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BFI London Film Festival 2022 Part 1 by Helen M Jerome: What a welcome, bumper year for cinema, getting back on its feet, and allowing cinephiles to immerse themselves in big film festivals again. The behemoth in the UK is the London Film Festival, and it seems to be continually expanding and spreading into unexpected areas to reveal all sorts of gorgeous big screen treats.
To save you time and cash, I’ll walk you through the very best (and worst) of cinematic offerings. Upfront I’ll focus on the feature-length ‘fiction’ films in part one – right here. Then in part two (coming soon) I’ll zoom in on some of the outstanding directorial debuts, plus documentaries – with the bonus of a couple of my entirely subjective, least favourites from the fortnight. And, of course, our annual and much-coveted DVD Fever Awards.
It was a big decision to make the festival’s opening film a family feature, but Matilda The Musical really worked for me by the simple tactic of taking a five-year-old child along. I put personal cynicism aside and watched it through her eyes, which was a rollercoaster of unfettered enthusiasm and excitement. And that, after all, is what cinema should be. Plus the moment it finished, she wanted to stay right there and watch it all over again. Tim Minchin’s songs are real earworms, Matthew Warchus’ direction transfers from stage to screen expertly, and the casting is perfect. In particular, Alisha Weir as the gifted Matilda at the heart of the story, Lashana Lynch as the teacher with the heart of gold, and Emma Thompson being utterly, comically vile as head teacher, Miss Trunchbull.
The closing film was also a guaranteed crowd-pleaser, being the follow-up to Rian Johnson’s original Knives Out feature. With Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery he takes his larger-than-life detective and central character Benoit Blanc, played by Daniel Craig, to another level. Again, it’s a bit of a locked room mystery, set on a Greek island with many of the ensemble characters sitting on thrones of lies, and with nothing quite as it seems. Clues little and large are sprinkled throughout and you find yourself straining to solve the crime(s) in what feels like real time. There’s someone for everyone to love (and hate) in the glittering cast of disruptors, with Kathryn Hahn, Janelle Monae, Kate Hudson, Leslie Odom Jr and Edward Norton up front, and cameos from the likes of Hugh Grant and Serena Williams, plus Blanc’s online gurus Stephen Sondheim and Angela Lansbury. And like a big box of chocs, just when you think you’ve gorged yourself sufficiently on the excesses, you find another equally rich layer underneath.
IN CONTENTION
Those jostling for attention in the Official Competition this year were not just strong, but also largely very accessible features. And it so happens that the winner, Corsage, was also my choice. Directed by Marie Kreutzer and starring one of my favourite actors Vicky Krieps, it’s very loosely based on the life of Empress Elizabeth of Austria in the latter part of the 19th Century, and channels the wit and irreverence of films like The Favourite while also breaking the fourth wall at crucial moments. If you like a bit of pomp, ceremony and facial topiary, you’ll love the set-piece dining room and court scenes. There’s generous latitude with historical accuracy in service of the storytelling and character evolution, so we can see that the Empress is both liberated and confined. You almost forget that the courtly tunes performed for her are actually Kris Kristofferson’s ‘Help Me Make It Through The Night’ and Jagger and Richard’s ‘As Tears Go By’, written a century later. She loves technical innovation, plays hard at riding and fencing, flirts shamelessly and demands absolute loyalty, but we also empathise with her, such is Krieps’ and Kreutzer’s mastery of their genre and dedication to detail. “Her soul is like a chaotic museum” feels like an apt description of a woman hurtling towards what feels like her inevitable end.
Courtroom dramas don’t always work, but Argentina 1985 is so much more than that. There’s genuine fear, jeopardy and tension in Santiago Mitre’s feature, based on the real events of the era. We hear real names that resonate across the decades and witness bravery in the face of horrific, targeted threats, as we see how the disappeared leave behind families who are still unable to grieve, while the military junta are put on trial. An essential watch.
Alice Diop’s Saint Omer is a very different courtroom drama and a small, simmering earthquake of a film. We follow teacher Rama as she travels to another region in France to attend a trial. As an independent black woman, she nevertheless carries personal, emotional baggage with her into court, and we feel the pressure of her own family and her being stuck between two cultures. In parallel is the story and testimony of the young woman in the dock, who is accused of killing her own 15-month-old daughter. With frequently locked-off shots, Diop makes it impossible for us to look away. We meet the accused’s gaze, and it feels visceral as Rama also observes and makes notes. References to the story of Medea, to FGM, to sorcery, culture and ethnology all seep into the narrative explicitly and implicitly, and Rama sees herself reflected here.
Brother is director Clement Virgo’s story of an invisible bond between siblings Francis and Michael, who look out for each other and their single mother, as they grow up in Toronto. Their West Indian heritage and absent father are alluded to and there’s a feeling of fate hanging over them at every stage. Black music is always there in the plot and their background as the swirling timeline spirals into an irresistible resolution. A fine adaptation of the David Chariandy novel.
Anyone who loved Mark Jenkin’s impassioned, political Cornish movie, Bait, will be drawn to his follow-up, Enys Men. Be warned though, this 1970s set drama is a very different beast, filmed on 16mm, in woozy, period colour and focusing on just one isolated woman (Mary Woodvine, also in Bait). Just about existing on a deserted island off the Cornish coast, walking around in a distinctive red rain jacket, she seems to be a survivalist haunted by visions of bygone tin miners, maidens, and lost lifeboatmen. The narrative is thinner, less involving, more elliptical than Bait, but it has strong folk horror elements and is perhaps more of a mood.
GLOBAL STARS
Big name directors and leading actors were rolled out daily at the festival. And some of their films were utterly irresistible. Poised halfway between charmingly beguiling and horrifically grisly, Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin is a belter, and just what his fans (including yours truly) hoped for after Three Billboards took him to another level. Using the same double act from In Bruges, in Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, McDonagh creates an entirely closed world on the endlessly, overwhelmingly beautiful island of ‘Inisherin’ a century ago. Hemmed in by religion, small minds and few prospects, when best friends Farrell and Gleeson fall out, the results are bloody and catastrophic for them and their community. Gleeson says: “I just don’t have a place for dullness in my life any more,” as his reason for jettisoning Farrell’s sweet, loyal friendship, and the ensuing feud. The excellent secondary characters in Farrell’s sister (Kerry Condon) and simpleton friend (Barry Keoghan) shed further light on the central relationship while getting some of the best lines. Luckily the film is also brimful of the blackest, bleakest humour, so you are left with a trademark sweet and sour McDonagh concoction that repays revisiting.
Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light is another gorgeous looking movie that evokes a different part of the 20th Century. Shot in Margate and based in the 1980s, the cinema itself – the art deco building and the magical art form within – is the real star. Shot by the inimitable Roger Deakin, it features many luminaries of British stage and screen in a romantic love letter to cinema that sweeps you up, then brings you crashing down to earth. Olivia Colman is perfect as the dowdy, depressed and lonely seaside cinema manager who is controlled and exploited by her married boss, Colin Firth. Toby Jones is the projectionist infatuated with the silver screen, and Micheal Ward is the new, young employee who loves two-tone and captures Colman’s heart. It’s set up to be cosy and convivial, but takes a darker turn and shows another, less desirable side of the eighties, and is all the better for it.
To be honest, I would walk over relatively hot coals to see a new Park Chan-wook film, so I was already excited about Decision To Leave. Its stars, Park Hae-il and Tang Wei, play a sleep-deprived detective and his bewitching suspect, and their mutual attraction is at the red-hot core of this tragi-comic thriller. The distance and clarity between dreams and reality further complicates a narrative that already skips around time and place, with the investigation conducted like a romance. Any film noir and Hitchcock fans (like the director himself) will also love spotting all the knowing references, visual and in-jokes, from Vertigo and Marnie, to Strangers on a Train and North By Northwest, plus Double Indemnity, of course. Is she a black widow? Is the cop imagining himself at the crime scenes or is this something real? Will he abandon his existing life for the femme fatale? Will you be able to resist this twisting tale? I think not.
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is the director’s faithful retelling of the fable of Gepetto creating a carved ‘real boy’ puppet, complete with the back story of the carpenter’s loss of his own 10-year-old son and his grief ever since. The Frankenstein myth of creation is there in the foreground, but the added context gives the narrative extra bite, setting it against the rise of fascism and Mussolini. The superb stop-motion animation is matched by excellent voice work from Ewan McGregor, Cate Blanchett and David Bradley. It might be a bit dark for some younger viewers, so advisable to watch it first.
There’s a fresh, female perspective that’s swept through the festival in recent years, with She Said the latest welcome addition. Director Maria Schrader kicks off this #MeToo story by jumping back to 1992 and Ireland, then spooling forward to 2016 in the New York Times newsroom, in a script written by Rebecca Lenkiewicz. We quickly plunge into the heart of the matter through two intrepid reporters, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, played by Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan respectively. Twohey takes a direct call from Donald Trump, dismissing a taped conversation as “locker room talk”, and suddenly they’re all getting threats. “Why is sexual harassment so pervasive and so hard to address?” is the question they’re all asking, with Patricia Clarkson and André Braugher riveting as the reporters’ determined and supportive superiors. There’s an instant rapport between Kazan’s and Mulligan’s characters once they start rooting out the transgressors and holding them to the light, as they discover that “the wrongdoing in Hollywood is overwhelming.” The sins of the likes of Harvey Weinstein and the downfall of Bill O’Reilly add context and immediacy to the brewing, righteous All The President’s Men vibe, with the added energy of the Spotlight investigation. Interestingly, only one person, Ashley Judd appears as herself. The rest are fleshed out by brilliantly focused performances from the likes of Jennifer Ehle, with Samantha Morton riveting as Zelda Perkins. Weinstein’s conversations are played back on audio and we see how he built the silence – then everyone complied or looked the other way – although as Perkins says, “this is bigger than Weinstein”. Essential viewing.
Another big female story reveals itself in Sarah Polley’s Women Talking. Adapted from a novel by Miriam Toews, its narrative has been shifted from the isolated bubble of a Mennonite community in Bolivia to one in the States. The not-so-secret weapon in this movie is the wonderful ensemble cast, including Jessie Buckley, Claire Foy, Rooney Mara and Frances McDormand, with Ben Whishaw as their sole male ally. The tale itself is pitch-black, as a group of wives, mothers and daughters gather in a barn – with Whishaw’s character taking notes, as none of them have been allowed to gain any kind of literacy. We gradually learn that each and every one of the women has been subjected to repeated rapes after being drugged, many of them falling pregnant afterwards. Some are visibly scarred and incest is rife. Previously told by the menfolk that they’d been punished by “the Lord”, they’ve only wised up collectively after one woke up with her attacker right there in front of her. Almost the entire movie is spent listening to the women speaking with passion about their experiences and discussing whether to quit the community and start afresh. Some still stay loyal to their abusers, some have to be convinced, and it’s a wrench for all of them – and their offspring – as they try to decide whether to leave the only home they’ve ever known. The minutiae of their conversations, the notion of forgiveness, the heated cut and thrust of their exchanges, and the emotion and passion in their every word, plus the bleached-out colour palette throughout, are what makes this film memorable.
Strong women also dominate Sebastián Lelio’s The Wonder (above), adapted from Emma Donoghue’s fine novel. Florence Pugh is on top form as a widowed English nurse sent to post-famine Ireland to investigate the case of a girl, Anna (excellent breakthrough role for Kíla Lord Cassidy) who is surviving without apparently eating. As in McDonagh’s Inisherin, the rural landscape and light are everything, beautiful but also overpowering and oppressive. Pugh represents the outside world of science against the superstition of the locals and their controlling faith, with supposed neutrals like physician Toby Jones and newspaperman Tom Burke drawn into the narrative. Meanwhile the idea of escape and emigration hovers over the community’s insular existence. The dark secret at the heart of the film takes some time to be unlocked as we experience the overpowering atmosphere of the area through Pugh’s eyes, and get to grips with her own personal history, secrets and grief. All seems hopeless, but Pugh’s determination may yet win through…
WELL ADAPTED
Some books and plays are a dream, and others are virtually impossible to adapt, at least successfully. But filmmakers nevertheless keep on trying. Noah Baumbach has made a decent fist of Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise that starts in 1984 academia, stuffed full of bad fashion and misplaced idealism. Snatches of conversation pull us into husband Adam Driver’s world of extremely edgy, but dodgy university courses and wife Greta Gerwig’s fitness classes for seniors, and their intellectualism spills over into their slightly feral kids, who have brains, binoculars and curiosity. As ever, no plot spoilers here, but the movie really takes off when disaster strikes and shocks them out of their cosy complacency, spiralling into extremes of panic and the ebbing away of their controlled lives. Not a total success, but a noble and entertaining effort.
Florian Zeller is a busy man. He’s still writing new stage plays, like 2022’s The Forest, while also adapting and directing his existing plays for the big screen. After the success of The Father, it’s now the turn of The Son, which neatly manages to back-reference the previous work by having Anthony Hopkins briefly pop up in that role. The only difference from The Son’s on-stage iteration is having less hot-house intensity than the enclosed atmosphere of a theatre, but this in turn means we can focus on the outside pressures – in this case in Manhattan – on a splintered family and their desperate son. Hugh Jackman is the high-powered workaholic father, Laura Dern the estranged mother, and Vanessa Kirby the young stepmum to struggling teenager Nicholas (Zen McGrath). We see that being wealthy high achievers doesn’t insulate you from mental illness. They push Nicholas into a new school, and he puts on a façade of contentment as he meanwhile drifts into dark thoughts and depression, with fractured conversations echoing around the family apartment. The pressure to fit in and succeed is immense, with each generation’s father wanting his son to fit his mould, and the self-deluded adults all convinced they’re making progress with Nicholas. Until they discover that love is not enough. No spoilers, but the ending isn’t quite what it initially seems.
Good to catch Alan Bennett’s play Allelujah – first seen at London’s Bridge Theatre – and now directed by Richard Eyre and neatly adapted by Heidi Thomas (of Call The Midwife fame) for the big screen. Some of Bennett’s favourite British actors pop up, including Julia McKenzie, Judi Dench, Derek Jacobi and Russell Tovey, in this bittersweet love letter to the NHS, with Jennifer Saunders also taking a key role. The plot has a twin thread, following the end times of a geriatric ward in Bradford, and the local TV crew who are filming the campaign to keep it open. To give it an even bigger twist, the government inspector (Tovey) charged with giving the hospital its last rites, is the son of one of the patients (David Bradley). You could also see this as a love letter to the elderly and their value to the community, and there are gentle, knowing laughs throughout.
To give an idea of when we last had a major adaptation of DH Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in this version Joely Richardson plays the older home help, Mrs Bolton, and previously she was Lady C herself. The central coupling (pun intended) of Emma Corrin and Jack O’Connell in the lead roles guarantees that stiff upper lips and aloofness soon turn to steaminess, long, lingering, lusty looks, and no little bucolic romping. Corrin is perfect as Connie, who knows she’s in for a loveless, sexless marriage when husband Clifford (Matthew Duckett) returns terribly and irreversibly wounded from the First World War. Bored, lonely and stifled, Connie walks in a red slash of a dress across the drab mining community, and through the claustrophobic, draughty rooms of the Chatterley estate. Until their gamekeeper and Connie’s kindred spirit, Mellors, turns up, equally damaged by war and his ex-wife. Bonding over the baby pheasants he’s tenderly rearing, and the couple’s shared reading choices (Woolf and Joyce), matters soon become carnal, and something primal and fierce ignites and flares between them. Of course, the director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre can’t resist giving some bigger picture messages about the ruling classes and the wars, and some modern feelings and views definitely skirt around the edges of this adaptation.
TRUE TALES
Based on the true, tragic story of Emmett Till, Chinonye Chukwu follows up her impressive debut Clemency with the punchy, civil rights drama, Till. Set in 1955, initially in a middle class neighbourhood in Chicago, Chukwu peppers the opening scenes with glimpses of foreshadowing, before the action heads down south when young Emmett visits family in Mississippi. Once he is murdered by a white lynch mob, the action and rhythm changes, as his mother Mamie is ignited by grief and rage, and turns into a reluctant activist seeking justice. Music seeps into the soundtrack organically throughout – including Fats Domino, Dizzy Gillespie, The Moonglows and Mahalia Jackson – setting the tempo, reflecting the joy and the dread, as we sense what kind of man Emmett might have become. Worth seeing just for Danielle Deadwyler’s extraordinary, award-worthy performance as Mamie.
The Inspection is another true tale, directed by Elegance Bratton, and basically re-telling his own story. Starring Jeremy Pope as young, gay black man, Ellis, and Gabrielle Union as his unsympathetic, homophobic mother, we see how Ellis has been pushed out of his home onto the streets for several years, until he signs up for the Marines. Cue all the familiar tropes of a military boot camp, but with few allies and added bullying. He’s even beaten up in the showers when they sniff out his sexuality. Celestial music contrasts with the brutality of the regime, and the clear message is: “Our job is not to make marines; it’s to make monsters.” Even when Ellis graduates, his mother won’t fully accept him. An impressive debut from Bratton.
Screenwriter Jack Thorne loves to get his teeth into a meaty, dramatic, real-life story and The Swimmers is perfect for him and director Sally El Hosaini. The action starts in Damascus in 2011 with two Syrian sisters training as swimmers by day and partying by night, even as their city is being bombed. But when their pool is hit in the middle of a race, they decide to leave their country for Europe, becoming refugees, plunging into a perilous journey, by sea and in the back of a lorry, through Turkey, Greece and Hungary, and into Germany. We experience it all through their eyes, the horrors, homesickness and small pleasures. There is light at the end of the tunnel for the Mardini sisters – who are in turn played by real-life sisters Manal and Nathalie Issal – and overall the message is to follow your dreams.
Set in July 2016, Faraaz aka “Standing Tall” is director Hansal Mehta’s dramatised version of the horrific attack that took place in a Dhaka café. We watch as five Islamist terrorists hold hostage dozens of civilians and murder many of them. Meanwhile their leader is elsewhere, planning the entire attack while working in a call centre. Outside the cops seem inept yet gung-ho, the concerned parents are frustrated in their attempts to breach the police cordon, and one hostage, Faraaz, stands up to the terrorists. As viewers, we feel similarly helpless, with the point-of-view switching back and forth from inside the café to outside the cordon.
Tobias Lindholm’s The Good Nurse is inspired by real events, and stars Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne (both excellent) as nurses who bond in adversity, as some of their patients start dying unexpectedly. No spoilers here, but there are chilling echoes of the Harold Shipman story, and it also channels Allelujah from this festival, and Argentine thriller, The Dose.
LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE
Lots of laughter and quite a bit of romance were sprinkled throughout the festival. The movies that made me laugh the most were definitely Ruben Östlund’s cinematic rollercoaster ride, Triangle of Sadness (above) and, perhaps unexpectedly, Nicholas Stoller’s BROS. Ostensibly a satire about money, class, vanity and sexism, Östlund’s latest outing splits into a handful of distinct sections. It kicks off with a short, sharp stab at the fashion industry, focusing on the superficial world of modelling and glamour couple Harris Dickinson and the late Charlbi Dean. We dip into his comical casting session, and later see his envy at her reticence to pay their restaurant bill, despite her higher earning power, in the process revealing his male fragility as their gender roles are swapped. Part two sees them hop onto a filthy rich cruise as their desirable guests, surrounded by passengers universally ethics-free and dripping in wealth. Part three is when the voyage hits choppy waters, literally, and the vulgar feast in which they’re all indulging is quickly vomited back up again. The ship continues into further peril thanks to the drunkenness of Captain Woody Harrelson and his oligarch companion, who lock themselves away to argue over politics. The final section is all about surviving, where monetary wealth means nothing, and practical skills are scarce and highly prized, meaning the structure of the diminished community is upended, notably by Dolly De Leon. You can see why this movie won another Cannes Palme d’Or award for Östlund, and you’ll find yourself speculating what happens after the film’s sudden, open-ended conclusion.
BROS is billed as a ‘bro meets bro love story’ co-written by Billy Eichner, who also plays commitmentphobe Bobby, who takes a fancy to Luke McFarlane’s disarmingly handsome Aaron. But every time you think it might just be a regular romcom with gay leads, it upends all the expected stereotypes and pummels the funny bones instead. Some of this might be due to the influence of producer Judd Apatow, and it definitely feels like Apatow territory, with wave upon wave of usually self-deprecating laughs, overturning yet sometimes reinforcing clichés. Some of the in-jokes are fabulous, such as the app called the ‘Zellweg’ for men who want to talk about actresses, then get off with each other – plus a lingering bitterness towards the younger generation “we had AIDS and they had Glee.” In among the non-stop gags and hook-ups we get some home truths and even tenderness, but this is most definitely played for laughs. There’s a bigger message about removing the remaining stigma from gay culture so it can be fully celebrated, and Eichner and Stoller are careful to keep swerving away from any potential happy-ever-after endings. Superb supporting cast too.
Chee$e is another inventively funny film, from Damian Marcano, set in Trinidad and revolving round a group of amiable anti-heroes led by the irrepressible Skimma. Their cheeky drugs scam involves hiding weed inside cheese as it sets and you can’t help taking their side against the hapless local police as the plot gently unfolds. But the funniest thing for me is the way it’s been subtitled so that the actual dialogue you hear is deliberately and cleverly undercut by the text running beneath the action. Great soundtrack too.
If gentle, sometimes slightly absurd comedies with retro-looking, lo-fi, sci-fi vibes are your jam, then Linoleum will be up your street. Directed by Colin West and starring Jim Gaffigan as a moderately popular TV personality, this veers into David Lynch small town territory. There’s bags of sweet, gentle humour with darkness underneath, as stranger things begin to happen, and our hero starts building a rocket at home – with pesky, but lovely kids helping out. Unfurling like a Mobius strip of time, characters and plot, it’s one you should go into without too much advance knowledge to appreciate.
Some comedies start off with great big belly laughs, but something goes a bit awry towards the end, and that’s the story of Dean Craig’s The Estate. The set-up is a divided, dysfunctional family vying for attention – and cash – when a rich, elderly relative is on her last legs. The inheritance is the goal and these “good” will hunters swarm around her. The cast is wonderful, with Kathleen Turner superb as the ageing aunt, with potential beneficiaries Toni Collette, David Duchovny and Anna Faris heading up a “family circus of insanity”. Unfortunately, however, after savouring much of the comic shenanigans, its dark, dodgy, morally dubious penultimate section leaves you with a bitter taste.
Taking the idea of lockdown behaviour to the extreme, The Middle Ages is an Argentine study of a creative family in which the parents are so busy juggling work and just coping that they neglect their 8-year-old daughter, Cleo. At times much like Home Alone, but with the kid in charge and narrating, this veers from the farcical to the bathetic. Mum and dad are a hyper, non-stop blur of activity – and played by the co-directors Luciana Acuña and Alejo Moguillansky – while Cleo is waiting, always waiting. Learning about Beckett and inflation, she starts her own money-making enterprise. The premise is good, the execution entertaining, though it does peter out a little. Lots of promise though.
Some fine studies of love popped up in the festival, with Mia Hansen-Løve’s One Fine Morning the pick of the bunch. Léa Seydoux plays a single-mum trying to cope with a fast ailing father and grandmother, as well as looking after her own child. From an intellectual background, she is a widowed translator who has pretty much given up on romance, until it takes her by surprise. The complexity and layers are typical of Hansen-Løve’s work – in fact, her own parents both taught philosophy – so there’s much of her own background in here. Indeed, the Bergman Island director slots bits of her own life into her work, and here shows how love can take many guises, including with friends and family. There’s a warm glow around the story, despite the difficulties encountered at every turn, and much of this is thanks to Seydoux’s excellent, empathetic performance.
Casting is central to the success of Emily Atef’s More Than Ever, which features the remarkable Vicky Krieps opposite the late Gaspard Ulliel in his final role. It is Krieps, however, who plays the ailing half of the couple, enduring seizures and needing a lung transplant. She flees to Norway alone, embracing the magnificent landscapes, her scenes drenched in sadness and light, with growing self-knowledge as she faces the end.
Maryam Touzani’s The Blue Caftan immerses us in the world of a hardworking tailor, Halim and his apprentice, Youssef. In denial of his sexuality, Halim already visits the local bathhouse and finds himself drawn to the young man that he and his wife, Mina, are employing. Emotions remain unspoken and as the heady atmosphere is stoked up, events are further complicated by Mina becoming sick. There’s no neat, expected ending though, with surprises in store.
Directed by Kôji Fukana, Japanese drama Love Life shows another side to love when we see what happens after a tragic accident rips a family apart, and could easily make their differences destroy them. Opening celebrations buoy you up and then you’re suddenly plunged into their profound grief. The delicately intertwining relationships, communication and cultural mix-ups, little lies, big deceits – plus karaoke – see the tone changing from dark to light, with the central figure of the young mother, as played by Fumino Kimura, keeping it all together.
Georgian film A Room of My Own appears to be a nightmare flatshare situation, with two young women who initially seem to be chalk and cheese. Tina sticks to all the Covid rules, Megi doesn’t. Both have terrible and childlike men in their respective lives, and we witness their every emotion and reaction in extreme close-up thanks to almost intrusive camerawork, as they confess all to each other, being brutally honest about their pasts. Does their growing intimacy drive them further together or apart – you’ll have to watch to find Ioseb ‘Soso’ Bliadze’s drama to find out!
EXCITING STORIES
One of the delights of seeing a host of new films is when something unexpectedly fabulous jumps out in front of you. Sébastien Marnier’s L’Origine du Mal is definitely that. Full of secrets and lies, thrills and wry laughs, nothing is quite what it seems here, especially the central character Stéphane, played by Call My Agent’s Laure Calamy, with tongue firmly in cheek. She works in a factory, her female lover is banged up in jail, and she seems to be earnestly questing to find her long lost father. Meanwhile he lives in a different world of vast wealth amidst a truly eccentric, dysfunctional family he cannot stand. Stéphane lies effortlessly to fit in with them, big fights ensue, and no-one is quite what they seem, as it turns from broad comedy to dark, comic thriller.
Set in post-revolution Tunisia, the action in Ashkal gets going when dead bodies start turning up among abandoned building projects. Though the main police investigation feels half-hearted and you sense some cops are compromised, two detectives keep their focus. If you like your political thrillers simmering and otherworldly, Youssef Chebbi’s drama is definitely one for you.
Another mark of a great movie can be how much it makes you think afterwards. The Blaze is one that lingers for a long time, with director Quentin Reynaud’s eco-thriller – or eco-pocalyptic drama – building huge tension right from the opening scenes. Father and son realise a vast fire is sweeping across their region in France and jump in their vehicle to escape, but get stuck along with endless other folk in the overwhelming smoke and heat and traffic queues. In this era of jaw-dropping climate change it’s an incredibly timely setting, and reminiscent of the dystopia of The Road and the end-times feeling of The Day After Tomorrow. Meanwhile you feel like you’re right there with those fleeing, despite the sense that you’re in a nightmare or dream world, and can’t help but wonder it they’ve abandoned all hope when they drive off the main route?
I loved director Tarik Saleh’s previous film, The Nile Hilton Incident, but I think that his latest thriller, Boy From Heaven might be even better. Adam, a gifted young man from a fishing family is lifted out of his rural life via a scholarship and into the Al-Azhar University in Cairo to study. He is soon thrust unwittingly into a world of politics and religion and acts of violence in this Islamic college, and is recruited to go undercover as a double-agent. Subterfuge and intrigue swirl around Adam and you realise how intricate and dense the plotting has been around his scholarship and recruitment.
Who could have predicted that one of the most popular films of 2022 would have a donkey as protagonist? Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO manages this in his sensory voyage of a movie, shot from the animal’s POV, with the sound design especially notable. We see EO taken from the circus, and his bereft fellow (human) performer trying to track him down. Other animals like horses veer into view as he comes in and out of dangerous and occasionally comfortable situations, appearing in empty streets – presumably during the pandemic. Suddenly he’s surrounded by football hooligans, or caged, or in Italy with Isabelle Huppert, as the story gets more complex and colourful. In the end, however, it’s very much an indictment of our treatment of animals.
You begin to appreciate the almost three-hour running time of Albert Serra’s Pacifiction when you realise that he cut this down from (wait for it) 540 hours of footage in the edit. The resulting epic most reminds me of The Third Man and Orson Welles’ The Lady From Shanghai, with characters skulking in the shadows and the sense of unease that permeates the story. It’s a surprisingly political film, where you see “the other side of paradise” most particularly its seedy, seamy side, where visitors appropriate, flatter and lust over the locals and their culture in Tahiti. Corruption is everywhere, an election can be fixed, colonial power is explicit, Graham Greene/Klaus Kinski-type characters in white suits drift into view, and the camerawork is often hypnotic. As Serra says: “politics is like a nightclub; it’s a party with the devil.”
Starting with marital suspicion, the plot of Mani Haghighi’s film Subtraction quickly becomes something far more complex about identity. There’s some serious doppelganger action going on – relatively speaking – and it’s almost Hitchcock-y at times. Beneath the superficially thriller-like plot it’s an examination of Iranian class and family structures, but while you watch it’s all about the thrills and your attempts to guess the outcome in advance…
Swiss film Unrest is only the second feature from Cyril Schäublin, but he already seems a director in total control of his art and technique. The unrest of the title has at least two meanings, as it describes the tiny, precise section – the unrest wheel – inside each timepiece being skilfully assembled in a watchmaking factory. But it also refers to the idea of anarchy being introduced to the workers by a visiting Russian, Pyotr Kropotkin. These women workers are revolting – or on the verge of it – stirred up by their visitor and something’s brewing while they toil over their laborious, but highly skilled work. At times the film is Kafkaesque, with parts of the town itself operating in four different time zones, and you sense the director applying the same precision to his filmmaking as the oppressed workers do with the splendid watches. Fascinating.
Kicking off with a singular, violent act, Xalé then jumps back a decade, with Senegalese director Moussa Sène Absa using the bulk of the film to show off his dramatic chops. There’s a chorus of Wolof-singing musicians with drummer, in Greek tragedy style. Twins Adama and Awa are split apart by differing ambitions and plans. And the plot spools back and forward to the present. Much to relish.
ALL OVER THE PLACE
So many countries and individuals now realise the value of filmmaking in achieving an artistic, cultural or even soft power goal. Some reflect the harsh reality of their situation, and Maryna Er Gorbach’s Klondike, set in Donetsk in 2014 and completed just before the 2022 invasion of her home nation, Ukraine, feels incredibly visceral and timely. Russians have “accidentally” destroyed part of a couple’s house when shooting down a plane, and the debut director humanises the terrible situation by focusing on their plight. The wife is expecting, but has to hold everything together as her brother and husband fight each other, and bodies fill the local graveyard. At times harrowing, but with sharp shafts of comedy, let’s hope it’s the first of many from this powerful director.
The Store is a stop-motion examination of a fragile social community in Sweden in the very near future. Everyone is at the end of their tether, and the director Ami-ro Sköld enhances the effect by mixing it with real, if feral, almost survivalist footage as the food starts to run out. Paolo Taviani uses a very different technique in Leonora Addio, which is very beautiful, with much of it shot in black and white. It’s a tribute to the film making of his late brother as well as the writer Pirandello, but also a portrait of 20th Century Italian history and film itself. Piled high with nostalgia and imagery, sometimes glimpsed, sometimes fully formed, it ends with 30 minutes of lurid colour in New York City in English and Italian. Masterful.
More like a French novella, Mikhaël Hers’ The Passengers of the Night instantly flickers into life and burns bright by virtue of starring Charlotte Gainsbourg, with Emmanuelle Beart in a key supporting role as a radio talk show host. Gainsbourg is a separated mother in 1988, with teen children, who decides to take in a homeless waif in Paris, and the warmth of the film vibrates further thanks to its dynamite soundtrack.
Finally, Sundance Prize winner Utama (aka ‘Our Home’) contains an urgent message within a visually gorgeous film, direct from Bolivia. Director Alejandro Loayza Grisi’s message is obviously on the climate emergency, all boiled down to how it affects one elderly, isolated couple in minute detail. The landscape looks stunning even as their world alters irrevocably. The husband can’t breathe properly, the llamas they farm are struggling, and there’s no water. The wife remains resilient, but their future and present look bleak. When their grandson visits from the city and offers them an escape, they view it as defeat. Powerful stuff.
That’s everything from BFI London Film Festival 2022 Part 1. Coming soon… As promised, in the second, concluding part of our round-up we’ll look at some directorial debuts and documentaries – plus my worst picks from the festival (to save you money). And, of course, the much-coveted DVDfever Awards.
Check out the London Film Festival website.
Also see the review of the London Korean Film Festival 2022.