POOR THINGS***** - BFI London Film Festival 2023 - Day 11

Iconic director of scabrous black comedies, Yorgos Lanthimos (THE FAVOURITE) returns to our screens with a steam-punk set, sexually charged satire so dark and strange that is left me gasping for breath.  Along with ZONE OF INTEREST, this film is doing something so audacious, so compelling and so far removed from the ordinary run of films that it deserves all the awards.  Whether it proves too strange, disturbing and provocative to appeal to a mainstream jury remains to be seen.

Emma Stone gives an astoundingly brave and career defining performance as Bella Baxter, a Frankenstein creation of adult woman and childlike brain.  We watch her rapid acquisition of language and intellectual ideas and sexual desires. Better explained in the source novel by Alasdair Gray, as she only knows her adult body, she has no shame or internalised misogyny. Bella is as free with her body as her thoughts.

Bella was brought to life by her guardian, Godwin (Willem Dafoe) and lives in an elaborate steampunk world of Lanthimos' vivid imagination. In Lanthimos' conception "God" is himself a victim of his surgeon-father's experiments.  Bella finds herself falling for the harmless, earnest Dr McCandless (Rami Youssef) but elopes with the charming, rogueish lawyer Duncan Wedderburn. It is here that her adventures, and ours, really begin, thanks to an uproariously funny and award worthy performance from Mark Ruffalo - apparently having the time of his life - and Lanthimos' beautifully reimagined  Mediterranean cities and Victorian hotel rooms. A shout out too for casting the iconic Hanna Shygulla as a wise old woman called Martha and Kathryn Hunter as a jaded Parisian madam. 

I cannot begin to describe the delights of a film that gives full flower to Lanthimos' dark gothic imagination - whether the production design of Baxter's house and successive interiors, to the wildly transgressive costumes that Bella wears, to the jarring, disturbingly brilliant score from Jerskin Fendrix. It is as if every element of the crew comes together in to deliver a heightened, sensual experience that frames and enables Stone's outlandish but also deeply moving performance. This is complete film-making of an extra-ordinary level of skill and accomplishment.  This is not to be missed, and on a big screen if possible.

POOR THINGS has a running time of 141 minutes and is rated R. It played Venice and London 2023. It will be released in the USA on December 8th.

MEDUSA DELUXE****

Thomas Hardiman's impressive directorial debut seems to have come to us by way of Peter Strickland and Alan Partridge. Set in the world of regional hairdressing competitions - the stakes thus darkly, comedically, low - his characters are trapped in a claustrophobic conference centre where hairdressers, models and a competition organiser slowly go mad trying to figure out who murdered and scalped the surefire competition winner, Mosca.  Accusations of skulduggery abound. Apparently the competition judge was being bought. And Mosca's grieving partner, arriving with their baby, has to deal both with grief AND accusations of infidelity.  

Claire Perkins' Cleve steals the show with her almost tragicomic obsession with winning and violence lurking just under the surface, triggered when she realises the fight was never fair. The other star is cinematographer Robbie Ryan, whose camera takes seems to be taking us ever-deeper into this strange obsessive world in what Fouad Gaber edits as seemingly one take. 

Is the murder-mystery conceit well-enough plotted and executed? Probably not. But I loved every minute spent in the company of these characters, with their strange obsessions but also their authentic and profound discussions about what it means to be a woman, in love, pregnant, or just plain wanting to do well at the only option of a career that society gave you. Plus, these have to be the most amazing end credits I've seen in quite some time. I cannot wait to see what Thomas Hardiman does next.

MEDUSA DELUXE is rated R and has a running time of 101 minutes. It played London 2022 and was released in the UK this week and in the USA last week.

MARRIAGE STORY - BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Day Six

Writer-director Noah Baumbach has created, in MARRIAGE STORY, the best Woody Allen film since the late 1980s. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about a director so closely replicating the technique of another even if it's a technique I so admire and it's done so well.  But if I push that slight queasiness to one side, I have to admit that MARRIAGE STORY is one of the most authentic, heartfelt and beautifully acted relationship dramas I've seen in some time, and I hope that Baumbach, Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver and Laura Dern are duly reward with award nominations.

The story is a deeply personal and relatable one.  It's based on Noah Baumbach's own divorce from Jennifer Jason Leigh, and acted by Scarlett Johansson in the midst of her own divorce.  Two fundamentally decent good people find they cannot live together anymore.  The husband - a theatre director - feels that his wife, his star actress - has cooled sexually, resents her for his having been married and faithful in his prime, and so has an affair.  The wife resents the fact that her career has been subsumed into his, that he so steadfastly considers them a New York family when she wants to go back to LA, that she's never given the chance to direct.  In the most trenchant line of the film, her lawyer points out that when he wants something it's a debate, but when she wants something it's just a discussion.

They begin the divorce process hoping not to involve lawyers. They have precious little money to split - the only real contention is custody and specifically where their primary home will be - are they a New York or LA family. But as she files for divorce when shooting a pilot in LA, as her kid was born in LA, he's in school there while she shoots the pilot, it all seems to go in her favour. Moreover, she hires a no-nonsense cut-throat lawyer played by Laura Dern, while he hires a decent lawyer played by Alan Alda. This all winds through - we get an absolutely superb, unrelenting, vicious, heart-wrenching, set piece argument - and the case is settled. The irony being that if he'd agree to just spend a year in LA in the first place they might never have gotten divorced in the first place.

I really love this film. There's something so honest about their mutual resentments, about her need to break free, about his complete lack of awareness.... There's also something so tragically well-observed in how the expensive lawyers think it's all about victory, and are actually social friends outside of the courtroom, and don't really care about the clients at all. There's a wonderful moment of subtle acting near the end when her lawyer has managed to squeeze out another concession from him, but a concession she even wanted, and when the lawyer says "you won!" you can see her wince.  

This is Scarlett Johansson operating at a level we haven't seen before - establishing herself as a truly gifted and mature actress. And in combination with her surprisingly tragicomic, charismatic performance in JOJO RABBIT - this truly is her year.  And I guess I'm overall pleased that someone is giving us complicated adult dramas of the calibre of late 80s Woody Allen, even if it isn't Woody himself. 

MARRIAGE STORY has a running time of 136 minutes and is rated R. The film played Venice, Telluride, Toronto and London. It will get a limited theatrical release in November before being released on Netflix on December 6th.

THE FAVOURITE - BFI London Film Festival 2018 - Day Ten

It's the early 1700s and Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) sits on the throne of England, but THE FAVOURITE, Sarah, Lady Malborough (Rachel Weisz) rules the country.  She does by being alternately kind but strict with the Queen, projecting herself as her protectress, appearing almost bullying. And she wields this power to keep England at war with France, her husband at the head of that army, and the Whigs in power.  But when Sarah takes pity on her young impoverished cousin Abigail (Emma Stone) she invites a viper into her nest. This apparently naive young girl is in fact an accomplished actress and manipulator and is soon working to usurp her cousin, gain her titles back, marry, and make an alliance with the opposition Tories. What's most astonishing about this story of rivals is that it's basically true. The only thing that has been added is exactly what should be in high quality historical fiction - an emotional imagination that shows us the conflicting motives and feelings of the three protagonists and what might have happened in bed.

The resulting film is by far the most mainstream that Yorgos Lanthimos (THE LOBSTER, THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER) has directed. It's a sumptuously shot, designed, framed and acted film that's highly accessible, and - with the exception of some superb swearing - is actually pretty inoffensive.  Rather than creating a sinister and claustrophobic near-horror feeling, Lanthimos has actually created a very sympathetic portrait of three women trapped in a strictly controlled courtly world, and while his trademark dark humour is still there in spades, this is his first film where I really cared about all his characters - where they were more than satirical cyphers or quasi-myths.

THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES (NEW AND SELECTED) - Day 4 - BFI London Film Festival 2017

In a London Film Festival where the prevailing tone has been one of a wake, in the words of Meester Phil, "Thank god for some wit and arseholery." The arsehole in question is paterfamilias Harold Meyerowitz (Dustin Hoffman with a raffish beard), a retired sculptor full of passive aggressive nastiness and jealousy. On the last of many marriages, Harold lives an indulgent life bitter that his supposedly less talented peers have achieved more commercial success, and demanding that his three children dance to his needs. The eldest is his son Danny (Adam Sandler) - an utterly charming but insecure man who has been constantly overlooked in favour of Harold's younger son Matthew (Ben Stiller), who is far more successfully financially and seems to have discovered a better way of dealing with his father. And then poor Jean (Elizabeth Marvel) is so overlooked that her grievances with her dad taking a back seat and comically inserted in parenthesis. 

The film is, then, a very darkly comic one.  There are properly laugh out loud moments to be sure - but the tone is bitter and tragic. And this is where the casting is absolutely spot on. I love it when Stiller and Sandler play straight roles because there's a certain manic comic energy underlying it. And when they ARE called upon for their slapstick chops, the payoff is all the better for the surrounding dark context. If I have any criticism to make, it's that the film felt over-long and occasionally lost momentum.  I felt that this was particularly the case in the scenes involving Harold's fourth wife Maureen (Emma Thompson).  Nothing wrong with her performance at all, it just felt a bit redundant. Otherwise this was a truly superb film as one would expect from a Noah Baumbach picture. 

THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES has a running time of 110 minutes and will be released on Netflix on October 13th. 

PHILOMENA - LFF 2013 - Day Eight

You can listen to a podcast review of this film below, or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes.



PHILOMENA isn't a bad film.  But it isn't a good film.  It's a perfectly serviceable TV weepie with a superior cast. The movie spends a lot of time self-mocking human interest stories for being schmaltzy melodrama designed to cater for the weak and stupid.  But it can't escape the fact that this is basically what PHILOMENA is.  It could've been more.  But bound as it is by the truth of the story, it can't get spiky enough to do anything interesting.

Let me explain.  Philomena (Dame Judi Dench) is a real life Irish woman who got knocked up, consigned to a convent, and had her son forcibly adopted when he was a little boy.  Fifty years later, she enlists the help of an ex-BBC journalist to find him, as it turns out, in America.  There's some interest in seeing a lapsed Catholic of some wealth and cynicism help a woman who has been so obviously wronged by her Church, but still has faith and forgiveness in her heart. We could have had a really fantastically interesting philosophical debate here, but apart from one  scene in which Philomena refuses to confess, the screenwriters seem to shy away from such a controversy.  Similarly, without spoiling anything, there are aspects of the son's life that Philomena, given her faith, could have struggled with.  But no, as if by the shake of a magic wand, she is perfectly fine and understanding and modern and lovely.  And then, take the journalist, Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan in an admirably modulated performace).  He could have had to confront some real issues about whether or not to exploit Philomena's story for financial gain.  But circumstances let him off the hook.  

The result is a film in which two basically nice people go on a road trip and any possible issue that might have caused some problems, some fire, some provocation, some debate, some nuance, are neatly handled.   This creates a rather banal and soupy experience better suited to the Hallmark Channel than the London Film Festival. And the jokes that are in the movie - while properly laugh-out-loud - are all in the trailer.

PHILOMENA has a running time of 98 minutes and is rated 12A in the UK.

PHILOMENA played Venice 2013 where Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope won Best Screenplay, and Stephen Frears won the Queer Lion. It also played Toronto and London 2013.  It will be released in the UK, Ireland and Iceland on November 1st, in the USA on November 22nd, in Sweden on December 6th, in Italy on December 19th, in Hungary on December 26th, in France on January 8th 2014, in the Netherlands on February 13th, in Germany on February 27th and in Japan in March. 

London Film Fest 2012 Day 4 - GINGER & ROSA

2009 was a great year for British literature, with Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and A.S.Byatt's The Children's Book duking it out for the Booker. The latter book was deeply concerned with how the sexual liberation of the Edwardian bohemians impacted their children. One of the key themes of the novel is to contrast the earnest liberal politics of the Bohemians with the lack of regard for their actual children. They want to make the world a better place, regardless of whether their children are fed and cared for, or hurt by their affairs. Byatt makes the point that artists and intellectuals can be both admirable for their work but a nightmare to live with. Strict principles can often be a convenient fig leaf for selfishness.

Sally Potter's new film, GINGER & ROSA makes much the same point, drawing on a much smaller canvas, but with greater intensity. It's about how a father's radical conception of personal freedom damages his doting teenage daughter. Roland sees Ginger's tears but cannot stop the actions that cause the pain, equating personal sexual freedom, and setting aside bourgeois morality, with his opposition to armed conflict. It's a pompous but not indefensible position, but the the same could be said for so much that happens around the girl. Her gay godfathers genuinely care for her, but their tales of radicalism fuel her wallowing deaths possibility of a nuclear holocaust. Similarly, their friend Bella praises Ginger's activism but denies whipping her up. It's no wonder the poor girl is sad and confused, desperately trying to please and not complain.

Alice Englert and Elle Fanning,
Rosa & Ginger respectively.

And what of Ginger's best friend Rosa? Although the focus of the film is not on her, she's an equally tragic figure. Where Ginger suffers from a surfeit of concerned but misguided adults, Rosa has a distracted mother and an absentee father. No wonder she latches onto Roland as an impressive father figure - a composite man to take care of her and shepherd her into adulthood.

GINGER & ROSA seems to me to be a perfect film - tightly scripted, beautifully acted and photographed, evoking in minute detail the spirit and design of early 60s London, but also hinting at wider themes of revolt and parenting. I love that in place of the Swinging Sixties cliché we get a drab, grimy post-war world and an uneasy conflict between radicalism and 50s suburbia. Particular praise has to go to Elle Fanning (Ginger) who carries so much of the emotional burden of the film, but also Christine Hendricks in a smaller but equally intense role as her mother. Alessandro Nivola as Roland, her father, brings just the right balance of sleaze and headstrong idealism. But ultimately, the triumph of this picture is Sally Potter's, in bringing a new perspective to 60s London, and doing so with such formal control and intensity. If there is any justice, this film, and particularly Fanning and Hendricks' performances, will be recognised come awards season.

GINGER & ROSA played Toronto and London 2012. It opens in the UK on October 19th. The running time is 89 minutes.

London Film Fest 2012 Day 3 - THE SUMMIT

THE SUMMIT is Nick Ryan's documentary about the 2008 K2 disaster.  K2 may be less tall than Everest, but it is a far more challenging climb. The peak is in the "death zone" where the human body cannot naturally survive - where the altitude, lack of oxygen and fatigue severely impair normal mental and physical function. Of the limited group that successfully ascend K2, 1 in 4 will not survive the descent, with a particularly high fatality rate around the "bottleneck" - a small pass to the upper slopes with an overhanging ice Seroc waiting to break off and cause chaos.  

The 2008 disaster saw a number of international teams and some solo climbers all try to ascend at the very end of the climbing season.  Despite poor planning and execution, crossed wires and some inexperience, 22 people did make it to the summit, but 11 lost their lives coming down, making it the worst single day on K2 in history.

What this documentary does well is to use video and photos and interviews with survivors and close family to give us a feel for the personalities of the men and women on the slope, what drove them on, and what might have been their reactions to the extreme conditions.  We become attached to them and will them to survive, even though we can deduce from who and who isn't a talking head, who will fall victim to K2.  We also become acutely aware that all eye-witness testimony is suspect and all moral judgements futile, because of the very nature of altitude sickness.  There's an extent to which we will never know what really happened up there that day.

What I found frustrating, however, was the rather haphazard organisation of the material, rather than a more straightforward linear approach. It was only upon returning home and going onto the internet that I got a really clear picture of what went on and the controversies around the different accounts - and that can't be right can it?

I also felt that because of who would and wouldn't speak to the director, the movie might've been a bit uneven in its approach.  Here and there throughout the film, different participants make comments about the Koreans being ill-prepared, just sitting and smoking, treating the sherpas poorly. This is put in stark contrast with the undoubtedly deeply brave and impressive Pemba Gyalje, who survived, and the charismatic Irish climber Ger McDonnell, who tragically died, apparently trying to save South Korean climbers.  I was crying out for someone to interview someone from the Korean team to get their perspective.   To be fair, in the end credits there is a statement saying that the surviving Korean team leader refused to be interviewed.  But couldn't they have gotten someone, anyone, a mountaineering expert, to explain the Korean perspective?

Overall all then, a fascinating documentary.  It was my sixth straight film of the day, and I have no interest in mountaineering, but I was transfixed by the story.  I am thankful for the insightful interviews with key survivors and their family, and Nick Murphy and DP StephenO'Reilly's breathtaking K2 footage. But it felt like only half the story had been told.

THE SUMMIT played London 2012. It does not yet have a commercial release date. The running time is 95 minutes.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 14 - WUTHERING HEIGHTS (2011)

Andrea Arnold (RED ROAD, FISHTANK) is an exceptional British director - a woman whose films take us under the skin of the characters she is portraying. She isn't a director of dialogue but a director of sensory perception. We hear the wind; dogs scuffling; kisses. We can almost feel the texture of worn clothes; curled hair; ruffled blankets; the mist on our face. We feel the relationship between two people from the way they are in each other's presence, not from the dialogue. And every emotion felt by the characters is mirrored in nature, brought to us with startling clarity by Robbie Ryan's award-winning cinematography. In short, Andrea Arnold echoes the authenticity and heightened sense-perception of Terrence Malick - high praise indeed - but justified. All these qualities make Andrea Arnold the perfect director to take on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights - a movie whose characters are so much embedded in the wild beauty of the Yorkshire Moors. Working in collaboration with screenwriter Olivia Hetreed (GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING), Arnold has taken a bold approach to the source novel. She only portrays the first half of the novel, takes away the framing device of Nelly recounting the story to a traveller, as well as the gothic vision that opens the novel.  What this does is allow her to take her time over establishing the central characters and conflicts.  

The Earnshaw family live in a ramshackle farmhouse on the Moors in the early nineteenth century.  The puritanical father brings home a poor young black boy, later baptised as Heathcliff, throwing the elder son, Hindley into brutally violent jealousy and contempt and the young daughter Catherine into a kind of selfish, selfless profound love.  When the father dies, Hindley brutalises Heathcliff; and his poor, rough person stands in sharp contrast with the smooth refined Linton family.  And so, when Edgar Linton proposes, Cathy accepts, though feeling she is betraying both herself and Heathcliff, who overhearing, runs away. So ends the first hour of the film.  In the second hour, Heathcliff has returned a rich man, and Cathy is now married to Edgar.  Their love is hemmed in by Edgar sending his sister, Isabella, as chaperone, and when Heathcliff learns Cathy is pregnant, he returns this apparent "betrayal" by seducing Isabella, so setting off a nervous reaction in Cathy.

The story is, then, powerful, passionate, violent - filled with supposed and real slights, revenge, and a love so painful to bear it results in self-destructive behaviour.  For it to work on screen, we have to feel that visceral connection between Cathy and Heathcliff - we have to believe that their every breath and decision is coloured by the connection.  In the first half of the film, I absolutely believe that thanks to some exceptional casting, the portrayal of young Cathy and young Heathcliff sets a new benchmark among the tens of film adaptations. Shannon Beer and Solomon Gave quietly, powerfully, portray a real and charismatic connection - they are quite simply magnetic. Sadly, the movie is let down by indifferent casting in the later scenes, with Kaya Scodelario (Effy in TV's "Skins") and James Howson.  I didn't buy into their relationship - Howson was too milksop, too little darkly enjoying his revenge on Hindley, not malicious enough with Isabella - and Scodelario simply didn't have the look of a wild bird tamed, caged - she looked to Isabella-ish!   Also, I know we are meant to suspend our disbelief, but the two Cathy's look utterly dissimilar. One feels that better casting would've provided the continuity seen in the Young and Teen Kevins in Lynne Ramsay's WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN.

WUTHERING HEIGHTS played Venice (where Robbie Ryan won Best Cinematographer) and Toronto 2011. It opens in the UK on November 11th; in Spain on November 25th; in Slovenia on January 26th; and in Poland on March 23rd.