The Young Royals (Series 2)

It seemed fitting to move on to this fantasy depiction of a Royal world, or more specifically, the school years of Crown Prince Wilhelm of Sweden at a private academy which resembles a Swiss finishing school.

As we saw in series 1, Wilhelm has discovered he is gay and his relationship with Simón, son of Latin immigrants, not only ruffles feathers because of the gender but also his social class.

Series 2 focuses largely on the rivalry between Wille, left as the sole heir when his older brother is killed in an accident, and his cousin August (Malte Gardinger), who is back-up heir and a nasty piece of work.  

Simon and Wille begin the series of 6 episodes distanced and it is only in the last 3 episodes that they come back together to give the series some of the magic it needs.  

Apart from that, we have Sara (Frida Argento), Simon’s sister joining the academy and she wreaks havoc wherever she goes and Simon has a potential new love interest in Marcus (Tommy Wattring), a local stablehand and odd job man.

It has to be said that the school with its veneer of tradition and then its freedom for the pupils is a bit of a farce but I guess that is so when your clients are rich and socially well-connected.   Nonetheless, the constant tension between these two factors also reflects the court and therefore the lives of the protagonists.  

As Wille, Edvin Ryding confirms his ability to squeeze nuances out of a tricky role, while Omar Rudberg continues to shine as Simon.  Most of the adults seem to be a bit slow (especially the Queen) although a new psychologist Wille is sent to shows a bit more sense than most.  The majority of the students continue to seem too old for the roles they are playing.

All in all, it is light entertainment, but a third series would need to move forward quite a bit from these enclosed parlour games to justify being watched.

3 stars

The Crown (Series 1)

Finally embarking on this series some years after its first appearance. I surely have little to add to all the publicity and hype it has received over the years so very much personal impressions here.

Overall, it is very well done in a BBC style of costume drama with pretty meticulous representations of the era and the events. Sometimes I felt that some storylines have been made more contiguous to help dramatic suspense and we can but wonder if some of the more intimate conversations actually took place at least the way they are played out here.

Claire Foy is excellent as Elizabeth and has that pinch of character that allowed her to be sovereign so successfully for so long. Matt Smith also does a very good job of Philip, a role that could easily be caricatured.

I could list a whole platoon of other fine performances but to settle on two: we have John Lithgow as Winston Churchill, possibly the best version ever and his best performance ever.  

Only Anthony Hopkins could match this.  Episode 9 when he finally caves in to age and resigns is my highlight of this series and his dialogues with the Queen, with his portrait artist and with his wife are superb.  Harriet Walter as Clemmie his wife also shines in this episode after being much more in the shadows previously.

Apart from the Queen’s dealings with the government, the main issues in this series are the illness and death of her father George and the ongoing and thwarted romance between sister Margaret and household aide Peter Townsend.

A sober foreshadowing of Charles and his romances in the future.  

Vanessa Kirby as Margaret is an actress I’m warming to, while I do not find the Queen Mother as played by Victoria Hamilton very fulfilling.  She seems like a fairly bitchy non-entity with far more power than she deserves.

Good start but I will ease myself into it in doses.  It’s all too much to binge watch.

4 stars plus

Oh Lucy

Just what the doctor ordered – something a little light.  From Japan, this film introduces salarywoman Setsuko, unmarried and bored with her mundane life.  Suddenly, she gets the offer to take over her niece’s English classes and curiosity gets the better of her.  

The teacher, John, is something of an eccentric, a hugger and insisting that they take on an English name. 

Soon, she learns that John has returned to the US with none other than her niece and when Setsuko’s rather estranged sister Ayako comes around for help to find her, the two fly off to California.  

Mika has left John by this stage and after tracking down the teacher, the three of them set off on a type of road trip to San Diego to find her.

This film by debut Atsuko Hirayanagi is definitely fresh with a sureness of narrative pacing and an adept navigation in between the typical clichés and stereotypes (both Japanese and Western).  The director also surprises us with small touches of her own and leaves things natural and messy as life is.  These are the things that audiences will empathise with and enjoy.

Shinobu Terajima gives a subtle and complete performance as Setsuko/Lucy in a role that could easily be a caricature.  

Kaho Minami as her sister is spot on and there is a surprisingly layered performance by Josh Harnett who turns out to be a bit of a lost big boy.  

In fact all three and also Mika are somewhat damaged and lost in life.

Enjoyable and credible within its incredibility!

3 stars

Sergio y Serguei

This whimsical Cuban film achieves a great deal considering its low budget and other restrictions.  Set in 1991 it tells the tale of a ham radio operator in Havana who makes contact with a Soviet cosmonaut, who is left stranded in the MIR space station when the Soviet Union collapsed.  

In this fanciful scenario, the main hero Sergio (Tomás Cao) studied in Moscow and can speak Russian and he initiates a friendship with the cosmonaut Serguei (Hector Noas).  As a result of this, they end up finding a way though Sergio’s contact in the US, another radio ham Pete (Ron Perlman) how to bring the Russian back to Earth.

  But all this takes place against a backdrop of issues.  

Serguei’s family don’t have enough to eat in Russia because the government is short of money, Sergio has government spies monitoring his every move and is also neighbour of a man building a raft to sail to the US, a plan Sergio’s students also has. 

 As a professor in Marxist philosophy all this hits Sergio hard.  

Although director Ernesto Daranas tries to inject plenty of humour in here and does offer some nice allegorical touches like one of the spies floating into space, the pace of the film becomes more uneven when these issues are introduced.  

On the other hand, this backdrop gives the film a special substance.

Imaginative and easy to follow.  May Cuban cinema keep going despite all the trials!!

2 stars plus

My Policeman

The story is a cheerless one playing out leadenly over 4 decades.  Tom, a policeman meets another man to whom he is attracted but to keep public face he decides to marry a girl he has been hanging about with. In these late years of the 1950’s homosexuality is a crime and the legal consequences if caught are extreme.

40 years on we get a denouement of sorts after decades of separation and denial, the three meet up again. The film moves back and forth between then and now, all at the same plodding pace, all with the same rather dreary cadence.  The director Michael Grandage has clearly set out to make one of those ‘classic British sad stories’ bereft of passion and life but classy in the style of the BBC. It drags and never takes flight.  

This is despite having pop star Harry Styles as Tom in his younger guise. Linus Roache plays the older version while his wife is played by Emma Corrin as young and Gina McKee now.  

Completing the trio is David Dawson as young Patrick and Rupert Everett as the now wheelchair bound stroke victim.  The actors sort of do what they can.

Dawson and Corrin are probably the best but the predictable script doesn’t help,  Is Styles as bad as critics say or as good as the fans proclaim?  I personally thought he was the weak link, simply because he often delivers his lines as if it were all today when he is supposed to be in 1957.  

He’s not a complete disaster but he doesn’t add anything more than some flesh.  The best scene is when Marion confides in a woman colleague at work at how she suspects her husband is gay and how she will change it when the woman replies, you can’t and goes on to shock Marion even further by revealing herself as lesbian.

The film never really brings Britain to account for these sad and unforgivable attitudes of a time past when not only sexism but also racism was rampant nor does it satisfyingly explain or deal with the pains these characters have been carrying around for so long. It’s all put down to stiff upper lips!  Frustrating because it is a good topic but we’ve seen this done more engagingly and sensitively many times before.

2 stars just

It Must Be Heaven

Elia Suleiman is a Palestinian filmmaker whose view of the world mixes humour and small often contradictory details.  In this unusual almost absurd film, he shows us scenes from his hometown Nazareth, from Paris and from New York, capturing an essence of sorts. 

 Some say he is commenting on the Palestine situation and while it gets a mention, via a Tarot reading principally, you have to infer things from his choice of images.  

Nazareth comes across as simple, almost tribal, old-fashioned with thieving neighbours, unhappy customers, ´street gangs´ and rituals.  

All quite underdeveloped. Paris seems super organized, bureaucratic, clean and safe but this is where the absurd Jacques Tati nature comes out – the ´battles´over deckchairs in the park and the skating policemen.

  Paris is also old, full of architecture alluding to its past and the military hint present in the form of tanks and air force fly pasts.  New York is more human in the sense of meetings: the taxi driver thrilled to be carrying a Palestinian, the tarot card reader, Gael Garcia Bernal and the meeting with a film industry rep.

  There are angels in the park and a security guard in the airport who allows Suleiman to make magic with his baton.  

The good thing about the film is that you never know what is coming up next, its most intriguing.  Suleiman is a calm central focus almost bemused by the world around him.  

Whether that makes it good cinema is harder to say.  I quite enjoyed it but enough was enough without perhaps a clearer less whimsical optic.

3 stars

Argentina 1985

Very solid Argentine depiction of the 1985 trials of members of the military junta. 

 Directed by Santiago Mitre, the film follows the work of Julio Cesar Strassera, the prosecutor who had to gather together a team of young inexperienced investigators to get evidence and testimony of the genocide committed by the military.  

We see the pressure they were under both for time and with threats from those in society who did not agree with their actions.  The film then shows the trial and reports on the sentences given.

Ricardo Darín composes another excellent character as the unprepossessing Strassera who himself was accused of doing nothing during the dictatorship.  

Peter Lanzani also shines as up and coming lawyer Luis Moreno Ocampo who has gone on to have an international career in human rights law.  

Alejandra Fleichner as Strassera’s wife and Laura Paredes as a victim who gives testimony also deserve a mention.

  So too, the screenplay by Mitre, Mariano Llinás and Martin Mauregui.

This film won’t go down as being innovative but is a correct and sensitive portrayal of legal actions that took courage and remind us that in a healthy democracy, the judicial institutions must be able to perform their duties independently and well.  

Although we might feel that this is yet another film on the same era and topic from Argentina, you can never have too many to remind people how easy it is for certain groups to suspend or distort the performance of justice in a country and the respect for human rights.

4 stars plus

Loving Adults

Netflix feature from Denmark that is strictly played by the book.  It’s a crime thriller that emerges out of an infidelity and segues into one wrong act after another.  Rather than delve into characterisations the film seems mainly interested in showing the mechanisms used to murder and then cover one’s tracks. 

 So, there is limited interest, surprise or intrigue.

That said, the technical side is professional and the actors do the best they can with the rather predictable roles: Dar Salim as Christian, the wandering husband and Sonja Richter as the mad wife.  

Notice how both have strange little bird-like walks! There is a son, whose role is painted in and the lover who is largely a sketch.  

Oddly enough the narrative driver is the detective on the case, recounting the investigation to his daughter years later just before she gets married – supposedly to make her think twice about what she’s letting herself in for.  

No great merit here from Barbara Topsoe Rothenburg and crew but not a disaster either.

2 stars

Three Thousand Years of Longing

Lots to like about this latest and somewhat unusual movie by George Miller and yet it never quite comes together into the magical experience it could have been.

Alithea, a narratologist is in Istanbul for a conference on storytelling when she buys a small glass bottle in the bazaar.  

Lo and beholds, she uncorks a genie (or djinn) who wants to grant her three wishes and tell her his life story into the bargain.  

Two thirds of the film are flashbacks to memorable moments in his life, when he was let out of the bottle and not lying underground or under the sea for centuries.  We see sultans and suleymans, imprisoned wives and scheming mothers.  

Lots of CGI scenes such as bottles that melt and incorporate people or objects before being reconstituted.  Alithea is fascinated of course.  The time comes for her to make a wish and at the beginning she says she has no wishes but eventually one or two come and have an effect on her and the relationship she has with the djinn.

It is a film about telling stories and about the limits we put on ourselves and our imagination.

But for all the charming images and the solid acting of Tilda Swinton as Alithea and Idris Elba as the djinn, there is a lack of progression and a lack of the spice that would make this really special.  It almost seems flat at times even if you want to like it simply for being different.

3 stars 2 plusses