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The London Film Festival 2015‘s first part of our festival round-up saw us take a look at the big hitters from the US, UK and Australia. Now, over the course of three pages, it’s time to see what the rest of the world came up with, starting with two outstanding movies from European directors who like to push the boundaries in very different ways.
We know Greece’s Yorgos Lanthimos for his stylistic but horrifying Dogtooth, but he’s now gone all big time and English-language with his follow-up, The Lobster. Good news is, he hasn’t sold out, far from it. In fact, he’s just got better, funnier and weirder. Much weirder. But with a starry, mainstream cast. Singles nervously converge at what is surely the world’s weirdest hotel, run by Olivia Colman’s strict manager. They’re given an ultimatum: either find a partner here – after a set amount of time – or be turned into the animal of their choice. Colin Farrell (accompanied by a dog, which turns out to be his brother) chooses to be a lobster, deemed to be a good choice by Colman, who drily observes that a wolf and a penguin could never live together.
Fellow singles include Ben Whishaw, John C Reilly and a desperate Ashley Jensen. They undergo lots of contrived bonding sessions, dinners, dances and one evening featuring Colman memorably duetting on Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart. Throughout, the cool voice-over is supplied by Rachel Weisz, who turns out to be one of the loners holed up in the woods not far from the hotel. The singles aim to hunt them down, but instead Farrell escapes, falls in love with Weisz, and they pair up and run away. But how will they fare in a world where people are arrested for being single? As well as being endlessly entertaining and provocative, Lanthimos’ film also poses questions: what would you do and exactly how far will you go for love? Perhaps we finally have a successor to darkly comic maestros Caro and Jeunet?
From Hungary comes Laszlo Nemes’ Son Of Saul, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes, and is not for the fainthearted. There’s constant, horrific noise and the stench of death hangs over the prisoner-workers in Auschwitz as they get on with the business of mass murder. The camera is extremely close to Saul (Geza Rohrig, remarkable) at all times as we see the everyday minutiae of the Jewish workers cleaning the gas chambers, hearing the last desperate cries of their own dying people, and collecting up their belongings. In the midst of this relentless vision of hell there are tiny moments of tenderness, notably Saul when spots what he believes to be the body of his son, and wants to get a rabbi to help him with a proper burial. Set over just two days, this film clutches us in its crunching claustrophobia, asks big moral questions, and lingers long after the final credits.
Latin America continues to produce some of the most talented and original film-makers around, who are now spreading their wings and their outlook across the world. Nasty Baby, from Chilean writer-director Sebastian Silva (who made The Maid) is set in Brooklyn. And not only does Silva take a central role himself, but he’s also managed to secure the talents of Kristen Wiig (Bridesmaids) and Tunde Adebimpe, from the band TV on the Radio. This tight-knit trio of friends have to face up to life and death in what starts out as a romantic, domestic drama before unexpectedly turning into a much darker genre, close to a crime thriller. And Wiig successfully tries on a new kind of role.
Made in Los Angeles, Chronic is a drama written and directed by Mexico’s Michel Franco, and starring Brit Tim Roth. He plays a devoted, almost obsessive carer who tends to get too involved with his patients. And he faces daily dilemmas – throwing up uncomfortable, very timely questions about mortality. What if one them wants to end it all? Should he get involved?
The eternal, yet urgent issue of migration is addressed by Mexico’s Jonas Cuaron in Desierto. Front and centre is Gael Garcia Bernal who wants to get across the border and into the US. He throws in his lot with a group of would-be migrants ill-equipped for desert conditions, cacti and snakes, especially when their truck breaks down in 120-degree heat. Waiting just on the other side of the border is a self-appointed, vigilante redneck, patrol-man who aims to pick them all off, one by one, equipped with only his rifle and his dog. As their numbers are whittled down, the film turns into a tense chase like The Fugitive, with Bernal’s character improvising to survive. But will he manage to make it alive?
How do you solve a problem like Paula’s? She has few prospects in her position as nanny to a well-to-do family, but views the prospect of pregnancy with dread – and no savings. There’s no easy melodrama, just the slow feeling of fate approaching and her fortune unravelling. A very promising debut from Argentine director Eugenio Canevari and young star Denise Labbate.
Dog Lady, aka La Mujer de los Perros, from Laura Citarella gets so close to its subject and her existence that it almost feels like a documentary. The semi-feral woman lives on the edges, from scraps and leftovers of the urban community of Buenos Aires, with only canines for company. She somehow manages to get through the seasons in this spare, almost dialogue-free study.
In Cesc Gay’s Truman, Julian is dying of cancer, but seems to be more worried about whether his dog, Truman will suffer grief at his owner’s passing. When Julian’s friend Tomas is summoned over from Canada they walk around Madrid, arguing, meditating on mortality and revisiting their pasts, yet Julian still cannot bring himself to tell his own son of his imminent demise. Both Ricardo Darin (right) and Javier Camara are on top of their game as the middle-aged friends, giving restrained, measured, masterly performances.
An unusually searching examination of a religious quandary is at the heart of The Apostate from Uruguayan director Federico Veiroj. Gonzalo is a confused young man attracted to his cousin and also to his neighbour. At the same time he wishes to leave the church, get un-baptised, apostatized and be erased from baptismal records. Full of real and dreamed self-examining scenes, he wanders into a nudist conference where even here he finds he doesn’t belong… but this dream merely reflects his self-doubt. Alvaro Ogalla is very good as Gonzalo, and the excellent soundtrack echoes the precise state of his mind at any time.
Short at just 70 minutes, yet somehow sprawling, the impressionistic Romantic Exiles from Jonas Trueba is bright and upbeat, showing a trio of idealistic Spanish chums setting off… somewhere. They discuss almost anything and give the film its semi-improvised feel. It may feel a little indulgent, but it’s also wistful and warm.
Looking further into Europe, Italy has its customary crop of solidly made movies. A good friend introduced me to Paolo Sorrentino’s Consequences of Love many years ago, and I’ve been a devotee ever since. But how does this very Italian director fare with Youth, his most mainstream English-language film yet? By casting two ageing icons, Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel, as ageing icons – albeit as a legendary composer and a film director – Sorrentino has struck gold. These best friends are holed up in an exclusive Alpine spa resort, populated with mountaineers, models, musicians, actors (like Paul Dano), and sports stars like Maradona (played by a very convincing lookalike), all in search of peace and privacy. The fly in the ointment is that Caine’s daughter, another subtle performance from Rachel Weisz, is being divorced by Keitel’s son… who has fallen for the pop singer, Paloma Faith, who plays herself in primary colours. The ageing duo walk, talk and muse on mortality, love, art and fidelity like a latter-day Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. There is much to savour as you luxuriate in the film’s location and quirky characters, but they’re all upstaged when Jane Fonda enters the fray as Keitel’s muse and they have a ding-dong slanging match.
Hugely topical, writer-director Jonas Carpignano’s debut feature, Mediterranea follows a couple of refugee brothers coming from Burkina Faso via Algeria and Libya to Italy. Across deserts, encountering criminal gangs, on unseaworthy vessels, losing almost everything en route, they are still unprepared for the racism that they face once they reach a Europe in the grip of recession. One brother is determined to fit in and graft; the other is more easily deterred. But how much will they be able to take when they’re both badly treated and attacked?
Set in the bleak rural landscapes of Albania and urban Italy, Laura Bispuri’s Sworn Virgin confronts the viewer with a totally alien, but traditional concept: that Albanian women who do not wish to marry can choose to live as men, and as ‘sworn virgins’. So tomboy Hana, who loves hunting and pursuing other manly activities with her father, becomes Mark. Which works out fine until she moves to Italy to be reunited with her sister, Lila, many years later. But can she remain as Mark? What will happen if she falls in love with a man? Can passion transcend outward appearance?
Mesmerising in conveying joy, pain and grief, Juliette Binoche is the main reason to see The Wait, the debut feature from Piero Messina. She is Anna, devoted and recently bereaved mother, who is so unable to process her own grief that she cannot bring herself to tell her son’s girlfriend that he has died. So together they wait for his reappearance. Set in Sicily, with a backdrop of extraordinary religious celebration and intense natural beauty, this focuses on the central relationship and pretence, but mostly allows us to luxuriate in Binoche’s beautiful performance.
Go to page 2 for many more films from the festival!
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.
What about the rest of Europe? From Poland comes Jerzy Skolimowski’s technically daring 11 Minutes, which seems to be moving around lots of disparate snatched lives until you realise that the action is all connected and converging. The total length of the actual action time is just 11 minutes, but we see it from different points of view, rewinding and fast forwarding in time to increase the suspense, fill in the gaps and try to make sense of motivation and context. A bit like putting together a jigsaw without the edge pieces. Initially it all seems to be filmed on iPhones, CCTV, tiny camcorders, Skype, laptops and police cameras, but this isn’t sustained throughout. But how does it all connect? A bold experiment.
From Romania comes a charming, almost wordless romance between lonely actress Cristina and much younger boxer Rafael, in Florin Serban’s Box. He is utterly infatuated with her before they’ve even met, and follows her ceaselessly. But will their seemingly parallel paths ever cross and can they find love or even fleeting passion?
Not exactly a Romanian Rear Window, but Radu Muntean’s One Floor Below does ramp up the tension after Patrascu overhears a neighbour threatening another – and a body is discovered soon after. The magnetic lead character, played by Teodor Corban, is a bit of an Arthur Daley type himself, ducking and weaving to make ends meet, and there’s violence bubbling under throughout this strong study of masculinity, suspicion and conscience.
In Africa and the Middle East there’s still bold experimentation, sometimes backed by generous budgets. The debut feature from Bazi Gete, Red Leaves, has a plot that’s basically King Lear set in modern-day Tel Aviv, with a widowed Ethiopian patriarch and his disappointing family at its heart. Having sold his home, he wants to live with each of his offspring for the rest of his life – or that’s the plan. But they aren’t so keen. He’s demanding and stubborn and they’d rather he was in a home, away from them. And things just get worse for him.
Biyi Bandele’s Fifty sees emotions constantly boiling over and an acting style that’s similarly heightened as we follow the stories of a group of affluent Lagos women in a frankly soapy drama. Bit of a letdown after the promise of Half of a Yellow Sun. Good soundtrack though.
There’s quite a bit of money around in the Middle East for movies right now, and the pick of the bunch is Very Big Shot, from Qatar and Lebanon. In fact, director Mir-Jean Bou Chaaya’s thrilling drama even made it into the festival’s Official Competition. For what starts out as a violent, shoot-em-up thriller gradually turns into something altogether more interesting, clever and occasionally playful. A big shot drug dealer who almost went straight realises he can smuggle vast amounts through airport security if he actually makes a film and hides the drugs in film canisters. So it becomes his film within the film itself. But how will they fund the production? And have they recruited the world’s most earnest director?
There’s a genuinely psychotic character at the heart of Rattle The Cage, the 1987-set thriller from writer-director Majid Al Ansari, and made in the UAE. Crammed with bags of suspense and knowing movie cliches, it has the look, feel, characters and pacing of a western, or maybe one of Tarantino’s violent oeuvre. Set over the course of just a few hours, with a mounting body count, it relies on the audience buying into the almost-pantomime villain luring victims into his web… and hoping for his downfall.
Finally, Asia brings some very different, very dramatic treats. From India comes Meghna Gulzar’s film
Guilty, based on true story of a murder case that’s still ongoing. When a teenage girl is found murdered, dead in her bed, all blame is focused on the family’s servant, who has gone missing. The police are painted as bumbling incompetents. And when the servant is also found dead, killed in exactly the same way, the girl’s grieving parents are suspected of an honour killing. The Inspector (Irfan Khan, reliable as always) from the Central Department of Investigation is called in, only to be betrayed and thrown off the case, so the investigation must start all over again. Gulzar says she was involved in a year and a half’s research for the film – and her thoroughness shows – and even though controversy rages around it, the case has still to be resolved.
Living an isolated life in the suburbs until he’s ‘suspended for being gay’, the professor in Hansal Mehta’s Aligarh works at the university of the same name – and his story is based on a real case from 2009. But has he been intentionally disgraced? How did the men who filmed Professor Siras in bed with his rickshaw driver know when to break in? Theories swirl around that he was intentionally disgraced, and one crusading reporter takes on the story and is determined to prove that this was a conspiracy led by the university and its politicised hierarchy.
The literally shadowy opening of Partho Sen-Gupta’s Sunrise shows top Mumbai cop Inspector Joshi still longing to solve the disappearance of his own child… a decade on. The rain beats down on Joshi’s own personal hell as he stumbles upon an incredibly dodgy nightclub with worryingly young girl dancers and seedy clientele. And meanwhile his wife is cracking up. Will his own personal mission collide with the investigation? And which is reality and which is his dream/nightmare?
An, from Naomi Kawase, is an absolute joy from Japan, with perfect ingredients. Unambitious baker Sentaro is just about getting by making his dorayaki pastries until he gets help from an elderly woman, Tokue, who knows how to make the perfect red bean paste filling, or ‘an’. Soon customers are queuing around the block… until there’s a major setback. No big action or fantasy sequences, just the pleasure of seeing characters and friendships gradually reveal themselves. And Kirin Kiki is simply wonderful as Tokue.
To see how 3D can be employed to boost a big budget musical you need look no further than Hong Kong director Johnnie To’s Office, which also stars its writer-producer Sylvia Chang as the new boss. It’s a non-stop fun fest that oozes glamour, in glitzy, stylised office space, but with all-too-familiar workplace rivalry, stsress and ambition. Not to mention corruption and other corporate shenanigans. The other big name stars include Chow Yun-Fat and Wei Tang, and they clearly relish their vamped-up roles in what’s an improbable mix of Moulin Rouge and Doris Day set during the financial crisis.
Wei Tang also stars in Mabel Cheung’s Chinese drama, Tale Of Three Cities, the far-fetched, but true story of actor Jackie Chan’s parents and how they met, lost and found each other many times. She’s an opium smuggler, he’s an ex-spy, and both are widowed when they first encounter each other. From then on they’re constantly on the run from multiple enemies including the Japanese, and their protracted romance is interrupted by war, near-death scrapes, escapes and rival suitors.
At DVDfever.co.uk we have a weakness for Korean cinema, and Assassination from Choi Dong-hoon certainly has its moments. Set in two time periods, with a gang of criminals assembled into a motley crew to fight against Japan, and boasting bloody shootouts, strong female leads and some double crossing, this may offer nothing new, but is always entertaining.
In the third and final part of our festival round-up we’ll bring you the best of this year’s documentaries, and then announce our virtual awards in all categories… ending by marking your card with a list of the absolutely unmissable movies.