SUNDOWN***** - BFI London Film Festival 2021 - Day 5

Michel Franco's SUNDOWN is a stunning taut character study that takes you from extreme discomfort to a kind of blissful understanding in its short 85 minute running time. It features a typically memorable and nuanced performance from Tim Roth as an extremely wealthy man called Neil who seemingly on a whim decides to turn his back on his family.  As the film opens, we see the family luxuriating in a Mexican resort that could come straight out of HBO's White Lotus. As Neil wryly says to Colin, "why do have to be such an arsehole?"  Their existence is lubricated by endless drinks and low-level bickering. We are unclear as to Neil's relationship with Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg) but he seems distant.  

The key plot point happens half an hour in when the family is called home to deal with the death of Alice's mother, and Neil pretends he's left his passport at the hotel and doesn't board the flight. He checks into a random downtown hotel and rather sleepily falls into a rhythm of drinking at the beach by day and sleeping with a local girl by night. He seems happy in this relationship and I rather admired his ability to slip into the local scene. But the audience's frustration mounts with each lie to Alice and our discomfort rises with the momentary flashes of violence.

As the film moves into its final act, Franco and Roth masterfully manipulate our feelings. It's testament to Roth's easy-going charm that even at his most inexplicable, we still hang in there with Neil, hoping to understand. Credit to to Henry Goodman (TAKING WOODSTOCK) as Richard, because his faith in Neil keeps us engaged. The resulting film is slippery and strange and unforgettable.

SUNDOWN has a running time of 83 minutes. It played Venice, Toronto and London 2021. 

REHANA***** - BFI London Film Festival 2021 - Day 5

Bangladeshi writer-director Abdullah Mihammad Saad (LIVE FROM DHAKA) returns to our screens with a brutal drama about a woman attempting to bring a sexual predator to justice.  That woman is Rehana, a Medical professor in contemporary Dhaka. In the opening scenes we learn that she is a deeply stressed out single mother who does not suffer fools gladly. Rather than let cheating students slide, she hauls them out of class, living her life by an austere set of personal rules. These rules are challenged when Rehana witnesses student Annie leaving the office of Professor Arefin in some distress. It becomes clear that Annie has been assaulted, but despite Rehana's pleas, she won't report him to the authorities. After all, in a misogynistic society, won't the authorities blame Annie for going to Arefin's office alone? And what about her father who sacrificed everything to get her into medical school?  This leads us to the provocative second half of the film where Rehana decides to take matters into her own hands and report the rape with herself as the victim and to take the consequences of that - including a brutal campaign to get her sacked and alienating her family.  It's a plot point that some might find controversial given the danger of making false rape allegations appear normal, when they are in fact very rare indeed, but I feel the film fully explores those consequences. 

REHANA is, then, a powerful and rightly tough watch.  The lead actress, Azeri Haque Badhon is absolutely stunning in her portrait of a good woman driven to extremes by a corrupt system. She makes questionable choices but it's to Badhon's credit that we feel empathy for them. I also absolutely loved the girl playing Rehana's daughter Emu, and the symmetry in their behaviour is chilling, even down to Rehana calling her Mummy and Emu calling Rehana Mamma. In a brutal final scene, Emu is protesting against her mother's actions and we see Rehana become as violent as the protestors who earlier blocked her exit.  We see the full emotional price of Rehana's earnest ideals.

REHANA has a running time of 107 minutes. The film is the first from Bangladesh to be selected for the official competition at Cannes 2021 and it also played Busan and the BFI London Film Festival.

THE HAND OF GOD**** - BFI London Film Festival 2021 - Day 4

 

Paolo Sorrentino’s THE HAND OF GOD begins as a kind of group portrait of working class Neapolitans in the 1980s.  It has the feel of a menagerie of grotesques, and Sorrentino feels no politically correct restriction on mocking the fat, the disabled, the absurdly made-up or the mentally ill. This might sound distasteful and yet, and yet, over that hour we come to feel a kind of familial familiarity with these everyday oddballs, delighting in their joy when Maradona signs for Napoli and enjoying their practical jokes. We even come to admire and love the genuinely loving mother and father of the family, delighting in the depiction of an ordinary happy marriage. 

Observing all of this loveable craziness is the younger son of the family, Fabie, whose quiet gaze is pre-directorial. For this is the third film in two days that I've watched where a director tells a fictionalised version of their childhood.  And to be sure, Sorrentino is not going to spend the second hour of this film in rather trivial but engrossing depictions of life in 1980s Napoli. Instead, major life events occur that force Fabie into being the protagonist rather than voyeur of his own life, and of this film.

I absolutely adored this movie. It is by turns hilarious and tragic and strange and whimsical. I merely dock it a star for having had an obvious ending point (for me) in a cathartic playground scene, but lingers for thirty minutes longer. 

THE HAND OF GOD has a running time of 130 minutes and played Venice 2021. It wil be released on Netflix on December 15th.

LAST NIGHT IN SOHO**** - BFI London Film Festival 2021 - Day 4

Edgar Wright (BABY DRIVER) returns to our screens with a brilliant thriller that's more murder mystery than horror film.  It stars Thomasin McKenzie (JOJO RABBIT) as a young fashion student called Eloise who is obsessed with all things 1960s thanks to her awesome grandma (the iconic Rita Tushingham). The key plot device is that Eloise can, M Night Shyamalan style, see dead people, and soon becomes obsessed with the glamorous Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy - EMMA) who rented Eloise's bedsit decades earlier.  As Eloise lives through Sandie she experiences the exhilaration of dancing in the Cafe de Paris and being seduced by Matt Smith's charming music manager, Jack. But soon the night-time dreams become nightmares as we learn that Jack is pimping Sandie out, and watch Sandie transform from free-spirited confident young woman to a weary, angry woman who doesn't believe she's worth saving. This allows for one of the most powerfully emotional scenes in the film, set-up by many previous mirror shots where Eloise and Sandie can almost interact with each other: Eloise tries to punch through a mirror to get Sandie to look at herself/Eloise and confirm her worth.

To say more would be to spoil the plot twists carefully laid down by screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns (PENNY DREADFUL) and the marketing department. What I will say is that Wilson-Cairns script is delightfully authentic in its depiction of mean girl verbal violence and more profoundly of sexual exploitation. And as with all Edgar Wright films, the use of music is exceptional. I also loved the design team's recreation of a seedy Soho that has all but disappeared now, filtered through DP Chung-Hoon Chung (THE HANDMAIDEN)'s neon lights and rain splashed streets. But most of all, this was just a really enjoyable film that genuinely surprised me - both with its satisfying plot twist AND with its thought-provoking depiction of a bright young girl's slide into prostitution.

I'm only docking it a star because of Thomasin McKenzie's inconsistent and distracting West Country accent.

LAST NIGHT IN SOHO is rated R and has a running time of 114 minutes. The movie played Venice, Toronto and the BFI London Film Festival and will be released in the UK and the USA on October 29th. 

SPOILERS BELOW: This film has a REALLY clever marketing and misdirection plan. The trailer and media coverage lead us to believe it's a horror film rather than a murder mystery because Matt Smith's Jack is depicted as the bad guy. We go into the film thinking that the real mystery is whether Eloise will go mad and whether anyone will believe her when she tells them Jack killed Sandie.  My first inkling that this was not the game was when Sam Claflin turned up as a vice squad officer. Why hadn't he been in any of the media coverage or on the red carpet. Why hadn't I spotted him in the IMDB credits? Well obviously because we need to believe that Terence Stamp is the older version of Jack for the misdirect to work. And I checked. Even on the film's end credits, Sam is just listed as playing Punter number 5. Random side-note - I've long thought Claflin would make a great Bond and in his suit and slightly sixties fuller hair I was confirmed in this belief.

THE WOLF SUIT*** - BFI London Film Festival 2021 - Day 3

Debut documentary feature director Sam Firth has made a deceptively simply but emotional fraught documentary about her own parents' marital breakdown and the impact that had on her own ability to be in a successful relationship. She begins by exploring archival material from her childhood and then by interrogating her own memories and that of her parents. They are game enough, even attempting a studio where Firth recreates scenes from her childhood, including painful memories of verbal and physical abuse. What's fascinating but unsurprising is how the three participants have very different perspectives on what happens. In particular it's fascinating seeing the dad parse hitting the mum as a slap or not a punch or as an act of aggression versus slapping a hysterical woman. It's also really hard to watch the daughter take in new information that contradicts long-held "memories" and reconcile the parents she loves now with the people they were then. This is really superb documentary film-making, even if at times I felt deeply voyeuristic watching what is in effect somebody else's therapy.

THE WOLF SUIT has a running time of 74 minutes. It is playing at the BFI London Film Festival 2021 and does not yet have a commercial release date. 

THE SOUVENIR II***** - BFI London Film Festival Day 3

Julie is grieving the death of her charismatic, controlling, deceitful boyfriend Anthony. She doesn't know if she misses who he was or just the companionship and intimacy of love. She expresses her grief in her student film, a memorial, or Souvenir, if you will.  And in making the film, she rediscovers her sense of fun and takes joy in her friendships. We leave her still aware that she is inchoate and waiting to find her voice, but optimistic. And we leave the film, conscious that writer-director Joanna Hogg, who has created this fictionalised version of her life in this film, has indeed voice her voice with this deeply felt, technically audacious, often hilarious, film.

Viewers who have not seen Hogg's previous film, THE SOUVENIR, may struggle to understand why Julie is so driven to capture her relationship with Anthony. Without Tom Burke's dominant presence, I feared that this sequel might lose its purpose, much as Julie feels unmoored at the start of the sequel. But as the film progresses we see Julie find her way, thanks partly to her unstintingly supportive if somewhat anachronistic parents (Tilda Swinton and a drily hilarious James Spencer Ashworth). She also progresses with her student film despite her supercilious film professors, but with the support of her best friend Marland (Jaygann Ayeh). Along the way there are moments of desperation - and searching for connection - and the lightest of touches with the tragedies of the 1980s when a gay editor reveals his boyfriend has been sick for a while.  Richard Ayoade also returns with a scene-stealing turn as an arrogant film student with dip-dyed hair. The problem is that he's not wrong in what he says! Julie should move on.

But what raises this film to a level beyond that achieved in the first part of THE SOUVENIR is Joanna Hogg's greater confidence in exploring the meta-textual nature of making a film about her own student film-making. I LOVE that the student film we finally see bears no resemblance to the verite-footage we have seen so far, but leaps into Fellini or Red Shoes ballet -esque surrealism. Bravo!

I also hope that Honor Swinton Byrne continues to act. She has a natural charisma and empathy that shines through the screen. I'd love to see what kind of range she has.

THE SOUVENIR II has a running time of 106 minutes and is rated R. The film played Cannes and the BFI London Film Festival 2021. It will be released in the USA on October 29th 2021 and in the UK on January 21st 2022.