Tag: river

Adoration

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Twelve-year-old Paul (Thomas Gioria, familiar here as the child in Custody (Xavier Legrand, 2017) likes caring for animals. Such as, for example, the fallen chaffinch he discovers at the bottom of the tree in which he’s building a treehouse. He’s used to foraging outside for food. He spends much time in the woods surrounding the mental institution where his single parent mum works and has their accommodation. One of her conditions of employment, stressed by her female boss Dr. Loisel (Gwendolyn Gourvenec), is that Paul not have any contact with any of the institution’s patients.

One day, his playing is interrupted by the arrival of a girl about his own age in a red dress. The staff are looking for Gloria (Fantine Harduin). Before they find her and take her back into their care, she and Paul have made friends. Aware of the rules, he has admonished her that the institution must not even so much as see them together.

Over time and many further clandestine meetings, their relationship deepens and grows. Eventually, Dr. Loisel discovers it and Paul is warned away from Gloria by his mother: the girl has done and is mixed up in some very bad things. However, the two kids continue to spend illicit time with one another, culminating in Paul’s stealing the institution’s keys to unlock the room in which Gloria is being held. This leads to a tense scene when the pair of them confront Dr. Loisel on a spiral staircase.

After that they go on the run together cross country following a river, pausing briefly to go off a high up bridge and swim together in the water. From there they leave behind a small trail of devastation with those people en route kind enough to take them in – a young couple (Peter Van den Begin, Charlotte Vandermeersch) and their baby on a moored boat, an older widower (Benoît Poelvoorde) who lives alone and keeps chickens.

As in earlier outings Calvaire (2004) and Vinyan (2008), du Welz proves himself adept at handling slow burning, character-based narratives with a deep underpinning of terror. The contrast between Paul, so easily turned from the light side of things to the dark and yet somehow moving back towards the light side, and Gloria, possessed by dark forces and misapprehensions about life that she doesn’t quite understand, is stark.

Paul is very much with Gloria while somehow she is forging her own path forward and will do so whether or not he comes along. He is being manipulated and she really doesn’t care that she’s doing it. Paul is so instantly likeable that you wince at his numerous bad choices with Gloria; she is so unconsciously devious and twisted that try as you might to like her, something about her makes your skin crawl.

Through it all, du Welz employs his trademark, matter-of-factly unpolished cinematographic imagery, quite literally grounding the film and rendering his narrative highly potent: while you marvel at the ordinariness of it all, he slips some really unpleasant ideas under the surface to unsettle you. Currently lacking a UK distributor, this dirtylicious gem is well worth tracking down while you can find it in the LFF.

Adoration plays in the BFI London Film Festival. Watch the film trailer (French language only, sorry) below:

River’s Edge (Ribazu Ejji)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

A Tokyo high school. Haruna Wakakusa (Fumi Nikaido) is seeing Kannonzaki (Shuhei Uesugi) but not sleeping with him. So behind her back Kannonzaki looks around for someone more compliant and finds Rumi Koyama (Shiori Doi) who, with the aid of a line of coke or two, is as enthusiastic about having sex as he is.

Kannonzaki is also a bully who frequently targets the quiet Ichiro Yamada (Ryo Yoshizara) with whom Haruna strikes up a friendship. Despite the fact of his dating Kanna Tajima (Aoi Morikawa), more as a cover than anything else, Ichiro is actually gay.

Ichiro is full of surprises. He’s raising a couple of kittens in a cardboard box outside a local building and deigns to show Haruna his “hidden treasure”, a skeletal corpse lying in the reeds near the river that runs through the city. He’s only shared this secret with one other person, Kozue Yoshikawa (Sumire), who takes time off from school as a working child model for photo shoots. She’s also a binge eater who throws up after overeating, thus maintaining her figure.

When a rumour spreads that there may be money buried in the reeds, Ichiro enlists Haruna and Kozue to help him bury the corpse so that none of school’s treasure hunters will discover it.

As much as the movie is shown from any one character’s point of view, it’s Haruna’s. But it’s a film punctuated by character vox pops, as if it were a documentary, wherein a character is responding to questions both trivial and large. The large questions leave most of the characters with nothing to say.

There are also hints of plot to come, as for example with Haruna’s explaining in an early vox pop why she saved her teddy bear from a fire, an event which doesn’t occur until the closing minutes, although then we only see its aftermath and that only briefly. These little interviews to camera appear to have been conducted long after the events depicted have taken place.

Although it contains graphic scenes of teen sex as well as occasional bursts of violence, this is primarily a drama about teenagers relating to one another in a world where adults, while they impinge on it, are outsiders and never more than minor characters. It’s based on a manga by Kyoko Okazaki.

The characters remain fascinating throughout and if a variety of relationships straight and gay are to be found both within and on the fringes of the proceedings, at its core this concerns a deep friendship between a straight girl and a gay boy. There’s something really refreshing about that.

River’s Edge played in the London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF) in 2018, when this piece was originally written. Available on Netflix in March. Watch the film trailer (Japanese, no subtitles) below: