THE ZONE OF INTEREST***** - BFI London Film Festival 2023 - Day 10

Writer-director Jonathan Glazer's astounding and haunting film THE ZONE OF INTEREST is worthy of all the festival buzz it has received since its world premiere at Cannes.  It is a film that is asks profound and disturbing questions about the morality of ordinary every day people. In stark opposition to ONE LIFE, this film suggests that the base attribute of humanity is indecency rather than decency.

The film is inspired by, rather than an actual adaptation of, Martin Amis' troubling novel of the same name.  Glazer strips away Amis' fictionalising to give us the stark truth of the Auschwitz concentration camp, informed by years of research and access to the site's archives. His film is actually filmed on location, with a replica of the camp Commandant's house built a few hundred yards from the original. There is a deeply authentic and disturbing sense of being in the presence of banal evil - in the landscape we have seen so many times in documentaries and in testimony from SHOAH.

The power of this film lies, I think, in the way in which it is meticulously constructed and the conceptual choices made by Glazer. The film is best described as working on three levels at once: the visual story; the sound design; and the score.

The first level is the visual story.  This is almost entirely that of the Hoess family with much of the action taking place in their house, breaking only as Rudolf is sent to Berlin for a temporary reassignment.  We are ensconced in the every day rhythms of the family - kids getting ready for school or playing in the pool - mother tending to her beloved garden or gossiping with her friends - servants laying the table.  As Hedwig Hoess' mother arrives for a visit we realise just how well this working class couple has done under the Nazi regime. The daughter of a cleaner is now the matriarch in a luxurious villa, with servants, mink coats, jewels. Hedwig has her pick of the luxury items stolen from Jews and despite a rather provincial ugly look clearly has a liking for finery. As for Rudolf he is what his children claimed - a loving father with a fondness of horses. They swim in the lake and paddle in their canoe.  

All of this is depicted with a natural casualness and intimacy that is afforded by strong performances from Christian Friedel (Babylon Berlin) as Rudolf and Sandra Hueller (TONI ERDMANN) as Hedwig. These performances are also enabled by a novel system of fixed cameras that allowed the performers to move through the villa more freely and stay in the moment. 

The key point of the visual narrative that we see the camp walls and the chimneys and the endless smoke but we never actually see the horrors behind those walls. (As such, this film would work well as a companion piece to the similarly formally audacious and haunting SAUL FIA.) This gives the film a kind of deliberate claustrophobia and a tension born of a false division between the idyllic family life and its surroundings. Indeed, the only time we break away from the perspective of the Hoess family is when Glazer uses thermal imaging to show a little Polish girl - almost like the heroine of a fairy tale - leaving a trail of apples and pears for the prisoners in the camp at night. It's as if her innate humanity and goodness can only be shown as the negative of the Nazi evil that we see in broad daylight.

This fake isolation is corrected by the second layer or element of the film which is Johnnie Burn's sound design. Because while we may not see the camp and its victims explicitly, we hear them constantly.  We hear the rumble of trains arriving and the screams of families being separated. We hear gunshots and horses rearing and panicked people.  Most horrifyingly, we hear the incinerators burn. To be fair we also see this in our peripheral vision - the orange lights at night as another selection is made. And we see the impact of this sound - of this actual immersion in murder - on the family. One of the daughters sleep walks. The mother-in-law comes to visit and then flees, unable to stomach the sounds and smell of burning. Rudolf, we later find, has some kind of stomach problem. And even if his conscious mind does not acknowledge the horror, his body is revolting against it. Strangely, it is only the wife Hedwig who seems to exhibit no horror, who is only angry when she thinks she might have to leave "this paradise".

So we have the visual story of what is happening with the family - and then we have the sound design telling us what is happening just outside of our vision. Both of these are scrupulously real and researched and cognitively dissonant. It's the dissonance that makes the film so hard to watch and so haunting.  The third element of this astounding film is Mica Levi's score.  This can only be described as the element that gives us the emotional response to the dissonance - to the truth of Auschwitz and of Hoess descending the final staircase into immorality.  It's a score like something out of a horror film, or how one might imagine Dante's Inferno to sound. It's aurally invasive and unreal and abstract and in some ways cathartic. Amidst this gentle family life, and off-screen constant rumbling machinery of murder, we need something that sounds like, and allows us, to scream in horror.

Part of me wishes Glazer had not broken our entrapment in this nightmare to show us footage of the modern Auschwitz museum. I feel the film may have worked better to not give us that escape, rather to mire us in hell. But this choice does not undercut just what a monumental achievement of cinema this film is. It is by far the most formally brave, and provocative film I have seen this year. 

THE ZONE OF INTEREST has a running time of 106 minutes. It played Cannes 2023 where Mica Levi won the Soundtrack Award, Jonathan Glazer won the FIPRESCI prize and the Grand Prize of the festival. It also played Toronto, Telluride and London 2023.  It opens in the USA on December 15th

LOVERS ROCK - BFI London Film Festival 2020 - Day 12

LOVERS ROCK is another of the five-part series of films that Steve McQueen (TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE) has made to be shown on the BBC as part of its Small Axe series of films exploring British Black history.  It couldn't be more different from the courtroom drama, MANGROVE, that opened the festival.  Rather, this is a celebration of a certain time and a certain style of home-made West Indian entertainment - the house party! As the movie opens in early 80s Notting Hill, some young boys are clearing out the furniture from a house, and some women are cooking up a storm while singing together.  Hours later young West Indian men and women don their finery and pay their fifty pence to come into an absolutely banging house party, with the most amazing music. The atmosphere is hot and sultry with dancing in the queue for the loo and people eating home-made food and making out in the back garden.  As with all parties, there are unwelcome attentions from men, but also more happy couplings, and evidently a copious amount of weed being smoked.  The best way to approach this film - with little plot or dialogue - is just to be carried along on the positive vibe. To become so absorbed, as the revellers do, that when the song Silly Games stops, you feel the music continue, with perhaps the most tuneful dancers of all time singing a cappella. The sun comes up and so does reality.  This safe and warm private space that celebrates West Indian culture is exposed for what it is.  An attempted sexual assault is thwarted.  And as a new couple leaves to make out in the workplace of the boy, his boss finds them and scolds them.  The black man puts on his cockney geezer accent that makes him less Other and threatening to the White man. The compromises of living as an ethnic minority begin again. 

LOVERS ROCK has a running time of 68 minutes. It is the second episode in Steve McQueen's Small Axe TV series.  It will air on UK TV on November 22nd and be released on the internet in the USA on November 27th. 

MANGROVE - BFI London Film Festival 2020 - Opening Night Gala

A rather different Opening Night experience at the London Film Festival this year. Rather than tripping up the red carpet to the Odeon Leicester Square in all our finery, we watched the opening film in our living room via the BFI's festival screening website.   Perhaps this is fitting as this year's opener is Steve McQueen's MANGROVE, part of a five part series of films to be shown on the BBC in November celebrating Black British History.  

The film's title is taken from a small West Indian cafe in Notting Hill in the 1960s that served as a kind of unofficial community hub for the immigrants who had come over as part of the Windrush generation.  It might be hard for kids now to realise that Notting Hill then was a poor part of North Kensington, full of immigrants trying to take their place in British society despite endemic racism.  They were brutalised by an institutionally racist Metropolitan police, and further brutalised and isolated by urban planning. The Mangrove was continually raided and broken up for no good - or at least lawful - reason.  And it's no accident that the Westway was built to carve up the community with a massive impregnable physical obstacle - leaving Notting Hill to be gentrified to the East, and Shepherd's Bush to rot in the West.  Even the constituency was reshaped in 1970 to break-up a potentially powerful voting block.

That year - 1970 - is no accident. It was also the year of the trial of the Mangrove Nine.   Naturally, as someone who received the finest education England has to over, I had no idea this trial had taken place!  And so this film serves as a powerful educational piece beyond its role as mere entertainment.  

The first half of the film shows anger building in the West Indian community at the continual harassment of the police.  Black men are beaten brutally, their mothers are spoken down to - coppers arrest black men on the whim of a card game.  And yet - and yet - there is joy and community and fun to be had at the Mangrove.  The roti is good!  The music is good!  And there might even be some under the table gambling and rum. The cafe owner, Frank Crichlow, certainly doesn't think of himself as a community leader, even though he has become one by default. He's just there to create a safe space for his people. 

The centre of the film is a peaceful protest organised by local activists such as the lawyer Darcus Howe, and the Black Panther Altheia Jones-Lecointe.  As the protestors meet intransigent police, they are beaten and selectively pulled out and arrested. Most absurdly, the nine are charged with Riot and Affray - a new charge so serious they are tried in the Old Bailey.

The second half of the film is thus the trial of the Mangrove Nine. We see them as differently motivated.  Frank's ambivalence is clear.  He even considers taking a plea deal. Others are angry and want to express that anger clearly and violently even at the cost of their own defense.  Howe and Jones-Lecointe are the most educated and articulate and so represent themselves.  They are the most clear-sighted about Frank and the Mangrove's role in the community, and the significance of the trial. They are invested in this as a pivotal moment in the civil rights struggle. 

One of the things that struck me most powerfully was the contrast between the sepia-toned warmth and informality of the Mangrove, where all are welcome, and Aunt Betty is always sitting on a stool with a song on her lips - and the austerity of the Old Bailey.  The topography of the courtroom is extreme - with the viewing gallery absurdly high and removed from the action, the judge once again boxed in and high, the mere lawyers low and supplicant. It's a building and a courtroom designed to impose, to give gravitas to those in power, and make sure those in the dock know their place. 

As a result, its British justice that's on trial - from the ability of Darcus and Altheia to enter the Bailey with the dignity of lawyers - to the ability to select a jury of ones peers - to the ability to leave the dock without being manhandled and confined. What I really liked was that - despite a superbly funny ally in one of the white barristers - this is not a film about white allies. It's Darcus' superb cross-examination of the prosecution's key witness - a Met police officer - that wins their case.  Although a genuinely decent closing direction from the Judge to ignore the colour of a uniform or of a witnesses skin, no doubt helped too.

There are several genuinely moving passages in this film. The first - moving me to tears - was am impassioned speech by Jones-Lecointe about how she is doing this for her unborn child.  But the second was the a long held close-up on Crichlow as he hears the verdict. In a sense, this has been his film and his journey - from businessman to activist. He has come to terms with what the Mangrove means to his community, and the responsibility that comes with that.

Of course, nothing changes really. The harassment continues and black people continue to face prejudice.  But there is some small comfort in the fact this history is finally being brought to our screens by our most talented of film-makers, and in a format where everyone will be able to see it.  But it does make me sad not to have experienced it on the big screen. I can only begin to imagine how powerful McQueen's extreme close-ups must have been in that format.

Special kudos to all involved in recreating 1960s Notting Hill - the street-scapes, clothes, music, cars, processed film that gave it a certain colour-scape and texture - all worked superbly well.  And kudos too, to the cast. Letitia Wright deserves special mention as Jones-Lecointe, as does Malachi Kirby as Howe. But it's Shaun Parkes as Frank who really takes us deep into the heart of this spectacular film.

MANGROVE played the New York and London Film Festivals 2020. It will be shown on TV in November. It has a running time of 126 minutes.

MARJORIE PRIME

I liked the ideas in MARJORIE PRIME far more than the film itself.  The ideas surround the nature of memory and AI.  In a near future, AI has developed to the point that grieving people can buy a "prime" - a lifelike robot who can learn to remember your family memories. As the film opens, we have an old lady called Marjorie (Lois Smith) who interacts with a younger avatar of her dead husband (Jon Hamm).  What's fascinating is that she is teaching him their shared memories but chooses to alter some of them - making his proposal more romantic so that that becomes his version of events. And then, as her memory fades and he becomes her factual record, it's the fake memory that becomes the shared history.  Marjorie's daughter (Geena Davis) is initially horrified by the concept of her mother having a relationship with a Prime, while her husband (Tim Robbins) sees it as a boon.  But as the film develops, we see the two of them have their own relationships with Primes and the position shifts as they too start to re-interpret history through shared but altered memories.  Most impressively, in the final scene of the film, we see the Primes themselves interact and share those memories, moving further away from the truth.  The film, then, raises important and nuanced questions about the nature of shared memory and the ethics of altering it. Should the truth be privileged or is it better to tell white lies that comfort people?

The problem with the film is that it reads like a didactic treatise rather than a living and breathing drama. Matters aren't helped by the fact that director Michael Almereyda largely keeps the action in the closed confines of the family home, paces the film slowly, and does little with his camera. To that end, the movie feels like a filmed stage play, and it is indeed based on a play by Jordan Harrison. I found myself admiring its ideas and some of its performances but deeply deeply bored.  

MARJORIE PRIME has a running time of 98 minutes and is not yet rated and does not yet have a commercial release date.  It played Berlin, Sundance and San Francisco. 

JACKIE

JACKIE is a mesmerising portrait of Jackie Kennedy in the immediate aftermath of the assassination of her husband, President John F Kennedy.  It attempts to give us an intimate portrait of one of the most recognisable and yet most enigmatic women in history at both her most vulnerable and strong moments - when she's both dealing with her personal shock and grief, but also struggling to protect the legacy of her husband and to shape his place in history. We are left with a picture of a woman who is intelligent, fierce in her protective instincts, but not above sly manipulation - Jackie as a political player then, equal in her influence to Bobby Kennedy, and a match for LBJ and even General de Gaulle.  We get Jackie famously refusing to change out of her blood-stained clothes for the cameras as well as the less well known fight to have an Abraham Lincoln style full state funeral. But at the same time, we are given a tragic portrayal of just how quickly the machinery of power, rightly but savagely, moves to protect the new President, and just how quickly the old President's wife and children are cast aside.  

Screen-writer Noah Oppenheim's choice to focus on Jackie and to make JFK, who killed him, his actual politics, almost incidental is novel.  But so too is Chilean director Pablo Larrain's decision to tell the story using a complex non-linear structure.  We move back and forth from the assassination to the autopsy to the swearing in to the funeral arrangements to the interview Jackie gives to a journalist where she creates the myth of Camelot.  But even this dizzying back and forth is intercut with flashbacks to Jackie guiding TV viewers through the White House in meticulously re-created awkwardly staged black and white footage, not to mention White House recitals and balls. The vivid primary colours of the times of Camelot - Jackie in stunning ballgowns dancing with her prince, make a stark contrast with the dun-coloured scenes of Jackie alone in the White House after his assassination, and sitting in the dreary rain-soaked country house to give her interview.  Kudos to Larrain and editor Sebastian Sepulveda for managing to pull off this complex construction while but not losing the viewer. 

UNDER THE SKIN - LFF 2013 - Day Five

GRAVITY was a technically accomplished mainstream thriller - NEBRASKA a beautifully observed heightened slice of life - but with UNDER THE SKIN, director Jonathan Glazer (BIRTH, SEXY BEAST) gives us the first film of the film festival that is an unashamed art-house hit - a piece of cinematic genius that is utterly uncompromising and infused with surreal visuals, an engrossing soundtrack, wrapped around a mystery.

Based on the novel by Michel Faber, perhaps best known for his stunning The Crimson Petal and The White, Jonathan Glazer's film is less a straightforward adaptation than a movie inspired by the material. He casts Scarlett Johansson in her most challenging role - as an alien fembot sent to earth to lure in wayward men to their deaths. I know that sounds absurd, but by ground this alien, surreal concept in scrupulpusly realist photography, Glazer and cinematographer Daniel Landin (44 INCH CHEST) give the movie an air of mystery and peril that subverts any comic overtones in the concept.

The first hour is basically an alien procedural. Scarlett Johansson's character cruises around Glasgow in a van, screening man to find those alone, with no-one to alert the police. She picks them up, takes them to her house and then.....gosh! How to describe the switch from ueber-realism to the heightened surrealism we encounter there - of this alien women leading men into the mire in a brilliantly pure visual scape that's matched by Mica Levi and Johnnie Burn's haunting, sensual, strange soundscape. 

The movie then takes a turn with the alien woman somehow jolted into amnesia about who she is, picked up by a well-meaning man, and led into what may be her first sexual encounter.  This freaks her out, and as the movie enters its final act, we see her pushed to an extreme of self-knowledge.  It's desperately sad, and shocking, and beautiful.

UNDER THE SKIN has a unique artistic vision and a profound understanding of how to situate the absurd in the real to make it credible and moving.  I am pleasantly surprised that Johansson would take such a role, in which she is compelling, but really this is Jonathan Glazer's film. It's about his artistic choices, particularly in the seduction scenes, and the collaborators he assembled to bring his truly unique and beautiful vision to our screens.  

This movie should win awards, but it's so challenging and strange it probably won't.

UNDER THE SKIN played Telluride, Venice, Toronto and London 2013.