tend to have a dark sense of humour. Instead, it’s a treat for fans of cringeworthy, unforgiving and eccentric cinema. It questions our human needs and our very own ability to convert our everyday life into a performance, leaving a bitter taste in its aftermath. After the ending of Pity, you too might need a little comforting.

Pity is available with ArteKino throughout the month of December.

Wandering Girl (Niña Errante)

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QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM THE TALLINN BLACK NIGHTS FILM FESTIVAL

Four sisters. Four mothers. And just one father. Twelve-year-old Angela (Sofia Paz Jara) is the youngest one, and the only one of the sisters who was brought up by their father. That’s because her mother died at childbirth. She’s not even seen a picture of her mother. The four sisters meet for the first time at their father’s funeral. And they have a mission: to take Angela to her aunt on the other side of Colombia, thereby preventing the prepubescent orphan from ending up in a government institution. They are about to embark on a journey, in both the geographic and the metaphorical sense.

Ruben Mendoza’s third feature feature is a gentle and exquisite coming-of-age tale. A coming-of-age under very unusual circumstances involving death, displacement and also violence. The director’s grip is firm, while his gaze is delicate and perceptive. You’d be forgiven for thinking this film was directed by a woman. Mendoza displays femininity in its integrality, including the societal challenges and physiological changes that Angela has to experience.

The cinematography, which is co-signed Sofia by Oggioni, is punctuated by unusual angles and POVs. A conversation between the four girls and a car mechanic is filmed from under the car. One of the girls is uncomfortable with the man looking at her breasts. “I don’t come with subtitles”, she confronts him. Yet we don’t see their faces, only their feet. Similar tricks and devices are used throughout the film.

Angela hasn’t had her first period and her breasts haven’t grown yet. She constantly contemplates her sisters’ bodies in order to understand the physiological changes that she’s about to experience. The sumptuous female curves, the breasts and the skin are filmed from very close. It feels frank, never exploitative. In what’s perhaps the film’s most significant moment, Angela jumps into the bath tub with one of her sisters. Angela touches her sister’s breasts. The older sibling clarifies: “Your breasts will pop up when you have your first period. When it happened to me, I couldn’t stop looking at my breasts. Maybe my breasts grew from me looking at them so hard”. The sisters encounter violence on their road trip, in another very significant sequence.

Coming at a taut 82 minutes, Wandering Girl is a lyrical, profound and solid piece of filmmaking. The action and the developments are very subtle and slow, while the performances are candid and effective. My only criticism of the film are the coming-of-age tropes. Angela is seen going through a tunnel, riding a trolley past a forest and also dancing with a digger. These sequences felt a little lame and redundant.

Wandering Girl is showing in Competition at the 22nd Tallin Black Nights Film Festival, taking place right now. DMovies have been invited to the event as a special guest.

Kadakh

Posted on by victorfraga

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM THE TALLINN BLACK NIGHTS FILM FESTIVAL

It all begins as an entirely viable drama and then rough a third of the way through the film it descends into a farcical caper. Sunil is alone at home and then a stranger knocks at his door. He says that they are related “by blood” and asks to come inside. A reluctant Sunil invites him in and offers him tea. Only for the stranger to reveal that he’s husband of Chhaya, the woman with whom Sunil is having an affair. The stranger proceeds to kill himself.

Sunil’s wife arrives at home and sees the corpse. Sunil does not want his wife to know that he’s having an affair, so he claims that the dead stranger is someone whom he fired recently. She buys the lie, and they conceal the body in a large wooden chest, just in time for the guests to arrive in their flat for the sumptuous Diwali party that they couple are throwing.

Each guest brings a new subplot along, including an elated friend who just landed a publication deal (played by the filmmaker Rajat Kapoor himself), an unpleasant elderly couple donning surgical masks and a pretty French lady who happens to be a “mentallist” (a person who read minds; her vaguely creepy and credible performance is one of the highlights of the film). To Sunil’s despair, weven Chhaya eventually decides to show up in search of her husband.

In the final third of the film, the deeply twisted values of each guest begin to surface. People are far more concerned about their job, their success, their appearances and even a Vietnamese vase than about a human life. These people are all complicit of each other in their corruption. They are “a-moral”, which is clarified by the means of in intertitle in the very beginning of the film.

All in all, Kadakh is an auspicious caper. The action is fast-faced enough to keep you hooked during the 96 minutes of duration. A jazzy music score with plenty of percussion and sax also helps to keep the action going. You will feel like you are inside someone’s flat in India during a Diwali party. There are a few continuity errors (such as the sun inexplicably rising from one sequence to the next without any time lapse), but this won’t prevent viewers from enjoying the film.

Kadakh is showing in the Competition at the 22nd Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, which is taking place right now. DMovies is following the event live, as special guests invited by the Festival.

The film was dropped from the Mumbai Film Festival last month after the director was accused of sexual harassment.

Suspiria 

Posted on by victorfraga

It’s big clit vs small dick energy in Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Suspiria, an aesthetic update of the original by turns confounding and magical – that neon soaked Argento look is replaced by the muted palette and instagram friendly architectural design/framing of Guadagnino. There’s enough glass brick on display to make you think twice about throwing stones, and enough conflicting, contradictory messages by this movie to have you frustrated, stupefied and eager to come back for more.

Dakota Johnson is the young American gone to Berlin to join a ballet troupe. We already know that her predecessor, played by an energetic Chloe Grace Moretz, has disappeared after ranting about a cult of witches, but rumour bounds that she has joined The Baader-Meinhof group. Johnson, shy but talented, finds more than just herself. There is, of course, some madness lurking in the halls of the Markos Dance Academy.

But there’s fairly little DNA shared with the Argento original. A fondness for split-focus dioptre shots aside, the closer comparative point is Possession, that masterpiece of writhing bodies in Berlin. That’s because Suspiria is far less interested in copying the emotions of the original than it is with taking a few of the themes and ideas (particularly that of displacement and cultism) through a modern lens. There have been countless comparisons to Aronofsky’s Mother! (2017) Which need to stop right here. Aronofsky’s edgelord antics mistake intensity with psychological intimacy. Guadagnino has far more control, each shot is charged and every cut purposeful. It’s a high style, high energy film that confounds genre, rebukes narrative threading, and is a far more exciting, bewitching film for it.

Everyone in Suspiria is in a cult. Whether it’s the Mennonite community Johnson comes from, the dance crew, the coven of witches, the terrorist cells in the background, noisily grabbing our attention, or the weight of a Nazi history that oppresses the characters, the cast is divided into cliques. Guadagnino wants to know how these interact, and whether they define us. That’s why the Berlin setting is integral, and why close ups of stamps on passports or on train lines, contain a communicative power that might catch you off guard.

Suspiria is fascinated by lines of communication and travel, about what throbbing power comes from within. That’s his egotistical flourish. The director speaks to us through these lines: love me, appreciate me. We’re all sort of in the Guadagnino cult no matter where you stand on the man’s work. I’ve always found him a difficult filmmaker, one in thrall to auteurism who uses his influences (especially the Italian New Wave and Rohmer) as a shorthand to Arthouse success. Art is always political for Guadagnino, who here uses dance like Call Me By Your Name (2017) used archaeology, or A Bigger Splash (2016) used music. To allow the character to visually express their soul. But here, he finds a groove by speaking almost directly to us. It is his dance, precise and cut in service of the story.

This is a guy who used the lush setting of his gay Merchant Ivory pastiche as an excuse to ogle the young women on the film’s periphery. It’s hard to buy him as more interested in women’s’ stories than his own. “I’m the hands” Mother Suspirium says. A vision of feminine oneness is all that the film can tentatively explore, the story representing a vague return to a more primal, earth mother vision of femininity. As the faculty and students celebrate around a vast dinner table in a cafe dressed as though Parisian (simulacrum comes up again and again), Tilda Swinton and Johnson sit at opposite ends, staring at one another in malevolence. Female pain is avoided and instead the film observes interior turmoil and bodily transience. Scenes in the mirror room where characters see themselves fully for the first time, or one key character literally pulling their chest open to expose their insides, are obvious symbolism that is actually quite welcome in such a glacially paced film.

Swinton delivers a bout of transformative performances that must be a nod to Peter Sellers in Dr Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964). Without spoiling too much, one appearance even has her staggering out of the wheelchair “mein Mother Susperium! I can walk!”. I see Swinton in a Guadagnino movie as a stand-in for the director – perhaps due to her presenter role in his debut The Protagonists (1999). Her roles as the stern dance instructor is full Swinton, with a subtle arc that really hits at the film’s climax. But it’s her heavily made up role as octogenarian German man Dr. Jozef Klemperer that deserves plaudits. It’s through his story that Suspiria really covers its key theme of generational trauma, as his softening coincides with his reckoning. It’s a shame that the promotional trail has reduced this performance to Andy-Kaufman-esque hoaxes, because taken on its own merits Swinton is doing her best work in years.

Johnson wins the screen by doing little outside of the extraordinary physical dance moments – like her mother there is a sensuality that she is confident to let sit. Then Jessica Harper from the original shows up in a small but vital role. Her face, older, but warmly recognisable, is the perfect meta-moment for a scene about the clash of the past and present. Guadagnino frequently uses this doubling of text and meta-text, like subverting the creative effects of the original for an infrequent pulse of CGI blood. It operates as a distancing effect. There’s enough going on that even if half of the film doesn’t work for you, there are half a dozen more elements that do pay off. Guadagnino doesn’t just eschew the original, he seems disinterested in the entire supernatural element of the film. Suspiria is really about all the other stuff, and when the witches get out of its way, it works like gangbusters.

Suspiria premieres at the BFI London Film Festival taking place between October 10th and 21st. It then shows at trhe Cambridge Film Festival, between October 25th and November 1st. It’s out in cinemas on Friday, November 16th.

School’s Out (L’Heure De La Sortie)

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A teacher in a French classroom stands by the window, watching his students as they work. We share his gaze at the back of their necks, sweaty as the sun sits high in the sky. After a moment of careful consideration, he opens the window wide and jumps out. The children’s screams bounce around the audience’s mind throughout School’s Out, filmmaker Sébastien Marnier’s sophomore feature.

Following his 2016 debut, Irréprochable, Marnier remains concerned by obsessive paranoia born from a generational misunderstanding and shifting value systems in French society. Laurent Lafitte, who you probably haven’t forgotten as the neighbour in Elle (Paul Verhoeven, 2016), plays Pierre, brought in as a substitute teacher for this class of advanced students, who brag about being a year ahead in their studies and exert their special status over Pierre, who wants to teach them how to behave like normal students. But what initially seems like a Mr Chips rehash soon takes on darker shades. Lafitte has this smug, naturally sinister presence. In different circumstances, you could imagine his character spending his nights going deep on Joe Rogan videos. Instead, he’s obsessing over his students, who he has become convinced have more involvement in these occurrences than the school faculty seem to believe.

The film is good at looking. We share Pierre’s gaze, as he crushes on his best friend, on another teacher, and as he becomes ever more curious about his students. Pierre isn’t entirely out of the closet, which these savant children clock on to and use to imply that his interest in them has a lustful edge. And, perhaps it does. We become implicated in that look the more depraved and self-destructive it becomes. It reminded me of Alain Guiraudie’s brilliant thriller Stranger by the Lake (2013), full of slow pans and Chabrolian dread. School’s Out wraps you so tightly into its protagonist’s perspective that his reality becomes indistinguishable from the audience’s.

An ominous hum overcomes the soundtrack, as the camera pans from the sky down to take in shot after shot of vast fields, you get the impression that this is one of the first movies to bear the influence of Shyamalan’s The Happening (2008), and I mean that as a compliment. That stark sound design intrudes onto the characters’ psychology, slipping into a score reminiscent of Carpenter or Goblin. When a rhythmic alarm blares in the classroom, the students hide against a wall, clearly tired of the regular terrorism drills. “This is the third one this term,” a student blankly tells Pierre. With children beginning to take a stand against these practices, these scenes take on a post-Parkland context that isn’t pursued as the entire end of the film, but rather, is one element of a piece that observes a post-millennial revolution from the outside.

When one of the children is bullied, kids in the background quietly film on their phones. Only in French movies do you see buffed up school teachers showing for work in a tight black tee, or getting into a fistfight with a student on the playground, or huffing fags by the basketball court. But this lack of boundaries is precisely what makes the film’s moral compass so difficult and compelling to follow. The teachers are a complacent clique, oblivious to the harm they cause each other.

Marnier also clashes a use of video camera footage of environmental disasters with the plush digital photography of the main narrative, to question our immersion into the story space. As Dimitri, one of the student ringleaders says, the video camera gets at something more real or authentic, seeing the world as it really is. When this group of Randian teenagers stare into the quarry where they meet to practice improving their pain threshold, I couldn’t help but think of the site as like Galt’s Gulch, the objectivist paradise at the heart of Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged.

Their self-isolation asks questions about environmentalism as egotism. While it’s hard to argue that fear for our future is the same as objectivist self-preservation, Marnier might be arguing that wokeness as superiority impinges messaging from reaching the layman, as we see in that bullying scene. While Marnier toys with the children’s malevolence, he withholds their perspective, keeping their motives in the shadows for long enough to constantly suggest Machiavellian intent. But it’s a distraction.

Marnier has presented a slight of hand. The final scene, one of abject terror shot in the lush surroundings of a local lake, presents the relief of our paranoia proved right. The only display of emotion is in that final scene: a reality, a reckoning. Lafitte is framed alongside the children; they are the same now. Its something like an ending of submission, an inevitable nightmare that brings the whole film’s mess of images and messages into sharp focus. What a film for right now.

School’s Out shows at the 62nd BFI London Film Festival, taking pl;ace between October 10th and 21st.

Kusama – Infinity

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Society rarely deems women worthy of the title ‘genius’. As those who control the ways of showcasing art, whether it’s a film festival or an exhibition hall, are so often men, the work of women can often be dismissed as insignificant compared to those of male artists. This was certainly the case for Yayoi Kusama. The Japanese artist arrived in 1950s New York only to be ignored in favour of ‘serious’ and ‘important’ artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Koonig. Yet she persisted, the tide turned, and now Kusama is the most popular living artist in the world.

Now a new documentary details her struggle, taking in everything from her difficult upbringing in conservative Japan to her move to the USA to finally representing her home country in the Venice Biennale. Using a mixture of archival footage and talking heads, Kusama: Infinity works both as an introduction to her life and work, and as a deeper exploration of how the conventional definition of ‘greatness’ is rooted in bias.

Kusama was born in Matsumoto in 1929 in a highly conservative and patriarchal society. Her mother routinely took away and burnt Kusama’s artwork, claiming that she would do much better to find a husband. Plus, she physically abused her daughter. In the start of many rebellions against conventional society, she learned to work in a complete fury — rarely thinking ahead before plunging head-first into her work. The concept behind the dots and the flowers came from hallucinations, allowing her experiences to bleed directly onto the canvas.

Unable to find success in Japan, she wrote to Georgia O’Keeffe, who told her to move to the United States. There we are given a stealth history in how art was used to protest against the Vietnam war, and how happenings and public nudity were used to shock a still narrow-minded American consciousness.

Yet once she moved back to Japan in the early 1970s, in a turn of history that would never occur to a man of the same stature — say a Mark Rothko or Barnett Newman — she was mostly forgotten about until her revival in the late 1980s. The documentary takes great care to talk to the curators and critics (many of whom are women) who saw the importance of her work and championed it, showing that diversity in cultural gatekeepers is the first step to a healthy art culture. Without them, it could’ve been a completely different story.

Crucially the documentary allows us just to see the work for itself. It is dazzling. Whether its her vast paintings of polka dots — which she described as “infinity nets” — or her permanent installations that seem to stretch on forever, her contributions to abstract art have been immense. Now her friendly, highly stylised, Pop-Art like patterns are perfect for the Instagram age, in which one’s feed is not just about just one picture, but how it looks presented in a broader context, alongside other pictures. We can now see infinity in the internet scroll, but Kusama was already there fifty years earlier. Now that is the work of a true genius.

Kusama – Infinity is in cinemas Friday, October 5th.

Faces Places (Visages Villages)

Posted on by victorfraga

This is as close as you will get to freestyle filmmaking. Signed by the legendary 90-year-old French director Agnes Varda and the elusive French graffiti artist JR (whose real identity and age remain unknown), Faces Places feels like a breeze of fresh air. It’s fun, it’s gentle and it’s also rejuvenating to watch.

The highly avuncular nonagenarian and the young man with hat and sunglasses attached (he never takes them off; they are an integral part of his mysterious persona) form a very peculiar and adorable couple. They seem to get on extremely well. And so they embark on a journey across the French countryside in a van packed with large flyposts and paint.

They engage with the local people and then turn the most unlikely locations (cracked walls, derelict buildings, a factory, ship containers and even a huge ruin on the beach) into an explosion of images and colours by applying the flyposts containing photographs of the locals (which they just snapped with their camera). In fact, JR does not like being called a graffiti artist. Instead, he describes himself as a photographer, and the outdoors as “the largest art gallery in the world”.

Agnes Varda and JR twist perspective to an extreme. This is pure metalanguage. A multitude of media are used: the movie cameras, mobile phones, walls, tablets and – most importantly – the random surfaces picked by the unlikely duo. This is an image within an image within a film. They recreate the locations that they visit in ways that the locals would never expect. A shy woman sees herself printed on a gigantic wall in a small countryside town, and soon becomes the biggest local attraction – forcing her to face her very own inhibitions. Dockworkers see their wives printed on a giant pile of coloured containers at the shipyard.

These people see a much larger version of themselves or someone they know in a plush and vibrant monochromatic version. The angle is often distorted and the images are permeated with plants, with gaps, with punctures or anything else that happens to be on the chosen surface. The subjects must feel incredibly honoured to be part of this doc.

Face Places is also tribute to spontaneity and ephemerality. This is a film-as-you-go documentary. The images won’t stay there forever, and erosion, the rain or even the sea (in the case of the beach) will soon wash them away. Maybe overnight. Maybe in a few days. Maybe in a few months. One thing is certain: nothing lasts forever, and that’s ok.

The film is punctuated with anecdotes not necessarily related to the images, and the two artists also visit places that they do not intend to paint. For example, they attend to the graves of photographers Guy Bourdin and Henri Cartier-Bresson. A twisted photography of a late photographer might be a step in the wrong direction, they probably thought. Maybe a photographic sacrilege.

The film has a very moving ending, that brings Agnes Varda to tears. She attempts to visit her old friend Jean-Luc Goddard in order to reminisce about the past and – presumably – to paint his image on a wall somewhere inside or near his Summer house. But Goddard has a dirty trick in store for Agnes Varda. After all, he’s just a “dirty rat”, she laments.

Faces Places is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, September 21st.