All of us Strangers

As we reach the end of the first quarter of 2024, along comes a film that is so beautifully moving that it catapults into the lead for film of the year honours.  Andrew Haigh has brought us Weekend, Lean on Pete and 45 Years among others, all powerful portrayals of individuals against the odds.  Here, he presents Adam (Andrew Scott), a 42-year old writer living almost alone in a tower block in London.  He’s gay and battling writer’s block as his topic – the death of his parents in a car crash 30 years previously – is not going well.  

He meets Harry (Paul Mescal), resident in the same block, or rather, Harry inveigles his way into Adam’s life and very slowly a relationship develops.  

Paul Mescal in ALL OF US STRANGERS. Photo Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2023 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.

Concurrently, Adam is revisiting his childhood home in Croydon and in a twist of ghostdom or magic realism is meeting up again with his parents (at the age when they died).  They have 30 years to catch up.  

Mother (Claire Foy) is a sheltered suburban housewife and Father (Jamie Bell) is a bit of a man’s man.  

Adam tells them he is gay and recounts some details of his past and present.  It becomes apparent that he is a loner and has never really worked through their death in an accident.  A series of conversations both with his parents and with Harry function as a type of processing of this long-held grief and as a spark to move into the future, as seen in this tentative new relationship. 

Put this way, the film seems straightforward but it is not.  The dialogues are rich and unpredictable and the ghost element makes it hard to know exactly what is true and what is in his mind or dreams.

The acting, especially Andrew Scott is excellent and Scott conveys a loss and damaged adult with sublime naturalness and without pity.  

Jamie Ramsay’s photography captures the blurry interface between worlds well – one `dream`is a drug propelled visit to a nightclub and Emilie Lavienaise Farrouch gives us an excellent soundscreen of music and noises.

But most of all Haigh in his direction of this film and in adapting a Japanese novel for the screenplay brings us a deep honest work about grief, loss, openness and solitude with a central gay element factored in.

Claire Foy and Andrew Scott in ALL OF US STRANGERS. Photo Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2023 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.

A really quite lovely if rather melancholic experience which ends by showcasing The Power of Love by Frankie Goes to Hollywood and enhances the reputation of that excellent song.

5 stars

The Kind Words

An Israeli-Canadian production from 2015 that is a pleasant and easy family drama to watch.  It focuses on three siblings (Dorona, Netanel and Shai) who suffer the loss of their mother Yona (Levana Finkelstein) to cancer.  

After her death it emerges that their father is infertile and was not the biological father of his children.  Sasson Gabay is sympathetic in this role.  

This sets the children off on a quest to discover who and the key person is Aunt Rosa (Florence Bloch) who lives in Paris.  Rosa and Yona had been born in Algeria and fled to France when the civil war broke out.  

Yona had a lover in Algeria that the parents were keen to see her separated from, possibly as he was not Jewish or a pure Jew but this man Maurice followed her to France and so Yona was sent on to a kibbutz in Israel where she met the father of her children.  Except that every year she would return to France to see her family and possibly Maurice (Maurice Bénichou). 

 This is the puzzle the siblings try to solve first by visiting Paris and then Marseille and talking to people who knew something about those times.  Dorona (Rotem Zissman-Cohen) is the grumpy cynical sister undergoing issues of infertility herself and on the point of separating from her adoring husband Ricky (Tsahi Halevi).  

Netanel (Roy Assaf) has been bit by the orthodox bug having married a devout woman who is busy bearing children for him so any sense that he is not pure is a torment.  Shai (Assaf Ben-Shimon) has a child in Budapest but is bisexual and curious so he is the driving force behind the search.  

Shemi Zarhin wrote and directed the film effectively and allows us to ponder on family demands and customs in a modern world and family secrets.  Should they be revealed?

3 stars plus

May December

May December. (L to R) Natalie Portman as Elizabeth Berry and Julianne Moore as Gracie Atherton-Yoo in May December. Cr. Francois Duhamel / courtesy of Netflix

May December, Charles Melton as Joe Yoo. Cr. François Duhamel / Courtesy of Netflix

Todd Haynes directed movie that stars Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore.  Based on a real story in which a 36-year-old woman had an affair with a 13-year-old boy, went to prison for it and then later married the boy and had children with him.

Haynes transfers this to Savannah Georgia 20 years later.  Gracie (Moore) is a busy member of society with 3 kids of college age and is still married to her young man Joe (Charles Melton), who now breeds monarch butterflies and has some minor job.  

Gracie has a catering business whose customers support her through pity.  Along comes Elizabeth (Portman), a TV actress researching the role she is about to play, that of Gracie at the time she met Joe when he worked at a pet store she was managing.  Elizabeth seems the height of tact and appreciation but her questioning of the family, Gracie’s ex and the grown up children they had and other members of society seems to put the marriage under strain.  

Joe is now 37 and facing empty nest syndrome apart from actually beginning to question if this is what he really wanted.  In short he is starting to grow up.  Gracie is a control freak and perfectionist who can’t be easy to live with and her children all seem pretty keen to get away asap.

A slightly odd film in some ways as it is a psychological portrait of a family and the actress herself and not exactly plot driven.

Portman does a very convincing job in the lead, Moore is solid as always in a part that she has played before while Melton surprises in the quiet way he conveys all that is going on underneath. Samy Burch has received plaudits for his screenplay good but not wonderful.  Soap opera music fills the background to 90’s effect.

Watchable, professional but nothing out of this world.

3 stars plus

Titane

Cannes winner of the Gold Palm a couple of years ago.  Controversial. And yes, like nothing you’ve ever seen.  I watched the first twenty minutes and wanted to give up: a rampage of violence, sex with a car and fires, it all seemed like a shockploitation movie and although I have my reservations and would not wish to see it again soon, the finished film does give us some interesting issues to ponder and discuss.

Alexia is involved in a car accident when aged 7 and gets a titanium plate fitted into her head.  As an adult, this has left her as cold and emotionless and also attracted to things metal, especially cars. (Which may have been a predisposition). The Alexia (Agathe Rouselle) we see at the beginning of the film, apart from being a model who drapes herself over cars, is also unhappy at home and in love with a propensity to murder those she dislikes with her titanium hairpin.  

When she goes on a killing spree, she ends up on the run and decides to present herself as the long missing son to a captain of the firefighters in a town down south.  

Oddly enough, this man Vincent (Vincent Lindon) accepts her instantly and completely despite her odd androgynous looks and total silence.  She becomes Adrien his missing son.  Adrien’s mother (Myriem Akheddiou) quickly realizes that Alexia is not her son but simply asks that she looks after Vincent with whom she is estranged. This second half of the film is the coming together of lost souls.  Vincent has never got over his loss, is getting old for his physical job and injecting himself with steroids and god knows what else.  He also has nightmares about fires.  Adrien becomes a firefighter but is shunned by the testosterone driven men in the team.  What is more, she is pregnant (by the car) and oozes sump oil at any given moment.  Nonetheless, she and Vincent stick by each other even when all the truth comes out.  The ending is strangely moving if rather uncomfortable for us.

Director Julia Ducournau has pushed our boundaries in terms of both story and of what we can accept in a movie.  There is a connection with David Cronenbourg here but Ducournau goes further also hinting at moral issues related to humanoid machines with no feelings, the boundary, if one still exists between a natural human being and one with mechanical implants.  The mind races here with thoughts of 3-D printing, humanizing robots, etc. Fire as a cleanser and as a destroyer is another theme and a third is the question of gender identity and transitioning.  Part of the story here is about being trapped in a body not of your own desire.  Then there is the topic of acceptance, pure and unjudged, which Alexia struggles to find.

Amongst all of this we have musical scenes with some very adept use of pop songs and a hilarious scene about learning CPR breathing using the song Macarena!

It is a film where you never quite know what is coming next and that is to Ducournau’s credit.  

Vincent Lindon is to be credited with going way outside his usual range of characters to give us this unique and poignant portrait of a macho fire chief with all his issues.  Agathe Rouselle has her first big role in the lead and is excellent and totally exposed.  You suspect she will never find another role quite like this.

Rubens Impens uses reds oranges pinks and blues to give us an imposing cinematography.  Jim Williams doesn’t miss a beat with the music.

Overall, this is a challenging and not always likeable film which makes us think.

3 stars

Goran

Nice to see a film from Croatia.  I saw a review in IMDB panning it written by a local.  It made me think how sometimes we downgrade our local products thinking we can never compete with Hollywood. This small dark comedy/horror is in fact quite acceptable and achieves a degree of scariness along with some wry smiles.

Goran (Franjo Dijak) is a small-town taxi driver married to Lina (Natasa Janjic), the blind daughter of a local timber businessman (Milan Strljic). He is good friends with Slavko (Goran Bogdan) and they have just completed a small sauna at the cottage they have in the mountains.  

A family meeting brings together Lina’s brother Niko (Janko Popovic Volaric), back from Zagreb with his friend Dragan (Filip Krizan). At this meeting Lina announces she is pregnant but Goran believes the child is not his.  

The family has all sorts of typical Balkan secrets.  A surprise birthday party is planned for Goran at the cottage.  On the way the first of a series of events knocks everything upside down and unchains all sorts of crazy behaviour leaving virtually no one unharmed and giving us some gory thrills with a fair dash of black humour.

Nevio Marasovic directs with confidence and the photography of the snowy landscapes by Damir Kudin and the use of old Croatian pop hits add to the atmosphere.  Iva Krajknc has a supporting part but the film belongs to Dijak with his hang dog looks.  Janjic also manages a difficult part well.  It’s no classic but shows a promising director and a part of the world we seldom see.

3 stars

The Young Royals (Season 3)

Light relief amongst the gloom. 3^rd and final series about a gay crown prince in Sweden and his love with his classmate from the other side of the tracks. 

 Set in a finishing school in the Sweden countryside it has plenty of fantasy elements with spoilt rich students, a strange reverence for tradition and in this season the threat to close the school (highly unlikely in some respects long overdue in others). Most of the school stuff and the other students can be ignored. Long running stories concerning the confused and at times evil August (Prince Wille’s spare)

(Malte Gardinger), Sara (Frida Argento), Simon’s sister

and Felice (Nikita Uggla), the large dark-skinned mother figure among the students (17 going on 41) fill out the episodes but what we really want is the relationship between Wille (Edvin Ryding) and Simon (Omar Rudberg).

Thankfully, the producers give us plenty of this and it is generally rewarding viewing: their commitment to each other hits the obstacles of the royal family and the fact that the Queen’s (Pernille August) nervous breakdown might oblige Wille to step into royal action earlier.

Class distinctions, racism and the topic of the monarchy are discussed here in subtle and attractive ways as is the concept of our expectations and people letting us down which also relates to Wille’s parents and Simon and Sara’s dad.

Simon and Wille have chemistry which helps and although the ending is more fantasy than reality, the show brings the whole story to a satisfactory close.

It may be teen fodder but it is not a completely vacuous story by any means and it does give us entertainment without overdoing the darker side as so many shows do these days (Euphoria, Elite)

 

3 stars plus

 

Stars at Noon

French director Claire Denis has quite a reputation in her homeland and in various other parts of the world too. Her latest work even won a major prize at Cannes and here we have it.  Stars at Noon keeps with her interest in foreign climes and is an adaptation of a book about an American journalist stuck in Nicaragua in the first Sandinista period who hooks up with a mysterious British man.  Together, the two plan to flee the country crossing the border into Costa Rica.  Denis locates the current film in the recent present.  The Covid pandemic is still present and restrictions are being sporadically enforced.  The film was shot in Panama to stand in for Nicaragua and the sticky damp decaying tropical atmosphere is beautifully captured.  

Trish is played by Margaret Qualley, a rather spoilt and unthinking American who clearly thought she could do more as a foreign correspondent than she has been able to.  She is unknown, too young and no one wants to buy her stories.  Her passport has been retained, she is sleeping with an older politician who pays for her board and is under surveillance from the military.  Apart from that, she has the arrogance of the American thinking that she needed only name her country and doors will open. Qualley takes a shallow and unlikeable character and actually makes a decent fist of the job helped by her attractive looks.  

Joe Alwyn plays Daniel, the Brit, clad in white suits like a throwback to Graham Greene and mysterious but also empty.  We quickly twig that he is not a businessman but some sort of spy.  As the movie progresses, rather vague hints at political power plays are dropped but nothing is ever fully clarified.  

One hour forty minutes of time is taken up setting the scene, watching the protagonists have sex, drink copious quantities of beer, whisky and rum and generally get thwarted in doing anything. Finally, they are obliged to leave the city and head for the border and the film wakes up a little.  Benny Safdie as a CIA man almost steals the film with his cameo but that too fizzes out.  Music by Tindersticks is good and photography by Eric Gautier catches the mood but overall I found this film to be a real slog.  The characters remain on the surface partly because it is a political thriller but it means we can’t connect. The thriller side is minimal and the threats are predictable and boring rather than creating excitement. The love story is damp and unconvincing.  The political intrigue which could have been really interesting is left as vague. 

A disappointing effort from Denis who has the resume to produce something much better than this dragging feast.

1 star plus

Golda

Releasing a film about a dead Israeli hawk of a PM in the year the Gaza-Israel conflict exploded probably did nothing to help this film’s chances at the box office but while many critics have positive features to highlight from the movie my overall feeling is that it pretty much sunk itself from the beginning.  The film looks at 20 days or so in the life of Golda Meir, premier during the 1973 Yom-Kippur war with Egypt and Syria. This event occurred partly through Israeli intelligence neglect but did lead to a historical meeting and détente between Meir and Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president.

Firstly, the film has a budget look to it.  Probably shot largely in the UK and set in Meir’s flat, the war room, government offices, etc.  Most outside shots are from media footage from the time and that’s where at the end we get another hint at the quality of the film.  The real Golda joking with Sadat speaks better English and seems more fun than the creation Helen Mirren makes in this movie.  Yes, the make-up (Oscar nominated) is incredible.  3 and a half hours of prosthetics and she looks like the 75 year-old granny!  I wasn’t too convinced with her accent and then the major part of the film is just leaden and depressing.  

Some brief scenes with Henry Kissinger (Live Schreiber) add both humour and dramatic weight but the rest is heavy going.  I think this is because director Guy Nattiv and writer Nicholas Martin haven’t quite decided if they just want to do a biopic or something else.  Helen Mirren is somewhat wasted as a result  and the scenes with her assistant (Camille Cottin) seem added in just to show her humanitarian side (plus the effects of her cancer and the treatment she is secretly undergoing).

There are too many clichés and resorting to symbols (sirens, dead birds and the ubiquitous smoke – cigarettes have the second biggest role to Golda). Long shots of Golda staring into space is just lazy and using Dascha Dauenhauer’s overly dramatic music to compensate for the lack of dramatic tension and decent dialogues is also a cheat.  

As you can imagine I wasn’t very impressed.  Both Golda and Mirren deserve better.

1 star plus

Killers of the Flower Moon

Martin Scorsese moves out of New York to Oklahoma 1920 where a series of murders of Osage people occurred.  Based on a true story published in a 2017 book, he tells the tale of one family in the centre of this scandal. Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo di Caprio), a rather slow ex-serviceman is taken under the wing of King Hale (Robert de Niro) a local Oklahoman farmer who acts as a sort of lord of the manor and boasts of how generous he is to the local Indians.  

He soon finds Ernest a wife, Molly (Lily Gladstone), a full-blooded Osage woman.  Why all this interest in the Osage? Well, this tribe was able to hold ownership of the land on which oil was found making them instantly very rich.

Some of the white folk were determined to reclaim this wealth by marrying into Osage families and then killing off their members so the title to the land ended up with the widowers or the children.  So, it happened with Molly’s family and we see how her mother and sisters die in different ways and Molly herself becomes increasingly ill but not before delivering 3 children.  

Eventually, and after a petition to the President made by Molly herself, Washington sends down a team to investigate headed by Tom White (Jesse Plemons), a precursor of the FBI.  The last part of the film involves his investigation and the subsequent trials.

In keeping with recent Hollywood history of the last 20 or so years, this is a dark film showing us the shadow side of the US.  Hale and Burkhart and their male colleagues are greedy colonialists who will stop at no evil to get their hands on more money. All with a veneer of respectability and a righteous belief that they deserve it. In the same way as they treated the blacks.  

So, expect no light moments in this movie, it is relentlessly grim.  And this is where its main problem lies.  3 and a half hours of dark gloom, however worthy the subject matter is, subtracts from the overall quality of a movie and even a name like Scorsese can’t get around that.  Either you make a mini-series or you edit. Scorsese doesn’t stint on the details, the settings, the staging, the costumes are all so well done but it just goes on too long.  At 2 hours I was ready for the end and still had 90 minutes to go!

Another aspect that detracted from the film in my humble opinion was the lack of the Osage people’s side.  We get a respectful handling of the people and some dialogue in their language but the focus is much more on the crimes and the white men than what the victims felt about it all. 

Having said all that, it is a pleasure to watch De Niro and Di Caprio at work.  The former gives us a really nasty type who oozes charm for all the wrong reasons and Di Caprio does a good job at depicting a character who gets increasingly lost and uglier as the film progresses.  

Jesse Plemons, John Lithgow and Brendan Fraser have fairly small appearances later on and Scorsese even appears at the very end.

Holding all this together though is a superb performance by Lily Gladstone.  She is the moral centre of the film, a role without so many words but with all sorts of conflicting feelings well expressed by this indigenous actress.

So, I have my reservations about some things, especially the slow pacing and extreme length but Killers is a film that I will recall for a long time to come.

4 stars

Bobi Wine – The People’s President

Documentary from Uganda: not a frequent event.  Shades of Navalny here as we follow an opposition leader try to win the 2021 election against long incumbent President Museveni, who has dictatorial characteristics.  The new guy is Bobi Wine (stage name), a rap artist whose real name is Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu.  

He sings local dance music with social and political lyrics endearing him to the large young population in the country.  Basically, we follow his campaign and the many obstacles the government puts in his way to standing: being arrested, having his entire team arrested, robbery of votes, trespassing on his property, etc. 

 Museveni uses the army for his own ends and sadly dozens of people are killed or injured in the process.  This helps the documentary by giving it suspense.  Will Bobi be able to stand? What will happen to him and to his family with 4 young children?  

We get a lot of footage from the family and his team including his musicians and see what they have to suffer.  And it all takes place against the background of Covid-19.

Mostly that is it. We do get to see a lot of Kampala, especially the slums and some of the countryside and we get some news footage spliced into the rest.  

An interview with Museveni is bizarre with him blaming the homosexuals and foreign influences for inciting the violence that the army cracks down on when it seems clear that it is the army engaging first.  I would have liked more on why people support him, even if his elections have been rigged.  Surely some voters believe him.

Moses Bwayo and Christopher Sharp make a fast-moving fly on the wall documentary which keeps us engaged and educated.  National Geographic are behind all this interestingly.  Wine’s music helps enliven this solid piece of documentary film-making.  Another testimony to the guts of individuals when standing up to repressive powers.

3 stars plus