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Simply Thrilling
I honestly didn’t think I’d be overwhelmed by a couple of thrilling Guatemalan features, and I certainly didn’t see The Whistlers (above) coming either. When you think of Romanian films you might imagine something gritty, socially aware and even worthy, like Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, or Cristi Puiu’s Death of Mr Lazarescu. Certainly not a thriller like writer/director Corneliu Porumboiu’s The Whistlers.
But this is an outstanding, twisting, turning tale, sometimes dark, sometimes erotic, occasionally political, and always compelling. Initially set in the Canary Islands, where our main protagonist, Cristi (Vlad Ivanov, brilliant) has just landed, it plunges into some fairly dubious and corrupt territory, with a few Hitchcockian plot devices and misdirecting McGuffins along the way. There’s even one scene that takes place on an old movie set, which is very meta, almost Orson Welles-esque. Cristi soon encounters the mysterious and aptly named Gilda (Catrinel Marlon, extraordinary) and he is drawn to her, but neither he nor the audience can decipher if she can be trusted. CCTV monitors them, and mob bosses and their lackeys try to control the duo, who learn to communicate by whistling. The idea being that they’ll be mistaken for birdsong, but will still be able to talk – hence the film title. Another plus is the soundtrack, from Iggy Pop to Mack The Knife and some splendid opera. Definitely want to see much more from Porumboiu and his main stars.
Imagine a junior version of Goodfellas, or Bugsy Malone played straight, with no music, but brutal violence, and you have a good idea of what director Claudio Giovannesi’s feature Piranhas is like. Maybe even Gomorrah, as this drama is also drawn from novel by Roberto Saviano, and similarly set amidst the Camorra. This is a close-up study of budding teenage thugs, who like magpies are drawn to shiny things, and long for the thrill of the chase, the riches and romance of their elders, and the glamour of their criminal enterprises. The narrative revolves around Nicola (Francesco Di Napoli, magnetic) who becomes drawn into a gang, and soon leads them into a world of AK-47s, extortion, bullying, protection rackets and playing both sides. Despite all this, the charisma of Di Napoli as he rides his moped through the narrow Naples streets is so compelling that it almost makes you want him to get away with it. Another young actor to watch.
Revenge thriller A White, White Day, directed by Hlynur Palmason is a remarkable study of a man possessed by grief gnawing away at him, with the unsettling, brooding feeling that he’s going to erupt at any minute. Starring the incredible Ingvar Sigurdsson as Icelandic cop Ingimundur, we see everything through his eyes, and the revelations about his late wife seem to happen in real time, for us as well as him. What keeps him sane and grounded is his young granddaughter, but as the seasons come and go, with Icelandic ponies wandering around in the background, he is jolted into waking up and investigating what really occurred when his wife was killed in a car accident. Endless questions are thrown up, some almost too painful to consider, but the detective in him just won’t let go.
My theory, for what it’s worth, is that Wash Westmoreland’s latest drama, Earthquake Bird, only starts to make sense if you imagine that the main character, Lucy (Alicia Vikander) has an alter-ego, Lily (Riley Keough) who is carrying out her darkest thoughts and deeds. It’s apparently based on a novel by Susanna Jones, and the Japanese setting and co-star/ love interest Teiji (Naoki Kobayashi) do elevate it somewhat. But as it’s already up on Netflix, you can judge for yourselves.
Further Afield
Penultimately, here’s the best of the rest of the film dramas – and hopefully some of them will get a decent release. We’ll flag up the ones you need to badger your local cinema to show, and fingers crossed the rest will pop up on your favourite streaming service(s).
Germany has excelled at making gripping television recently, with the two Deutschland series (83 and 86, with 89 imminent) plus Babylon Berlin. Now come two very different, but wonderful films: Lara, from Jan-Ole Gerster, and System Crasher (above), from Nora Fingscheidt. With her 60th birthday looming, piano teacher Lara (Corinna Harfouch, fabulous) is a living, breathing example of imposter syndrome – and to add insult to injury, her only son Viktor (Tom Schilling, from Never Look Away and Generation War) is now the feted piano virtuoso she should have been. People from her past and neighbours from her present press in on her thankless existence, until she seizes the initiative and tries to turn her fate around, as the plot builds to a crescendo of Viktor’s concert and the aftermath.
System Crasher is about 9-year-old Benni (Helena Zengel) who doesn’t fit into any boxes and is demanding and hyperactive 24/7. She can be violent and foul-mouthed, and we feel what it’s like to live in her chaos, to hurtle around in her shoes, with lots of point-of-view and deliberately shaky handheld camera work. Her own family can’t cope with her, and wherever she’s placed, she either flees or gets thrown out. She appears fearless, but is afraid of fitting in. An extraordinary, upsetting and challenging film with an amazing central performance.
On A Magical Night (aka Chambre 212) could only be French, such is its bold, liberated overstepping of boundaries in the most personal, se -xual relationships. Directed by Christophe Honoré, it centres on a married, midlife woman with a wandering eye, Maria (Chiara Mastroianni), and opens with a telling scene in which she’s hiding from the girlfriend of one of her student lovers. When her husband discovers her infidelity – and he doesn’t know the half of it – she moves across the road to hotel room 212. At this point the film turns into something far more fantastical, imaginative and comic, as an endless stream of lovers from her past and present turn up with their own stories, each exactly as they would have been at the time she knew them. Plus her husband’s own conquests from the past, and what they might be like now. As their numbers grow, it becomes hectic, but is nevertheless a refreshing role-reversal and still feels very romantic.
There’s another side to late romance in the touching and uplifting Two Of Us (above), directed by Filippo Meneghetti and starring Barbara Sukowa and Martine Chevalier as two older women who are not just neighbours, but have been secret lovers for years. They are about to leave their existing lives behind and escape – when one of them has a stroke before this can happen – but even then they cannot live without each other.
Argentine gay romance End of the Century is set in Barcelona, with memory flashbacks where the two protagonists realise they met two decades earlier. Peter Mackie Burns’ film Rialto
is an altogether less joyous affair. Apart from a tiny chink of hope, this is a gritty and occasionally grim voyage into a man’s dwindling life – as he loses his father, his job and his family – entering into a paying relationship with casual rent boy (Tom Glynn-Carney of Dunkirk and The Ferryman). Monica Dolan is understated and magnificent as the wife of the dwindling Colm (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor), and Dublin provides the raw backdrop to his descent.
The Orphanage transports us to Afghanistan in the late 1980s, when the Russians were in charge of everything, right down to the curriculum in state-run orphanages. Directed by Shahrbanoo Sadat (of Wolf and Sheep fame), the focus is on one teenage petty thief, Qodrat, who is so obsessed with Bollywood movies that even when faced with the most desperate situations he re-imagines these scenes in Bollywood style. And these fantasy sequences are quite something. But what will happen to the country and specifically all these children if the Soviets depart and leave a void? The mix of hindsight and insight wound around Qodrat’s compelling character leaves quite an impact.
Anyone who saw Singapore director Anthony Chen’s unforgettable debut feature, Ilo Ilo at LFF 2013 will be eager to track down his latest, Wet Season (above). This is a December to May love affair, but awkward as it’s between a married female teacher at a boys’ school and one of her students. She’s been trying to get pregnant, with no luck, has to look after her ailing father-in-law and support her needy brother. Then one incredibly rainy day (hence the title), she gives a besotted pupil a lift, he is helpful and attentive, and it all moves up a notch. Metaphor alert: there’s a lot of overripe fruit employed here!
Oliver Laxe’s Fire Will Come from is set in glorious Galicia with Amador Arias playing a convicted arsonist suspected by everyone on his return to his rural home, where his elderly mum lives with her cattle among the stunning landscapes – which look even more amazing when they’re blazing.
Sister, directed by Svetla Tsotsorkova, centres its story around a struggling Bulgarian mother and her two daughters who compete over everything, while she keeps dark secrets from them. Its heart-crushing opening sequence is all part of the fantasy that teenage Rayna fabricates to elicit sympathy and money as she sells figurines at the side of the road. But when she gets entangled with her own sister’s boyfriend, her stubborn tenacity seems like less of an asset and more of a selfish characteristic. Italian epic drama, Martin Eden is cleverly and carefully directed by Pietro Marcello to appear like a period drama, from format and colour palette to film stock. Based on Jack London’s original story, transplanted to Italy, it stars Luca Marinelli as the eponymous hero of his own life, where our adventurer’s picaresque journey seems almost self-mythologising, even as he strives to leave his previous existence behind.
Korean director Ga-Young Jeong also stars in her quirky relationship comedy Heart, which is very obviously influenced by Hong Sang-soo. Her character is almost totally unfiltered across multiple scenes, and to say she’s forward would be an understatement! From France comes Rebecca Zlotowski’s An Easy Girl, at times verging on soft porn, and set in Cannes where young Naima is lured into the superficially glamorous, but frankly sleazy lifestyle of her visiting cousin, Sofia, with the fallback option of loyal best friend Dodo always being there for Naima when things get out of hand. Hari Sama’s This Is Not Berlin is another coming-of-age drama, set in Mexico when the glamour of the 1986 World Cup and an exciting new music scene explode around a group of youths. After its dreamlike, slow motion opening of fighting schoolboys, it settles down into a darker, but consistently woozy voyage into a club scene of hair gel, eyeliner, Roxy Music and experimentation, with a hugely evocative soundtrack.
Bubbling under at the festival were some promising English language features. Atom Egoyan’s latest, Guest of Honour (above), stars David Thewlis as a food inspector who cannot cope with his daughter’s acceptance of a wrongful conviction. It doesn’t always work, but Thewlis is a strong lead and there are some memorable moments to pull the viewer through. Dabbling in the area of depression and ‘happy pill’ type treatments is Little Joe, confidently directed by Jessica Hausner, with Emily Beecham, Ben Whishaw, Kerry Fox and a whole hothouse full of futuristic floral trouble. The excellent sound design and colour palette are deeply unsettling, and it’s all a bit Day of the Triffids as it asks if we should be playing God – especially if we might potentially create a monster?
Following up his striking film Shell – which launched Chloe Pirrie’s career, is Run from Scott Graham. It doesn’t quite hit the same heights and has been pitched as exploring the protagonists’ love of Springsteen, but I’m guessing there were problems with the music rights, as we only touch on the magic of the Boss in the matching tattoos, opening graphics, and one track over the closing credits. It’s not quite tartan noir and not quite road movie. Although, if the Springsteen rights do come through, it might make the narrative knit together more effectively, as this is very much a town full of losers, with a couple of them pulling out of there to win, as they race souped-up cars around the harbour.
Trey Edward Shults highly-anticipated Waves was a bonus festival feature, boasting pumping soundtrack and dual narratives that might almost stand alone as separate films. The parallel stories are joined because the two protagonists are siblings, hedonistic Tyler and shy Emily (Kelvin Harrison Jr and Taylor Russell, both superb in their Instagram-ready worlds) whose lives and fates are changed and intertwined because of each other’s actions. It’s refreshing to see the world of a middle-class African American family with high achieving teens, even as we witness them losing control and their world turning upside down after an incident at a house party.
NO WAY. NEVER AGAIN. ABSOLUTELY NOT. NOPE.
Only a handful of gawdawful features this time out. But what made a couple of them even more scarring, leaving us shell-shocked, was that they were screened back to back. Kind of thought nothing could be worse than Judy and Punch, but then The Other Lamb (above) came along and plunged new misogynist depths. Both were billed as ‘feminist’ films, and that couldn’t be further from the truth, even if you have female directors (Mirrah Foulkes and Malgorzata Szumowska), you can still make a punishingly bad piece of work that sets the cause back decades. And if you are going to show some kind of revenge, then maybe don’t leave it until the final couple of minutes of the film. Just a thought. Anyway, at least the violence in Judy and Punch isn’t confined to the main women in the story; no, there are elderly and frail people – even a baby – who are subject to abuse too. So democratic.
Slapstick echoes of the puppets they wield makes Mia Waskilowska and Damon Herriman rather unusual anyway, even in their slightly eccentric town, but it gets even darker and I wish I’d followed the lead of several others and walked out. However, The Other Lamb is in a different league of awfulness. It thinks it’s The Handmaid’s Tale. It isn’t. Long story short: guy called Shepherd (yes, it really is that subtle) has set up a cult with only female members, each of whom he takes as a wife, which gets to feel rapey pretty quickly. Then when they give birth to their own female offspring, oh yes, he moves on to them. And it’s exactly as oh-please-take-my-eyes terrible as it sounds. One person was so keen to get out of the screening midway through that he fled by actually climbing over the backs of the seats in the cinema. My friends who were there with me still talk of it in hushed tones with PTSD in their eyes, lest we forget.
Styled as an intoxicating, wildly original movie and somehow picking up the festival’s Best Film award, Monos is a glamorised feature about child soldiers who brutalise as they cut a swathe through their wild environment, beating up perceived enemies and rubbing out innocents if they get in their way. It’s all very sub-Lord of the Flies and I hated it from the opening sequences right through to the bitter end, and hope to never see it again. Another stellar bit of overacting from Robert Pattinson – and Johnny Depp too – in Waiting for the Barbarians. It may have visual echoes of John Ford’s The Searchers at one point, and Mark Rylance is as watchable as ever, but this cannot save the movie.
As for French drama, Don’t Look Down, which is pretty pleased with itself and features a group of five friends discussing their romantic travails over a full meal, I can only urge you to avoid it and host your own dinner party yourself.
Go to page 3 for more from the BFI 63rd London Film Festival Part 2!