PRETTY RED DRESS****

Dionne Edwards debut feature is an assured and humane drama featuring incredibly strong central performances from its core trio of actors.  Natey Jones starts as Travis, a South London DJ just released from prison and returning to his family and a shit job in a restaurant.  His wife Candice (Alexandra Burke) is desperate to break out of her shitty jobs to star in a musical as Tina Turner.  She welcomes her husband back, and they seem to have a mutually supportive and sex-positive relationship. The drama begins when we realise that Travis is attracted to the stunning red dress he has bought his wife for her audition. When his teenage daughter Kenisha (Temilola Olatunbosun), and then his wife catch him wearing it, he tries to laugh it off as a drunken joke.  But we realise it's something far deeper, and soon so do they.  Their reactions feel authentic and complicated.  Candice wants to be supportive but also needs him to be her husband as he used to be - for her, there's a difference between role-play and questioning identity.  Meanwhile Kenisha, who is also starting to come out as gay, feels that she has to defend her father from homophobic language and is on the verge of being excluded from her school. We realise Travis is a good man when he defends his daughter's acting out despise his internalised homophobia. But I couldn't help but feel that the final scene let the family and the audience off the hook a little too easily.  Nonetheless, this is a great debut feature and I look forward to seeing what Dionne Edwards does not. It's also really refreshing to see contemporary real London on screen.

PRETTY RED DRESS has a running time of 110 minutes. It played the BFI London Film Festival 2022 and was released in the UK last month.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - DEAD RECKONING PART ONE*****

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE DEAD RECKONING PART ONE is the action film other action films want to be when they grow up. It brings us glamorous destinations and stunts that are better choreographed and more audacious than a James Bond, Bourne or Fast film.  But most of all, it brings us a depth of relationship dynamic that we just don't get with other films.  The characters care about each other, they riff off of each other, and they have a profound moral sense. This means that amidst the action scenes we get moments of real pathos.  We actually care that the characters survive.  We actually believe in their mission.  

The big bad in this film couldn't be more timely: a sentient AI that has gained access to every major nation's defense and intelligence systems.  Governments are vying to control it and so become the world's next superpower.  By contrast, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his friends and colleagues in the Impossible Mission Force want to stop it. And to do so they need to unite two half of a cruciform key AND figure out what that key unlocks.  This mission will lead them from an attempted theft in Abu Dhabi airport, to a car chase in Rome, a brokered deal in Venice, and an interception aboard the Orient Express.

The stunts are just incredible. The car chase in Rome neatly references THE ITALIAN JOB and gives us the physical comedy of Cruise driving a tiny Fiat. But the money shot is the one that was featured in the extended trailer, showing Cruise motorcycling off a mountain then free gliding onto the Orient Express.  And yes, in a world of CGI, the fact that we see and know that it is Cruise makes all the difference. 

But as I said before, what makes this film fantastic are the layered relationships and call-backs.  I love Vanessa Kirby channelling Vanessa Redgrave from MI1, as Max's daughter and Alanna.  I love having Harry Czerny back as Kitteridge, and how Macquarrie shoots him in a askew angles, just like Brian de Palma in the first film.  As for the much ridiculed MI2 I would argue that Hayley Atwell's Grace is basically Nia Nordorff-Hall redrawn with more spunk.  From MIs 1 to 3 on we get both Simon Pegg's Benji and Ving Rhames's Luther as the IMF's IT experts, with some great banter as to who is the best coder. (Clearly, Luther!)  And from MI5 and 6 we get Rebecca Ferguson's literally kickass former MI6 agent Ilsa Faust. In other words, the gang's back together and we really feel their love for each other: indeed that bond is an integral part of the plot.

It's worth taking a moment to note that the core group of players is one of the most diverse in contemporary action film. Few films are making their crack coders older black men.  Even better, that we rarely see a MI woman in a bikini (unless she's training to hold her breath underwater).  These are all professional competent women. They aren't (with the exception of Nia) damsels in distress. And while Grace is a shit action driver, well, wouldn't we all be? But we have no doubt that she would be a skilled member of IMF in due course.  And let's just highlight the careful writing of the character Paris, played superbly by Pom Klementieff. In a Bond film, she'd be just another crazed evil henchman.  But in this film she's given growth, nuance and dignity.

It's also worth remembering that what Tom Cruise and Christopher Macquarie have achieved is rare: they have pushed forward the action genre while also creating a mournful meditation on the toll secret work takes on personal relationships and the refuge that is found family.  And, if that sounds po-faced, they do this while also making meta-jokes about latex masks and how everyone thinks the IMF is the International Monetary Fund. 

I cannot speak highly enough for the way in which this franchise has developed. MI3 had been my favourite instalment up until now but this just blew me away.  See it now, on the biggest screen with the big sound system you can find. 

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - DEAD RECKONING PART ONE has a running time of 163 minutes and is rated 12A in the UK and PG-13 in the USA. It is on global release.

LOVING HIGHSMITH*** - BFI Flare 2023

LOVING HIGHSMITH is a fascinating but ultimately frustrating documentary about the enigmatic and spiky American author Patricia Highsmith.  I have long loved Highsmith's books and the various film adaptations they have spawned. There's something curiously liberating and absurdly funny about her amoral criminal protagonists, not least the charismatic psychopath Tom Ripley.  Set against these dark, disturbing crime novels, we then had the subversive romance of Carol, or The Price of Salt, in which a rich 1950s housewife finds a fulfilling happy ending with a young shopgirl. They don't suffer, they don't regret, they don't die. They live happily.  One struggles to reconcile the two novelists and the many Patricia's.  Is she a courageous and admirable figure - an undeniably important writer - the life of the party - fearless in her love life?  Or is she a mean, alcoholic, anti-semitic misanthropist?

Vitija approaches Highsmith through her family and love life. We meet some of her family living in contemporary Texas, who speak of the buttoned up nature of life in the South of the 1950s.  It seems incomprehensible that this literary woman grew  up in the family of a rodeo-announcer!  But what a fucked up childhood she had.  Her mother divorced her father before she was born and apparently tried to abort her by drinking terps.  Young Patricia was so aghast at being gay that she tried to sleep with men and conversion therapy.  Per her lover and fellow author Marijane Meaker, everyone did, because of the endemic bigotry of the times.

Of all the interviews it is Meaker who is the most astute, and the most fascinating, depicting the lesbian underground scene in New York and the many reasons why Highsmith would've written The Price of Salt under a pseudonym. This is interspersed with archival footage of Patricia as well as Gwendolyn Christie reading excerpts from her diary, further explaining how career-ending writing a "gay book" might've been.

In addition to Meaker, we meet some of Patricia's lovers from her self-imposed European exile.  Tabe Blumeschein and Monique Buffet are fascinating for the insight they show on life in 1970s and 1980s queer Europe, but I just didn't feel like I was getting at the core of who Patricia was. Maybe one cannot without really immersing oneself in her voluminous diaries. And maybe even then you would come against a kind of wall of subterfuge and unwillingness to allow emotion and vulnerability to penetrate. My abiding feeling finishing this documentary was one of a supreme artist but also of an emotionally thwarted life. They really do fuck you up, your mum and dad. 

LOVING HIGHSMITH has a running time of 83 minutes. It was released in the USA last year and is playing BFI Flare 2023. 

WHO I AM NOT**** - BFI Flare 2023

WHO I AM NOT is an intimate and heart-breaking portrait of two intersex people struggling to find a place in contemporary South Africa. It is directed by Tunde Skovran with empathy, economy and a quiet but powerful voice. 

The first protagonist is Sharon-Rose Khumalo, whose chromosomes say she is male, but who presents as female. In fact, she presents as "hyper" female, becoming Miss South Africa.  She is self-aware that her desire to be publicly acknowledged as a beautiful woman could be the result of trying to prove something to society, and to fight against the biological reality that she can't conceive. At the end of the film she courageously pronounces herself to be a woman, in a moment that's meant to be cathartic, but given all we have seen her struggle with in terms of infertility, it seems a tragic or compromised victory at best.

The second protagonist is Dimakatso Sebidi, whose chromosomes say they are female, but who presents as intersex and who resists society's attempts to pin them into one box or other.  Their journey is embedded in that of  their family, and the desperately sad cloud of mystery surrounding surgeries their parents subjected them to at birth. Through the course of the film, we see Dimakatso actually find out the facts of their biological reality and chromosomes, and have to come to terms with the fact that there are some things they won't ever know. The most poignant conversation is with their father, who asks for forgiveness for the surgeries, arguing that he was just trying to do what was best.

This conversation brings us back to the fact that contemporary South Africa is a country where religious belief is still common and profoundly impacts people's view of sex, gender and acceptance.  It's telling that Dimakatso's father asks God to forgive him, leaving a disenfranchised Dimakatso to ask about their agency in forgiveness.  I also found it fascinating to interrogate how people come to turns with those born intersex: if God creates all, didn't he also create the Intersex? If they are an abberation, then God is fallible. The religiosity extends to everyday interactions.  A small business owner explains to Dimakatso that he can't employ them because how would he refer to them?  They answer, just with our name.  This is clearly something he can't wrap his head around and he rejects her job application while wishing her a "blessed day".  

WHO I AM NOT has a running time of 105 minutes. It played SXSW and BFI Flare 2023.

FINDING MICHAEL***

 

I am obsessed with books, podcasts and films about summitting Everest.  I am the obverse of an action-adventure extreme sportsperson and maybe that's why I find the psychology of needing to pit yourself against nature fascinating. What drives these people to go into the "death zone", where life cannot be sustained without supplemental oxygen, in such numbers that they cause contagion on the slopes, litter it with refuse, and ultimately - tragically - dead bodies?

FINDING MICHAEL is the latest addition to this body of work and takes a new angle of focussing on what happens to the families left behind. In this case, that of Michael Matthews, who perished on the way down from the summit, twenty years ago. His little brother's interest is piqued by a photo sent to them in 2017, of a body that could be Michael.  Should he go at great expense and danger, leaving behind his wife, children and newborn baby, to try and get the body back?

The journey is one of discovery but not in the way we think it will be.  The brother, Spencer Matthews, who was only ten with Michael died, is discovering the kind of man his brother was, and the journey he went on. We see a stunning trek up to base camp, we visit the same temple where Michael and Spencer take blessings, and camcorder footage from his fellow climbers on his way up. Some subtle and sensitive editing puts the two journeys side by side.

There are three almost unbearably sad moments in a very sad film throughout.  The first is when very early on at base camp, the sherpas tell Spencer that the photo isn't of his brother at all, but of an Indian climber. But they send up climbers and drones anway to comb the slopes.  The second  moment was when Spencer looked at the last photo taken of his brother, already struggling for oxygen, already dying, just before he started to climb down. The last was when Spencer diverted resources from finding his brother to helping bring down the body of a dead sherpa so that his family could have closure, and seeing their wailing grief.

The journey is worth it for Spencer's greater discovery of his brother but comes at a cost: reopening the wounds of grief of his mother and sister. It's also somewhat problematic to me that he is willing to pay people to put themselves in danger on the small chance of recovering a dead body.  And yes the resources are then diverted to help someone else, but only on the conditional that Michael is not found. It made me wonder in what sense both summitting on commercial climbs, and then the entire project of this film was one of wealth and entitlement. And yet one supposes that the industry - and employment - exists because of these people.

At any rate, I really enjoyed the film: it was both moving and thought-provoking. The cinematography is very special - with beautiful vistas of the mountain - and the way in which the editors step through the process of going up for lay-people to understand was really well done.

FINDING MICHAEL has a running time of 100 minutes and is streaming on Disney Plus.

WINTER BOY aka LE LYCEEN****

 

Theatre and cinema writer-director Christophe Honore (MA MERE) returns to our screens with a deeply personal, heartfelt and affecting retelling of the loss of his father and the impact this had on him as a young gay man.

The film opens in contemporary rural France with high-school student Lucas speaking not quite to camera as an unreliable narrator of his own story. We later find this is part of a therapy session. He describes his final trip to boarding school with his father, played courageously by Honore himself, who we come to realise probably committed suicide by driving his car into oncoming traffic.  Very quickly, the father is dead, and we see the rest of the film unfold in grief and trauma.

At the start of the film, Lucas is an out gay schoolboy with an active sex life. But when his father dies he decides to close off all feelings and live for physicality and the moment. He goes to Paris with his elder brother Quentin and develops a crush on Quentin's room-mate Lilio. He also flirts with religion, indulges in a random hook-up for the first time (nicely inter-cut!) and flirts with sex work in a kind of twisted act of protection for Lilio.

Clearly he is acting out, and struggling to come to terms with grief and his own sexual power as a near-adult. It's a lot and when the waves finally break the ramifications are severe and sensitively handled. 

There's so much to love in this film. First and foremost, newcomer Paul Kircher's magnetic central performance as Lucas but also Erwan Kapoa Fale's heartbreakingly sensitive turn as Lilio. I love that Honore depicts gay sex beautifully and openly, and also that he depicts the love-hate of siblings so authentically. Vincent Lacoste is fantastic as big brother Quentin. I really felt like I knew this trio and felt invested in their lives. 

But there are things I didn't like in the movie too. I didn't like that the opening therapy scene carried on into voiceover over the immediate reaction to the death. I found it mannered and distracting rather than elucidating. I think Honore means it to be mannered: he's making a point about a disjointed, fragmentary and contradictory narrator. Fine. I just could've done without it.  I also didn't like what felt like a forced focus on the mother (Juliette Binoche) late in the film. It felt as though Honore had to give her one big scene to get her to do the film.

That said, this remains one of the most beautifully told and affecting movies I've seen in a while, and well worth seeking out. I can't wait to see what Paul Kircher does next. 

LE LYCEEN has a running time of 122 minutes. It played Toronto, San Sebastian and London 2022 and BFI Flare 2023.