MAY DECEMBER** - BFI London Film Festival 2023 - Day 4

Todd Haynes' latest film fails to ignite. What's the point of setting up such a grungy nasty little tabloid scandal, complete with melodramatic music and Chekhov's hunting rifle, if you aren't going to truly mine the emotional gore?  Instead, we get a limp, anaemic relationship drama, enlivened only by the occasional caustic barb from the matriarch (SALTBURN vibes, anyone?) but one that ultimately wastes great performances from its twin leads of Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman.

Moore stars as the deeply delusional and manipulative Gracie, now 60. She lives with her husband and three nearly grown kids. The twist is that Gracie, when 36, seduced aforementioned husband when he was ijust 13 (although British audiences may fail to grasp just how young a seventh grader is for most of the running time.)  Over twenty years later there is no sign that Gracie realises that she has done anything wrong, and her husband seems to be living in a state of arrested development, more elder child than partner.  So much so that I spent much of the film trying to figure out if Charles Melton was a bad actor or just directed to look simple.

The family's fake-we're-fine lives are upturned when Natalie Portman's TV actress comes to town to research an upcoming movie.  In her own way, Portman's Elizabeth is just as fake and manipulative as Gracie, except she is more self-aware of why she is behaving the way she does.  It's a great role for Portman who gets to show us her subtle manipulations.  Portman also has a fantastic monologue straight to camera that is as good as anything she has done since BLACK SWAN.

I just felt that all of this was wasted in a script by Samy Burch that fails to really go as nasty and melodramatic as it could've done. I wanted more about how a young abused child comes to realise he was taken advantage of, his life thwarted. I wanted more of the kids' reactions to being raised in this weird set-up. I wanted twisted queer frissons between Gracie applying lipstick to Elizabeth.  I was waiting for something, anything to happen, and all I got was a tease. Chekhov's rifle failed to fire. 

MAY DECEMBER is rated R and has a running time of 113 minutes. It played Cannes and London 2023.

THE KILLER***** - BFI London Film Festival 2023 - Day 3

David Fincher returns to our screens with his mordantly funny, coolly stylish, impressively spare hitman procedural, THE KILLER.  The film is based on Alexis' Nolent's cult graphic novel, adapted for the screen by Andrew Kevin Walker who also penned SE7EN.  We spend the film inside the mind of a ruthlessly pragmatic hitman played by Michael Fassbender (SHAME).  We watch him narrate and then fuck up a hit on a French businessman, and then spend the rest of the film taking revenge on the people who tried to wipe out the chain of evidence leading to the fiasco. There isn't much on-screen dialogue, but flashes of deliciously dark humour and social satire from our deadpan narrator as he deftly takes down German tourists, New Orleans restaurants and Floridian ex-cons. As for Fincher, his social satire extends to self-absorbed beanie-wearing billionaire tech-bros, as superbly exemplified in Arliss Howard's cameo.

There is nothing not love about a film this well-made. It's just so stylish and handsome in its execution, so dark in its humour, so brilliantly scored by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, so pure in its focus....  All I want to know is whether Fincher is taking the piss out of Morrissey or legitimately using his songs in his score. Do please try to see this on a big screen and not at home on Netflix. This deserves a proper screen and audio setup.

THE KILLER is rated R and has a running time of 118 minutes. It played Venice and London 2023 and will be released on Netflix on November 10th.

THE BIKERIDERS***** - BFI London Film Festival 2023 - Day 10

Writer-director Jeff Nichols (TAKE SHELTER, MUD, MIDNIGHT SPECIAL, LOVING) has produced his career best work with THE BIKERIDERS - a film or rare beauty, nuance and heart-break.  It's based on a book by photojournalist Danny Lyon, documenting a motorcycle club that slowly morphs into a full-on violent gang, much to the horror of its founder and leader Johnny (Tom Hardy).  The real star of the film is Jodie Comer with a flawless working class Midwestern accent, playing Kathy - a good girl who cannot resist the handsome, dangerous biker Benny (Austin Butler).  We see the story through her eyes and her narration to an on-screen portrayal of Lyon.

For the first half hour of the film, despite the occasional Iron Cross and bit of senseless violence, one can't help falling in love with this group of outsiders and goofy ne'er-do-wells. When Zipco (Michael Shannon) tells us how the army rejected him, your heart breaks for him. When Cal and Cockroach are goofing around, it's just loveable silliness. And yes, they do ride around on motorbikes and do the odd bit of in-and-out, but they also take care of their own. They are a found family: they vouch for each other. 

But the club is a victim of its own success. As the members and chapters increase, it's impossible to know everyone. And the new younger kids come back from Vietnam messed up and hooked on drugs. Nichols starts to show us the truly dark side of the Vandals, as they morph into full-on biker gang, complete with violent misogyny and horrific violence. 

All of which leads us to a true Succession fight, worthy more of THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD.  By this point, one wonders if Johnny is stuck in a role he can't escape, in a monster of his not-quite creation.  He tries to pass the leadership to charismatic loose canon Benny but even Benny knows better, and more the point, cannot be beholden to anything, not even his wife. 

All of this is photographed in the most beautifully warm, sepia-toned, lush manner by DP Adam Stone, and the needle-drop late 60s and early 70s pop and rock tracks capture the atmosphere perfectly. But really this is about a spare script that allows the actors to do all the work between the lines.  Comer is award-worthy but everyone is at the top of the game. This is truly one of my favourite films of the year.

THE BIKERIDERS is rated R. It played London 2023 and opens in the USA on December 1st.

OCCUPIED CITY*** - BFI London Film Festival 2023 - Day 2

Steve McQueen (12 YEARS A SLAVE) returns to our screens with an epic and scrupulously well-made documentary that pairs contemporary Amsterdam locations with a narrator, Melanie Hyams, describing what happened there during the Nazi occupation and Holocaust.  We see everything from famous tourist sites like the Riksmuseum or Concertgebouw to domestic interiors and seemingly ordinary suburban homes.  And, shot as it was during the pandemic, we see deserted city streets during the curfew and vaccination centres. The documentary thus serves as a double documentary of the Holocaust but also Amsterdam during Covid.  Sometime the pairing of visual and narration is jarring.  Horrific anti-semitism and murder calmly narrated by Hyams over an everyday apartment. And sometimes the pairing is surprisingly resonant, such as an act of fascism narrated over footage of an antifa protest, or an anti-covid lockdown protest monitored by drones and riot police.

The film is based on McQueen's wife Bianca Stigter’s Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945r and I did find myself wondering if a book was the better format for this story. The running time of this superb film is well over four hours, including an interval. I understand that for some reviewers this has led to an overwhelming and moving cumulative impact of image after image and story after story. And I also understand that in some respects the endurance of an epic Holocaust documentary is itself a homage.  But for me, once I got to the second hour, I felt myself tire, and my mind start to wonder. I would far rather have watched this over sequential nights in parts, which is the way I typically watch and rewatch SHOAH.

OCCUPIED CITY has a running time of 246 minutes. It played Cannes, Telluride and London 2023. It opens in the Netherlands on November 24th.

SALTBURN** - BFI London Film Festival 2023 - Opening Night Gala

Emerald Fennell's second directorial feature is a desperately disappointing mash-up of superior works.  We begin with forty minutes of Brideshead, before morphing into The Talented Mr Ripley by way of The Blandings and Kind Hearts and Coronets. Worse still, Fennell uses transgressive sexual acts to paper over the unoriginal and meandering plot. The film is not as darkly funny as she thinks it is. And its only saving graces are Rosamund Pike as the AbFab clueless matriarch, and Carey Mulligan in a touching cameo as the mother's addict friend Pamela. One star for each of them, and half a star for Richard E Grant shouting "Just eat the bloody pie!"

Barry Keoghan stars as the Ripley-esque Oliver Quick, a Fresher at a fantasy Oxford where  you drive up to the Rad Cam, smoke in your room, and students not tourists drink at the KA. Oliver is drawn into the in-crowd when he helps out Felix Catton (Euphoria's Jacob Elordi), and lands an invitation to his Brideshead-style country house, Saltburn. In addition to Felix, Oliver charms the Wodehousian ditsy father, caustically selfish mother and vulnerable sister (newcomer Alison Oliver). The only person who seems on to his manipulations from the start is the family's poor relation Farrell (Archie Madekwe - GRAN TURISMO).  Game senses game. 

The film proceeds at a leisurely pace, with every plot twist telegraphed years in advance. The way the film develops will not surprise anyone with a shred of (cine-) literacy. There are occasional lines or scenes that are mordantly funny and brilliantly constructed, mostly involving Pike and Mulligan.  But between them, ennui and an infantile desire to shock.

Fennell's first feature, PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN, was just that. SALTBURN is a step back. Will her inevitable third feature show this to be a mis-step? Will her directorial choices add to her narrative or to continue to be puzzling (why the 4:3 aspect ratio?) or showy without effect (look! mirrors!)?

SALTBURN has a running time of 127 minutes. It will open in the USA on November 24th.

FLORA AND SON*

FLORA AND SON is the latest music-themed romantic drama from writer-director-composer John Carney (ONCE). I wasn't entirely convinced by that film, and even less so by this one. Nepo baby Eve Hewson stars as foul-mouthed single-mum Flora who gifts her light-fingered son a second-hand guitar. He proves more interested in creating shit rap songs on Apple's Garage Band in a scene of crass product placement that sounded like something Goldie Looking Chain would pen as a spoof.  So Flora takes the online guitar lessons herself, being tutored by Joseph Gordon Levitt's LA-based songwriter. Predictably, their online lessons are soon shown without the Zoom framing device and they are sharing romantic song-writing dates in the same frame. We roll toward a mawkish finale and I was still semi-hopeful we'd at least get a good final song out of it, as we did with ONCE. But no such luck.

FLORA AND SON is rated R and has a running time of 97 minutes. The movie played Sundance and Toronto 2023 and was released on Apple+ this weekend.