no other choice (w&d park chan-wook, w. donald e. westlake, lee kyoung-mi)

11am on a Friday morning is a great time to watch a film which questions the new world order we are all subject to. Chan-wook’s film has enough highways and byways for the viewer to undergo their own personal journey down its highways and byways. After the set up, with Man-su losing his job and embarking on his dastardly scheme to become re-employed, there were moments when the film teeters on the edge of self-indulgence, in the style of a Jacobean tragedy which becomes obliged to go through its revenge story beats. (With some gratuitous comedy beats thrown in). Yet, as the narrative starts to swirl towards its centrifugal conclusion, the investment of director and audience is rewarded. Chan-wook’s meditations on the diabolical nature of a world given over to dehumanised capital, aided and abetted by AI, comes into flower in a darkened lights-out factory. The dedication to Costa Gavras in the closing credits feels like game recognising game. 

the brutalist (w&d. brady corbet, w. mona fastvold)

 In a party of five, The Brutalist had an approval rating of 3.5. The way in which the issue of the holocaust was addressed with subtlety and discretion was praised. The reveal of Guy Pearce’s repressed sexuality was deemed by most a convincing device. The acting was in general admired. I found myself as the lone dissenter, feeling as though the film failed to live up to its ambitions, denoted in part by its running time, in part by its thematic. It felt as though there were too many breathy scenes in closed rooms, and lacked the bravura panache of Childhood of a Leader. But, as noted, I was in a strong minority, and it would appear that the director’s vaulting ambition has been well received. One aspect of being in London is that I find myself seeing far more of the buzzy films when they come out, rather than a few years later. The industry generates a sense of expectation, clearly required for marketing purposes, but perhaps unhelpful for a more considered take on the latest must-see. Either in terms of admiration or deception.

Nb. One of the things that strikes me, thinking about the film a few weeks later, is that the title would imply a reflection on the idea of brutalism as an architectural genre. Whereas what Lazlo seems to be designing is something closer to a neo-classical temple. In the brief scene where his future employer shows images of his earlier Bauhaus-y work, we get a glimpse of this ‘brutalist’ architecture, but this line of Lazlo’s work doesn’t feel as though it is explored in any great detail thereafter. Perhaps he will later gain acclaim as a brutalist, or perhaps the point is that with success he rejects this style. Whichever option he has taken is never interrogated, and the architect’s intellectual framework, so redolent in the title, seems to be swallowed up by the examination of his emotional framework.

holy spider (w& ali abbasi, w. afshin kamran bahrami, jonas wagner)

It goes without saying that an Iranian genre film with a combative female heroine is something to be lauded, at any time, but especially now. The film is apparently based on real events, as an ex-soldier, driven by a desire to clean up the streets, starts murdering prostitutes in the holy city of Mashhad. Rahimi, a journalist from Tehran, comes to Mashhad and sets out to hunt down the killer, using herself as bait. As Mr Curry observed, it’s a film in the tradition of Seven, with the spirit of Fincher and before that Hollywood B-movies looming large. The film decides at one point to split its narrative between the killer and the journalist, which serves to diminish a certain amount of dramatic tension, and the denouement, when the killer picks up the journalist, actually occurs at the end of Act 2, with the last act examining the social and political implications of the case. Perhaps as a result of these choices, the film sometimes seems a little like a mash-up of varying intentions, neither genre nor social drama, although, who knowns, perhaps this is a good thing. The opening sequence, which builds to the murder of a prostitute, has an elemental power which the remainder never quite matches, in spite of some graphic murder scenes, but Holy Spider is another example of the rude health of the Iranian film industry in spite (or perhaps because of?) the constraints of the society it emerges from. 

tár (w&d todd field)

It is the curious nature of having maintained this blog for over fifteen years that permits me to revisit my thoughts about a little seen film called In The Bedroom, by this director. I noted the film’s nuanced take on controversial material and its ‘none-too-likeable’ characters. It always takes courage to represent characters who are unsympathetic, and Field doubles down on this in his masterly new film, which has it nods to Haneke’s Piano Teacher and Weisse’s The Audition (which curiously also features Nina Hoss, with Blanchett’s role echoing that played by Hoss in that film). Put simply, this is an astonishingly assured film, one which is both highbrow and unafraid to use genre tropes when it needs to. It’s a film which manages to include a ten minute interview sequence discussing classical music, as well as dream sequences and at least one jump scare. There are so many elements in Tár that it feels as though it has no right to succeed (the strange neighbours, Bach’s progeny, an adopted daughter (from where?), but Blanchett’s performance and the filmmakers’ skills hold the whole thing together. The edit, by Monika Willi, who has frequently worked with Haneke, is superb, maintaining the pace, pulling out of scenes with the delicacy of a masterchef, and the sound design, (score by Hildur Guðnadóttir), so key in a film about a conductor, is exquisite. Perhaps on a second watch, vast crevasses might open up, but one suspects not. 

birds of passage/ pájaros de verano (d. cristina gallego, ciro guerra; w. maria camila arias, jaques toulemonde)

As Epstein pointed out, (see review of Monos below), budgets for Latin American cinema are not easy to obtain and don’t tend to be big. Interestingly, this is the second Colombian film I’ve seen this year which would appear to have managed to put a respectable budget together. This is an epic, with neatly delineated chapters, taking place over a decade or so, charting the rise of a small scale family cartel in a remote, indigenous corner of the country, where they still speak the native language, and exist within a circumscribed cultural space, with its own rules and rivalries. The opening scene, showing a young woman getting ready to present herself to the world at a ceremony where she performs a striking dance with a suitor, is compelling. The suitor, Rapayet, emerges as the film’s protagonist, with the film following his rise and demise as a marijuana dealer in the seventies. 

The film looks amazing. It’s well shot, the insight into this curious coastal world feels revelatory, it lacks nothing in style. However, the narrative soon  becomes a somewhat prosaic tale of revenge and counter-revenge. The young woman we meet at the film’s opening becomes a secondary character. Her husband too remains slightly one-dimensional and resigned to his fate. The framing device at the start and finish of the film, when a storyteller sings the song of the tale we will see and have just seen suggests the filmmakers are aspiring to a mythic dimension as they recount the pre-history of the cocaine wars, (the man who ends up at the top of the pile comes from Medellin, no mas). But the film never seems to hit the additional notes required to raise the turbulent material onto another level. It’s a well-made, solid, engaging film, which uses its budget effectively, but never quite gets under the skin. 

red sparrow (d. francis lawrence; w. justin haythe)

Heathrow, waiting to catch a plane to Houston, where I will not leave the airport. 

Mr Curry decided we should go and see Red Sparrow rather than A Fantastic Woman for reasons which were never entirely clear and the truth is that the movie offers less to get excited about than its ‘hot-under-the-collar’ press would hope. Within ten minutes Mr C had murmured to me “This is an airline movie, right?’ And he was. Any film which has a plot point revolve around floppy disks feels unlikely, introducing a degree of contrivance which undermines even the most far-fetched of narratives. At some point, even though we know we’re watching a Bond-esque fantasy, we need to feel there’s some kind of underpinning in at least a hypothetical truth, and a detail like this seems is so unwieldy that even the most tenuous connection to that hypothetical reality is ruptured and we start to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. Which may or may not annoy the filmmakers, who knows. Maybe they don’t care and they’re just laughing all the way to the bank.

What is interesting, however, about Red Sparrow, is its representation of the the American other, in the shape of the Russians. These Russians, are ruthless. They have a devotion to the nebulous idea of the state/ motherland. And, in Red Sparrow, above all else, they are obsessed by sex and its power dynamics, rather than its pleasure dynamics. One can’t help thinking that this is no more than a mirror to the state of US society: that the portrayal offered within the film of the Russians is a way of exploring the concerns and values of the filmmakers themselves. None of which reflects their country in a particularly flattering light. 

manchester by the sea (w&d kenneth lonergan)

"Manchester, so much to answer for."

From a British perspective, one of the most striking aspects of Lonergan’s film is the title. Manchester has never been and never will by the sea. It’s hard to know whether the American director has chosen the title as an ironic nod to the original Mancunians or not. What is notable is the names of the small towns which are thanked in the credits. Richmond, Gloucester, Essex, etc. All stout English names. Which reflects the fact that this is an implacably Anglo-Saxon film. It doesn’t even have the Gaelic tinge which many north-east coast US films do. (cf Casey Affleck’s brother’s oeuvre, not to mention The Departed etc). However many years ago, disenfranchised dreamers from Britain landed on this shore, and set about constructing an immigrant’s version of the old world. The names didn’t change all that much. The question is: did the values? 

This is all the more prescient because one can’t help thinking that the world Lonergan portrays feels like Trump-world. It’s introspective, small-town and tainted by prejudice. Casey Affleck’s character, Lee Chandler, is blackballed by the community for his supposed role in his children’s death. No-one will give him a job and in the end it’s completely understandable why he has to leave. No matter that Lonergan seeks and succeeds in wresting a cathartic narrative out of Lee’s misfortunes; that which underpins it, besides an act of god, is the local community’s almost complete lack of empathy. Manchester-by-the-Sea is far closer to The Crucible than Little House on the Prairie or Our Town. There are also echoes of Vinterberg’s The Hunt, even if Lonergan is interested in creating a redemptive narrative, rather than a condemnatory one. At heart, Lonergan would appear to be a sentimental soul, seeking to find shards of hope within the harshness of the universe and the societies his characters inhabit. 

The complexities of the film make it richer. Affleck’s protagonist has no shortage of flaws. He’s given a classical journey to go on and that journey is meticulously laid out. It is a cinematic masterclass, to the point of cliche, in the art of the character arc. However, what makes Manchester-by-the-Sea special is that it does more than this. It creates a portrayal of contemporary US society which is poised in the balance between kindness and cruelty. A Morrisey-esque dichotomy. Which way will the respective Anglo-Saxon worlds tip? Will there be space for the Lee Chandlers of this world, the damaged survivors? Or will they be driven out?