Tag: pregnancy

A Deal With The Universe

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The filmmaker asks his mum what his name is. “It’s J”, she replies. “J for what?”, he asks. “J for Jason”, she says sheepishly like a child to a teacher, knowing she should have got the answer right first time.

Despite its momentous title, this is quite a low key affair. There’s an argument that suggests that home movies are the purest form of cinema, bereft as they are of the industrial trappings of sophisticated moving image making. Conversely, in recent years, increasingly sophisticated technology for the consumer market has meant that many people can make and indeed edit films about their own lives as personal mementos. Whether such films should be turned into professional features is a whole other question.

This film started life as a personal diary to record a pregnancy and a couple’s impending parenthood. With a twist. Tracey and Jason had been together for some time, a woman and a trans man, when they learned that Tracey couldn’t have kids.

Jason had been taking testosterone since 2000 in order to transition from female to male. He halted the process in order to fertilise a human egg in his own body then transfer it to Tracey’s womb. At least, that was the plan. It didn’t work out that way, though; she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a mastectomy. Then Jason realised his own body could carry the child through to its birth. However, try as he might, Jason couldn’t get pregnant over numerous attempts. Then he had a miscarriage. Finally, after more than 30 attempts, the pregnancy took.

Although some big moving image taboos are being broken, to the film’s credit it doesn’t feel like that when you’re watching. We’re not used to seeing women post-mastectomy or men in the process of gender transition on a movie screen. Both Tracey and Jason are very relaxed in front of the camera. Tracey shows off her chest both before (two breasts) and after (one breast and a scar) surgery. Jason, when he finally gets pregnant, frolics underwater in the local swimming pool. I certainly can’t recall another documentary where a man is shown getting pregnant.

Anyone who’s ever tried to have kids successfully or otherwise knows it’s a journey fraught with all manner of possible setbacks and disasters. For some couples, everything goes right first time; for others, not so much. This more universal aspect of the subject matter may help open the film up to a wider audience. That’s also true of the mastectomy material which is very well handled.

The couple look like very ordinary people and you can’t but help feel for them in their plight. Jason is motivated to show a trans person in the context of a stable, loving relationship as not vastly different from the his fellow human beings, a goal he accomplishes admirably.

However, while its subject matter is compelling and its autobiographical human subjects congenial enough, the origins of the project and its filmic form let it down. Whatever merits the home movie format possesses ultimately become the film’s weakness. It just doesn’t quite know how to break out of its home movie roots.

The perfunctory editing into a readily digestible narrative frequently allows what should be a thoroughly compelling story to slide into the merely banal. Perhaps stretching the material into a feature at just under 90 minutes was a mistake: parts of it feel way too thin. The best bits are impressive enough but too much padding elsewhere lets the whole thing down.

A Deal With The Universe is out in the UK on Friday, April 12th, and on VoD the following Monday! Watch the film trailer below:

If Beale Street Could Talk

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The couple walks along. They’re completely in love. “Are you ready for this?”, asks Fonny (Stephan James). “I’ve never been more ready for anything in my whole life”, replies Tish (newcomer KiKi Layne).

Welcome to a movie that is at once one of the most romantic of the year – out just in time for Valentine’s Day – and a gritty indictment of the way black people are treated in the USA. Which sounds a pretty unlikely mix, but then Barry Jenkins is hardly an average director. His Best Picture Oscar winning Moonlight (2016) proved this for this writer by having one character at three different ages played by three actors and making that potentially disastrous proposition work so brilliantly on the screen.

If Beale Street Could Talk‘s source material is a 1974 novel set in Harlem by US writer James Baldwin (1924-1987) who explored the black experience in some considerable depth and is the subject of highly recommended documentary I Am Not Your Negro (Raoul Peck, 2017). The novel is Baldwin‘s response to the incarceration of black people for crimes they have not committed by a system, as he sees it, designed to keep them in their place through systematic abuse and mistreatment. Baldwin has a gift for writing about people, what makes them tick, their good and bad qualities.

The film’s romantic opening soon gives way to something else: Tish visits Fonny, in prison for a crime he did not commit, to tell him she’s going to have his baby. The only way they can communicate is through a glass partition. They’ve been friends since childhood and are now partners as adults. But they’re not married and she’s got to tell her and his parents about the baby. And the family have to find a way to get him out of prison.

The narrative is a clever exercise in parallel editing. One strand shows Tish and Fonny’s life together, growing into love, finding an apartment, his being picked on by a racist cop (Ed Skrein). The other shows Tish’s story following Fonny’s incarceration, her telling both their families about the baby, the ongoing life process of pregnancy, birth and raising a son, fighting for her partner’s release with her mother’s help.

The two leads are terrific. KiKi Layne is a real find, capturing a mixture of innocence and fragility on the one hand and a perseverance and strength on the other. The latter is something Tish gets from her parents, especially her mother Sharon (Regina King) who at one point has to fly to Puerto Rico to persuade gone to earth witness Victoria Rogers (Emily Rios) to testify that Fonny wasn’t the man who raped her.

Although he gets less screen time, Stephan James as Fonny is good too whether showing Fonny’s essential optimism in his life in the outside world or his attempt to hold himself together as prison life threatens to make him fall apart, the latter experience only really seen from Tish’s side of the glass partition when she visits him. (There is no attempt to otherwise show Fonny’s prison life beyond such visitation scenes, no way the film might be described as a prison movie).

In addition there are numerous impressive bit parts – the film is surely destined to become a future Who’s Who of Black US acting talent – and other aspects of the production do it proud too. The sequence where first Tish’s family then Fonny’s react to the news of her pregnancy deserves a special mention, there being much to say about the way Tish’s family, despite being oppressed by a system rigged against their race, practise life-affirming values in marked contrast to Fonny’s family where father is driven to rage by feelings of powerlessness while mother and daughters use legalistic Biblical language to lord it over the “sinful” Tish.

Special mentions should go to James Laxton’s cinematography for juxtaposing the lush, vivid palette of a seventies Harlem romance against the harsh, brutal colours of an oppressive prison environment (exactly the qualities that seemed to be absent from the cinematography of that other recent, period New York movie Can You Ever Forgive Me?) and an achingly beautiful score by Nicholas Britell. That said, this is one of those movies where all the technical people and their departments, those unsung, behind the scenes heroes of movie-making, each more than pull their individual weight to contribute to a whole that adds up to far, far more than the (considerable) sum of its parts.

This remarkable film consolidates Barry Jenkins’ achievement in Moonlight and deserves to be even more widely seen, not only because it so beautifully articulates the black experience in the racist society that is the USA but also because it’s so well put together in terms of all aspects of movie-making craft. The cast, main and bit parts, are to die for and it’s a great introduction to the writings of James Baldwin to boot. See it.

If Beale Street Could Talk is out in the UK on Friday, February 8th. On VoD on Friday, June 21st.

Mothers (Dangshinui Bootak)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Hyo-jin (Im Soo-jung) and her stepson Jong-wook (Yoon Chan-yong) didn’t really know how to react when his father died. And they haven’t seen each other for around a decade. But now, the grandmother who’s been looking after the boy in the interim is no longer in any fit state to do so. So, would she be able to take the boy in?

It’s a good question. Hyo-jin’s already busy running an academy to teach teenagers and her assistant Mi-ran (Lee Sang-hee) is pregnant with another child. And Hyo-jin’s relationship with her own mother is hardly exemplary – it seems that whatever Hyo-jin does, her mother criticises or disapproves.

A further mother appears in the shape of a different female, Joo-mi (Seo Shin-ae), a friend of Jong-wook who is not exactly his girlfriend, more a companion. Initially, she gets on better with his mother than he does, for instance ringing Hyo-jin to let her know where her son is when he doesn’t want anything to do with his mother and won’t even call her.

Then Joo-mi announces she’s pregnant. Jong-wook is not the father. (We’ve seen no sign of any physical sexual activity between them). He likes the idea of parenting a child. She, on the other hand, thinks the child would be better off if adopted by a responsible family.

There is great potential here for exploring all manner of complex mother/daughter, mother/son, mother/foetus relationships and director Lee Dong-eun does so by complex, almost novelistic dialogue. The filmmaker has an extraordinary sense of flow about the way he shoots scenes with his excellent cast. This striking quality is one the passable but somewhat insipid trailer, with its much faster cutting, completely fails to convey.

Some of the difficult behaviour of the boy towards his mother is anticipated by her behaviour towards her own mother in earlier scenes. The way this is handled within the larger body of the narrative is extremely subtle, not at all forced and, consequently, most impressive. Jong-wook aside, since he plays quite a pivotal role in the proceedings, the male characters are largely peripheral with an assortment of female characters major and minor to the fore.

I’m not sure if this is a exactly ‘woman’s picture’, although it certainly contains much material of interest to women. Watching as a man, I found its situations drew me in while the deftly sketched characters held my attention. Its concerns may be undeniably feminine concerns, but at the same time they’re the sort that interest not only women but also men.

Mothers could so easily descend into mawkishness, sappiness or sentimentality, but it never does so and is all the better for it, opting instead to deal in intelligent observation of ordinary lives. That may have something to do with it being an independent rather than a mainstream Korean movie. Whatever, it makes for fascinating viewing.

Mothers plays in the London Korean Film Festival. Watch the film trailer below:

Tehran Taboo

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Here’s a thing. Packed with political, sexual and social subject matter, this is a live action film shot in Tehran. Only it’s neither live action nor shot in Tehran. The content rendered shooting on location pretty much impossible. The live action is actors shot against green screen with a view to building the location into the film later on. Then it’s treated by a process called rotoscoping which, despite having been around for the best part of a century, is not that well known outside of animation and movie special effects circles.

Rotoscoping is basically tracing images of e.g. actors off sequential single frames of film to retreat them as drawings in animation – think of the Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds sequence in Yellow Submarine (Geroge Dunning, 1968). It was invented and patented by legendary animator Max Fleischer for his Out Of the Inkwell trick film shorts (1918-27) featuring Koko the Clown. More recently, Richard Linklater employed a computer enhanced version of the technique on Waking Life (2001) and Philip K. Dick adaptation A Scanner Darkly (2006).

In Tehran Taboo, the locations are provided by a combination of drawn images and 3D elements which have been composited with the rotoscoped cast within the computer. Not only is the overall effect thoroughly convincing, the film has a hyperreal aesthetic which straight live action doesn’t. There’s a compelling, almost hypnotic quality to it.

A snowbound, midwinter opening with a car kerb-crawling lines of prostitutes sets the scene. Life under fundamentalist Islamic rule seems to regard women as inferior citizens who must get their husband’s written permission to be allowed to do anything. No such bureaucratic checks exist for the men, although as suggested by the scene where a man is taken away by police from a park where he’s been holding hands with a woman, everyday life can be far from easy for them, too.

The three-handed plot concerns three women. Pari (Elmira Rafizadeh) is a prostitute doing her best to raise her young boy as a single mum. She dispenses sexual favours to an aging judge as a means of getting her son past an officious, low level female bureaucrat who is refusing him admission to the school in the area into which Pari and son have just moved.

The judge puts Pari up in a vacant flat he happens to own where she makes friends with respectable housewife and mum-to-be Sara (Zar Amir Ebrahimi) whose hardline husband is refusing to sign the form to allow his wife to work during her pregnancy. One evening, larking about with Sara and slightly drunk, Pari undertakes as a prank call to the building’s caretaker and suggest a rendezvous. She does this on Sara’s phone which will eventually have dire consequences for the latter.

Meanwhile, a third woman Donya (Negar Mona Alizadeh) visits an underground dance club where she has sex with a musician Babak (Arash Mirandi) in the men’s room. However, she’s due to get married very soon and needs to prove her virginity to her husband. This requires an expensive operation for which she insists Babak must pay. So he sets about finding out about either this operation or possible alternatives to it.

Like Pari’s son taking delight in dropping water bombs from his balcony onto unsuspecting innocents below, the men here mostly game the system and have everything their own way. The women, however, have a much harder time of it, wherever they fit (or don’t fit) in the social spectrum. Ironically for a system that purports to uphold sexual abstinence or monogamous relationship, the woman that fares best here is the worldly-wise prostitute while the respectable, faithful housewife who makes one accidental minor slip finds herself in an ever worsening, no win situation culminating in a devastating rooftop finale involving a phoenix costume and a camera held by Pari’s astonished son.

If the rotoscoping process adds anything, it ups the visual ante producing the movie equivalent to reading a graphic novel. But the film stands on the merit of its writing and strong performances from its highly effective cast. See it – and be reminded of the freedoms we in the West have that are all too easily taken for granted.

Tehran Taboo is out in the UK on Friday, October 5th. Out on VoD on Monday, January 7th (2018).