KAJILLIONAIRE - BFI London Film Festival 2020 - Day 1

Miranda July's third feature is everything I have come to expect and love - a kooky, quirky almost surreal comedy that contains at its core such deep love and earnest humanity that it can make you cry.   I truly understand why this film gets as many one-star ratings as five-star raves:  it lives in the same rarified space as films by Michel Gondry and Charlie Kauffman and it's clearly not going to be to everyone's taste. All that I can say is that I laughed out loud for pretty much all of it - and that I got deeper into it I was so invested in its lead character that I could've cried tears at the ending.  This film moved me, and its characters will stay with me.  I keenly want to know what happens next.

The film opens on a family of grifters, robbing mail boxes to pay the rent on their weird office beneath a bubble factory, whose overspill bubbles they are in charge of cleaning up.  The dad, played by Richard Jenkins, is a kind of goofily charming but increasingly creepy scam artist who seems to have a rather nasty hold over both wife (Debra Winger) and daughter. And the key story here is how the twenty-something year old daughter (Evan Rachel Woods) breaks out of the infantilised and yet loveless relationship with her parents by a chance encounter with a pretty woman called Melanie (Gina Rodriguez).  Melanie is our way into the movie. She comes from a normal, real world, albeit with an oppressive mother she's trying to escape. The way in which she's fascinated and entranced by her new friend allows us to find her strangeness endearing too. And in a sense, while Woods and Winger are giving the most mannered and big performances, it's Rodriguez who has the hardest job in playing the straight man.

I found the slowly building relationship between the two women utterly beautiful and the emotional catharsis as Woods' Old Dolio believes she has endured The Big One to be a thing of real joy.   How can the simple passing of a toothpick across a table break your heart? This is what Miranda July does. And it's a strange kind of emotional genius.

KAJILLIONAIRE is rated R and has a running time of 104 minutes. The film played Sundance and London 2020. 

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.

STRAY - BFI London Film Festival 2020 - Day 1

 

I am not a dog person and I really didn't connect with STRAY - an award-winning doc by Elizabeth Lo about stray dogs in Istanbul.  It focusses on three dogs and gives us a dog-eye-level view of life on the streets. The pleasure I had in the film were seeing those insights and I kind of wished the dogs were out of the way.  I know the film wants to tell me something deep and meaningful about how we treat homeless dogs vs homeless Syrian refugees but honestly I just want to focus on the latter.  There's so much political and religious and social conflict and crisis and nuance in Turkey today, I cannot believe this was the subject path the director took! Finally, we end up with a kind of dog's fantasy scene of strays gambolling in the countryside. It was all just too twee for words. 

STRAY played Bergen and HotDocs 2020 where it won Best International Feature. It is currently playing at the BFI London Film Festival. It has a running time of 70 minutes.

HAPPY THUGGISH PAKI - BFI London Film Festival 2020 - Day 1

HAPPY THUGGISH PAKI is an effervescent animated rap-video that starts with the artist, Hardeep Pandhal talking about the mechanics of modern animation, before we switch to a 1980s Pacman cartoon and then enter into a free-associative biographical rap that's by turns hilarious and provocative.  There's imagery of a turban-wearing muslim man being hung in front of the White House and this switches to ruminations on masturbation in your bedroom or filling in tax returns.  All the while a sample of Ms Pacman squealing "Paki/Paci" squeals in the background.  The visual and lyrical references are deep and I certainly didn't catch them all, but I really loved the experience.  The rap ends, we're back into the animator's studio and we get an even more random shot of him trying to remember the names of kids he was at school with from an old photo. We've all been there, but why here and now?!

HAPPY THUGGISH PAKI has a running time of 21 minutes.

ENOLA HOLMES

 

I thoroughly enjoyed ENOLA HOLMES - a wonderfully funny, earnest and kinetic young adult detective caper starring Millie Bobby Brown as the younger sister of Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes.  In this version of fictional history, Enola (Brown) is raised by her eccentric but learned mother (Helena Bonham Carter) until said mother mysteriously vanishes.  Stuffy conservative Mycroft packs Enola off to a boarding school but she soon escapes to find her mother.  That first mystery isn't really solved, setting us up for a sequel, although it is hinted that mum is a radical activist feminist. So we get a second mystery: just who is trying to assassinate handsome but feckless young Lord Tewkesbury (Louis Partridge).  As befits a progressive work, it is Enola who saves Tewkesbury rather than the other way around, and she solves the mystery of the case before her indulgent brother Sherlock (Cavill). The result is a pleasingly feminist and funny caper that shows just how good Millie Bobby Brown is at comedy. I doubt many other actresses could get away with breaking the fourth wall as often and with such wit as she does. I am very much looking forward to the inevitable sequel.

ENOLA HOLMES has a running time of 123 minutes and is rated PG-13. 

TENET (some spoilers but they won't deter your fun)

Try to feel it!

TENET is a return to form  for Christopher Nolan after the technically brilliant but narratively simplistic and arguably jingoistic, DUNKIRK.  He is far safer in his home territory of cerebral sci-fi and kinetic action sequences.  In TENET, the big concept is that a future scientist created a technology to reverse an object's entropy. So it's not technically time travel but it does involve people and objects (cars/guns) going backwards from our present-day perspective.  None of it really makes sense, and there's a funny early sequence where poor Clemence Poesy has to do her best Basil Exposition impression, both explaining the concept AND telling us not to think too much about it.  

Realising the danger of this tech, the future scientist splits the algorithm into nine parts - like Horcruxes or Infinity Stones -  and hides them in our present. (Why doesn't the scientist just destroy it? Who the frack knows.) This naturally pisses off vague future people, who want to find and re-assemble the algorithm and use it to wage war on the present. 

It's not a very original plot is it?!

Why does the Future hate us, mummy? They hate us for the same reasons Greta Thunburg hates us.  Moreover, they are making a massive gamble that by wiping us out they won't also make their own existence void. And so they enable a present-day Russian oligarch called Sator to re-assemble the Infinity Glove, sorry The Algorithm, starting with a piece that was hidden in the closed Soviet city where he grew up.  

Is this a spoiler? Well yes, but not in any way that should detract from your enjoyment of the film.  The real fun is in seeing how Nolan takes us and his Protagonist through his world where the action is happening simultaneously in linear and reverse time. It’s a lot of fun of seeing events replay themselves from different time perspectives, and recognising little Easter eggs laid early in the film pay off later on.  This involves hand-to-hand combat scenes and car chases where people are fighting in dual times. It's all just enormous fun and technically an absolute marvel. No other film-maker is going to literally crash a 747 into an airport hangar for you.  And the delightful insouciance of Himesh Patel's Mahir explaining this plan is presumably a meta-comment on Nolan's own audacity.  

Another reason why this film is fun is its knowing humour.  First off, we have John David Washington playing against the very notion of suave sophisticated Bond - throwing barbs about snobbery back at Michael Caine's knighted fixer.  But mostly, it's all about Robert Pattinson's Neil, who starts the film as a kind of crumpled linen-suited alcohol soaked minor diplomat but ends as something of a hero.  I couldn't resist his rakish charm, perhaps modelled on a younger Jeremy Irons?  Let's see more of this! Every time he wasn't on screen - for example a deathly dull interlude on a yacht in the middle of the movie - I wanted to press the fast forward button.

Tailoring goals.

Another reason to love the film is its intelligence and its absolute refusal to dumb down for a mass audience. And to all the reviewers out there who claimed they couldn't understand what was happening, my retort is to DO BETTER.  Nolan takes great pains to colour code the timelines and to play back scenes so that we really understand what is happening from each angle. If you don't get it, that really is on you.

That said, there are limits.  Nolan's refuses to give the protagonist a name. He's called The Protagonist. He even has a conversation with Dimple Kapadia's arms dealer about who really is the protagonist. This is the sort of pretentious wank that only literary theory students should be allowed to indulge in.

The plot is also - sci-fi concept aside - pretty hackneyed. The idea of protagonist and antagonist in a race to assemble a MacGuffin that can - da da daaaaaah - end the world - is fairly common. And even at the micro-level, the idea of a protagonist falling for a waif-like blonde abused by her evil oligarch husband is pretty well-worn. Indeed it's something straight out of a B-list Bond movie like NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN. 

I am a waif-like blonde on my abusive lover's yacht, please help!

As is Kenneth Branagh's awful Russian acc-yent.  Could they really have not found a Russian actor to play Sator? Not to mention poor Elizabeth Debicki basically just reprising her role from THE NIGHT MANAGER here.  Every time Nolan tries to make us care about the fate of her and her son, I thought, I just don't care at all. Also, if you marry a very rich old Russian dude, are you not somewhat suspicious about what he did, and what kind of man he was and is, to get all that money?  My sympathy is thin. Let's get back to cool action sequences!

Please save me from my luxury yacht - again!

Anyway, B-grade Bond plot and silly Russian accents aside, TENET is a superbly fun and twisty, technically marvellous ride. And for the first time since THE PRESTIGE, I actually CARED about the characters. Not the stupid woman and her pointless son, but the evident bromance between Neil and The Protagonist. Now there's a sequel I wish Nolan would break his no sequel rule for.

TENET has a running time of 130 minutes and is rated 12A in the UK and PG-13 in the USA. It is on release in the UK and wherever the pandemic is allowing cinemas to be open.