ALL OF US STRANGERS**** - BFI London Film Festival 2023 - Day 5

ALL OF US STRANGERS is the latest film from Andrew Haigh (WEEKEND) and yet another beautifully crafted, intimate, emotionally affecting film. It stars Andrew Scott (Sherlock) as Adam, a gay, forty something screenwriter struggling to deal with the death of his parents when he was a child. On successive visits to his childhood home he imagines he can tell them about his life now, come out to them, and tell them how the world has changed for him.  The scenes can only be described as truly heartbreaking. Adam flits between adulthood and childhood, delighting in being able to be cared for by his mum and dad, but then also bristling at their attitudes to his sexuality. They tell them they are proud of him and he is so riven with self-doubt and pain that he cannot accept the complement. Claire Foy and Jamie Bell are wonderful in these smaller but viscerally emotional roles.  

I found the present day relationship less successful. Adam strikes up a friendship with another man in his apartment block: they are seemingly the only two people home alone at Christmas.  Harry (Paul Mescal) seems more comfortable in his skin at first, or at least more able to articulate his need for connection and intimacy. But as the film progresses we realise that he is also deeply vulnerable.

Andrew Haigh's previous films showed a willingness to mine the emotional nuances of modern relationships. But I feel ALL OF US STRANGERS is a leap forward in its technical skill and visual and aural creativity. In particular, a bravura central scene in a nightclub shows a director increasingly confident in his work and willing to push himself stylistically.

ALL OF US STRANGERS has a running time of 105 minutes. It played London 2023. It goes on release in the USA on December 22nd and in the UK on January 26th.

LIVING - BFI London Film Festival 2022 - Day 5

LIVING is a delicate, quiet, deeply affecting and faithful adaptation of Kurosawa's 1950s film Ikiru, brought to the screen by screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro and director Oliver Hermanus.  How ironic that a Japanese-British writer and South African director should make a film that so piercingly investigates what it is to be that most English of things - an elderly, middle-class civil servant - an English "gentleman" of a certain period - perhaps epitomised by our late Queen - of English decline, of the stiff upper lip, of just getting on with it and not causing a fuss.  Then again, one could argue that this kind of investigation has been at the heart of Ishiguro's stunning oeuvre from the start, and what better writer to take an iconic Japanese film and inject it with Englishness.

Bill Nighy gives the performance of his career - the kind of award-worthy performance that makes you wonder why he wasn't offered more challenging dramatic roles decades ago - as the stiff, near silent civil servant whose entire job seems to be blocking action in a Kafka-esque byzantine bureaucracy. As Mr Williams shuffles another manilla folder into a pile on his desk his guiding principle seems to be that "it can do no harm" to rest there for a few more weeks. 

The news that Mr Williams has mere months to live jolts him into self-reflection. He attempts a seaside jaunt to live it up, being guided with care by Tom Burke's roué. But this seems out of character and tacked on. The real enlivenment comes from his relationship with a young former colleague played by SEX EDUCATION's Aimee Lou Wood in a break-out role of real warmth, honesty and gentle humour. Mr Williams envies her vitality, and unable to communicate with his son, as much of a procrastinator as his father, he confides in her, and finds the inspiration to now make what small difference he can - to actually do his job by shepherding the building of a children's playground.

The resulting film is tender, beautifully observed and shown with quite some directorial flair.  As with the best drama, it's all about what isn't said, and the pauses between the words.  There's also some excellent, dryly comic set piece passive-aggression when Mr Williams turns the bureaucracy on its head by effectively sitting and making people feel awkward. Credit to Oliver Hermanus and his team for beautifully capturing the look and feel of post-war London - not least Sandy Powell's costumes. There's real panache in the way Hermanus depicts the seaside episode in particular, set to music, with little dialogue but everything expressed in glances and responses.  This is very fine film-making indeed.

LIVING has a running time of 102 minutes and is rated PG-13. The film has played Sundance, Telluride, Venice, San Sebastian,Toronto and the BFI London Film Festival. It will be released in the UK on November 4th and in the USA on December 23rd. 

MOTHERING SUNDAY* - BFI London Film Festival 2021 - Day 9

Eva Husson's MOTHERING SUNDAY is, I am sad to report, a total failure of a film. It has nothing in it to capture the interest of the viewer, and may even verge on the exploitative. This is all the more frustrating because it's an adaptation of Graham Swift's critically acclaimed novel of the same name, which told the story of a famous author and how an affair she had when working in service in the 1920s set her on the path to greatness. The problem is that this film shows us nothing of that greatness - we see no literary merit or acute perception by means of voiceover or later extracts of novels. Rather, the film merely declares the woman a success.  As a result, we are unconvinced, and don't understand why we should be interested in this author's origin story.

As the film opens we are in the last days of World War One.  The tone is one of suppressed grief and rage.  Three upper class families meet over a weekend in Henley. It becomes clear that one of them has lost both of their children in the war: the father (Colin Firth) represses this knowledge with banal cheeriness while the mother (Olivia Colman) looks sullen and detached but occasionally flares up into tears and deeply selfish condescension. Another family has lost two sons already, and the third, played by Josh O'Connor has inherited all their hopes and burdens. He must now study law and marry his deceased brother's fiancee.  He rebels by shagging the neighbour's maid (Odessa Young) and vast amounts of the film consist of them lying naked on a bed, or - once he departs for an engagement lunch - her wandering aimlessly naked around his house. This is basically 70% of the film. Will anything happen? No. Not even when a major event happens. There's no confrontation. No exposure. No dramatic tension. Nothing but boredom.

We then flash forward at intervals to the maid's second love - a black philosopher. Oh, we think, this could be really fascinating. How does a black man navigate Oxford in the 1920s? What prejudice do they face as a mixed-race couple? But no. Zero drama or character exploration here. Pretty girl gets typewriter and supportive boyfriend. Writes novel we don't see. Is apparently brilliant. We don't see it. Grows up to be Glenda Jackson. Is insufferably arrogant. Who gives a shit?

The film was so dull I started wondering what the point of the nudity was. Is it that it's meant to be sex positive? If so, cool. Apparently this is what writer Alice Birch does, or did, in her adaptation of Sally Rooney's Normal People. But I couldn't help wondering what people would say if a male director made a film that basically just followed a pretty young naked girl around with no apparent dramatic purpose.

MOTHERING SUNDAY is rated R and has a running time of 111 minutes. It played Cannes, Toronto and the BFI London Film Festival 2021.  It will be released in the USA and UK on November 19th.