Les Pires (The Worst Ones, 2022)

When looking at a catalogue of films such as that for the Europa! Europa Film Festival, where almost every title is entirely unknown to me, and even most of the directors and stars aren’t ringing any bells, you may wonder, how do you select what films to go see? I’d like to say it was because they won awards (like this one, which won the Prix Un Certain Regard at Cannes last year), but no, it’s not usually that. Obviously if they have had any critical response I do take that into account but for the most part, I don’t know the films, I look them up, and then I go to the ones directed by women or indigenous filmmakers because it’s a way to narrow down a long list of films I know nothing about. And for the most part, you get good results; this one is no exception.

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Films about filmmaking are a really pretty familiar topic to any festivalgoer or even casual watcher of movies, because there’s no story filmmakers like to tell more than their own one (I mean, write about what you know is a cliché for a reason). The focus here is on the kids who have been roped into the director’s vision, which appears to be some kind of Kes-like vision of a working class life, particularly Lily and the younger boy Ryan, who play siblings in the film-within-the-film. It takes a little time to get going, but ultimately there’s quite a nuanced take on what’s going on: the film’s director alternately feels like a tyrant, having childish fits of anger on set at his (child) actors’ lack of commitment to the emotion, then a slightly creepy guy setting up a sex scene involving the teenage Lily, and ultimately as a man with quite a complex layered emotional emptiness at his heart who is fairly open about it when talking to Ryan. The young actors have their own struggles with their colleagues, schoolkids and the townspeople, and as it goes on there’s plenty of lowkey angst, but it’s relatable and understandable, and never overwhelms the story. This film won the Prix Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2022, and I think it’s a strong choice.

CREDITS
Directors Lise Akoka and Romane Gueret; Writers Akoka, Gueret and Elénore Gurrey; Cinematographer Eric Dumont; Starring Mallory Wanecque, Timéo Mahaut, Johan Heldenbergh; Length 99 minutes.
Seen at the Classic, Melbourne, Sunday 26 February 2022.

Sis dies corrents (The Odd-Job Men, 2021)

Since moving to Melbourne at the start of February, I’ve already been to films at a couple of small film festivals, so I thought I might cover those this week. One of the festivals was the Europa! Europa Film Festival, which runs in a couple of related (but I believe independent) cinemas in the Melbourne suburbs, the Lido and the Classic. It was a good excuse to visit both these areas and their fine cinemas, which are both very pleasant multi-screen environments, and if I lived closer to either Hawthorn or Elsternwick I’d definitely visit again. The festival itself presents a number of titles from the past few years that haven’t had much of a media profile, the kind of thing that you see at these festivals and then more or less disappear completely, which is a shame because all the films I saw had plenty to recommend them, not least this Catalan film by a woman filmmaker about some men on the job.

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This Catalan-language film is made entirely with non-professional actors (the characters have the same first names as the actors), making it all the easier to imagine them as actual handymen, fixing plumbing and electrical issues across the city. Focusing on men with this career is a canny way to incorporate a range of social milieu, whether an upmarket studio, a wealthy home and a flashy kitchen showroom, or the rather dowdier and more lived-in small apartments of the city, with an old man who is keen to let people know about his health regimen, or a home with a harassed father and two impish daughters. There’s no real big plot to speak of, aside from that it’s Moha (Mellali)’s first week with the group, as the older man who runs the company (Pep Sarrà) is retiring; his colleague Valero (Escolar), however, is an aggressively annoying man who is quickly and unthinkingly racist towards Moha and it takes much of the film for him to soften his attitude. Indeed, he’s such an unpleasant bully of a man that it’s difficult to watch what is otherwise a sweet, very low-key film, but the director does her best to keep things moving along with a minimum of fuss and no over-explication of the themes.

CREDITS
Director Neus Ballús; Writers Ballús and Margarita Melgar; Cinematographer Anna Molins; Starring Valero Escolar, Mohamed Mellali, Pep Sarrà; Length 100 minutes.
Seen at the Lido, Melbourne, Friday 17 February 2022.

Criterion Sunday 621: Rosetta (1999)

The opening of this film is iconic, and to a certain extent it’s what put the Dardenne brothers — already in their middle age and having had years of documentary and film experience behind them — on the map. Our title character just barges forward relentlessly, getting into a fight with her employer (who has just let her go at the end of a probation period), and in the first few minutes we don’t even see her face, just the arch of her shoulders, her propulsive forward movement, the determination that the back of her head implies, the anger at not having a job anymore. This defines the film and while it does slow down at moments, for meals, brief tender passages between people, for the most part it’s this forward momentum that carries it. Obviously it’s a style that the brothers were working on in their earlier film La Promesse but it comes to fruition here, in a film that delves into the lives of those living outside of established social safety nets, a hard-scrabble existence of living paycheque to paycheque, needing work to survive and doing anything they can to get it, a generation Rosetta exemplifies and had such a strong effect there was even a belief it led to a law protecting the minimum wage in Belgium (it didn’t, but it certainly must have galvanised opinion). It still holds up all these decades later, and the Dardenne brothers still have strong careers on the back of its impact, but it’s hard to get over the way this central character is introduced, the force with which that swing door is pushed as this film begins.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Directors/Writers Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne; Cinematographer Alain Marcoen; Starring Émilie Dequenne, Fabrizio Rongione, Olivier Gourmet, Anne Yernaux; Length 93 minutes.

Seen at the Paramount, Wellington, Friday 28 July 2000 (and most recently on Blu-ray at home, Melbourne, Friday 3 March 2023).

Criterion Sunday 620: La Promesse (1996)

By all accounts, certainly by that of the filmmakers themselves, this is where it all began for the Dardenne Brothers. They’d made documentaries, even a couple of features, beforehand and had built up a bit of a career since the 1970s, but here is where they applied those techniques to fiction in a way that would become their trademark — a restless camera constantly following their protagonists, eschewing careful blocking and marks in favour of this documentary-like verisimilitude, using unknown actors (often non-professionals) and of course following often overlooked working class lives. So here we are introduced to Roger, played by the actor who would probably most closely be linked to the Dardennes, Olivier Gourmet, as an apparently nice boss, and his son Igor (Jérémie Renier, who would return in L’Enfant), though it soon becomes clear Roger is a dodgy operator, exploiting immigrants, using them for construction work, and then when one dies by accident, covering it up despite his widow (Assita Ouedraogo) and baby living in one of his properties. So this leads to the promise of the title, between the dying man Hamidou and Igor, an ethical dilemma of the nature that would also come to define the Dardennes’ filmmaking. It’s all beautifully shot and composed, with a breathless headlong rush into danger, as Igor defies his father and starts to make his own choices in life.

CRITERION EXTRAS:

• There’s a short piece with more recent interviews with both Gourmet and Renier reflecting on making the film, being there at the start of the Dardenne brothers’ journey into successful filmmaking.
• There’s also a much longer interview with the brothers by an American film critic at their office, which really gets into the detail of their career and work on the film.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Directors/Writers Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne; Cinematographer Alain Marcoen; Starring Jérémie Renier, Olivier Gourmet, Assita Ouedraogo; Length 94 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Melbourne, Sunday 26 February 2023.

రౌద్రం రణం రుధిరం Roudram Ranam Rudhiram (aka ఆర్.ఆర్.ఆర్ RRR, 2022)

The full list of my favourite films of 2022 is here but I’m posting fuller reviews of my favourites. So on the penultimate day of the year I caved to the clamouring voices online telling me that this was a fun film. I’m hardly resistant to popular Indian films either, but I’d hoped it might get a cinematic screening (then again, I’m in NZ, so of course not). It still works fine on the small screen but you can see it’s made for an audience.

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People have been talking up this film all year, and, to be fair, it’s pretty clear why. Watching it is not three hours of your life that you’ll regret, I don’t think. Not that it necessarily does things differently from other big Indian productions I’ve seen (and technically, as an aside, this is not Bollywood but Tollywood as it’s originally in the Telugu language — not that Netflix cares one bit about that kind of fidelity, meaning I had to watch it in Hindi and you probably will too, though it’ll default to English dubbing).

But what it does as a film, it does bigger! And more! And… uh, bigger, have I mentioned that? It is undeniably a lot, and I think towards the end it becomes pretty mired down by some problematic weighting — it has a hard-on for torture like no film since that Mel Gibson one about that guy on a cross, and so I suspect its politics lean rather hard into nationalism. However, at least at the historical level of the film’s plot, we’re dealing with freedom from colonial oppression, and who can’t get behind booing a giddily awful British aristocracy, a group of feckless oppressors delighting in misery, division and bloodshed (except for Jenny; she’s nice).

So, seen as a story about getting out from under the thumb of some bad guys (who are also bad actors), this hits all the buttons and does it with the kind of bold maximalism you come to expect from this kind of production, with gleefully non-naturalistic animal fights (all CGI-rendered), explosions, and some thrilling camerawork. It passes the time quite nicely.

CREDITS
Director S.S. Rajamouli ఎస్. ఎస్. రాజమౌళి; Writers Rajamouli and V. Viyajendra Prasad కె. వి. విజయేంద్ర ప్రసాద్; Cinematographer K.K. Senthil Kumar కె.కె.సెంథిల్ కుమార్; Starring N.T. Rama Rao Jr. జూనియర్ ఎన్.టి.ఆర్, Ram Charan రాం చరణ్ తేజ, Ajay Devgn अजय देवगन, Alia Bhatt आलिया भट्ट; Length 182 minutes.
Seen at home (Netflix streaming), Wellington, Friday 30 December 2022.

The Woman King (2022)

The full list of my favourite films of 2022 is here but I’m posting fuller reviews of my favourites. This big historical action epic comes from the very dependable Gina Prince-Bythewood, one of the better directors working in Hollywood, and it’s a powerful evocation of an era not much seen on screen.

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Just to kick things off: I really enjoyed this movie, especially as a big screen cinematic experience. It has an old-fashioned sense of an historical epic, albeit about a little corner of African history that isn’t often represented on-screen (primarily because it doesn’t revolve around white heroes or saviours, and surely the time for patriotic stories of European conquests over tribal peoples has long since passed). But it’s curious that this African story is written by two white women; given the other talent involved I don’t think that meaningfully invalidates any positive representation the film can provide, but it might give a hint as to the way in which the film tends towards a platitudinous Hollywood liberal sense of injustice being righted, as Viola Davis leads her Agojie (the so-called “Dahomey Amazons”) as a righteous force dedicated to eradicating slavery.

Clearly there are experts in this history — of which I am not one, nor are many of the online commentators peddling the criticisms to be fair — who acknowledge that the situation was more complicated than it’s portrayed here. Just my cursory awareness of our modern online world leads me to the understanding that it’s perfectly possible for groups of women to come together to actively promote and defend patriarchal systems of oppression, fascism and hate speech. The film doesn’t deny that the Dahomeys were just as involved in slavery as their enemies, the Oyo Empire. So the feel-good roles of Davis as Nanisca, her second-in-command Izogie (the brilliant Lashana Lynch) and young recruit Nawi (an impressive Thuso Mbedu) may not quite reflect real history, but that’s fine by me because this is primarily a film and an entertainment that hopefully leads people to learn more about this historical time and context.

However, whatever your caveats, it’s undeniably a well put-together epic with the appropriate levels of heart-tugging sentiment and brutal warfare action scenes. Gina Prince-Bythewood has come a long way from Love & Basketball and that sweetly saccharine film The Secret Life of Bees with one of the Fannings in it. She made the fantastic Beyond the Lights and her recent foray into action with The Old Guard was the rare superhero film I actively enjoyed, and so she is not short of directing skill, nor is her team lacking in their ability to both capture the location and people (cinematographer Polly Morgan), or the nuances of the acting — and this in particular seems like quite a departure in the type of role Viola Davis is usually seen in, and she surely deserves some awards love for it. There may be all kinds of ways to criticise it, but I admire any film that tries to tell a bit of history we’ve not seen played out before.

CREDITS
Director Gina Prince-Bythewood; Writers Dana Stevens and Maria Bello; Cinematographer Polly Morgan; Starring Viola Davis, Thuso Mbedu, Lashana Lynch, Sheila Atim, John Boyega; Length 135 minutes.
Seen at Light House Cuba, Wellington, Thursday 3 November 2022.

Catherine Called Birdy (2022)

The full list of my favourite films of 2022 is here but I’m posting fuller reviews of my favourites. I recently covered Lena Dunham’s breakthrough feature film Tiny Furniture in my Criterion Sunday supplement (which led to her getting the Girls TV show), and in some ways she still struggles as an artist with growing up. Hence we get this feature in which she really throws herself into childhood, but with a middle ages twist, and it’s rather sweet really: almost brutal when it needs to be, but never really getting bogged down in the filth, at least not too much.

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Lena Dunham directed (and wrote and produced) this adaptation of a young adult novel, but she isn’t in it at all, which is something worth pointing out to the sadly numerous anti-fans of hers. And though it may seem quite different from artsy studenty metropolitan lives, perhaps its mediæval setting isn’t so far removed from that spirit of creative jouissance she usually tries to cultivate. It’s certainly not far from the darker and more depressive concerns because for all its lightness of touch, quirky colour and spirited performances, there’s an underlying grimness to life itself which haunts the film. Of course the key is that for the most part the characters don’t dwell on this (perhaps because it’s something they can never escape), but it adds something grounding to what could otherwise come across as altogether too twee. There are memorable turns from all kinds of supporting actors, not least Andrew Scott (unsurprisingly) as Birdy’s father, or Paul Kaye as “Shaggy Beard” (some kind of Yorkshire nouveau riche), as well as from Bella Ramsey in the lead role who gets across her childish energy as she is thrust into an altogether more adult world (or rather, perhaps there is no such distinction; certainly there was no concept of being a teenager, and that’s part of what the film gets across well: you’re a child until you’re not).

CREDITS
Director/Writer Lena Dunham (based on the novel by Karen Cushman); Cinematographer Laurie Rose; Starring Bella Ramsey, Andrew Scott, Billie Piper, Lesley Sharp, Joe Alwyn, Sophie Okonedo; Length 108 minutes.
Seen at home (Amazon streaming), Wellington, Thursday 20 October 2022.

The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson (2021)

The full list of my favourite films of 2022 is here but I’m posting fuller reviews of my favourites. This Australian revisionist western film by an Aboriginal woman director, writer and star came out at festivals in 2021, but I caught up with it on a flight (it would fill a big screen though, and for some reason in my mind that’s where I saw it). Not a perfect movie, but it had a lot that I really liked.

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I suppose that, strictly speaking, this isn’t a Western (because it’s not set in the American West, or even the West of Australia) but it shares a lot of characteristics with those kinds of frontier dramas, where (white) settlers are put in precarious situations due to their low socioeconomic status and lack of protections afforded by ‘opening up’ a country not previously inhabited by them. But as this film knows all too well, that kind of work doesn’t lead to great outcomes for indigenous populations, and while it’s based on a classic 19th century Australian short story, it’s also very keen (being written and directed by an Aboriginal woman director) to strike out in a new direction that can acknowledge the complicated history and stories being interwoven here. Which is all by way of making it sound pretty dull and well-meaning, when actually this has a lot of the striking widescreen compositions and tense drama that the best of the Western genre brings, plus some excellent lead performances from the director herself in the title role, plus Sam Reid as a well-educated indigenous man who come across her cabin and who she tries to help. By the end I felt invested in the story, even if not every element worked so well for me (the music had a tendency to push a little hard at times).

CREDITS
Director/Writer Leah Purcell; Cinematographer Mark Wareham; Starring Leah Purcell, Rob Collins, Sam Reid; Length 104 minutes.
Seen in flight from Auckland to Nouméa, Saturday 8 October 2022.

Criterion Sunday 604: In Which We Serve (1942)

A solidly crafted flag-waving exercise in wartime uplift, about the way a diverse (well, diverse from a class-based background at least, if literally nothing else) group of fighting men on a navy ship come together through adversity. The film is largely told in flashback as the HMS Torrin lies crippled and sinking after the Battle of Crete, as some of the surviving crew reflect on how they came to be there. Turns out this is a fairly effective narrative strategy, allowing both for the setbacks of war (the sinking of the ship, the loss of life) to intertwine with the duty and service that motivate these men, most of whom are lifelong Royal Navy crewmembers, and the wives and children that wait for them back in England — and indeed, given the fairly limited screen time, it’s the women who give some of the film’s best performances. Writer and co-director Noël Coward himself plays the ship’s captain, which makes sense given his own leading involvement in getting the film made, and he acquits himself well enough, in the soulful vein of a by-the-book type who nevertheless has great admiration for all his crewmembers (except for a baby-cheeked Richard Attenborough, who abandons his post in one memorable vignette), but it’s the emotional story between John Mills and Bernard Miles which is most satisfying. All in all, this is well-made and probably the film for its time, but it’s still pretty boilerplate as a wartime fighting film.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Directors Noël Coward and David Lean; Writer Coward; Cinematographer Ronald Neame; Starring Noël Coward, John Mills, Bernard Miles, Celia Johnson, Kay Walsh, Joyce Carey; Length 114 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Sunday 1 January 2023.

Criterion Sunday 595: Il momento della verità (The Moment of Truth, 1965)

This mid-60s film from the Italian director of such politically-engaged Italian classics as Salvatore Giuliano and Hands Over the City went to Spain for his next film, although his characters continue to speak in Italian because this is, still, an Italian film. Despite that, I think it does capture something of what makes bullfighting appealing alongside plenty of what makes it utterly objectionable. It’s fair to say it’s a film that really immures you in the blood and corporeality of this sport, and there’s no shortage of shots featuring bleeding, dying bulls, bulls being killed, all for the name of the elegance and machismo of this contest. Yet at its heart, it’s a story of a poor young man with very few opportunities in life, seizing on something that he is good at, as a means of dragging himself out of poverty. The drama in the ring, as he starts to master his vocation, adds to the texture of the film, which I think captures well this kind of existence, a transient life on the road chasing the money from bullfights in small towns, fights for money but not the glory of the huge arenas in Barcelona and especially Madrid. The bulls aren’t the only ones brutalised by this life, and theirs is not the only blood you see, but the film doesn’t look away from the horrifying reality of this sport and that’s probably enough to put off some viewers (as it should).

CRITERION EXTRAS:

• This is one of the thinnest packages of extras for any modern Criterion film released on Blu-ray, with just a single 13-minute interview with Rosi, conducted many decades later, as he reflects on the making of the film. His recollections aren’t uninteresting, but you expect more from Criterion.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Francesco Rosi; Writers Pedro Beltrán, Ricardo Muñoz Suay, Pere Portabella and Rosi; Cinematographers Pasqualino De Santis, Gianni Di Venanzo and Aiace Parolin; Starring Miguel Mateo “Miguelín”; Length 107 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Friday 2 December 2022.