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Isabelle Huppert is definitely having a moment. She seems to have entered a golden phase in her career, so whatever project she chooses, no matter how slight or overblown, she effortlessly acts everyone else off the screen. Case in point is Elle, from Paul Verhoeven (The Man Who Would Be Hitchcock), with nods to Rear Window voyeurism (binocular spying) and Frenzy (brutal sexual assault). It’s all rather sordid, and we get a back story about her father, the infamous, incarcerated mass murderer, which in turn informs the increasingly violent video games her company makes. There are nods to Hitch themes like identity and submissiveness, and she keeps putting herself in harm’s way. Though it’s more Hitch-cod than the real thing. So it’s a miracle that Huppert’s reputation comes out not just unscathed, but actually enhanced.
Huppert is also the reason to see Souvenir, from Bavo Defurne, which casts her as a washed-up ex-Eurovision chanteuse, Liliane, now working on the production line in a pate factory. She’s happy to spend her days in monotonous work and her evenings knocking back the booze, until young Jean (Kevin Azais) joins the factory and recognises her. He’s also an amateur boxer, who charms her (despite the three decade age difference), woos her, becomes her manager, and improbably lures her back onstage. So it turns into A Star is Reborn, complete with chanson choruses you can’t get out of your head (Je Dis Oui!), sung with amusingly overwrought gestures. Parfait!
If you’ve seen The Conversation or The Lives of Others, you’ll be familiar with the paranoia in a film like Scribe, that involves listening in on other people. Debut director Thomas Kruithof constantly places his camera behind and above the subject – usually Francois Cluzet as Duval, or the ancient typewriter he’s using – increasing the sense of claustrophobia and tightening the tension. Kafkaesque in its layers and the sense of floundering around, so Duval (and the viewers) can’t tell who the good guys are, as he also struggles with his alcoholism. Compromised at every turn, it feels like he’s a pawn in intricate Cold War politics, and being Cluzet, it’s impossible to drag your gaze away from him for even a moment.
Stepping much further back in time, A Woman’s Life is Stephane Brize‘s fine adaptation of a Maupassant story that manages to balance reverence with freshness. We get an insight into life of Jeanne, played by Judith Chemla, as she goes through her blissful girlhood, and falls for young nobleman Julien, who turns out to be serially unfaithful. Just as she’s coming to terms that her life won’t be a bed of roses, she is further betrayed and impoverished by her spendthrift son. Set near the Normandy coast, the style and pace of the film get us right into her innermost thoughts and feelings, and her sense of suffocation.
The Innocents is based on the diary of the main character, wartime doctor Mathilde, played by the luminous Lou de Laage. Director Anne Fontaine‘s coolly beautiful, yet starkly shocking film is about despair, love, hope, and misjudged values when your world is collapsing around you. The year is 1945, when French medics are working through their final weeks’ duty before leaving Poland, and Mathilde takes pity on a nun who says that they need help at their remote convent. What seems like a one-off event, helping a heavily pregnant young woman – described as a charity case, but actually another nun – to give birth, turns out to be the first of many. For all the nuns have been systematically raped and impregnated by occupying troops, left terrified and unsure of what to do. “For us nuns,” they tell her, “the end of the war doesn’t mean the end of fear.” And Mathilde narrowly escapes the same fate on her way back, taking refuge in the convent and making it her mission to help them. Shame dominates the nuns’ lives, with one describing her faith as “twenty four hours of doubt and one minute of hope.” When the babies are born, the Mother Superior (Agata Kulesza) claims she’s taking them away to a better place, yet is this just another twist in this amazing true tale?
The Stopover is set in Cyprus, where a military unit is stopping off to decompress on its way back from Afghanistan. Directed by sisters Delphine and Muriel Coulin, the film focuses on two women, Aurore and Marine, played by Ariane Labed and Soko, and the tension building between them and the rest of their almost entirely male unit. They’re all still wired up and jumpy, even as their ‘decompression’ starts, using VR headsets to ‘revisit’ their tour of duty to try to get everything – including PTSD – out of their systems before their return home. Yet they all still seem unsettled and rootless, tense and troubled, as the action simmers to boiling point…
In a quiet, run-down, Southern Italian seaside town, where prostitutes wander back up the beach after a night plying their trade at sea, we meet a family straight out of Shameless, who have built their entire livelihood around their daughters, who are Indivisible, conjoined twins. Brilliantly directed by Edoardo De Angelis, the 18-year-old twins are all-too-believably played by real-life sisters Angela and Marianna Fontana. They spend their days preparing to perform as a beautiful celebrity freakshow, bringing blessings and good luck, singing at weddings and coming-of-age ceremonies, with their money-grubbing father and gadget-obsessed mother ferrying them around and constantly pushing them forward. Then, just as they’re coming of age, they’re told by a doctor that as they don’t share any organs, they could be separated.
Fed up of always being together, one twin is over the moon at this revelation, the other’s not so sure, and the parents can see their income disappearing. When the twins run away (which is hard in itself), it’s straight into the clutches of a seductive, yet sleazy bloke who has offered to pay for their operation, but is running what’s basically a David-Lynch-esque brothel on a boat and wants to have his wicked way with them. So many questions are raised, including the hypocrisy of their very own family leeching off the girls, and it seems like there can be no fairytale ending. Recommended.
One of the best thrillers of the festival has to be the slow-burn Fury Of A Patient Man (right), set in Spain and directed by Raul Arevalo. Flipping back and forth in time, it’s deliberately unsettling, a feeling that’s enhanced by the point-of-view filming of a violent robbery and attempted getaway in the opening scene. Moving forward to the present day, we have no idea why Jose (the seething, brooding Antonio de la Torre) is befriending the locals, and gently, gradually making a play for the local barkeep’s wife, Ana (Ruth Diaz). It all starts to come clear when we discover the identity of the victims of that initial, fatal robbery (but I won’t spoil that for you). Suffice it to say it will have you gripped, as you travel through some memorably bloody retribution scenes, including one beneath a boxing gym. Outstanding.
Smoke And Mirrors, aka Man of 1000 Faces, is a tense thriller and a compelling watch, based on the true story of infamous Spanish secret service agent Francisco ‘Paco’ Paesa (Eduard Fernandez). Directed by Alberto Rodriguez, and set in the 1980s and 90s, the action moves around Europe, identities change, dirty money is laundered, deals are all dodgy, and a tangled web is woven. So much so that it’s hard to remember who’s alive, who’s dead and who’s undercover. At least we can be sure that pretty much everyone is corrupt!
Denmark first pushed its way into our consciousness in the last decade with The Killing, created by Soren Sveistrup, and starring Sofie Grabol as Sarah Lund, and Lars Mikkelsen as Troels. Now, in The Day Will Come, this unbeatable trio link up again, with Jesper Nielsen directing. This is an equally dark story, but more worryingly, it’s ‘inspired’ by real stories from an infamous boys’ home called Godhavn in the 1960s. When their mother gets sick, two cheeky young brothers, Erik and Elmer, wonderfully played by Albert Lindhardt and Harald Hermann, are sent away to this home, run by strict, sadistic headmaster Heck (Mikkelsen), whose cruelty is softened by an idealistic teacher (Grabol). The behaviour of the rest of the staff, however, varies between casually cruelty to full-on sexual abuse, yet it’s hard for sympathetic school inspector David Dencik to catch them out. Cooly filmed, like a Hammershoi painting, the goings-on inside make Dotheboys Hall look like a holiday camp.
Go to page 3 for more great films from the BFI 60th London Film Festival.