Editor KC Wingert reviews Michael Caton-Jones’ female-led film at BFI LFF 2019. 

The Scottish comedy Our Ladies made its world premiere on Friday, 4^th October, as part of the BFI London Film Festival. Given the popularity and critical success of the Alan Warner novel on which Our Ladies is based—which also spawned a West End musical adaptation from Lee Hall (Rocketman, Billy Elliot)—the film bills itself as a hilariously entertaining romp, documenting a day in the lives of five schoolgirls from the Scottish Highlands. Set in the mid-‘90s, Our Ladies could be an ode to navigating raging hormones and desperate crushes similar to Ten Things I Hate About You or a touching coming-of-age story á la Lady Bird. Unfortunately, Our Ladies is not on par with these nostalgic genre classics, missing a few of the key features that make its mid-‘90s teen comedy companions so great.

Orla, Fionnula, Kylah, Rachell, and Amanda are the self-proclaimed “partiers” of their Catholic school’s choir. They’re all completely obsessed with sex, gossiping about who’s shagged whom the entire bus ride down to a choir competition in Edinburgh. The girls make plans to spend the day drinking, shopping, and finding men to sleep with before their big performance that evening. However, as tensions among them unexpectedly begin to rise, they split off from each other, embarking on their own Edinburgh adventures.

Not all of these girls are as experienced as their open attitudes towards sex imply. Orla (Tallulah Greive), for instance, begins the film praying to a portrait of Jesus hung in her room that she might have sex that evening because, unlike Jesus’ mother, she “doesn’t want to be a virgin her whole life.” Fionnula (Abigail Lawrie), on the other hand, has slept with plenty of guys, but what she’d really like is to sleep with a girl—one of the few secrets she keeps from her friends. With womanhood fast approaching, the girls are forced to think hard about their futures perhaps for the first time, and the conclusions to which they begin to come make them realise they may have less in common with each other than they thought. For some of them, the thought of being a teen mum and staying in their small Highland town forever is the dream—while others in the group look upon that attitude with derision.

Though these characters’ separate journeys are entertaining to watch and elicit several genuine laughs, they get in the way of a cohesive plot. In fact, a lot of the characters’ actions feel less like they have narrative purpose and more like they’ve been shoved in as a punchline. The narrative structure of Our Ladies feels awkward and ham-fisted right down to the corny, character-by-character epilogues.

(Can I please take a brief moment to say how much I hate epilogues in fiction films? If this character’s future isn’t important enough to merit a sequel, it’s not important enough to show an inspirational music-backed freezeframe of that fictional character’s face with some text telling us where they fictionally moved after leaving their fictional hometown and what kind of fictional job they have, in this work of FICTION).

Our Ladies’ queer subplot ends on a triumphant note that feels wholly unearned, and the entire main conflict of the film is ameliorated with a hackneyed kumbaya moment after which everyone just carries on as usual. There’s even a random, inexplicable musical number written in, which feels out of place in a film that otherwise seems to be making an attempt at gritty realism. The final act simply devolves into a bunch of jokey bits that are meant to be funny but because of the subject matter—underage girls getting involved with older men—are actually just very uncomfortable to watch.

A good coming-of-age film should be one that almost anyone can see a little bit of themselves in. Unfortunately, Our Ladies doles out characters that are unlikable and unrealistic. It deals with the hormonally-charged boy-craziness of a group of teenage girls in a way that doesn’t highlight the hilarity and awkwardness of exploring one’s sexuality in the way so many great teen comedies do. Rather, it feels exploitative; the cast of young girls is depictd as gladly flirting with unbelievably creepy older men, having sex while completely wasted and then casually laughing it off later, and reacting nonchalantly when a man exposes himself to them and proposes an orgy.

Perhaps this exploration of teenage girls’ sexualities misses the mark because, despite the fact that the main cast is entirely female, neither the writer nor the director of this film a woman. In fact, Our Ladies’ unequivocally odd choice of writer/director is Michael Caton-Jones – otherwise best known for directing the 2002 feature Basic Instinct 2, which Wikipedia describes as an “erotic crime thriller” and Rotten Tomatoes describes as “bad.”

Our Ladies comes to us at a time when ‘90s nostalgia is in high demand and women’s stories are being celebrated in film more often than ever. The film has an incredibly talented young cast and a promising pitch, but potential alone cannot make a film good. Our Ladies lacks authenticity in its hollow attempt at sex-positivity, and because it deals with the stories of teenage girls, that failure comes across as not only sexist but also as downright creepy. I’m not going to say conclusively that men can’t tell girls’ coming-of-age stories—Bo Burnham proves they can with his 2018 feature Eighth Grade, for instance. However, Caton-Jones (who, again, DIRECTED BASIC INSTINCT 2) demonstrates that he does not possess the insight into the mind of a teenage girl necessary to tell this story well.

Our Ladies has not been issued a UK release date yet.

Milo Garner reviews Werner Herzog’s intimate new film at BFI LFF 2019.

Werner Herzog has a penchant for representing the alienated. His great films of the ’70s and ’80s have always centred on those who have lost touch – or who have never been in touch – with the world around them:  the raving king Aguirre stumbling on his forsaken raft; the vampire Nosferatu, reduced to a lovelorn welp; the wandering, ever-lost Stroszek drifting through the hinterlands of America. Even in his more conventional output – not least the Nicholas Cage vehicle Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans – his protagonists seem a step removed from their reality. Herzog himself might be described similarly. He is by no means a loner, nor a reject – few rejects nab a guest spot in The Simpsons, let alone a role in the latest Star Wars project – but nonetheless he seems to share something of the errant madness that infects many of his leading players.

His latest film Family Romance, LLC considers alienation from its inverse. It concerns Ishii Yuchii, the founder of the eponymous company, which provides a rental service for family members and friends. Though much like something pulled from a Charlie Kaufman script, this company is genuine, and while the incidents in the film are largely scripted, they often drift into the realm of documentary – a realm in which Herzog is, of course, immersed. The Japan of his film, and, by extension, the Japan of reality, is a country wherein alienation has become the norm – a country in which a company like Family Romance not only exists, but feels much at home. This film is sci-fi, dystopian, but not with much need to invent or fabricate.

The aesthetic of the film is notable in this respect. Shot on a handheld digital camera (operated by Herzog himself, with additional footage from producer Roc Morin), a visual style reminiscent of low-budget filmmaking techniques pervades throughout. The privilege of Herzog’s name is difficult to ignore; had a new director submitted a film of this technical quality, there is little chance his film would feature at such a prestigious festival as LFF.

However, this low-quality style – the rollicking, imprecise camerawork of an aging director using a relatively cheap camera – suggests a distinctly relevant aesthetic question. Considering the fictional premise, the imprecision implies an artificiality, as though the means of this film’s making are constantly revealed and thus a constant reminder of its untruth. This artificiality is then complemented by its opposite:  much of what takes place in the film is inescapably real. An extended scene of children playing with and petting a hedgehog is essentially documentary, as is the sequence of crowds gathering around a certain stunt pulled in the middle of the film. In these moments the ramshackle production no longer suggests falsity, as though the film exists on a thin line between an unconvincing fiction and an uncomfortable reality. No doubt much of the amateurism is a result of inexpert hands and low budget, but the effect suggested by these choices synthesises with the film otherwise closely and consistently.

The narrative of the film follows Ishii Yuchii – played, naturally, by himself – as he completes various jobs for his company. The most significant is to fill in as someone’s ex-husband, acting as a returned father to a young Mahiro (too young to recognize true- from false-dad). The ethics here are obviously sketchy, but more distinctly interesting is the question of affect. The happiness Mahiro experiences with her faux-father is no less ‘real’ than it would have been with her actual (and still absent) father.

This conclusion leads to the further observation that so much of the modern world is constructed through falsehood. Instagram is briefly mentioned (though not with the dismissive grimace of an angsty boomer; Herzog’s interest in burgeoning tech has aged him well). In this increasingly pervasive online sphere, reality and unreality are becoming more indistinct. In a chemical sense – the sense of dopamine and serotonin – the actions of Ishii Yuchi and his company could be considered noble. They are providing happiness where it would otherwise not exist. They are perhaps not a symptom of an increasingly isolated world, but its cure – the first step towards a future where artificiality and authenticity are intertwined and indistinguishable. This idea is not far from Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, a film that considers a similar ground to Family Romance, LLC, if more elegantly.

This sentiment, however, does suggest an unease – perhaps an orientalist, exotic discomfort for a Western observer. This burgeoning culture peals like a cheap sci-fi novel, and not one of the utopic bent. Herzog, while generally reserved in his judgement, seems to sympathise with this assessment; his inclusion of ‘LLC’ in the title, as noted by Peter Debruge for Variety, seems an ironic undermining of the two words prior. Eric Kohn, writing for Indiewire, further suggests that the film engages in a subtle critique of such widespread and all-consuming capitalism as Family Romance requires, in which commerce now encompasses friends, family, and love – all things that money supposedly cannot buy.

For Herzog, though, love is the problem. To quote the late Daniel Johnston, ‘true love will find us in the end,’ and this film proves no different. The dramatic crux – late in arrival but no less affective – concerns Ishii Yuchii and the realisation that he has begun to develop a genuine affection for his surrogate daughter. This is calamitous for his work. The ghost in the machine is just that – the artificiality of this new world can only function so long as its purveyors remain genuinely detached and unaffected. This, Herzog supposes, quite contradicts the human spirit.

While this is the lasting impression, it is not a conclusion entirely. Earlier in the film, Herzog follows Ishii Yuchii into a ‘robot hotel’ – a gimmick establishment in which the hotel staff and even its fish are robots. Herzog here suggests a cyborg future in which capitalist service might circumvent the foibles of human limitation. Even then, the director is wont to consider beyond this bleak premonition. Speaking a line that can be read in no voice but Herzog’s, Ishii asks the hotel’s (human) proprietor whether robots can dream – a throwaway ‘shower thought,’ for the moment. More so, however, this is Herzog thinking beyond the gimmickry of contemporary robotics. True love will find us in the end, sure – but perhaps it’ll find them, too. A scrappy, micro-budgeted, and inconsistent docu-drama, Family Romance, LLC rests far from Herzog’s most compelling output, but it is nonetheless a cogent, even affecting investigation of concepts central to humankind’s present and future.

7/10

Family Romance, LLC is showing in select cinemas. Check out the trailer below:

Milo Garner meets Orçun Behram’s horror debut, The Antenna, at BFI LFF 2019.

I met The Antenna at a party and he wouldn’t shut the fuck up. I was in the kitchen when he approached me, and initially, I’ll say it, I wasn’t unimpressed. He had a sort of stylish way about him. Not exactly well-dressed, no, but he’d thought it through. Nearly postmodern, angular, almost smart but not quite. He spoke to me first – of course he would, I would later think – something about an anecdote he’d heard about a man who fell off the roof of a tower block. The whole thing was very bizarre, very deadpan.

The music was quiet at this point – someone had put on one of Aphex Twin’s slow tunes – and The Antenna seemed to be in his element, talking in that kind of husky whisper that suits certain men. But soon after, things started to devolve. I wasn’t entirely sure what he was drinking – for some reason he’d poured whatever beer it was into a clear tumbler – but he had told me it was a lot like Kronenbourg. But not quite. Watered down maybe? Or, as I later came to suspect, his own imitation brew. He offered it to me enough, assuming – for a reason quite beyond me – that it’d be in some way to my taste. And sure, I do like Kronenbourg. I’d go so far as to say I really like Kronenbourg, in the right situation. But this diluted swill only got worse the closer I got to the dregs. And The Antenna seemed intent on not letting me leave the kitchen, that much seemed clear.

After telling me about the man who fell off the roof he segued – quite incoherently, I should add – into what would become an endless rant about television. Nothing particular, mind, just that TV was bad, and rotting our brains, and whatever the fuck else cliché you could pull out of a ’90s WhiteDot screed. He grabbed my shoulder emphatically more than once, only to let go with a theatrical raising of both arms at some sort of climatic ‘revelation’. I was meant to be wowed. I was not wowed.

Eventually, someone else was pulled into his gust of garrulous vapidity. The music had by this point degraded to an assault of ’80s pop hits. This girl, the new arrival, did not allow me the quick exit I was hoping for. Instead I was caught in a strange crossfire of The Antenna hitting on her, all the while keeping up his desperately trite narrative of TV-brain-rot with me. This would result in lengthy asides (during which the emphatic shoulder grab would reappear) where he would try and amuse her with what I assume were his best recollections of various true crime headlines. None of them were very entertaining, and in all honesty, I quite wished he could get to the end of his tirade sooner rather than later. The girl did leave, finally (what I’d do for that confidence, lady), but only after she and The Antenna shared a good minute or two of silent eye contact.

‘Dancing in the Moonlight’ was playing. His hand gripped my shoulder tightly. Christ. It was a little before this that his bullshit had outdone itself. He had begun to tie in a variety of statist conspiracies into his TV narrative – they’re behind it, he said loudly. They’re the ones making sure we all have a working set, he said even more loudly. His endgame was a kind of drone army of TV-infected slaves doing the government’s bidding or something. He even said something about them being faceless, but not like in a literary sense – literally faceless. Like in that episode of Doctor Who. On reflection, a lot like that episode of Doctor Who. I asked him if he’s seen it. Stupid question, no TV. That one’s on me. Then something truly inexplicable happened. Rodger Waters’ ‘Amused to Death’ blasted from the next room.

‘Finally, some real music.’ He skipped away, completely satisfied with how that conversation played out.

I finished the remnants of his fake-Kronenbourg and regretted it. What a waste of fucking time.

The Antenna has yet to get himself a UK release date, but you can watch the trailer below:

Emma Davis reviews Ciro Guerra’s latest colonial drama.

Waiting for the Barbarians follows a man called the Magistrate (Mark Rylance) over the course of a full year running the outpost of a small frontier town situated in ‘The Empire’. The film starts with the torrid arrival of Colonel Joll (Johnny Depp), a cruel and efficient officer who has been sent to quell any indigenous peoples’ revolt against the Empire. The Magistrate works closely with the oppressive Colonel, which leads the Magistrate to question his loyalty to the Empire – an uncertainty that acts as a catalyst to his eventual downfall. Despite a colour palette reminiscent of the Adventures of Tintin comics, this film takes on a surprisingly dark and serious tone.

This is Colombian director Ciro Guerra’s fifth feature film and first English-language one. Waiting for the Barbarians bears similarity to the director’s Oscar-nominated Empress of the Serpent and his crime drama Birds of Passage, which both explore the tumultuous relationship between Colombian indigenous peoples and their oppressors. Extrapolated to a more general context,  Waiting for the Barbarians centers the psyche of the coloniser, not the colonised. The script is penned by Afrikaner J. M. Coetzee, writer of the novel by the same name, who grew up in South Africa during apartheid. His best-known works are largely about people feeling like foreigners where they live—an idea that is explored with the Magistrate’s character in Waiting For The Barbarians.

Mark Rylance handles the character of the Magistrate astutely. His character is gentle yet strictly bureaucratic, a disposition nuanced by an obsession with the local people and culture. The audience feels unease as Rylance’s creepy performance and a strong script deftly handle issues of fetishization and the colonial gaze. The character of Colonel Joll serves as a great adversary to Ryland’s Magistrate. Johnny Depp plays the Colonel as cold, cruel, and deeply unsettling, a portrayal that avoids becoming a caricature thanks to the small amount of screen time given to his character. The body language and costume design of the Colonel juxtaposes that of the Magistrate, with the Colonel’s decadent black-and-gold uniform providing a stark contrast to the practical khaki clothing of the Magistrate. When the pair interact, their scenes reveal tension beneath the characters’ polite formalities. 

The rest of the characters are not utilised as well as Rylance and Depp. As Officer Mandel, Robert Pattinson makes an excellent late entrance to the film, but the rest of his time on-screen feels indulgent and is used to demonstrate increasing brutality against revolutionary suspects. Aside from these three men, Gana Bayarsaikhan plays a woman from the ‘barbarian’ nomadic tribes, simply called The Girl. Tall and beautiful, with a tragic backstory and incredibly muddled storyline, she simply exists to further the narrative development of the Magistrate. This issue extends to the rest of the supporting cast; while they could be interesting figures in their own right, they simply prop up their protagonist. 

The film plays with lots of ideas, but these ideas fail to impress. The whole movie feels dated, especially the tropes of colonial fiction used. The second half contains more physical violence than the first, exposing a greater depth of suffering to the Magistrate and, in turn, the audience. What pleasure would an audience receive from seeing a uniformed white man beating a row of Asian people? What do I, as a viewer, discover about human brutality by seeing women and children of colour being beaten? What can I learn about the tension between revolution and reform as forms of social justice? This movie portrays violence and suffering without actually delivering the substance it desperately wants to get across. Clunky narrative and weak thematic points let down an otherwise stylish film.

A modern audience would benefit from specific depictions of the injustices that speak truth to colonialism’s impact. For instance, I prefer the work of director Claire Denis in her cinematic explorations of the ‘white saviour’; compared to Denis’ filmography, Guerra’s direction and Coetzee’s writing look weak. Ava DuVernay’s series When They See Us takes the perspective of the victims of a wrongful conviction by New York Department of Justice. Any adaptation of Madame Butterfly will show how a white man in power falling for and seeking to protect a woman of colour in his imperial domain was a staple of 20th Century Asian representation. In literature, Nadine Gordimer puts nonwhite South Africans in the centre of her stories on apartheid South Africa, in contrast to J. M. Coetzee’s more limited scope. Gordimer is thus known for more politically-charged writing about apartheid South Africa than Coetzee (You can read about their debate on censorship around Salman Rushdie’s work here). When it comes to examining colonialism, I think it’s inappropriate to insist, as Waiting for the Barbarians does, on an almost fantastical setting when the costume design and colonial themes strongly invoke the very real memory of European violence. As such, exploring the perspective of the oppressor, no matter how sympathetic they are, is dangerous — and frankly, it’s boring.

The film explores the validity of indigenous peoples’ knowledge, and this produces the most compelling metaphor. As the Magistrate tells the newly-arrived colonial armed forces, the local people know the land better than the colonisers of the Empire. When suspects are apprehended by the armed forces, the violence is pointed: the indigenous captives’ eyes are ruined to blindness. They can no longer see the world around them or the land they live on. Their feet are burned, which also symbolically ruins the lifestyle of nomadic peoples: they are now deprived of the freedom to roam without subjugation and obedience to the Empire. But again, it is not particularly insightful to reap the suffering of people of colour on-screen when they are unnamed characters. In this film, they are reduced in the gaze of the Magistrate, their coloniser, as he questions his own allegiance to the Empire.

The inadequate handling of these narrative features distracts from the main cinematic elements of the film. No matter how well the cinematography serves the desert and mountains, or how intricate the costume design, the film’s analysis of colonialism feels strange amidst the realities of our modern discourse. It misses the mark on what kind of stories are needed today to discuss issues and repercussions of colonial regimes. Those in power have written their own history, and this film reinforces these narratives instead of directly confronting them.

Comparatively, Waiting for the Barbarians‘ attempt at commentary leaves audiences underwhelmed. The film clearly wants to be subversive—are the colonisers not the barbarians for their violence?—yet falls flat. The creative tools used to explore these ideas are employed awkwardly, making the stylistic and cinematic elements empty and the overall movie a drag. Whilst empire nostalgia is insidiously prevalent in European nations, I’m not sure to what audience this movie is meant to appeal.

Waiting for the Barbarians has had select showings at film festivals worldwide. A wide release date is not yet confirmed. Check out a sneak peek below:

Editor KC Wingert reviews Chinonye Chukwu’s powerful debut.

With her sophomore feature Clemency, writer-director Chinonye Chukwu made history as the first black woman to win the Grand Jury prize at Sundance—and in its turn at the London Film Festival, the film proves to overseas viewers to be more than worthy of its acclaim. A stunning exploration of the American death penalty, Clemency is easily one of the most beautifully-told stories and most socially important films of the last decade.

Alfre Woodard leads the cast as Bernadine Williams, a career-driven prison warden who has overseen 12 executions over the course of her tenure. A harrowing opening sequence portraying the execution of convict Victor Jimenez illustrates for viewers the emotional toll that witnessing a man’s death can have on a person. The tension of the scene is palpable, and we see the effects of this in Bernadine’s personal life. She struggles to sleep at night and drinks heavily to cope. Her marriage to her husband Jonathan (Wendell Pierce) struggles as Bernadine reckons with the horrors to which she bears witness; her husband cannot understand the way her job affects her. While teacher Jonathan educates the next generation and gives them hope of a bright future, Bernadine is complicit in stealing the future away from countless men. She is not a sadist, but she is forced by the nature of her profession to carry out sadistic practices—and in the interest of appearing professional as a black woman in a position of power, she must do so unsentimentally. But her robotic demeanor is not necessarily a reflection of her true feelings toward the practice of execution, and viewers follow Bernadine as she struggles to mask her own humanity with professionalism.

Though the film explores Bernadine’s character most thoroughly, viewers are also given detailed glimpses of the emotional states of everyone involved in these executions, from the prison officers, to the prison chaplain, to the men on death row themselves. Aldis Hodge gives an incredibly moving performance as Anthony Woods, a prisoner awaiting execution who may be innocent of the murder of which he was convicted fourteen years ago. We see him slip between moments of desolation and glimmers of hope as he navigates the existential dread of being sentenced to death for a crime he maintains he did not commit and as he awaits any news on the painstakingly bureaucratic decision on his appeal, which determines whether he lives or dies. Hodge’s performance is complicated, heartbreaking, and totally affective. When Anthony feels hope, we feel hope; when he despairs, so do we.

Similarly, Richard Schiff gives a nuanced performance as Anthony’s lawyer Marty, a man whose career has been dedicated to appealing the death penalty and to fighting for clemency on behalf of his clients. Marty, having worked on such cases for 30 years, is downtrodden, resigned, and ready to retire. A man who was once passionate about the cause, Marty is tasked with finding hope and keeping spirits high for Anthony despite the almost futile odds of winning. In a visit to his client, he looks thoughtfully on as demonstrators outside the prison shout their support for Anthony, not as a man who is inspired by their words, but as a man who fears their protestations may be in vain. In a glum conversation with Bernadette, Marty poignantly explains the overwhelming stakes of being a death row inmate’s lawyer:  “When I win, my client gets to not die.”

This film is disturbing and horrifying, to be sure, but in the way that 12 Years A Slave is. The doleful tone of Clemency is real—it reflects the experiences of people whose lives are affected by the inhumanity of the death penalty. It does not rely on gore and jump scares to disturb its viewers; rather, it forces viewers to confront the undignified reality of state-sanctioned murder. It is one thing to acknowledge the horrors of the world, to want to learn from tragedy and strive for betterness. But it is another thing entirely—a wholly more affective experience—to witness these horrors brought to life before your eyes. For this reason, Clemency should be required viewing for Americans at least, and for anyone who thinks they have an opinion on the death penalty.

Find Clemency in theatres this December and check out the trailer below:

KC Wingert reviews the buzzed-about dark comedy at LFF 2019. 

With her debut feature Lucky Grandma, a film about an elderly Chinese-American woman with a rebellious streak, writer-director Sasie Sealy contributes equal parts humour and suspense to this year’s London Film Festival. Tsai Chin plays the titular role of Grandma Wong, a gruff, chain-smoking loner whose expressionless indifference and grumpy demeanour has led me to dub her the Clint Eastwood of Grandmas. Grandma Wong lives alone in the small, outdated Chinatown apartment she and her late husband once shared. Though her daily schedule is monotonous—practising tai chi, lighting incense for her in-home Buddhist altar, evading her adult son’s requests that she move in with him and his family—Grandma Wong receives a reinvigorating jolt of excitement while visiting a fortune teller, a sequence which visually references the opening tarot scene of Agnès Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7. The fortune teller presents to Grandma Wong a series of cards written in Chinese script and tells the old woman that she will have an incredible amount of luck on October 28^th (admittedly a very different fate than the one predicted for Cleo).

With fortune on her side, Grandma Wong empties her bank account on the 28^th and hops on a Chinatown bus headed straight to the casino. At first, it seems like the stars really have aligned for her; she beats incredible odds and wins at craps and roulette so many times that her tokens double, then triple, and then quadruple. Her lucky streak comes to an end eventually, though, and she returns to the Chinatown bus downtrodden, having lost all her savings in one bet.

Grandma Wong’s good luck seems to take a different form, however, when money literally falls into her lap on the bus ride home. The man in the seat next to her suddenly dies of a heart attack while everyone else on the bus is asleep. When the bus hits a bump and a duffel bag filled with money falls from the luggage carriers overhead, Grandma Wong realises that her deceased seatmate is in fact a gang member transporting money for the Red Dragon gang. Already panicked about her casino losses, Grandma Wong absconds with the money, inadvertently placing herself at the centre of a violent gang conflict over the cash.

The strength of this film is not necessarily the narrative, which at times feels muddled and confusing amidst its portrayal of New York gang politics and reaches a hasty conclusion in its third act. Rather, Lucky Grandma’s greatest asset is its characters, all fully realized through the little details which make up each person’s unique and entertaining personality. Grandma Wong’s lanky grandson David, for example, may play a relatively small role in the film. However, in the approximately 10 total minutes of screen time he has, viewers learn that he is a one half of a dance duo, making goofy, low-quality hip-hop music videos in his grandmother’s apartment with his chubby, twerk-happy friend Nomi. This small, endearing personality detail raises the emotional stakes later in the film when the Red Dragons demand Grandma Wong pay a ransom to spare David’s life. The same goes for the character Big Pong (Hsiao-Yuan Ha), the man Grandma Wong hires as a bodyguard after dopey Red Dragon gangsters Pock-Mark (Woody Fu) and Little Handsome (Michael Tow) show up at her apartment. Big Pong first appears to be quiet and intimidating, but viewers will find a tender sweetness in his character when he talks about being a vegetarian, describes the girl he loves who still lives in China, and scolds Grandma Wong’s grumpy neighbour for disrespecting an elder.

The main figures in any film are only as strong as the actors who play them, and the cast of Lucky Grandma brings these characters to life with quirk and charm. As the socially isolated Grandma Wong, Tsai Chin is often the only actor onscreen. The character requires an actor who can subtly convey large emotions with her facial expressions and body language, and Tsai Chin is more than fit for the challenge. She brings laughs just by widening her eyes, furrowing her brow, or turning her head—no dialogue required. As gangster hitman Little Handsome, actor Michael Tow somehow manages to be simultaneously terrifying and hilarious, sending chills down one’s spine with his threatening stare one moment and highlighting his character’s sheer absurdity with a goofy smile in the next. The talent in this cast alone could dispel any excuses Hollywood may make for whitewashing Asian or Asian-American roles (I’m looking at you, Scarlett Johansson).

Though it is not a life-changing or particularly profound film, Lucky Grandma is sure to make viewers chuckle heartily, scoot to the edge of their seats in suspense, and stare in wonderment at each creatively-framed shot. The plot leaves room for confusion and questions, but the dramatic achievements of the cast alone are enough to make this film a success among audiences. The film deftly combines humorous and whimsical moments with darker undertones. Considering the film centres on the identity crisis of an elderly Chinese-American woman—a demographic I can safely say is sorely underrepresented in American film—Lucky Grandma is a breath of fresh air and a new perspective in the comedy genre.

Lucky Grandma is still showing in select cinemas. Check out what influenced the film below:

Editor KC Wingert reviews our first film from BFI LFF 2019.

Warning: this review contains spoilers. 

Making its UK premiere at LFF, The Peanut Butter Falcon is a delightful dramedy from collaborators Tyler Nilsen and Michael Schwartz, whose writing recalls the humor and delight of American novelist Mark Twain and whose comical directorial style rivals the Coen Brothers for their quirky contribution to modern American folklore.

The first feature-length narrative from the filmmaking duo, The Peanut Butter Falcon tells the story of Zak (Zack Gottsagen), a young man with Down’s syndrome placed in  a nursing home after his family forfeits him to the state. Despite friendships with the elderly residents of his home and a close relationship to his direct caretaker Eleanor (Dakota Johnson), Zak feels imprisoned. He wants to explore the world before he gets too old, and his only respite from his monotonous life is his fantasy of becoming a professional wrestler under the tutelage of his hero Saltwater Redneck (Thomas Haden Church). He cleverly configures numerous madcap escape schemes with the help of his older roommate Carl (Bruce Dern), which provide many laugh-out-loud moments within the first 20 minutes. But The Peanut Butter Falcon is not all silliness—rather, it becomes a more tender film when, in one of his late-night escape attempts, an underwear-clad Zak stows away on a boat stolen by the churlish Tyler (Shia LaBeouf) as he skips town.

Stuck with a differently-abled stranger wearing nothing but his underwear, Tyler is at first disgruntled. LaBeouf masterfully plays this character as a surly loner whose gruff exterior slowly chips away as he befriends and aides Zak on a journey to the Saltwater Redneck’s wrestling school. Tyler, a sort of frontiersman/survivalist who seems to know how to navigate the rugged Outer Banks but can’t seem to stay out of trouble, is on the run from two fishermen from whom he stole crab traps and whose equipment he burned in retaliation for jumping him.

Tyler, we find out, has lost his brother—and blames himself for the tragic death. But as he grows closer to fellow misfit Zak, he finds fraternity in his relationship to his lovably idiosyncratic companion. Watching LaBeouf and Gottsagen onscreen together is an absolute delight; their palpable chemistry creates an incredible friendship onscreen. It is satisfying to see the goofy LaBeouf act without condescension alongside a young man with Down’s syndrome, especially in a story that is less about “overcoming” a disability and more about embracing the challenges and joys of understanding and loving someone with Down’s. As for Gottsagen, his empowering performance highlights the humour and skill so many people with Down’s syndrome possess while reminding viewers that having a disability does not always mean a person is helpless.

Overall, The Peanut Butter Falcon easily interweaves humour with heartbreak, moments of joy with pangs of dolour. It feels much like the tall tales of Twain’s Americana, with magical moments punctuating the narrative into a romantic frontier myth akin to those which make up much of American folklore. Themes of self-realisation and cleansing give the characters of The Peanut Butter Falcon beautiful, heartwarming redemption arcs which will leave viewers euphoric. Ending on a slightly uncertain (but happy!) note, this expertly-crafted story from Nilsen and Schwartz reminds viewers that one’s story isn’t over ‘til it’s over, and that there is always room in life for rebirth, restoration, and growth.

The Peanut Butter Falcon will be screening at the BFI London Film Festival on 3 October, 4 October, and 11 October 2019. Tickets are available to purchase on the LFF website. Check out the trailer below: