Tag: film

The Natural History of Destruction

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM CANNES!

The Natural History of Destruction asks a simple question: is bombing civilian populations justified in the name of war? It seems to be the only question in the film, asked again and again and again, as Sergei Loznitsa shows us endless images of the mechanics, banality and brutality of war: leaving endless, merciless destruction in its wake in search of a bigger cause. Ostensibly about the allied bombing of Germany — which is estimated to have killed between 350,000 to 635,000 people while crippling the country’s armaments production — the film’s timely premiere resonates in the current moment, with Russia’s campaign of terror demolishing cities in Ukraine as this review is being written.

Created exclusively with archive footage courtesy of both British and German collections, Loznitsa’s latest is a WW2 film that feels contemporaneous, mixing black-and-white observational footage with painstaking re-recordings to show us the total dehumanisation of war.

We start with sketches of everyday German life, people out and about in town, heading to biergartens and cafes, singing songs and going to work. Evening arrives, the picture zooms out and these scenes are reduced to momentary lights in the ground, strikingly light up by the advent of cluster-bombs.

I didn’t just see Rostock, Lübeck, Cologne and Berlin while watching this film. I saw Mariupol, Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia. Further back, it evokes NATO campaigns in Baghdad and Belgrade, or Putin’s levelling of Grozny, all committed in the name of the “greater good”. No matter who is waging war and who is on the so-called right side of history, the final effects are the same: dead people, flattened buildings, the complete vanquishing of hope and humanity.

Occasionally the silent-film-like images are punctuated by speeches. One British army official asks the German population to simply leave the cities and camp out in the countryside, a simplistic solution that betrays the reality of living in a country during the war. He goes on to say that although a campaign of bombing on this scale has never been tried before, it will make an “interesting experiment.”

And while war historians might agree that the bombing itself was justified in that it ground German production to its knees, allowing Soviet Union and American forces to sweep in and take Berlin, absolutists can claim the moral high ground: no victory could possibly be worth this much death and destruction. But Loznitsa avoids any editorial process — no talking heads, no narration, no moral grandstanding — and allows us to come to our own conclusions; starting debates instead of finishing them.

It’s this complexity, as well as seeking the humanity in a people that overwhelmingly supported the Nazis, that make him a complex figure. Only recently was he kicked out of the Ukrainian film academy for his ties to Russia and for speaking out against a widespread boycott, while at the same time, many of his fiction films have also been accused of Russophobia. In my view, this controversy is probably the sign of an independent filmmaker.

One thing you can say about Loznitsa is that he’s both a deep thinker and a prolific filmmaker (this is his third documentary in two years). Nonetheless, clocking in at just under 110 minutes long, his images are exhaustive and enervating, at once deeply terrifying and rather monotonous. His documentaries, like Victory Day, which stretched to over an hour despite only having enough material to justify a 20-minute short, has the habit of just making the same point over and over again. While the intention is to conclusively batter home the horrors of aerial warfare, the length and duration of certain images, which repeat themselves without revealing any new layers, struck me as unnecessary. The deeply-felt moral question the film raises is a highly important one, making it even more disappointing the finished product makes this such an alienating picture to sit through.

The Natural History of Destruction plays in the Official Selection as a Special Screening at Cannes. No UK release date yet.

Sick of Myself

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Woodcutter Story

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

To say Finnish cinema is deadpan is a bit like saying water is wet. It’s not only a part of the national character, it is the default mode of expression for so many of their films; viewing the world from a slightly askew, whimsical and neatly framed angle. The Woodcutter Story at first feels like it could occupy the same world as Aki Kaurismäki: emotionless-seeming characters sat in dingy bars, weird dancing and an endlessly optimistic hero within a deeply cynical world. Unlike Kaurismäki however, I sensed little life between the frames while watching this slow, un-engaging story.

Our idiot, in the classical, literary sense, is Pepe (Jarkko Lahti), who, as the name of the film suggests, works as a woodcutter somewhere deep in the Finnish forest. Snow is everywhere in this film, caught in gorgeous widescreen images that seem to almost subsume the film’s characters. He’s not the kind of person to worry about his fate; when a convoy of sleek, black cars turns up and the suits start firing everyone in favour of building a new mine, he seems to be the only worker who thinks there has to be a good reason for such capitalist greed. The rest of the film tests his worldview against a world that is slowly fading from view.

Director Mikko Myllylahti, following up his screenplay for The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki with his first feature behind the camera, uses this catastrophic event to explore the nuances of this small village and its weird inhabitants. Violence, betrayal and plain strangeness occur one after the other, all told in a similarly reserved, slow style, bringing to mind Twin Peaks and its own collection of oddball townsfolk, or the Coen Brother’s Fargo (1996). The similarities to television are not unwarranted as The Woodcutter Story has an episodic and shoddy feel, Pepe tasked with being mostly a bystander to all the bizarre goings-ons, including unnecessary forays into science-fiction, revenge thriller and a tale-of-the-workers.

Not once did I feel like it cohered into something urgent, either philosophically, narratively or emotionally. Pepe is an inherently reactionary character, which would be fine if his resilience against catastrophe had a sense of purpose or a clear through-line; instead he encounters this series of unfortunate events with a variance of contrasting reactions, stemming from hopelessness to guilelessness to nothingness, making him frankly uninteresting to follow for the space of 100 minutes.

Compositionally, Myllylahti has a great eye for compelling frames, whether it’s capturing oppressive interiors or showing off the beauty of the countryside, showing characters at the front of the frame while the world around them feels too big for their small needs. Nonetheless, there are times when the film could’ve opted for a more direct, urgent mode of filmmaking instead of trying to keep an ironic distance throughout. Perhaps there’s some dream-logic I missed that ties it all together. I’m not going to spend my time trying to find out.

The Woodcutter Story played in Critic’s Week at the Cannes Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It is out in the UK in October as part of the 66th BFI London Film Festival.

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.

The ugly face of female violence, from the horse’s mouth

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

We first meet the hero of Askar Uzabayev’s latest film, Happiness, standing in front of the mirror. Pulling down her bathrobe to reveal her naked chest and shoulders, illuminated only by candlelight due to regular power outages, she inspects her many bruises. Played by actress Laura Myrzakhmetova, but named archetypically as just “Wife”, she is one of millions of women across Kazakhstan living under the brutal spectre of domestic violence.

This issue is of epidemic proportions. As producer Bayan Maxatkyzy tells me, “Every year, about 400 women die from domestic violence. Only seven per cent of victims report domestic violence, despite nearly one in two women in the country suffering some sort of abuse. And this is just the official data. There could be more.” And with no official law for the protection of victims, “thousands of abusers get away with this crime on a daily basis.”

Maxatkyzy suffered intense domestic abuse herself, but counts herself as one of the lucky ones. She’s a genuine movie star in Kazakhstan, talking to me across Zoom while wearing large sunglasses and sitting on an opulent couch with an expensive-looking handbag in full-view. Rising to fame for her role in the popular 1993 Kazakh melodrama Love Station followed by a successful journalism and acting career, she has four million Instagram followers, more than any other celebrity in the country. So, when her first husband, Bakhytbek Yesentayev, beat and stabbed her four times in 2016, the story became national news, eventually leading to his 9-year imprisonment.

Happiness

Maxatkyzy’s fame give her case widespread attention, but the woman at the heart of Happiness, which recently won the Panorama Audience Award at the Berlin Film Festival, has no such protection. The first half is utterly drenched in sadness and desperation, a culture of misogyny permeating almost every scene. Her daughter (Almagul Sagyndyk) is getting married, yet nobody seems to be celebrating. The perennially drunk Husband (Yerbolat Alkozha) tells the bride-to-be in an embarrassing liquor-sodden speech to “never raise your voice” if she is to be a good wife, displaying a cycle of submissiveness and shame handed down from generation to generation.

When he later rapes his own wife on his daughter’s wedding night, a cardboard cut-out of a beautiful woman wrapped in clingfilm lingers in the background; an ironic contrast of feminine perfection that perhaps represents the ideal, voiceless woman. Despite her tragic home life, the Wife works as an influencer, selling perfume that she promises will give other women happiness.

In her posts, the Wife lays out a rehearsed theory, underscored by Antonio Vivaldi’s “Winter”. She says that happiness is 50 per cent nature, 10 per cent living conditions, and 40 per cent a result of free will. But the reality of the film, imbued with endless beatings, police corruption and sexual menace, lives within that middle 10 per cent, resulting in a horrifying, hard-to-look-away portrayal of living under the fear of death with little chance of state protection.

Both Maxatkyzy and director Askar Uzabayev, who adapted a script co-written with journalist Assem Zhapisheva, avoided state financing models when finding funding for the film. Maxatkyzy crowdfunded $20,000, with many women “sending one, two dollars” to the cause. “As many rich producers are men, and this was [Kazakhstan’s] first movie about domestic violence, they didn’t want to take part. Because they are men,” Maxatkyzy says. “Maybe they just didn’t believe in this project.” Uzabayev also believes the crowdfunding was the right choice. “When the government pay, they tell us what to do, like not showing police corruption,” he says.

The film takes a freewheeling turn by the end, anchored by Myrzakhmetova’s performance. The actress both empowers and teases out the nuances of her unnamed hero, who is neither victim nor a stereotypical “strong woman”. But Myrzakhmetova was not the first choice for the role. In fact, according to Uzabayev, “six candidates before Laura rejected the role. Our last candidate refused to take it two days before we planned to start shooting. In the beginning [the actresses] were inspired, but after discussions with their husbands, they were prohibited from taking this role.”

The film’s overwhelming atmosphere of shame and fear, coupled with the wider, grim context, is a far-cry from stereotypical Hollywood portrayals like The Invisible Man or Promising Young Woman, which can lean more poppy, revenge-laden and digestible. Happiness is so powerful because it doesn’t borrow inspiration from genre cues, such as the meticulously-planned revenge or a final belief in the police to fix the problem, and pursues its own uncompromising, highly distressing path. As Maxatkyzy says, “We didn’t take ideas from American or European movies because our mentality is completely different. Our society is totally patriarchal.” Her hope is that the movie will be widely-seen in order to start a conversation, both in Kazakhstan and further afield: “My intention is that people will remember situations that happened among their own families. I hope the inconvenience that they feel will lead to the realisation that they could take action to change the situation.”

Happiness premiered at the Berlinale. Stay tuned for a wider release.

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All images in this article are stills from ‘Happiness’.

The Novelist’s Film (So-seol-ga-ui yeong-hwa)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM BERLIN

There are some huge changes in Hong Sangsoo’s filmmaking obsessions with The Novelist’s Film. Characters smoke e-cigarettes as opposed to regular ones, they wear/sort-of wear FFP2 masks in different poses and they are drinking makgeolli instead of soju. Otherwise, it’s another trip down the personal obsessions of one of the world’s most repetitive directors. If you’re already enamoured with his style, you’re in for a great time, but if you don’t like his work, you’re likely to get quickly bored. As I probably said last year. And the year before that.

One of the many in-jokes of Hong Sangsoo’s films is that the characters almost always seem to know each other well before they bump into each other: of course they do, they’ve been in the same films together over and over again! The Novelist’s Film starts outside a bookshop with the novelist Junhee (Lee Hyeyoung) having a smoke then walking and catching up with an old friend.

They sit and drink coffee, while Junhee explains how she has become bored of writing over and over again in a certain way. This sentiment is later echoed by a chance meeting with a filmmaker, another Hong doppelgänger, who adamantly states that he believes his work has changed. Having missed the chance to have her work adapted into a film by him, she meets his former muse Kilsoo (Kim Minhee), who she asks to star in her first ever film. And yes, they drink a lot, and the film finally ends, like The Woman Who Ran (2020) did, with Kim Minhee in a cinema alone, watching a film.

Why a novelist directing a film — a phenomenon that is not rare whatsoever — is presented as such a fascinating innovation with form is never really interrogated, but it’s worth pointing out that a Hong Sang-soo novel would be something I’d be first to read. Would it skew like Hemingway’s Iceberg-theory Short stories or the French nouveau roman? Given that the conventional novel is a place for evocating people’s inner lives, Hong Sang-soo is unlikely to turn in a Victorian or 19th century Russian style-epic anytime soon. His whole thing is highly cinematic, creating textures and ideas through performance, cutting, camera movement and lighting — but it’s an interesting thought experiment nonetheless.

As for the eponymous film itself, we catch glimpses of the 47-minute meisterwerk at a screening (previously attended by two (2!) critics and remarkably not even watched by the programmer of the cinema) by the end. It’s an even grainier and unfiltered work than what we’ve previously watched. And the storyline and themes are conspicuously absent. What does Kilsoo think as she finally walks out of the screening? We are never told. Hong, the ultimate, playful, trollish filmmaker, once again dances around the subject without facing it head on, inviting us to read between his Pinteresque pauses and excessively mannerized politeness.

Hong’s digital-aesthetic is even more bare bones that usual: you can count the number of cuts in the entire film with your hands, the black-and-white cinematography is super exposed with very high contrasts, and his characteristic zooms are sparsely deployed. When the director complains about finding funding, it shows in this work, which looks pretty cheap. Once again this is an actor’s showcase, a hangout study in art and life that is rich in nuance and line delivery. And leaning more funny than profound, this metatextual, stripped-down work is entertaining without ever reaching the heights of his best work.

All actors are on fine form, especially when their reserved nature and formal speech breaks down or is violently ruptured, resulting in more laughs than most genuine comedies at the Berlinale. But all the people laughing are film critics, the exact kind of people that have watched several Hong movies — especially at Berlinale, where he basically has a reserved competition slot — and revel both in the sameness and the ever-so-slight permutations. I never get too bothered when he has a slightly substandard, inconsequential work like this. He’ll be back next year. We’ll laugh once more. And probably make the exact same comments. And I’ll write another review.

The Novelist’s Film plays in competition at the Berlinale from February 10th to the 20th.

That Kind of Summer (Un Été Comme Ça)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM BERLIN

Set in a retreat for the sexually obsessed, That Kind of Summer sees Quebec auteur Côté create a reverie on desire, addiction and the possibility of changing eventually one’s ways. A challenging yet relatively conservative work, Côté is relatively more ambitious than in his last few features, creating a work that actively interrogates the multifaceted nature of sexual desire.

Three women enrol in a retreat for the sexually addicted. It’s hard to say whether they were forced to go on purpose or they are are willing to enrol just to get a free holiday. They are asked to stay for 26 days, with a one day off in-between. They are looked after by visiting Germany professor Octavia (Anne Ratte Polle) and social worker Sami (Samir Guesmi), who resist their own desires to help these women find a way of living without having to think about sex.

Unlike many Hollywood movie, where rehab is presented as an opportunity for radical change, never mind the unrealistic nature of such radical changes within such a short time offered, That Kind of Summer deliberately eschews conventional character development in favour of a more realistic depiction of people trying to think beyond sexual obsession. People aren’t solved within a single retreat. Whatever neurosis you have, it’s going to take more than one trip to finally figure out what’s wrong, if anything is actually wrong at all.

While the women in this stay are well-rendered when it comes to their sexuality — shown through solo scenes and interaction with other men, as well as giving time to explain their feelings — the lone male character draws a blank. He is tempted throughout his stay — with all three women temping him at one point or another — but his internal psychology is left strangely alone, making for a weirdly feminine only experience. Considering the amount of scenes we encounter with women pleasuring themselves, including Octavia, the lack of inclusion of the male perspective fails to round out this tale in an egalitarian way.

The cinematography is handheld, and seems to bob up and down as if the camera is lost at sea, creating a sense of unease throughout. Côté remains a supreme stylist; favouring huge close-ups, long, almost silent takes and ambiguity through camera movement, never settling on a single character or style, making for a film that viewers can interpret in various different ways.

I have watched several Denis Côté films now (mostly at Berlinale) and I still can’t quite figure out his style. This is a director who trods his own dogged path, following his whims throughout various successful and unsuccessful ventures. There is an absence of conventionality throughout his filmmaking, which avoids traditional filmmaking structures in favour of a more observant and subtle style. The Quebec filmmaker seems to watch and watch his characters as if they aren’t scripted (even if they are). Rarely passing judgement, his films present a situation without ever settling on a side. It makes for a fascinating watch, but it rarely feels urgent: he’s kind of filmmaker that remains a pleasure to experience, but rarely makes you feel despite his surfeit of style. Here’s hoping his next film has something a bit more engaging to latch on to.

That Kind of Summer plays in Competition at the Berlinale between February 10th to 22ndÉ.

Passengers of The Night (Les passagers de la nuit)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

There’s a certain serenity and magic that comes over me while listening to the radio late at night. It can often feel like you’re the only one listening to the radio host while the rest of the world has gone to sleep. Named after a late-night show that accompanies truckers on long-distance journeys, Passengers of the Night has a similar kind of soft energy. Director Mikhaël Hers transmits this personal-feeling story to us as if he’s talking alone in a radio booth, creating an ode to both the bonds of family and reminiscences of the era in the process.

Like a lot of French films, it takes a broad, novelistic approach, taking us on a journey through the 80s, a golden age for the left, opening on François Mitterrand’s election on 10th May 1981 and ending with his decline. Hers shoots on film, mixing hazy, muted images with archive footage, creating a nostalgic feel for the time, further accompanied by classic 80s bands like Television and Lloyd Cole & the Commotions. Paris, photographed from all sides, looks particularly dreamy here, with Eric Rohmer films playing in Marquee cinemas, people playing tennis against buildings, and punk parties by the Seine.

Charlotte Gainsbourg stars as Élisabeth, a recently divorced mother looking after her two teenage children, Matthias (Quito Rayon-Richter) and Judith (Megan Northam). Matthias is a classic randy teenager, staring at girls in the apartment block opposite them and dreaming of the first time he will have sex. Judith is the political one, grateful for Mitterand’s election and holding plans to run for office one day. As far as families go, they get on pretty well, Hers electing to explore personal development rather than engineering generic conflicts.

But Élisabeth has to make ends meet for his children and applies on a whim to a late night radio talk show, where people call in and tell their stories. Quite the opposite of modern radio talk shows, which thrive on debate or conflict, Passengers of The Night is a more relaxed and hush programme, simple allowing people to tell us about their lives. Rather frustratingly, we don’t ever see any of these shows in detail, apart from one guest, the enigmatic 18-year-old Talulah (Noée Abita), who lives on the streets.

Élisabeth invites Talulah into their home, but her secrets never unveil. Like the drifter in Agnes Varda’s Vagabond (1985),she is a woman without a past. Usually this would irk me, but it fits in with the central theme of the movie that some secrets, whether written, spoken or implied, are better left in the past, better existing in the memories of just one person. The final result is a rather lovely film, one that never moved me that much, but still evokes a particular time, place and feeling with bittersweet ease.

Passengers of The Night played in the Competition section of the 72nd Berlinale, when this piece was originally written. It is out in the UK in October as part of the BFI London Film Festival.

One Year, One Night (Un año, una noche)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

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A tale of two performances: Noémie Merlant as Céline, fresh off A Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019) and Jumbo (Zoé Wittock, 2020) with a credible, affecting portrait of trauma denial; and Nahuel Pérez Biscayart as Ramon, suffering severe panic attacks right from the start without enough depth to properly pull it off. A tale of a couple, navigating the aftermath of the 2015 Bataclan attacks together, with the finer and cleverer performance being dragged down by a messy one.

One Year, One Night is based on the true recollections of two French-Spanish couples who went through unimaginable horror when escaping from the horrific terrorist attack, where 130 people were brutally killed by Islamist terrorists. Using a back-and-forth narrative technique, starting in the aftermath before giving us piecemeal cutbacks to the attacks themselves — tastefully shot so as to avoid any depiction of the gunmen — the result is a touching portrait of trauma and the pains of trying to live within its shadow.

The film works best when explaining the ways that life goes on even when you have suffered a severe event, with Ramon and Céline going back to their jobs; Ramon is in some kind of financial services while Céline is a social worker at a foster home, mostly working with Black and brown kids. With a manner reminiscent of Jean-Marc Vallée, edits come through these scenes like intrusive thoughts, showing us the difficulty of trying to move forward. But while Céline’s arc, telling no one what happened and hoping the negative feeling just goes away, seems more fascinating, Ramon’s everything-on-the-table reaction, vacillating between grief and encounter and moments of strange enlightenment, required subtler execution from Biscayart, who can’t quite pull it off.

Naturally, their relationship, told over the course of a year, comes under great scrutiny, whether they have drunk too many beers in Spain, stressed from work, or try and plan the future together. At times the attack itself fades from view and we are left with a handsome-enough relationship drama. But the dramatic line of the film is left severely wanting, with little shape given to each character’s development or conflict: arguments in rooms and cool dancing scenes can be fun, but they have to actually mean something; instead it just feels like padding.

And at 130 minutes, what could’ve been a neat Panorama film is given the bloated self-importance of a competition entry. While the experiences of the Bataclan survivors deserves a fair telling — with their input and consent, of course — One Year, One Night doesn’t live up to the importance of the task.

One Year, One Night plays in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, running from 10-20th February.

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

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Return to Dust (Yin Ru Chen Yan)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM BERLIN!

China might have made massive economic advances in the last few decades, but what of the people caught between the cracks of the country’s huge economic achievements? Li Ruijun looks at a simple farmer couple in northernmost Gansu, creating a poetic tale that unfolds with the simplicity of a fable.

Ma (Wu Renlin) and Guiying (Hai Qing) didn’t have much say in their marriage, arranged by their respective families, but slowly warm to each other anyway. She is severely disabled, unable to hold her bladder, while he is very taciturn, happiest when working the field. Their relationship is sweetly rendered by Ruijun, whether it’s the way they cook for each other, keep one another warm or imprint the shape of a flower on each other’s skins with individual grains. You won’t hear phrases like “I love you” or see them making love or cuddling, yet the love they have for each other is self-evident. But they are hopelessly, bitterly poor, their poverty viewed by others in the community as more of a hindrance than a problem to be solved. This pride and passion eventually clashes against a world that seemingly has no more use for them.

This is a sad yet dignified story, buoyed by slow cinema techniques that rarely cut away. Shooting with a boxy frame, the beauty and toil of working the land gains epic dimensions, the characters often dwarfed by the sky behind them. The pain and reward of their lifestyle is rendered in unwavering detail, the camera utilising long takes in showing the process involved in farming. With so many films using computer generated effects almost without thought, there is something epic about the physicality and realism of the landscapes and the way they are transformed here.

Both Renlin and Qing turn in fine performances — there is a real skill in being able to play people with so little without delving into caricature or moral simplicity. Ruijun doesn’t have any grand speeches or wider sociological screeds, but seems to simply observe, allowing the audience to draw their own conclusions.

The film asks: who are these rapid changes for and why are people being left behind? When offered an apartment Ma points out that there would be no space for his trusted donkey, pigs and chickens. But when you’re proceeding on a so-called Grand Plan — the likes of which the Chinese government loves to implement — considering every individual’s problems simply isn’t an option. With so much Western focus on China on its huge population and staggering technological advances, Ruijun invites us to zoom in and focus on the minutiae of rural life, with people kept in a trap of poverty through no fault of their own. The final result is quietly devastating; there’s no bang, but a long sad whimper.

Return to Dust plays in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, running from 10-20th February.