Children 404

A Russian documentary from 2014 shortly after the government passed a law to the effect that LGBTQ groups setting up websites or chat groups were effectively acting in contrary to the state.  

Askold Kurov and Pavel Loparev made this simple documentary to shine some light on the reality for LG people in Russia and the discrimination they face in daily life, as well as focusing on Elena Klimova who set up the online group Children 404 as a space for LGBTQ youth to meet.  

Even during this film we see that the police are coming after her.  She was eventually charged and sentenced for breaking the law but the court dismissed the case saying that there was no evidence of this.  We also see Pasha who is desperate to leave Russia for Canada and some other young people brave enough to show themselves.

All very sad that a country drives its young away or underground through lack of tolerance and misogyny among other practices. And this is promoted from above in the form of President Putin.

The value of this documentary is more in its fresh real life feel and for documenting what is going on.  It is a fairly rough and ready film.  Kurov subsequently worked on the more sophisticated Welcome to Chechnya, which covers similar ground.

2 stars

Fair Play

Fair Play. (L to R) Alden Ehrenreich as Luke and Phoebe Dynevor as Emily in Fair Play. Cr. Sergej Radovic / Courtesy of Netflix

Debut film by Chloe Domont.  Got much better reviews than public acceptance.  Hardly surprising as it is not a very pleasant watch. 

The setting is a hedge fund in New York run by a ruthless character Campbell (Eddie Marsan).  It’s full of rather immature men who think they are a cut above the rest of society because of their skills at buying and selling sharing.  In the team are Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) who are a couple but not out in the company as relationships between staff are not encouraged.  All goes well until Emily gets a promotion.  While she tries to push for Luke with her boss, a move that is not regarded well as Campbell does not like him, Luke starts to feel resentful at being looked over.  Time goes on and Luke seems to want to sabotage Emily’s career but it is not so clear and the relationship begins to suffer. She gets a car every morning and he has to take the subway. There is a sexual tension as well as they don’t have sex any more. Eventually, there are some melt down scenes and a finale which is strong and not especially enjoyable where the very point of consensual sex and/or rape prove to be very hard to determine.

Certainly, the atmosphere is toxically macho and Luke is no saint but I’m not sure Asystem too.  There are aspects of the film that I found unrealistic.  When they have their final clash, it is at a party full of friends and family and nobody intervenes.  Emily’s mother is seen as totally obsessed with their engagement and seems unable to sense that her daughter is unhappy and some of the scenes in the company seem more like people sitting around enjoying melt downs rather than helping colleagues through the issues.  Maybe that approach is what really happens. 

Dynevor is the star of this film and proves to be a bright new talent (whose real-life mum is a dreary long-timer in the soapie Coronation Street).  Ehrenreich has a more difficult role and acquits himself well and Marsan is making a thing of creepy rather unpleasant characters.

As a film it’s probably best regarded as fodder for gender rights courses.  While it reminds us of Fatal Attraction, Wall Street and The War of the Roses I found it all rather too dark and lacking in something extra to attract me.

3 stars plus

Problemista

An unusual debut film by Julio Torres who appears on Saturday Night Live and directs, writes and stars in this work.  He plays Alejandro Martinez, an El Salvadorean seeking a work visa in the US and to be employed as a toy designer.  

His mother (Catalina Saavedra) brought him up creating an imaginary world with models and toys and now he feels he can contribute to a company in the US.  Sadly, he cannot get a job like this and is employed by a cryogenics firm until they sack him.  Through this he meets an extraordinary woman, the partner of an artist, Bobby Ascencio (RZA) who has frozen himself for posterity.

She is Elizabeth, played with gusto by the great Tilda Swinton, with a fiery red hairstyle and a combative approach to everyone.  No sooner does she enter a restaurant than she’s off-side with the staff.  Elizabeth needs help to locate Bobby’s works and then curate a show and she sees Alejandro as a support in this and Alejandro thinks she could help him with sponsoring his visa application.  

The film shows the bumbling push-me pull-me relationship between them as they try to achieve their goals with comments on art, creativity, the meaning of life and the immigration process all mixed in together.  It has its own individual touch and some moments of humour.  Swinton is a delight in a role we are not accustomed to from her.  

Torres is more of an acquired taste.  He is credible as a sort of lost nerd but his individual scenes lack oomph.  A little editing could have been good.  Wrapping up the whole show is a rather nice narration from Isabella Rossellini.

A pleasant enough film with some wacky moments (Craigslist?)

but apart from Swinton it lacked something.

3 stars

The Zone of Interest

Definitely a film with a difference.  Jonathan Glazer takes on the topic of the Holocaust but from the angle of the family of the director of the complex who live in an idyllic house and garden right next door to the camp.  He took inspiration from the novel of Martin Amis but has taken things in another direction.

Commandant Rudolf Hoss (Christian Friedel) is a successful and obsessive manager who has made his camp a model in the Nazi system of concentration camps.  

Wife Hedwig (Sandra Huller) is a proud homemaker who has transformed her house into a sort of haven with a garden, swimming pool and greenhouse for she, her husband and children.  Trouble is that from the house you can hear the screams of prisoners, see the flames of chimneys, smell the burning flesh and find body parts and belongings of those killed inside.  Hedwig has coffee mornings with other Nazi wives as they discuss new clothes available (from the victims), her children play with gold teeth extracted from the dead.  The evidence of what is happening across the wall is present day and night.

It is a bizarre and horrifying scenario.  How can you live next door to a concentration camp and pretend nothing is happening?  Some can’t.  One daughter can’t sleep properly, the younger son is clearly perturbed and Hedwig’s Muty (Imogen Kogge) lasts a few days before beating a quick retreat to where she came from.   Hedwig continues blithely attached to her home and refusing to accompany her husband when he is promoted back to Berlin.  She even threatens a maid with having her ashes spread over the land by her husband if she so pleases.  There are other chilling scenes: meetings discussing production targets as if it was a car factory when the production is in fact killing people.  The big brass in Berlin throw lavish parties as if nothing is amiss.

What Glazer wants us to reflect on here is our capacity to ignore what is happening around us particularly when that something is so cruel and morally wrong.  That’s why his speech on receiving the Oscar for Best Foreign Film upset so many people – he accused many of us of looking the other way in regard to today’s tragedies like the crisis in Palestine.

Glazer films the characters at a distance.  The same distance they display towards the Jews.  It is an interesting technique.  He also throws in some unexpected twists: the use of Grimm’s grim fairytales told to calm the frightened daughter, nighttime scenes showing a local girl who planted apples for the prisoners – a real case.  Glazer met this woman who died aged 90 before the film came out.  He also gives us an updated scene of cleaners preparing the modern-day Auschwitz museum for its daily opening. It is not a film with great action or a plot.  It is not meant to be.  It is a reflection on our ability to remain unmoved by deeply shocking acts.

Mica Levi’s industrial and haunting music is a plus as is Lukasz Zal’s photography.

A brave thought-provoking work.

4 stars plus

Un Varón

The English title for this film, ‘A Man’ doesn’t quite capture the same nuance that varón has in Spanish.  There is in the latter more of a hint of the manly, the masculine, the macho, the having the balls that the English term doesn’t always include.  And this is the crux of the movie.  Carlos is a 16-year-old living partly in a sort of youth boarding establishment and partly in his sister’s flat in the seediest part of Bogotá.  His sister works on the streets, his mother is in prison and Carlos has had problems with authority.  To survive amongst the bigger boys, he deals drugs and does favours and errands.  The problem is that he is a small young man with a soft face that he has tried to toughen up with tattoos and haircuts.  His voice is not deep.  

If he is gay, this is not explicitly stated in the movie and his rejection of a prostitute may be more to do with fear and shyness. The film was nominated for a Queer Palm at Cannes but to me the story is elsewhere.  It is about surviving in the toxic bullying male culture of the poor neighbourhoods of 3^rd world cities.  

In a way, Carlos’s uncertain sexuality helps us focus more on the poisonous environment.  While the boarding school may be bad enough, leaving kids like Carlos on the streets is worse exposing them to constant danger.  At times we in the audience can sense the enormous vulnerability he must feel constantly. When he cries, chastising himself at the same time because men don’t cry, we get it instantly.  How we have allowed societies to become so inhospitable is a big issue here.  As one character says seeing a young boy trailing around after his father, “He’ll follow in the footsteps of his old man”.

The film plays much like a documentary and does not have a complex storyline.  Many events fizzle out into nothing and the perpetual waiting and checking that is the life of survivors.  Director Fabian Hernandez has done a good job creating that atmosphere and Sofia Oggioni captures the decadence of these city barrios and Carlos’s life with real genuineness.  Dilan Felipe Ramirez Espitia as Carlos acquits himself well in the lead.

At 80 minutes, it could still have had another 10 minutes lopped off and lost nothing and yet it is also no walk in the park for viewers.  Nonetheless, it conveys the story of a life with little hope and empty words perfectly.  All rather sad.

2 stars plus 

Barrio Boy

This independent film is a full version of a 2014 short.  

Set in Brooklyn, NY, specifically Greenpoint, it is the story of Quique (Dennis Garcia), a young barber who is struggling with his sexuality in a macho world which does not look kindly on gay men.

Only his cousin Rafa (Pierre Jean Gonzalez) understands and is supportive.  At home, the women in his family want to know when he will get a girlfriend and there is a local drug dealing thug, Cuz (Keet Davis), who seems to be part of the family and is in Quique’s basketball group and who is busy controlling who does what. 

 Lots of gossip too. 

Things come to a head when Quique spots Kevin (James Physick), a cute Irish guy who is visiting to sell his mother’s house.  Sparks fly but the two struggle to get the relationship going and flowing.

This film by Dennis Shinners means well and has positive features but also suffers from some holes in the storyline and an inconsistent dialogue.  There is a strange scene when Quique goes to a photgrapher who prepares portfolios for porn stars which makes little sense, for example. I liked the ending which is realistic if not happy ever after and Physick gives his character some great lines.  The issue of being DL or discreet is a universal one and definitely believable here but Quique seems a little mature to be fighting this.  Maybe the actor is a little old after the original short film on which this was based.

I would also praise the photography (Garrett Shannon) which observes this rather plain neighbourhood with interesting eyes and a vibrant soundtrack.

Nothing very new but honest enough in its own way.

2 stars

Poor Things

One of the hit films of the season by creative Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, the film has elements of Wes Anderson, of Disney fairytales, of Frankenstein and Pygmalion, of Tim Burton and of something more raunchy and political.  It may be a comedy but there are many dark sides to the film as well.

Bella Baxter (Emma Stone, superb) is presented to us as a sort of monster, a project of an anatomical surgeon Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), who with his multiply scarred face managed to save a dead pregnant woman and insert her baby’s brain into the body, thereby raising it to be a woman. 

 So, at the beginning Bella is like a child in a woman’s body.  At first she is captive and protected in her master’s ‘castle’ but eventually seeks to know the outside world and when on the point of being married to Max McCandles (Ramy Yousseff) , her ‘father’s’ assistant and future surgeon, she is kidnapped by an unscrupulous lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) who soon realizes he has bitten off more than he can chew.  

He takes her to Lisbon, Alexandria and Paris.  Bella, given the taste of freedom starts to grow up quickly but without a sense of the social conventions of the time.  She says and does what she likes and is fond of ‘furious jumping’ or sex.  

When she realizes that she can make money from furious jumping and she and Duncan are in a tight spot she has no qualms becoming a whore, regarding it as part of her education.  She learns also from the madame, Madame Swiney (Kathryn Hunter is a nice turn) and fellow pro Toinette (Suzy Bemba) who introduces her to socialism.  Later, she returns to London to an ailing Godwin.

Apart from being an extraordinary fantasy, Poor Things is also a film about the roles of men and women, of social conventions, of freedom, of the body and the closing message says a lot about the liberation of individuals especially women.

Stone is excellent in the lead role changing subtly at each stage and convincing us as to her character.  The rest of the cast are fine as you would expect with actors of this caliber.

Set design is superb, with steampunk elements and nods to different genres and movements and the wardrobe work is great.

I’m not sure if I am a total fan of the film, which could have had a slight trim but it grew on me as the film went on held together by Stone’s virtuoso performance. Good camerawork by Robbie Ryan and music from Jerskin Fendrix.

4 stars plus

The Old Oak

In the category of social conscience Ken Loach has and continues to be a leader.  This, he has said at 87, is his last film.  It may not be his greatest but as usual it is a poignant and pertinent look at where we are at as a society.  The outlook is not so rosy.

Loach takes the story of a small village in Durham, on the coast and once the site of a colliery. It never recovered from the closing of the mines in the 80’s and now is populated by poor families who can’t manage either financially or psychologically with their plight.  

TJ (Dave Turner) runs the last operating pub and it too is on its last legs.  Locals come in to have a pint and moan about their fate.  In 2016, a group of Syrian refugees are settled in the town, using up cheap abandoned terrace houses that were bought by speculators.  Somewhere there is one example of the locals’ grievances.  Their houses are worth nothing and they are ill-prepared for foreigners to come in seemingly getting better treatment than themselves.

The arrival does not go well and Yara (Ebla Mari), one of the few Syrians to speak English has her camera broken by a local yobbo. Later TJ offers to get it fixed and slowly a friendship emerges.  TJ is pretty down and out but he helps in a local charity run by Laura (Claire Rodgerson) which provides these refugees whom fled war with nothing with some second-hand clothes and basic necessities.  Even that makes locals resentful.  

Little by little however, largely thanks to Yara’s efforts to fit in and make contacts with locals (she’s a photographer) and her interest in the relics of the mining years from the heyday of the village which are now stored in a back room of the pub, the frost starts to thaw.  The said back room is used to become a sort of soup kitchen for both locals and refugees.  

Nonetheless, local resistance from some sectors is still live and in another horrifying scene not necessarily directly related to the main issue here, TJ loses his pet dog to the uncontrollable pitbulls of some local boys.  This speaks more of the absence of controls and of the state in this region.

Loach has an agenda and this may lead to some of the scenes being a bit contrived but he and scriptwriter Paul Laverty know how to introduce ideas with a naturalism that makes it all seem very credible.  And as some critics have said he is best when showing rather than telling as sometimes the speeches become a little too didactic.

He gives us at the end glimmers of hope and suggests that the Syrians have a clearer idea of the solidarity and compassion needed to move forward in these difficult times where the state in particular has abandoned many people.

Dave Turner is excellent in the lead and Mari and Rodgerson do well as support as does Trevor Fox as a local with his issues.  Most of the cast is non-professional and Loach knows how to get the best out of them.

Robbie Ryan films well and George Fenton gives us discreet but appropriate music.

A lesson perhaps but a good one delivered by a master who observes society closely and reflects it back to us to show us how we need to move forward.

4 stars plus

Anyone But You

I have to admit that I am in two minds about this movie.  As a throwback to 90’s romantic comedies it is a very polished work albeit totally derivative of other films and of course of Much Ado About Nothing, the Shakespeare play with a not dissimilar plot (lovers pretending to hate each other).  The 90 minutes pass by attractively, with the major part of the action taking place around Sydney.  A perfect film for a wet afternoon.  It has had good ratings among the public and surprised with its uptake.

On the other hand, there is something overly calculated about the film borrowing as it does and being a pretty unrealistic fantasy.

Bea (Sydney Sweeney) has a one-night stand with Ben (Glen Powell) a man who buys her a coffee in a Starbucks like place so that she can get the key and use the toilet (this is a new and illegal move on the part of some coffee shops – denying the public the use of the facilities).  The whole set up is contrived but not impossible.  Then Bea sneaks out on Ben, but soon realizes that she really likes him, doubles back and hears him slagging her off to friends in a sort of macho boast.  End of romance. 

As these things tend to do (!), they end up crossing paths 6 months later when Bea’s sister gets married to Pete’s sister, Pete being Ben’s best friend.  They all troop off to Sydney for the wedding and the sparks between Bea and Ben are so noticeable that the family and friends all conspire to push them together which neither have any intention of happening.  But then, they decide to go along with the ruse and play at being lovers just to get the family off their backs. A number of rather orchestrated faux pas ensue.  All very harmless fun conducted by beautiful people in a stunning environment and with no money issues.  Harbour Rescue also seem happy to spend time and money helping them sort out the romantic tangles. Not, I’m sure.

At the end of the day, even though there are one or two funnyish moments it doesn’t have the sharp humour of Joy Ride or any really creative touches.  A weak running joke on Tasmania is as old as it gets and the script in general is poor.  Bryan Brown as one of the doting Dads comes off best among the support acts, Dermot Mulroney has a thankless part and Rachel Griffiths is also doing what she can with an unattractive character (Bea’s bossy mum). Ga-ta as Pete makes little sense and Charlee Fraser as one of Ben’s ex-girlfriends is one of the few interesting extras.  Don’t even mention the Aussie surfer and what the parents thought paying for Bea’s ex Jonathan to come long for the ride is unclear.  The actor seems to have no idea what he is doing there.

Sydney gets excellent photography and a total sales job as a potential wedding destination even if hill and sea are stapled together unnaturally and the Harbour Bridge and Opera House are done to death.

Sweeney is an up and coming star and has the blonde looks and figure to hold the centre but she is pretty predictable as an actress and has just two expressions.  Powell has only one, a squint-eyed frown.  But they are not supposed to be the comic distractions in the end but the cute lovebirds who don’t know it.

Given all of this it is surprising how watchable it is.

2 stars plus

Ferrari

Michael Mann is a veteran American director of action movies and returns after some years with a biopic of sorts focusing on a key moment in the life of Enzo Ferrari, when facing bankruptcy and personal strife he managed to hold his bottle and motivate his team into winning the Mille Miglia road race.  

This is 1957 and was a turning point in Ferrari’s fortunes and their approach to Fiat.

So, what to make of this film?  It has some excellent features but definitely does not add up to the sum of all its parts. Possibly this is due to treating Ferrari as a suave cold fish who despite mourning a dead son and trying to be close to an illegitimate one is not a character we really root for.  I also think that the scripting is Hollywood wooden in parts with some awkward cliché lines as Troy Kennedy Martin adapts a book and fills in gaps of personal conversations that we don’t know even exist.  

Mann is great with the racing scenes (shout out to cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt too) and the recreation of that time in Italy seems very authentic.  

Daniel Pemberton’s music is another plus. But the film seems dark a lot of the time and there is some rather pointless sex between one of the drivers (Gabriel Leone as De Portago) and his woman.  Two car crashes add to the dark feel and the excitement of the races never seems to balance that.  

I also feel that having it spoken in English rather than Italian prevents it reaching a sense of reality. Adam Driver is good enough to get by but Shailene Woodley never convinces as his mistress Lina Lardi no matter how much the wardrobe people make her look like 50’s Italian.  Woodley has issues holding an accent too and frankly her part is uninspiring. 

All of these factors leave you feeling under-inspired in a biopic that should lift you.

The major savior of the film is Penelope Cruz as his largely estranged wife and more present business partner.  Her character is more interesting and Cruz attacks it with a mixture of gusto and restraint as a wronged but still sharp-minded woman.  She dominates every scene she is in and lifts them and the film as far as she can.  Possibly because she has the Latin blood the other main characters are missing.  It’s one of her best recent performances and one she may still get prizes for.  

Driver ends up convincing in part and he is such a sound actor that you believe in him.  Shame he doesn’t get much more to do than look urbane.

3 stars plus