Complex thoughts on AFTER THE HUNT***** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 6

Director Luca Guadagnino redeems himself after a run of mid films, not least QUEER and CHALLENGERS, with the adult, nuanced, tricksy and provocatively brilliant AFTER THE HUNT.  It’s based on a script by Nora Garrett and deals in shades of grey and ambiguity. It reminded me of the best of those ethical dilemma dramas that Woody Allen made in the mid to late 80s, not least because Guadagnino pays homage to Woody with the style of his credits.  It also reminded me of the iconic ALL ABOUT EVE in its depiction of a rather spiky marriage and the disruptive interloping of a young rival.

It is far from a perfect film. I felt that Andrew Garfield's performance went from depicting an obnoxious character to just being obnoxious. Whenever he's faced with a choice he always tends to go too big.  I also didn't feel the epilogue was necessary or additive. So why have I given the film five stars?  Because I have spent much of the hours following the screening discussing its choices and themes and debating what was actually happening. I love it when films provoke debate and withhold easy answers.  I also think that Nora Garrett has pulled off a rare feat in so evenly balancing the accusations that Gen Z and Gen X have of each other. 

The movie is essentially a four-hander battle of the wits between two generations.  In the older cohort we have Julia Roberts’ Alma, a Yale University Philosophy Professor who specialises in teaching virtue ethics.  Alma is cool and calm, perhaps too well-put together and unflappable. Her sense of style is assured and unique and easily aped.  Early on we discover that she has some kind of secret from her youth, and that she withholds a lot from her husband.  We feel that it must be traumatic and yet she seems to regard its artefacts with fondness. The deepest level of the film is concerned with uncovering her attitude to this event. 

In contemporary life, Alma seems to attract acolytes, and has a dangerously unboundaried relationship with her star students and her younger colleague Hank.  She somehow holds this all in a fragile equilibrium that the movie will shake. The fascinating and unresolved side-issue that we get no clear answers on is whether Alma has a problem with drug addiction or if she really is just treating excruciating pain. Did the drugs cause the ulcers or the other way around?  What we do know is that Alma is a career woman and deeply ambitious. She wants tenure. She has battled her way through the misogynistic world of academia and wants her just desserts.  

This may well be the role of Julia Roberts’ life, and certainly it’s her greatest role and performance of her later career.  She is on screen for almost every scene and she carries the film. Alma is enigmatic, infuriating, arrogant, makes terrible choices, and yet I found her to be real and sympathetic. 

Alma is married to a psychiatrist called Frederick, played by the always wonderful Michael Stuhlbarg.  It's a small role, even a cameo, but as in CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, in some ways it's Stuhlbarg's character that carries the emotional heart of the film. Frederick can be theatrical and immature and petulant. But he truly loves his wife and understands something profound about her childhood trauma that she cannot see. He also understands something profound about her relationships with Hank and Maggie.  He is flawed but wise.

In the younger cohort we have adjunct professor Hank who is also battling for tenure.  His students love him, he flirts with everyone, and he is an obnoxiously large character, played to the limits of largeness by Andrew Garfield. I suspect some of this is a necessary choice. His career will be ruined by a graduate student, Maggie, who accuses him of sexual assault right after he accuses her of plagiarism. We will not know if he did it, but we have to see his largeness, his physical presence, his lack of self-control, to feel that he might have done.  It's a slippery role. His first reaction is hurt and entitled and arrogant. That does not mean he did it, of course. 

And finally, in real opposition to Alma, we have The Bear's Ayo Edibiri as Maggie, her young PHD student, acolyte, and mentee.  She is a young black female philosopher at Yale, so one might imagine she is already on the back foot. But screenwriter Nora Garrett complicates Maggie by making her incredibly wealthy: the daughter of major donors.  Does Alma suspect she is a plagiarist? Is she? Yes she does dress like Alma.  Did she steal her mother's Bulgari ring to wear as a pendant, copying Alma? Is her accusation of trauma replicative of Alma's?  Is the accusation an attempt to discredit Hank? Is she dating a trans man for the optics?  It's a good performance from Edibiri, every now and then hinting at satisfaction at getting a certain reaction from Alma, but I felt that of the four actors she was the weakest. Perhaps because this is by far the largest and more complex dramatic role she has been given.

The wonder of this script and film is that both Maggie and Alma are right. Maggie is right to say that Alma has let her down, both in her reaction to the assault but more broadly.  Maggie is right that first-wave feminists did not adequately support the struggle of women of colour, and too often tried to get what they could within the existing patriarchal structure rather than challenging it. Alma's life has been one of not compromising her ambition by upsetting the apple-cart. Maggie wants to destroy it.  But Alma is also right in how she skewers Maggie's generation for its virtue-signalling progressive illiberalism: its need for the safety of a lukewarm bath when university in general, and a philosophy class in particular, should be all about debating uncomfortable subjects. 

Like I said, this is far from a perfect film. But it is an ambitious and provocative film. I love that it centres a middle-aged complex woman and is willing to confront and interrogate shifting inter-generational attitudes to difficult issues. The running time is long but I was not bored for a minute.  This is grown-up cinema at its best.

AFTER THE HUNT has a running time of 139 minutes and is rated R. It played Venice and London. It opens in the USA on October 10th.

QUEER** - BFI London Film Festival 2024 - Day 10

This is a long film for little plot or interiority.  It proceeds as follows:  ageing disheveled junkie called Lee hooks up with younger man called Eugene who may or may not actually be queer in 1950s Mexico.  They travel to a tropical jungle to take ayahuasca, have a trippy experience, then part. Decades later the older guy is apparently still in love with the boy. And even this overdoes the level of narrative propulsion which is basically nil. I never felt as though I had a handle on whether Lee was actually in love or in lust until the final five minutes of the film. I didn't feel invested in the relationship or the intricacies of whether Lee was a trick or a love interest for Eugene.  There's a limit to how far you can watch Daniel Craig drink tequila in a linen suit.

Still, there are a few redeeming features to this film.  The needle drops featuring Nirvana and Prince are anachronistic but effective.  There's a wonderfully unexpected and bonkers and against type cameo from Lesley Manville (Disclaimer).  Director Luca Guadagnino and his leads, Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey, are admirably brave in depicting gay sex. And as I said before, the final five minutes were genuinely moving. But boy there was a lot of self-indulgent, handsomely produced, but utterly dull chaff to wade through to get to the grain.

QUEER has a running time of 135 minutes. It played Venice, Toronto and London 2024. It goes on release in the USA on November 27th and in the UK on December 13th.

CHALLENGERS**

I am giving CHALLENGERS one star for Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' occasionally superb electronic soundtrack and a further star for cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom's cheeky tennis ball POV shot. Otherwise CHALLENGERS is a damp squib of an attempt at a sexy adult relationship drama, replete with hammy dialogue and superficial characaterisation.

All of which is a shame for the multi-talented star Zendaya, who was using the film to rebadge herself from being a Disney child star to a serious actor.  The weird thing is that I am not sure anyone apart from Zendaya thinks she's pigeonholed in that way.  A brave, vulnerable performance in Euphoria put paid to peppy, pretty Zendaya the teen star.  And Sam Levinson's MALCOLM & MARIE gave her a role in an actually fully fleshed out proper adult relationship, playing opposite John David Washington.  Now that was a toxic relationship shown in all its gnarly and credible glory!

So back to CHALLENGERS.  The person responsible for this ludicrously melodramatic film is debut feature screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes.  No-one in a real relationship has ever spoken in the way that his characters speak.  Watching this felt like watching a Bollywood movie or 1980s soap opera. As a result, the relationships aren't credible and the characters struggle to capture one's attention or sympathy.  To be sure, the film tries hard to camouflage its superficiality with tricksy camera shots and a non-linear narrative. But unpick the flash and there's nothing there.

Zendaya "stars" as junior Tennis ace Tashi whose career is cruelly ended with a brutal knee injury.  She vicariously lives her career by coaching her successful husband Art (Mike Faist) but they have little sexual chemistry.  He hits a bump in confidence and she enters him in a challenger tournament to get some court time, at which point they both run into Patrick (Josh O'Connor - MOTHERING SUNDAY) - a washed-up former peer and lover of Tashi and potentially Art.

The irony is that this is meant to be Zendaya's first headline film, and she has been the star of the red carpet promoting it.  But when you watch the film you realise that she's just the tennis ball that Art and Patrick are playing with. The film is ACTUALLY one about homosocial and potentially homosexual love. The climax thus has actually nothing to do with Tashi at all, but both players falling into each other over the tennis net. Poor Zendaya. She isn't even centred in her own film.

I am coming to the slow realisation that I do not like director Luca Guadagnino's films. But they appear to be critical darlings, certainly since he came to global recognition with CALL ME BY YOUR NAME. I just don't get the hype.

CHALLENGERS is rated R and has a 131 minute running time. It is on global release.

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME - Day 7 - BFI London Film Festival 2017

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME has two problems that I couldn’t get over. In fact, even more than that, I had a miserable and difficult time watching this film - even though it was one of my most anticipated and by one of the most exciting directors working today - Luca Guadagnino. The first problem is its length. I kid you not, but basically nothing happens in the first hour of this film. A pretty arrogant and self-indulgent middle-aged man called Oliver (Armie Hammer) arrives at an Italian villa owned by an academic (Michael Stuhlbarg) he’s working with. There seems to be an antipathy between Oliver and the professor’s teenage son, Elio and each of them seems to be flirting with girls about town. As we move into the second hour of the film it becomes clear that the antipathy is of the kind one might see in a playground where kids pretend not to really like the girl or boy they actually like. Oliver pulls back from taking the flirtation further but actually teases Elio by suggesting trips to town together and initiating physical intimacy. The messages are mixed but Oliver clearly knows that the relationship would be seen as wrong. He cites this as a reason to pull back. 

And this is where we get to the second problem with the film: the casting of Armie Hammer. For a start, he can’t match the acting ability of Michael Stuhlbarg (magnificent in his one big scene) or indeed newcomer Timothée Chalamet as Elio. When the father generously calls Oliver good, and the relationship meaningful, I just sat there wondering how he’d got that from the flaky, selfish  (and apart from one opening gambit to show his intelligence, not conspicuously smart or interesting) personality I’d seen on screen. A related issue is that while in real life Armie Hammer is 31, for me he looked a lot older than that. And that gave the relationship a pretty nasty feel to it - one of uneven power, grooming and exploitation. I feel that Guadagnino really messed up with his casting and should’ve gone for someone who actually looked like a mid-20s post-doc, and a kid who looked a more mature 17 then a 14/15. And I’m pretty amazed that audiences haven’t screamed louder about this. I wonder if the critical reaction would’ve been as warm if this had played out between an old man and a 15 year old looking girl. It left a very bitter taste in my mouth indeed. 

Meester Phil's points to other issues with the film although he didn't find age to be such an issue:  he found the pacing uneven - that the film somehow didn't cohere or feel credible to him. As a result he wasn't emotionally involved. 

So, for those looking for a truly beautiful gay love story, and one that isn’t shy about explicit sex either, then check out 120 BPM and leave this behind.

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME has a running time of 130 minutes and is rated R. The movie played Sundance, Berlin, Sydney, Melbourne, San Sebastian, Toronto, New York and London 2017. It opens in the UK on Oct 27th, in the USA on Nov 24th, in Sweden on Dec 1st, in Canada on Dec 8th, in Thailand on Dec 14th, in Australia on Dec 26th, in France on Jan 10th, in Brazil on Jan 18th, in Greece on Feb 8th and in Germany on March 1st.

A BIGGER SPLASH - BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Day Six

Director Luca Guadagnino (I AM LOVE) makes a triumphant return to our screens with his remake of Jacques Deray and Jean-Claude Carrière’s LA PISCINE.  One of my all-time favourite films is thus transformed into another superb erotically charged, wonderfully ambiguous thriller.

In this largely faithful remake, we are placed on a small Italian island and a rented villa where rockstar Marianne (Tilda Swinton) is recovering from a throat op that renders her almost unable to speak. She's evidently passionately and mutually in love with her boyfriend, a recovering addict photographer called Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts.) Their gloriously restful idyll is shattered when Marianne's ex Harry (Ralph Fiennes) turns up with his young daughter Penelope (Dakota Johnson) in tow.