BABYGIRL**

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CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME?

CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME? is a lovely film about a rather unique story that works essentially as a two hander between its award-winning stars, Melissa McCarthy and the ever-glorious Richard E Grant.  McCarthy plays one-time successful biographer Lee Israel, who has fallen out of fashion and into alcoholism and squalor.  One day she chances on a genuine letter from Fanny Brice of FUNNY GIRL fame, and through small steps begins to make money by forging letters from famous writers with just the right amount of wit and salaciousness to fetch the very highest prices.  To do this didn't just need a loose grasp of ethics and a facility with vintage typewriters but genuine literary taste and skill. One of the saddest moments of the film is when Lee realises that this is her most popular work in years, and it's not even in her voice. Of course, soon the collectors start to realise that her work is fake - she's "finding" too many letters, and some question whether Noel Coward would really have been so overt about his homosexual advances.  The FBI contact her dealers, and she has to get her fellow alcoholic, the roguish, charming Jack Hock to fence the letters for her, making him an accomplice.

What I love about this film is the genuine chemistry between McCarthy and Grant as Israel and Hock and the contrast between her misanthropy and his boyish charm and glee.  Underneath both there's a story of expectations dashed and a live that hasn't lived up to their hopes - and in Hock's case in particular the sadness over fading looks, the inability to talk one's way out of travel. Both are victims of a faster, prettier world.  And while aware that their schemes are wrong, don't really see the harm in it. It feels like a schoolyard jape, just like the prank calls they make.  The final scene between the two has a quiet pathos - self-awareness, of mortality, crime, art.  The reality of what they did and are. It's desperately moving.

I also love the beautiful recreation of early 90s New York and the milieu of those bookshops that deal in first editions and collectibles. There's a certain look and indeed smell to those stores (I frequent them!) and this film somehow just captures that particularity and person. 

Finally, I admire the light touch, but never evasiveness, with which screenwriter Nicole Holofcener and director Marielle Heller treat Hock's dying of AIDS, and indeed both characters' homosexuality. The result is delicate, elegant, and more moving for it. 

CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME has a running time of 106 minutes and is rated R. The film played Telluride, Toronto and London 2018. It was released last year in the USA and is currently on release in the UK.

45 YEARS

Andrew Haigh (WEEKEND) returns to our screens with another deeply affecting, beautifully directed character drama.  45 YEARS stars Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay as an apparently happily married couple approaching their 45th wedding anniversary when a letter is delivered reporting the discovery of the frozen body of the husband's former girlfriend, Katya.  Although she died before the couple even met, his references to "my Katya", the fact that they pretended to be married, the way it has affected him, all deeply affect his wife.  The husband disappears into the attic to look at old letters and play old records and even smell old perfume. And the formerly trusting, loving wife becomes distrustful and insecure - checking up on him, changing from a perfectly understanding reasonable woman into someone unwilling to even hear the other woman's name.  

What I love about the script is that you feel sympathy with both characters even as they do things that are unsympathetic or self-involved. These are two real people, with all their faults and strengths, facing up to emotions long forgotten and long suppressed.  As we see the wife become sneaky and cold, her position is utterly understandable. As she demands a public show of loyalty at their anniversary party, and we see her husband almost child-like in his desire to please her, we still understand both sides.  The tragedy is shared and irrevocable, as summed up in the most haunting close up on Rampling's face that closes the film.

This is film-making at its most raw and elegant - the melancholy blue-gray misty Norfolk landscape a perfect backdrop for the melancholy regret.  It's a film that contains no grand emotional break-downs but is absolutely paralysing in its depiction of mis-trust.  Andrew Haigh has established himself as one of the most assured directors of actors and I can't wait to see what he does next.

45 YEARS has a running time of 95 minutes and is rated  15 for strong language and sex. The movie played Berlin 2015 where Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay won the Silver Bear.  It opened earlier this year in Estonia and is currently on release in the UK, Ireland and Slovenia. It opens in Germany on September 10th, in Denmark on October 8th, in France on November 4th, in Sweden on December 4th and in Greece on December 10th.