REVIEW: Dreamcatcher (2015)

Few documentaries these days align themselves as concretely and directly with a particular cause or worldview as Dreamcatcher does. Most documentaries prefer to expose and to criticize without ever offering much in the way of alternatives or positives. Equally, many documentaries prefer hard-hitting action film camerawork and editing over stories about people eloquently and humanistically presented. Dreamcatcher then is a true documentary – a tough view of a world that needs fixed and a clear-sighted but non-judgemental view of the people on all sides of this world, an angry but compassionate, affectionate film about people and their world.

The film follows the Dreamcatcher Foundation, a Chicago-based movement that provides a framework for women to get out of sex work on their own terms and in their own time. The co-founders, Brenda Myers-Powell and Stephanie Daniels-Wilson, are both former sex workers themselves, are first seen driving around the streets of Chicago at night, offering help and assistance or simply condoms to anyone they find. Their approach to the problem is to act as a movement of solidarity, to support women who want to get out and to provide for them when they are ready.

Where many documentaries will have a political agenda and then find the people to fit, Dreamcatcher approaches the issue of sex work entirely from the perspective of the people both involved directly with the Dreamcatcher Foundation and those who came under their wing along the way. As a result, the film moves along with a world view that is totally undeniable and thoroughly authentic. Film culture is remarkably poor when it comes to the sex worker – they are common enough on screen, but they are usually confident and well-rounded and ultimately happy. Dreamcatcher has the effect of an angry polemic, but it is only angry as far as it makes the viewer angry – the film itself is relatively restrained, it does not even use much score to guide the viewer, rightly aware that the life stories told on screen are enough to make the point.

And these stories are powerful. In one shocking scene, Myers-Powell sits quietly in an after school meeting in which student after student offers up their experiences of sexual abuse and deprivation. We move from this to a scene of Myers-Powell in her day job, talking to sex workers in prison. The point is obvious – that sex work is not a choice but is being prosecuted as if it is – and powerful (there are still enough people in the world with delusions about the sex trade) but it is the stories of these women that is the focus, providing the true corrective. As much as Dreamcatcher is a film of solidarity, it is a film of collective action and experience.

Where other documentaries will settle for providing a villain for the audience to despise, Dreamcatcher and the founders of the Foundation itself do not settle for vilification. We also hear the story of Homer, Myers-Powell’s former pimp and now a key speaker in her organisation. Again, his story provides a further corrective, being another story of sexual abuse and economic deprivation, providing again a political point (the victimisers are often as much a victim of the cycle as the more obvious victims) through and because of a human story.

As a result, Dreamcatcher is a powerfully humanist film, addressing an argument in human terms where it has too often been presented in terms of statistics and criminality. Being a story of a grassroots movement and the good work that they do, the film provides more than a powerful push for change. It shows this change in motion and working. The film is not an easy watch but few films give as much hope.

Offering a view that cannot be ignored or belittled as well as providing an insight into how revolution can be achieved through collective action, Dreamcatcher is one of the most important political and humanistic documentaries ever made. It is an urgent and thoroughly moving film that bears witness and gives hope. Find it and see it.

REVIEW: Inside Out (2015)

Inside Out is the new Pixar film (or at least it was until the recent The Good Dinosaur) and yet another highly regarded animation that both adults and children can watch and enjoy. But is it any good?

We are probably all familiar with the concept now, but to quickly reiterate – Inside Out takes place largely inside the head of eleven-year old named Riley, focussing on her emotions personified here as Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust. When Riley suddenly has to move house, this shock causes a major upset to her personality – before then, it had been developing smoothly with a strong emphasis on happiness. Joy and Sadness become trapped in Riley’s long term memory – leaving Anger, Fear and Disgust in charge (an obvious disaster). Joy and Sadness attempt to make it back into Riley’s consciousness before something terrible happens and Riley becomes changed forever.

It seems compulsory now to write about how clever the idea behind Inside Out is, and it is for the most part. In a rushed opening, we are shown the dynamics of this imagined head – from the emotions themselves to the long term memory bank, Imagination Land, the film studio that produces Riley’s dreams and the core memories that make Riley who she is. It is all very imaginative and it is well mapped out and easy to follow – each emotion is specifically coloured and any memories that they produced all equally colour-coded. However, a film cannot rest on the cleverness of its concept alone.

There are a few things that don’t add up – as silly as it might be to look into this too much. The film suggests that long term memories can be forgotten (visualized here as being dropped into a pit and bursting into ashes), but does not account for unexpected recall – the Proustian rush, if I was going to be pretentious (which is certainly the way this review is looking). Equally, as poignant as it might be to have Riley’s imaginary friend disappear into the pit and out of her memory (the theme of putting away childish things from Toy Story 3 is back in earnest in this film), it nonetheless doesn’t seem realistic that Riley, or anyone, would just forget the fact of an imaginary friend. More troubling is the fact that as Riley becomes more and more reserved and emotionally numb, ultimately deciding to run away from home, the film suggests that these sorts of problems are the result of someone’s Joy and Sadness being sucked accidently into one’s long term memory. Obviously the film is not supposed to be taken in this way, but it is a problem that the film’s whole concept only works if you ignore everything about it that doesn’t add up.

There are two other problems, which are more damaging. The concept is interesting, but it is unwieldy, and the storyline that has been used to showcase it isn’t very involving. The story is a rather tired re-run of the journey home with obstacles arc which has been done to death. Equally, the characters unsurprisingly are very one-note. Joy is irritating and hardly develops throughout the film, whereas the other four are barely better than caricatures. As far as drama and character, Inside Out offers less than even some of their less ambitious work, such as the Monsters films.

There are great moments in Inside Out. The mid-film, sudden trip into the heads of both of Riley’s parents are funny and welcome – they offer some insight into directions the film could have taken but didn’t. Equally, there are a few moving moments, particularly the revelation towards the end that one of Riley’s key core memories was not the result of Joy alone, but primarily Sadness. The film has a nice view about maturity involving the mix of all emotions, rather than the prevalence of the positive ones – a nice spoiler is noticeable in the scene inside the parents’ heads, in which the emotions are a team and are barely discernible beyond their colours.

Problematically, Inside Out is too much about a ‘clever’ idea and not enough about drama and character. With what it gains in imagination, it loses in those moments where other Pixar’s could hit you at some unexpected emotional level – see primarily Wall-E, Up and Toy Story 3. And with the limited range of the characters, you are never taught to care.

REVIEW: Carol (2015)

Those expecting another Sirk tribute from Todd Haynes may be disappointed. Carol, like his version of Mildred Pierce before it, is a different film entirely and has more than likely been mis-sold to the public. Carol is less a film of political outrage and more a stylish and slow paced film of mood and thought.

Therese (Rooney Mara, now miles away from that disinterested turn – though who could blame her – in that awful Nightmare on Elm Street remake) is a shopgirl who does a kindness to one of her customers, mailing her back her misplaced gloves. This customer, however, is Carol, a seductive and glamourous divorcee. Carol invites her to lunch as a thank you and an attraction begins to develop between the two women before they even know it.

Early in the film, we have a character who is watching Sunset Boulevard for the sixth time and who is taking notes, his subject the disparity between what is said by the characters and what is meant or felt. A signal then to the audience that Carol will be a film of quiet, meaningful silences and yearning emotion masquerading as mundane small talk. The relationship between Therese and Carol develops slowly, the two women’s reserve as much a fact of the morals of the time as of their own fear, shyness and confusion. It is an unlikely relationship that may not initially make much sense, but it develops convincingly. Haynes keeps his camera distanced, the women frequently kept inside window frames and doorways. Kept back like this, we are always aware that the characters are a little more than we can understand – like in Sunset Boulevard, we see the front but not the mind. And, especially with the ending, we know that they will continue to exist after the film.

The characters are rarely allowed to lose their composure, but when they do, it matters. Carol’s husband, Harge, who forces Carol to stop her ‘deviance’ by taking her child away from her, loses his hard skin with an impassioned but hopeless “I love her.” The same line, slightly altered (“I love you”), similarly breaks from Carol towards the end of the film and has a truly powerful effect.

There are other times, however, where the film overplays its hand. Carol stands up to Harge and two male custody lawyers in one barnstorming scene that trespasses onto the wrong side of tacky. The Hollywood cinema of 1950s had a lot of such moments, but transplanted here it feels too jokey, too winking and knowing – as if the film has, for a moment, lost its serious veneer. The film lifts the opening and closing bookending from Brief Encounter, which works well enough while the film is playing but is quite irritating afterwards (particularly if you rewatch Brief Encounter in between – the moment in that film is perfect and heart-breaking and ought not to have been repeated). Quite why the film needed such an overt homage is anyone’s guess. Equally, the sequence in which Carol and Therese go away for a trip to Carol’s home in upstate New York literalises the idea of the ‘tunnel of love’ in a way that feels overdetermined.

Carol then is a film both quiet and intense. It is slow and mannered, as much as a means for intellectual distanciation as an expression of suppressed emotion. The final scene, while moving, is so clearly meant to make a critic write the word ‘swoon’ that it becomes as much a success of form as it does a success in character or story or emotion. Carol then is a very good, well made and moving film, but it also has a degree of practised coldness to it, a feeling of technique where honesty ought to be. It will work on the mind, and with the critics, but will it stay in the heart?

REVIEW: Sicario (2015)

In the heyday of the political thriller, which we will put as the 1970s for American cinema, ambiguities were often less moral in nature and more in terms of the extent of the problem. The Conversation, a masterpiece by the way, is ambiguous as to the exact nature and motivations of the forces ranged against poor old Harry Caul, but the film itself is less ambiguous about what it thinks of the culture of surveillance. We see the same questions of the nature of the crime and the criminals in The Parallax View and All The President’s Men. Those murky days were, ironically, a simpler time – the enemy was hidden and seemingly omnipotent, but they were not us. The films are never in doubt about what they felt were wrong with the world. Nowadays, however, this division is less clear, as are the films. Sicario sinks under some of the same issues that made something like Zero Dark Thirty such a hateful film.

Emily Blunt plays Kate Macer, an FBI agent recruited into a secret task force which aims to take down the leader of a Mexican cartel. Under Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) and the mysterious Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro), Kate is told to watch and learn. However, Matt and Alejandro may have other reasons for wanting Kate around, and they may not be trusted.

Sicario is a thriller about Mexican drug cartels, the American’s complicity in both the crimes and the general demand which funds and fuels the cartels, the moral ambiguities in policing across borders and outside the rules. It is a great-looking film, brilliantly shot by Roger Deakins, tightly directed by Denis Villeneuve and scored by Jóhann Jóhannsson. It moves at a good pace, which keeps it serious and largely engaging throughout (apart from a seriously poor coloured rubber band plot contrivance), a dense and complex plot that keeps you interested and some tough performances. It is effective, slightly shrill entertainment, with some fantastic, tense set pieces that largely hold the film together. As such, it is a very well made and watchable film. But…

Most political thrillers have a problem striking a decent balance between the complexity of their politic commentary and entertainment value. Sicario is dark and complex, even uncompromising, plot-wise, but it is hopelessly shallow in other ways. Its representation of Mexico is downright insulting – American agents casually climb to the roof of their compound on the Mexican border and watch gunfights and explosions in Mexico with binoculars. We do see short sequences detailing small aspects of American corruption (a few scenes) and complicity (one line), but we get a lot more focus on Americans getting the job done, state murder compared to finding a vaccine and talk of the ends justifying the means. Using Kate Macer as an audience surrogate, finding out as we do how the Mexican drug war ‘really’ works, the film makes its own world view clear. But since this is primarily a thriller, this world view is hopelessly inadequate to any real and true understanding of the problem and strongly stacks the deck to favour of the Americans as emotional identifiers for the audience. We are always standing on the American side of the border, looking at the Mexican drug war through the eyes of Americans. The film offers then a severe view of Mexico and a queasily ambiguous view of the Americans’ collusion with criminals and their willingness to break the rules. Where a fairer and more complex film might want to question this very American idea of the ends justifying the means, Sicario prefers to avoid this issue.

Sicario is a very well made film, but it remarkably shallow in terms of what it depicts. It is hard to work out what the film wants you to think of the Americans’ use of torture and their collusion with criminals who slaughter whole families. It represents this world as murky, dense and confusing, but does not dare offer an opinion, happy presumably that it is largely across the border and not here – a presumption that is self-serving and certainly not good enough. Where it should confront and shock but stand above the nastiness shown onscreen, Sicario instead remains mired in the same ambiguities as the film’s American characters. But when these ambiguities involve assassination and torture, that’s an uncomfortable place for a film of any sort to be.

REVIEW: The Look of Silence (2015)

Considered one of the best films of the year in 2012/3, The Act of Killing was a disturbing documentary about the perpetrators of the Indonesian genocide of 1965 who still live in impunity, considered heroes for their slaughter. Joshua Oppenheimer’s new film The Look of Silence has often been considered as a film that addresses the criticisms that The Act of Killing encountered, though the two films were really made concurrently. While the earlier film was questioned for its lack of context and its willingness to allow the perpetrators to speak in place of their victims – even going so far as to almost complicit with their crimes – The Look of Silence offers a more confrontational approach to the killers and places the victims in the centre of events.

The film follows Adi, an ophthalmologist, whose own brother Ramli was murdered before Adi was born. After watching some footage shot by Oppenheimer of two killers bragging shamelessly about their crimes in scenes similar to those in The Act of Killing, Adi and Oppenheimer embark on a series of confrontations with some of the killers, using his experience as an ophthalmologist as a cover.

The Look of Silence is a tough watch, but it is also easier to like, freed as it is of the moral complicity of The Act of Killing by focussing on the pain of the victims and by confronting the killers. In each interviews, Adi casually asks the killers about what they did and what they think about it, allowing them to boast and confess their crimes, before revealing his identity and the details of his brother’s death. Interviewees includes the heads of local families, leaders of death squads and even M.Y. Basrun, speaker of the legislature. Each, when told the truth about Adi and his motives, offer similar, depressingly human, rationalisations for their crimes, feeble threats and panicked denials. Oppenheimer’s camera lingers on the faces, both of Adi and his interviewees, often concentrating on their faces when there are no words left to say – the titular look of silence.

Beyond the trickery and the sight of the murderer’s finally having to squirm out of the facts of the past (shades of Shoah here), the film is constructive. It displays the silence and fear of the victims. Adi is told by Basrun that the killings will begin again if the victims’ families continue to want justice. Another interviewee suggests that Adi is part of a communist plot and threateningly attempts to find out what his name is and where he is from. It also shows that, despite the frequent calls of the killers and some of the victims to forget the past, Indonesia will not overcome its problems until these questions are asked and the impunity of the killers is removed. The film ultimately makes the case for truth and reconciliation, but also shows that the victims who remains in Indonesia are still in a very tenuous and dangerous position – a criticism of the here and now in Indonesia and, hence, important and valuable.

More than The Act of Killing, The Look of Silence is about the lies that surround Indonesia’s past. Early in the film, we see archive footage of an American news report about the genocide which, though not hiding the violence and the suffering (how could it?), complacently suggests that the killing was being done with the support of the population, was indeed being carried out by the people themselves, was not being orchestrated by a military dictatorship. We see footage of Goodyear Company’s Sumatran rubber plant, where the workers are all accused ‘communists’ working as slaves at gunpoint – the American reporter is sickeningly casual about this open abuse. Later, we are in a classroom, during a history lesson, hearing a teacher shamelessly indoctrinating his students, including Adi’s son, giving gruesome lessons about communist atrocities and recommending full compliance with the state. Though both scenes are about the past, they are also about the present, and reveal the film’s strategy of talking about the fear, suffering and silence of the modern Indonesian state by revealing the horrors of the past. The film acts as a powerful corrective to the lies of Indonesia and the West today.

Centring on Adi, who confronts the killers with a remarkable bravery and composure, The Look of Silence puts the focus on the victims and, in the meetings between the victim and the killer, on the future. Though Oppenheimer is not particularly interested in authenticity – there are many scenes here that feel staged – he has created a work that confronts the lies about Indonesia’s past and which gives a voice to the victim’s, one expressive not of their wish for revenge but of their wish for the truth, justice and ultimately safety and security. It is a powerful statement and an important, disturbing film about Indonesia and about all of us.

REVIEW: Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015)

Shaun The Sheep Movie is another Aardman production that draws as much of its inspiration from quaint old-fashioned Englishness as anything else. It is difficult to imagine another children’s animation that focuses this much on farm life and caravans. Another advantage to this film is that it is practically a silent film, which means that the jokes have to come thick and fast and the film can’t get bogged down in too much plot. The film then is madcap, flinging ideas and jokes about without much concern for pacing and structure and is all the more fun for that.

Shaun has become bored with life on the farm. The farmer has become set in his ways, sticking rigidly to an imposing schedule that leaves no room for variety. One day, Shaun sees a holiday advertisement for recommending a day off and decides to get rid of the farmer just for the day. This plan, however, goes horribly wrong and the farmer ends up lost in the big city, suffering from memory loss, and it is up to Shaun and the other sheep to find him and bring him home. Things are complicated by a enthusiastic animal catcher.

Odd as it is to review a children’s film about some cheeky but industrious sheep, the film does have some problems, most of which, admittedly, it overcomes. The design of the characters here does not allow for much expression and it is difficult to really care about them. Apart from Shaun, the other sheep are interchangeable and it is hard to distinguish any particular characteristics between them. This means that you never really feel that you are watching characters, just some dumb sheep, and it is difficult to stay emotionally involved. Though a problem, this does not matter too much – the film is more than funny enough to keep it going through its reasonable 85 minutes.

Where other Aardman films were overstuffed with plot at the expense of actually being funny, Shaun the Sheep Movie keeps things simple, preferring uncomplicated, silly situations and types. Indeed, there is no reason for the sheep to intrude on a posh French restaurant or for Bitzer, the farmer’s dog, to be dressed as a doctor, running along hospital corridors on all fours or attempting surgery. This preference for jokes and good comic timing over anything else works because the jokes are quite good (even a dated Silence of the Lambs reference with an angry cat raises a chuckle) and the film has a higher hit rate than most comedies.

So the animation is likable, the film has a nice quaint feel and, most importantly, it is actually quite funny. It doesn’t have the charm of, say, last year’s Paddington but it does join the likes of Penguins of Madagascar and the Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs films, all being children’s films that are inventive and funny enough to delight anybody. Even the awful cash-in song over the end credits is quite funny.

REVIEW: Cartel Land (2015)

Cartel Land follows, with a remarkable degree of access, two different vigilante groups – the Autodefensas, a citizen’s group in Michoacán fighting against the cartels, and Arizona Border Recon, a small group patrolling the US-Mexican border. Akin to a straight profile piece, the documentary addresses the rise of each group and their inner workings.

Dr José Mireles started the Autodefensas in his own town to drive out the Knights Templar drug cartel. He then decided to move on to the next town and the town after that, often coming in armed and uninvited and performing raids on the houses of those suspected of having connections to the cartels. Meanwhile, army veteran Tim Foley has set up a small group who patrol the American side of the border, trying to catch cartels smuggling drugs into the US. Both groups need all the help they can get, which means that they do not delve too far into the motivations of their volunteers.

Cartel Land shows a fairly comprehensive picture of the Autodefensas, the main focus of the film, moving as it does from the hope of the Autodefensas’ early successes through to its inevitable corruption at the hands of both the cartels and the police. There are shorter sequences with Arizona Border Recon and even shorter sequences with a group of meth cooks. The aim of the film is to reveal how complicit everyone is in the drugs trade. The armies and governments on both sides of the border, the paramilitaries, the vigilantes, the cooks and the cartels are interconnected. The film closes as it opens with an interview with a meth cook, who learnt his trade from American chemists and whose biggest customer base is American citizens. At the end of the film, in a shocking reveal, with see also that he is wearing the official uniform of the Mexican security services. Cartel Land then is an exposé that reveals the problems inherent in Mexico and the US’ War on Drugs. It also has incredible access to the Autodefensas, creating such a full picture of the group’s rise and fall that it often feels like fiction filmmaking. However, the film isn’t without its problems.

As with The Act of Killing, it is difficult to avoid the feeling that the film is complicit in the crimes that it depicts. When the Autodefensas capture one high-level cartel member, he is beaten before our eyes, with many of the Autodefensas members seeming to play up to the camera. When the group controversially raid houses, the camera goes right in after them. Elsewhere, the film takes us into the Autodefensas’ base where they engage in torture right before our eyes. Worst of all is a sequence in which the members come under fire whilst inside a car – the camera is of course also inside the car. They run down a car with a similar description to the one that attacked them, bringing out a man and his family. Before the eyes of the family, this man is taken away. We watch as he is questioned in the back of the car, a gun to his head. While it would be naïve to suggest that these things would not have happened without the camera’s presence, it is hard not to imagine that the camera’s very presence is only making things worse for the people we see getting abused. The film does not offer any insight into how this access was granted and what the Autodefensas intend to get out of all of this.

Another issue with the film is its structure. The film examines two vigilante groups, one Mexican and one American, but we are never sure quite what has been gained by their comparison or juxtaposition. The story of the Autodefensas is of a grassroots movement that begins in reaction to a series of horrendous murders and spreads, corrupting itself and harassing the citizens. Meanwhile, Arizona Border Recon is a small group, without a clear purpose and without a clear enemy. The one group of Mexicans that we see them detain are only working people attempting to immigrate. Their members are less knowledgeable of the wider context of the drug war, more ideologically suspect and, ultimately, a lot less open to corruption. The film does give a picture of the near impossible battle to be fought against corruption and drugs in both Mexico and America, but there seems to be little value in comparing two so different groups. Meanwhile, the interviews and revelations of the meth cooks that bookend the film add some important context, but nothing important of the story of these two paramilitary groups.

Cartel Land then is a well-produced action movie style documentary with an important view on the drug war and the border war. It has fantastic access to both groups. However, it doesn’t hang together where a more sober and complex analysis might have done and it does not get away from questions of complicity. Like many documentaries these days, it is a dirty picture of a dirty war.

REVIEW: West (2015)

West is an interesting film. A modern German film set in the 1970’s about a woman and her son emigrating from East Germany to West Germany, which examines the similarities between the two halves of the state, rather than merely considering the former as a site of cold bureaucratic menace and the latter as one of freedom and opportunity.

Three years after the death of her lover, Nelly Senff (Jӧrdis Triebel) smuggles herself and her young son Alexei (Tristan Gӧbel) into West Germany. Housed in a refugee camp, she goes through the process of collecting enough stamps to be legally allowed to make a life for herself in the West. One stamp involves getting the all clear from a tough intelligence agent, John Bird (Jacky Ido). The longer it takes Nelly to get the stamps she needs, the more she begins to realize how little the West is different from the East.

Our films, as well as our histories, are fond of showing a dark, unpleasant Orwellian East (Soviet bloc) in opposition to a free, colourful and open West. We have enough films like The Lives of Others about East Germany and the Stasi, but few enough about the equally cold and bureaucratic West. West revolves around the same Kafkaesque set-up as these other films, but its main difference is in showing that this kind of dehumanising processing was not unique to the Soviet bloc. Indeed, in one scene, it is an arch picture of Carter hanging on the wall, rather than a tough, uncompromising picture of Stalin. Later, we see Alexei playing with a friend, both of them sitting by a tall chain-link fence with West Germany and normality beyond. The parallels with the current plight of refugees in Calais is obviously unintentional (the film was made in 2013), but nonetheless telling.

However, where the film works best is in the quality of its cast. Triebel gives a fantastic performance as a woman trying to comply whilst also keeping some sense of personal liberty and dignity. Her strong performance ensures that the film is as much if not more about her character’s struggles than any overarching political message. The film’s examination of her attempts to make a life for herself and her son indeed recalls the feminist but fairly non-political Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.

Anchored by a strong central performance and intriguing for its rare view of Soviet-US bloc parallels, the film makes a slight misstep with the shady past and indeed possible present by Nelly’s former lover, who may just be a Stasi informer and who may be attempting to contact her. Where the film had previously worked as the story of one woman’s struggles, this development moves the film into spy movie territory, a convoluted storyline that distracts from the real drama of the film.

West then is a moving drama that has the ring of lived-in authenticity and strong performances. Questioning what it is that we call freedom, it feels as much a film about today as one about the 1970’s, which is really what all films set in the past should feel like. Worth seeking out.

REVIEW: Enemy (2015)

Enemy is a film that is not bothered about the ‘anxiety of influence.’ Director Villeneuve and writer Gullón display such a fondness for other films that it is difficult not to feel it rubbing off. Before the film is even ten minutes in, we are solidly in the world of both Cronenberg and Lynch. The rest of the film is a puzzle that is left for you to decipher at your own leisure.

Adam is a history lecturer, who teaches about the controls of dictatorship and yet lives a fairly bare existence himself, rotating between teaching, commuting and having joyless sex with his girlfriend Mary (Mélanie Laurent). Having rented and watched a film that a colleague has recommended, Adam suddenly jerks awake, convinced that he has seen his double in a bit part actor in the film. He becomes obsessed with finding this person, a search which sparks, to say the least, an identity crisis.

Enemy feels like a film from that brief period of time after Donnie Darko that saw a surfeit in similar puzzle films, from The Machinist to Primer. Largely eschewing traditional plotting and characterisation in favour of plotting, some of these films were maddening and some were quite good fun – Primer was particularly enjoyable. Enemy is instead all about the mood. It is a grim, greens-and-yellows detective story that withholds enough to make a puzzle out of itself without ever distracting from its overall vaguely Hitchcockian tone. There are several interpretations about what the whole thing is about (and a good few of them sound rather silly), but the real value of the film is that it gets an edgy, searching, eerie feel without ever having to sacrifice it to some series of revelations and a villain to be beaten. It is a film about asking questions, not one about finding answers, and it is all the more interesting for that. It is told with an invention and élan, which keeps you interested, even if the film’s examinations of identity, uniqueness and fidelity appear to boil down to an episode of Wife Swap.

Jake Gyllenhaal gives a great performance, playing two characters with slight differences. Most of the eeriness of the film comes from the fact that Adam and Anthony are so similar in small ways, as opposed to total opposites who usually encounter each other in films of this sort. Gyllenhaal then is tasked with playing two different characters who have to be both different and the same. He pulls it off well. Mélanie Laurent and Sarah Gadon have less to do (these kinds of films all too often favour men), but turn in convincing performances as women watching the men (or man) in their live falling apart.

In summary, good, unsettling fun – up until the ending, which is, unfortunately, a touch too smugly odd. This complexity, more stylistic than anything, will be disappointingly missing from Villeneuve’s other 2015 release, Sicario.

REVIEW: Girlhood (2015)

Girlhood is a French film about a group of friends who get up to no good and in the end become women, so there isn’t really anything particularly new about it as far as that goes. Where it is different is in the fact that these girls are black and from the rougher part of Paris. Girlhood then is a film about growing up but it is not the kind of film that fits into the white middle class fantasy that most films prefer to stay in. But here there lies a slight problem with the film.

First, perfunctorily, the plot synopsis. Marieme (Karidja Touré) is a 16 year old African-French woman living in an economically deprived suburb of Paris. Her mother works nights and is rarely around and her abusive brother makes the rules at home. Falling out of school, she falls in with a gang lead by Lady (Assa Sylla), and becomes a member of the gang. These friendships help Marieme become more self-confident but does not necessarily lead to happiness.

Girlhood is anchored by some fantastic and realistic performances, which often feel more real than the situations themselves. They give angry and committed performances that heighten most of the sillier scenes and which carry off both the emotional and the physical moments. There are a couple of fight scenes that are has convincing as anything similar in any more masculine film.

Girlhood offers many things probably not seen before. Films of the urban poor are often exclusively male so the film does feel unique for its female focus. It begins with an interesting sequence, in which a group of girls playing American football, Marieme included, with all the strength and grit that that would take. We then cut to the same group, shed of the bulky sports gear, walking home. As they split up into ever smaller groups and walk in amongst crowds of males, they become quieter and quieter, their heads kept lower and lower. It is a powerful sequence, in that it shows the subtle ways that paternalism has remained in society. Nothing in particular happens to anyone, but it is telling that the scene is nonetheless tense.

For all the things that are praiseworthy about Girlhood – its performances, its insight into a side of our society that hasn’t been seen in such detail before, its mostly fluid plotting – there are some things had don’t ring quite so true. The film is directed by Céline Sciamma, a white middle class woman, and, for all her very obvious skill, panache and understanding, there is an element of distance about her camera. Some critics have gone as far as saying that she is fetishizing her characters and, indeed, her performers. I wouldn’t go as far as that, but there is a distance that is maintained throughout. More problematic for me, however, is the film’s insistence on casting the film in a near fairy tale light. Girlhood is realistic and grim, but Sciamma seems to wants us to consider the film more as a work of symbolism. So we do get an insight into Marieme’s life and the cultural and socio-economic reasons for her indifference and dissatisfaction with the world outside her friends, but they are very shallow. Her teacher, castigating her off screen in one scene, is written off practically as a villain. The film’s refusal to judge does not stretch beyond the four members of Lady’s gang, which feels only like a denial of reality. More irritatingly, Sciamma prefers to see Marieme’s very real decline as some kind of positive, self-actualizing, even feminist experience. After every new low (her decision to start carrying a knife, her bullying, her petty crime, her abandonment of her home including her sister), the film cuts to a blank screen for a long stretch, scored with near triumphant, hopeful, transcendent music. By the end, Marieme has lost everything and Sciamma prefers to see this as character building, rather than what it is and what it would be in real life. By the end, Sciamma’s film seems to celebrate Marieme’s tough life for its fairy tale and feminist associations, in the process denying its very real difficulties. It seems, then, that it is not Marieme’s blackness that Sciamma is fetishizing, but her poverty.

There are a lot of films about the urban poor and the difficulties of their existence due to a range of factors from uncaring bureaucracy to unemployment to drugs to crime. Girlhood is worthy of celebration of approaching the subject from an angle too long ignored. It has a fantastic cast of young and honest actors. But what Girlhood depicts is real, not symbolic, and it is hard not to feel that a disservice has been done.