BACK TO BLACK****

Marisa Abella (Industry) delivers a stunning central performance as Amy Winehouse in this new biopic of the singer. She captures Amy's caustic wit, her physical mannerisms, and most impressively, her spoken and singing voice.  Director Sam Taylor-Wood (NOWHERE BOY) tackles the audience's apprehension head on in an opening scene showing Winehouse's Jewish parental family singing together. Abela freestyles Fly Me To The Moon and the audience relaxes, safe in the knowledge that Abela's Amy is spot on. Her Amy is straightforward to the point of rudeness, full of energy and sheer talent. But also troubled way before she meets her much vilified husband Blake Fielder-Civil. She is already bulimic and alcohol dependent with a self-acknowledged streak of self-sabotage, particularly when it comes to men. This is something that Matt Greenhalgh's script, using her own lyrics, explores from the first scenes.

About forty minutes into the film, Amy's first album has been a breakout success but she has been told to restyle herself for America. This plays into all of the insecurities that have fed into her self-abuse. And at that moment we meet Jack O'Connell (UNBROKEN) as Blake Fielder-Civil. He is charming and fun and has a deep knowledge of music over which he and Amy can bond. It's another powerhouse performance. There's an immediate spark and we are swept up in young, heedless romance.  According to this version of the story, it was a genuine love affair on both sides at first, and while he was already using Class A drugs she stuck "only" to alcohol and weed. It's only when they reunite after a break-up that he was motivated more by her fame and money and ability to fund his smack habit.  Once inside prison, he cleans up and realises what's obvious to the rest of us - that this is a desperately toxic codependent relationship with competitive self-harm. He wants to break free. Fair enough. But it breaks Amy in the process.

Needless to say, this is a more nuanced and sympathetic portrait of Fielder-Civil than we got from contemporary news reports, or from Asif Kapadia's superb 2015 documentary AMY. My only criticism of Kapadia is that he often creates pantomime villains in his films - whether Alain Prost in SENNA or Fielder-Civil and Mitch Winehouse in AMY.  Greenhalgh and Taylor-Wood may have swung the pendulum back too far in BACK TO BLACK but I really appreciate the attempt to treat humans as flawed real people. And we have to remember that Fielder-Civil was also a young man and an addict at the time. 

The whitewashing of Mitch Winehouse, played by the innately sympathetic Eddie Marsan, is probably going to be even more controversial.  In this film, he is portrayed as an indulgent father who is totally out of his depth when it comes to Amy's addictions. This kind of tracks with Amy's mother saying, in Kapadia's documentary, that when Amy told them about her bulimia they just kind of ignored it and hoped it would pass. We don't see the avaricious exploitative father of Kapadia's doc at all.

But let's not be fooled into thinking this film is a whitewashing of the brutality of addiction and bulimia.  Amy's descent into full blown class A drug addiction is shown explicitly, but never exploitatively. We see her ability to go clean for periods, but that she is, in the scripts words, always on edge, so that it doesn't take much to push her over. In this film, it's always heartbreak that does it - whether Fielder-Civil leaving her, or her inability to get pregnant and have the stable family life she craved.  The narrative is convincing, and Abela's central performance is heartbreaking.  I love that we spent so much time with Amy and her beloved Nan (Leslie Manville) and saw that Amy's heart was rooted in jazz. I felt I had an understanding of her deep familial musical heritage that I didn't get from Kapadia's doc.  And this is, I think, one of the most important things that we need to know about her.

BACK TO BLACK is rated R and has a running time of 122 minutes. It went on release in the UK today and goes on release in the USA on May 17th.

FERRARI* - BFI London Film Festival 2023 - Day 5

Michael Mann (HEAT, THE INSIDER) returns to our screens with an execrable biopic of the iconic Enzo Ferrari.  It is a film that pays no respect to history, cultural specificity or the ethics of what one chooses to show on-screen of real-life horrific crashes.

In Mann's version of Ferrari's story, as written by Troy Kennedy Martin (THE ITALIAN JOB!) we focus on the year 1957. Mann and Kennedy choose to make this a make or break year for the company, whose road car sales are insufficient to subsidise the racing.  The notoriously paranoid, selfish, dictatorial Enzo Ferrari needs to bring in outside financing and give up control in order to compete with the advances being made in England and Germany. Films need stakes, so Mann/Martin argue that Ferrari must win the Mille Miglia road-race to attract investors. Yeah I guess.... But Ferrari was constantly in trouble and flirting with investors. 

Similarly, while Enzo may have transferred some assets to his wife's name for tax and political reasons, I cannot imagine he was walking around like a proto-feminist claiming they built the company together, and the book does NOT suggest that she was the business strategist behind the throne. This all sounds like modern retconning to give Penelope Cruz something to do other than scream hysterically.  Enzo WAS in fact a notorious womaniser and misogynist. The film only hints at how horrific he was. 

The truth of the film lies in how devastated both parents were at the death of Ferrari's only legitimate son Dino, and how Enzo kept the existence of his illegitimate son secret from his wife for many years.  It is not known how Laura finally learned about Enzo's mistress Lina Lardi, or of the existence of Piero, but it is true that Piero was only legitimised after Laura died. This was not, as the film implies, because of some cash-for-bungs bribe that Laura paid Enzo, but because of the constraints of the Italian legal system.

Now to move from history to drama. Is the film emotionally involving? No. Because the acting is terrible. Adam Driver is miscast as Ferrari. He is way too young. The Commendatore was 59 in 1957.  Driver is not yet 40.  He looks not yet 40 with a fake belly and a bad hair dye job. He looks nothing like Enzo - fine - Enzo has a very specific face. But he doesn't move or walk or talk like a c60 year old provincial Italian. Would it have killed them to either a) cast an Italian or b) someone who could do a passable Italian accent?

But this problem of bad acting is way worse when we consider Shailene Woodley's attempt at Lina Lardi.  Her accent is so appalling it isn't even Italian-adjacent. I was reminded of Jodie Comer's note perfect accent-work in THE BIKERIDERS and left with the cruel realisation that Woodley is simply a YA film actress over-promoted and best-forgotten.

Finally, we have Penelope Cruz - the only decent performance in the film but one that is for sure Spanish not Italian, and so at odds with the real woman as to be laughable. It's as if there is nothing of merit or interest in Laura's betrayal and pain unless she's a porto-modern boss bitch.

All of this I could have forgiven had the racing been good. And to be fair, most of the footage of the testing at Monza, and the road racing in the Mille Miglia is really well done with great recreations of the historic vehicles rebuilt with the help of the Ferrari factory. Kudos to Mann and cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt (MANK) for that. My only issue here is the very distinct choice Michael Mann has made to show very graphic crash footage, not just of Castelotti but also of Guidizzolo.  As one of the few audience members who knew exactly what was coming, I was in fear once I saw the Monza crash.  It's strange to say but in the history of motorsport films we have rarely if ever seen a frame by frame replay of an horrific crash, especially one involving civilians. Think of FORD VS FERRARI where Christian Bale simply disappears over a hill. Or even the way in which Asif Kapadia handles the crash in SENNA. But Mann shows no such finesse here. He does not leave anything to our imaginations. I found it pretty exploitative. I might have forgiven the choice, or understood it better, in a better film. But in such a trashy, melodramatic, soapy film, it felt cheap, and frankly disgusting.

FERRARI has a running time of 130 minutes. It played Venice and the BFI London Film Festival 2023. It will be released on December 25th in the USA and December 26th in the UK.

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.

UNBROKEN

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

One of the less edifying revelations of the Sony hack was producer Scott Rudin's contempt for Angelina Jolie's talent as a film-maker and his bile at her leave of absence from his CLEOPATRA project to make UNBROKEN. So I approached this World War Two biopic with some interest and maybe some scepticism. What I am happy to say is that UNBROKEN is a handsomely made film about a true wartime hero, that while conventional in its approach, has so much authentic concern with the human condition that it left me with real tears, as opposed to some of those more mawkish and manipulative films that want to make you cry but don't. (THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING, I'm looking at you here.)