Tag: review

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

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

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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.

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.

Both Sides of the Blade (Avec Amour et Acharnement)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

To borrow the same metaphor, Both Sides of the Blade is a double-edged sword. On the one hand we have a finely-acted drama minutely detailing the ins and outs of marriage and infidelity; on the other, we have an overwrought and sentimental tale that doesn’t ever compel the audience to sit up in its seat the way the average Claire Denis film usually does. This is a half-baked, disappointing effort from one of our great living directors, all the more of a letdown due to her normally high batting average.

The radiant Juliette Binoche, returning with Denis after Let the Sunshine In (2017),stars as Sara, a woman seemingly secure in her relationship with Jean (Vincent Lindon). The film opens on an idyllic scene, the middle-aged couple swimming in the sea, cuddling and kissing before returning to their Paris apartment and making love. But the music, courtesy of Tindersticks, suggests an erotic thriller; a mash of discordant trumpets and strings portending confusion ahead. For Jean has entered into business with Sara’s former flame François (Grégoire Colin), alighting a moody marital drama that never settles on a consistent and engaging tone.

Denis is known for her highly stylish approach to filmmaking, even when making a so-called “domestic drama”: from Sara’s first sighting of François to a frantic agency opening to the endless arguments with her husband, the camera gets inside her head and creates an appropriate sense of disorientation, further complimented by Denis’ mixture of camera formats. From moment to moment, the dialogue is smart: while on the nose throughout, it allows the couple to test each other, as they debate what François means to them and how he will dominate their lives.

Binoche typically excels in the main role, portraying a woman who knows what she wants, but is afraid of what happens if she gets it. She’s both smart and cunning, sexy and brave, afraid and manipulative, often within the same scene. Even when the story falls short, she finds new dimensions to her character throughout. Lindon rises equally to the game, moving between magnanimity and jealousy, pragmatism and anger, with ease. Together, they keep the lockdown-light drama engaging — with reminders of the coronavirus pandemic throughout and endless scenes shot within their modern Rue D’Amsterdam apartment — throughout each scene despite the failure of the plot, co-written with novelist Christine Angot, to give them any shape to their respective destinies.

But what of François, occupying the Count Vronsky-role in this modern-day Anna Karenina? Wearing a Le Coq Sportif jacket and riding a motorcycle, he’s criminally underwritten; giving us little sense of why he’s such a big deal. Other supporting players, including Jean’s black son and white mother, or a friendly pharmacist, are equally tokenistic, making me feel that the film would be better without them taking part at all. The whole thing is filled with unearned moments, even if the individual craft is fairly sturdy. While by the end you can see from both sides (of the blade) now, it’s that crucial third side that needs further sharpening. Or even better, a much sharper knife.

Both Sides of the Blade played in Competition at the Berlin Film Festival, running from February 10th to the 20th. On all major VoD platforms in December.

Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush (Rabiye Kurnaz gegen George W. Bush)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

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Being both highly important and deeply funny at the same time without one part overshadowing the other is a difficult line to tread, but Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush, stemming from a fantastic central performance by Meltem Kaptan, manages to feel absolutely effortless. The kind of crowd-pleasing comedy that you could probably recommend to just about anybody, expect it to be a domestic hit in Germany and perhaps even have many admirers overseas.

The year is 2001. The US is in paranoiac overdrive due to the recent 9/11 bombings. Turkish-German Murat (Abdullah Emre Öztürk) travels to Pakistan from Bremen without telling his mother Rabiye (Meltem Kaptan). He is later arrested by the authorities on suspicion of terrorism and later taken to Guantanamo Bay. As he is not technically being held on American soil, he is denied the right to a fair trial, leading Rabiye to enlist the services of German human rights lawyer Bernhard Docke (Alexander Scheer).

It is at once a courtroom drama and a culture-clash comedy, with the chaotic Turkish mother and the stereotypically rigid German lawyer butting heads on the proper way to do things. For example, while he insists that things takes time, Rabiye likes to rush into rooms, demanding the nearest minister’s attention. But where a lesser screenplay might have let this play out in obvious, cringe-worthy ways, Rabiye Kurnaz has laser-sharp focus on both its central characters, making their relationship feel natural and well-earned despite their many differences. It’s a huge step up from the other war on terror comedy Curveball (Johannes Naber, 2020), which lacked both urgency or even a single laugh.

Taking place over many years, the film does a great job of explaining the different levels of bureaucratic hell that Murat is under without ever having feeling complex or over-explained. New developments that could’ve become repetitive or over-laboured are placed in new settings each time, managing to reveal something new about the characters in the process. Kaptan, with her larger-than-life demeanour, huge bird’s-nest haircut and motor-mouth attitude, is the absolute centre of the piece. Rarely falling into cliché, she elevates the script into the kind of well-made broad comedy (with a message) that contemporary cinema so often lacks.

The facts of the case are shocking: not only are 39 people still held in Cuba without ever having a fair trial, but the German government has been proven to actively cover up their involvement in the so-called war of terror. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, making a comedy such as this a better delivery system for the film’s message than any dark and depressing camp-set drama ever could. In fact comedy is perfect, because it humanises Muslim people instead of constantly seeing them through a victim/perpetrator binary, actually working better than nearly all of the 00s war on terror thrillers to discuss the legacy of American overreach.

It also provides a key lesson to the new wave of unfunny American “serious” comedies, from Don’t Look Up (Adam McKay, 2021) to Bombshell (Jay Roach, 2019). You don’t need to lecture in order to get your message across. You simply have to be funny. Rabiye Kurnaz is all of that and more.

Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush plays in Competition at the 72nd Berlinale, running between February 10th and 20th.

Before, Now & Then (Nana)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

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A once stylish yet reserved, opulent yet modest, Before Now & Then creates a reflective portrait of a country in turmoil through the romantic experiences of one women. More of a contemplative character portrait than a traditional romance, it offers rewards in its resplendent filmmaking while smartly examining the nuances of the feminine experience.

Nana (Happy Salma) has a comfortable life. She lives on a large Dutch colonial estate alongside her husband Mr Darga (Arswendy Bening Swara) and children, hosting gatherings of women where they listen to music, eat food and talk about family. But her dreams suggest otherwise, reminding Nana of her violent past escaping the coups and genocides that characterised 60s Indonesia. Having lost her first husband and child in the coup, she remembers the war in vivid detail, unable to move forward in a country that’s on the cusp of rapid change.

The role of women in this patriarchal society seems yet to be defined. While men are free to go and do as they want, as seen through Mr Darga’s dalliances with other women, Nana gathers the small pleasures while she can, like smoking a cigarette on the terrace or playing with her children. At the meat market she meets the mysterious Ino (Laura Basuki) — with a kind smile, she simply radiates empathy, allowing Nana to figure out how to navigate this new reality.

It’s not only Nana who seems stuck between past and present; the film itself has little concern with traditional narratives, instead giving us a full sense of who Nana is. A lot of the time, we simply watch her thinking, captured against the gorgeousness of her house and almost always impeccably dressed. Her daughter asks her why women’s hair has be kept up: the answer is “to keep secrets”, the likes of which are slowly revealed to us piecemeal throughout this carefully crafted story.

A great sense of romanticism and unspoken longing comes through the music, mixing contemporary 60s songs, traditional and a lush score that moves between waltzes and playful string movements. The music, bringing to mind In The Mood for Love (Wong Kar Wai, 2000), is almost constant throughout the film, almost acting against the slowness and consideration of the characters themselves. Credit must go to Salma herself, able to command the camera and allow us to see her perspective even when it seems like she’s not doing much at all.

It’s likely that many of the cultural and feminine nuances of the story eluded me — it’s not particularly illuminating for anyone learning about mid-twentieth century Indonesian history for the first time — yet once I settled into its rhythms, I found it to be a fine, absorbing aesthetic experience, even if I was never fully enraptured by its style.

Before, Now & Then plays in Competition at the 72nd Berlin Film Festival, running from February 10th to 20th.

Flux Gourmet

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

In-fighting, flatulence and freaky food is all on the menu in Flux Gourmet, the latest offering from oddball auteur Peter Strickland. Conjoining his pet themes — the meaning of compromise, deep dives into noise, and the way sex is used as a weapon — into one culinary package, it’s further proof of his unique, uncompromising style. While not reaching the heights of The Duke of Burgundy (2015), it’s a strangely amiable comedy that might not provoke any belly laughs, but kept me wryly smiling throughout.

It occupies a realm between what I’d term horror-light — taking the giallo-lighting, penchant for gore and rapid zooms the genre is often-known for — and light-fantasy, set in an institute dedicated to the fusion between cooking and music. Heading a “band” taking up residency for an undefined amount of time in this location is Ella (a brilliantly prickly Fatma Mohamed), berating her colleagues Billy (an emo Asa Butterfield) and Lamina (a more straight-laced Ariane Labed) for not following her vision to the letter. Soon the band find themselves butting heads with the institute leader, excellently played by Gwendoline Christie. She wears so much black-eyeliner that she resembles a panda.

The film betrays its left-field approach to storytelling early on, when the narrator, Jan Stevens (Makis Papadimitriou), a Greek journalist tasked with documenting this collective, complains of gastric turbulence. There is something wrong with his intestine, leading him to constantly hold in farts. This means that he’s perennially uncomfortable, making his job chronicling the various disagreements within the band incredibly difficult. Their pursuit of culinary performance perfection is later complicated by various rifts between the group, including the sly machinations of the institute leader and a rogue collective previously rejected from the institute lingering menacingly around the edges.

Strickland does a great job of establishing and interrogating the unique personalities of all the players, giving us a TV series worth of content within just two hours. These aren’t just types, but people with their own hang-ups and neuroses, not easily solvable within the confines of a movie. Repetitive moments — from the teams synchronised wake-up to their morning walks to crucial “after-dinner speeches” — give us the full overview of each central character, allowing us to see the story from a variety of different perspectives. One could easily imagine a longer-form adaptation with a different collective appearing each episode.

This is definitely true when it comes to the actual art at the heart of the film, developing Strickland’s obsession with noise as previously seen in The Berberian Sound Studio (2012). I wanted more: from the crackle of fresh food hitting the pan, to the boiling of water, to the crack of an egg opening, hearing conventional kitchen sounds blown up to surround sound is a true auditory delight. But beyond a running joke about a flanger ruining their performance and generic droning sounds, the actual mechanics of the music is left sorely unexplored.

And when the “wind” does finally comes, it simply arrives too late, making for an unsatisfying finale. Nonetheless, I’m happy someone is giving Strickland the money to make films this stylish and weird. I’ll come to his restaurant anytime.

Flux Gourmet played in the Encounters section of the 72nd Berlinale, when this piece was originally written. It is out on monst VoD platforms in September.

Estonian Dispatch: The First Feature Competition Round-Up

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

There are few greater pleasures than watching new visions by debut directors: offering rough and ready versions of ideas that they simply couldn’t wait to get off the page and onto the big screen. The Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival — celebrating its 25th year — offered all of this and more with its First Feature Competition, with 20 films from first-time filmmakers that have little in common besides a desire to make a strong mark upon the cinema stage.

With minimal sleep but plenty of company and even more coffee, I managed to see all 20 films in this debut stage in the small yet bustling city at the heart of Northern Europe. Braving the cold, rain, snow, sleet and slippery streets, and catching a mixture of cinema screenings and screeners — two experienced while waiting in airports — I can safely say that the programme featured a strong combination of crowdpleasers and arthouse experiences, showing off the next generation of filmmakers in style. As Festival Director Tiina Lokk told us in our podcast interview: “There could be mistakes, but you see the talent.“

Other Cannibals

Perhaps the best example of combining both broad appeal with an intense personal vision is the First Feature Competition winner Other Cannibals (Francesco Sossai, pictured above). Beloved by basically every British person I met in the festival, this German-produced, South Tyrol-shot black-and-white tragicomedy is a loopy journey exploring an unusual friendship with shades of the oddball humour of Ben Wheatley. It wouldn’t have been my first choice for the winner — that would’ve been the touching German drama Precious Ivie (Sarah Blaßkiewitz), exploring racism in Germany with great nuance and humanity — but its a deserved winner nonetheless with the potential to be a breakout hit.

The biggest commercial success is probably destined for Immersion (Nicolás Postiglione), a taut Chilean thriller that uses a simple conceit — man stuck on a boat with two strangers and his obstinate daughters — that could easily be remade on Michigan’s Lake Superior. Expect a streaming pick up for this one, which shared the Jury Special Prize with the French Her Way (Cécile Ducrocq), which boasted a brilliant, pick-of-the-fest performance from Call My Agent’s Laure Calamy as a sex worker raising funds for her son’s cooking education.

Often the most interesting visions win the critic’s awards, with the FIPRESCI prize going to Aleksandra Terpińska’s Other People (pictured below),which adapted the unusually-written rap novel by Dorota Maslowska to excellent effect; providing a panoramic portrait of Polish society which doesn’t shy away from its savage critique of unfettered consumerism. A perfect movie to catch just ahead of the Christmas holidays. Using a great array of cinematic tricks, it deserved to be joined by Lithuania’s Feature Film About Life (Dovilė Šarutytė) for its affecting blend of narrative fiction of home-video, but which failed to win any awards.

Other People

I’m broadly happy with the awards, but it is a shame that Asian efforts — from the incredibly well-shot black-and-white, dream-like vision of Chinese film Who Is Sleeping in Silver Grey (Liao Zihao, pictured in header) to the dour, depressing yet truly original Dozens of Norths (Koji Yamamura) from Japan to India’s whimsical The Cloud & The Man (Abhinandan Banerjee)— missed out on any awards. In fact, Immersion was the only non-European film to win an award in this section, making it a more insular, Euro-centric ceremony than it needed to be.

As a British critic, I’m often harshest on my own country’s efforts, which is why it was a shame that The Score (Malachi Smyth) failed to live up to the hype of its ‘heist-musical’ designation. A more un-categorisable entry was Adam Donen’s deeply idiosyncratic Alice, Through the Looking: À la recherche d’un lapin perdu (pictured below), a phantasmagorical journey through space, time, memory, filmmaking, philosophy and almost everything else you can think of. It was a film that didn’t really succeed, but it was deeply interesting nonetheless. Equally entertaining was our conversation with the filmmaker, which you can listen to over on Mixcloud.

Watching movies themselves is only one part of the pleasures involved in a film festival, especially one as egalitarian as Tallinn Film Festival. Where in Berlinale and Cannes access to talent is moderated through PRs, regulated meeting slots, and the dreaded roundtable, Tallinn allows you to easily share drinks, conversations and good times with the talent themselves, especially the debut directors and actors who are just as glad to be there as you. This kind of direct communication allows for the free transfer of ideas and debates about cinema and national character types, giving one the sense of truly being at the centre of the film world, if only for ten days.

Alice, Through the Looking

An excursion to Estonian’s second largest city of Tartu — which will be a European Capital City of Culture in 2024 — was also included as part of the festival’s hospitality package, expanding my understanding of the Baltic nation’s make-up. And whether it was the innovative, digital-first national museum, the melancholic ruins and bridges above the town, the bohemian river-side cafés and bars, or the pink-pastel buildings that suggest Wes Anderson’s next movie, it’s these types of small journeys that definitely expand what a film festival can provide: not just watching one film after another, but the opportunity to engage with a larger cultural context. Estonians don’t just provide cinema, they provide a true sense of unforced community. I simply can’t wait to visit my Baltic friends again this time next year.

The Red Tree (El árbol rojo)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

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The richer you are, the easier travel becomes, the number of available options quickly multiplying. But for the poor, looking up long-lost relatives can become something of an epic task. Eliécer (Carlos Vergara) learns this the hard way when he is tasked with his accompanying his half-sister Esperanza (Shaday Velasquez) half way across the country; spanning the tranquil Colombian seaside to the hustle-and-bustle of Bogotá.

We first meet the middle-aged Eliécer playing the traditional gaita instrument, a type of flute made from bird feathers and a hollowed cactus stem. He is tied to his small, remote, seaside community, with little need for interruptions in his life. Yet, when his far younger sister Esperanza turns up, asking for help to find her mother after her father has died, he is tasked with making the arduous journey towards Bogotá, made all the more complicated because they don’t have enough money for the bus ticket. The odd-couple becomes an even more mismatched gang-of-three when joined by the proud and slightly combative Toño (Jhoyner Salgado) who has dreams of becoming a boxer. The resultant trip both explores the concept of makeshift families and the way the nation is progressing along the way.

Road trip films can be quite liberating for filmmakers, as once the essential journey is in place, the genre itself can double-up as an exploration of the country or countries its set in. In fact, if a road trip film didn’t provide any local colour, it wouldn’t be much of a road trip at all. Colombian society and traditions are expertly explored here, covering everything from the local music to the ongoing civil war. This is a country rich in both hospitality and danger, where every stranger you meet could be a charlatan or a samaritan with a heart of gold. Even worse, you could meet either side of the conflict itself, both sides seemingly carrying the threat of violence. For Eliécer and Toño however, this is the only world that they know, with almost everything accepted as just a fact of life. There are no grand statements here, only everyday people, acutely observed.

The best scenes take place away from the road however, with Eliécer and Esparanza almost working together to create a composite picture of a father neither of them knew very well, as well as forming the type of connection that only siblings can have. Adapting his own screenplay alongside Ivan Sierra S, Joan Gómez Endara doesn’t use any flashy techniques to get his story across, neither does he look to diagnose the issues at the heart of his movie. While this downplayed approach often means the story lacks urgency, it is finally made up for by its affecting, if a little straightforward, ending. The final product is a touching, quiet film that provides both national detail and solid character study in equal measure.

The Red Tree plays in the First Feature Competition at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 12th – 28th November.

The Cloud & The Man (Manikbabur Megh)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

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A whimsical Georgian film asked viewers earlier this year: What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (Aleksandre Koberidze, 2021). Now from India, we have a more literal answer, no less whimsical in its approach. When Manik (Chandan Sen) finds himself drawn away from the day-to-day doldrums of his mundane life — work, family duties, more work, hearing the complaints of his neighbours — he looks up and sees a cloud in the sky. The only problem is, no one else seems to see it.

At first I assumed Manik takes an umbrella with him everywhere because he wants to keep out of the sun. Kolkata is suffering from record temperature highs, piling on the stress he feels in his everyday work. It turns out the umbrella is actually in case of rain, as he sees an equally lonely cloud in the sky, following his every move. The final result is a small dose of magical realism, a medium dose of attentive city portraiture and a large dose of fanciful character study.

There is a touch of Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, 1989) to this story, but where the angels wanted to descend to earth to be with mortals, this mortal wants to shake off his coil and be with the clouds. The black-and-white aesthetic is not just a stylistic approach, but crucial to the way that Manik sees the world. Widescreen images and surround sound immerse us in Manik’s world, allowing him to stay in the foreground amidst endless hustle and bustle surrounding him. Colour would be overwhelming, while black-and-white keeps its cool distance.

It’s a contrast in temperament. While the world around Manik seems to be constantly in a state of flux, nothing can change his approach to life. He feels like a throwback: he carries no mobile phone, his job (unspecified) sees him sitting in front of an endless stack of papers, and he likes nothing better than tending to his rooftop garden. One image in particular sticks out: a television with nothing inside; used to frame his flowers and view them in a different light. It invites you to visit this world alongside Manik, expertly downplayed by Sen, all the more effective in his performance for the few times he allows joy to finally crack his otherwise deadpan visage.

Abhinandan Banerjee takes a symphonic, rhythmic approach to narrative, repeating images in the way composers repeat key motifs, building upon them differently each time, paying back a slow start by cleverly rewarding our attention. The music itself grows and changes with the film, starting with simple melodies before adding complexity in instrumentation and exploration. Occasional changes from black-and-white to colour again flip Wim Wenders’ script by seeing the world from the cloud’s perspective, creating a cruel contrast between the world of imagination and the world of reality.

It could be easy to take fun of Manik; to see his perspective as a truly blinkered one. He’s prone to being hoodwinked by fast-talking men and barely resists the harsh reproaches of the women in his life; whether it’s his landlady or even his own mother. But with the cloud, he allows himself to feel different. Filled with possibilities. There’s something rather beautiful in all that, even if it’s hard to pinpoint exactly why. I guess we all look at the sky differently.

The Cloud & The Man plays in the First Feature Competition at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 12th – 28th November.

Zeros and Ones

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

The Eternal City is often portrayed as joyous place, filled with life, excitement, beautiful people and incredible scenery. But when walking very late at night, it can often feel rather malevolent and mysterious, filled with long-hidden secrets. The Rome of Zeros and Ones is a pandemic-infused noir suffused with dark shadows, the endless symbols of Christianity repurposed for much darker purposes.

Into this reality comes American military officer JJ (Ethan Hawke): equipped with a face-mask, he looks like he has never smiled in his life. He is on a mission to seemingly save the world from an unknown threat. He invokes Jesus through voiceover more than once, boldly stating that he was “just another soldier.”

Any of the genuine Christian elements such as loving your neighbor, turning the other cheek and self-sacrifice seem omitted here: this is a cold and lonely world, exacerbated by the worst pandemic in a hundred years. It’s difficult to say exactly what he is fighting, only that he manoeuvres an almost empty world, solely populated by Russian spies, Asian drug dealers and American spooks. His brother (also played by Ethan Hawke) has been detained, accused of promoting revolutionary ideals across the country. What those ideas are, we never quite know, as the film prefers to shroud its central mystery in an ambivalent, shadow-heavy tone.

Ferrara works hand-in-hand with cinematographer Sean Price Williams, one of the best cameramen in the business, as evidenced through his work with the Safdies and Alex Ross Perry. Williams shoots Rome almost entirely at night, making it seem as filled with betrayals and secrets as The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949). This is complemented by grainy, over-exposed digital footage, ramping up the paranoia with a sense of constant surveillance. The music by Joe Delia then expands the scope where the evidently small budget can’t, featuring reverb-heavy military drums and Glenn Branca-like guitars. The result is an incredibly moody spy thriller so baked in cynicism that it makes John Le Carre look like Frederick Forsyth.

The setting make absolute sense and is integral to the film’s mood. Italy was the ground zero for coronavirus in Europe, the haunting images emerging from the country a terrifying prelude to what would soon devour the continent. Nonetheless, while it is definitely a more interesting corona-influenced film than the comedies and dramas I have seen so far, finding a way to wrap it into a political thriller, Zeros and Ones preference for atmosphere over coherence can make it hard to find a grip.

Ferrera is a great experimental filmmaker, making his relative misfires still worth exploring and digging into. But while something such as Siberia (2019) could work brilliantly as an exploration of the mind and soul despite having little to no plot, Zeros and Ones’ attempt at reconfiguring a genre usually obsessed with plot makes it harder to love. No one could come out of that film knowing what actually happened, but certain images — like the saints of the Vatican shot like members of a secret cult, or Ethan Hawke running down a deserted, barely-illuminated alleyway or yet another Ferrara sex scene between JJ and a mysterious woman — will stick with me, creating an allegory for a world that has been plunged into a new dark age.

Zeros and Ones played in Concorso internazionale at Locarno Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. On all major VoD platforms on Monday, March 21st (2022).

Cop Secret

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

This Scandinavian movie answers one of the most important questions of our time: what if Tango and Cash, from Tango and Cash (Andrei Konchalovsky, 1989), were also lovers? Taking the homoerotic subtext of 80s and 90s buddy cop thrillers and putting it at the heart of the movie, this cop parody posits a new kind of hard-boiled masculinity for the 21st century. While ultimately an uneven take on the beloved genre, Cop Secret is a slick, at time hilarious production that shows off a lighter side to the usually dour and stoically-depicted Nordic nation.

Bussi (Auðunn Blöndal) is the toughest cop in Reykjavik, opening the film with blatant disregard for rules, restrictions and different jurisdictions. He’s your typical alpha-male, unwashed protagonist, a bald, leather-jacketed, jäger-swilling, punch-first-ask-questions-later kind of guy who represents an absolute nightmare for the police HR department.

The Sylvester Stallone to his Kurt Russell is the wealthy, metrosexual, impeccably-groomed, openly polyamorous and proudly pansexual Hördur (Egill Einersson). He’s already rich and speaks 15 languages fluently (it would be sixteen but he chose not to learn Danish on principle). Together they fight for supremacy of Iceland: when meeting at the heart of a robbery Bussi asks if Kenny Rogers is playing while Hördur asks if he’s at a casino. Nonetheless, they are both ultimately respectful of each other’s excellent police work and soon find their personal and professional lives tangling.

Villain Rikki (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson) is purposefully Europacorp-satirising Eurotrash, talking in English with an accent that feels like a parody of a Trump parody. Haraladsson’s performance is deeply inspired, deliberately bizarre and filled with pointless anecdotes about animal behaviour. It’s the only part of the movie that feels truly cut loose, channelling that raw energy that makes something like Tango and Cash, a complete mess of a movie that’s nonetheless utterly brilliant as a result, so unique.

The American influences, ranging from Lethal Weapon (Richard Donner, 1987) to The Other Guys (Adam McKay, 2010) are pretty pronounced, and the overall tone so polished, Dwayne Johnson — recently himself riffing off this same genre with the rather uneven Hobbs and Shaw (David Leitch, 2019)— could turn up and it wouldn’t feel incongruous. Nonetheless, while American cop comedies thrive off gay panic jokes, baiting audiences with subtext before a Mark Wahlberg-type shouts he’s not “really gay” so everyone can understand he’s still a cool Boston cop, Cop Secret actually goes the extra mile, normalising the concept of a an alpha male cop who can be gay while beating the shit out of bad guys.

The ultimate scheme of the bad guys is mostly irrelevant — something to do with hacking, a football game and a gold reserve — and makes little to no ultimate sense. Thankfully, this satire manages to nail the basics of good, clean action choreography, realising that it has to look like the real deal in order to work at all. While the relatively smaller Icelandic budget sometimes shows in rushed CGI backgrounds and the odd awkward edit, director Hannes Þór Halldórsson (who usually spends his time in goal for the Icelandic national team!) has studied the basics of the genre well, resulting in a fun and easy film to kick back to with a couple of drinks in hand.

Cop Secret played in Concorso internazionale at Locarno Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It premieres in the UK in October as part of the BFI London Film Festival.