It’s festival season! The FilmSoc blog is covering the 75th Venice International Film Festival (29 August – 8 September), diving into the myriad of films and events on offer to deliver reviews.

Milo Garner reviews Shinya Tsukamoto’s Edo-period samurai feature. 

In Japan, the B-movie still thrives. Cheaply (and quickly) produced films have long had a market there in a lively direct-to-DVD scene (which does not necessarily suggest low quality as in the West), and many directors of these films also work theatrically, resulting in a wide range of cinematic output. Takashi Miike is the most recognisable figure of this grouping, an incredibly prolific director whose work ranges from the low-budget exploitation Dead & Alive trilogy to a Hollywood-friendly remake of 13 Assassins. But most pertinent to Shinya Tsukamoto’s latest is his 2017 feature Blade of the Immortal, a Jidaigeki manga adaptation with an emphasis on killing, the unkillable, and gore. Killing, as the name might suggest, engages with each of these themes in its own, contrary, manner.

Most directly, the title refers to Sosuke Ikematsu’s samurai, who finds himself unable to kill, despite his great ability in the art of swordplay. This might seem a basic narrative contrivance for the film, but it has a surprising thematic depth. Killing is set deep in Japan’s Edo period, the century and a half following the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600. During this period, the Tokugawa Shogunate established a firm grip over Japan, leading to an unprecedented period of peace. For a country dominated by a military class, this left great questions over their utility and purpose. For some, such as the famous Miyamoto Musashi, this peace permitted time to master the art of swordplay in a more philosophical sense, and also permitted a development of ideas pertaining to honourable conduct amongst the warrior class. Musashi reportedly fought in six battles, but many of his admirers would have fought in none. The act of killing had become detached from the role of the warrior, and in Killing Tsukamoto evidences the impotence of a warrior class who is so unused to war.

Impotence is the word for it, too. Tsukamoto parallels Ikematsu’s inability to kill with his sexual failings. He appears to be a chronic masturbator, able to simulate sex much as he can simulate combat, but incapable of the deed itself, despite a present (and seemingly willing) participant. The film’s form does not shy away from presenting this parallel bluntly: shots of Ikematsu gripping his sword phallically abound; he has a lust for death but is incapable of performing. Rarely have sex and death been paired so obscenely, though often bedfellows.

This idea is built around a narrative that constantly teases something Tsukamoto knows he will not provide. The initial setup suggests a sort of Seven Samurai type scenario, in which one samurai seeks to build a team of experts who are then trapped in a village besieged by thugs. Ikematsu confronts these neer-do-wells, but is so frightened of the idea of killing that he all but befriends them, awkwardly laughing at their jokes, promising the villagers that they aren’t so bad. When his new master suggests he set off on the road to Edo, he suddenly falls ill – a psychosomatic case no doubt. This is an intensely revisionist vision of the ronin, one emasculated in every sense.

Said revisionism feeds through into the film’s form. Its rough handheld becomes an almost indecipherable mess of cuts during fight scenes (that isn’t an entirely good thing), and otherwise makes use of ample crossfades and jerky movement. Some of this style is dictated by necessity – the day-for-night scenes do not appear to be artistically motivated – but the overwhelming aesthetic is one similar to Miike’s low-budget formal mania: equal parts questionable and absorbing, particularly a Sanjuro style blood-explosion from near the film’s end. This is met with an excellent ambient soundtrack from Chu Ishikawa (which will sadly be his last), one that grounds the often-ridiculous content with a sense of reflective seriousness. I wouldn’t say this is a particularly reflective film overall – it has far too much fun for that – but it is undeniable that there is a tonal element of that kind lurking underneath. Also undeniable is that Killing makes for a very entertaining eighty minutes, a creaky but curious film that shows far more than it says.

6/10

Killing (斬、) had its premiere at Venice Film Festival. It has yet to acquire a UK release date. Check out its trailer below:

It’s festival season! The FilmSoc blog is covering the 75th Venice International Film Festival (29 August – 8 September), diving into the myriad of films and events on offer to deliver reviews.

Milo Garner reviews David Oelhoffen’s newest crime thriller.

Well if it was any other man, I’d put him straight away
But when it’s your brother sometimes you look the other way

In a genre of heartbreakers, there are few country songs that seep tragedy like Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Highway Patrolman’. Two brothers who have fallen on opposite sides of the law, compelled by their natures to clash and clash, until they can clash no more. It isn’t just the friend-made-foe convention that makes it such an effectual story, but rather the moral quandaries it implies. The lines that must be crossed in the name of fraternity, the unsure grey between individual honour and wider ethical belief. It was Dante who decided that treachery served as the road to hell’s deepest circle, but the question remains: treachery to whom? The law, or kin? It is around that question Close Enemies finds its drama.

Oelhoffen’s crime thriller might not concern brothers, but it comes close enough by centering on old friends, at one point fellow criminals, one now reformed. They are linked not just by their past but their material condition – both are born of immigrant families, and both find themselves alienated for this fact. Manuel (Matthias Schoenaerts) laughs at a joke about Arabs begging on the street – the French are very giving if you are asking for money to go back home. Driss (Reda Kateb)  mentions in passing that only while working in narcotics can his face be an advantage rather than the opposite. That these themes are held at some distance is to the film’s benefit, and an example of Oelhoffen’s smart restraint – this is not a film about race in France so much as one that includes such issues in a wider context. It does not need to grandstand the facts; that they make up an organic part of the film’s environment is enough.

Another sharp decision is in the presentation of Manuel and Driss’ relationship to begin with. It is not exposited in lengthy dialogue, nor shown in flashback or prologue, nor discussed in serious detail. It only becomes evident after the film has already established its momentum, and even then only across a few lines and moments. A scene in which Driss glances over old photographs of the pair might cross this line, but I feel this is simply to ensure that everyone is on the same page. It is the sort of dynamic that can easily find itself overwrought – not so here. This extends to their shared scenes, in which the potential melodrama of suddenly invoking their old friendship is always avoided. Their bond is implicit, and feels all the more real for this fact; it does not need to be shouted or repeated.

But besides this relationship, the film is otherwise very much plot-driven. It moves at a consistent pace, never short on new revelations or developments to further it ahead. It is largely conventional in its series of betrayals and twists, but then this is a film that thrives in convention. A well-made genre picture should not be discarded for that fact – especially one so ably crafted as this. The camera is loose and active, handheld but always clear enough for the action. This is matched with the editing, which prefers extended shots to cutting in the manner of a similar Hollywood project. This permits an intimate tension at times, the diegesis trapped with its protagonist as he is stalked through the projects. Threats often appear offscreen, some never clarified; gunshots from afar are a recurring motif of this kind. Again, not an original innovation, but an effective example of a well-worn mould.

That would be an apt description for the film taken together, particularly as it reaches its pathos-soaked conclusion. All the beats are hit, but with consummate ability. It doesn’t ever threaten to be anything more than a simple police procedural, and really it doesn’t need to be. This is effective entertainment that justifies its context and content enough to carry a genuine weight and impact. Expect an American remake somewhere down the line.

6/10

Close Enemies (Frères ennemis) had its premiere at Venice Film Festival. It has yet to acquire a UK release date. Check out its trailer below:

It’s festival season! The FilmSoc blog is covering the 75th Venice International Film Festival (29 August – 8 September), diving into the myriad of films and events on offer to deliver reviews.

Milo Garner reviews Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s upcoming drama. 

“Von Donnersmarck: two features, never more.”

For a while this was one of the great tragedies of modern German cinema, the acclaimed director of The Lives of Others dropping off the cinematic map after completion of his poorly-received (though relatively successful) sophomore effort. Eight years later he returns with a grand and sweeping narrative about art, love, and Nazis. With an estimated $20 million budget, it is also amongst Germany’s most expensive productions, and that much is clear.

In approaching this three-hour behemoth, however, I detect an uneven split. There is the more substantial film, one that concerns the process of artistic creation, its meanings and origins, set around an artist living in East and West Germany during the Cold War. Then is another, a melodrama about love and eugenics in the GDR, an exaggerated and far less engaging subplot that consumes most of the film’s first half. It is in this melodrama that many of the film’s issues come to the fore, the first and most essential being its appearance. While the cinematography is technically well executed, it is the production design that must be questioned. Everything has a sheen, a brightness and cleanliness. It almost reflects the romantic cinema of the thirties and forties, obsessed with beautifying everything and everyone. Kurt (Tom Schilling) might paint all day and night in one scene, but God forbid his perfect hair might fall out of place, or his fresh face be besmirched by some blemish. And Ellie (Paula Beer) may age more than a decade by the film’s close, but let that not show on her faultless body, always caught in a warm and welcoming light. For a film so caught up with the concept of truth, it seems perhaps ironic that it presents a visual aesthetic so unreal.

This unreality follows into this subplot’s villain, too. Professor Seeband (Sebastian Koch), an ex-Nazi eugenicist, becomes the arch-evil, the father-in-law from hell. Not only is he a Nazi (the skull on his cap emphasised like in that Mitchell and Webb skit), but he’s a philanderer, prickly in attitude, and a general bastard all round. His character cannot be compelling because he is entirely contrived, and nothing about him is at all refined or rounded. It is possible for a Nazi to be human even if they are still despicable –  this kind of moral depth might have given the film something to grasp on in this extended section. Instead we are left with a ruefully predictable romance, one whose dramatic ironies veer increasingly in the direction of soap opera. It is competently, if not excellently made and always watchable. But at once, disappointing.

While the sections focused on art must still endure the rather ironic aesthetic qualities of the film, they are a little more developed in narrative, and for the better. The central idea is an artist finding his voice, caught between extremes. The first of these is in the Soviet clench of East Germany, where limitations are obvious. He is trapped in the genre of social realism, which prioritizes immediate and obvious meaning to the more indulgent habits of artists. This is art for the people, a populism of sorts, one that sees bourgeois in the abstract. Von Donnersmarck is clear to reflect this belief against Nazi rejection of degenerate art, for much the same reasoning.

Kurt then emigrates to West Germany, but here faces a foe less obvious than Soviet artistic tastes, that being a lack of substance altogether. Instead, it is necessary to produce something garish and loud, new and outspoken. A total freeform in which it is easy to lose oneself, as Kurt almost does. He must discover his own style, and what it means to have a style at all. This arc functions, but it functions as any might predict. Again, for all its artistic pretentions in content, the film’s form is deeply conventional, and perhaps loses a sense of its subject in being so. At Eternity’s Gate, while perhaps not so pristinely crafted as Never Look Away, achieves its own goal of explicating the artistic process far better in its attempt to embody it. We see as Van Gogh sees, and understand the world as he does fully. While von Donnersmarck occasionally experiments with point of view shots, this is largely a film from the objective eye. Everything is as it seems.

I am left at a crossroads with Never Look Away. It is generally engaging and always well crafted, but at once lacking in direct, evocative feeling. It hits every beat, but as the (surprisingly smooth) run-length trundles on, emotional investment always seems out of reach. The acting is generally up to standard, at least half of the music is great (with the other half being uncharacteristically bland for Max Richter), and it’s difficult to fault von Donnersmarck’s understanding of space or camera placement. But the result is spectacle that fails to move.

5/10

Never Look Away (Werk ohne Autor) had its premiere at Venice Film Festival. It has yet to acquire a UK release date. Check out its German trailer below:

It’s festival season! The FilmSoc blog is covering the 75th Venice International Film Festival (29 August – 8 September), diving into the myriad of films and events on offer to deliver reviews.

Milo Garner reviews Kazakh director Emir Baigazin’s latest feature. 

The River (Ozen) is a film split into three. It starts as a soothing and meditative piece on family in isolation, continues into a trite analysis of technology and its discontents, before concluding with a striking consideration of hierarchy and power. As might be expected, these three sections are linked by the eponymous river, a device that takes on new metaphorical meanings as the film drifts by. It is in many ways a flawed work, inconsistent and naïve, and yet is at once engrossing, even enchanting.

The first of the film’s segments introduces its characters, primarily the five brothers who will drive its plot. They are led by the eldest, Aslan, a solemn boy who seems alienated by this position of supposed authority. Their father appears in frame only occasionally, generally as a disciplinary figure. They grow restless, and the eldest becomes unsure of himself. But they are in the middle of a wide emptiness – modern civilisation would appear absent entirely if not for their father’s motorbike. As such they survive in their own way. Emir Baigazin’s camera focuses on the boys at play, the boys at work. As they wander the wilderness, astounding compositions portrays the Kazakh wastes as rarely seen, yellow rocks against the cutting blue sky. These shots are slow, and generally do not imply direction, but resist being ponderous. Instead they are immersive, fragile snapshots of a world so far removed. The introduction of the river changes this feeling a little, suggesting a tension. Against the stillness of frame its fast current becomes electric. Dangerous. The boys are taken in by its lure, but resist its rushing course. It seems as though the river represents a certainty in life, a constant and unchanging motion. But also a pleasure, the likes of which the boys hadn’t yet experienced.

Then begins the second, with the arrival of Kanat, a boy from the city. The tone immediately changes. This young cousin zips around on a segway and dressed in a reflective silver hoodie. He holds in his hands a tablet that plays obnoxiously loud 8-bit music, presumably from what is supposed to be a video game. Kanat is a caricature, and apparently a caricature from a different decade. He is the modern world, the opposition to the hills and crags and lonely peaks that have so far been established. He is also a vastly uninteresting addition to the film. We watch as his tablet slowly corrupts all but the eldest of the brothers. They begin to fight over the game, as if they hadn’t before. They begin to masturbate, as if they hadn’t before. They begin to become greedy and commodified, something they had also, apparently, been protected from. I’m not suggesting that technology has no real impact on the world, so much as that the impact displayed here is of a totally naïve kind. Tech rarely creates these behaviours, but it might exacerbate them – there is no sense of Baigazin acknowledging this fact, instead presenting Kanat’s bag of tricks as the serpent of Eden. Not so serious as that, I would add, nor quite so equivocal, but close. Now the river is technology, a treacherous force that enraptures those who come near – it can be treaded so long, before taking you under.

Suddenly Kanat disappears, and Baigazin reveals his final hand. The eldest son takes responsibility for the disappearance but forces a silence on the others by revealing the secrets of each in turn. As a result, each of his brothers begin to treat him as an authority figure, informing on the others, obeying his ever-harsher word. His father says that he has become a man, but it seems rather a channelling of frustration after Kanat had stolen his spotlight. A tension emerges that is never fully resolved, but the sudden change in dynamic works nonetheless, a sort of coming of age, and one that benefits greatly from the edging out of Kanat’s character. By the film’s conclusion a certain fraternity is achieved, and the river changes again. Now it appears a sort of catharsis, a symbol of closeness and brotherhood. It flows together, as one. Peace has returned to the plain.

6/10

The River had its premiere at Venice Film Festival on September 3rd, 2018. It has yet to acquire a UK release date. Check out its trailer below:

It’s festival season! The FilmSoc blog is covering the 75th Venice International Film Festival (29 August – 8 September), diving into the myriad of films and events on offer to deliver reviews.

Milo Garner reviews Zhang Yimou’s newest visually-captivating wuxia epic. 

Grey is a dull colour. It connotes the industrial and the ascetic, a lack of character and concrete emptiness. It is rarely striking, instead a kind of paste, a middle-ground between dark and light but never so stark as either. A grey day is miserable and uninteresting. A grey tone suggests a slowness, or an emotionlessness, or a bureaucracy. The modernist cinema of Antonioni or the realist cinema of the British kitchen sink directors often relied on grey to create mood, but the mood was ever bleak, ever dour. Black and white cinema tends to rely on contrast to contradict a greyness; they called it the silver screen to avoid that dusky alternative. But Zhang Yimou, master of the vivid and bright, has crafted a grey film. Every element of the production design sits between charcoal and white smoke; clothing, scenery, weaponry, and décor. A real-world desaturation, mired in constant rainfall. This is far from the vivacious crimson of Raise the Red Lantern and the lush greens and blues of Hero, and yet equally arresting. Zhang’s artistry is incredible in its detail, every element in step with the next – before the film has even begun he has exhibited one of his crucial cinematic talents: the ability to create a world most unlike our own, grant it an internal consistency, and inhabit it with some myth or legend of his own devising.

This colouring, or decolouring as it might be considered, threads into this legend. Zhang imagines a world where the shadow and light of Ying and Yang have merged, where motivations and intentions become unclear, loyalty and betrayal overlap, where masks fall, then fall again. It opens in the royal court of Pei, a kingdom that has been humiliated and supplicated by the neighbouring Yang. The city of Jing had been lost, but the king now seems weary and unwilling to take it back. He prefers a delicate peace, ensured by an uneven alliance with their once-enemy. In this fractious court is Commander Yu, a jingoistic war hero who seeks to face General Yang in single combat and regain Jing in his victory. A straightforward arc, only that this is not the real Commander Yu, but his ‘shadow’. The actual Yu resides hidden behind the court’s walls, sick and dying; he has sent a double to take his place, his wife supporting him in this scheme.

Already, a duplicity begins to emerge, a maze of motivations intertangling beneath a more typical wuxia story. As has become especially prominent in recent cinema – and especially at Venice, between The Other Side of the Wind, Vox Lux, American Dharma, and Sunset – Shadow (影) exists in a marsh of fiction, but a fiction that eventually consumes truth, twists it into a new thing. Yu’s double slowly begins to inhabit the original’s role and position, replicating his actions and his emotions. Yu’s wife becomes unsure of herself, lost between the real Yu and a double that more accurately represents the man she once loved. The film ends at the confluence of these anxieties, and while it becomes a little convoluted it also permits a degree of curiosity that the rest of the film – entertaining though it is – generally resists.

This entertainment is again wrought from Zhang’s absolute command of craft. He imbues his fight scenes with an element of grace that only the very best of wuxia cinema can achieve: his use of slow motion is essential, punctuating the rhythm of a battle and permitting a lingering eye on the physical beauty there displayed. The choreography is more like dance than what passes for combat in most western cinema, intricately and beautifully performed; bodies pushed to their physical limit, witnessed in the soak of a rainstorm. This is then accentuated in typical style, through wirework and CGI, though Zhang restrains himself a little in these areas, particularly against his more recent filmography. Wires are used to emphasise jumps but not to create the mythic duels of Hero, preferring a (relatively) more grounded approach. CGI, too, is held back by set pieces that are a little more restrained. The hail of arrows or gust of leaves that look so plastic in Hero are absent here. The exception is a landslide-type set piece of such brilliant audacity that it is difficult to critique in any technical sense – even describing it would be an indecipherable folly.

These battle scenes are also imbued with more precise filmic detail. The editing builds tension through effective crosscutting, one moment coupling a musical performance to two simultaneous duels, a kinetic camera exploring each of these scenarios with vigour in turn. The music itself is also excellent, using the jolting chords of a guzheng and guqin to pace both the quieter political scenes and the raucous battle. The wider soundtrack has a similar impact, with spluttering arterial spurts and generic weapon swooshes providing an aural impact to the choreography in motion, which is further enlivened by the ceaseless pelting of rain. The sum of all this is not something that resembles reality, but it is in this unreality that wuxia and Zhang best operate. This is given a new dimension by the film’s own thematic direction, in which everything seems to be an imitation or contradiction of something else.

It is a little unfortunate that much like Hero, Shadow must also falter under its narrative. These characters might be legendary tropes, but they, and many of their stories, still feel contrived. Events must take place for the story to develop, rather than events that take place because of the developing story. There are also a few too many ‘gotcha’ moments, the kind of expositionary explanations offered by a victorious schemer after he has successfully fooled his mark. Instead of declaring and explaining exactly what they know, how they knew it, and why they acted on that information in the way that they did, characters could instead simply act in a way that makes all those facts implicit. For the obvious spy in the court to be outed as an obvious spy does not then need a narration on the exact uses of a spy who is obvious, to cite one example.

But for its deficiencies in writing, Zhang still presents and exceptional visual experience. His world is built with such consummate talent, his fight scenes choreographed with a rare eye, his set pieces so outrageous they become surreal. Certainly not Zhang’s best or most graceful film, but another solid entry to his enviable canon.

7/10

Shadow will have its UK premiere at the BFI London Film Festival. Check out its trailer below:

It’s festival season! The FilmSoc blog is covering the 75th Venice International Film Festival (29 August – 8 September), diving into the myriad of films and events on offer to deliver reviews.

Milo Garner takes a look at Julian Schnabel’s ode to Van Gogh. 

It has a name like an Emily Dickinson poem, and At Eternity’s Gate covers much the same territory. Following Van Gogh at the end of his life, it muses on the beauty of nature, on loneliness and alienation, and on the great beyond. It is fashioned much like the work of Terrence Malick, featuring a flowing camera drifting about forests and fields, characters circling each other as they speak in vagaries, and the occasional voiceover linking together an elliptical cut, set to leap ahead at any moment or fade to a sudden black. It is most unlike last year’s Loving Vincent, a film that covered a similar ground (albeit from the reverse angle). That film, while astounding in its making, is flat and simple in script – a work of fine artistry, but mediocre art. At Eternity’s Gate might be the opposite, always artistic, but perhaps a little looser at the seams.

It flourishes best when set in the nature Van Gogh so loved. The colours saturate, the film stock grows grainy, the camera peers up and through the trees. In these moments we are not told that Van Gogh loves nature: we feel it. Set to French impressionism or minimalist piano, we follow him into the wilds. The camera rushes through the yellows and greens, enjoying every moment. Shots from Van Gogh’s point of view are altered further, with the lower half of the screen defocused. This represents his manner of seeing the world, a certain distortion, a blurriness that might be detected in his landscapes. By no means an effect meant to replicate his work, it is instead a suggestion of subjectivity, a leaning toward the supposition that we all glimpse the same nature in different ways. These moments of happiness seem almost unusual, with the image of Van Gogh so often associated with the mood of his drearier works (the titular oil painting especially). Cinematically, said mood also prevails: Loving Vincent viewed the man in a sombre retrospect, and Maurice Pialat’s 1991 biopic also saw little room for levity. This may not be a happy film, but it is not one bereft of happiness. It does not lose yellow for blue.

Slightly less accomplished are the scenes structured around dialogue. These differ formally in their more restrained nature, and will often be conceptually focused, with Van Gogh explicating some belief or other and being fenced against by an interlocutor of some kind. Most often this will be Gaugin, who initially rejects Van Gogh’s obsession with painting the real and the seen. He prefers painting from the mind, abstract, indoors. Van Gogh’s argument is that painting the scenery is just as internal, as it is less the trees of France that he paints than the trees of his mind’s eye, different from any other. These conversations are often interesting, but do occasionally risk straying into the academic. It seems almost ironic that Schnabel frames these lengthy discussions about feeling over thinking when he has already evidenced his ability to do so through visual prowess alone – a sense of redundancy drips into shot. This is made worse by the occasional habit of repeating dialogue – though that is in part a representation of Van Gogh’s suffering mind – as a line that, said once, might sound true or wise risks pretentiousness when echoed; and pretentiousness is a fate this film narrowly skirts at some points.

But then the film will grasp back with something more physical, something direct. Van Gogh’s struggles with reality are portrayed viscerally through the camera, often tilting and panning as if to somehow understand better its subject. Dafoe’s performance is expectedly impressive, managing to capture both the spark of genius and the blaze of discomfort at once; he seems always to be teetering, bar when among the trees. His cognisant discussion with a priest best fulfils this feeling, with his insights on life and art falling disturbingly close to his personal comparisons with Jesus; in this conversation he seems both to drift in and out of lucidity, aware of his madness in a way madmen are not supposed to be.

If beset occasionally by structural shakiness, At Eternity’s Gate is not a film obsessed with plotting or pacing. It prefers to drift, to glance at branches and listen to the impossible music on the wind. It understands Van Gogh and his paintings – better are they experienced in three dimensions than Loving Vincent’s two – and displays his person through snapshots of his final days. Small insights and revelations often avoid formative moments altogether or approach them indirectly. It is a film of visual beauty, a grasp to understand a great artist on his own terms, rather than breaking down his character and analysing the pieces. It is here that it differs most from Loving Vincent, a film that sought to present Van Gogh as a mystery to be solved, puzzle pieces that belong together. There we look at him, here we look as him.

8/10

At Eternity’s Gate had its world premiere at Venice Film Festival on September 3rd, 2018. It has yet to acquire a UK release date. Check out its trailer below:

It’s festival season! The FilmSoc blog is covering the 75th Venice International Film Festival (29 August – 8 September), diving into the myriad of films and events on offer to deliver reviews.

Milo Garner reviews Brady Corbet’s extravagant exploration of stardom. 

Vox Lux is a grandiose film. Its relatively prosaic story is elevated to ludicrous heights by orchestral flourishes, associative montage, and three acts on title cards. Even the title is soaked in prestige, the Latin for ‘voice’ and ‘light’. The protagonist (Natalie Portman) is named Celeste – heavenly. Accusations of artifice might seem appropriate, and they are. Corbet thrives in it, and more, has made a film about artifice. The pop music centre of Vox Lux is not incidental, but rather its direct subject. A Star Is Born took on a similar subject, and the result was tasteless – an empty shell, comment replaced by sentiment. Corbet, however, unpacks fame and those caught in its beam, insight hid between each provocative flash.

The film opens in 1999, in a manner that might be unexpected for a rise-and-fall music film – a school shooting. The scene initially serves as a kind of origin story for its Miley Cyrus type protagonist, but becomes far more incisive as the film goes on. The shooter introduces himself as he enters the classroom, and then does so again. His act requires exposure – he must be known. Without the fame, infame, whatever it might be known as, everything he has done becomes nothing. And it is a circular pattern – the media stokes interest in heinous acts to generate attention and profit, leading others to follow the same path. It is little different to pop stardom, Corbet supposes, a feedback loop of attention for which genuine substance becomes an afterthought.

This is taken further in a new event that instigates the second act: a terrorist attack using iconography taken from a Celeste music video. It is supposed that this is an act of sheer provocation, using the image of an immodest woman to represent all that the perpetrators hate about the West. But Celeste realises it is less the exact meaning of the masks than that they provoke a reaction. The modern world prizes that reaction above all, and for terrorists, just like school shooters or pop stars, that is their power. The power of headlines, the power of being listened to, even if they have nothing of interest to say. What the terrorists wanted or stood for is left oblique, much for this reason. This is pop music meets post-truth; it doesn’t matter what is said, or even how it is said, only that people know who said it, and loudly.

Corbet builds these themes organically within a slightly more conventional narrative arc, though presented with fiery élan. Celeste’s fall from innocent child to drugged-out has-been functions in that it rejects the sort of naivety that plagues the likes of A Star Is Born. As much as Celeste initially presents herself to be incorrupt, she has from the very start a leaning toward the illicit. Fame exaggerates and enables this tendency, but does not create it. The sheer nonsense of the star system is then grounded by the droll narration of Willem Dafoe, who presents what is a very real scenario as some kind of twisted fairy tale, completed with a literal deal with the devil. But that is what makes the film so very obscene – it is entirely believable, a grand version of a very familiar reality. It is this conscious self-importance that leads to the film’s third act, which captures a Celeste concert in all its vainglory. Her washed-out and tired appearance is replaced by glitter and performance, dance and music. Image is everything, and here we are given a glimpse. Whatever truth that lay before is forgone in an instant, flashing artifice in its place. This is the reality people want to see.

Corbet knows this well, and so injects his own film with a similar flair. Most of the credits are placed at the front of the film, in an extended retro twist. The title has its own Von Trier style card that lingers onscreen. The score is exuberant, winding, sinister. The abstract imagery is striking, sometimes even suggesting Matthew Crawley. The closing credits are stylishly presented after a finale of rare suddenness in contemporary cinema. Many of these elements have no substantive purpose in their own right, but taken with the aesthetic philosophy of the film at large they seem to be an extension of its argument. A bright, even lurid, provocation. Bold choices that will force the film to be noticed, and force a few walkouts too. In short, attention for attention’s sake.

8/10

Vox Lux had its world premiere at Venice Film Festival on September 4th, 2018. It has yet to acquire a UK release date. Check out a teaser below:

It’s festival season! The FilmSoc blog is covering the 75th Venice International Film Festival (29 August – 8 September), diving into the myriad of films and events on offer to deliver reviews.

Milo Garner appreciates ‘Son of Saul’ director László Nemes’ latest drama.

Like a river running ceaselessly, Sunset (Napszállta) is insatiable. It flows and rushes and crashes with grace and ferocity, rushing into the black, seeking its conclusion with dextrous élan. Son of Saul was a deeply impressive debut from László Nemes, exhibiting a fully formed style and exquisite method – he realises that the best way to emphasise the unshowable is to do just that, keep it from vision. His camera was locked to Saul’s back, a wide frame just revealing hints of the horrors beyond, leaving their detail to the mind of the viewer. Sunset proceeds in a similar vein, but one yet more sophisticated, finding for this form a narrative that fully complements it – one that makes emphatic the unseen, the unknown, the unthinkable.

The film opens in Budapest, sometime in the early 1910s. This is a civilisation on the brink of non-existence, the last gasp for one of Europe’s most illustrious – but least represented – empires. In less than a decade the empire would be strewn asunder in the rubble of the First World War, its wealth and magnitude quickly a forgotten memory; Nemes has created an atmosphere of apocalypse, but one that only seeps from the edges. His Budapest is defined by its extremes – secret societies of both low and high class whisper in the dark corners, poor workmen toil away outside luxury stores, secrets linger on every tongue. He does not present this downfall in a political or even pointedly social manner, preferring instead to evince a tone, a rhythm of decline. It would be difficult to describe what exactly is wrong with Sunset’s Budapest, but it always seems askew, always awry.

The film’s opening shot introduces us to Irisz Leiter, veiled and unknown. She is the orphaned daughter of the man who once owned an exclusive hat shop in central Budapest, one that still bears her family name, and so travels there to take up employment. She is treated with suspicion and without reason sent away, though she refuses to leave the city. News reaches her ear that she might have a brother, but this fact, initially denied, is itself cloaked in yet more ambiguity and ambivalence. This is the mode in which Nemes reveals his narrative, every fact and detail questioned and obscured, a mystery in which everyone seems a complicit agent. The battle lines have been scuffed and hidden, but they lie there still, awaiting definition. Leiter rattles the cage, delving further into an ignored past, enlivening a flame thought cold.

This narrative of obfuscation is compelling, and is matched by a protagonist who drives the plot against any risk of needless obscurity or confusion. Almost every conversation, every decision, every movement or event in the film is at some point interrupted or disturbed. Characters on the verge of revelation will be distracted and pulled away, decisions made will suddenly be reversed, and most consistently will Leiter reject the reality assigned to her. Constantly she will be detained by word or force and in some way resist, constantly she will contradict what might be the expectant direction of the narrative. Instead she is a driving force, forcing a momentum, never supplicant or pathetic. This is a film that never rests, refusing to take any time to reconcile so much as push ever on. In this way, it reflects less a period piece than it does a thriller, unrelenting and exhilarating.

This narrative force is matched and encouraged by Nemes’ formal direction. Maintaining a similar camera to Son of Saul, his lens is often close to Leiter’s back, her body obscuring most of the frame. She is often in motion with the camera maintaining the frame, letting detail slip in from the sides, often out of focus. Her alienation is felt texturally, the mystery is encompassing. This motion also figures into the pace of the film, conversations often taking place with extensive blocking, characters always busy elsewhere, or concerned with some other thing. Leiter’s interruption, and our observance, is very much incidental to the scenario.

This close eye on motion also delves into more specific formal territory, such as Leiter only ever coming into frame from left to right. In western writing this is the direction of progression, of forward movement. It also bears comparison to Agnes Varda’s Vagabond, in which its protagonist is notably caught in traversals that move from right to left. Where Varda’s wanderer, equally isolated in her way, is attempting to escape society, Leiter seeks to probe its hidden depths, implicate herself directly. The deeper she burrows the further her supposed neutrality is questioned, but Nemes always presents her as someone who acts in accordance to herself, not a supposed or genetic allegiance of any kind. Budapest continually reveals itself to be a city built on opposing fronts, but Leiter refuses to directly identify with either, preferring instead to tread the path that encompasses her own conception of justice or truth.

The camera’s closeness to Leiter also results in an immediacy to proceedings, as already essential to the film’s narrative progression. Leiter is centred in every scene, the camera never leaving her for long in the rare cases that it does. This attachment courts tension; any moment of danger becomes doubly unsettling for the knowledge that there is nowhere else the camera can or will cut. We are trapped with Leiter, and must remain at her side as her environments become ever more threatening; even spaces deemed safe take on a sinister tenor. Coupled with Leiter’s tendency to the bold and brash, Sunset almost enters the realm of horror cinema, a descent into unravelling chaos and destruction. The raid of an estate becomes intimate through Leiter’s eyes, and her inherent vulnerability forces what could be a minor event in a more distanced film into being a deeply unsettling set piece.

But most astounding is how Nemes maintains this formal and narrative excellence throughout. Never does the plot slacken, never is attention lost. This is a film of forward motion, progressive momentum, intimacy; and at once also serves as a metaphorical telling of a civilisation crumbling under its own weight. It shines with the glint of Europe’s finest cinema: it has beautifully rich colours, pristine close photography, a cutting string soundtrack. But then, I also feel that one of its closest companions, besides Son of Saul and some nods to the like of Béla Tarr, is Mad Max: Fury Road. A bizarre, even facetious comparison that might initially seem, but they both engage in a similar cinematic mode. They both create scenes of extended and inescapable tension, emphasised by constant motion, constant interruption, constant development in stakes. Fury Road might be more physical than Sunset, but much of their success relies on the same principles, albeit through two very different lenses.

I make that comparison from more than a theoretical position but an emotional one. They both imbued in me a thrill and a levity, a certain disbelief at what I was witnessing. They are not intellectual– though they do find intellectual footfall – but rather experiential, functioning best as a direct cinematic force. This is cinema that cannot be written down, cinema that is explicitly visual and aural. The sculpting of time, which for some films can be incidental, or of middling importance, is here paramount – every moment is justified, every cut reasoned; a story that in some other manner might come across as trite or limited is here elevated to the inimitable. Sunset is the beautiful rush, a confluence of vision and ability so rarely found, and so sweetly savoured.

10/10

Sunset will premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on October 15th. Take a look at its trailer below:

It’s festival season! The FilmSoc blog is covering the 75th Venice International Film Festival (29 August – 8 September), diving into the myriad of films and events on offer to deliver reviews.

Milo Garner reviews Olivier Assayas’ comedy on the Parisian publishing world.

It seems suiting that a film entitled Doubles Vies (English: Non-Fiction) would be one of two parts. It lives its own double life, the first as a supposedly intellectual consideration of publishing in the digital age, the second as the quintessence of French cinema – a middle class social group all engaged in endlessly revolving affairs with one another, each unsure on what exactly constitutes love, and each sure that an extramarital fling certainly does not condemn whatever that thing is. It can even strengthen it, they hope. The double life of the film is, like most moonlighters, an uneven affair. The first part embraces the worst elements of Assayas’ filmography, but there is plenty to be salvaged in the second.

But to begin as the film begins – an extensive monologue on the state of literature in modern-day France. Things aren’t looking good. The supposedly oncoming digitization of books is faltering at the gate. Book sales are up, but from an all-time low – eBooks are falling from an all-time high at serious rates. Does this mean we are a society who does not read? Not exactly. People read, and increasingly write, every day. The internet is the domain of the literate, in some sense, and every blog, text, or tweet represents some form of written expression or communication. Like the witticisms from the ancien régime, one character suggests – and equally valid as literature. All these things are true: literature is an art in decline and the potential consequences for society are wide ranging. But true as they are, Doubles Vies never deigns to delve much further. It frames the above discussion constantly (and often repetitively) as coffee-table debates between middle class peers, but in such a way as to gradually condescend what must be a very particular audience. Every fact is explicated, stats are quoted, ideas are clearly rounded. It is as though Assayas prefers this film as a soapbox to present his various musings and deliver them in much the same way he probably acquired them: as lengthy screeds amongst friends, far more amusing for the participant than the onlooker.

Perhaps if this information was in some way novel it could at least create a sense of didactic interest, but almost every supposed revelation is by now very old news. In Personal Shopper Assayas used technology innovatively whereas Doubles Vies is more like listening to your dad explain the obvious. Assayas at one point creates an analogy to publishing via Bergman, particularly Winter Light. This choice is worth mentioning as in Winter Light Bergman suggests several things about the state of religion in then-modern Sweden without ever having to describe them. A priest preaching to an empty church is a searing image; a gaggle of Frenchmen musing on global trends – often without irony – is less so.

Irony is not something that Assayas lacks, however. It is telling that the various discussions considering the value of the digital over the physical are shot with a very grainy 16mm. The indexical nature of film, now rare against the overwhelming tide of digital, suggests a physicality and warmth – that same descriptor is often applied to vinyl for a similar reason. The remnants of an analogue world, one less efficient but far more tangible, linger. Where digital filmmaking is an interpretation of information – one that can be altered in process – film strips are reacting chemically, directly. This, I would imagine, is Assayas’ meta-argument in favour of the book over the eBook. And to deliver it as a visible fuzz is a great deal more elegant than any amount of spurious intellectualism between friends.

Then there is the framework for this discussion, the network of people that simply cannot keep their hands to themselves. The main dynamic pits Alain, a together and charming publisher, against Léonard, a pathetic slob who apparently has some talent for prose and, shockingly, womanizing. Léonard is more than his serial affairs, however, as he also uses them (exclusively, it would seem) as the subjects of his writing, or “auto-fiction”. He applies the thinnest of veneers, changing a few names here and locations there. A blowjob at The Force Awakens becomes oral at The White Ribbon, a joke that had the Venice crowd in raptures. And fair enough. The tone that permits such silliness is also the reason the film can function so well against its milieu of wordy back and forths. The actual double life is that the film wears the mask of intellectual cinema when it is truly a comedy, and sometimes a very funny comedy at that. The screwball-esque doings of Léonard are gratifying, especially as we witness his supposedly “chaotic” worldview squirrel away when he is presented with that adjective in a more practical capacity. As the film continues this element becomes more prominent (mainly due to a severe reduction in seminars on publishing in the second half), and for the better.

Even the intellectual discussion becomes more interesting when it steers toward the distinction between truth and fiction in writing, and whether an experience might in some way belong to someone, even when veiled. Léonard’s writing does not exist in a void of his creation, but rather the world on which it is based, meaning the fiction-non-fiction he writes has real-world impact despite its supposed fabrication. His insistence that it is fiction, if only in part, does not sever this link to reality as he might like. This is far more interesting territory, or rather territory discussed in a far more interesting way, involving fewer stats and figures than radio discussions and writer Q&As. Here is a slightly more organic explication of ideas.

Ultimately Doubles Vies is a minor work, though it seems this was always the intention. It may falter in its opening half, but then has enough charm and humour to remain afloat and sailing. The performances are all excellent, particularly the ever-dependable Binoche and the listless Macaigne, who have a rare chemistry, or anti-chemistry as it might be described. The camera calls attention to its form and nature even if individual shots are less captivating. The script is just about droll enough to counteract the more grating of its tendencies. These elements might not meld into a great film of any kind, but a good one? That they manage.

6/10

Doubles Vies (Non-Fiction) will have its UK premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on October 13th. Here’s a clip from the film:

 

It’s festival season! The FilmSoc blog is covering the 75th Venice International Film Festival (29 August – 8 September), diving into the myriad of films and events on offer to deliver reviews.

Milo Garner takes a look at the debut of Orson Welles’ long awaited final film. 

A cynic might suggest The Other Side of the Wind cannot be considered a true Orson Welles picture. After all, the man isn’t around to denigrate it, and hasn’t been for a long time. Isn’t this just a cobbling together by friends and colleagues? The long-dead resurrected, but not quite the same? But then, what Welles film is ‘true’, besides Citizen Kane? His filmography is a sort of grand tragedy, whereby a master at 25 was stifled for the remainder of his career, in one way or another. The one way could be considered as the fate of his earlier American films. These were infamously cut, recut, reshot, rewritten, debudgeted, or any other manner of studio-centred villainy. He was no doubt an abrasive fellow, but to have reels of his original negatives literally thrown into the sea – as happened in macabre twist that has forever disfigured his second feature – seems a fate no artist, no matter how insufferable, should suffer.

The other way is then the fate of his later films, as well as much of his freer but rougher European output: money. He rarely had it, and if he did, not enough. His early American pictures are defined by their sophistication of form. From his debut, he experimented with camera equipment and lighting, pushing the technology to its limit. There should be no doubt that the extravagant longshot that opens Touch of Evil would have been impossible after his self-imposed exile – an idea beyond his means, as I am sure he had many. As a result of this, his European pictures are often shaky, or beset by some technical issues. Chimes at Midnight serves as an example, with both the live and dubbed sound coming across as amateur and cheap, in a film that is everything but.

To describe the exact history of The Other Side of the Wind would require an essay (or a monograph), but to shorten things dramatically it was much the same affair. Welles did not have much money, and as it happened, not enough to finish editing the film after having shot it for the best part of a decade. As such, ten hours or raw footage sat largely untouched for years, various intermingling legal blocks standing between the world and a finished cut, a battle that has been fought nearly continuously since the 70s. The film we see now is not the result of archival digging, nor the equivalent of some B-sides finding their way onto a ‘lost album’ that often takes place among music’s late and great, but rather the culmination of decades of work. While it is impossible to say how different Welles’ own cut would have been, substantial efforts were made to align this version to his original vision, including cutting it to under two hours to sate Welles’ oft-stated distaste for films beyond that length.

More fascinating than its history is the film itself. Far from a late work of a legacy director playing it safe – Welles was never afforded such workable prestige – it plays as fresh experimentation. A flurry of cuts, aspect ratios, shooting styles, and genres. Narratively, it is a form of mockumentary, following aging art director Jake Hannaford (a loud and grumbling John Huston) as he screens his latest unfinished picture in an attempt to secure further funding. The sections including this fictional director are shot in a sort of faux-vérité mode. Welles imagines him followed everywhere by a host of student filmmakers armed with super 8 and 16mm cameras, literally hiding behind walls and bushes, filming his every move. They are naturally shooting in different formats, and so they will be jumped between at high speed (sometimes overlapping), crossing all the forbidden lines of moviemaking. Even F for Fake’s frenetic cutting seems tame compared to much of The Other Side, which nears overwhelming during its central party scene. A truly daring assault of shots and angles, its chaos in content made textural in form.

Yet this style stands as one of a pair. While most satirists presenting a pseudo-film for the sake of a narrative generally create something overtly comedic or at best of questionable artistic value, Welles’ film-inside-a-film is almost too beautiful to laugh at. That isn’t to say he failed in mocking the sometimes pretentious leanings of Antonioni’s sparse modernism – a mostly nude Oja Kodar traipsing around industrial architecture for extended periods of time certainly manages that – but rather that he has put such effort into making his mockery authentic that it may as well be the real thing. The cinematography is striking, with intricate lighting setups, precise compositions, and artful camera movement. A psych rock track plays on the soundtrack as Oja Kodar walks through a nightclub, different colours splashing across her face and body as she does. This is not a scene Orson Welles would ever direct; it bears nothing in common with his personal style. And yet it would also be the envy of so many who value this method of filmmaking. His joke is rendered with such care and skill that it’s hardly funny – a strange reality.

But it does serve purpose in the narrative, essentially acting as a breather between the increasingly intense nature of the mockumentary sections of the film. This structure isn’t without its issues; Hannaford’s film is intentionally presented as utterly bereft of substance or narrative, but given so much of it is actually shown, this becomes both a missed opportunity and an invitation for distraction. The film-within-a-film takes up a significant amount of the run-length, and as such could offer more than its bizarrely astounding visage to the larger film.

This issue, however, is not enough to derail what is otherwise a fascinating combination of cinematic frustrations that must have been building up within Welles for years. Like a follow-up to F for Fake, this film puts little value in ‘truth’ or ‘fiction’, melding and merging them into a nearly indecipherable slew. Auto-fiction, as it might be described in Doubles Vie, but also very much not. First, its blistering style, a rejection of conventional and popular art filmmaking, set on contradicting the establishment in every frame. Then, the content itself, which savagely attacks the filmmaking community, finding it a place for hangers-on, vapidity, anger, and vice. Throughout his life Welles had always contradicted truth, conventional cinema, and the film industry; in his final statement he rejects them all at once.

8/10

The Other Side of the Wind will be released November 2nd on Netflix. Catch its trailer below:

It’s festival season! The FilmSoc blog is covering the 75th Venice International Film Festival (29 August – 8 September), diving into the myriad of films and events on offer to deliver reviews.

Milo Garner assesses Bradley Cooper’s much anticipated directional debut. 

A Star Is Born is, if nothing else, competent filmmaking. Despite the various doubts that were justifiably raised around the project – an actor’s directional debut starring a largely untested pop star is always going to be a questionable proposition – Bradley Cooper has defied these early critics and created a surprisingly functional film. Besides a few laboured shots (at one point, Cooper’s drunk and drugged rockstar drives past a billboard depicting nooses) this could easily be directed by one of Hollywood’s old hands. It gets from A to B, and gets there without any major slip-up. A lack of enthusiasm might be detected in this write-up so far, as it is that very feeling that the film inspired in me. Everything works, the wheels crank round and the script tears on, but rarely does it reach above base functionality. It is of little surprise that this is a remake (the fourth!) of a film from the 1930s – it brings to mind the assembly line nature of all but the best of Hollywood in that period.

The narrative progression should sound familiar – a woman singing in a bar gets spotted by a rich-and-famous musician who rockets her to fame, but it’s not all that it seemed once she gets there. It’s what they did before the X Factor, common practice. Cooper’s spin is curious in that it isn’t a spin at all – he plays it exactly straight. A few drag queens are thrown in for good measure (then promptly edged out), but this is essentially a beat for beat remake in a modern skin. By foregoing any narrative surprise, the film would then need some compelling characters to function in any interesting way, however again Cooper fails to provide anything more than what would be expected as minimum. Lady Gaga’s Ally is especially disappointing, nearly escaping the whole of the film with her morality unscathed; the person she is at the beginning is essentially the same one she becomes by its end, only then with more money. Fame’s corrupting tendrils are considered, of course, but always batted away before they cause any significant damage, and more than that, remains often superficial. Backing dancers might not fit Gaga’s vibe, but modern celebrity culture asks for far worse of its young stars than for them to simply dye their hair; a more incisive consideration of modern fame could have made this section engaging, but instead we are left with something that fails to reach beyond the surface.

Superficiality is, however, inherent to a good deal of the film. Again reflecting its 1930s heritage, A Star Is Born enjoys wealth as much as it supposedly critiques it. In the 30s, cinema was often used as a window into how the other half live, with screwball comedies backdropped by palatial chandeliers, droll servants, and blinding sequin dresses. As we follow Gaga’s rise to fame, the film seems to enjoy the process. It almost appears to be wish fulfilment; a flawless protagonist is picked up by a broken-but-beautiful man who lets all her dreams come true. There are trials along the way, but these never question the nature of being famous inherently, just the way of being famous, or the way of being wealthy. To win a Grammy is great, the film supposes without question, but perhaps not like that. It isn’t generally the business of a film like this to ask such questions, that much I can grant, but lacking anything else of real interest lays bare its otherwise more acceptable flaws.

Any interest that might be implicit even despite this is then consumed by a corrosive blandness as the film enters its second half. Here, after fame is secured, the rhythm falters. We must instead be sated by the turbulence in its central relationship, generally signified by Cooper getting off his face and Gaga condemning him for doing so, him going clean, then getting off his face again. A circular motion of that like is, again, not poor by design, but should serve as a foundation for something (anything) more compelling. Instead the romance develops and unfurls as might be expected, and any chance of a rousing melody replaced by the constant drone of predictability.

While drones and melodies are in mind, the music deserves a mention. Three styles dominate – stadium country/blues, stadium pop, and ballads combining a little of the two. The singing and playing is all adequate, perhaps even quite good, but other than a few of the guitar solos I wasn’t hugely impressed by anything on display. A matter of taste, certainly, but if La La Land can make me like show tunes anything is possible. I suppose my feelings about the film’s music reflect well my feelings on the film altogether – technically well put together and rarely unpleasant in a direct sense, but then so unremarkable, so flatly predictable. I’m sure A Star Is Born will become something of a sensation in the coming months, and will find itself beloved by many for its by-the-book balladry. But I’d prefer a few wrong notes to a progression so dull as this.

4/10

A Star Is Born will be released in UK cinemas everywhere on October 5th. Check out its trailer below:

It’s festival season! The FilmSoc blog is covering the 75th Venice International Film Festival (29 August – 8 September), diving into the myriad of films and events on offer to deliver reviews.

Milo Garner reviews Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest absurdist comedy. 

In a direct sense it would be wrong to say that The Favourite is historically accurate. The characters are largely real and the process of events is not entirely fabricated, but then so much else is, or at best, ruefully assumed. But in another, perhaps more pertinent sense, it is historical, and in a way that many films more fixated on events and dates and costumes are not. It communicates a historical concept, an idea, and does so using the anti-real of cinema for emphasis. Yorgos Lanthimos has never been a realist director, and it is perhaps through his absurd lens that the ludicrous nature of an early modern court – the factionalism, the infirmity of certain monarchs, the impact of personality on state affairs – can truly be understood or presented. The only film I know to consider the court to a similar degree (only with the addition of bookish accuracy) is Roberto Rossellini’s seminal The Taking of Power by Louis XIV, which propagates a contemporaneously-novel theory of how the Sun King exploited and advanced the ceremony of the court in order to establish his personal power base. The Favourite is a sort of inverse, considering how various members of the court and Parliament can slip behind a monarch’s ear for personal or political favour.

But if this suggests some sort of dry explication of historical academia (something Rossellini is wilfully guilty of), let any fears be assuaged – though a little different to Lanthimos’ other outputs, a surreal and sometimes unsettling comedy still awaits. The madness of the court simply allows yet more indulgence, with goose racing and giant dresses in lurid rooms of muted English opulence. Better yet at night, lit by candle and torch, characters illuminated orange against a surrounding black. The Killing of a Sacred Deer might have more impressive shot composition, but The Favourite certainly trumps it in texture – never has a late-night grain seemed so courtly. And if the saturated orange of the evenings might suggest a creeping angst of vying factions, the extreme wide angles used during the daytime fully encompass the off-tilt reality in which they live. We are given only an occasional glimpse at the world beyond the palace; we’re trapped in its circular rhythms.

While Lanthimos’ form is continuously interesting, it is in his leading lady that his film can be truly revelatory. Anyone familiar the golden age of British television comedy in the early 2000s is well aware of Olivia Coleman’s talent, and to see her finally granted such a significant role in a film such as this is gratifying. As Queen Anne, she embodies the contradictions of her character fully and consistently. The most obvious being in the comedic, with a gift for channelling the petulance and childishness of a monarch infirm. But more importantly – and this has often been the case in her television work – it is her dramatic performance that rounds the role. For all the absurdity this film encourages, it is in Anne that a sense of pathos can develop. Her tragedy, her occasional lucidity, the total lunacy of her position and the society that caused it. These things can all be read in Coleman, who only has to drift into a brief melancholy to entirely shift the film’s tone. Some moments are genuinely affecting, even if caught between a sex joke and a ballshot, as is often the case.

It is there that The Favourite occasionally slips. Its comedy is generally effective and a raunchy tone is certainly not undue for a period piece, only that sometimes the dialogue feels out of step with the atmosphere otherwise created. Peter Greenaway attempted a similar schtick but got away with it, as did Michael Winterbottom in his own meta-modern Georgian comedy. In their work, perhaps, it felt a little less like modern zingers given an antiquated brush-over; there are plenty of wonderful insults that can be borrowed from the past, most better than a ye olde ‘you’re cute when you’re angry’. A similar note can be made of a recurring dancing joke, in which modern dance is anachronistically inserted. It was sort of funny, but it doesn’t quite match the comedic tone otherwise struck.

Interestingly for a film otherwise so farcical, it does lay increasing attention to the actual progression of its plot, and largely succeeds in this development. Sarah (Rachel Weisz) and Abigail’s (Emma Stone) ever-escalating power plays are engaging and their dynamic intriguing. Sarah is perhaps the more interesting of the two; initially presented as the more obvious villain, it later becomes clear that, while she is evidently a cruel and exploitative woman, she does, in some twisted way, care for Anne. Abigail has an arc that is initially intriguing – a moral woman forced to contradict her beliefs for self-advancement – but later falters into a rather trite version of absolute power corrupting absolutely. This reflects a general issue in the tail-end of the film overall – as soon as Abigail and Sarah’s rivalry dies down in a direct sense, the narrative fails to find a compelling conclusion other than whatever might be made of Abigail’s ‘fall’, predictable as it is. Anne’s own decline was a little more interesting, but unfortunately largely unexplored.

But if not a triumphant closing (though certainly an adequate one), The Favourite is nonetheless very entertaining in the moment, a well shot and well-paced comedy bookmarked by a slew of strong performances. If it slips in the particulars of comedy or narrative, it does so against an extraordinary background – that rare period piece that totally defies the conditions of its genre and its history to deliver something far more original.

7/10

The Favourite is set for general release in the UK on January 1st, 2019. It will premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on October 18th, 2018. Take a look at the trailer below:

It’s festival season! The FilmSoc blog is covering the 75th Venice International Film Festival (29 August – 8 September), diving into the myriad of films and events on offer to deliver reviews.

Milo Garner analyses Alfonso Cuarón’s personal introspection of his hometown, Mexico City. 

Set in a district of Mexico City sharing the same name, ROMA is not the first film to bear such a title. In 1972, Federico Fellini released his own Roma, a series of semi-autobiographical vignettes that captured the Italian capital as he understood it. These varied from a symphony of traffic jams to a lewd display of religion-as-carburet – the ultimate aim was to create a kind of a cross-section of society as according to Fellini’s mind. Alfonso Cuarón’s film does not reflect Fellini’s at first blush, even seeming to be its opposite. It is set around a single family, is largely focused on genuine realism, and is limited within the confines of a single year. Yet it is in watching it unfold that a certain similitude becomes newly apparent. Cuarón is not simply using Mexico City and its environs as a setting, but rather as an essential part of the narrative. Every long traversal shot, or incidental detail, or lengthy tangent – these are not elements of pacing or plot so much as an attempt to recreate Mexico City of the early 70s, breathing and alive. Though we recognise the characters in them, these are, in effect, vignettes just as in Fellini’s film. Little moments that form the time and the place; this family does not exist in a drama extraneous to its surroundings, but one very much part of it.

An example might be a scene in which Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) goes to the cinema with her boyfriend. The frame is filled with detail: a man selling bouncing balls outside the door, the subtle change from an indigenous language to Spanish on the arrival of Cleo’s beau, and an extended scene from an old British war film, just a little out of focus and subtitled in Spanish. Cuarón is recreating the world of his childhood, permitting a sense for atmosphere that might otherwise be inimitable. Orson Welles once said of ‘the great supercutter’ Ernest J. Nims that he “believed that nothing should be in a movie that did not advance the story.” Welles went on to lament that “since most of the good stuff in my movies doesn’t advance the story at all, you can imagine what a nemesis he was to me.” So too would Nims find a foe in Cuarón, I think – it is between the beats that ROMA finds its heart; an endearing portrait of a past remembered. Not always a beautiful or pleasant past, but one that feels genuine; and lived in.

Against this lively backdrop plays out a largely straightforward narrative, but one that is just as emotionally accomplished. It is best surmised through reference to another film, one featured briefly in ROMA (and presumably figuring significantly in Cuarón’s youth): Marooned. The few seconds of footage presented are of two astronauts lost in space, comparisons to Gravity seem obvious. But more relevant is its reflection of ROMA, in which we find Cleo in a situation aptly described by that titular verb. She is indigenous and yet appears an outsider – the children she minds ask why she speaks in a language they don’t understand. She loses her virginity to a man who promptly up sticks when she reveals the baby she’s unwillingly carrying. The closest to family we can decipher are her employers. They are all happy together, but there is an inescapable distance separating them. That she is an employee always threatens to undo any sense of belonging, and thus she watches from the exterior. Cuarón understands the socio-political nature of this character but decides against didacticism, instead preferring a subtlety. Just hints at the wider picture, caught in the back of frame, or in a brief exchange. Most disruptive is a student protest that breaks into violence, but even this is treated as a passing event rather than a subject for comment or analysis. Cuarón’s Mexico is not an academic representation, but a snapshot. In one scene a wedding is taking place just out of focus – the end to another film perhaps, but nothing to do with this one. A world that breathes beyond the camera’s end.

Supporting this flowing and often moving story is Cuarón’s typically excellent formal ability. His style is consistent with his earlier works in that it emphasises long takes and conjoined scenes, but is also more specifically adapted for this project. His use of long traversals to capture the streets of Mexico City are almost tableaux, encompassing details without lingering. He also makes use of extended panning shots, exploring the family home with its corners and crevices. This is again an understanding of space and its importance – the home acts as a location, but also a tactile part of the characters’ lives. This is just as true on the rooftop, where an extended shot captures the various maids on various other houses all washing up at once to the rumble of the city streets below. This may be the story of one family, but so many others exist on its fringes.

More specifically, metaphorical imagery is also employed, and while clearly meaningful, it is always restrained enough to avoid being forceful. One such example might be the opening shot, of a paved floor being slowly encompassed by small waves of water, then followed by soap. Wiping the slate clean, perhaps, as might Cleo desire in some way. We later find that she is the cause for this water, cleaning the driveway from the mess of the family dog. This image is granted additional effect later, with Cleo walking against the far more imposing waves of the sea, being caught in their violent crashing. Her life resembles this wading, punctuated by moments of suffering; it is her inescapable truth. A deeply moving moment. Then there is the image of the plane, a distant flyover that repeats itself throughout the film, in reflections and backdrops. A symbol of motion and progress, forward momentum, and at once distance and powerlessness. But all-encompassing, ever present.

These grander ideas exist then with those smaller, but just as impressive. A scene where Fernando Grediaga ever-so-carefully manoeuvres his oversized car into a garage several sizes too small is as funny as it is incisive, made all the more so by his wife’s later but far less graceful attempts. And it is in that comedy that ROMA finds its soul. This isn’t a tale of disaster even if disaster is often its subject. It is one that understands the downbeat as much as its opposite – the annoyance of the family dog trying to run out the gate every time it’s opened versus how funny that actually is. It is a film that encompasses so much, and yet remains deeply personal. It is the philosophy of Fellini’s film through the soulful lens of Cuarón, and the result is a wonder.

9/10

ROMA will have its UK premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on October 13, and is expected to be released on Netflix later this year. Check out its trailer below:

It’s festival season! The FilmSoc blog is covering the 75th Venice International Film Festival (29 August – 8 September), diving into the myriad of films and events on offer to deliver reviews.

Milo Garner critiques Rick Alverson’s curious telling of a peculiar 1950s tale.

Jeff Goldblum has reached a stage in his career at which point simply turning up is considered sufficient. This isn’t an attack on the man – many great actors have perfected the art of simply turning up, not least Bill Murray – merely an observation on this late bloom in his working life. His natural aura has become something of a cinematic style; he is charismatic, laissez faire in manner, off-kilter but not quite off-putting. And it is on this that Rick Alverson relies in The Mountain, a film whose supposed charisma is its best, and perhaps only, asset.

We open to a series of static shots in the academy ratio. They are artful each, composed with rigour and a close eye for colour. Desaturation on a brown-grey palette. It soon becomes apparent we are in the 1950s, watching the sorry life of a young boy who doesn’t quite know who he is. Trapped in a squareish world, Alverson’s film almost resembles the work of Roy Andersson for a moment, a collection of ascetic vignettes depicting a society at odds with itself. This isn’t the 1950s that cinema usually explores, not even the dystopic variety. This one is sapped of its life; it is a drab, dour, but intriguing place. To see a style such as this in a relatively mainstream American film, even reflecting Kaurismäki in one scene, is a pleasure that should not be understated – it is a look and feel that invites fascination. But this is a fascination that the film cannot sustain.

The narrative, as far as it goes, follows the effectively orphaned Andy (Tye Sheridan) and a family-friend/electroshock therapist as they travel to various medical establishments across the country. Goldblum shocks, Andy photographs; the former enjoys his work, the latter hopes to find his mother somewhere along on the journey, though her fate is ominously undescribed. There is little more to drive the plot than this, other than the abnormalities of Andy’s dreams and thoughts – he struggles with sex, both intercourse and biological distinction. It is through this general ambiguity that The Mountain seeks to beguile. It presents a fog to be cleared; a set of shadows from which a source might be deciphered. As often happens with films of this kind, very little lies beyond the visage.

But for what it’s worth, there does seem to be a fairly simple thematic tenor across the film’s length, being the nature of difference, and how it is dealt with, or indeed, snubbed out. Goldblum is the old way, the grand salesman and the toxic silencer. Anyone who falls beyond the typologies for normality as established in the 1950s is a waiting victim, better a frazzled emptiness than a potential burden. As Goldblum himself mentions in passing, like closing a camera aperture to F11 – “doesn’t let much light in”. But then exceptions present themselves – Andy’s usefulness spares him the shock, and any other position of power might equally save someone from that ignominious end. Women feature as patients more often than not, and this is no accident; they are more frequently disruptive in a male dominated world. This idea of categorisation is brought to the foreground by Andy himself; he cannot properly distinguish between man and woman, and though he doesn’t yet know this term, he instead is often confronted by the image of a hermaphrodite – an in between, something that doesn’t fit with his already faulty preconceptions. Goldblum’s worldview has no room for those beyond the boundaries of his reality, and if his particular method is no longer in practice, to drug and diagnose has become a sort of modern parallel (as alluded to in the film).

But for a film so focused with rigorous form and extended philosophical rants, this is not a conclusion of significant depth or weight, nor one that can maintain interest as the narrative begins to waver in the final third. The film might be a visual marvel – one shot of a car snaking along a mountain road is little less than exquisite – but it lacks necessary substance. The alternative would be for it to entirely let loose, perhaps resulting in a more freeform experiment, but despite its strangeness this is a film attached to its conventional roots. More a Lanthimos-lite than an American Andersson, it was never quite capable of bringing its well-crafted pieces into a substantive whole.

4/10

The Mountain had its world premiere on August 30th at Venice Film Festival. Its trailer has yet to be released.

It’s festival season! The FilmSoc blog is covering the 75th Venice International Film Festival (29 August – 8 September), diving into the myriad of films and events on offer to deliver reviews.

Milo Garner digs into Damien Chazelle’s much anticipated Armstrong biopic after its world premiere at Venice Film Festival. 

Going to the Moon was analogue. That vague dissociation of the digital world, with its wireless automation and computerized mechanisms, was a thing of the future; Apollo still dwelt in a physical realm that can be touched and felt. Every switch has a sound, every device a cord -technology made tactile. Damien Chazelle understands this. In First Man he takes the complex development of a space programme and finds that which can be felt. Shots will linger on faces, eyes, or a father’s hand running through his daughter’s hair. In its initial moments it almost drifts into the world of Malick and Lubezki, with wordless, almost formless moments of human interaction and emotion. The film is at its best when this mode is embraced fully, foregoing conventional style to achieve a closeness rare in biographic cinema. As Armstrong hurtles through space, editor Tom Cross cuts frenetically from his face to his instruments to his view of the abyss. These cuts will cycle like a minimalist composition, not intended to inform an audience or drive a narrative, but to convey an emotional state.

This conveyance of a state feeds into the picture at large, starting with the way in which it is shot. Utilizing old, grainy film stock, Chazelle mirrors his La La Land method by presenting First Man in the format most temporally appropriate for a film of its type. The result is something similar to a Pennebaker documentary, with long lenses, vacillating focus, and freeform handheld camera. If the best documentarians of the sixties had been permitted access to the Apollo mission, First Man might have been the result. This stylistic tenor is maintained even in a more incidental manner, where Gil Scott-Heron’s infamous protest song ‘Whitey on the Moon’ is caught by Sandgren’s camera as if by chance.

Music is also the film’s main inconsistency. For much of the introduction it is absent, and tellingly. We hear instead the groans and shrieks of engines, the rustle of a suburban town, the ticking of a coffin being lowered. It almost seems as though Chazelle has defeated the studio system from within, somehow achieving a Neil Armstrong biopic shot like Cassavetes. But soon after this rush of bold experimentation, Hurwitz’s harp-heavy music enters frame. A certain dose of conventionality follows, leaving at least a few biopic boxes dutifully checked. While Hurwitz’s La La Land score had been one of that film’s strongest assets, here his talent seems less assured: earthbound, his music feels incidental and unimportant; in space, an attempt at the grandiose always some degree less bold than the imagery it accompanies. A subpar score in this case is more significant than the music being a little inferior – this sort of expressionistic cinema can use silence and soundtrack to great effect, tapping into that primordial core of the brain that even imagery struggles to reach. Chazelle might ape Kubrick in his use of a waltz among the stars, but he misses the Ligeti that truly set 2001 apart.

It isn’t only the music that seems to contradict the documentary style of the film’s majority. My abovementioned description of Armstrong’s crisis in orbit appears to do the same. But it must be considered that the style is a means to an end. If it is in the film’s interest to be inconsistent, Chazelle prefers that to the less artful alternative. It is in space especially that various of these restrictions are loosened – the camera can be still, or float far out of reach, or cut like a cyclone. The end is always the same – to actualize the well-known facts of the Apollo mission, and to grant the audience what Chazelle describes as a ‘virtual reality experience’. If not every aspect of the film’s form functions to the same high standard, it must be recognized that the biopic genre is being twisted to deliver both realism and expression, a rarity in this kind of mainstream cinema. On Earth this aim is best suited to sixties docudrama, but when beyond Chazelle considers it necessary to delve further into Armstrong’s direct psychology.

It is that which makes up the other side of First Man’s proverbial coin. As much as it seeks to impress and thrill with its beautifully rendered imagery – both the cinematography and production design are without fault – it also intends to contextualise and deepen its subject. It is this which steers the film furthest from its potentially experimental routes and into the human interest that hopes to make Armstrong a man more than Man. Here Chazelle is a little less successful. While Armstrong’s relationship (or lack of) with Jan and his children technically functions on a thematic level, it is in need of further intrigue to maintain interest. Foy’s character is defined by her want for normality and as such it is difficult to conjure much more – hers is a story of deep familiarity, and not one developed in any substantial way here. Somewhat more interesting is Singer and Perlman’s interpretation of Armstrong himself, a man flanked by death and failure his entire career. He fits what is quickly becoming the quintessence of a Chazelle protagonist – ambitious, obsessive, and in some way negligent for this fact. In Whiplash this led to a moment of catharsis; in La La Land a kind of anti-catharsis; and in First Man there is a meld of the two. Armstrong the man at this point overshadows Armstrong the Man – there in his moment of triumph is he most vulnerable. A bold direction for a man so essential to America’s new mythology.

Yet if Chazelle’s aims were to unpack Armstrong in any significant sense, he is only successful to a point. Armstrong’s psychology is ultimately centred on a single incident, and instead of deepening this moment or broadening his character, the film instead returns to it without development. As a rhetorical device it functions, but doesn’t resonate nearly as much could, or perhaps should have. But these narrative shortcomings ultimately represent the secondary aim of First Man. The first is an attempt at total immersion – a recreation of a time and place, a feeling and an atmosphere. The rich colours and grainy stock, Scott-Heron’s song and JFK’s speech, the flicking of switches and the hatches and the spacesuits. Every detail is convincing, and more than that, intimate. This is not a docudrama presenting the Apollo mission as it happened, but a film set on taking its audience with them. And in this, it doesn’t take a step wrong.

7/10

First Man will premiere in the UK on October 12th. Catch the trailer below: