Rose Island

This Italian comedy based on a true story in 1968 was a pleasant surprise.

  It may not be a great film but it raises a laugh and progresses smoothly from start to finish.  The story involves Giorgio Rosa, a slightly mad engineer who spends his time inventing things like a new car

and getting into trouble because he does not register it or follow the legal requirements.  His most famous invention ends up being an “island” made of steel just outside the 6km territorial limits of Italy off the coast of Rimini.

  Rosa and his friend Mauricio decide that they will declare a new nation on this platform which contains nothing more than one building and which quickly becomes a sort of beach club that people flock to as they have total freedom to do what they want and drink want they want.

  When the authorities find out, they try to stop it but technically it is beyond their jurisdiction

and Rosa himself appealing to the UN and the Council of Europe for legal protection for his space.

Elio Germano brings his understated comedic skills to the lead role and is ably supported by Matilda de Angeles as his on and off girlfriend.  

Fabrizio Bentivoglio as the zealous minister in Rome and Francois Cluzet as the Strasbourg bureaucrat bring their weight to the film and there is a wide array of bit players in the minor parts. 

 An entertaining package from director Sydney Sibilia with attractive music from Michele Braga.

3 stars

Corpus Christi

Acclaimed Polish film based on a true story in which a juvenile delinquent who has discovered a vocation for the ministry

in a type of reform school heads off to a small village in the south of the country where he “falls” into the role of a replacement priest.

  Although he is only twenty, he uses sermons and prayers from his reform school time and others he googles to start conducting services and taking confession.  

He also manages to make friends with many locals and gets to know of a road accident that took 7 of the villagers’ lives and which has left the village divided.  In his own way he goes about trying to heal this and to bring his own angle to the blessing of buildings etc.  

At the same time, he fears being caught and he still enjoys activities that are supposedly not in the realm of priests, including a relationship with the daughter of the church’s warden.

Wide-eyed Bartosz Bielenia is excellent in the lead role and ably supported by Eliza Rycembel as the girlfriend

and Aleksandra Ronieczna as her mother.  Piotr Sobocinski Junior captures the mood perfectly with his photography.

Corpus Christi has a lot of food for thought and undoubtedly speaks a lot to Polish society and their ultra-religious fervor in present times.  Unfortunately the subtitles for it didn’t always seem the best.

4 stars

Frankie

This is what you get when you try to make a meaningful movie without a story.  Very few directors can get away with it and the famous one’s like Eric Rohmer are now long gone.

Ira Sachs has got a useful cv to his name but this is just a classic “What’s the point?” exercise.

Frankie is a famous French actress played by Isabelle Huppert.  She has some bad news to impart so she gathers her nearest and dearest together in Sintra, Portugal, where she plans to tell people what to do (she is a micro-manager).  Ex and current hubbies are there, her two children,

both struggling with their own relationships, a make-up artist friend (Marisa Tomei) from the US has also been cited and she comes with her current beau (Greg Kinnear).  There is a granddaughter, some other locals like a tourist guide and the people of the zone.  Most of the film takes place on the same afternoon, with conversations held in the narrow town streets, at beautiful lookouts or rambling around the forest that surrounds the town. 

 The ending is a sunset.  Nothing much happens and some scenes seem completely superfluous.

At one point, Frankie is frogmarched into a local fan’s birthday and her absent look of being lost and bewildered more or less seems to sum up Huppert’s role in the entire film.

  It is nice to see Marisa Tomei and Jeremie Renier tries to make sense of his role but the speeches are artificial and embarrassing apart from being very much in the “rich people bored out of their brains mode”. It is really only Sintra and its beautiful geography deliciously caught by Rui Poças that saves the film.

  Oh, and characters and stories appear and vanish for no apparent reason.  A no basically but a mercifully short peripatetic film.

1 star plus

The Young Royals (series)

Light entertainment with a serious core for the middle of winter.  Young Royals is a sort of Gossip Girl meet Skam, set in a Swedish boarding school for the elite.  

Prince Wilhelm, second son of the Queen of Sweden has been sent there after issues at his previous school.  He struggles initially to fit in until he meets the friendly day-boy, Simon, a son of Venezuelan and Swedish parents.

  The big secret is that Wilhelm is gay. And inside the school not everyone is as friendly as they seem.  

We get loads of school intrigues and plenty of potentially stereotypical characters that somehow manage to avoid the worst of the clichés.  

August, second cousin of the prince is a fixer and indispensable aide who turns out to be full of secret sides, Sara, Simon’s sister claims to have Aspergers and is quite frontal and Felice, with her XXX bosom and matronly figure is a mixture of insecure girl and mother to the others.

  Adults are kept to the margins as in Skam and often seem to be dumber than they should be with the exception being Simon’s mum.  The strange mixture of traditional rituals and the funky gossipy soundtrack takes some getting used to but overall this is a light entertaining series.

  The serious questions underneath are worth discussing.  Can a royal be openly gay these days?

  What happens about succession? (The girls in the school immediately suggest surrogacy).  Lots in common with Love, Victor but the majority of the students here are much more closed and traditional than their American counterparts. 

 Nice to see acne, awkward bodies and shyness here.  Edvin Ryding as Wille and Omar Rudberg make a credible and sweet central couple.  Here’s hoping for series 2.

4 stars for freshness

The Disciple

Another Indian film, this one from the young director of Court, Chaitanya Tamhane.  Although I enjoyed slipping into its languid pace and appreciated the focus on raag music I wanted to be able to say that this is better than it actually is.  The main problem is probably that for film purposes it is rather slim narratively.  

We meet Sharad when he is 24 trying to carve out a career as a classical music singer of raags, which is an art form that requires much practice and an almost spiritual connection with the music each time you perform.

  Sharad has a teacher who is one of the few remaining disciples of a famous guru Maai who died in the 70s and is regarded as the most legendary of all raag singers.  Or so the myth goes. 

 The film takes us rather vaguely through the 16 or so years until Sharad reaches his 40s.  He goes in for contest after contest but doesn’t seem to get any better,

his own guru ages and ails and the world starts to turn towards star turns on The Voice India rather than retain an interest in the narrow and less popular classical field.  Sharad eventually realizes he is never going to make it and just how good are his idols anyway?

It’s a poignant, if almost sad movie and gives us a rare insight into the cultural changes occurring in India today. The cast is fine and Tamhane has his artistic touches but it is not a film to set you alight.  More to make you think.  And enjoy the music.

3 stars 2 plusses.

The Undoing (series)

Much discussed series in late 2020, I have finally got round to it.  For an American series set in New York it is a paean to foreign talent: Susanne Bier, the director is Danish, Hugh Grant and Noah Jupe are British,

Nicole Kidman Australian, Donald Sutherland, Canadian. 

 You get the picture.  David E Kelley, the writer is American and comes off a long list of hit shows.  Well, the quality is generally pretty high and the acting is generally excellent.  More on that anon. 

 I thought Susanne Bier paced it well until the last episode, which seems to be the general consensus and it has that European gait of not too fast and plenty of moments to think in the middle, like Grace’s walks.  There is an overuse of certain images. Henry is always watching news on his mobile or an I-pad and Franklin sits around in art galleries or his gallery like house.  Minor points but they come across as lazy.  Good winter photography.  

The story is initially intriguing and has some twists but seems to fizzle out in the home straight and the exciting chase ending adds nothing to what we already knew. There is definitely a gap in not providing a better climax and denouement.  

There are also some plot holes here and there and perhaps less attention to the victim than was deserved.  There were opportunities to complicate things with a character like Franklin, Grace’s father and I never really understood the attitude towards the portrayal of Detective Mendoza apart from the obvious idea that he was blinkered.

Thankfully, the failings in these areas are compensated for by one of Hugh Grant’s best performances ever – a charming, charismatic villain who has plenty to hide.

Nicole Kidman does a lot of metaphorical handwringing as the wife but as a clinical psychologist has an interesting role and performs well. Donald Sutherland as Dad, Noah Jupe as the son and

Matilda de Angelis all do very well but it is as the defence lawyer Haley that the second half of the series comes alive.  

Noma Dumezweni comes alive and attacks the role with gusto.  One of the more memorable characters in a while.

I enjoyed it but 6 episodes was a slight stretch.  See for the acting.

4 stars

From the Vine

This Canadian-Italian flight of fantasy is actually quite bad cinematographically.  But the buoyant mood and the beautiful Potenza landscape lifts it sufficiently to make the escapism quite acceptable on a grey damp winter’s day.  

The premise is that of a Canadian car company executive who quits his job from one day to the next and decides he has to visit his grandfather’s vineyard in the South of Italy last having been there as a child 45 years previously.

Based on a novel, we follow Marco as he installs himself in the immaculately maintained family home and sets about reviving the vineyard.  Without telling his wife or daughter who come hot footing it from Toronto to take him home and end up falling under the spell of the Italian sun.

  Clichés abound and it is best to suspend belief regarding many plot details such as expecting a permit to operate as a winemaker being granted almost instantly.  

Some plotlines like the imminent arrival of devastating rain vanish into thin air, characters from Marco’s past in Canada just happen to pass by Southern Italy and for some reason the man goes everywhere by train when he could clearly afford a car.  All very sloppy but the reward comes in the idea that someone is discovering what he really wants to do in life (and it’s probably much better for the environment than his current job).

Joe Pantoliano just manages to convince us as Marco while most of the rest of the cast suffer from hackneyed lines and one-dimensional characters.

  I forgot to mention that Cisterna obviously felt the need to add some magic realism hence talking vines and winking statues!!!

A film this bad shouldn’t actually be so tolerable to watch but there we are.

2 stars

Falling

This is Viggo Mortensen’s debut as a director.  It is a cathartic work, a sort of howl from the guts featuring a topic that is increasingly common but not often covered: the anger is the elderly suffering dementia or Alzheimers.

  Critics of the film say that the father in the movie is over-the-top, constantly angry and abusive and forever railing at all around him, especially his family.  As such they claim it is exaggerated and not credible in a movie.  Anyone who has lived with family that have reached this state will deny the exaggeration.  This is what can happen.  People who are manageable or mild in earlier life become monsters as they age and make it very hard for the family to continue loving and caring for them.

The role of Willis in this film is a gift for 80-year-old actor Lance Henricksen.  He has a great time swearing, exploding and lashing out and it is a highly convincing performance.  As a younger man he was a mean type

and this meanness has become pronounced in time.  Some say that son John (Viggo Mortensen) and daughter Sarah (Laura Linney)

are passive in the face of this abuse but it displays the love and compassion of a family who believe they have responsibilities as children despite the mistreatment.  The fact that John is gay and lives with his husband and an adopted Latino daughter is more grist for Willis’s homophobic mill

and he is also highly critical of Sarah’s husband and children.  What’s more he has seen off two loving women

who could not take the treatment he dished out.

Mortensen directs well though possible over relies on flashbacks and while the climax is a few minutes from the end, the last few minutes are quite bizarre.  Nevertheless, despite the heavy subject matter it is a film that is watchable, intelligent and possesses some moving scenes which hint at what life in that state must be like.  Acting and photography are very solid.

4 stars

Martin Eden

For about two thirds of this film I felt I was watching a sort of new classic in the sense that this adaptation of the Jack London novel shifted from California to Naples and located in a sort of vague time band ranging from the 19^th century to today somehow melded all these elements into a satisfying and coherent whole.

  Certainly the vision of Pietro Marcello, director is an ambitious one.  He takes his lead character Martin Eden and plants him in the history of Italy over the last century or so and displays his struggle to become an accepted writer, having left school at 11 to go to sea.  

By the end of his life he is rich, about to embark on a book tour of the US and also profoundly upset and mentally afflicted by his experience.  The core of the story and the incentive for his rise is initially the desire to win the heart of a young woman (Jessica Cressy) who belongs to a bourgeois class.

  Martin’s lack of “education” or “manners” does not bode well with the family though they are willing to give him a lift in life, just not the hand of their daughter in marriage.  Stubbornly, Martin wishes to go it alone and ends up being taken in by a widow (Carmen Pommella) in the country who provides him with the base to start writing.

He then meets Russ Brissenden (Carlo Cercchi),

a journalist and socialist who becomes a sort of mentor and opens his eyes to the slavery in the world, even in the unions which purport to be fighting that.

So, there is a strong focus on the difficulty of moving out of one’s class, a universal theme even today when globalization does facilitate social movement. Eden explores the fact that slavery could be the natural order of things and that we are never truly free and yet his reverence for the sea suggests he finds his freedom best when close to the sea.

The two main features that distinguish this movie are: the strong central performance by Luca Marinelli

who conveys the stages in his life and the uniqueness of Eden as a person very well.  Secondly the choices of the director as to how to film the movie.  In order to cast a sort of fog over specific time much of the film is shot in 16mm and seems to be an old movie which means that he can insert shots in sepia which may be taken from old footage or news reels or may be newer.  

This collage effect gives us plenty to consider.  What do the inserts illustrate?  

Sometimes we have children dancing, the soundtrack of summery songs from France or Italy in the fifties, sometimes war footage or scenes of migration and at one moment we even see a group of Africans (refugees?) on the beach.  It is fascinating.

However, the rather rushed final third and a certain lack of focus there (Jack London died young) detract a little from the overall effect.

4 stars plus

The Cave

This 2019 documentary was Oscar-nominated and has been awarded prizes the world over.  I’m not sure that as a piece of film it is that wonderful but rather it is the mere fact that it was able to be made and the subject matter that it covers which gives rise to admiration.

  The film centres on a team of doctors and nurses in a hospital in Eastern Ghouta, Syria.  This town is adjacent to Damascus but as it was held by opponents to the regime it has been subject to bombing by national and international forces for several years and in the film we see that this has been going on from 2013 to 2018.  Dr Amani Ballour is just 30 years old and a pediatrician.  

She has been voted to be the administrative head of a hospital that has most of its upper floors bombed out and has had to resort to going underground in a series of tunnels and rooms to be able to continue serving the local people, many of whom have been injured in the blasts.

The film is an “in your face” pastiche of life in “The Cave” for years on end: the lack of medical supplies, the grave shortages of food, the constant threats of a bomb dropping as they here the jet fighters overhead (Syrian or Russian), the malnutrition of children, the senseless injuries and the difficulty of keeping one’s morale up.  

It’s a fairly messy narrative because life is like that and sometimes the editing is not always what you expect but director Feras Fayyad, who coordinated all of this from a distant location manages to convey life there to a tee, allowing us to feel how deadening it must be to see this as your only foreseeable future.  There are some lighter moments but mostly it is bleak and relentless, this struggle to save lives and keep the clinic going. Eventually they are evacuated to the north of Syria and several of the key medical figures have left the country, drained doubtless by the experience.

Dr Amani and her team deserve the Nobel Peace Prize for this and it seems shameful that all of us around the world are powerless to stop a government from committing these acts against its people and to stop the Russians (or whatever other foreign government is involved) from unleashing violence on innocent people.  

The argument always goes that the “terrorists” use the people as shields but the sensation here is that the people are abandoned and vulnerable and have been unforgivably left to die by their own government.  The UN has apparently categorized the attacks against Eastern Ghouta as war crimes but whether anything will result of that is unclear.

So, this film is an important document to support this resolution and to bring to our attention heroes such as Amani and Salim Namour, the classical music fan surgeon.

3 stars plus plus