Tag: sex

Suna (Suna Kahevahel)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

In a hotel room, sitting on two beds at right angles to each other, she says to him: “you won’t be too controlling, right? I don’t want anybody interfering with my life.” Then he sets out his own stall. “I’ll eat whatever you cook me,” he says. “When necessary, I’ll take a bath immediately.” You get the impression that that might not happen all that often.

Played by Turkish singing star Nurcan Eren, Suna craves the security of a relationship without any of the male domination that so often accompanies it. The man she has chosen, Veysel (Tarik Pabuccuoglu), has recently become a widower and wants a companion and partner in life. Not only that, he seems to want someone very like his former wife. He seems a kind, gentle man.

So they have an Imam wedding, a discreet Muslim ceremony with the local Imam present, which joins them in the eyes of Allah but may not have quite the same legal force as a regular marriage in Turkish society. For instance, if he dies, there’s no automatic legal provision that she gets the house.

With the help of the Veysel’s son Erol (Erol Babaoglu), Suna moves in to his house which is situated in a small, rural village. Veysel takes great delight in showing her his pair of caged budgies, which clearly mean a great deal to him.

She has worked as a cleaner and sets about cleaning up his house, which hasn’t been done for three years. A neighbour invites her to the local woman’s meeting, where you go along with a bit of money which Veysel, when asked, is happy to supply. But in the event, she goes out for a walk along the beach instead.

She enjoys walking outside, and on another occasion, when Erol is bringing the couple back from a shopping trip, she insists on being dropped off at the same place as Veysel and walking home alone. Walking home, a man hassles her, but fortunately another man comes to her rescue and sees him off. Her rescuer’s name is Can (Firat Tanış) , and they hit it off.

She seems to have more in common with Can than she does with Veysel, and often drops round to visit and chat with him. It turns out that he is a film critic, and in their conversation it emerges that she played parts as an extra in movies in Germany. She also visits a local restaurant bar, and one night stays there for sex with the owner, who, it turns out, has violent tendencies and likes inflicting pain on women during sex. It’s not clear whether Suna enjoys this, but given that she never goes back to the restaurant, one imagines not. She invents a cover story about being mugged on the way home from the women’s meeting earlier in the day to explain bruises on her face and neck.

As an independent, older woman in a deeply conservative society, Suna is in a difficult position: it doesn’t look like things are going to end well.

Fairly early on, a static image fills the cinema screen, a tapestry hanging on the wall with a picture of a peacock. On the soundtrack can be heard Veysel;s grunts and groans as he has sex with Suna. ‘With’ might be the wrong word: ‘to’ might be more accurate because we hear no noise emanating from her, the obvious assumption being that she is simply lying back as he takes his pleasure with no regard for hers. Aside from a shorter rerun of this scene, the other similar scene here is at the restaurant bar, where silhouettes of a rock band on a section of wall are shown while we hear the restaurant owner’s aural expressions of sexual enjoyment alongside Suna’s cries of discomfort and pain.

The sex scenes in this film are one of its great pleasures, although not in the way you might expect. All truly great directors reinvent the language of cinema and mould it to their own ends. Director Sezgin here has reinvented the cinematic grammar of the sex scene. It’s long worried me that actors and actresses (and more often than not, it seems to have been actresses, presumably because at least until recently, the vast majority of directors have been heterosexual men) have been required to expose their private parts to the camera and simulate coitus for it (and in rare cases, engage in actual coitus). I’m not being prudish about this, and I’m absolutely not talking about people’s personal behaviour outside of filming cinema, or morality, or anything like that – each to their own – but requiring actresses or actors to shoot sex scenes is, at least arguably, problematic. You shouldn’t be required to exposed yourself on the screen in that way, in my opinion.

Here, however, Sezgin has found an alternative way of portraying sex on camera without making any of those visual demands on her cast which works a treat (there’s a short clip of it in the trailer below, but when you watch the film, which unfolds at a very deliberate and measured pace, it has a greater impact than the little excerpt shown there). You could certainly argue that she’s borrowing heavily from the language of radio; sound, after all, is a significant component of cinema; I’d like to think that Orson Welles, in his Mercury Theatre on the Air days, would have been proud of her.

Also impressive is the portrayal of a film critic. I’ve seen this done in films before, but I’ve never seen a director get it right. On this occasion, however, I didn’t spot any gaffes, completely believed the character I saw on the screen and was delighted to have seen the film. (It’s not the primary reason I liked the film, and I realise this element is more likely to appeal to film critics than anyone else, but nevertheless, this element is a real pleasure.) The film is dedicated to the late Turkish film critic Cüneyt Cebenoyan.

I should add that personally, as a non-Turkish speaker unfamiliar with either the language or Turkish names, I didn’t immediately cotton on that the director was a woman – although looking at the movie’s subject matter about the plight of women of a very specific age in a very specific culture the fact of her gender would have been a reasonable guess. On one level I don’t care – it’s about whether a director is competent, has a vision and can realise it on the screen. If people can tick those boxes, I’m all for it – and if they happen to be women, then fine. Sezgin, in this film, ticks those boxes.

Given that half the humans on the planet are women, and that a good number of the rest of us humans are men who find women fascinating, the story ought to be of interest to a great many people. And it is so beautifully told, and the film so rigorously constructed and shot (on a minimal amount of resources, I might add) that it deserves to be widely seen. I can’t claim much knowledge of Turkish cinema, but Sezgin’s film reminded me of the poetic realism of the likes of English director Terence Davies (notably The Terence Davies Trilogy, 1983) and The Bill Douglas Trilogy (My Childhood, 1972; My Ain Folk, 1973; My Way Home, 1978, all directed by Scotland’s Bill Douglas).

There’s a similarity in the way these visual narratives are constructed via a series of small incidents to build up a compelling picture of the ordinary life of a character. Clearly Sezgin is a woman while these other two are men, so on some level her film is going to be very different from theirs. Yet, like these films by Davies and Douglas, Suna is a masterpiece.

Suna premieres in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. Watch the film trailer below:

Call Of God (Kõne Taevast)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The following quote from the late director Kim Ki-duk comes right at the start of this film, the last one he shot prior to his death from complications arising from COVID-19.

“The closer they are to death, the more humans miss and reminisce about their youth. I miss my twenties, although I made many mistakes in my youth. So, if I go back to that time, I really want to do good. But life never comes back.”

Kim wasn’t alive to complete it, so what we have here is the film put together from colleagues who worked with him. We’ll never know exactly how close the film is to what he intended, but it will have to do.

It was shot outside his native Korea – not the first time director Kim has done this: his second movie Wild Animals (1997) was shot in France, Amen (2011) in various parts of Europe and Stop (2015) in Japan. In recent years, various #metoo allegations against him by actresses have turned him into something of a persona non grata at home, and he’s been forced to work elsewhere. This final film was made in two Baltic States – Estonia and Lithuania – as well as Kyrgyzstan, with dialogue in Russian and Kyrgyz. The two lead actors could pass for Korean.

It takes place in the dreams of its young woman protagonist (Zhanel Sergazina), an idealistic romantic in search of / waiting for love to strike, when one day, a smart young man (Abylai Maratov) asks her the way to the Dream Café. It’s a sunny day and they walk in the park. Suddenly a thief snatches her purse, and the man sets off in pursuit, getting punched in the face but getting her bag back. After this, they start seeing one another. He turns out to be an author, so she buys his book. The next time they meet, it turns out he was going to give her a copy.

She initially resists his physical advances, but that doesn’t last long, and images soon get pretty racy. She starts talking about trust and accesses his mobile phone, whereupon she discovers that he’s still communicating with an old girlfriend and makes him swear he will speak to no other women from now on.

The black and white photography (i.e. most of the film) ostensibly represents a dream state, but that’s somewhat complicated by a parallel framing narrative in which, also in black and white, the woman periodically wakes from her dream and gets messages on her mobile phone (presumably the eponymous call of God) informing her that what occurred in her dream will soon recur in her waking life and advising that if she wants to see what happens next, she needs to go back to sleep. While you’re pondering what it all means, at the end of the film, it starts all over again, but this time in colour as what happened in her dream recurs in her waking life.

It’s bizarre that the film should play like a dream state when Kim himself would shortly pass into the next life – while you’re watching it there’s a definite sense of the hallucinatory, walking through parks, or later walking through nature, and the naive. In other parts, it throws the extraordinary at you, such as the scene where the couple feed each other tidbits on the end of sharp, pointed kitchen knife blades. And as elsewhere in the director’s films, there are characters who from time to time step outside the realm of the politically correct.

There’s something compelling about all this, to do with the very nature of cinema: sitting with a bunch of strangers in a darkened space for a group act of collective dreaming. For a while, Kim was the bad boy of Korean cinema, if not world cinema, going beyond the pale and doing things considered unacceptable. This film represents an intriguing coda to a fascinating if uneven career which refused to play by the rules.

Call Of God shows in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, as part of the Critics’ Picks strand.

In The Morning Of La Petite Mort

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

This opens with a shot of a painting depicting a pig, a fire, an orgasmically ecstatic, scantily clad woman and more, elements which play a part in what follows.

In a smart, up-market apartment, a beautiful young prostitute (Wang Yun-zhi) meditates. Then she services her clients (shown to a soft-core degree of explicit detail). She gets the job done, but the men she services don’t seem to understand that sex is about two people, not just one person (them), so she endures it as a not especially enjoyable job rather than takes pleasure in it. She has a little grille in her door so she can see who’s there before she opens it.

Meanwhile, a young man (Yusuke Fukichi) rides a scooter through the streets, arrives at the building in the pouring rain, walks along the corridor. He’s delivering food to her apartment. His job done, he returns to his home. Home is a loose term; he’s technically homeless: he occupies a room in an abandoned section of a building with no fixtures and fittings, a basic, concrete shell. Some of the window panes are missing and the polythene sheeting covering them is attached, but torn in a few places and blowing uselessly in the high wind. He sleeps in a makeshift bed made from cardboard boxes.

The above two sequences are intercut, so that the footage constantly moves from one life to the other. The festival catalogue compared this to the films of both Wong Kar-wai and Kim Ki-duk. The former you could make a case for, but where Wong’s international crossover success Chungking Express (1994) revitalised cinema in both Hong Kong and beyond, the same can’t be said of the current film: its subject matter feels like we’ve seen it before. Both films, it’s true, deal with urban lives bumping in to one another, but Wong’s film was a game changer in a way that Wang’s current one is not. The Kim Ki-duk comparison is more apt, so we’ll return to that in due course.

In true, clichéd, tart-with-a-heart fashion, the whore opens her door and her heart to the delivery boy. They have sex and she enjoys it, the first time we’ve seen her take such enjoyment. During and after coitus, he is smitten with what can only be described as grief, first silently and then sobbing out loud. In a long, static and post-coital shot, she first (to my inevitably male gaze) tenderly touches and holds his hand, then enfolds him in her arms. (It would be interesting to see what a female writer would have made of this film: likely as not, she would have come down on it like a ton of bricks.)

As he’s leaving, they negotiate a deal down to 15 from 20 takeaways as the price for the evening. So he comes back, merely to deliver food, another 15 times. (This too recalls Chungking Express, with its narrative of stockpiling out-of-date cans of tinned fruit day by day only to later binge eat them all in one go.) Then, one day he comes back to find a real estate agent showing a well-heeled couple round the cleared apartment.

Before that though, on the back of the first night, the delivery boy takes the prostitute out for a romantic evening at a restaurant and they both have a really good time, with no attached obligation for coitus. He confesses to her his dream of starting his own food stall, and when he’s subsequently got it going, she comes down to visit him. On a later occasion still, she discovers that she is pregnant. And vanishes from the narrative.

Meanwhile, the delivery boy has been slowly finding the occasional piece of furniture for his makeshift home, transporting a cupboard from a building’s rubbish deposit point on his bike then up the stairs by hand to where he’s living. Here he runs into a lady Filipino resident (Jan Hui-ling) who appears to have a bona fide apartment in which she stores goods as if it were a small warehouse and has a fridge packed full with large, solid cuts of meat.

She takes pity on him, rescuing a blanket and taking it up to his place. After the young prostitute disappears from his life, this older woman comes and lies beside him, caressing his side tenderly, but he’s not interested and does not reciprocate.

Instead she must make do with the sleazy, local building superintendent (Jason King Jiah-wen) constantly coming on to her and soon forcing himself on her. It’s unclear to what extent this is consensual and to what extent she enjoys it – somewhere between the two. Some script ideas there (and you can write a script in pictures and or sounds, no-one’s suggesting it has to be dialogue) in need of clarity. Judging by Nina Wu (Midi Z, 2019), Taiwan has been as affected by the #metoo movement as much as anywhere else, so there’s really no excuse for such woolly portrayals of female sexuality.

This is as good a moment as any to invoke the spirit of the late Kim Ki-duk, the bad boy of Korean cinema whose final film Call Of God (2022) is also in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, and who often plays around with notions like this. However, I would argue Kim does so as a deliberate provocateur who has thought things through and, however unpalatable others might find his conclusions, run with them.

In The Morning Of La Petite Mort goes on to further episodes after the prostitute has vanished, in which the delivery boy works at a chicken farm and one night has a crash which leaves him half-blinded and covered with burn scars. The prostitute, meanwhile, comes back into her own strand of the narrative as a mother (now played by Ivy Yin Shin), with one terrific scene where she has sex with a client (Cres Chuang), doing everything for him while he does nothing for her, while she rocks her baby’s hammock style cradle with her foot, a scene and an image worthy of Kim Ki-duk. In another tremendous scene towards the end she discovers the former delivery boy, now scarred with burns, confined to a wheelchair and reduced to selling food from a tray and she buys him a meal from a stall to feed him, her young daughter also at the table, like an archetypal nuclear family. In an echo of earlier, she caresses his forehead and he, now barely able to see, breaks down in grief.

The film may have its shortcomings, however the deft way it juggles the lives of its various protagonists makes it worth a look. A handful of scenes are quite outstanding.

In The Morning Of La Petite Mort premieres in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

Rule 34 (Regra 34)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

Who says you can’t do it all? Simone (Sol Miranda) is a young Black bisexual Brazilian woman with two very different professions. During the day she is studying to be a public defender, protecting the most vulnerable in contemporary society; by night, she is a cam girl, performing sex acts on camera for male attention. Just by existing, she is everything Jair Bolsonaro hates.

The title shows that anything is possible, even in a country where culture is under attack by bigots like in Brazil. Rule 34 is an internet rule that if you think of something, there will be a pornographic depiction of it online (feel free to close this browser and try it yourself!). People like Simone, although often neglected, genuinely exist, and they deserve their own cinematic portrait.

The good news is that we get a cracking, sparkling, discursive and compelling character study with Julia Murat’s film, examining the boundaries of consent, what it means to seek pain, and the intersection of systemic oppression and personal choice. Simone herself is on a mission to decolonise her own depiction as a black woman online, arguing that much Black BDSM depiction has connotations of slavery. This is linked to the wider difficulties that Black people face in Brazil, as well as women and minorities.

Instead of a simple polemic however, Murat treats us to a film that pushes back against boundaries, while never settling for easy answers. Discussions between the law students are emboldened and intellectual, with few stupid questions and answers, breaking down simple binaries of black/white, male/female, endlessly looking for the grey areas that the law — by its structural nature — cannot find its way around.

But if the law cannot provide closure or liberation, perhaps sex can. Simone is in a ménage à trois with two of her fellow students, male and female alike, freely showing what can happen when people are informed of what they want to do with their own bodies. Murat makes some bold choices here, displaying full-frontal nudity, asphyxiation, spanking and choking; the likes of which could easily be exploitive in the hands of another director. All the time, however, Simone is looking to push the boundaries, resulting in a spiky feminist film that is both exciting to watch and thought-provoking at the same time.

At the centre is Miranda herself, who has no difficulty holding the attention of the camera as the film intuitively edits between different moments of her life, showing the full, complex spectrum of her character. At one point, she just sits alone and eats what appears to be an onion. It should be a kind of throwaway scene, but in the hands of an actor this assured, it had me strangely compelled. The kind of performance that can change the entire tenor of a film, it’s no wonder Murat chooses to end the film on a close-up. With a face that cinematic, it would be rude not to.

Rule 34 Locarno Film Festival plays as part of the Concorso internazionale at the , running from 3-13th August.

Rimini

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Ritchie Bravo (Michael Thomas) is the kind of loveable, broken rogue that you can’t help but love. He calls his casa a pirate ship; he dons a huge “sealskin” jacket; and he always provides a bon mot on the right occasion, especially in front of the ladies. But beneath the armour, the persona, the legend, is a man, adrift in a miserable seaside town, covered in snow and blanketed in cloud.

Ritchie Bravo is a schlager singer, crooning the kind of cringe-worthy songs that make Tom Jones sound like an opera singer. He lives in Rimini, a far cry from the warm, sunshiny city of its most famous son Federico Fellini. Unlike Fellini, who actually recreated the town on set in Cinecittà Studios, Ulrich Seidl shoots firmly on location, finding the kind of places so cringe-worthy — like an oldies bar named 007 Dancing (3.6 stars on Google Maps) — you simply couldn’t make them up.

Bravo navigates these wintry spaces with ease, sliding between shoddy slot casinos, beachside boozers and shuttered hotels, breezy and easy in public, desperately alone in private; drinking vodka to hide the stench of booze on his breath, and covering his pouchy belly with tape to look better when singing dreadful, sentimental belters in front of coach-loads of elderly Austrians. To supplement his income, he sleeps with some of the visiting ladies, these sex scenes shown in almost all of their unadorned glory.

In these scenes, Seidl shows a part of human life others may shy away from: normal people have sex; old people have sex; fat, ugly people have sex. It’s a part of what people are, no matter who they are or how they look. In this way, his sex scenes, however awkward they look — and using minimal cuts — are somewhat revolutionary in conventional, non-pornographic cinema.

But watching all this, it’s hard not to wonder: what does Ritchie think? What does he actually want out of life? In Ulrich Seidl’s characteristic style, borne from a seasoned documentary career before moving to features, he shoots almost exclusively in medium and long-distance frames, favouring planimetric compositions and still camerawork over flashy inserts or rapid cuts. It’s almost like he’s following a real guy called Ritchie instead of creating a story about him — which starts in North Tirol at his mother’s funeral before taking us back to his life in Rimini, where a sudden blast from the past requires him to rapidly (and perhaps unethically) increase his income.

In this manner, it’s not too different from Sean Baker’s Red Rocket (2021), also featuring a sex-adjacent hustler that toes the line between good and evil, relatable and awful at the same time. The most satisfying part is how cleverly the dramaturgical line snaps into focus: despite looking like a shabby character portrait, this is a neatly plotted story with a beginning, middle and end, simply composed of the kind of longer, more contemplative, enigmatic and interesting scenes that many other screenwriters would choose to leave out.

Touching on themes of race, identity, belonging, sexuality and more within its runtime, it nestles various ideas within its simple seeming style; resulting in a touching, intellectually rich and at-times hilarious portrait that I would simply love to watch again. Thankfully for us, Ulrich Seidl has already wrapped on a continuation of that same world. I will be first in line: Ritchie Bravo is too big for just one film.

Rimini played in competition at the 72nd Berlinale, when this piece was originally written. It premieres in the UK in October as part of the BFI London Film Festival. In UK cinemas on Friday, December 9th. On BFI Player on Monday, September 4th.

Goryeojang

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Over fifty years old, Goryeojang is sadly available as only a print with two reels (three and six) missing. The LKFF screened the version where the missing scenes are explained by a brief series of intertitles so that the rest of the film can make sense. It’s a tough film to pigeonhole. A description like period drama, which genre it absolutely fits, proves woefully inadequate as a description. To a Western viewer, it plays out like a classic fairy tale with archetypal characters and considerable amounts of cruelty. The art direction is light years away from any sort of social realism with its rural sets obviously artificially constructed in a studio, recalling (to name but one obvious example) The Singing Ringing Tree (Francesco Stefani, 1957).

The concept of Goryeojang – taking your elders up a mountain when they reach 70 so that they can face death – is central to the world conjured here and all the characters accept the idea as part of their fate. This idea introduced in an opening, present day, TV discussion programme which is never referred to again in the film (perhaps the payoff came in one of the missing reels). Everything else takes place in Korea’s Goryeo Dynasty (918-1392). Keum (Ju Jeung-ryu) has remained in the village past her 70th birthday not out of some desire for self-preservation and longevity which we in the materialist West would recognise, but rather because her adult son Gu-ryong (Kim Jin-kyu) isn’t yet married and she wants to make sure that happens for him before she goes away to die.

Throughout the narrative a lady shaman loiters around the village’s sacred tree enacting strange songs and rituals to ensure local life proceeds according to tradition as it should. Early on, she prophesies to young mum Keum that the latter’s son will eventually kill the ten sons of the man Keum plans to marry, a prophecy which will overshadow everything that follows.

While her new husband in question is kind enough to her young son Gu-ryong, the former’s ten sons prove considerably less charitable and set the boy up in a game of blind man’s bluff wherein, while the boy is blindfolded, they place a venomous snake in his path which bites his leg when he unwittingly walks into it. This leaves the boy crippled.

Twenty years later as an adult, the boy has become socially ostracised as no able-bodied woman will marry him. He’s also done rather well for himself causing considerable enmity between him and his ten stepbrothers. When Gu-ryong eventually marries a mute, they kidnap and gang rape her, leaving him on his own again. Later, he adopts a young girl with a pockmarked face Ye-on, another outcast who like Gu-ryong didn’t fit in with their former cruel siblings.

With the area in the grip of hunger caused by drought, the lady shaman insists that Gu-ryong must take Keum up the mountain and leave her there to appease the gods who will then send the much-needed rain.

Sequences such as the blind man’s buff/snake episode, the gang-rape of the mute and, most particularly, the late scene at the mountain top where Gu-ryong must abandon the aged Keum to her fate lodge in the memory of the viewer. The latter sequence delivers a place littered with human skulls and bones across which Gu-ryong traverses back and forth as he tries to leave but his mum keeps finding last words to say or suggestions to make before he leaves her forever. Director Kim milks this for all it’s worth, yet the performances are so heartfelt and the material so disturbing that it really gets under your skin. Most of Kim’s films are set in the present day, so the period historical nature of this one is something of an exception. The sex, violence and cruelty of the narrative is, however, in keeping with many of his other films, as is the almost fairy tale like quality.

Goryeojang is sometimes also known as Burying The Old Alive.

Ieoh Island (1987) Director: Kim Ki-young, Tuesday, 12 November⋅18:15 ICA, book here.

Goryeojang plays in LKFF, The London Korean Film Festival. Watch the film trailer below:

A US Blu-ray of Goryeojang is released by the Korean Film Archive on November 14th. Available here.

Holiday

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

While it takes place in consistently bright sunshine near a Turkish habour town, there’s nothing pleasant about the family dynamics portrayed here. Although Sascha (Victoria Carmen Sonne) arrives at a Turkish airport wearing summer clothing and lugging a case at the start, the narrative wouldn’t do too well in the Bechdel Test as all her dealings with the world appear to involve men and revolve around sex and/or violence – real, implied or refused. Pretty quickly she’s in a parked white car with Bobby (Yuval Segal) and explaining to him that she’s €300 short. He complains that “pretty girls think everything is for free” and gives her a pretty unpleasant warning on behalf of the boss to ensure she’ll never make another mistake like that. Her one and only warning which is never discussed again.

Later Sascha is picked up by boyfriend Michael (Lai Yde) and his number two Bo (Bo Brønnum) in the same white car. They drive to the villa where the rest of the ‘family’ are waiting. Swimming Pool. Drink. Drugs. A couple of other women, one of whom Tanje (Laura Kjær) looks as young as Sascha. There’s clearly money to burn and Michael has put some of it into the tacky hotel where Sascha stayed overnight after her flight.

Male hijinks and larking about quickly give way to something darker. Take the loyal Musse (Adam Ild Rohweder) who barks when playfully called a dog. At one point he puts a foot wrong: he comes back to the villa after someone hasn’t shown up. Michael is concerned that Musse may have lead the police there. They take him from outside into a downstairs room while Sasha, Tanje and a child are sent to watch TV in the lounge. The three turn up the volume to hide the sounds of whatever’s going on in the other room. Later bearing flesh wounds he hands out presents to Michael, Bo and others. Michael tells him everything is okay and gives his an envelope of cash. His philosophy is to punish bad and reward good.

How this works out for the women in this group is much more sexual. Sascha is abused in some pretty unpleasant and explicit ways by Michael, which immediately earn the film a BBFC 18 certificate (and the same for its trailer below, although the material in the film itself is considerably stronger and far more unpleasant than what’s shown in the 18 trailer).

Not all characters here are as nasty. Dutch yachtsmen Tomas (Thijs Römer) is an easy going type who, it later emerges, has given up the cutthroat world of sales and marketing for a life sailing round the world with his pal Karsten (Stanislav Sevcik). Sascha meets the pair in an ice cream parlour queue and later takes Ecstasy with Tomas on the local beach. He’s a nice guy who is later going to wish he hadn’t come anywhere near Sascha.

Holiday consistently looks good with Turkish sun burning into every bright blue skied, daytime frame and the night time environment appearing just as idyllic. No-one can accuse the cast of not trying really hard.

Eklöf previously had a screenplay credit on Border/Gräns (Ali Abbasi, 2018) but her feature directorial debut is nowhere near as complex or skilfully orchestrated as either that, Burning (Lee Chang-dong, 2018) or Dragged Across Concrete (S. Craig Zahler, 2018). Both these latter films contain an element of misogyny. Yet while the female-written and -directed Holiday’s intention to express the voices of women placed in positions of submission might be admirable, this backfires in the finished film by failing to offer any way out of a misogynistic cycle of violence in which women are abused by men. A few unsettling scenes and shocks, not least in the closing 10 or so minutes where the piece veers off in one or two unexpected directions, aren’t really enough to lift the whole above that. Perhaps Eklöf should take a lesson from Revenge (Coralie Fargeat, 2018) which at least attempted to turn the tables.

Holiday is out in the UK on Friday, August 2nd. On VoD on Monday, August 26th.

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:

Ederlezi Rising

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

You’ve got to admire the sheer ambition of Ederlezi Rising, a Serbian Sci-Fi movie shot in the English language with production values and visual effects on a par – mostly – with anything Hollywood at its most lavish can offer.

I say mostly because there’s an early rocket launch sequence which cries out for exterior shots of the rocket on its launch pad and then taking off, but all we get is an admittedly impressive view from space of the distant ship ascending into the atmosphere. It’s the only time the production misses a trick like this and it doesn’t detract from what follows.

The plot concerns one man and his dealings with women – well, one woman in particular. Milutin (Sebastian Cavazza) is given a new assignment by the Ederlezi corporation. Prior to his flight into deep space, a woman social engineer (Marusa Majer) explains the nature of his mission and that he’ll be required to work in a team of two, the other member being an android modelled after a human woman “but unlike a human woman, she’ll be unable to hurt you.”

In other words, he gets to programme the android, so in addition to doing her work as a crew member, she’ll do whatever he wants. Cue much physical, sexual activity between Milutin and his android Nimani (former porn star Stoya) whose name appears to be a generic model branding rather like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968).

In the long tradition of Sci-Fi going back to ‘Mother’ in Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979), the ship’s computer is also a woman (voiced by Kirtsty Besterman). But it’s Nimani with whom Milutin spends the most screen time. When she periodically and literally shuts down her battery to recharge, she stands upright while lines of orange run up and down the three walled sides of the square shaped charging station around her recalling nothing so much as the black and white image of circles running up and down the lifeless, upright robot Maria in Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927).

Although she is very much an equal partner in the two-man crew operating the ship, Nimani’s heavily sex-oriented extracurricular activities recall the sexualised androids of Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) and its sequel Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017).

The other major reference point is Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1971), the space station interiors of which have clearly provided the inspiration for those of the ship here with its sparse angular passageways.

There are further links. Solaris‘s astronaut was obsessed with and repeatedly ran into a reincarnation of his late wife while Ederlezi Rising’s is a loner obsessed with his numerous previous failed relationships with women. This contrasts with Nimani over whose personality Milutin has some control, but she proves far from satisfactory because ultimately he wants a partner capable of her own decisions, even if they prove to be at odds with his.

He can enable her independence only if he can delete her operating system and then reboot it, leaving her with memories generated from their relationship but without the compulsion to submit to him. The ship’s computer refuses him the security clearance needed to action this, so Milutin has to find a way to override the system. His only option is to put the ship in danger to access the required clearance. But in doing so he’s warned that the uninstallation process is irreversible and will be potentially catastrophic for Nimani.

There are more than enough CG exterior spaceship shots to satisfy SF buffs, but far more importantly the relationship material tackles some very deep male/female relationship issues. The whole thing is surprisingly memorable and effective.

Ederlezi Rising plays in the Raindance Film Festival. Watch the film trailer below:

Tehran Taboo

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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