Empire of Light

This Sam Mendes written and directed film, supposedly a paean to the cinema has provoked scathing reviews from many critics who have labelled it a mess and been better supported by the public.  Set in Margate in the early 1980’s, the film centres on Hilary Small, a woman with mental issues who is duty manager at the local cinema, the rather grand Empire.

Apart from pleasuring the manager, Ellis (Colin Firth), a mean-minded individual, she falls in love with a new young employee, Stephen, a black youth who wants to go to university but is having obstacles.

It’s clearly a love affair that can’t last but in a reflection of Causeway, it’s about two people seeking some sort of solace in each other in a context which has given them each a bad hand.

Hilary has a chip on her shoulder about the way she has been treated by men in her life but how much of it is increased by her schizophrenia or bipolar condition we don’t know. Part of the film focuses on that and features a massive Hilary melt-down during a gala screening of Chariots of Fire.  

Olivia Colman in a both nuanced and grandstanding performance handles this scene with relish.  

On Stephen’s side, the rise of the National Front and an increased public racism is making his life a challenge, despite Hilary encouraging him to go for his dreams.  Micheal Ward does a good job in this role, complementing la Colman in her scenes.  

And Toby Jones as Norman, the projectionist, offers his insights into the marvels of film and the healing power of cinema to represent the third major theme here.  

Yes, there is a mess here in the sense that things are not neat or symmetrical.  Yet that perhaps better reflects life.  Messy, unpredictable and yet for learning.  Roger Deakins provides superb camerawork, capturing a time and place with perhaps more luminosity than it deserves.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Rose bring us a strong soundtrack too and it is arguable that Mendes gets good performances out of his actors. The weak link seems to be his screenplay which doesn’t always follow the logic we would expect.  Regardless of the flaws I enjoyed the film and especially appreciated watching Colman who is undoubtedly the tops of her generation.

4 stars

After Yang

I really liked Kogonada’s first film Columbus and he doesn’t disappoint here with After Yang.  The mood is strangely the same but the subject matter is very different.  Jake (Colin Farrell) is a father of a family with his partner (Jodie Turner Smith, Nubian goddess) and his daughter Mica who is of Asian descent.  

There is a 4^th member, Yang (Justin H Min) who is an adult humanoid, bought to look after Mica and connect her with her Asian heritage. In this period set sometime this century, there are humans, clones and these bots which appear human but have computer minds and mechanical body parts deep inside.  

Yang has a critical malfunction and Jake takes him to be fixed but this is no easy task partly because it seems his papers are not completely in order.  

Eventually, this leads him to a technological museum where the curator played by Sarita Choudhury is interested in having Yang for his parts.  Yang’s memory is extracted and Jake is able to access it and discover far more about his “son”, including a connection with a young blonde woman (Haley Lu Richardson).  

But bots are not supposed to have feelings!

Kogonada explores all this in a relaxed style (yet another languidly paced film), creating a highly believable future in which technology and humans live intertwined, where Siri like audio commands are the norm and where Whatsapp calls are now by huge holographic images.  

Not a lot may happen in the film but we are intrigued to find out more thanks to the director’s way of telling a story.  Benjamin Loeb creates almost blurry futuristic images to contrast with clear scenes of nature and Aska Matsumiya has produced a very apt soundtrack.  As a dramatic actor, Farrell is having a good year and convincing more and more. 

All in all, a very intelligent exploration of life a couple of decades down the track.

4 stars plus

Causeway

This film squeaked an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor in the form of Bryan Tyree Henry, has seen the lead performance of Jennifer Lawrence largely ignored and has not been much of a success otherwise.

Let’s be frank, it’s a small film, largely a two-parter, a psychological study of two “losers” who somehow get together as friends and help each other along.  All set in the depressed downside of New Orleans.

Lawrence is a war veteran and engineer who served in Afghanistan and who suffered brain damage in an explosion when her convoy was attacked there.  We see her in recuperation at the very beginning, learning to use motor skills again and do things for herself.  Somewhat remarkably, she suddenly recovers to be driving a car and moving home but the psychological trauma of the event remains.

And given that she is not best pleased to be back in her childhood home with a distant difficult mother (Linda Emond), she dreams of returning to the forces. We see a lot of the character silently coming to grips with the new reality.  

A chance meeting with James, a garage owner, when she hands the family truck in for repairs leads to them slowly becoming friends – no strings attached, no expectations and slowly they build a friendship.  Although they do have a disagreement at one point, the film lacks much dramatic tension which makes it feel all rather slow and drifty.  

Nonetheless, it is a chance to see the very able Henry and the excellent Lawrence at work.  I was very impressed by her pared down but somehow deep performance that some say is her best in years.  If so, I can’t quite get why she got no accolades for it.  This film is a debut for Lila Neugebauer and shows promise but there’s not really enough here to get excited about.

3 stars

Glasshouse

An unusual South African dystopia film that has its merits and would be a good film to study in a course but probably not one I’d wish to see again. It concerns a family of mother, son and three daughters who are living in a Victorian conservatory holed up against a dangerous world which has been destroyed by the Shred, a deadly virus that erases people’s memories.  

Inside the glasshouse, the family grow their own food, boil down any dead bodies that come their way and try to keep knowledge and memory alive in this post-apocalyptic world.  

Mother (Adrienne Pierce) is the authoritarian cautious figure and her 2^nd daughter Evie (Anja Taljaard)

follows in her footsteps.  Older daughter Bee (Jessica Alexander) is a more romantic dreamy type who lets a stranger (Hilton Pelser) into the compound.  

Daisy is very young and the innocent questionner while son Gabe (Brent Vermeulen) has been affected by the Shred and is like a baby in a man’s body.

The arrival of the stranger provokes questions: Could it be long-lost brother Luca who left the glasshouse some time ago?  Could it be an infiltrator?  What effect does he have on the girls, especially Bee who falls in love with him.

After a slowish languid start, the climax ratchets up the tension somewhat (all within an almost soporific pace) and acts of violence and love occur to change things forever.  

The actions however are secondary to the themes of the film – memory, ways to remember through routines, rituals and story-telling and the suggestion that the stories we tell are designed to give meaning to our lives and circumstances, not to describe reality.

Plenty to unpack here.  Kelsey Egan has created a strange Victorian world with a disquieting atmosphere, seemingly childlike and yet menacing at the same time.  Typical of a fairytale.  Good acting and music by all and Emma Lungiswa de Wet accompanies Egan in writing the tight script.  

Not entirely my cup of tea but clearly the work of a thoughtful talented new film maker.

3 stars plus

Matthias & Maxime

Xavier Dolan returns with this film that was filmed before the pandemic.  Somewhat less strident than some of his work.  It is the story of two weeks or so in the relationship of two childhood friends, Matthias and Maxime.  

Matthias (Gabriel D’Almeida Freitas) is a law graduate beginning to climb the corporate ladder.  He is straight and has a supportive girlfriend.  He is perhaps tiring of his childhood group of friends who are loud and love playing word games.

Maxime (Xavier Dolan himself) is looking after his addict mother (the wonderful Anne Dorval)

but about to leave for Australia for a year where he plans to travel and work in whatever job he can find.  Maxime is gay and alone, perhaps somewhat inhibited by a port wine birthmark on his face.

The two friends will miss each other but the intensity of this separation is heightened when the two are press-ganged into filming a scene for a friend’s sister who is making a film for her film school.  The scene involves them kissing and this basically shakes Matt’s foundations.  He denies it at first but slowly realizes at an almost subconscious level that he has deeper feelings for Maxime.  The film covers this period, the farewell events and arrangements and Matt’s increasingly awkward behaviour. 

Dolan includes a lot in his films.  There are the noisy messy meetings with friends where sometimes the wrong things are said but the affection is clear.  There are Maxime’s struggles to handle his very difficult mother.  Maxime is her legal guardian and about to hand this role over to his aunt.  

Matt’s mother (Micheline Bernard) is like a second mother to Maxime and there are some lovely scenes with her and then there is the arrival of an English speaking colleague (Harris Dickinson,

very good) in Matt’s office who also shows Matt a different perspective on life.

Sometimes Dolan includes odd scenes, road lines passing underneath a car but he also has an eye for a good frame (several scenes are viewed through windows).

Finally, a word about Xavier Dolan, the actor.  Perhaps critics have focused more on him as a director here but I found his performance to be varied, rich and entirely credible.  He really is a talented actor.  And he is well accompanied here too.  This may not be his best film but I found it authentic and with plenty to enjoy.

4 stars

La Casa de las Flores (series 1)

Successful Mexican series from 2018 and first of at least 3.  A blend of telenovela and comedy it is led by famous local actress Veronica Castro, who plays Virginia De la Mora, the matronly head of  family and a floral business.  

The series begins with the suicide of a woman who hangs herself in the shop and turns out to be the long term lover of Virginia’s husband Ernesto. This unleashes a never-ending chain of events, some realistic, some fantastic and all involving the De La Mora family.

The oldest daughter Paulina, played by Cecilia Suarez with unusual diction is the family problem solver, generous and vengeful at the same time.  

She has an ex-husband turned transsexual (Paco Leon, excellent) in Madrid and a teenage son.

Elena (Aislinn Derbez) has returned from the US with a fiancé in tow but soon gets distracted in other ways and Julian (Dario Yazbek Bernal), the spoilt younger son is busy bedding all and sundry, coming out of the closet and going back in and baring his butt whenever he can.  

His main gay squeeze is the family accountant Diego. Ernesto (Arturo Rios) has a daughter by his lover and an adult stepson and these are all involved too.

The deceased ran a drag night club called La Casa de las Flores just like the florist so there is plenty of room for contrast and confusion here.

Basically the series is about morals.  Old-fashioned moral standards are being challenged every step of the way by new fashions, thereby reflecting two sides of Mexico’s current scene.  Some of the stories are more credible than others and some work more successfully as comedy than others.  I found the love scenes of pent-up gossipy friend of the family, Carmela less than authentic and the interventions of the maid Delia never quite convince in her role as a sort of Shakespearian fool.  At other moments the drug situation rears its head as Virginia decides to start her own marijuana business.

So lots of material thrown at us.  It’s never boring but as colourful as it is I felt that it fell well short of a Betty La Fea, the legendary Colombian comic novela that was so well constructed at all levels.

I notice that season 2 of this show has lost fans, perhaps because of Veronica Castro’s absence (not that she wowed me) and perhaps because the novelty of this chaotic family will quickly wear off.

Entertaining up to a point.

3 stars plus

Selena Gomez: My mind and me

I knew little about Gomez before watching this documentary, mainly that she was a pop star and actress graduated from the Disney school where she started at 7 and that in recent years she had had health issues.

Of these latter points we get to know a lot more during this film.  As it turns out one of the main aims of the film is for Selena to talk about her mental health issues (she was diagnosed bipolar as well as having lupus and a kidney transplant) so that she can destigmatize mental illness and help people reach out for help.  

Her social awareness – she has a foundation to promote mental health education in schools – and her donations to a school in Kenya must be lauded and she does seem to have an empathy with her fans.

Apart from a haunting new song on this very subject, there is not much other music here.  We see a brief part of a concert tour she had to abandon and quite a bit of her looking fed up in mindless promotional interviews.  

There are also several scenes returning to her Texas hometown and the simple life among working class neighbourhoods there.  We do not get anything much on her romance with Justin Bieber nor her acting and TV career.

This curation and focus on the mental issues she has had which don’t really go much beyond Selena explaining she often feels unworthy seems rather too pat at times and there are clearly aspects of it all that she does not wish to reveal.  So, one side is the courage she is showing to bring this topic into the open, the other is that it almost seems like a selling point.

Alex Keshishian has made star documentaries before, notably that of Madonna – Truth or Dare. This is a little different but won’t really convince me to follow this star, just perhaps hold her in higher esteem for her social work.

3 stars (just)

Undine

German director Christian Petzold is held in high regard and has picked up numerous awards for films like Phoenix and Transit.  I am still not convinced that he moves beyond my category of interesting and into something better.  

Undine is based on a local legend about mermaids or ondines who can marry mortals and live in a human body but if their lover falls out of love with them they must kill the man.  

In this film we have a mysterious central character Undine Wibeau (Paula Beer) who is a historian, a solitary and almost robotic woman who has a great affinity with water.  At the beginning of the film her boyfriend Johannes (Jacob Matchenz) is leaving her and she repeats her threat to kill him if he does.  Soon after in a fortuitous magically realistic scene she falls in love with an industrial diver Christoph (Frank Rogowski) and the two kiss in the debris of an enormous fish tank that explodes. 

 Their relationship goes ahead full steam and she visits the place where he works – a pond near Wuppertal. 

 The rest of the time she gives incredibly boring guided tours of models of the city of Berlin and its growth in a Berlin museum.  

Somehow Petzold wants us to connect this urban growth and man fashioning his environment to his needs to the story he is telling which is a sort of romance cum murder mystery. 

UNDINE Still 2

 Christoph seems to die but doesn’t, Johannes meets an ugly fate, Undine disappears and is spotted again and somehow by the end of the film the elements are in slightly different spaces.  

Definitely different and including some memorable scenes but I wouldn’t say I totally engaged with it.  Paula Beer is luminous and mysterious as Undine and the best thing about the film.  

I’ve never been totally sold on Rogowski who is a much-admired German actor and the rest of the cast are adequate.  Hans Fromm gives us appropriate camerawork and the music, especially Bach is haunting.  My stars are for the novelty of the work and for Beer.

3 stars

Rare Beasts

Billie Piper is a pop star, TV actress and theatre performer in the UK who directs her first film here, a sort of anti-rom com.  She plays Mandy, a single mother with a 7 year-old Larch (Toby Woolf) full of tics.  Mandy is unsure of herself and works in a creative agency for TV where she meets Pete (Leo Bill) , who she starts going out with.  

As Mandy tries to find and assert her feminism, Pete is from a very Christian family and a bit of a cynical male traditionalist.  And yet the relationship advances ….for a while.  Mandy’s mum played by Kerry Fox has cancer and is permanently depressed, her feckless father (David Thewlis) hangs around getting nowhere and a few other characters appear and disappear. Some scenes are memorable and well-done, other parts seem out of synch but maybe this and the playful use of colour are part of the gimmick.  There is also a theatrical nature to some scenes which reflects Piper’s history on the boards.

I can’t say that I felt much either for or against this film. Piper shows she can think outside the box and has fun tearing down our expectations of the romantic comedy.  But the characters are not especially likeable and some directorial choices don’t really impress.

2 stars plus

The Fabelmans

Steven Spielberg’s latest which is semi-autobiographical.  It’s all about the son of a Jewish family that moves from New York to Arizona to California as Sam, the boy becomes fascinated by movies and by making films.

Much of this film relates to what he realizes about the world from shooting home-made movies and right up to the end when he gets some good advice from John Ford (David Lynch in a pleasant surprise) in Hollywood as he seeks his first job.

  Another main theme is the relationship with his mother Mitzi (the versatile and convincing Michelle Williams). 

 Sam (Gabriel LaBelle) is closest to his mother but is floored when he discovers that Mitzi, a frustrated concert pianist, is more in love with Benny (Seth Rogen),

Dad’s best friend and not her husband Burt (Paul Dano) who is generous and attentive.  

The third main feature is a period at High School in California when Sam discovers antisemitism and has to deal with white jocks bullying him.  Almost inevitably this leads to a love affair with a Christian girl who wants to convert him.

As you can see, there is plenty of material here.  The first half of Sam as a boy and up to when he discovers his mother’s ‘infidelity’ is the most satisfying and includes a brief but powerful appearance from Judd Hirsch as Uncle Boris.

I felt the second half was less compelling.  

The whole sequence in the school is more of a memory of rites of passage and adolescent challenges and is perhaps trying to say too much.  The departure of Mitzi back to Arizona in the last quarter also removes a big figure from the screen.  

Spielberg is a huge talent and is able to layer this story with interesting shades.  

But does that lift this above Licorice Pizza and Once upon a Time in Hollywood as a nostalgia piece?  I’m not at all sure.  

I enjoyed it a lot though I felt Spielberg was getting things off his chest rather than giving us a film with a major message.

4 stars plus