Tag: homecoming

Homecoming (Le Retour)

Posted on by victorfraga

QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM CANNES

This is a movie that rightly deserves the spotlight. It indeed received abundant attention for the media, but mostly for the wrong reasons. Homecoming’s Cannes premiere was overshadowed by accusations of improper behaviour towards the cast because of a scene of sexual nature involving two adolescents. Furious feminists sent the director hate e-mails and demanded that the film is pulled from the Festival). The director defended her actions, but eventually conceded that she will use intimacy coordinators in the future. Describing a fully-dressed, simulated masturbation scene between a 15- and a 17-year-old as sexual harassment is on a par with calling David Bowie a paedophile for dating a 13-year-old when he was aged 15. Frivolous and absurd.

The 10th feature film by the 67-year-old French filmmaker is a story simple on the surface and profound in its emotions. It takes a candid approach towards sexuality, bursting with authenticity and performances that are beyond engaging. The film begins with a desperate black woman with two small children leaving Corsica. It’s not entirely clear why she’s crying, but it’s evident that she’s departing. Fast-forward about 14 years. Khédidja (Aïssatou Diallo Sagna) returns from Paris with her now grown-up children: Jessica (Suzy Bemba) is 18-year-old intelligent and confident young woman about to enter a prestigious university in Paris, while Farah (Esther Gohourou) is a more dysfunctional 15-year-old prepared to rob and to trade marijuana in order to raise some holiday cash. The two teens have an affectionate relationship, despite their different personalities. The three of them stay with Khédidja’s boss Marc (DenisPodalydès), his wife, his tomboy, happy-go-lucky teen daughter Gaïa (Lomane de Dietrich), and his smaller children. However welcoming, the fact that Marc and his family are white and Khédidja’s are black is the first reminder of fraught race relations in France. And it doesn’t take long before the black teens experience racism in far more vivid colour in a very insular (in both the literal and figurative sense of the adjective) Corsica.

Jessica and Farah were born in Corsica to a white father, whose fate and complicated family history are revealed later in the film. He was loving and devoted to his daughters, and it took a cruel twist of fate to destroy the family. Khédidj never felt welcome in such a closed community. She felt like an the outsider on a perennial holiday. The problem is that a holiday should not last very long. And it didn’t. Khédidj is now attempting to reconnect with the place where she once lived, and she is kindly aided by her boss, his wife and an indeed an old friend. The girls seek to establish a connection with a homeland hitherto foreign to them.

The three (black) women become romantically and sexually engaged with local (white people), with Jessica firmly treading on homosexual territory for the first time. A masturbation scene between 15-year-old Gohourou (the actress has the same age as her character) and 17-year-old Harold Orsoni (who also plays a character presumably of the same age) is the controversial one picked up by the French media, and it did not make the final cut. Gohourou and Bemba deliver high-octane performances. The scenes of sexual nature are gentle and moving. And this isn’t the only tender element of the film. There are gentle subversions all over: family, race, gender, and sexuality.

Gohourou is passionate and funny as an irresistibly naughty and unapologetically confrontational teen who feels that her mother does not take her seriously, while Bemba is confident and captivating as a charming and clever adolescent coming of age, at times stumbling on her footsteps. In fact, all supporting actors are excellent. A drug-taking scene in a house party is distinctly affecting. Love moves in mysterious ways. And reconnection with a long-lost fatherland can have some unexpected repercussions.

This is no pedestrian emotional ride. Homecoming offers a rollercoaster of sensations, often eliciting laughter and cry. This isn’t a misery-fest, either. There are positive turns and impromptu connections in the most unlikely places and times. I seriously hope that this precious little gem of French cinema is neither overlooked nor relegated to the #MeToo casualty bin. This would be extremely unfair to the filmmaker, the actors and the crew (the majority of which have stepped forward in defence of the director). Unless there is a very sordid revelation yet to be made. Judging by the tone of the film, I doubt that such is the case.

Homecoming premiered as part of the Official Competition of the 75th Cannes Film Festival.

Wake Me (Zbudi Me)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

A man wakes up in hospital, clearly traumatised. His head is bandaged. He has no idea who he is beyond his name, Rok (Jure Henigman). His girlfriend Rina (Živa Selan) drives him home.

When the door of the social housing apartment opens, and the woman inside (who we later realise is his mother, played by Nataša Barbara Gračner) realises who it is, she tries to shut the door but not before he can get a foot in. He forces entry, and the lady social worker explains that this is the last address he remembers, that he should regain his memory in time. And already, he remembers a name, Jure (Timon Sturbej). Who turns out to be his little brother. His brother at his mother’s insistence makes up the bed in the brother’s room.

Rok hangs around on walkways in Jesenice, as the local railway station is named, walks through an underpass to a cafe where he asks after Damjan (Jurij Drevenšek), another remembered name, who he finds doing his day shift as a watchman in a school. Back at home, his girlfriend Rina (Živa Selan) brings over some of his stuff. At night, he watches Jure spraypaint graffiti images. After the pair of them have a run in with the man whose wall it was, they watch an old video of people fleeing Rok as he wields an axe. Later, says Jure, who only heard the details second hand, things got really messy as Rok cracked a guy’s head open.

Rok calls in on Denana (Tamara Avguštin) and her wheelchair-bound husband Selim (Blaž Setnikar). Later, his mother tells him how he and Selim got in a fight which crippled Selim. Later still, Damjam suggests that now he’s Back, Rok will want revenge. This is news to Rok. He visits an Inspector Janežič (Jure Ivanužič) at the police station who tells him he’s forgotten that he was “a good guy who left all this”. That doesn’t stop him and his mother talking Jure into leaving for Austria, where life chances are better.

He watches a video of him and his girlfriend fooling around as she cooks dinner: happier times. He realises he has a key, so travels over to her apartment and lets himself in. She’s not pleased. So he returns the key. Later, he gets attacked on a covered pedestrian rail / road bridge after doing his grocery shopping by people who know him from before, and who Jure – who is now back – is with.

The whole thing benefits considerably from urban Slovenia locations, crisply shot by cinematographer Ivan Zadro. The shot towards the end when Rok gets attacked is particularly impressive: a long shot of the covered pedestrian bridge as he walks across screen left to right, two men running towards him right to left and one running from behind him left to right to deliver the knockout head blow with a handheld object.

You’ll also remember shots of railway stations at night, and trains passing through the city. There’s a clear sense of purpose to the whole film and Jan Vysocky contributes an eerie orchestral score that adds much to the overall atmosphere. As a picture of a man suffering memory loss trying to reconnect with his past, which is how it sels itself, the piece does what is says on the tin. It isn’t likely to want to make anyone move to Slovenia anytime soon, though.

Wake Me premieres in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.