NYAD***** - BFI London Film Festival 2023 - Day 8

NYAD destroyed me in the best possible way. It made me laugh, it made me crush on Jodie Foster, it made me sit on the edge of my seat and my heart-beat race, it made me cry ugly happy tears. This is a movie that is just to well put together, so compelling, so engaging, full of such wonderful characters, that I did not want it to end. I am Team Nyad. The only slightly sad thing is that as much as I suspect Annette Bening is using this as her shot at an Oscar, the actor who steals every scene is Jodie Foster.

Bening stars as Diana Nyad, a real life champion swimmer whose dream was to swim a hundred miles non-stop from Cuba to Florida through shark-infested water. That dream eluded her in her thirties, but pissed off at turning sixty and being written off, she decides to make another attempt. The film makes it clear that Nyad is not short of ego and that kind of ruthless selfishness that makes winners win, but it also makes it clear that marathon open-water swimming is a team-sport.  Nyad, for all her stubborn egomania, is beloved. Most of all, by her multi-decade best friend and partner in crime Bonnie, played with swagger, charisma and great fun by Jodie Foster.  

As we follow Diana in her quest, we are always aware of the dangers and the stakes thanks to clear and crisp direction from Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin.  They beautifully weave in flashbacks and audio from the real, younger Nyad, explaining the physical and mental challenge of ocean swimming, and make us feel part of her ramshackle team of navigator, captain, shark and jellyfish experts.  The result is a film no less compelling than the directors' previous Oscar winning documentary film FREE SOLO. The idea of having documentarians fictionalise this story is inspired because it so beautifully takes the best of the both formats. I cannot recommend the resulting film highly enough, if for no other reason that to see Jodie Foster have more fun on screen than I have ever seen her have.  And just to see older women succeed, and female friendship and excellence celebrated. 

NYAD is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 121 minutes. It played Telluride, Toronto and London 2023.  It opens in the USA on October 20th in cinemas and on November 3rd on Netflix.

THE MENU***

My cousin announced she was getting married in Lisbon and as my husband and I hadn't been to Portugal for decades we thought we would make an extended holiday out of it, planning a road trip by picking every single Michelin one and two star restaurant along the way for dinner every night bar the wedding, starting in Faro and ending in Porto.  We are the greedy capitalist bastards, where the dishes become a blur, that have apparently sucked the joy out of cooking and life for celebrity chefs like the fictional Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes).

As a result, he lures a privileged few diners to his remote island restaurant for an epic tasting menu that will fully express his nihilism and totalitarian control of both staff and diners.  If you have the audacity to ask for mere bread, his maitre d, Elsa (Hong Shau) simply says "no".  Every course is exquisitely described and reveals yet more about the contempt in which the diners are held. And so we come to the inevitable horror-comedy conclusion.

For me, this is a superb social satire cum black comedy that takes the piss out of people like me. It comes as no surprise that it was written by two late night comedy writers - Will Tracy (Last Week Tonight With John Oliver) and Seth Reiss (Late Night With Seth Myers). There is a spareness to the comedy that is devastating. And the over-fussiness of the menu seems absolutely spot on.  Mark Mylod (Succession) directs with a cool deadpan tone and kudos to all involved in the production design.  The performances are uniformly good BUT Hong Chau is the stand-out in expressing the cult-like status of these chefs and the rigidity of their approach to actually enjoying food. It's kind of nuts to me that Anya Taylor-Joy has been nominated for a Golden Globe rather than Chau, who deserves awards not just for this but also her performance in THE WHALE. What a year she had in 2022.

However, while I do think the film is worth watching, well-made, and funny, I couldn't shake the feeling that it was a really good 60-minute episode of Black Mirror rather than a feature film: a high concept comedy that couldn't sustain its runtime. 

THE MENU has a running time of 107 minutes, is rated R, played Toronto 2022, and is available to stream.