Tag: Sebastián Lelio

The Wonder

Posted on by victorfraga

The year is 1862. Ireland is still recovering from the Great Famine, which claimed more than two million lives and left the country’s morale devastated. A young girl named Anna (Kíla Lord) has inexplicably stopped eating, and somehow remains mysteriously alive four months later. English nurse Lib Wright (Florence Pugh) is recruited by the local authorities in order to guard her, ensuring that she is indeed not taking any food. They wish to establish whether her parents are committing fraud, or if a miracle of some sort is indeed taking place. Some people suspect Anna is feeding on magnetic waves or some unknown particles. The girl claims that she’s eating “manna from heaven”.

In the beginning of this 103-minute, Anna is strong and standing on her feet. Three quarters of the movie later, she can barely talk. And barely anything happens at all, in a tediously flat narrative arc and melatonin-inducing plot. Lib sets out to convince locals that the mother has been secretly mouth-feeding her daughter “like a bird” when she kisses her good-morning and goodbye. Having lost a child herself, the English “Nightingale” cannot bear the thought of allowing Anna to die. She is determined to save the young girl’s life. They create an awkward bond, with Anna calling her “Nan”, which is fact short for “Nancy” (a nickname she has pulled out of nowhere, as with most of the narrative devices in this movie). They exchange philosophical platitudes, with the film purporting to establish some dialogue between faith and reason, or perhaps some comment on the consequences of the Famine, or the relationship between England Ireland. I have no idea of the director’s real intention

The parents play an ambiguous role. It is never entirely clear whether they are trying to profit from the commotion generated by their child’s ordeal (a cunning writer from the Daily Telegraph is on standby, attempting to score a journalistic scoop) or if they genuinely think that their daughter has become some sort of saint (in Catholic faith, sacrifice is always the route to sainthood). At one point, Anna says that she won’t allow her late brother “to burn in the flames of hell”. She is referring to a younger sibling who tragically passed away year earlier. Yet another loose end that doesn’t seem to tie with anything else in the story.

Anna is painful to watch. And not because her malnutrition, which worsens by the day. But instead because of her insufferable devotion. Her lines are cliched, her delivery is repetitive and dull. The final twist isn’t entirely predictable, yet it’s hardly original. Plus Lelio starts and ends the film in the actual studio setting, trying to make some statement about the subjectivity of characters and the active role of audiences. As with much of the film, this denouement has very little to say. The outcome is a profoundly pretentious and downright boring movie. You are welcome to try and milk some deep philosophical meaning, yet you may might end up succumbing to filmic malnutrition.

The photography of rural Ireland with its consistently gloomy climate is largely effective, complementing the sullen atmosphere of the drama. But this isn’t enough to save an otherwise mediocre production. Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde famously wrote in Cahiers du Cinema in the year of 1948: “cinematography of the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative filmmaker”. He was absolutely right!

I ask myself why a talented and audacious filmmaker such as Lelio left his native Chile, where he authored masterpieces such as Gloria (2014) and A Fantastic Woman (2017), and crossed the Atlantic in order to create such an empty and redundant film. Not to mention the tragic Hollywood remake of his very own 2014 drama. Sometimes you just wish people would stay closer to their roots.

The Wonder showed in the Official Competition of the 70th San Sebastian International Film Festival/ Donostia Zinemaldia, when this piece was originally written. It is out in the UK in October, as part of the BFI London Film Festival. In cinemas on Friday, November 4th. On Netflix on Thursday, December 15th

Gloria Bell

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

When I saw the Chilean film Gloria (Sebastián Lelio, 2013) some years back, I was blown away. The story of a 50-something divorcée going out and finding herself sounded like the sort of movie I’d hate… and yet, against the odds, Lelio’s film, particularly its feisty central performance by Paulina Garcia, completely won me over. I recall it having a pretty decent Latin music soundtrack too, culminating in Umberto Tozzi’s triumphant disco anthem Gloria.

Leilo having in the interim carved himself out a respectable international movie career – an Oscar for A Fantastic Woman (2017), an impressive change of pace with the British drama Disobedience (2018) – he’s had the inevitable offer to remake some of his Chilean output for the US market. In Gloria Bell, adding the character’s surname to the title for the remake, he collaborates with sometime Oscar-winning actress Julianne Moore.

So all the ingredients should be there to deliver something very special, whether you’ve seen the original and are going for the comparison or you are coming to the story for the first time here. And yet, somehow, the new film feels flat. It lacks the magnetic quality of the original.

Maybe it’s the difference between Chile, rarely seen on the screen here in the English-speaking world, and the US whose movies have flooded our cinemas. Maybe it’s the 80s’ US disco music on the soundtrack which replaces the original’s far more vibrant Latin selection. Certainly, it peps up at the end when the title song (this time the American version recorded by Laura Branigan) comes on, but it’s far too late by then.

Apart from shifting the story from Santiago to Los Angeles and the heroine from Chilean to American, the story is pretty much identical. So it’s hard to believe the problem is the script adaptation. This even applies to the trailers – the trailer for the original Gloria can be seen for comparison further down the page below the Gloria Bell trailer.

The plot has 50-something Gloria (Moore) go to discos in search of love and eventually embark on a relationship with divorced father Arnold (John Turturro). Cue unflattering, over-fifties sex scenes in which he has to remove a medical girdle he wears round his waste, all very commendable in terms of visual representation of that demographic.

Gloria has pretty much learned to let her grown up kids get on with their own separate lives while she gets on with hers. Her son Peter (Michael Cera) is dealing with an absent partner who has left home for a while to find herself and leave him to bring up their child. Her daughter Anne (Caren Pistorius) is on the verge of moving to Sweden to make a life with a surfer she met via the internet. By way of contrast, Arnold seems to be constantly under pressure from his two daughters who we never see but are constantly making demands of him over the phone.

After much resistance, Arnold is persuaded to come over for a meal and meet Gloria’s family – not only her kids but also her ex-husband. The evening proves too much for Arnold and marks the beginning of the end of his and Gloria’s relationship. Except that, try as she might to cut him off, Arnold doesn’t want it to let her go…

Julianne Moore is on the screen most of the time. Where the original film and Paulina Garcia’s seemingly effortless performance in it felt like a welcome breath of fresh air, however, if you’ve seen the original, this one feels like a pointless retread with Moore failing to add that certain something that Garcia brought. Which is a pity, because on paper this remake sounded like it might be really quite something.

Gloria Bell is out in the UK on Friday, June 7th. Watch the film trailer below:

And here, for comparison, is the trailer for the original 2013 Chilean film Gloria:

Disobedience

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Highly respected rabbi Rav Krushna (Anton Lesser) addresses his synagogue about the qualities that make mankind different from the animals and the angels. Man, he says, has free will. Alone in creation, he is able to disobey his creator. Then, as if struck down for preaching some treatise in defence of apostasy, he collapses.

Ronit Krushka (Rachel Weisz) is a British portrait photographer working in New York. She is promiscuous, rootless and seems to be looking for something although she’s no idea what. One day she gets a phone call which makes her return to London and the Hendon orthodox Jewish community which she left years ago. She heads straight for the house of Dovid Kuperman (Alessandro Nivola), at once her father’s favourite pupil (and likely successor as Rav) and an old childhood friend. She’s a little surprised to find he and her other great childhood friend Esti (Rachel McAdams) are now man and wife. The couple agree to put Ronit up during her stay.

Two things become clear as the narrative plays out. One, Dovid’s relationship with the Rav is the father/child relationship that Ronit never had with her father. Dovid spent hours discussing Jewish religious texts with him while Ronit wasn’t really interested. But now she’s back, she wants proof that her father really did love her. Scant evidence is forthcoming on that front. Two, Ronit and Esti were in love back in the day. Ronit chose freedom from the religious community and got out; Esti married a husband as the community expected and made herself fit in. However although Dovid is a good man who cares deeply for Esti, there’s a certain spark missing in the relationship. A spark which threatens to ignite when Ronit returns.

There is much to admire here – tortured performances which plumb the depths of the soul from its two female leads, a feeling that the Orthodox Jewish background has been researched and put on the screen at a very deep level, unresolved issues with a departed father. It’s a world unfamiliar to the movies and to most cinemagoers, but the film plunges you right in. Director Sebastián Lelio and cameraman Danny Cohen seem completely in sync in their dealings with the cast, ensuring that those amazing things that actors do end up on the screen without the mechanics of film making getting in the way.

The theological and human contradiction of the Rav’s opening and final address underpin everything that follows. What is obedience? What is transgression? What’s more important – the community or the individual? As the two women struggle with their feelings for each other and events take their predictable course, you can almost feel the boxes of a contemporary Western individualist view being ticked off. Almost. The piece seems to be at its strongest where its characters struggle with these tensions.

Weisz is one of the instigating producers behind the project and has chosen well both in source material and director. It’s a surprisingly effective and cinematic movie adapted from a novel, a process which all too often produces the exact opposite outcome. Leilo having proved himself highly adept at stories involving women’s issues such in Gloria/2013 and transgressive sexuality in A Fantastic Woman (2017) here delivers a compelling story in a completely convincing, parochial North London environment. The result could so easily have been a tedious plod, but somehow, it all comes together. An impressive achievement.

Disobedience is in cinemas from Friday, November 30th (2017). On BritBox on Wednesday, March 17th (2021). On Mubi on Sunday, June 5th.