LONDON FILM FESTIVAL: Beti and Amare (2014)

This short review appeared on The Upcoming website here as part of their coverage of the BFI London Film Festival.

Beti and Amare is a difficult film to categorize – a war romance set in 1936 with science-fiction elements made for only $7,000 in Ethiopia – and most likely one the likes of which you probably haven’t seen before.

Set during Mussolini’s Abyssinian war, a young woman, Beti (Hiwot Asres), escapes to her grandfather’s (Atrsaw Wisenbet) remote hut. They lead a meagre existence. Beti is threatened with rape by the local militia, a band of three young men in search of Italians to kill. When their goat dies, Beti’s grandfather leaves her alone in the hut, where she encounters a stranger, Amare (Pascal Dawson), who may be from outer space.

The film begins with an old-fashioned newsreel, which, despite being oddly upbeat in the face of some very real suffering, does make one pertinent observation – in times of war, it is the most vulnerable who suffer the most. The film then is an attempt to address Mussolini’s war from the perspective of those who suffered the most. Beti is a refugee, forced into a meagre life in a remote hut, living alone and under threat from men riled up by war. Beti dreams about a spaceship crash-landing on Earth, a dream that seems to come true when Beti is most in danger. Beti and Amare strike up a strong wordless friendship, one that helps Beti through her suffering and her loneliness.

The film is about suffering rather than battles and war, and it is a valuable film in this regard. Asres gives a strong performance, conveying both Beti’s vulnerability and strength without the use of a lot of dialogue. The film is well directed, particularly when one considers that it was made on a shoestring. However, the film seems to be more interested in being a festival oddity, rather than an honest and emotional story about how a young woman copes with the horrible world she finds herself in. Instead of making Beti’s retreat into fantasy the focus of the story, the film uses it as an excuse for extended flights of fancy, which ultimately overwhelm the drama at the film’s heart.

The film sacrifices coherence for strangeness, leaving one wondering what exactly was writer-director Andy Siege trying to say with the film. The film purports to be about the suffering of the most vulnerable (a fact that sets it apart already), but it loses a certain truth by focusing on oddity.

LONDON FILM FESTIVAL: The Way He Looks (2014)

This short review appeared on The Upcoming website here as part of their coverage of the BFI London Film Festival.

The Way He Looks is writer-director Daniel Ribeiro’s feature debut. Adapted from his own 2010 short film Eu Não Quero Volta Sozinho, the film is Brazil’s official entry for the 2015 Academy Awards.

Leonardo (Ghilherme Lobo) has been blind since birth. His best friend, Giovanna (Tess Amorim) helps him out and seems to have developed a crush on him, one that he is unable or unwilling to notice. When a new classmate, Gabriel (Fabio Audi), arrives and almost immediately strikes up a friendship with Leonardo, Giovanna begins to feel left out.

The Way He Looks is a film about disability, but it manages to transcend that often patronising and mawkish subgenre. Ribeiro and Lobo make sure that Leonardo is a three-dimensional, even somewhat complex character, not simply a figure of pity or a medium for a message about disability. The film works best simply as a film about the difficulties of romance in high school, a coming-of-age film with villainous bullies, romantic misunderstandings and a soundtrack that makes good use of Belle and Sebastian’s “There’s Too Much Love.” The blindness is present but it rarely takes centre stage and it is easy to imagine that the film would not have been significantly different without it.

That said, Ribeiro shows great versatility in conveying a burgeoning romance without the use of visuals. Leonardo’s growing affection for Gabriel is presented through sounds and smells, particularly in one touching scene in which Leonardo finds Gabriel’s jumper. Ribeiro is ably assisted here by great performances from his three young leads, all of whom offer complex performances rather than the types usually seen in high school dramas. Eucir de Souza and Lúcia Romano are both very good as Leonardo’s parents, trying to reconcile Leonardo’s maturation with their continuing worries about him.

The film is not flawless, but it works as a likable and funny indie film about growing up and discovering one’s sexuality. It is an honest and largely non-judgemental depiction of young love – although Isabela Guasco’s Karina, is too quickly written off – and a sensitive portrait of a blind person’s attempts to fit in.

LONDON FILM FESTIVAL: Still The Water (2014)

This short review appeared on The Upcoming website here as part of their coverage of the London Film Festival.

A film of love, life and death on the island of Amami, south of the Japanese mainland, Still the Water attempts to represent the traditions of a small island community as two children come to terms with death.

The film follows Kyoko (Jun Yoshinaga) and Kaito (Nijiro Murakami) as they both come face-to-face with death. Kyoko falls in love with the moody Kaito, who is significantly less mature than she is. Kaito’s parents have divorced and neither seems to spend much time with Kaito, who suffers in silence. Meanwhile, Kyoko is trying to come to terms with her dying mother. Then Kaito finds a corpse floating in the sea.

The film has a real human warmth to it, and there are many scenes that manage to convey some universal truths about life and death and our inability to fully grasp these big questions. The main problem with the film is that its success or failure may depend on the degree of one’s sympathy for films that juxtapose the permanence of nature with the human struggles playing out in its midst. In this respect, the film is much too long and somewhat conventional for its own good. A more experimental or vibrant film might have better represented these themes more successfully than a lot of sober looks into the middle distance followed by shots of wind blowing through foliage. Oftentimes it feels cold and intellectual when it should be emotional and the graphic goat slaughtering scenes seem to paradoxically suggest that the kind of natural grace the film represents is only open to humans. Similarly, the film’s triumphant ending, thanks to a judicious use of blur, seems to unintentionally suggest that an embrace of nature should only go so far.

The film ends with a typhoon, which both threatens to engulf the humans or bring some sort of clarity, but the film remains somewhat vague. The character’s emotional journeys are clearly mapped out (almost too precisely) but we are left with a feeling that we have not learnt anything we didn’t know before. One death scene is presented lyrically and rather movingly, but only because it totally ignores the pain and the discomfort of the act of dying. It is a warm film, but it feels only surface deep – a film betraying the influence of Malick, Herzog, Kurosawa and Mizoguchi but few ideas of its own.

LONDON FILM FESTIVAL: Oxi: An Act of Resistance (2014)

This short review appeared on The Upcoming website here as part of their coverage of the BFI London Film Festival.

Oxi: An Act of Resistance is an essay film by Ken McMullen and it takes a unique and experimental view of the economic turmoil in Greece.

The film strives to draw a parallel between Greece’s economic problems and the tragedies of Sophocles and Aristophanes, suggesting that Greece, and the EU in general, have departed from the values of the past and that this is what has lead in the current crisis. The Greek classics espoused democracy and a politics based on love and understanding rather than a politics of economics and party lines, as shown by the democracy of Pericles, which was, among other things, the original welfare state.

The film is interspersed with quotations from Thucydides, which remain remarkably relevant for a text that is two and a half thousand years old. The film opens with one quotation which claims that human nature, being the way that it is, is always going to repeat itself – indicating, first, the historical precedents for the inequalities of today and, second, suggesting that these classics contain important lessons for today. This point is made succinctly as the camera lingers on some ancient Greek landscapes, suggesting a permanence between the past and the present. Several interviewees argue for the return of the values of these ancient writings, often passionately and with inspiration.

The film is at its best, then, as an extended lesson in classical literature and its relevance today. But where it is less successful is in its attempts to restage scenes from these plays, updating them for a new audience. It becomes an exercise in performance, which looks a lot more artificial and cerebral than the impassioned and moving testimonies of real people. Worse still is the fictional element in which a detective, Inspector Pinon (Dominique Pinon), horrified that anyone would dare ‘steal’ the words of Sophocles and Aristophanes and make them relevant for today, castigates writers and actors. The point is that these classics are not set in stone, but live and breath today, but the way the film attempts to demonstrate this is both pretentious and somewhat contradictory.

The film works best as a dialogue between classic Greek literature and the current problems in the world. The people interviewed call for the return of the principles of the past and the film is a moving and fascinating testament to what we have lost. But it often uses too much artifice to tell a plain and simple truth.

LONDON FILM FESTIVAL: Kelly and Cal (2014)

This short review appeared on The Upcoming website here as part of their coverage of the BFI London Film Festival.

Kelly (Juliette Lewis) has just had a baby with her husband Josh (Josh Hopkins), and is now wandering around her house, trying to get used to the idea of motherhood and domesticity. She meets Cal (Jonny Weston), a teenager in a wheelchair, whose rambunctious past and trapped present mirrors her own. They strike up a relationship that will threaten everything Kelly has.

Kelly and Cal is yet another American indie film about a lost middle-class woman torn between her materialistic friends and a more anarchic past. Kelly used to be in a band – a Riot Grrrl band called Wetnap – though her mellowing is typified by an embarrassed nostalgic fondness for Bryan Adams. As it goes with films like this, she finds release in an outspoken younger man whose hatred of all compromise and tradition represents first what she has lost and then, when the film begins to re-establish the status quo for its safe ending, his dangerous immaturity. Jen McGowan and Amy Lowe Starbin, the director and writer respectively, ensure that their film about repressed non-conformity hits all of the typical beats, smugly mocking Kelly’s in-law (including Cybill Shepherd) and friends for their wholly blinkered and materialistic view of life and yet re-establish these very things for the ending in which Kelly finally embraces motherhood and domesticity. Kelly’s fears and her attempts to escape from her big house and tightly knit family are revealed as something rather selfish, rather than something truly self-fulfilling, and the film ends triumphantly (to the upbeat twangs of an indie song) with her having learnt her lesson.

The actors are all rather good, but they are never given anything to do. McGowan and Starbin prefer dramatic scenes to end with one character storming out while the other looks on, agape, shaking their head in sadness and confusion. The viewer can be forgiven for wishing that they would simply yell and scream at each other until all of those not so subtle nuances were laid clearly out in the open, instead of this series of barbed, pointed statements followed closely by a slammed door. When Cal drowns out Kelly’s complaints by playing the drums, one wants her to toss the drums out the window. Instead, she leaves.

Films such as this, presumably about repressed emotions, are much too often repressed themselves. It is a half-decent film well acted, but there doesn’t seem to be any real heart in it.

NON-REVIEW: Why Gone Girl (2014) Isn't Any Good

A new David Fincher film is usually followed with quite a lot of interest, usually from critics who say everything but the word ‘auteur’ – now a bad word, though the meaning remains. Fincher’s habit of making one bad film and one half-decent one continues, though this time it would be a stretch to call Gone Girl half-decent.

Gone Girl is a twisty film that is hard to write about without getting into spoilers, so I’m not going to try avoiding them, so be warned. Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) is unhappily married to Amy (Rosamund Pike). When she disappears, the police (including Kim Dickens) begin to suspect Nick for the crime. Nick and his sister Margo (Carrie Coon) try to clear his name.

There isn’t much point in reviewing Gone Girl at all. It seems to be the kind of film that will strike a chord with some people who are willing to ignore its flaws. If one does not like the film, it is probably down to their finding these same flaws insurmountable. Therefore, I am not going to review Gone Girl. I am simply going to address five simple thoughts about why the film doesn’t work.

1. The plot is not clever. In fact, it is really rather stupid. Amy Dunne’s master plan is so over-thought and hinges on so many variables that it is pointless even trying to imagine that something like this could ever possibly happen. The film loses all credibility fairly quickly, which would be forgivable if it was at least entertaining.

2. The film is not entertaining. One reason that Fincher has managed to gain the cachet of a modern-day ‘auteur’ (primarily, it seems, from critics who want posterity to show that they were on the right track all along – no critic wants to be dismissive of the filmmaker who turns out to be the next Hitchcock) is that he is very good at making stupidity look like intellect. His films usually have a cold and intellectual feel, but they are never particularly deep. This means that a dumb script will be made to look like something out of Beckett. Gone Girl is, hence, a dumb thriller that thinks it has something profound to say, and so mutes the drama and thriller aspects to allow the audience the necessary distance to think about the film’s real meaning. However, if the film has no particular meaning (see Point 4) then it leaves the film feeling both stupid and dull. The film’s tediousness brings us to the next point.

3. It is not an excuse to say that the film’s flaws in story and pacing are down to a difficult adaptation. Fincher is usually good at picking clever scripts, scripts that do the hard work for him. The successes of The Social Network are all down to Aaron Sorkin and the cast, Fincher’s contributions are overblown party sequences and that awful boat race scene. Gone Girl’s may have had problems because the book was apparently such an unwieldy source (I haven’t read it), but it is still a film and needs to work on its own. Gone Girl may be a good adaptation – it might give a good approximation of what it is like to read the book – but that does not make it good cinema.

4. The film’s subtext is not clever or original. The film, then, is not really a mystery-thriller after all, but really an examination of how long-term relationships might develop over the years, moving from the false play-acting of the early days to the growing resentment towards the ease with which one’s other half embraces a bored domesticity. The film’s ending is an exaggerated look at the kind of couple that only stays together for the kids, faking love and happiness in public and wanting to kill each other in private. Many dramas look at this kind of thing in a way that is truthful and moving, taking a long, hard and difficult look at what it is that makes relationships tick. Gone Girl takes two and a half hours to say that unloving relationships happen.

5. The film is not feminist. There is a moment in which Amy complains about the way that women have to alter their personalities to attract men, but also keep them. This may be true, but it is difficult to believe that it is extremely common or that it doesn’t cut both ways. Are there men out there who have to falsify their personalities in order to attract women? If there aren’t, then why not? The film is happy enough making the statement and moving on. Regardless of the validity of that, the film also suggests that, once free, the woman truly in touch with who she really is will lead a lonely, seemingly asexual existence next to a pool, eating a huge packet of crisps. Rosamund Pike, in a rather one-note performance, plays Amy as a stone-cold psychopath, a manipulating, vengeful villain without an ounce of remorse. Hardly a feminist icon. Meanwhile, the other woman that Nick has a sexual relationship, Andie (Emily Ratajkowski, most famous for that ‘empowering’ “Blurred Lines” music video) is a stereotype of the neurotic, clingy airhead girlfriend. According to Amy’s argument above, Andie would really be playing this part (based on what she thinks men like) and in reality would be a much more fully rounded and independent person. The film is not interested in this question.

Gone Girl is the kind of film, like Skyfall or The Dark Knight Rises, that you could only think is clever if you ignore the stupid. It is also a film that offers a facile examination of marriage, one that the film seems to think is actually challenging and risky and that requires the cover of a dopey thriller. Almodóvar or Verhoeven it ain’t, though it is, by definition, pretentious.

DVD REVIEW: Fruitvale Station (2013, released in UK and Ireland 2014)

Fruitvale Station ends where most films would start and is all the more powerful for it. A dramatisation of the shooting of Oscar Grant by a BART police officer at the Fruitvale Station in Oakland, California in the early hours of New Year’s Day, 2009, the film won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and led to comparisons with Spike Lee for the film’s first-time writer-director Ryan Coogler.

The film shows in detail the last 24 hours of Oscar Grant’s life (played here by Michael B. Jordan). Oscar is making some resolutions for the New Year – he wants to turn his life around and stop lying to his girlfriend (Melonie Diaz) and his family. The film is essentially then a portrait of a man who has made mistakes wanting to do right by his girlfriend and four-year old daughter Tatiana (Ariana Neal).

Beginning with some of the real-world footage of the shooting of Oscar Grant (the shooting occurred on a crowded train station and was recorded by several camera phones), which casts a feeling of inescapable doom over all that follows, the film settles down to an intimate portrait of a young, black man in America trying to put his past to rest. He has been caught cheating on his girlfriend and he has just lost his job due to his constant lateness and he still retains a near-explosive temper. But Coogler and Jordan are thoroughly sympathetic and they make sure that Grant emerges as a fully developed human being rather than a saint or a sinner. Jordan’s performance certainly helps here, presenting a powerful portrait of a young, urban, black male (a type too often represented as only criminal), who is nice and friendly and potentially violent without allowing any of these attributes to hold the role to ransom.

Coogler keeps his camera observational and we watch Grant attending his mother Wanda’s (Octavia Spencer) birthday and kidding around with his daughter and going to San Francisco with his friends. Although we do know what is going to happen on Grant’s return from ‘Frisco’, a knowledge that does cast a pall over all that precedes it, the film works well without it. There are few enough films about the day-to-day lives of young African-Americans (Gimme the Loot is the only other recent one that springs to mind) that Fruitvale Station would have worked simply as a likable and moving family drama, one in which Rachel Morrison’s fluid camerawork recalls John Cassavetes and Bob Edwards’ sound design recalls Robert Altman.

However, when the incident at Fruitvale Station does happen, it is suitably shocking and challenging. Coogler does not make it clear where he and his film stand – was the shooting the result of racism, or fear thanks in part to racism, or was it truly just an unfortunate accident? This has led to a number of readings of the film. In a closing paragraph at the end of the film, we are given the BART cop’s defence (he thought that he was reaching for his taser) either ‘coolly’ or in a way that presents it as ‘faintly absurd.’ Is the real footage at the end of the film of a vigil for Grant on New Year’s 2013 at the Fruitvale Station a testament to the pain and anger that the shooting caused in the community or a ‘thinly-veiled code for a second, federal Civil Rights trial for the cop.’

For me, the film is angry and shocking, but it is also essentially a humanist film. It is clear from the way that the film has been conceived that it is more interested in humanising a tragedy than simply making a story out of it. Coogler does not approach the story as a battle in the courts, where most films about real-life injustices play out. Fruitvale Station is instead an attempt to represent a horrific crime in human terms, not in terms of justice and outrage and the courts. The film’s sudden ending (evidence both that Coogler’s heart is in the right place and that he is a director who knows exactly what he is doing) is devastating, not because it leaves you angry, but because it leaves you contemplating the pain and suffering left in the wake of the shooting.

Where the film does get into bother, and where a large amount of the criticism of the film lies, is in the positive portrayal of Grant, though too often these criticisms seem to be from people who find it difficult to imagine that an ex-con could possibly be a good son or a loving father. A review in Variety stupidly using the phrase ‘rabble-rousing.’ For me, the film’s only problems were a few moments where it tried too hard for pathos, such as an invented scene in which Grant is shown playing with a doomed pitbull and Grant’s last moments with Tatiana, full of foreboding but marred unnecessarily by her seeming clairvoyance. Two moments in which slow motion is used in an attempt to make the scenes more effecting are equally unnecessary.

The fact that the film was released at the same time as the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case only indicates all the more clearly how important it is. Not as a polemic, but as an attempt to give an insight into the human loss behind these cases. Coogler wisely does not say in the film whether the shooting was about race or inequality or anything else, but what he does do is put a human face on the tragedy, making Oscar Grant less the name of a martyr and more a human who should not have been killed by the BART police in the early hours of New Year’s Day, 2009. Probably not a ground-breaking thing to attempt, but it remains something too rarely done and, when you consider both the frequency of these kinds of shootings and some of the oddly defensive reactions to the film, entirely needed. Basic but indispensable.

WORKS CITED

‘coolly’ – Ashley Clark - http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/reviews-recommendations/film-week-fruitvale-station

‘faintly absurd’ and ‘thinly veiled code’ – Kyle Smith - http://www.forbes.com/sites/kylesmith/2013/07/25/fruitvale-station-is-loose-with-the-facts-in-an-effort-to-elicit-sympathy-for-oscar-grant/

‘rabble-rousing’ – Geoff Berkshire - http://variety.com/2013/more/reviews/fruitvale-1117949029/

REVIEW: Magic in the Moonlight (2014)

Woody Allen does not read the reviews of his films. Some people think he should, but I think it is a good thing. Only a film director utterly unaware of the ‘narrative’ other people are making up for him – early funny ones, great middle period, the grim Bergman period (totally underappreciated), the lazy later ones and the recent return to form (which seems to have happened at least three times) – would have a confidence to release films so set in their own unique ways as You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger and To Rome With Love either side of something as crowd-pleasing as Midnight in Paris. Some of Woody Allen’s best films are simple elaborations on themes already tackled elsewhere – the grim but brilliant Another Woman and the carefree musical Everyone Says I Love You share the same plot point. That said, Allen’s new film, Magic in the Moonlight, will most likely play like an unintentional gift to his more negative critics – evidence for their (incorrect) assertion that he is simply not trying anymore. Magic in the Moonlight is indeed wafer-thin, light entertainment, but does it suggest that Allen isn’t that bothered?

Colin Firth plays Stanley, a magician who spends his free time exposing fraudulent psychics. Invited by his old friend Howard (Simon McBurney) to the south of France, where a rich family are besotted with a new psychic Sophie (Emma Stone), whose tricks even Howard cannot figure out. Stanley agrees, but after meeting Sophie, he cannot uncover her secrets or explain how she does it. He begins to wonder if there really is something supernatural about her and, hence, about the world.

Magic in the Moonlight then is about a moody and outspoken atheist who is suddenly faced with something that science cannot explain. Stanley cannot sleep at night such is his fear of a meaningless existence and when Sophie’s abilities start to break down his (dis)beliefs, he is first sceptical and then overjoyed. Firth is good here, overwhelmed by joy and excitement – as we all would if we suddenly found proof of the possibility of an afterlife. The twist ending is both totally expected and yet mildly disappointing, like waking out of a cheery dream.

Beyond that, there is disappointingly little to Magic in the Moonlight. The film is full of conversations about atheism and faith, as if the film needs to establish the stakes of this dilemma that we have all surely gone through at one point or another. Most of the dialogue is heavy on exposition – there is a lot of explaining for a film as slight as this. Some scenes wander badly while some of the snappy scenes are not nearly snappy enough. Sometimes it feels like something Noel Coward wrote in the early-1940s, which isn’t a particularly good thing. The film feels stretched at 97 minutes – already a bit on the long side for a Woody Allen film – considering that a film as deep and rich as Another Woman was twenty minutes shorter. There are some jokes about Nietzsche but they aren’t good ones – there is no sense here that Allen has even read Nietzsche. In fact there are very few jokes, a lot less than the plot would suggest and a lot less than can be expected of Allen.

Taken as light entertainment, the film is fine. It is entertaining and it is diverting, but only in the way of a TV movie scheduled in the middle of a lazy, rainy afternoon. The cinema feels like the wrong venue for this film, since the cinema encourages more attention and focus than this film can sustain. It is decent, but it is wholly disposable in a way that other supposedly disposable Allen films were not. The ending is so uncertain and rushed it feels like an awkward shrug. It is probably the first Allen film to feel as if it was made only to sustain his one-film-a-year record. So, a bit dull, not awful but not nearly funny enough either, reasonably likable when it is playing. Though you can’t help but wonder what some first-time writer-director would do with these actors, this budget and this idea.

See also:

Blue Jasmine

SHORT REVIEW: Rob The Mob (2014)

This short review appeared on The Upcoming website here.

Rob the Mob is being mis-sold. It is not nearly as irritating as its trailer and its title would suggest. It is a much more sombre film than the Tarantino-style comic violence trappings of the fraudulent trailer. Weirdly enough for a gangster film with a bit of a comic edge, there are no stereotypes and if the characters are not particularly likeable then they are at least interesting and believable.

Set in 1991, Tommy and Rosie (Michael Pitt and Nina Arianda) are two small time hoods who want to start anew after Tommy gets out of jail for robbing a flower shop. However, life on the straight and narrow is too slow and depressing for their needs. Tommy wanders into the trial of John Gotti and picks up on one salient detail – that mobsters don’t carry guns in their social clubs – and decides to rob the mob. Amazingly, he and Rosie survive but after one robbery too many, they find themselves caught between the mob (led by Andy Garcia) and the FBI, with only crusading journalist Jerry Cardozo (Ray Romano) to help them out.

Though based on a true story, this film ought to be sleazy, exploitative and cynical, but it actually seems to care about its characters. The film takes the time to establish Tommy and Rosie’s relationship and their characters – as well as their attempts at more legitimate work – before they even have the idea to rob the mob. Not only that, but the film is surprisingly balanced on most other characters. Andy Garcia’s Big Al is a credible threat but he is also given a nice little moment in which he monologues about how inevitable his descent into a life of crime was. The film maintains an interesting dialogue between the pros and cons of leading a legal but meagre existence compared to a dangerous and criminal but plentiful one – which one can take or leave.

It is not a flawless film. It has a tendency to over-sentimentalise – one scene between Big Al and his innocent grandson is particularly poor – and the ending is flubbed. However, the cast is very good and the writing is generally pretty good and it takes the time to make you care about these outsiders. Thoroughly entertaining though hardly flawless, Rob the Mob is a pleasant surprise.