Riding on public transport can be an awkward yet often liberating experience, allowing us to experience the world go by while also trying to avert our gaze from other strangers. FIRST TIME [The Time for All but Sunset – VIOLET] captures this mixture perfectly, creating an arthouse romance about the endless possibilities found on while sitting by yourself on a train.
FIRST TIME starts in fantasy-land, playing a Coca-Cola commercial from 1987 soundtracked by Robin Beck’s eponymous song. The clips are unabashedly romantic, beautiful lovers swooning by the beach while clutching the world’s most popular soft drink. Hamburg’s U3, a circular subway line that spans 25 stations, provides the ‘reality’. The majority of FIRST TIME is comprised of an epic simulated one-take where two young boys (Aaron Hilmer and Fynn Grossmann) sit opposite one another, sneaking glimpses as and when they can. Soundtracked by slowly-rising dreamy indie pop, First Time asks us to sit and watch as these two boys feel the pangs and flushes of attraction. With no dialogue or text, we are not told what to think, simply to observe and come to our own conclusions.
If it sounds forbidding, especially for 50 minutes, FIRST TIME is actually a lot of fun. It’s ostensible arthouse, installation-favourable form is prodded and poked, even subverted, with moments of incongruity that belong in a romantic comedy. The film is proof that if you have some form of tension at the heart of a movie, you can easily stretch conventional cinematic patience. Neither teen wants to get off the train, yet neither of them wants to make the first move either. The overall result is an expertly rendered depictions of young, awkward and painful romance that’s as tense as anything in a Hitchcock movie. Even in liberal Hamburg, one sees the reluctance of young men to approach another romantically for fear of being violently rebuked. Both actors Hilmer and Grossmann have so much to do physically here, pulling off that acute feeling of being torn between emotions rather well.
The frame of the train window acts as a layer between the boy’s world and wider Hamburg; an anchor for the passing of time and a silent Greek chorus. Pay close attention and the repetition of the train line is complemented by insider references that gain a strangely cosmic meaning, suggesting that advertisements have a strange way of permeating our collective unconscious.
It’s worth admitting that I’m very biased towards anything train-related. Whether it’s Before Sunrise (Richard Linklater, 1995), Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945) , A Station for Two (Eldar Ryazanov, 1983) or Night Train to Munich (Carol Reed, 1940),trains are the most romantic and beguiling form of transportation. For the ultimate site-specific screening, I even watched the screener on a train, allowing both background and foreground to blend into one another. Despite my favourable disposition towards anything train-related, FIRST TIME doesn’t just coast on pretty images and handsome young boys, but provides an experience both emotionally and intellectuallystimulating (as well as being rather funny). Conceptual artist Nicolas Schmidt, who already impressed me at Berlinale 2020 with his strange short Inflorescence, showing a flower fluttering in the wind near an allotment as Crowded House’s “Don’t Dream It’s Over” plays, has stepped up to another level of sophistication with this gorgeous medium-length effort.
FIRST TIME plays in Pardo Di Domani – Concorso internazionale at Locarno Film Festival, running between 4th – 14th August.
A religious satire filtered through a dark sci-fi imagination, Ultrainnocence asks if one can find god through intense experimentation. Telling the story of two men who slowly go insane when trying to prove the existence of a divine creator, this quirky and odd film is definitely an acquired taste.
Orión (David Climent) and Adán (Pablo Molinero) are two men with a dream. Played with deliberately slapstick humour by the two actors, they quickly make fools of themselves when pitching a new idea. Nonetheless, they are given the opportunity to be lab rats in an experiment run by a mysterious religious institution. Will they discover the answers to the big questions? Don’t bet on it.
Perhaps the best thing about the film is the production design. The lab is abundant with strange wires and contraptions, often shot against bright and non-traditional lighting schemes. It is hermetically sealed-world, a place that will occupy the vast majority of the film’s runtime. The two men are trying everything, exhausting themselves, and the audience, in the process. Soon we realise that the film is not about whether or not they will find anything, but exploring the futility of even trying to find answers to the big questions.
Debut feature filmmaker Manuel Arija de la Cuerda’s background is in short films, and Ultrainnocence, despite running over 90 minutes, feels like a short that’s been stretched out to feature length. There is little here that really needed the extra runtime. Adapted from a play, it’s talky scenes with elements of the absurd, test the patience of the audience, especially those who are looking for answers to the big questions that the film poses almost from its first scene.
Later diversions into pure sci-fi territory that attempt to approximate Kubrick at his trippiest, hint at the more awe-inspiring film that Ultrainnocence could’ve been. But the obvious budget limitations of the film really show at the seams, meaning that these images don’t pop off quite as much as they should. Additionally, cuts to family back home are very thinly drawn, making one wonder why they were even included in the film at all.
Playing as part of the Rebels with a Cause Competition — made to celebrate out-of-the-box cinematic approaches — Ultrainnocence bucks conventional filmmaking wisdom throughout; more concerned with spectacle and comedy than providing any semblance of a coherent narrative. Unafraid to take turns into the surreal and madcap imagination, it definitely shows the directors talent for creating oddball situations, yet it gives us nothing really philosophical to chew on. Utilising repetitive phrases and references, the screenplay and show-off nature of the two actors quickly gets tiresome. While some may be absorbed by the bizarre path this film takes, I was quickly turned off by its off-putting approach.
Ultrainnocence plays as part of the Rebels with a Cause Programme, running from 13th to 29th November.
The spirit of Edward Yang lives on in Great Happiness, a sad comedy from debut director Wang Yiao. Evidencing a great amount of charm, ambition and confidence in craft, it marks the arrival of a major new talent in Chinese cinema.
The story focuses on three young men, who seemed to have been left behind in the great advances of recent Chinese society. After a strange prelude — involving an advert for milk that won’t make sense until the very end of the movie — we learn that Xining’s parents were well-off during the boom times of the 90s, but at the turn of the millennium they faced a difficult future following the closing of their factory. Meanwhile, huge rows and rows of apartments dominate the landscape of the town — also (and aptly) named Xining.
He is trying to have a baby after four years of marriage, hoping to rely on a new special treatment to finish the job. Meanwhile his friend Li embodies the new monied class of young Chinese, all flash and pie-in-the-sky business ideas, hoping to become a huge business contractor. The more thoughtful Sui is an architect, with designs that buck the trends of contemporary Chinese design. Together they come up with a business idea that they hope will make them stand out in this remote corner of the world resting on the Tibetan border.
If only life was so simple. The title, Great Happiness is ironic, because there is also a great sadness that permeates every frame of this gently-shot movie. Director Wang Yiao has a strong control of tone here, making use of long takes and smart camera movements that reveal information in a satisfying piecemeal fashion. Sometimes he manages to combine two different ideas within the same shot, giving away plot developments through a simple zoom or movement to the left or right. Combined with fantastic Mise-en-scène and a great eye for comic construction and pay-off, and this is one of the most impressive debuts you will see all year.
But there is also a serious message about the capitalist state of the previously communist country. Money rules everything, with nearly every decision discussed with a minute analysis of how much it might cost and how much profit it might reap. Lies big and small constantly cloak decisions of the heart, characters deceiving one another depending on how they want themselves to be perceived. Meanwhile, there are doctors bills to be paid and plenty of characters living abroad; suggesting that the great progress of the Chinese state has left a lot of people behind.
On a superficial level, Li might represent the capitalist drive of the new China while Sui represents its old artistic soul — it’s no coincidence that his father is a Ping Pong teacher with a business in an old temple who is losing business as more and more students gravitate towards football. Xining lies somewhere in the middle; a seemingly passive character, he contains depths that aren’t revealed until the film’s final fascinating and enigmatic scene.
There is so much to say about this 150-minute film — including Sui’s romantic dilemma that provides great levity throughout the film, as well as well-layered references to the one-child policy — that simply can’t fit into this simple review. Yet despite the forbidding runtime, the movie breezes through its conflicts, creating characters that you could easily watch for three, four, maybe even five hours.
With a great appeal that bridges the gap between arthouse cinema and gentle contemporary comedy, the film has the chance to be a big hit when it’s released back in China. With a specificity that deeply locates us in that time and place while containing universal messages that resonate far beyond the Middle Kingdom’s borders, Wang Yiao has created an epic of the human heart that digs deep into the soul of the nation.
Great Happiness plays as part of the First Feature competition at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 13th to 29th November.
It begins much like The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, 2009), with a parochial village captured in arresting monochrome and coiled by pre-war tension. The border village of Vitorazsko, we’re informed, has always been a no man’s land, neglected and apparently stolen from by both Austrian and Czech officials. In 1938, the villagers’ dilemma is caught up in Hitler’s annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland, sending their fate in a most terrible direction.
What emerges from this struggle is a film about identity, ideology and groupthink. About how individuals will turn against others within their group in order to survive or merely control. One woman, Marta (Barbora Polakova), becomes a quasi-brown shirt by 1939; emblazoned with a Nazi lapel pin and a smug look on her face. Before that, in 1938, a hateful little man named Otto intimidates a Jewish shopkeeper, pressuring him to sell his shop before the Germans arrive. You can identify Otto’s Nazi sympathies by his moustache and side parting, features that he removes in 1945 as his thuggish allegiance shifts in an instant.
Some villagers aren’t so venal. Karel, for instance, is a pragmatic family man. When a portly bureaucrat visits him to register their nationality, he reasons with his family that they should declare themselves German, as only Germany will provide land subsidies. He does not realise that this decision – made with practical foresight rather than any kind of patriotism – will have the gravest consequences.
Soon, the narrative progresses to 1942, where we see that Josef (Csongor Kassai), the husband of a Jewish wife, has become a member of the resistance, raising funds for Nazi victims and procuring firearms. He is a noble, brave character at this point, yet he will become a shameful figure by 1945 – the very kind of authoritarian he despised, fixing armbands on his enemies and imposing summary punishments. It is his story that is at the centre of Shadow Land’s morality tale of power and hive-mindedness.
Upon his return from a Nazi labour camp, Josef implements the expulsion of Germans from the village. It is a microcosm of the forced exodus of Germans from the Sudetenland in 1945 – 1948, answering the call of President Edvard Beneš for a ‘final solution of the German question’. In Vitorazsko, this sees National Socialist groupthink replaced by tyranny in the name of the republic, bringing out the same sadists who branded swastikas in 1938.
Otto, the hateful opportunist who had exploited anti-Semitism, can be seen cheering the Stalinist forces, waving his arms and baring his teeth. He is the worst kind of partisan – an individual utterly without principle, apart from that of self-preservation and promotion. He and other boorish thugs round up the Germans, relishing every opportunity to bludgeon and humiliate not out of righteous anger but spiteful enjoyment.
The film’s broad scope is a reflection of the 14 years Ivan Arsenjev spent on the script, perfecting his astute cautionary tale. Fortunately, director Bohdan Slama transferred this story to the screen with no flaw of note, perhaps no flaw at all. Shadow Country is a subtle yet very deliberate excoriation of groupthink in an age where it is rampant, causing this Czech epic to be necessary viewing.
Shadow Country has just premiered at the BFI London Film Festival.
After six months’ postponement, The Hunt has finally made it to theatres. The violent satire – which centres around a group of ‘liberal elites’ kidnapping and hunting conservatives for sport –had been set for a September 27 release before the political landscape turned against it. On August 4, mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton raised doubts about the film’s timing, but these concerns were somewhat eased when test audiences didn’t connect the two.
Days later, however, Universal shelved the project when the script was picked up by Fox News, whose crass pundits branded it ‘sick’, ‘demented’ and ‘evil’. Even Donald Trump got wind of it, tweeting: “Liberal Hollywood is Racist at the highest level… the movie coming out is made in order to inflame and cause chaos.”
It would be unreasonable to expect a nuanced, insightful film review from Fox News, but despite his penchant for Jean-Claude Van Damme movies, Trump could’ve done so much better in his appraisal, just look at his review of Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941). The truth is that The Hunt doesn’t have an ideology or agenda; like all good satire, it mocks both ends of spectrum – the elites and the deplorables.
Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof’s script wastes no time establishing its political themes, lexicon and slapstick viscera – among mentions of ‘snowflakes’, ‘cucks’ and ‘crisis actors’ are brains, limbs and entrails. The deaths come thick and fast, but the characters stick around long enough to serve their purpose as caricatures of US demographics – the mullet sporting Wyoming hick; the tattooed, Gatorade-drinking Florida trash; the hairy conspiracy theorist from some mountain cabin God knows where.
Bucking this trend is Crystal (Betty Gilpin), one of the few to emerge from this bloody tableau. She may be from the red state of Mississippi, but she’s disarmingly neutral in appearance and demeanour. However, her skill in jumping, punching, shooting and killing is anything but neutral. She’s another one of those “badass” John Wick women who’s somehow able to clear a room of armed men with balletic violence in mere seconds. Indeed, all the combat scenes are of that overly choreographed variety that’s high impact yet without credibility and consequence.
Away from the mayhem are the wealthy liberals overseeing this questionable activity, which is dubbed ‘Manorgate’. They too are familiar caricatures – minimalist, pretentious and endlessly bogged down by trigger warnings and microaggressions. The group is led by the steely Athena (Hilary Swank), who’s unlikable yet too underwritten to be loathsome, which she should be. Of course, she also fights like an MMA champion on a bucket of human growth hormone.
The Hunt provokes a few laughs in the characters’ exchanges, making light of America’s political divide. Yet some of the zeitgeisty terminology feels shoehorned and scripted, especially during an impromptu discussion of Orwell’s Animal Farm in the film’s bloody climax. Whether it’s Vietnam, Watergate or Thatcherism, political strife often spawns great art, and it’s no different today. Much will be written about the Trump era’s influence on cinema, but The Hunt’s place in that canon will be a tepid footnote.
In every large genocide, there are those who drive the horrors, while others watch it. Then there are the few who fight against it. Philippines president Manuel L. Quezon was one such rebel, cast as he was in a role of saving the lives of 1,200 Jewish people. Closing the 1930’s, Quezon (played by the irrepressibly handsome Raymond Bagatsing) countered the battles that surrounded the world with his own battles of a relapsed tuberculosis.
I’m reminded of Stanley Kubrick. Although a lifelong friend of Schindler’s List director Steve Spielberg, Kubrick’s disdain for the 1993 WW2 epic was palpable. “Think that’s about the Holocaust?” the American director famously roared. “That was about success, wasn’t it? The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. Schindler’s List (1993) is about 600 who don’t.” A celebration of altruism has every reason to resonate as a Holocaustian picture, and that’s exactly what Matthew Rosen does here.
Aurora Quezon (Rachel Alejandro) plays the silent, doting wife in a parade of German/American army uniforms. Not exactly a celebration of powerful women, but instead a celebration of human survival. Bagatsing plays Quezon. He has a schmoozing, boozing raconteur, swathing his conversations with future US president Dwight E. Eisenhower (David Bianco) through cigarette-lit conversations. Finding refuge for his Jewish refugees wasn’t difficult; providing them with US visas proved more taxing. In time honoured tradition, Quezon entertains his guests with ballroom swings and delectable selections of choice women, while taking a solemn moment to ponder his mortality. The cameras roll nicely off Bagatsing, dressed as he is in a number of lucid white suits, never a button, lace or tie under pressure.
The picture is dazzlingly well filmed. Opening up on Quezon and hiw wife reeling over reels of concentration camps, the 1944 montage echoes the grey, dirty films the married couple watch. Suddenly, the film pirouettes back to 1938, riding through the cobbled streets to decorate the Philippines in all of its Technicoloured majesty. And then there’s the shocking final shot, caught as he is in a wheelchair that will roll Quezon to his untimely death.
Quezon ponders to himself how many more he could have saved, in good Schindler’s style, before Jewish singer Shulem closes the film’s credits with a soaring ballad espousing the many he did save. What sounds like a garish number from the 1980s actually works elegantly in the film.
However horrific and dreadful the Holocaust was, it is essential to remember the good that was done amongst the mass evil committed. In a time of political uncertainty and upheaval, audience members need to remember there is always hope.
Quezon’s Game is in cinemas on Friday, January 31st.
Gareth Jones (James Norton) is a cool-headed journalist who travelled to the Soviet Union in the 1930s. His reputation was sealed earlier in the decade, having counted Adolf Hitler amongst his list of subjects. With his spectacles at hand, he captured the horror, the hurt and the heaviness that paraded the biggest country in the world. Jones witnesses a mass starvation unknown to the better fed in Great Britain. Following a tip and a hunch, Jones uses his connection to Prime Minister Lloyd George (Kenneth Cranham) to permit him a voyage to the Soviet land.
Norton delivers a very committed performance conveying a lot of emotion through his steely eyes. The real life Jones was admired by the similarly spirited George Orwell, and one of the film’s standout scenes shows an exchange held between Norton and the Animal Farm writer (here played by Joseph Mawle). It might not have happened in reality, but there’s no damage to this particular half truth. Instead, it does show the admiration for a man now very much forgotten by the sands of time. Norton is excellent, as is Vanessa Kirby (playing aide and confidant Ada Brooks), their paired chemistry bringing welcome humour to the icy dry backdrop.
What lets them down is the scaling, the two-hour runtime scarcely long enough to understand the ambitions, failings and arrogance the Soviet Union espoused. With the advancement of television, Mr Jones feels like it should be serialised, which would make the film’s final act (Norton gamely selling his perspective to the presses) a striking closing episode. As it stands, it sits awkwardly in a faster paced film.
Similarly, Polish director Agnieska Holland happily shows the horrors outside, but rarely inside, robbing the extraordinarily talented Norton the chance to look towards himself for all the privileges he owns. But at least the film recognises the bravery and vitality Gareth Jones held, one that should be praised in a future Bob Dylan song.
Mr Jones is in cinemas across the UK on Friday, February 7th. On VoD on Friday, February 21st,
Mihai (Cristanel Hogas) is an immigrant. And as such he is divided between two nations. His beautiful wife and his young daughter dwell in Romania. Mihai is in London, where he toils as a construction worker, presumably in order to save money and provide a better future for his family. His relationship with his family is vibrant and colourful, while his life in the UK is sombre and colourless. This is emphasised by the photography, which switches from plush tones to black and white according to the geography and the protagonist’s state-of-mind.
The young Romanian gave up his own personal kingdom, complete with queen and little princess, in favour of a faraway and hardly hospitable Kingdom. He hasn’t seen his beloved ones in two years, he confides to a coworker. The United Kingdom is portrayed as a dark and divided nation. Immigrants are everywhere: there are Romanian and Bulgarian construction workers, and a Syrian refugee working in the local convenience store. Yet these people are not integrated into the heart of a nation that has become increasingly immigration-hostile and downright racist.
The action takes place shortly after the Brexit referendum. Enthusiastic Remainers are campaigning on the streets: “Not in Hackney, not in Brixton, not in our name, we want to Remain”. But the bigots are equally empowered, and the repression expresses itself in other shapes and forms. Mihai and other immigrants lose their job due to the prospect of leaving the EU, and Mihai has to work as a handyman in order to make ends meet. And he encounters violence on the streets: “Stop stealing our jobs and benefits, go back to your country”.
Memento Amare is a movie about wanting to move on, but being held back because of perverse circumstances. It is not a didactic and linear drama. The narrative is complex and multilayered. It zigzags back and forth: in time, between countries, between reality, allegory and imagination. Viewers are made to wear to shoes of a hard-working economic immigrant, and to experience his roller-coaster emotions and split allegiances.
Because the movie is not entirely chronological, there are hints of the disclosure in the very opening sequence. The outcome looks bleak yet inevitable. And it raises a number of questions: Could the psychological wounds of Brexit could stay open for decades? How will the “orphaned” generations react to having their king (and their kingdom) taken away from them? Is it possible that the young may seek justice with their hands? Is warring the only road towards redemption? One thing looks certain: solidarity has collapsed (perhaps to the point of no return), and the future is not bright.
The Hollies’ Graham Nash flew to America to holiday among the warmer climates and smoke filled conversations. At a house party, a chance encounter with Stephen Stills and David Crosby led the trio to harmonise over a song. His fate was sealed, Nash crusading from then on in the American locales, his life in England now a distant memory.
Crosby, Stills and Nash were one of the many highlights to perform at the freewheeling Woodstock festival. Elsewhere, The Who worked with violent appearance before a fiery Jimi Hendrix lit his electric guitar alight. Jim Marshall, a hot-shot photographer, captured them all. His camera captured the intimacies, the energies and honesties each of the artists displayed. Marshall’s commitment to the lens matched Duane Allman’s to the six-string and when the blues guitarist died in 1971, Marshall walked in a 12-hour long penitent silence, mourning his friend with solemn silence. Galadrielle Allman, one of the many participants discussing the cameraman’s extraordinary legacy, laughs at how honestly Marshall recalled her father’s liberal drug use.
Marshall’s drug habit was legendary, and one he flaunted openly, publicly and regularly. Discussing the matter on radio, Marshall bullishly boasted he snorted more cocaine than The Rolling Stones themselves, the steamy band Marshall befriended and captured. Drugs aided his work, Marshall capturing the penetrative excitement of the 1960s’/1970s’ product. One of his more intimate photos shows Mick Jagger and Keith Richards working on their harmonies, studio bound and pensive.
Nash adored the reality of his work, a work ethic entrusted by many. John Carter Cash, discussing his father’s At Folsom Prison, felt Marshall’s work captured his parents’ intensity better than any film could. The son of immigrant parents, Marshall shadowed his fellow underdogs, and his John Coltrane portraitures caught the jazz artist’s inherent passion.
What starts as a love letter to photography quickly changes to a history of America, tighter in its resolve than Martin Scorsese’s three hour Netflix epic. This documentary shares with Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019) a non-linear structure and a fascination for automated weapons. Though he lacked Frank Sheeran’s murderous streak, Marshall’s gun use got him into legal trouble, including one 1983 arrest for threatening the lives of his neighbours. Typically, Marshall offered his wardens rock star photos with chutzpah, but the incarceration had consequences. Work with corporate rock band Survivor felt at odds with his bohemian sixties principles, while friend/associate Amelia Davis recalls a solitary older man coked out spreading incomprehensible messages in his private notes.
Marshall, if not always the most pleasant of individuals, was never less than fascinating. The film uses archived interviews among the more contemporary (Marshall died in 2010). Matched against Michael Douglas’s self aggrandising segment (the starlet seems more interested in talking about himself than his subject), Marshall was something often unseen in LA circles: humble. A great tribute.
Show me the Picture: The Story of Jim Marshall is in cinemas across the UK from Friday, January 31st.
The film title is evocative with sub-erotic overtones. In fact, it is just the streetcar running to Desire, still a rough area in downtown New Orleans. Here is hard, proletarian New Orleans, with its honky-tonk bars, jazz clubs, African American underworld, louche and long, steamy nights. Into this world comes Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh), one time teacher, a faded “Southern Belle”, now penniless so forced to live with her sister Stella (Kim Hunter), who is married to the handsome roughneck Stanley (Marlon Brando), who treats Blanche with disdain. This might just seem to be a treatment of the tougher end of American working class life.
This famous 1951 movie is an adaption of the eponymous Tennessee Williams’s play, which was a Broadway hot in 1947. Far from being just a depiction of a certain area and its inhabitants, its themes are universal and stretch way beyond New Orleans. The original play, written by a gay man, is surprisingly feminist, showing how women are forced into false and fictitious roles by male oppression. Its gay undertones are obvious but remember that Williams’s text was heavily censored to suit the 1950’s. Class oppression also features, with Blanche’s fantasies about herself as a faded member of the upper classes.
The dominating presence of Stella’s husband Stanley smoulders over the whole film. Marlon Brando gave a performance that launched his career. Stanley is unregenerate masculinity, handsome, beautiful even, but totally selfish and domineering, holding late night poker games that ruin the sleep of the women around him, including Eunice (Peg Hillias), the neighbour upstairs.
Interestingly, all significant male characters are types that may well have been familiar to Tennessee Williams as a gay man. Stanley is a gorgeous piece of “rough”, as beautiful as he is dangerous. Mitch (Karl Malden) is the desperate gay man, who has lived with his mother all his life, desperate to get married before it is too late. The pretty and gentle young man who collects for the Evening Star (Wright King), from whom Blanche obtains a kiss, is the shy type Tennessee Williams may well have known from the gay scene. Finally, Blanche’s fiancé, who shot himself after Blanche was hurtful to him one evening, is the self-hating gay man who cannot take any reproach to his masculinity.
It is not that Blanche is specifically attracted to gay men. What she is looking for is kindness, gentleness and respect in men, which seems more easily provided by gay men. Her prissy and delusional ways put most men off so she is driven to receiving them at the disreputable Flamingo Club, while holding down a job as a teacher. Eventually she is driven out of town after an inappropriate affair with a 17-year-old schoolboy. Stella is her last refuge.
Stella, at least, has knuckled down and got on with the world as it is, however unsatisfactory her marriage. Blanche has not and things eventually unravel for her when the brutish Stanley, on the very night that his wife is giving birth to his child, rapes her. Her mind tips over into insanity and she is driven away to an asylum.
What makes A Streetcar Named Desire so outstanding is the way it illustrated the brutality with which society marginalises and isolates people just because they are on the wrong end of the power game. Women have to put up with a rotten deal because so many men refuse to give up their power and to relate properly to women. Many gay men have to live in a shadow world of desperation because society will not afford them a place. Poor Blanche copes by living in a world of class-driven illusion by imagining she is a lady”fallen on hard times but, in doing so, only removes herself further and further away from any hope of redemption. Unlike her sister, she cannot face the world and men as they actually are. All this is acted out in Stella’s cramped apartment in New Orleans, the monochrome of film noir and the sure footed direction of Elia Kazan.
A Streetcar Named Desire will be shown in selected cinemas from Friday, February 7th. Go see.
In 1998, for the TV anthology Gakko no Kaidan G, Takashi Shimizu made two very short (three-minute) shock films, respectively titled Katasumu and 4444444444, in which he introduced creepy, contorting revenant Kayako Saeko and her meowing son Toshio, laying the central groundwork for the grudge-dbearing, implacably vengeful spirits at the epicentre of what would become his Ju-on series. Their popularity enabled him to expand this universe into the feature-length ‘V-cinema’ features Ju-on: The Curse and Ju-on: The Curse 2 (both 2000), and these in turn would be remixed by Shimizu into the theatrical features Ju-on: The Grudge (2002) and Ju-on: The Grudge 2 (2003). By this stage, the J-horror craze had hit the United States, and Shimizu was invited to remake his films for an American audience. In the first of these, The Grudge (2004), Shimizu retained the Tokyo setting and the extraordinary actress Takako Fuji (in the role of Kayako Saeki), while importing an ensemble of American characters to add to the alienation and disorientation that were always fundamental parts of the series. By The Grudge 2 (2006), Shimizu had allowed Kayako’s curse to be translocated stateside to Chicago, and by The Grudge 3 (2009), he had handed over the property entirely to director Toby Wilkins’ caretaking. There have been further reboots in Japan (also lacking Shimizu’s personal touch) with diminishing returns, and there has even been Koji Shiraishi’s more-fun-than-it-sounds Sadako vs Kayako (2016), a postmodern crossover of The Grudge with that other iconic, multiple sequel spawning sequel J-horror sensationRing (Hideo Nakata, 2000).
So there are inevitably some whose knee-jerk response to news of yet another attempt at The Grudge will be to roll their eyes and begrudge this umpteenth retake its very need to exist. After all, there is little new that co-writer (with Jeff Buhgler) and director Nicolas Pesce brings to the prospect, apart from his identity as an extremely talented creator of mannered indie horror (The Eyes of My Mother, 2017; Piercing, 2019), and the associated promise of a more idiosyncratic spin on the material. Yet with The Grudge, Pesce merely retreads old ground. We have already many times seen Kayako aiming her irrational rage at anyone – young or old, male or female, good or bad, local or foreign – who has the misfortune to step into the residence where she and Toshio were murdered by her husband.
We have even already seen this rage transferred across the Pacific to America. Pesce is pointedly going back to the source of his inheritance, expressly setting the passage of Kayako’s grudge from Japan to America in 2004, the same year as Shimizu’s first cross-cultural American remake, and then skipping ahead to 2006. the year of Shimizu’s remake sequel. The new location of the transplanted curse is a small town in Pennsylvania whose very name, Cross Rivers, marks it as a site of transition – a place of passing between one country, or perhaps one state of being, and another.
Ignoring the warnings of her police colleague Detective Goodman (Demián Bichir), newly widowed, newly arrived Muldoon (Andrea Riseborough) starts investigating the connections between a strange series of deaths that have radiated out from 44 Reyburn Drive ever since, two years earlier, Fiona Landry (Tara Westwood) returned from a Tokyo job and moved in there with her family. You already know the score. The stories of those that either lived or even just set foot in the house, and the inexorable deaths that came to them afterwards, are here told in a mixed-up manner that confounds the norms of chronology, fitting everyone’s fate (including Muldoon’s own) into a complex jigsaw of creeping horror. This is, essentially, the pattern found in every version of The Grudge. Even Shimizu’s first theatrical version from 2002, not to mention his first American remake from 2004, were merely replaying – and refining – a routine that he had already set out clearly in the series’ previous incarnations. Not only do the Grudge films, with their recurrent hauntings in showers, baths, beds and closets, echo one another, but repetition – of a viral variety – is inscribed as a theme in the very fabric of each and every instalment, as the curse is passed, like a contagious infection, from one person to another, always, inevitably, leading to the same vain struggle to survive or escape, and to the same destructive outcome.
In all these films, the conclusion is foregone and a mood of utter nihilistic doom pervades. That is the films’ raison d’être – it is, precisely, the nature of the grudge, an ineluctable, supernatural force which, once it has put its hooks into a person, will never let go. Here, as previously, the fractured timeline ensures that we know that most of its characters are going to die – indeed, are already dead by the time Muldoon comes to look back on their cold case files. In this franchise, like in the Final Destination series, mortality is prescribed, and is not meant to come as a surprise, even if the precise form that it takes may, until revealed, be less clear.
Complaining that Pesce’s version is merely more of the same may involve some truth, but it is also missing the whole point of the franchise. Apart from Kayako herself, the one fixed point of these films is grotesque, harrowing death foretold, which Pesce, like previous directors, duly delivers as a bleak memento mori for the popcorn-chewing, thrill-seeking viewer. Pesce’s The Grudge is most definitely a Grudge film. If you have objections to that idea in principle, or dislike the Grudge films in general, then obviously it would be strange to pursue this one. The clue is in the title. If you like some or all of those other films, then Pesce’s film has all the grim goods – and if those goods seem like pre-loved hand-me-downs, in a way, with this particular franchise, they always were. Kayako’s iterative acts of vengeance have always been passed down a chain of contagious inheritance, affecting anyone and everyone but the actual party who wronged her.
“We’re still settling in,” Muldoon tells Goodman of her and Burke’s recent move to Cross Rivers. “It’s definitely different.” Perhaps Pesce felt the same way, having to find his way around a property that was not originally his own. Pesce’s previous film, Piercing, was already itself a Japanese import, adapting a 1994 novel by Ryu Murakami (whose writings also inspired Takashi Miike’s Audition, 1999) into the stylised idioms of an urban American giallo – but with The Grudge, one feels Pesce is far more constrained in his inventiveness by the demands of a studio, and struggling to put his individual stamp on an established and now highly conventionalised set of franchise tropes. He is certainly well-served by a cast that includes (among its victims) John Cho, Betty Gilpin, Jacki Weaver, Frankie Faison and Lin Shaye, all of whom – apart from Shaye, whose character’s dementia makes her different from the others – play their rôles with a genuine, earthy earnestness that brings an anchoring reality to the film’s more surreal flights of fancy.
Most of the effects work is practical, while careful attention is paid to the house’s gradual deterioration over time – like the terminally ill loved ones that both Muldoon and Goodman had to watch slowly getting worse. Old William Matheson (Faison) is also having to bear witness to the decline of his wife of 50 years, Faith (Shaye). Perhaps the most disturbing innovation of the film is not any of several standard (and not especially effective) jump scares, but rather William’s stated claim that the house, whose ghosts represent an opportunity for someone who otherwise has no belief in an afterlife, might be the best, indeed only, kind of hope for him to be able to spend more time with his dying wife. This is a loss of Faith in more than one sense. No doubt some viewers will state that Pesce’s film is not frightening, but most of its dread is of a more existential brand, with everything awash in anxiety, despair and the panic of fatalism.
The Grudge ends with a sustained exterior shot of yet another home. Even if we suspect that something horrible is happening indoors, nothing happens in the shot itself, which elapses merely to the banal sounds of a garden sprinkler and birdsong. This is where Pesce comes into his own as the film’s director, with a sequence that, in looking away, distances the viewer and frustrates any expectation of pat resolution. Though they always come with a supernatural overdetermination, most of the film’s killings are carried out by the living upon members of their own family, opening up a subtext of domestic violence and mental illness (both of which are formally presented within the film as the police’s explanations for the multiple deaths at Number 44). Pesce’s long final shot offers the chilling suggestion that we never really know what is going on inside, behind closed doors, in an America whose sunny suburban surfaces conceal a deep-seated anger and murderous madness that are catching.
