Memoria

This is a cinematic experience.  To make a judgement about whether it is a great film is hard because it is so different to the usual form of movies, but this is typical of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. 

In his first film outside Thailand, Weerasethakul returns to his usual themes: death, the connection between living humans and the dead or other dimensions, etc.  This time the location is Colombia.

Tilda Swinton (co-producer) plays Jessica, a Scottish woman who we perceive lives in Medellin and works with flowers. But in this movie, she is first scene visiting her ill sister in Bogotá – an archaeologist working on a dig involving an ancient tribe.  But this is not the main point of the sketchy plot.  Jessica has started hearing sounds, a sort of heavy thud with a bit of a metallic edge.  These sounds are not heard by others and lead Jessica to explore what might cause them.  

She visits Hernán, a sound engineer, who manages to recreate the sound. Just as they are getting closer, he disappears. She spends some time with the topic of archaeology and visits galleries and museums.  

She also consults books on fungi, presumably related to her business.  But then she ends up in a small rural town where she meets another man called Hernán, older than the first, who claims that he absorbs and retains all memories.  

They spend a long time together and Jessica realizes that she can access not only her past memories via sounds but also those of humankind.  Then there is a strange twist towards the end.

To appreciate this trance-like meditative film, you have to relax and be open to flowing with it, wherever it goes.  There are many long scenes with little action but small details that appear if you have the patience to wait.  

In a way, as spectators, we share Jessica’s search as if we were accompanying her. We may never know exactly what Weerasethakul wants us to believe but in some ways our minds are opened by the fact of our testing out possible hypotheses.

I found this “experience” fascinating, helped by Tilda Swinton’s sensitive and intelligent interpretation and the constant unexpected scenes the director gives us.  As each scene unfolds, you ask yourself what you should take from it and how it adds to the story.  

This technique is not for everyone but in this particular film of the Thai director the need for the spectator to interact in some way with the story is more and more obvious.  Certainly one of the more original films this year.

4 stars 2 ++

The Phantom of the Open

Fitting very clearly in the sub-genre of British people doing weird things and somehow getting away with it, this movie is about one Maurice Flitcroft, a crane operator at a shipyard in Northern England who, without having ever played a round of golf, enters the British Open in 1976 and scores the worst ever round.  

The story doesn’t stop there, encouraged by the press and the public support of him as an underdog, he enters the open again under a different name and eventually gets invited to a tournament in Michigan named after him (only the Americans could do this part!).  

Among all that we see his family life with long-suffering wife Jean (Sally Hawkins) who sees his good side, his rather skeptical step-son Mike and the twins who end up being international champion disco dancers and seem right wallies.  

The message is ´follow your dreams´ and the director Craig Roberts even adds in a moony Peter-Pan like scene at one point.

The major feature of this film is Mark Rylance as Maurice.  Classical actor, Oscar winner and knight, he manages to convey a character that appears a bit stupid a la Forrest Gump but is rooted in some important values and has a general disdain for the pompous authorities like Golf Club officials.  

Rylance makes Maurice a credible and at times even admirable character in spite of what reality was probably like.

So, a mixed bag of a film.  Some of the typical British understatement, some genuine wit, some clichés and some excellent acting.  Sally Hawkins does what she can in a fairly thankless role!

I wouldn’t want to see it again but there was enough in here to save it from oblivion.

2 stars plus

Circumstance

Going back a decade here to a film set in Iran, (filmed in Lebanon) by an Iranian-American filmmaker Maryam Keshavarz who wanted to tell the tale of a clandestine love affair between friends in Tehran.  The friends are Ataleh (Nikohl Boosheri) and Shireen (Sarah Kazemy).  

But this is dogmatically religious Iran and their love is limited to intimate moments at home and underground parties where alcohol, drugs and sex rule until the morality police swoop down.

Ataleh’s family life is complex too.  Her father (Soheil Parsa) is part of the establishment but has carved out a space for his family, mother (Nasrin Pakkho) is an overworked surgeon and then there is brother Mehran (Reza Sixo Safai) who has been in rehab for drugs and is now veering across to the other side of the religious right.  

To the extent that he has installed cameras throughout the house to spy on his own family.  For much of the film, creepy Mehran is the most interesting character in that he replicates the Iranian state inside the family – dictating what the others can and can’t do.  Conflicted father is also interesting, how he adapts and uses connections and money to avoid scandal and move forward.  Perhaps these characters are somewhat overdone but they doubtless represent examples of common behaviour in this sort of society.  

To add a lesbian relationship to all that is perhaps almost sinking the ship for a new film maker but despite its rough edges and some ill-explained inclusions (the dubbing of the Harvey Milk scenes and the foot fetish taxi driver), Keshavarz largely gets away with it and gives us a story that we are curious about. It was only in the last part that I really felt engaged with the girl’s story, as the noose tightens around their future.

A mention must be made of the fact that a film of such ´honesty´ could not be made in Iran and apparently had to be smuggled out of Lebanon itself so kudos for the guts to bring this to the screen.  Not perfect but a valuable addition to depictions on these complicated religious societies.  

Acting generally sound and I especially liked Soheil Parsa as the conflicted Dad.

3 stars

The Worst Person in the World

Films like this don’t come along everyday.  A sort of psychological portrait of a generation but focused on one 29 year-old woman, with elements of romantic comedy and tragedy thrown in, The Worst Person is wrapped in a fresh humour that makes it different and so much more authentic seeming than much on offer today.

Joachim Trier shows us Julie (Renate Reinsve), an attractive young woman who is drifting from one course of study to another at university and from one relationship to another, never quite knowing what she wants.  

In this movie we see 4 years of her life with much of it involving her relationship with Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), a successful graphic artist and with Eivind (Herbert Nordrume) who she meets when she crashes a party.  

In between all of that are smaller episodes with family, the debate about whether she wants to be a parent, more lack of definition as to her career and so on.  

Trier handles comedy, romance and tragedy with an admirable lightness, helped by an intelligent and unpredictable script and by a remarkable performance by Reinsve who won Best Actress at Cannes for this.  She is a transparent, luminous, confused and authentic character that is easy to identify with.

  Danielsen Lie also shines in a less sympathetic role but one in which he digs deep for eternal truths.

  Kasper Tuxen gives us Oslo as the setting, and the long twilights or early nights of this Nordic capital.

  He plays a lot with light and shade but there is a cleanness to the image and a lack of obviousness to the angles which please.  

One set piece in which Julie runs across town to her love while the rest of Oslo stands still is compelling and makes up a quartet of excellent scenes dotted around the film:

Julie and Eivind’s meeting, a night on magic mushrooms and a long chat between Julie and Aksel towards the end which will all remain in the mind for a long time.  Good music from Ola Flottum and a well-chosen soundtrack of songs and, as I said before, a script by Trier and Eskil Vogt that keeps your attention throughout.  A very satisfying watch.

5 stars

Love Victor (series 3)

Disney series based on a film – Love, Simon about a teenager coming out at high school and learning how to navigate in the world when his sexuality is public knowledge.

This is the third and last series and it has become very formulaic.  It was always on the slightly corny side despite the good intentions and now it has become really quite saccharine.  Most of this series revolves around couples breaking up and making up and few serious issues are allowed to bloom, in fact many potentially interesting plot conflicts are resolved magically without any explanation or discussion. 

 For that reason one of the most interesting characters is Rahim, the gay Muslim with a Queer Eye profile and we see a bit of the bullying he suffers and his attitudes but it is all kept very light.

Victor is too nice for words and his big moment comes when he gives a speech when receiving a gay award.  Otherwise, he is pulled between Benji,

his ex, who still has drinking problems and a lack of character.  A little is made of Victor being his support but not enough. 

 Victor has a new love interest Nick and they seem to get down to some heavy sex but the production chickens out and says they didn’t go all the way, which also occurs with some other relationships.  Puritanical USA in action and the opposite extreme to Euphoria.  

Lake is now a lesbian but it seems unconvincing, Felix, who is quite the funniest of the cast is trying to get in Pilar’s pants which has the Salazar parents up in arms.  Pilar comes out as the second most interesting character this season but ends up fading out in the last episodes.  

Mia (and Andrew) are monumentally boring and all she wants is a family, which she now finds at a distance with the birth of a stepbrother.  A storyline with her mother is not allowed to advance and her father never really convinces.  

Finally, the Salazar parents Armando and Isa swing between nice and understanding and fundamentally religious and controlling – another unconvincing portrayal.

Some critics have suggested that the writers have become lazy and I have to agree.  Perhaps also because they have too many characters for 7 30-minute episodes.  I just ended up feeling it was all very unreal and made me think of many of the fantasy comedy series of the past.  Heartstopper has definitely taken over in the same category so perhaps just as well Love Victor reaches an end.

2 stars

The Lost City

Very much in the line of Romancing the Stone, which of course is 38 years old now, about a romance novelist who ends up living an adventure similar to those she writes about and more.  

Here, Loretta Sage (Sandra Bullock) is a burnt- out romance writer who ends up being kidnapped with her cover model (Channing Tatum) and taken to a tropical island where her kidnapper, the mean son of a publishing group (Daniel Radcliffe) wants to find some missing treasure.  

He believes that Loretta can decipher the symbols of an ancient civilization that left some parchments about this very thing.

Of course, it is all pretty much fantasy but it gives the directors, the Nees, the chance to engage in a romantic comedy as Loretta and Dash, her model, who previously showed disdain towards each other, start to come closer in the face of the adversities they face.  

Thankfully, Bullock and Tatum have chemistry and are well aware that it’s all a spoof and the directors move things along at a good pace so that the cheesy dialogue and the plot holes don’t attract so much attention.

Daniel Radcliffe is satisfactory as the villain but who shines is Brad Pitt in a cameo as a personal trainer and ex-mercenary type.  

Da´Vine Joy Randolph as Loretta’s manager also adds plenty in her role.

Light and pretty frothy, predictable but with some slapstick and digs at the genre, this is absolutely no classic but is a pleasant watch.

3 stars

Ali and Ava

Nice to see a film set in Bradford!  Ali and Ava, as it suggests, tells the tale of a romance between two people of different racial backgrounds in their middle ages.  It is not an easy experience as both have families that reject the idea but it is a lovely validation of the idea that love often finds us in the most unexpected ways and places.  

Ava (Claire Rushbrook) is a classroom assistant of Irish descent, who is a mother of 4 and has been previously married, the most recent to an abusive man.  Since then she threw herself back into studies and a career but is still a central figure to her kids who either live with her or locally.

  She has 5 grandchildren. Ali (Adeel Akhtar) is of Pakistani descent, married to a younger woman, Runa but separated from her even though they still live in the same house.  

Runa (Ellora Torchio) is getting on with her life but Ali is sort of stuck, in part concerned about family fallout if they admit that the marriage has ended.  

Ava and Ali meet because he chauffeurs a tenant’s student to the school Ava works at and a friendship soon emerges. They bond through music although their interests differ with Ava being a country and folk singer and Ali liking techno and punk among other things.

I liked the way director Clio Barnard showed the characters growing throughout the film and how the environment can be such a challenge.

It is a quiet movie, sometimes padded out with extra music and with a rather too neat ending but on the whole it has a good story to tell from the North of England today or indeed anywhere that has become a location for various different racial or religious cultures living side by side.

3 stars plus

Mare of Easttown (series)

I seldom give top marks for a film or series but having just been riveted by the great acting, incredible narration and terrific cohesion of the 7-part series Mare of Easttown, I happily award 5 stars to this excellent production.

Set in a small city in Pennsylvania, working class and shot in a drab winter, Mare… is the story of a police detective who is on the case of a murdered girl but whose efforts are being affected by the fact that she herself recently lost a son to suicide and as it is a small place knows pretty much all of the people involved in the new case.  

As the plot unfolds (even giving us twists in the last episode) we get underneath the skin of a troubled town full of people with secrets, with trauma, broken or damaged people including the children.

  Thanks to some pretty dry humour and some action, all this pain is bearable as we watch the efforts of at least some of the characters to come to terms with life and in some cases pull themselves out of the mud.  Others are not so lucky.

Kate Winslet has said that this has been the most challenging role she has ever played.  Such is her talent and work ethic that she succeeds completely.  She is totally credible as a detective whose life has always been in this Pennsylvanian town, we believe in all the struggles she has had.  She accompanies her script with all sorts of small touches: the way she scoffs a hot dog while also having an important conversation.

  There is so much detail in small physical acts that she shows helping the audience to identify with her.  The whole cast is also believable but among the equals I would single out Julianne Nicholson as her friend Lori,

Evan Peters as her colleague Colin,

Jean Peters as her mother Helen, Sosie Bacon as Carrie, mother of Mare’s grandchild, Enid Bailey as Dawn, cancer sufferer and mother of a missing girl, Deborah Hedwell as Colin’s mother.  

Nonetheless, Winslet, apart from being the star that she is, is on another planet.  This is a consummate performance.

Craig Zobel as director and Brad Ingelsby as the writer shine as well, sustaining various narrative threads at the same time and giving us a scan of US society today.  We may not have political input here but we see the effect of the neoliberal policies in society and we see the reluctance Americans have when confronting death and when being expected to process moments of grief.

A timely and very well-made series

5 stars

Yuli: the Carlos Acosta story

This reasonable interesting biopic traces the life and career of Cuban first dancer Carlos Acosta who became the first black dancer to dance Romeo with the English National Ballet and who has had an excellent dancing career before becoming director of the Birmingham Ballet. He was born in the early 70’s in Cuba to a poor numerous family with his father being a truckdriver.

When his athletic talent and flexibility suggested he could be a dancer, his father pushed and pushed a reluctant Carlos to study for this with the help of the often exasperated teachers as Carlos kept trying to escape. His father nicknamed him Yuli as the name of a warrior that would be his sport of guiding spirit.  Eventually, despite many hiccups including his father’s imprisonment and his sister’s mental health issues Carlos made it to grey rainy Britain and made a career and a permanent home there, always longing to be back in Havana.

So, it’s a film about overcoming the odds, about talent needs to be draen out through work and through having people who believe in you and what makes it very interesting is that Carlos resisted all this – he just wanted to stay near his family and play football.  

His father (Santiago Alfonso), the most interesting character keeps saying that it is a crime not to develop your talent.

The film is directed by Iciar Bollain, Spanish director and actress and the screenplay written by her husband Paul Laverty, who has worked a lot with Ken Loach.

It is an interesting blend of documentary and fiction.  Carlos Acosta plays his older self in the film and is recalling his life through a ballet he has composed and choreographed about it, so we get to see the real acted scene and then often a balletic version of it such as the time when his father beat him with a whip.  

The rest plays pretty much as a typical biopic with a delightful Edilson Manuel Olbera Nuñez playing his ten-year-old self and Keyvin Martinez taking the role as a late adolescent and young adult.  There is some great music by Alberto Iglesias and Alex Catalan captures the images of sunny poor Havana and rainy Britain well.

I wouldn’t rate it as a great film but it does give us an idea about a dancer I was unaware of and it does teach us some lessons on the way.  Like most biographies, some things could have been accentuated more or handled differently but I guess here we get the version Acosta wants to show us.

3 stars plus

Nasha Natasha

This documentary splices an exhausting tour Uruguayan singer Natalia Oreiro makes across Russia playing 12 concerts in 4 weeks during a Russian winter with excerpts from her TV and film work and family background. 

Oreiro has had an extraordinary success in some countries well away from South America such as Russia and Israel and is treated as a goddess there.  

Thanks to this film we get some idea of how her spunk and her humility serve as a role model to young Russian women who have lacked such models in their own culture.   Interviews with young Russian women who’ve grown up with Natalia and call her Natasha are enlightening and form the best part of this otherwise uneven film. 

 Her family background from a poor part of Montevideo is predictable enough and confirms that she always had the personality and drive to go far.  We get testimony from co-stars and family members and experts from hit shows like Muñeca Brava.

I found the tour footage less satisfactory.  There are some backstage scenes, plenty of travelling on planes and trains, a bit of the concerts and the meeting in the streets with fans.  

Yet, it’s all flung together a little haphazardly for my liking.  I believe the film was heavily edited from a first reel.  Moreover, it doesn’t help if you are not a great fan of her work – I actually prefer her work portraying Gilda and singing her music.

Martin Sastre, the director, who used her in a fictional film some years back, Miss Tacuarembó produces some nice scenes and gives us some sort of narrative but the flow and quality is not perhaps as good as it could have been. 

 At times it seems overly like a home movie that has not been well filmed. Nonetheless, we get some sense of who Oreiro is and why she is so important to many people even if it is not as full as bios of this type usually offer.

2 stars