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Having already made I Am Love with his friend and muse, Tilda Swinton, Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash pairs them together again and seems to promise big things. After all, it also stars Matthias Schoenaerts as a filmmaker and current partner of Tilda the reclusive rock star, Ralph Fiennes as her old record producer and flashy previous lover, with Dakota Johnson as Fiennes’ precocious daughter, and it’s all set on an idyllic Italian island. But the tone is uneven, and when the dark shadows from their past return and the film does a handbrake turn to become something else, it doesn’t quite gel.
France once again brings treasures, the odd turkey, and a couple of films that are close cousins to Michael Douglas’ extraordinary character in Joel Schumacher’s 1993 film, Falling Down. How many times can you push someone until they snap and push back?
In most years Dheepan, from Jacques Audiard (A Prophet), would sweep to the top of all the award lists. But this is the year of Carol and Son of Saul, so the competition is incredibly strong. A makeshift family of man, woman and girl are thrown together as they flee civil war in Sri Lanka. As migrants they end up in France, pretending to be a married couple and daughter to make their assimilation easier. Dheepan is put in charge of a run-down apartment block in an estate run by gangs, ever resourceful and quick-footed in getting on. Meanwhile his ‘wife’ works as home-help to one of the gang’s elderly patriarchs and their ‘daughter’ acts as translator and go-between. But try as he might, Dheepan cannot escape his past, which re-emerges just as gang violence spills over. There’s only so much a man can take, as Audiard shows in this masterly telling of multiple story arcs: international, local and personal.
Stephane Brize’s Measure Of A Man (right) is very much a tale of our times of downsizing and viewing everyone as dispensable. We are plunged into the desperate, hopeless existence of Thierry, beautifully played by Vincent Lindon, who won Best Actor at Cannes for this role. Suddenly unemployed, with a disabled son, he is sent on pointless courses with no chance of work; he’s even interviewed for a machine tools operator job by Skype. How far down can Thierry be pushed – when everything conspires against him? When he finally becomes a security guard, he’s forced into a moral dilemma, involving someone even worse off than him… but will he finally flip and reach the end of his tether?
My Golden Days (right), directed by Arnaud Desplechin, gathers a series of scenes plucked from the past of Paul Dedalus, played by Mathieu Amalric as an adult, and by the remarkable Quentin Dolmaire as young Paul, who falls in love with Lou Roy-Lecollinet as Esther. And the film is a love letter to their romance.
The Cowboys from Thomas Bidegain (who co-wrote A Prophet and Rust and Bone) is pretty much John Ford’s The Searchers updated and shifted to modern-day France. A regular, country music-loving family is shaken to the core when their 16-year-old daughter Kelly goes missing, and they discover that she’d been seeing a local Muslim lad and learning Arabic. Beside himself with anger and grief, her father starts to search for Kelly everywhere, but every time he gets close, the trail goes cold. He is John Wayne to her Natalie Wood and will not accept defeat. Time passes and they haven’t given up the search, with Kelly’s brother George becoming more prominent in the story, and encountering the likes of John C Reilly on his journey to far-flung lands. But can the search really have a successful resolution?
Some films utterly divide critics. Many love Evolution, from Lucile Hadzihalilovic, for its fantastical atmosphere, watery landscapes and characters – who are basically identical cloned mothers and sons who feed on raw sea urchins and boast some surprising aquatic features. Is this a view of our wet future? Is there a dead body in the ocean? Why do the cloned women come down to writhe on the beach at night? Are the boys being impregnated? Quite frankly I did not care; in fact I hated this movie, did not make it until the end, and cannot recommend it.
The Nordic countries continue to delight and surprise with the sheer variety and ambition of their output. Typical of this is the wonderful Virgin Mountain from writer-director Dagur Kari, an Icelandic-Danish co-production. What makes it remarkable is the lead performance of Gunnar Jonsson as Fusi, a hugely overweight fortysomething man who still lives at home with his mum, and spends his leisure time playing with scale models and wargaming with his one friend. Routinely bullied at work, he keeps his head down and has low expectations of his lot in life. Until he is given a birthday present of line-dancing classes, and finally plucks up the courage to go. He falls quickly and irrevocably in love with fellow dancer Sjofn, who used to work as a florist and now helps on refuse collection, and is spiralling into depression. You’d have to have a hard heart not to melt at Fusi’s devotion and transformation, but you’ll also find yourself laughing out loud at this touching, often comic, love story.
Gold Coast stars 1864 lead actor Jakob Oftebro as idealistic 19th Century Danish botanist Joseph Wulff, sent to Guinea to set up a Gold Coast coffee plantation, but quickly pulled into a fevered, dreamlike and morally unstable colonial existence. It’s also worth checking out for the performance of young John Aggrey as Wulff’s devoted servant, Lumpa, and for the mystical, swirling soundtrack from Angelo Badalamenti (Twin Peaks). The whole sprawling, visually stunning epic is directed by Daniel Dencik, whose brother, David Dencik, stars in the uncategorisable, black comedy Men And Chicken, helmed by Anders Thomas Jensen. The story is propelled by two brothers who go off in search of their real, geneticist father in a remote, island sanatorium, where farm animals roam freely. Here, where life is feral and bestial, they find yet more brothers, all with deformed features… but why? Scandi-fans will have a field day spotting their favourite Killing/Borgen/1864 actors. Mads Mikkelsen is unrecognisable, as are Soren Malling, Nicolas Bro, and Nikolaj Lie Kaas (Game of Thrones).
If you’ve been waiting for a Danish zombie flick starring Mikael Birkkjaer from Borgen and The Killing, then you’re in luck. What We Become is the debut feature from writer director Bo Mikkelsen and is set in a sleepy suburb that suddenly wakes up and finds itself stumbling into endless schlocky cliches of the horror genre. The troops are called in. Everyone is quarantined. Teens wander off into the woods. Gentle elderly folk turn round and bare their teeth with crazed zombie eyes. The pesky kids discover what’s really been going on… and it’s very nearly Shaun of the Dead. But it’s not meant to be a spoof.
Flocking is set in another close small town in Sweden, where one teenager accuses another of raping her. But it’s she who they turn against – and her family, no matter what any court decides. Bullying and abusive threatening messages push them to the brink, and many get behind the accused instead. Even the church sides against the girl, as director Beata Gardeler captures a claustrophobia normally associated with dark stories of small town America.
My Skinny Sister (right) is a very personal story for Swedish writer-director Sanna Lenken, and foregrounds the intense pressures of competitive ice skating on Katja, while tackling her secret eating disorder. What should the younger sister, Stella, do when she discovers this? It’s uncomfortable at times, with sibling love, hate and jealousy in the mix, and has terrific performances from both young actresses, Rebecka Josephson as Stella and Amy Diamond as Katja. This film is out this weekend in UK cinemas.
Go to page 3 for more from the rest of Europe.