SEBERG - BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Day Three

Director Benedict Andrews (UNA) returns to the festival with his biopic of the  Amercian actress who became a French New Wave icon - Jean Seberg.  The script from Anna Waterhouse and Joe Shrapnel focusses on the period in her life when Seberg was persecuted by the FBI for sleeping with and funding a "radical" black activist. What starts as a sting on peripheral people in the Black Panthers' funding circle becomes years of aggressive stalking, wire-tapping, defamation through gossip columnists - nothing less than an attempt to drive her crazy and out of Hollywood for daring to hold progressive views and sleeping with a black man.

The tragedy of Seberg's story is that it worked.  She became rightly paranoid, nervous, manic, was effectively blacklisted from Hollywood films, fleeing to Paris.  Her affair with activist Hakim Jamal was exposed - she was slandered as being pregnant with his child when she was really pregnant by a Mexican activist. The stress caused her to attempt suicide many times, and to the premature death of her baby daughter. As the film ends, Seberg has some kind of closure and reclamation. She meets one of the Feds who's been harassing her, and has the confirmation that she's not crazy. The film ends on a bravura held close-up of her reaction to this. But we know, and the end credits next to her face tell us, that she ultimately found no peace, dying in what we assume was a successful suicide attempt a handful of years later.

The resulting film has many merits. Kristen Stewart is absolutely sympathetic as Jean Seberg.  The physical resemblance isn't there, but the costume design is superb - and that's all beside the point. I absolutely believed in her as a young, good-hearted woman being driven to a breakdown by sinister forces. It's another in a line of really strong performances from her in small arthouse films that show she's really a superb actress. Last year's festival pick, LIZZIE, and PERSONAL SHOPPER before that, are cases in point.  It's gotten to the point where I now trust Kristen Stewart implicitly as a curator of my film experiences. If she goes for a project, I will assume it has an interesting subject, director, approach, and I will watch it. I can't say that about many actors.

I also liked Benedict Andrews direction and Rachel Morrison's cinematography - the film has a moody, sensual, sun kissed look, with beautiful Hollywood interiors belying the darkness at its core. And I really loved the score from Jed Zurzel (SLOW WEST) and especially the unusual song pics - not least a wonderfully melancholy cover of Tom Thumb's Blues by Nina Simone at the end.

My only real issue - but it was an issue - was with the script. I felt that the focus was too narrow. I wanted more context. Let's see the civil strife in America and why the Feds were so on edge.  Let's see the true contrast between Compton and Seberg's Hollywood.  Let's see the consequences of her affair - let's see how her colleagues react with prejudice to her sleeping with a black man - let's see her lose roles.  And let's understand more of her husband Romain Gary (Yvan Attal) - let's see why he decides to stand by her, really to the end, despite mutual infidelities and a divorce.  

Let me be clear - Stewart is amazing here, and focusing specifically on her mental state is almost enough to make a compelling film, but not quite - this film could've done so much more.

SEBERG has a running time of 98 minutes. The film played Venice Toronto and London 2019. It will be released in the USA on December 13th. It does not yet have a commercial release date in the UK.

MUDBOUND - Day 3 - BFI London Film Festival 2017

Dee Rees' MUDBOUND is a profoundly cliched and deathly slow-paced film about racism in post-WW2 Mississippi.  We're on a mud-drenched farm, owned by a small-minded white man (Jason Clarke) and his rather superficial, simpering  but ultimately warm-hearted wife (Carey Mulligan). They live there with their two daughters, and his cruelly racist but caricatured Pappy (Jonathan Banks), while the brother (Garrett Hedlund is off fighting in Germany.  Also living on the farm are the black tenant farmers, of eminent virtue and no character nuance whatsoever. As Meester Phil put it, the mum is played by Mary J Blige in the "Oprah Winfrey" role. The tenants son Ronsel (Jason Mitchell) is also off in Germany fighting the war, and experiencing far more freedom than he ever found in the USA.

The plot of the story, such as it is, sees the white brother and black son return from WW2 and form a friendship through their shared trauma.  Clearly nothing good is going to come of this anachronistic enlightenment and in due course we get a searingly violent scene set to a beautiful gospel hymn. In fact, I would wager that it's an unintentional irony of this film that all the really truly shitty stuff happens either in church or when set to a hymn.  I think the ending is meant to be uplifting, nonetheless, but I found it all rather patronising and fantastic - as if Germany post-war was an utopia of racial harmony.  

Overall, this is a long drawn-out film, whose paper-thin characters can't stand the weight of history thrust upon them.  And I found the wannabe Mallickian voice-overs deeply irritating.  Seriously - watch the first half and ask yourself - would this be any less good - would my understanding of characters' feelings be any less - without this incessant portentous rambling?

MUDBOUND has a running time of 134 minutes and is rated R.  The film played Sundance, Toronto, New York and London 2017. It goes on release on the internet in the USA on November 17th. 

FRUITVALE STATION

Oh dear. The poor women next to me was in floods of tears and actually apologised for crying to me when the lights went up.  This may well be a peculiar trait of the English: apologising for a visceral emotional reaction.  I rather gather that this has been the response of the majority of viewers of FRUITVALE STATION - the critically acclaimed debut feature from writer-director Ryan Coogler. He has evidently made a deeply-felt earnest and politically charged film, and audiences are responding in kind.  After all, who can't feel sorry for a charming, fallible, but loving son, boyfriend and father who, through no fault of his own, ends up getting shot by a policeman at the metro station that gives this film its title.  The real Oscar Grant didn't deserve to die.  But he also deserves a better film than this piece of emotionally manipulative hagiography.

Ryan Coogler's conceit is to give us the man on the day before he died, enlightening only with a flashback to his time in prison and his beef with a fellow prisoner.  We see Oscar as a loving if occasionally unfaithful boyfriend, raising his daughter Tatiana responsibly, and supported by a loving extended family. It's certainly a far cry from the cliche of young black men raised by single mothers, ditching their multiple baby-mamas and up to no good.  To be sure, he's done time, and he has a cowardice when admitting to his family and friends that he's lost his job, but deep down we know Oscar is a great guy.  Why? Because he helps a pregnant woman take a leak and cradles a dying dog.  The problem is that this is a whitewash. The incident with the dog just didn't happen, and other factors we should have known about aren't mentioned.  Most crucially, the way the movie wraps up leads the audience strongly to believe that Oscar was deliberately shot by a racist cop, when the truth could be that it was just an honest mistake. Who knows?  The point is that the film doesn't admit of an alternative narrative and in doing so becomes trite propaganda.

Okay. So what if we were to approach this film as fiction and ignore any attempt at veracity, how does it work as pure drama? The opening shot of found footage showing a young man brutally treated on a metro platform is powerful and throws us into the action.  The opening scenes of the movie give us a character sketch of his relationship with his girlfriend that is deft and interesting. But then, as he roams around for the day getting ready for his mother's birthday party the movie loses pace and interest. We are marking time, hungry for character development.  The set piece confrontation at the metro station is brilliantly tense and horrific, if one can draw oneself back into the film, but just as you think "this is a tremendous movie" it descends into hackneyed E.R. territory and then into its politically simplistic ending.  So, a movie that doesn't quite cohere - that doesn't quite convince - hanging on the shoulders of a masterful set piece. A tremendous waste.

FRUITVALE STATION has a running time of 87 minutes and has been rated R in the USA and is rated 15 for strong language, violence, and injury detail.

FRUITVALE STATION played Sundance 2013 where it won both the Best Drama and Audience Award and Cannes where it won the Un Certain Regard - Avenir award. It also won the Independent Spirit Best First Feature Award. It opened last year in the USA, Singapore, Greece and Turkey and opened earlier this year in France, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium, South Korea, Portugal, Brazil, Italy, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Germany. It opens in the UK and Ireland on June 6th.