Tag: police

Poppy Field (Mooniväli)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Earthquake Bird

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Tokyo, 1989. An American woman who’s not long been in Japan has disappeared and the last person to see her alive is Lucy Fly (Alicia Vikander) who has lived in the country for five years, two months. Lucy is hauled in for questioning by the police and as her life in Japan slowly reveals itself in flashback, it becomes apparent why they want to talk to her.

Lucy is quiet, reserved, introverted. She mostly keeps herself to herself. She fits in well in Japanese society with its emphasis on the importance of the group over the individual. She is fluent in Japanese and works as a translator. She plays cello in an amateur string quartet with three much older Japanese women.

She also socialises with a group of international expats which is where Bob (Jack Huston) introduces her to the woman about whom the police wish to question her, Lily Bridges (Riley Keough) who is working as a nurse. The two women possess very different personalities. Lucy might be foolish to agree to take the newly arrived foreigner under her wing and show her the ropes. Lily is the stereotypical American: brash, outgoing and nosy. Not someone you imagine adapting well to Japanese society. She doesn’t even speak the language.

Lucy’s life changes when she runs into a man taking photographs on the street. He claims not to be interested in photographing people, only buildings, water, reflections. Something hooks her. Teiji Matsuda (Naoki Kobayashi) works at a noodle restaurant, but amateur photography is his passion. Soon she’s regularly going back to his flat, strangely situated at the top of an exterior spiral staircase and fully equipped as a darkroom, to be photographed. When on one occasion she removes her top, he tells her that wasn’t what he wanted. Before long, however, the pair have entered into a full-on, physical relationship.

She becomes obsessed with the photographs of old girlfriends Teiji keeps locked away in a filing cabinet. She knows where the key is and takes a look. When he later finds out, he is not pleased. Lily, meanwhile, wants to meet the boyfriend and when she does is clearly attracted to Teiji. This classic love triangle setup is fuelled by the growing tension between Lucy and Teiji.

Much as it would like to play like a Japanese thriller, Earthquake Bird is the adaptation of an English novel and it doesn’t feel very Japanese – despite a great quantity of Japanese dialogue, much of it delivered by Vikander. (To her credit, for this film she had to learn both the Japanese language and playing the cello, the latter something she’d learned a little as a child.) That said, as an outsider’s view of Japan, it’s convincing enough. And it has to have something of a grasp of Japanese culture and the country’s mindset to work.

When the police initially question Lucy, they do so in second-rate English until they discover she’s fluent in Japanese, something she doesn’t initially reveal. This seems to be typical of the woman. She is beset by guilt for an incident in her pre-Japan past for which she rightly or wrongly believes herself responsible.

For those wondering about the title, it relates to a bird that, as Teiji explains to Lucy, if you listen carefully, can be quietly heard to sing following an earthquake. There are several small-scale literal earthquakes in the narrative, that are soon over without any ill after effects. And then there are minor earthquake-comparable incidents, like a violinist from the string quartet slipping down steps to her death, to the shame of her fellow player who has recently polished the stairs and fears she may be responsible for the accident. Or Lucy falling ill when she, Teiji and Lily go on a day trip to Sado Island.

The whole is visually arresting throughout, with top-notch cinematography by Chung Chung-hoon who shot Oldboy (Park Chan-wook, 2003) and The Handmaiden (Park Chan-wook, 2016) and production design by Yohei Tanada who also did ManHunt (John Woo, 2017) and The Third Murder (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2017), so while you could wait a couple of weeks for it to turn up on Netflix, you might enjoy it more if you see it on the big screen first. As you might expect from Wash Westmoreland, previously the co-writer-director behind Still Alice (2014) and Colette (2018), this is as much character and culture study as it is thriller, which may infuriate some but reward those with the patience to take it on its own terms.

Earthquake Bird is out in the UK on Friday, November 1st. On Netflix in March!

Out Of Blue

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Morley’s latest film is both infuriating and enthralling in equal measure. Infuriating because its convoluted plot, firing off in several directions one after another, is often nigh on impossible to follow. Enthralling because while you never quite know where you are, it periodically throws at you utterly compelling little visual clues and sequences of images as teasers to suggest narrative or other possibilities.

Some viewers are going to hate this film and wonder why they wasted their money to see it. Others like myself, while not showering the film with unqualified praise, are going to want to revisit it several times and get more out of it each time they return. If you’ve got the patience and are prepared to dig on a first viewing and return later to dig some more, there’s a lot waiting to be unearthed here.

After a brief introductory sequence in which astronomer Jennifer Rockwell (Mamie Gummer) talks to a small audience outside an observatory about the stars and our place in the universe, she becomes the subject of a homicide case. But who pulled the trigger and blew her face off?

Finding herself in charge of the investigation, Police Detective Mike Hoolihan (Patricia Clarkson) examines the crime scene. Rainfall has interfered with it through the opened telescope slit in the domed roof. She notes such objects as a gun, a sock, a high heeled shoe and a jar of skin cream. She is approached by and surprisingly quickly falls in with TV news reporter Stella Honey (Devyn Tyler) who appears at unexpected moments and disappears equally unexpectedly.

The two immediate murder suspects are Jennifer’s boss Dr. Ian Strammi (Toby Jones) – it was his gun and he covered up the telescope but didn’t close the roof – and her boyfriend Duncan Reynolds (Jonathan Majors) – it was his sock. Reynolds’ alibi was that he rushed home after lovemaking to work on an all-consuming academic theory, Strammi’s that he spent all night with a female student discussing Schrödinger’s Cat. Hoolihan’s boss Lieutentant Janey McBride (Yolanda Ross) and colleague Tony Silvero (Aaron Tveit) have different ideas, including the latter’s belief that the perpetrator is the .38 Calibre Killer who hasn’t killed since the 1980s.

Something doesn’t feel quite right to Hoolihan, though, so she turns her attention outwards to the victim’s family – war hero father Colonel Tom (James Caan), mother Miriam (Jacki Weaver) and their twin sons.

The plot may or may not be clearer in Martin Amis’ novel Night Train from which Morley’s script is adapted, although she’s apparently removed and added quite a lot of material. The New Orleans setting allows for a commendably interracial cast and a clutch of striking performances. Chief among these is Clarkson’s detective, trying to just get on and do her job even as elements from the case on which she’s working resonate with half-remembered memory fragments from her own past. Or perhaps they’re prophetic images from her future.

Morley tantalisingly baffles and dazzles us with repeating images: a red scarf blowing in the wind of an electric fan, blue necklace baubles dropping onto and bouncing on a floor. The piece ends as it begins with images of the stars in the sky above the city.

All this proceeds in a kaleidoscopic manner focusing on a character here and a bunch of images there until a point towards the end where one of the images furnishes a key clue as to what all this is about and the solution is abruptly revealed in a curt couple of lines of dialogue that could have been thrown in at any earlier point in the proceedings.

As far as Morley’s concerned, the plot doesn’t seem to be what really matters. Her interest lies elsewhere – trauma, memory, repression. Our past affecting our present. Some intensely personal events have influenced Morley’s directing: her father committed suicide when she was eleven and according to the press blurb there were characters and situations in Amis’ novel that she immediately recognised as from her past. If the film doesn’t work so well as a straightforward genre exercise, those viewers with the patience to let it speak to them on its own terms over multiple viewings will find it rich in meaning indeed.

Out Of Blue is out in the UK on Friday, March 29th. Before then, it screens in the Glasgow Film Festival on Wednesday and Thursday, February 27th and 28th. On VoD (BFI Player and other platforms) on Monday, October 21st.

22 July

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The date is July 22nd, 2011. After detonating a bomb in Oslo, a far-right terrorist traveled to the island of Utøya to massacre teenagers attending a youth leadership Summer camp. Once he was apprehended by police, the country had to come to terms with his actions while the survivors had to rebuild their lives and, if they chose, confront the terrorist in court.

Not to be confused with the bravura single take, Norwegian language film U: July 22 (Erik Poppe, 2018) about the massacre on the island itself, due for UK release two weeks after this one, 22 July is the English language film by UK director Paul Greengrass using a Norwegian cast and crew which covers not only the massacre but events leading up to it and its aftermath. It’s based on the book One of Us: The Story of a Massacre and its Aftermath by Åsne Seierstad, a renowned Norwegian war correspondent whose expertise Greengrass says he found invaluable in making the film.

Greengrass’s background in journalism and documentary led to feature films like Bloody Sunday (2002) and United 93 (2006), about the 1972 Derry, Northern Ireland ‘Bloody Sunday’ shootings and one of the commercial flights involved in the 9/11 US terrorist attacks respectively, which dramatise actual historical events with documentarian accuracy. He uses this approach again in 22 July, which shares a great deal with United 93, another film about a terrorist attack perpetrated against a Western democracy.

Whereas 9/11’s terrorists were immigrant Islamists from a culture beyond the target country, the lone operator behind the Oslo and Utøya attacks was a far-right extremist and a Norwegian national, the enemy within. Both United 93 and 22 July start with the terrorist preparations and follow them as they put their plans into action, but where United 93 followed both what went on in the aircraft and events on the ground e.g. in air traffic control up to the point the aircraft was destroyed in mid-flight, 22 July covers not only the Oslo bombing and the Utøya shootings in its first third but also the survivors – both teenagers and terrorist – up to and including the point where the former group confronted the latter individual in court.

Thus, in addition to one plot line following far right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik (Anders Danielsen Lie), another follows two teenage brothers at the camp Viljar and Torje Hanssen (Jonas Strand Gravli and Isak Bakli Aglen) in their attempts to survive. Viljar, who helps his younger brother flee to safety, receives a gunshot wound to the head and shoulders and for months after the incident must undergo hospital treatment and therapy. As he does so, he must face his own demons: will Viljar be able to confront the terrorist in court and show the world that there is a better way? A third plot strand involves the Norwegian PM Stoltenberg (Ola G. Furuseth) as he struggles to deal with the unfolding terrorist incidents.

It’s gripping and terrifying material, impressive not least for the huge amount of research that Greengrass, Seierstad and team have clearly put in. On a really big screen it’s visceral and harrowing – apart from Viljar’s sustaining his injuries there isn’t a great deal of graphic detail shown, but the fact that these are carefully crafted recreations of actual events that took place in recent history lends the representation considerable gravitas.

Controversially, Greengrass has chosen to make this film with online movie streaming service Netflix and while we would encourage you to see it in a cinema with a decent sized screen if you possibly can, those with Netflix accounts may, understandably, choose to watch it on that platform instead. (Hey – go and see it in the cinema first!) The teenage survivors are the next generation, so Greengrass’ stated intention of reaching that audience via a familiar streaming platform makes complete sense, much as I hate to have to write that this is the case.

In short, this is a well researched, realised and performed and to boot a highly effective docudrama about devastating events that remind us to be vigilant in combating and confronting terrorism, whether perpetrated by right wing extremists or anyone else. It would make a terrific double bill if preceded by United 93 for those that have both stomach and stamina to cope with both at once, however it’s undeniably an effective piece of cinema in its own right. You might wonder why Greengrass would need to make a 22 July after having already made a United 93: the answer is, the Islamist terrorist atrocity and the right wing extremist terrorist atrocity are two sides of the same coin, so the pair of films presents us with some sort of wider, balanced view. The new film is absolutely essential viewing in much the same way that the earlier one was. Don’t miss.

22 July is out in cinemas in the UK on Wednesday, October 10th as well as on Netflix. Watch the film trailer below:

Two Doors (Doo gae-eui moon)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The story of the Yongsan tragedy. Yongsan is an area of Central Seoul which had been the site of a US military base and the infrastructure such as bars and prostitution which had grown up around it. Once the US military decamped to another area, the developers hoped to move in and regenerate the area. For ‘regenerate’ read ‘gentrify’, a situation not entirely unfamiliar in parts of the UK at present. In Yongsan, when some tenants in one particular housing block refused to move out, activists seized on this and helped stage a protest.

Instead of listening to their grievances as the protesters would have hoped, the authorities surrounded the block with police whose presence only served to aggravate the protesters into throwing firebombs. The police subsequently stormed the building with intent to remove the protesters who barricaded themselves inside and whose last stand would take place in a lookout structure on the roof of the building.

With water cannon concentrated on both the block and the lookout, a SWAT team was lowered onto the roof in a container carried by a crane and the protesters retreated into the lookout. Tensions were high on both sides when the lookout suddenly burst into flames. The ensuing inferno claimed the lives of five protesters and one police officer. Initially, no-one was quite sure what had happened.

A court case followed. It concluded that the police operation had been necessary to uphold the rule of law and incarcerated four protesters who’d managed to survive the fire.

The Pinks film making collective didn’t think these arguments were good enough and set out to make a documentary about the incident. The surviving protesters being in prison weren’t available for interviews, so all the filmmakers had to work with was the footage shot by journalists and police at the incident plus audio recordings of the trial. There are also a few interviews of people on the protesters’ side.

Out of these limited materials came an extraordinary film. You feel like you’re watching the tragedy unfold in real time with commentary after the event trying to piece together exactly what happened. What emerges for a viewer unfamiliar with recent Korean political history is a terrifying picture of a repressive, right wing regime where ordinary people are stamped on in no uncertain terms.

The police going inside the building and the SWAT team airlifted in by container are clearly under extreme pressure. This is one of those cinematic experiences where you believe one group (the police) to be in the wrong, yet at the same time they’re in an impossible situation and you feel for their plight. That doesn’t render their actions right, correct or good, but it does in some sense put you alongside them and elicit a degree of sympathy.

As documentaries go, this is a must see and whilst it obviously would have a particular resonance for a South Korean audience, for an international one it transcends such concerns with its picture of a repressive regime and the toll exacted from those charged with maintaining it on the ground. Although it’s a very different situation, UK residents will recall the Grenfell Tower tragedy too.

Two Doors plays in the London Korean Film Festival. A follow-up film The Remnants was made by the Pinks film making collective five years later and is also showing at the Festival.

The Remnants (Gong-Dong-Jeong-Beom)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Set to open in Korea in 2018, this is the follow-up documentary to Two Doors (Kim il-rhan/ Hong Ji-you, 2012) about the Yongsan tragedy in which a policeman and five protesters were killed in a fire atop a housing block during a protest. One of the limitations imposed on that film was the incarceration of those protesters that escaped the burning rooftop lookout atop the Yongsan building. Viewers of the first film kept asking what had happened to these people.

The short answer is: four years after originally being sentenced, they were pardoned and released. This meant that they were now available to tell their own stories, so Kim and Lee from the Pinks film making collective and their crew started talking to them on camera. Slowly, a second film started to emerge. It’s not exactly a sequel, more a follow up. Which is to say, it’s dealing with different aspects of the same story but constructed around a different template and operating within a dissimilar set of parameters.

In the process, this second instalment starts to unpack elements that were never fully explained in the first film. For one thing, the rooftop lookout is now described as a simple structure erected by the protesters themselves rather than an original architectural feature, with interview material of the rigger who oversaw its construction.

This second doc also explores areas into which the first’s limitations prevented it from venturing. One question is that of how the fire in the lookout actually started in the first place. Two Doors drew upon a number of sources. The exterior footage shows the structure unexpectedly, suddenly burst into flames with no obvious visual clue as to why. There’s no police footage of what occurred inside the structure presumably because cameras were turned off when the Swat team moved onto the roof. The official report which formed a major part of the evidence in the court case goes suspiciously quiet when it comes to this part of the operation. It was something which therefore got passed over in the original film, but with access to those who were inside the inferno and survived, the various factors leading up to the deadly combustion are explained in some considerable detail.

This access makes The Remnants much more people-centred than its predecessor. It becomes clear that there were two camps among the protesters, those from the building itself and those activists who came in from outside to help them in their struggle. In prison, the two factions became polarised. After their release, three survivors wanted to meet together on a regular basis to talk through and collectively process the trauma they’d experienced. By way of contrast, the fourth survivor’s way of dealing with it was to go to rallies and remind people of the tragedy to keep it in the public eye. The first three want him to meet up with him and talk about it, but for a long time he refuses, believing this to be a waste of time. Eventually though, the four are brought together in an event attempt to try and understand what happened on the day of the fire: this also serves as a catalyst for the unwilling party to engage (argue with) the others which proves cathartic for all concerned.

Any documentary about survivors of a tragic fire will bring to mind Grenfell Tower for UK residents, although the specifics of that tragedy are very different. Inevitably, because The Remnants concerns the Yongsan tragedy survivors rather than the authorities, the film feels more inwards-focused than its predecessor. But it’s a striking work for all that.

The Remnants plays in The London Korean Film Festival.

The Receptionist

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

This is both a Taiwanese production and a London one in terms of writer-director, cast and locations. The Receptionist is inspired by real life events that happened to someone director Jenny Lu knew. Fictionalised here as Anna (Shuang Teng, also one of the producers, whose performance is quite simply heartbreaking), that character has come to the UK seeking work to send money back to her debt-ridden family and turns up alone and out of her depth at a newly opened, suburban London, so-called massage parlour where a “body to body” is £60 a time. It’s run by hard-boiled Chinese Madam Lily (an astonishing turn by seasoned actress and singer Sophie Gopsill) whose briefly seen English landlady (Nicola Wright) has no idea Lily is anything other than an ordinary tenant.

When the dowdy Anna turns up trolley suitcase in town, Lily already has three women working there – Mei (the very watchable Amanda Fan) and Sasa (a multilayered performance from Tsai Ming-liang regular Chen Shiang-chyi) service the clients while Tina (Teresa Daley whose honest, matter-of-fact performance carries the film) works as receptionist. Mei is a happy-go-lucky type from Malaysia who seems to like dressing up, but don’t let the surface of her character fool you: this film is an honest attempt to portray the lives of sex workers in the UK, how they get into that line of employment and what keeps them there. The older Sasa is a single parent mum working to support her child.

Although the character of Anna was the script’s inspiration, story construction is built primarily around receptionist Tina from whose perspective we are shown the lives of these characters as they ply their trade within the confines of a small, anonymous London terrace.

Literature graduate Tina is living with her white English boyfriend Frank (Josh Whitehouse from Northern Soul, Elaine Constantine, 2014) and both of them are struggling to get work. There are just too many applicants chasing each job whether for architectural assistants (him) or anything in the book trade (her). Tina goes to an interview for a receptionist job and initially walks away when she discovers it’s a receptionist post for a brothel. But then, she needs the money. And the job pays. So she goes back and takes it. Just for a few days. At first.

One of the great strengths of the film particularly in its more focused first half, while purporting to document the plight of East Asian ethnic minorities in the UK (which it does admirably), is that it manages in passing to succinctly express the situation in which Generation Rent currently finds itself – lumbered with student loans to service, unable to find a job, lacking sufficient money to buy a home – which suggests that its audience may be far, far wider than the East Asian demographic at which it seems at first glance to be aimed. Those tensions are never far away and go some way to explain why these women have fallen into the sex industry.

The occupants of the house must interact with their mostly English-speaking clients, so scenes between the women are in Mandarin while others are in English. We watch them cooking, relaxing and working with clients. Both director and actresses appear as fluent in English as in the other languages, giving a real sense of a an immigrant community within the wider, English-speaking London. The clients are a mixture of pleasant and unpleasant, the latter giving rise to some fairly harrowing scenes. Towards the end, perhaps in an attempt at narrative closure, there’s the inevitable police raid.

This first feature gets an awful lot right and makes some important comments about Britain today and the way it (mis)treats both outsiders and its very own younger generation. It’s perhaps noteworthy that it’s taken an outsider to make this film in Britain: nevertheless it’s bang on target and deserves to be shown to a wider, mainstream UK audience.

The Receptionist played London East Asian Film Festival in 2017, when this piece was originally written. It is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, July 20th.