Tag: Tilda Swinton

Memoria

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

With Memoria, Thai legend Apichatpong Weerasethakul is basically trying to do the impossible: use the cinematic form to depict the vibrating, mysterious connection between all human beings. A dreamy, strange, addictive and loopy dream-like journey through Medellin and the Colombian jungle, his first non-Thai film is the best film of the year.

Tilda Swinton, the patron saint of all things weird, stars, in an unusually downbeat turn. She plays a woman from Scotland travelling to Medellin to visit her sick sister. Her sister’s husband suggests her sickness has been caused by her research: investigating a tribe in the Amazon that purposefully choose to stay hidden. She could be cursed. Like with Weerasethakul’s previous films, one suspects ghosts or malevolent spirits might be involved.

The film starts in typically slow fashion, a long pan of Swinton waking up in a dark room, then suddenly punctuated by an ominous banging sound. Considering how Weerasethakul’s films always make people fall asleep, these bangs are equivalent to Joseph Haydn’s “Surprise Symphony” in the way they can jolt the audience back into alertness. They come and go throughout the film, suggesting an otherworldly presence constantly lingering outside of the frame.

I did nod off in the beginning (not a criticism), but thanks to these bangs, I didn’t completely succumb to sleepiness; the film connecting with me on a strange, visceral level thanks to its epic long takes and strange, static mise-en-scène — whether it’s car alarms going off by themselves, a jazz band playing for upwards of ten minutes, or the epic finale featuring Tilda conversing with a man who has never left his village because he remembers everything and believes that “all experiences are harmful.” Swinton is completely on the wavelength of the director, making for a great combination of artist and subject.

It’s hard to say what it’s about, although clues abound throughout the movie, which is far more playful than any description could give it credit for. What’s more impressive is the way that Weerasethakul invites you into his completely original world. Memoria is like a feature-length version of those YouTube videos which can transport you to any soundscape in the world. Only playing in cinemas in perpetuity in the United States as part of an experimental run, the 360 degree sound mix gives a clear reason why this film should ideally be seen in the cinema. Whether it’s the humming of birds or the sounds of city life, Memoria embraces you into its vibe, making for a genuinely unique experience. Conversely, if it ever makes it onto your laptop screen, it would make the perfect calming soundscape to work alongside. I could easily imagine it having it on while going about my day job.

Memoria played in the Current Waves section of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. In cinemas Friday, January 14th. On various VoD platforms in June.

Memoria is in out Top 10 dirty movies of 2021.

The Personal History Of David Copperfield

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The mid-19th century novel The Personal History Of David Copperfield is considered Charles Dickens’ masterpiece. Narrated in the first person by the eponymous David, it tells of one man’s life from birth through a series of adventures and encounters with a motley crew of relatives, friends and associates that seem to span the social breadth of Victorian England.

To cut the novel’s tale down to a manageable movie length, director Ianucci and his co-writer Simon Blackwell have dumped certain characters and subplots to focus on others. As with the director’s previous outing The Death Of Stalin (2017), the final film half works yet is beset by strange casting choices – actors playing Russians sporting a variety of English dialects in Stalin, various BAME actors playing roles that aren’t always entirely believable in terms of their ethnicity in Copperfield. That includes the film’s lead Dev Patel, who plays David convincingly as a wide-eyed innocent.

There’s a great deal of racism around in the 21st Century: it’s hard to believe there wasn’t considerably more in the 19th when few were trying to address those issues, yet no-one seems to notice Patel’s obvious ethnic background. When he’s sent to live with the family of his mother’s kindly housekeeper Clara Peggotty (Daisy May Cooper), she and her husband have adopted a number of orphans, one of whom, Ham (Anthony Welsh), is black, which could make sense. Later, however, when the mother of David’s privileged, white, secondary school friend James Steerforth (Aneurin Barnard) is played by the black actress Nikki Amuka-Bird, the ethnic casting is distinctly unbelievable. Pursuing the colour blind casting still further, Ianucci casts Chinese British actor Benedict Wong as Wickfield, the financier ultimately ruined by alcoholism and another terrific black actress, Rosalind Eleazar, as his daughter Agnes.

On one level, colour blind casting sounds great and if you view the whole thing as a satire not based on any specific, historical place and time then it’s not a problem. Sadly, Dickens is very much a man writing about the 19th century and even though all the actors are fine in terms of performance, the BAME casting sometimes doesn’t work. I’m not saying the entire cast should be white – there were certainly some BAME people around – but I’m calling for an attempt at historical accuracy, a practice which should take precedence over the accidental pursuit of a politically correct fantasyland that never was.

Outside of the ethnic controversy, Ianucci proves highly adept at casting Dickens’ characters. Dev Patel carries the film well and other highlights include Hugh Laurie’s Mr Dick, a sweet if mentally ill man who believes Charles I to have deposited his thoughts in his (Mr. Dick’s) head and Ben Wishaw’s suitably ingratiating social climber Uriah Heep. Tilda Swinton doesn’t appear particularly stretched in the role of David’s controlling and donkey-hating aunt Betsey Trotwood.

Dickens wanted to highlight the problem of want in Victorian society and the film represents this aspect of his writing well. The constant hounding of Micawber (Peter Capaldi) for his debts results in one memorable scene where his baby in its pram is suddenly moving down the hall as the bailiffs grab under the front door and pull the hall carpet out underneath it. Equally impressive are the scenes of David working as a child in a bottle factory where the machines are too tall for him to operate properly.

Elsewhere however, as with Stalin, one struggles to remember that Ianucci is the comic genius behind television’s political comedy series The Thick Of It (2005-2012) and its superb feature film spin-off In The Loop (2009, in both of which Peter Capaldi so brilliantly played ruthless and foul-mouthed spin doctor Malcolm Tucker). Maybe he’s better at portraying contemporary rather than period stories. That said, if his Copperfield never quite scales the genuinely funny comedic heights of The Thick Of It, or even reaches the foothills, it at least gets Dickens’ remarkable characters onto the screen and is not without its moments.

The Personal History Of David Copperfield is out in the UK on Friday, January 24th. On VoD in June.

The Souvenir

Posted on by victor@dmovies.org

Supposedly a filmic memoir, Joanna Hogg’s latest, the excruciating, heartbreaking romance The Souvenir turns an overplayed drug addiction story into magic by peeling away at our sympathies for the characters and her arresting images. The palatial surroundings prove to be a diseased cage.

Newcomer Honor Swinton Byrne pulls off a difficult performance as Julie, the smart, rich girl becoming aware of her own naivety. Despite being a budding filmmaker who just wants to realise her script about working class people in Sunderland (she visited once for a friend’s art show), she is unable to see outside of her own experience, and blind to the problems closest to her. She largely stays inside her Knightsbridge flat, but what starts as a room of one’s own is soon infiltrated by a poison.

Julie has been utterly coddled by her parents and so she throws her dependency onto the Oxbridge graduate Anthony. He’s vague about his foreign office job; Julie finds pictures of him in disguise in Afghanistan. Their relationship is immediately intense, although Hogg does not show them touch for the entirety of their developing relationship. And as soon as we do see them make that physical connection, we, and Julie, finally see the track marks on his arm.

Tom Burke’s performance must be one of the highlights of Berlinale. Delivering lines so slow, his bulking presence in the frame dominates and his arrogant demeanour cuts through scenes with this bitter assumed birthright. A harrowing withdrawal scene far removed from the romanticised movie view it gets in movies like Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996), turns the living room into a kind of tomb, with Anthony a terrifying Bela Lugosi.

Inspired by Ozu, Hogg cramps the characters into these full, tight frames. Even when the camera takes a distance, the architecture of the flat, the lines of furniture, silhouettes of the city skyline, separate the characters. Often these stark shots are replicated later on with certain elements changed, drawing our attention to the passage of time without the need for exposition. A jaunt to Venice becomes a horrifying death march, in a scene that really pulls together the film’s critique of high-class degradation. Unsatisfying sex and opulence correspond in a scene that puts the audience into a drugged stupor.

The literal souvenirs of a relationship, however, are the most haunting element of the movie. Not just material things, like the ornate bed frame and extravagant clothes she acquires, or her taste for music which moves away from punk until she’s enjoying classical. It’s this entire worldview, how all of our relationships will change us in ways that might never become clear to us.

All of the characters carry a baggage, and Hogg doesn’t push any of this onto the audience, allowing the fragments of this story to take place in glimpses. Parts of it are almost cringe comedy, as Anthony condescends with such ease, telling Julie to abandon sincerity or documentary in her work, to be more like Powell and Pressburger. But it’s not quite satire. Repeated references to The Troubles tell us what’s taking place in the background, and what Julie doesn’t have to concern herself with. This other world, a real world. It’s on the other side of the wall, outside the window, through the lens.

Swinton Byrne’s real-life mother Tilda Swinton lends her presence to a small but effective role, giving it a little star power. It’s great that her discerning choices can bring more eyes to directors who can do with the attention. She’s back in old lady mode, only a step removed from her Grand Hotel Budapest (Wes Anderson, 2014) role. It’s an exquisite, detailed turn.

The beats of a toxic relationship are so familiar, and that’s what makes it difficult to watch. We want to tell at the screen, tell Julie off, beat Anthony up. This will be too much to handle for some, such unadorned privilege, a protagonist making such obvious mistakes and going largely unchecked. It might be difficult to sympathise, why doesn’t she just leave him? But in the sustained depiction of high-class consumption, Hogg shows toxicity as a drug, a society as sick as Anthony. With the end title card promising The Souvenir Part 2 is coming soon, I can’t wait to find out how Hogg will expand this already epic chronicle.

The Souvenir premiered at the Berlinale, when this piece was originally written. It’s out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, August 30th. On VoD Monday, September 16th. Available for free on Mubi for a month from October 25th.

Suspiria 

Posted on by victorfraga

It’s big clit vs small dick energy in Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Suspiria, an aesthetic update of the original by turns confounding and magical – that neon soaked Argento look is replaced by the muted palette and instagram friendly architectural design/framing of Guadagnino. There’s enough glass brick on display to make you think twice about throwing stones, and enough conflicting, contradictory messages by this movie to have you frustrated, stupefied and eager to come back for more.

Dakota Johnson is the young American gone to Berlin to join a ballet troupe. We already know that her predecessor, played by an energetic Chloe Grace Moretz, has disappeared after ranting about a cult of witches, but rumour bounds that she has joined The Baader-Meinhof group. Johnson, shy but talented, finds more than just herself. There is, of course, some madness lurking in the halls of the Markos Dance Academy.

But there’s fairly little DNA shared with the Argento original. A fondness for split-focus dioptre shots aside, the closer comparative point is Possession, that masterpiece of writhing bodies in Berlin. That’s because Suspiria is far less interested in copying the emotions of the original than it is with taking a few of the themes and ideas (particularly that of displacement and cultism) through a modern lens. There have been countless comparisons to Aronofsky’s Mother! (2017) Which need to stop right here. Aronofsky’s edgelord antics mistake intensity with psychological intimacy. Guadagnino has far more control, each shot is charged and every cut purposeful. It’s a high style, high energy film that confounds genre, rebukes narrative threading, and is a far more exciting, bewitching film for it.

Everyone in Suspiria is in a cult. Whether it’s the Mennonite community Johnson comes from, the dance crew, the coven of witches, the terrorist cells in the background, noisily grabbing our attention, or the weight of a Nazi history that oppresses the characters, the cast is divided into cliques. Guadagnino wants to know how these interact, and whether they define us. That’s why the Berlin setting is integral, and why close ups of stamps on passports or on train lines, contain a communicative power that might catch you off guard.

Suspiria is fascinated by lines of communication and travel, about what throbbing power comes from within. That’s his egotistical flourish. The director speaks to us through these lines: love me, appreciate me. We’re all sort of in the Guadagnino cult no matter where you stand on the man’s work. I’ve always found him a difficult filmmaker, one in thrall to auteurism who uses his influences (especially the Italian New Wave and Rohmer) as a shorthand to Arthouse success. Art is always political for Guadagnino, who here uses dance like Call Me By Your Name (2017) used archaeology, or A Bigger Splash (2016) used music. To allow the character to visually express their soul. But here, he finds a groove by speaking almost directly to us. It is his dance, precise and cut in service of the story.

This is a guy who used the lush setting of his gay Merchant Ivory pastiche as an excuse to ogle the young women on the film’s periphery. It’s hard to buy him as more interested in women’s’ stories than his own. “I’m the hands” Mother Suspirium says. A vision of feminine oneness is all that the film can tentatively explore, the story representing a vague return to a more primal, earth mother vision of femininity. As the faculty and students celebrate around a vast dinner table in a cafe dressed as though Parisian (simulacrum comes up again and again), Tilda Swinton and Johnson sit at opposite ends, staring at one another in malevolence. Female pain is avoided and instead the film observes interior turmoil and bodily transience. Scenes in the mirror room where characters see themselves fully for the first time, or one key character literally pulling their chest open to expose their insides, are obvious symbolism that is actually quite welcome in such a glacially paced film.

Swinton delivers a bout of transformative performances that must be a nod to Peter Sellers in Dr Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964). Without spoiling too much, one appearance even has her staggering out of the wheelchair “mein Mother Susperium! I can walk!”. I see Swinton in a Guadagnino movie as a stand-in for the director – perhaps due to her presenter role in his debut The Protagonists (1999). Her roles as the stern dance instructor is full Swinton, with a subtle arc that really hits at the film’s climax. But it’s her heavily made up role as octogenarian German man Dr. Jozef Klemperer that deserves plaudits. It’s through his story that Suspiria really covers its key theme of generational trauma, as his softening coincides with his reckoning. It’s a shame that the promotional trail has reduced this performance to Andy-Kaufman-esque hoaxes, because taken on its own merits Swinton is doing her best work in years.

Johnson wins the screen by doing little outside of the extraordinary physical dance moments – like her mother there is a sensuality that she is confident to let sit. Then Jessica Harper from the original shows up in a small but vital role. Her face, older, but warmly recognisable, is the perfect meta-moment for a scene about the clash of the past and present. Guadagnino frequently uses this doubling of text and meta-text, like subverting the creative effects of the original for an infrequent pulse of CGI blood. It operates as a distancing effect. There’s enough going on that even if half of the film doesn’t work for you, there are half a dozen more elements that do pay off. Guadagnino doesn’t just eschew the original, he seems disinterested in the entire supernatural element of the film. Suspiria is really about all the other stuff, and when the witches get out of its way, it works like gangbusters.

Suspiria premieres at the BFI London Film Festival taking place between October 10th and 21st. It then shows at trhe Cambridge Film Festival, between October 25th and November 1st. It’s out in cinemas on Friday, November 16th.

Letters from Baghdad

Posted on by victorfraga

Let’s talk about Iraq: “We promised an Arab government with British advisors and delivered it the other way around. We tried to govern and failed. In my opinion, we tried to govern too much”. Does this sound familiar, like these words were uttered last decade? In reality they are from Gertrude Bell in the early 20th century. This British woman, often nicknamed the “the female Lawrence of Arabia” is considered one of the champions of Iraq independence, if often overlooked. The irony that her commentary remains so current a century on suggests that British meddling in the Middle East hasn’t changed so much, perhaps just reinvented itself.

This documentary made out of black and white photographs and moving images, some reenacted and some original, contains so much historical information that you will either need a pen or a prodigy’s brain to in order to retain most of it. With Tilda Swindon as the voice of Gertrude Bell, the movie will take you on a journey and history lesson of British Imperialism, vested interests and female representation. The film is built in such a way that it isn’t always possible to distinguished between the real and the reenacted sequences. The talking heads interviews are clearly staged, as the people would now be dead or well into their 100s, while of the images from the Middle East are very difficult to date.

Letters from Baghdad is film made to look nostalgic. Thankfully it’s not nostalgic of British imperialism and grandiosity. Instead its nostalgic tone is lonesome and sorrowful, like the cry of a woman subtly dismissed from history simply because she was a female. Recognising a British woman as one of the champions of Iraq independence was just too subversive at the time. T.E. Lawrence patronisingly described her as “a wonderful person, not like a woman”, while a government official likened her writing of a white paper to “a dog standing on its hind legs”. Her determination was dismissed as arrogance and abruptness, in a stance symptomatic of sheer misogyny. Fortunately times have changed, and two female filmmakers have come to rescue and to reclaim her legacy.

The film explores Gertrude Bell’s personal life from her early attempts at marriage in the UK, following her infatuation with the Middle East, her later dalliances, her political influence all the way through to the time near her death at the age of 58 in the year of 1926 (from a controversial overdose of sleeping pills, which the film doesn’t discuss). There is also plenty of historical material, from the forced eviction of Arab locals in order to make room for British officials, the usual British disregard for a comprehensive political scheme and the all-too-familiar oil interests.

Bell is considered one of the most affable British agents in the Middle East, and one of the very few who could be vaguely trusted by the locals. She often traveled on her own and at her own risk, and she raises the fundamental question: “how can you persuade people to trust you and take your side when they don’t know whether you’ll be there to take theirs?”. She passionately related to the region, and that’s where she felt at home the most. She claimed: “I became a person in Syria”. She also stated “the me that they expect will not return”, indicating that she would feel like a foreigner upon coming back to her very own birth nation the UK.

This is a didactic and effective doc, if somewhat esoteric. Do watch it if you have an interest in British imperialism in the Middle East and women’s history. Despite blending old footage with reenactments, the film isn’t particularly innovative in its history-telling format, and it’s also a little monotonous in the historical wordiness. A good one for the history class, but not for Friday night.

Letters from Baghdad: The Untold Story of Gertrude Bell was out in UK cinemas in April 2017, when this piece was originally written. It was launched on VoD as part of a BFI collection entitled Folly, love and courage: three remarkable stories from international female filmmakers in June, 2018.