SHOSHANA**** - BFI London Film Festival 2023 - Preview

Michael Winterbottom's SHOSHANA is a handsomely made, meticulously researched, admirably nuanced, film about politics and policing in 1930s Tel Aviv. At that time, Tel Aviv was a new modern town established by Zionists attempting to create a Jewish homeland in British-mandate Palestine.  The film (set in Italy) gives us a sense of how attractive life must have been there at the beginning: beautiful weather, stylish clothes, wonderful music, idealist politics and civilised debate. All of this is summed up in the real-life figure of Shoshana Borochuv (Irina Starshenbaum).  She is an intelligent, beautiful, Russian Jew who came to Israel with her iconic Zionist socialist father, and retains his idealism and mission.  She wants to create a peaceful, inclusive Israel without the violence she sees in the British occupation, and so becomes a member of Hagganah, who seek to work WITH the British for eventual independence.  This stands in contrast with the militant tactics of Irgun.

The film starts with violence, but somehow it feels like flashes and fleeting compared to the ratcheting intensity that comes later.  In the first twenty minutes we see the British summarily shoot an Arab and hang a Jew. The casual racism and anti-semitism of the British is summed up in the person of Geoffrey Morton, played by Harry Melling (THE PALE BLUE EYES).  He stands in contrast with Shoshana's lover, Wilkins (Douglas Booth), who speaks Hebrew and seems to genuinely love Shoshana and Tel Aviv.  But the message of the film is that idealism and love cannot survive politics.

As the film goes on, we see the stakes rise.  As Hitler's intentions toward the Jews become clear, the need for a Jewish homeland intensifies and the flow of immigrants increases.  Shoshana is now under threat for daring to be in love with a British police officer.  The Jewish policemen working with the British are targets too. Our lovers split up under the pressure of societal condemnation and police investigation. Wilkins - our sympathetic protagonist - is now witnessing brutal interrogations and taking part in brutal police raids on suspected Irgun members, notably their leader Avraham Stern (Aury Alby). By the depressing end of an immaculate film, we are asked if anyone's humanity can survive the brutal politics that created a still-contested state. When I saw the final scenes my heart broke.  

Winterbottom directs with patience and meticulous attention to detail. The "action" sequences of police raids are tense, and well choreographed.  The political debates clear and well-articulated. I had a real sense of time and place and what was at stake. And of the invidious demands put on fundamentally good people. My only criticism of the film is that while Starshenbaum and Booth give good individual performances, I never bought into their passionate love affair. They had no screen chemistry.

SHOSHANA has a running time of 119 minutes.  It played Toronto 2023. There are still tickets available for the BFI London Film Festival.

GREED - BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Day Eight

GREED is a witty satire undone by heavy-handed politics and a Chekhov's Lion last act twist that is so obvious and absurd it can only be described as a Marxist masturbatory fantasy. It's a movie whose politics were perfectly in keeping with the anti-capitalist Millenarian rabble up the road on Trafalgar Square, with a similar level of intelligence and nuance. I didn't learn anything about Phillip Green and his ilk that I - and anyone else who reads a newspaper - didn't already know. And I didn't need a lecture on fast fashion at the end of the film. I also didn't need a very reductive version of how fast fashion exploits workers.  Those seeking a more nuanced view of what those jobs are worth to Asian women, and how they are empowering themselves, should watch MADE IN BANGLADESH instead.

That said, if, and it's a big if, you can ignore the final fifteen minutes of this film and Winerbottom's unsubtle politics, there's a lot to like about GREED.  Steve Coogan is very good as a preening narcissist. To use a line from the film, "but you're playing yourself, so it doesn't need to be method." Shirley Henderson is absolutely class as the mogul's Irish mother, both as a young woman and as a grandma.  There's something very convincing about her tirade at the priggish public school headmaster patronising the Irish immigrant. And some of that immigrant drives ring true to my family's desire to make good. Ambition is different/fiercer/stronger when you've been locked out and kicked down. But it's David Mitchell as the biographer writing McCreadie's life story who gets all the best lines, and one wonders how much of that was written by Winterbottom or ad-libbed by Mitchell. I also really liked a sub-plot about McCreadie's feckless daughter filming a reality show, with real-life reality star Ollie Locke. There's some really great social commentary here. Shame it gets so obvious when it comes to its immigrant and anti-capitalist politics. 

GREED has a running time of 100 minutes.  It played Toronto and London 2019 and will be released in the UK on February 21st 2020.

THE WEDDING GUEST

The title might suggest mawkish rom-com, but indie British director Michael Winterbottom's latest film is an imperfect but still compelling road-trip thriller set in Pakistan and India. It stars Dev Patel (HOTEL MUMBAI) as a British psycho-killer paid to abduct the British-Pakistani bride at her wedding.  The twist is that she's in on the heist, not wanting to be married off to a suitable boy.  In fact, the whole thing has been concocted by her and her unsuitable Indian boyfriend, whose family handily run a jewellery store. The joy of a film like this should be in the double-crosses and power-plays, and while we get some of that, it's never cleanly enough delineated or carried out with enough conviction. Radhika Apte - so fantastic in the Netflix series SACRED GAMES - is once again the scene stealer in this film, playing the victim who's actually far more capable and wily than she might at first appear.  This is quite an achievement given that so much of her character is slippery - and her motivations unclear. In fact, I am quite sure that my version of what happens is squarely prejudiced by my view that no sensible woman could fall for someone as monstrously psychotic as Dev Patel's character. Sadly, his character is far less well drawn.  How is it that this boy who can't speak any Asian languages and doesn't seem that competent with a gun, is nonetheless very comfortable wheeling and dealing cars, fake IDs, and ruthlessly killing people?  It just doesn't really hang together, and I didn't buy Patel as an assassin. This isn't because he can't act - it's because the script doesn't give him enough.  

Other than the performances I really enjoyed the cinematography and production choice of being in the midst of real Indian locales, with real Indian extras. For example, the sheer authenticity of having an actual Rajasthani jeweller in his shop - or the mobile phone seller - adds up to a film that really takes the time to situate us in a reality despite the high concept plot.

THE WEDDING GUEST is rated R and has a running time of 96 minutes. The movie played Toronto 2019 and opened earlier this year in the USA. It is now on release in the UK in cinemas and on streaming services. 

SUNDANCE LONDON 2013 - Day 1 - THE LOOK OF LOVE

I find Steve Coogan fascinating but I suspect he finds himself even moreso. Why else does he persist in authoring projects where he plays refracted versions of himself? The chippy Northerner with unreal talent, parleying that into success with radical and daring work - super confident to the outside world and yet always eager to tell us just how well-read he is - commercially brilliant but with a controversial and unconventional private life. Charming, subversive and slippery. That's my take on Coogan. It would also be a good description of the character Coogan played in Michael Winterbottom's superb Tony Wilson biopic, 24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE. And it's also a good description of the legendary Soho strip club owner and property mogul, Paul Raymond - the subject of the latest Winterbottom-Coogan collaboration.

As the film shows us, Raymond had an uncanny ability to make money, pushing the boundaries of UK legislation in producing nude shows and magazines. Cleverly investing the money in property, he became Britain's richest man. But this is contrasted with his literally pathetic personal life, as signalled by the movie's title, THE LOOK OF LOVE. And here we get into the most slippery territory of all.

Despite running strip clubs and porno mags (a description he always, somewhat disingenuously, denied), it's not clear that Raymond disrespected or degraded women. He seems to carry no malice. Both of his long term partners, his wife Jean (Anna Friel) and his girlfriend Fiona (Tamsin Egerton), left him because they tired of what were up until then consensually open relationships. He never leers or gropes or openly exploits. There's something charmingly honest and open about him.

If anything, his sad fault seems to be a more general lack of empathy - a kind of emotional neutering. When his wife leaves with his son, he seems to simply turn off any remembrance of him. When his illegitimate son turns up, he's charming for one night, as one might charm a business acquaintance, but then shakes his hand and sends him on his way. He seems to love his wife and girlfriend, but not to the point of giving them the monogamy that they want.

And then there's the pivotal relation with his daughter Debbie (Imogen Poots), who longs for a career as a singer and is groomed to take over his empire. Paul seems to love her but in a completely unboundaried way that involves exercising no parental discipline. When he catches her doing coke with a marvellously bearded and sinister Chris Addison, he just tells her to do the best quality, and is seemingly blind to her inner despair.

In the end, what do we learn about Paul? That he was a charming, highly talented businessmen with very messy relationships. It was arguably better to be ignored by him than loved by him: his love involved a fair amount of delusion and denial. I felt bad for him. I wondered if he succeeded in impressing himself? Whether knowing Ringo Starr had designed his flat reassured him that he'd arrived. But this was a man so conscious of his own public image, so polished and repressed that one hardly scratches the surface with this film.

And what of the film? The production design, score, casting are all superb. I love the way Winterbottom's fluid handheld camera brings us right into the action and emotion, and the editing that beautifully juxtaposes a funeral with a wedding. But the movie is not as consistently high energy as 24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE or A COCK AND BULL STORY nor as formally daring as TRISHNA. Rather, it's a basically linear biopic that largely reduces a complex man to one tragic relationship. And sadly, when that relationship takes centre stage roughly half way through the film, it dramatically loses pace.

THE LOOK OF LOVE has a running time of 101 minutes. The movie played Sundance 2013 and will be released in the UK on April 26th, in Australia on April 27th and in the Netherlands on August 22nd.

London Film Fest 2012 - Day 9 - EVERYDAY

There were two French women next to me in the screening of Michael Winterbottom's new film, EVERYDAY. They talked throughout the film and would sometimes laugh at strangely inappropriate moments.  Normally, I would've asked them to be quiet, but as it turns out, eavesdropping on their banalities was about as much entertainment as I got in the 90 minutes runtime of the film.  Which is not to say that the film isn't well-made. It's just that nothing actually happens.

Shot over five years, the film is about a family living through the imprisonment of the father (John Simm). This involves the mother (Shirley Henderson) gathering up her four kids in rural Norfolk, and taking trains and buses to get to a variety of prisons in which the father is held. We see that both parents love their kids and each other.  Casting the kids from the same family also helps bring an air of intimacy and authenticity.  And by shooting over the prolonged period, we get a real sense of changing seasons and passing years.  I liked the family and I sympathised with them.  The problem is that basically nothing happens.  The dad comes out on day release, then parole, then for good.  The family are happy to see him come home. The End. There's no grim explanation of what he did, or of his chances of re-offending. No social context at all. And because the family is, by and large, loving and warm, no drama to speak of.

The result is that EVERYDAY may not be the worst film I've ever watched, but it's certainly one of the dullest. Shame on writers, Michael Winterbottom and Laurence Coriot (HUNKY DORY) for wasting such a good cast and a terrific score from Michael Nyman. 

EVERYDAY played Telluride, Toronto and London 2012 and will be broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 10 - TRISHNA

Freida Pinto stars as Trishna in Michael Winterbottom's loose
adaptation of Hardy's Tess of the Durbevilles.

TRISHNA is a fascinating, intelligent film about a relationship turned sour on the back of withheld secrets and unequal material power, centred on Freida Pinto's first performance of real merit. 

She plays a poor, naive village girl called Trishna - who in her society is simply a commodity to earn to support her family, and conditioned to obey. A chance meeting with a rich young man, Jay (Riz Ahmed, FOUR LIONS), prises her away from her family and strict values. They approximate the life of two lovers in the freeing atmosphere of big city Mumbai. Given the differences in their social status, it is a measure of Jay's belief that he loves Trishna, that he's willing to broach the subject of marriage, but the revelation of secrets and the return to a cloying small-town hotel serve to subtly alter their relationship, step by step, into one of master-servant, and sexual exploitation, with alarming results. 

What I loved about the film was how it was able to show the drastically increasing imbalance of power in the relationship with a few elegant, economical scenes. There is very little straightforwardly scripted dialogue. Characters' actions, positions, tell us everything. Jay is rarely shown other than supine on a chair or bed, waiting for his dinner to be served to him. Trishna seems to turn within herself, visibly shrinking as the film progresses, trapped in her material dependence on Jay and her shame at her sexual history. I also loved how writer-director Michael Winterbottom didn't feel the need to show Trishna's accusers as a gaggle of villagers or hotel workers scandalised by her situation. Her emotional distress, her shame, her sense of betrayal and entrapment, is all in her own mind, and expressed by Freida Pinto in a quiet, sensitive performance. I also loved Winterbottom's willingness to simply observe everyday Indian life - a side of India rarely shown in glitzy Bollywood movies. DP Michael Zyskind's (28 DAYS LATER) evocative images of Rajasthan and Mumbai show what can be achieved with high quality DV (in sharp contrast to yesterday's MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE).

That said, there are some small quibbles. In the Mumbai section, I'm not sure what the cameos of director Anurag Kashyap and actress Kalki Koechlin really add. Also, I'm not sure this film should be marketed as an adaptation of Hardy's "Tess of the Durbervilles". I spent the whole film being teased into believing that a Hardy character or situation was being introduced only to realise that Winterbottom wasn't going to take the film in that direction. His adaptation contains clever elisions and contemporarises the story intelligently. But what you end up with is a quite different beast - particularly in the character of Tess/Trishna. I would suggest that by far the best way to enjoy and appreciate this film is, then, to take it on its own terms.

TRISHNA played Toronto and London 2011.

THE KILLER INSIDE ME - They fuck you up, your mum and dad Part Two

Lou Ford is a courteous, softly spoken cop in 1950s Texas. He has a sweetheart called Amy who dotes on him: the townsfolk think he's a stand-up guy. But when he was a kid, Lou's housekeeper got off on his spanking her. And this poor little fucked up kid grew up into the kind of guy who can only express love through violence. Lou is something of an enigma - he is alienated from himself - from real emotional engagement with others - and thus from the viewer. Far more intriguing, from a psychological standpoint, are the two women - his girlfriend and his hooker-mistress - who love him. It's mysterious that they love such an emotionally avoidant man - let alone that they continue to do so despite suffering at his hands. Maybe they too were fucked up by their parents? Maybe it's just another case of people being attracted to people whose pathologies enable their own.

Whatever the answer, this is not the kind of film that deals in straightforward answers. Rather, Michael Winterbottom gives us a more or less faithful adaptation of the celebrated pulp novel from Jim Thompson - its triumphs and failures in tact. The film works best as a sinister mood piece, anchored by the superb central performance of Casey Affleck and embedded in superlative production design. I was genuinely surprised that actresses known best for fluffy rom-coms - Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson - would want to appear in such a film, and yet more surprised to see how well they acted in the demanding supporting roles as Lou's mistress and girlfriend respectively. They really hold their own against a supporting cast of the calibre of Ned Beatty and Elias Koteas. This movie is worth watching for the quality of the performances and the cinematography alone.

Nonetheless, this is a flawed film. Yes, there's a crime caper that propels the plot, and some faint dramatic tension between the unions, big business, and a cover up, but this movie is basically a psycho-drama. The fault of the piece lies in the fact that, as psycho-drama, it always holds the viewer at a distance from the motivations of the three key characters. This makes for a frustrating film - a teasing provocation.

One final word about the violence in the movie. THE KILLER INSIDE ME got a lot of press coverage in the UK on account of its graphic depiction of violence against women. Moreover, the movie was accused of misogyny on the grounds that the women in the movie apparently get off on being victimised. To my mind, THE KILLER INSIDE ME is not at the extremes of graphic violence in cinema. Viewers used to the cinema of Haneke or Noe will have seen far worse. Moreover, there is no sense in which this film is "torture porn". Winterbottom's intentions are manifestly earnest. I also find accusations of misogyny misplaced. Yes, the fact that these women go back for more is disturbing. But surely the movie/book are saying something about a particular psychopathology - and in this case it happens to involve the man as sadist and women as masochists. But there is no general point to be made about the role of men and women in such relationships. After all, just look at the dependent relationship between Johnny Papas and Lou.

Additional tags: Mags Arnold, Melissa Parmenter, Tom Bower, Simon Baker, Liam Aiken, Jay R Ferguson, Jim Thompson

THE KILLER INSIDE ME played Sundance and Berlin 2010 and is currently on release in the UK, USA and Denmark. It opens next weekend in South Korea. It opens in August in Belgium and France; in September in Switzerland, Greece and Taiwan; in Finland and the Netherlands in October.

London Film Festival Day 12 - GENOVA

Michael Winterbottom has an impressive track record as a director, spanning genres from hyper-real reportage in A MIGHTY HEART to the witty, post-modern A COCK AND BULL STORY. But, 24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE aside, I've always been a bit frustrated by Winterbottom's movies. They seem to get four-fifths of the way there, in terms of performance, integrity and style, but miss that final energy that grips you and makes you want to watch a movie again.

Winterbottom's latest movie, GENOVA, is another case in point. It's beautifully filmed on location in Genoa. It has a strong cast, led by Catherine Keener and Colin Firth. It has an earnest subject and Winterbottom treats it with restraint and respect. But the movie never really goes anywhere. It dangles promising ideas in front of us but leaves us hanging. In short, it's a ninety minute tease.

As the movie opens we see a mother (Hope Davis) and her two young daughters driving on a highway. The car crashes and the mother dies. We then move to a snowy funeral. The father (Colin Firth) is taking his two daughters to Genoa for a year. He'll teach in a university, they'll go to school, and the "change will do them good". Arriving in Genoa they are met by an old college chum (Catherine Keener) who clearly has a thing for the father.

We seem to be in the same sort of territory as Nic Roeg's classic film about grief in Italy - DON'T LOOK NOW. The narrow, dark streets of Genoa are as menacing and bewildering as the Venetian canals. Winterbottom even hints that we'll be dealing with dark supernatural material. The younger daughter finds a photo of the landlord's dead wife in the flat and the glass mysteriously cracks. And then she starts seeing and hearing her dead mother. The feeling of menace builds towards a crescendo but without any final pay-off. Maybe Winterbottom has no interest in pursuing genre film and wants to go for something more real - like QUIET CHAOS - but if so, why introduce those elements in the first place?

GENOVA played Cannes, Toronto and London 2008.

A MIGHTY HEART - good as far as it goes

A MIGHTY HEART is based on Mariane Pearl's memoirs about the kidnapping and murder of her husband, American journalist Daniel Pearl, in Pakistan in 2002. Director Michael Winterbottom and DP Marcel Zyskind perfectly capture the chaos of Karachi on hand-held DV. Winterbottom also gives Jolie a chance to show off her acting skills for the first time since GIRL, INTERRUPTED. However, the director chooses not to examine the causes and motivations of the terrorists and only hints at the complex politics of US-Pakistani relations. What we are left with then, is simply a police procedural, and one is which we already know the tragic outcome at that. Moreover, aside from Jolie and Irrfan Khan in a supporting role, I thought the supporting cast was pretty weak.

A MIGHTY HEART played Cannes 2007 and was released in the USA, Germany, Portugal, Denmark, Spain, Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Slovakia earlier in the year. It opens in the UK today. It opens in Mexico on September 28th, in Singapore, Norway, Australia, Turkey, Brazil, Estonia, Sweden in October. It opens in Italy and Japan in November.

A COCK AND BULL STORY - Nobody likes a smarty-pants

A COCK AND BULL STORY is an odd sort of film. Far cleverer than the average cinematic fare, and in parts, hysterically funny. And yet you leave the cinema not entirely sure what you have been witness to....

The movie is an attempt to bring the supposedly unfilmable novel, "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy" to life. The novel was written by a village priest, Lawrence Sterne, in the eighteenth century and - remarkably for the time - played fast and loose with narrative structure, as well as dealing with bawdy subject matter. To quote the film, Tristram Shandy was a post-modern book written years before there was anything modern to be "post" about. The novel tells the story of Tristram's parents and uncle, various escapades encountered by each. So much happens, so baggy and chaotic is life, that it is only in the final volume that Tristram finally gets round to being born! In bringing the novel to the screen, the director, Michael Winterbottom, has opted against a straightforward adaptation. Rather he has made a film about making a film about Tristram Shandy. Winterbottom argues that this is truer to the spirit of the novel, while getting over the tricky fact that in a novel of 500 pages, so little happens that you can barely get a half-hour script out of it.

The film-within-a-film structure is a nice idea, and we get some very funny scenes parodying actors' over-weening egos and libidos, but this stuff was done with more wit in David Mamet's superb flick STATE AND MAIN. Moreover, much of the humour depends on the audience knowing who the lead actor, Steve Coogan, is. I imagine the jokes at Coogan's expense will be utterly lost on an international audience. And once again, hasn't this stuff been done better in Ricky Gervais' EXTRAS?

But all this would be excused if the film were genuinely, laugh-out-loud funny. After all, when you've hired the likes of Stephen Fry, Shirley Henderson, Rob Brydon, Dylan Moran and Steve Coogan, expectations are high. The film is very, very patchy. There are sequences that sort of meander and exist and seem to serve no purpose at all. And just when you just about give up on the thing, there is flash of side-splitting, pant-wetting funniness. Seriously, I left the cinema knowing I had a cult classic on my hands. It's all there - basically boring long-winded Britflick interspersed with one-liners so funny, so instantly memorable that the audience was already quoting it on the way out of the cinema. This film is a WITHNAIL AND I for the new millenium, and will no doubt be quoted ad nauseam in student unions for the next fifty years.

A COCK AND BULL STORY was shown at the London Film Festival in November 2005, but goes on release in the UK on the 20th January 2006. The film goes on limited release in the US on the 27th January. There are no scheduled European release dates.

NINE SONGS - a failed but noble experiment

NINE SONGS is a bold experiment in cinema by acclaimed and path-finding director, Michael Winterbottom. Filmed on hi-def video, the movie follows the relationship between two characters from first meeting to break-up, punctuated by nine songs at concerts that they attend. The twist is that the evolution of the relationship is expressed through the couple's sexual experiences. These are depicted with a breath-taking intimacy that is, despite the explicit content, not pornographic (to my mind at least.) Having said that, I found NINE SONGS to be a movie that I admired rather than enjoyed. Without the conventional narrative devices I found it hard to empathise much with the characters. After a while the explicit sex became rather tedious as the movie descended into another round of cool music, drug-taking, sex, limited dialogue. It just seems to me that if you want to make a point about how relationships evolve and make it perceptive and interesting, you probably need more than a bit of (largely unimaginative) sex on screen. It will be interesting to see whether, in ten years time, this movie is remembered for the explicit sex or the cool footage of new bands like Franz Ferdinand.

NINE SONGS premiered at Cannes 2004 and goes on limited release in the UK today. It goes on release in Austria in May 2005 and in the US in July 2005.