NZIFF 2021: Gagarine (2020)

Continuing with my reviews of films at Whānau Mārama – New Zealand International Film Festival is this dreamy, almost magical realist French film about a housing estate. Now generally I dislike magical realist films, but this one — for all its spacy themes and title — is very much grounded in lived reality. It’s set in a French housing project and while it eschews the gritty realism of, say, La Haine, it still captures a lot of the same anger and despair while hitting a very much dreamier and hopeful tone. And one of its central protagonists is played by Lyna Khoudri, so excellent in Papicha and surely destined to be a big star (I believe she has a small role in Wes Anderson’s latest The French Despatch).

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It’s interesting to read the blurb at the top of the festival programme’s entry for this film — which speaks of Yuri (the central character, played by Alséni Bathily) and his dreams of becoming an astronaut and how he and his two buddies band together to save their estate (or banlieue if you will) — and realise how much it both describes and yet does not capture this film. Because it could describe this film (or at least the first 20 minutes or so), but yet it is so much more than this suggests, not just in complexity but in the wonderment and expressivity of its atmospherics. This is a film about social housing and displacement, about the institutionalised classism and racism of the state, about lives unmoored and threatened by almost unseen forces, and yet it’s really about dreaming, about imagination, about being with others and helping one another to be better but without losing sight of all the ever-present threats of the real world. It’s all quite beautiful and reminiscent a bit of Rocks (in its cast and setting) but without feeling constrained by the niceties of social realism. It cuts loose and just floats serenely, knowing it can take that ride with the central character, because crushing reality is always just around the corner. A very persuasive blend of melancholy and mystery that won me over.

CREDITS
Directors Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh; Writers Liatard, Trouilh and Benjamin Charbit; Cinematographer Victor Seguin; Starring Alséni Bathily, Lyna Khoudri, Jamil McCraven, Finnegan Oldfield; Length 97 minutes.
Seen at Penthouse, Wellington, Saturday 6 November 2021.

Work It (2020)

If there’s one thing you can rely on Netflix for, it’s formulaic teen movies and romcoms, and then maybe the intersection between those. They have lots of examples, yes, I’ve seen plenty, but mostly they’re pretty likeable I find, and it’s a genre they seem able to do quite well. So here’s another teen film and another dance competition film, with a little bit of romcom to it but not too much.

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It would be easy to write this film off as formulaic, because after all it is formulaic: it follows the ‘let’s form a team and beat our peers in the big finale’ and it cleaves tightly to all the rules as we understand them. Plus, being set in a high school, it folds in all the rules around teen high school movies too (all those cliques to introduce). And then there’s the team in question, which is a dance troupe, and already this film feels very mid-2010s because we’ve seen all those movies already, and clearly so have the filmmakers. But I can’t write it off, because dance movies still spark joy in me however formulaic they may be, and this one isn’t entirely witless. Sabrina Carpenter in the lead is pretty good (except at pretending to be bad at dancing), her band of high school misfits endearing in almost exactly the same way as, say, Pitch Perfect, and the love story is almost perfunctory, but I found it all very likeable and watchable, once you get past the initial wobbles (where the screenplay tries to throw in of-the-moment buzzwords like ‘being cancelled’ in a really clunky way).

CREDITS
Director Laura Terruso; Writer Alison Peck; Cinematographer Rogier Stoffers; Starring Sabrina Carpenter, Liza Koshy, Jordan Fisher, Keiynan Lonsdale; Length 93 minutes.
Seen at home (Netflix streaming), Wellington, Sunday 14 February 2021.

左様なら Sayounara (2018)

Still catching up this week with my favourites I saw last year, this one’s a bit of an anomaly. I saw it in that first flush of film festivals moving online, via a “Japanese Film Festival Magazine” website which was streaming a number of recent Japanese films, many by women directors. Perhaps it was seeing this during lockdown that made me respond positively, who knows, but I did very much like it.

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There is, of course — given the title, which is reminiscent of the French adieu, in the sense of a final goodbye — a deep seam of sadness and melancholy that laces through this film. This much is clear in its setup: Yuki (Haruka Imo), who seems to be a fairly popular girl in her high school class, starts to become sullen and distant after her friend Aya (Kirara Inori) dies. Despite this, there’s something in the way that it unfolds that has a deeply-felt warmth to it; for all Yuki’s grief, it feels over the course of the film as if Aya’s death allows her to come to value what’s really important in her life. And so she finds herself cutting out the mean girls who share gossip about Aya (speculating that her death in an accident may have been a suicide and revealing that they never really liked her anyway) and starting to welcome new experiences, like going to gigs with the guys in her class who make an effort to reach out to her and don’t seem to hold her in the same shallow judgement. In flashbacks, she relives her times with Aya, rehearsing her grief and admonishing herself for not crying or being appropriately sad at her friend’s death, even as it’s perfectly clear to read on her face how she feels.

None of the drama comes in big gestures or speeches, just in little moments like a classmate shuffling shyly behind her at a school fieldtrip, in which you can see the classmate wanting to reach out to Yuki but opening rather gauchely with “Were you good friends with Aya?” to be rebuffed with a simple “Why?” before falling back, uncertainly, as they both walk on. A lot of the movement of the film is similarly captured by the camera in these emotional exchanges with a thankful paucity of dialogue, but it seems to me that this is as much about the writing and direction allowing this space as it is to the excellent acting of Imo. For all the film’s melancholy, it’s heartening and affecting, and ultimately is not so much about the death of a schoolmate as it is about another finding out how to live (which sounds so much more melodramatic when I write it down than it is in the film).

CREDITS
Director/Writer Yuho Ishibashi 石橋夕帆; Cinematographer Shu Hagiwara 萩原脩; Starring Haruka Imo 芋生悠, Kirara Inori 祷キララ; Length 86 minutes.
Seen at home (Japanese Film Festival Magazine streaming), London, Thursday 14 May 2020.

Criterion Sunday 381: La Haine (aka Hate, 1995)

At a certain level you get the feel that this film was aiming to light a fuse under the complacent French middle classes about the angst and turmoil — generational, class-based and racially motivated — existing under their own noses, in the vast banlieux (the French equivalent of council estates, or projects) just on the edges of their largest cities. And I suppose it did have that effect, but watching it again 25 years on, it feels very polished and Hollywood, but then it’s taking something of a cue from Spike Lee and his seminal Do the Right Thing six years earlier. That much is evident in the structure of the story and in some of the technical effects (zoom shots and dollies, such as the one into Saïd Taghmaoui’s face at the start and end of the film), though obviously not in the colour palette which unlike Lee’s forcefully saturated colours is rather starkly monochrome. There’s humour too in a lot of the film, but what feels a little lacking is menace, but then again it makes sense that the film isn’t trying to make its protagonists feel like dangerous characters to spend time with — sure, Vincent Cassel’s Vinz is on edge, but like the other two he is just fronting aggression to hide a deeper malaise — and in fact, it is, as it should be, the police who are the characters you (and the protagonists) can’t feel comfortable around. I don’t know if I was looking for something with more edge, but it has aged if anything rather gracefully, and even some of the period cultural references — like confronting skinheads with a rousing ‘fvck Le Pen’ — haven’t actually changed at all (even if the specific Le Pen is different).

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer Mathieu Kassovitz; Cinematographer Pierre Aim; Starring Vincent Cassel, Hubert Koundé, Saïd Taghmaoui; Length 97 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Friday 18 December 2020 (and originally on VHS at home, Wellington, November 1997).

Global Cinema 25: Brunei – Yasmine (2014)

From Brazil, one of the largest countries in the world and a major film producing nation, to one of the smallest, Brunei. Needless to say, this country (also sometimes called Brunei Darussalam) doesn’t have a huge range of film production to choose from, but the teen sports drama I’ve gone for does seem to have enjoyed a little success and was available on streaming services.

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Nation of Brunei, the Abode of Peace (Negara Brunei Darussalam)
population 460,000 | capital Bandar Seri Begawan (64k) | largest cities Bandar Seri Begawan, Kuala Belait (31k), Seria (30k), Tutong (19k), Kapok (4k) | area 5,765 km² | religion Islam (79%), Christianity (9%), Buddhist (8%) | official language Malay (Behasa Melayu), although English is also recognised | major ethnicity Malay (66%), Chinese (10%) | currency Brunei dollar (B$) [BND] | internet .bn

A small country on the northern side of the island of Borneo, surrounded by the Malaysian state of Sarawak and a coastline on the South China Sea; the island is also shared with Indonesia (who call it Kalimantan). Traditionally it is said to be named for its founder Sultan Shah’s 14th century cry of Baru nah (“that’s it!”) upon landing, though may also derive from the Sanskrit varun (for “seafarers”), and Borneo shares the same roots. The earliest settlement on the island may date back to Buddhist Srivijaya empire around the 7th century CE, while Chinese records show an independent kingdom of Boni on the island in the 10th century. Boni converted to Islam in the 15th century and transformed into the Sultanate of Brunei, and at its peak in the next few centuries ruled over Borneo as well as parts of what is now the south-west Philippines up to even Manila. With the rise of Spain in the region and the incursion of the Ottomans, along with internal squabbles, Brunei entered a period of decline. Much of their territory was ceded to these others powers, as well as to Britain in the 19th century, and the modern boundaries were more or less set by 1890 following a treaty with Britain making it a protectorate, aside from a brief period during World War II when Japan occupied the island. Oil was first discovered in 1929 and has been the basis of much of the state’s wealth since. It gained independence from Britain in 1984, and is ruled by an absolute monarchy under the Sultan of Brunei.

Much of the country’s culture is influenced strongly by neighbouring Malay cultures (as two-thirds of the population are of Malay ethnicity) and by Islam. Given this background, there hasn’t been a huge amount of film production in the country and what does exist largely draws its talent from Malaysia.

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Yasmine (2014)

On the one hand this is quite a likeable teen sports drama film about the young woman of the title (Liyana Yus) who is trying to break free from her strict father (Reza Rahadian) and who falls out with his schoolmates at the start about where they’re going to college. For reasons (jealousy mainly, I think, but also from being shunned by her new college for being really full of herself) Yasmine takes up the martial art of silat with (as is the usual trope) two other unlikely club members at her small (and apparently, more orthodox religious) school. Once formed into a team, they enlist the help of trainers to help them beat the reigning local champions who, obviously, happen to have Yasmine’s former best friend Dewi (Mentari De Marelle) as their best fighter. There’s also a sub-plot involving Yasmine’s dad and the wheelchair-bound ex-champion who coaches Yasmine’s team.

A lot of these plot points do seem pretty familiar, then, from sports movies over the years, but it’s worth pointing out that on the other hand — and yes, I do appreciate that the usual usage of this structural gambit does imply some kind of juxtaposition, which is not what I’m offering — it appears to be the first film directed by a Bruneian woman, and also how many films do you generally see either from Brunei, or about the sport of silat? Probably about as many as I do, or have done until I saw this. So while it may not break any narrative barriers, it is still likeable and interesting.

CREDITS
Director Siti Kamaluddin; Writer Salman Aristo; Cinematographer James Teh; Starring Liyana Yus, Reza Rahadian, Mentari De Marelle; Length 105 minutes.
Seen at Airbnb flat (Tubi streaming), Lower Hutt, Tuesday 17 September 2020.

Rocks (2019)

There’s a new American film out in cinemas that’s catching acclaim right now, Miss Juneteenth, but last week saw the belated UK release of Rocks, one of the stand-out films which premiered at last year’s London Film Festival (and Toronto too), and was originally slated for an April release. It’s great to finally have seen it, one of the recent highlights of a new crop of great British films that deal with real lives.

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Watching this new and acclaimed British film, I find myself surprised because I sort of had director Sarah Gavron (unfairly no doubt!) pegged in my mind as a fairly bland middlebrow director, though perhaps I was just feeling uncharitable towards the very heritage-film-adjacent Suffragette (2015). However, this project is an entirely different story of quite different people in a different era (well, it’s set in the present). It’s clear, as the filmmakers discuss in a brief video intro that screens before the film, that this was very much a collaboration not just between the two writers but between them and the young first-time actors they found to play most of the roles. And it’s very persuasive (though co-writer Theresa Ikoko is right to question the meaning of the phrase “authentic”), if only — but not only, let me be clear — because it tells a story of characters who aren’t often foregrounded in British films.

Specifically it’s about a Black British girl of Nigerian descent, Olu, but nicknamed “Rocks” (Bukky Bakray), her small brother Emmanuel (D’angelou Osei Kissiedu) and her entirely believable set of friends, most notably the slightly gawky Sumaya (Kosar Ali). Rocks finds herself abandoned by her mother and takes a picaresque tour of all these friends’ lives and their disparate living situations. The film is shot by Hélène Louvart as a constant jumble of movement and faces against its East London backdrops (somewhat more close-in than perhaps intended for me, because the cinema I was in showed it in the wrong aspect ratio). Anyway, it’s a great film that deals believably with young British kids navigating their lives, played very much as teenagers with all the awkwardness with words and difficulty around emotions as is too little seen, and makes it into a moving drama.

CREDITS
Director Sarah Gavron; Writers Theresa Ikoko and Claire Wilson; Cinematographer Hélène Louvart; Starring Bukky Bakray, Kosar Ali, D’angelou Osei Kissiedu; Length 93 minutes.
Seen at Curzon Aldgate, London, Saturday 19 September 2020.

Babyteeth (2019)

I’ve still only seen five films in a cinema since lockdown rules were relaxed, because I am still very careful about how much I’m stepping into cinemas (and there’s still a relative paucity of new content available, quite aside from the fact that the institutions I most often frequent, like the BFI Southbank and the ICA are not yet reopened). However, this Australian film tempted me back into a cinema, because it looked like one of the highlights of the London Film Festival last year. It clearly doesn’t work for everyone, presumably to do with its themes and the way it presents them, or perhaps the age differential in the central relationship (her age is somewhat skirted around), but I really liked it.

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There’s basically an entire sub-genre of films about terminally-ill teenagers, and it’s probably also fair to say that they don’t always get the best reception. It’s a strange category because it’s hard-wired to be a weepie, but it’s too often made into this romantic thing given the demographic involved. Of course, the 20-or-so-year-old Eliza Scanlen has recent form for playing dying children, but she plays them well so it’s no surprise she’s excellent as Milla here. However, I think the real focus, because it’s where the greatest pain lies, is in the parents and as far as casting goes, you don’t get much better in Australian cinema than Essie Davis and Ben Mendelsohn. The film itself has a rather arch structure, little chapter headings popping up on screen, and an at times whimsical and stylised presentation. Still, for all that it’s pulled down some fairly mixed reviews, I find myself liking this film quite a lot. The choices that the filmmakers take are pretty bold — although I think the romantic story between Milla and the older Moses (Toby Wallace, playing a 23-year-old to her teenager) required a little bit more thought about the way that age gap would play, although certainly it is acknowledged within the film — and so I think they pay off, but ultimately this is an actors’ film and they excel.

CREDITS
Director Shannon Murphy; Writer Rita Kalnejais (based on her play); Cinematographer Andrew Commis; Starring Eliza Scanlen, Toby Wallace, Essie Davis, Ben Mendelsohn; Length 120 minutes.
Seen at Genesis, London, Sunday 16 August 2020.

Criterion Sunday 336: Dazed and Confused (1993)

I avoided this when it was first released in cinemas, though I was about the same age as the characters in the film, because it was marketed as a stupid high school movie and it didn’t appeal to me at the time. It also had the sense of being a very indulgent nostalgic look back at the 70s, and that’s a criticism that’s more difficult to avoid because in a sense it is, in addition to which indulging his characters is very much a Linklater trademark. Watching it again many years on, though, that feels like the thing that’s aged best — this sense that almost all the characters have some redeeming quality even if they are sleazy creeps (like McConaughey’s older Wooderson, cruising the high school to pick up girlfriends) or big dumb jocks (like Sasha Jenson’s Don). There’s even a glimmer of humanity in Ben Affleck’s O’Bannion, but not much because he’s the real bad guy here, a grinning sadist who has to retake his final year at school. However, there’s no manufactured hostility between the jocks and the geeks here; sure there’s a bit of back and forth in the conversations, but nobody avoids anyone else and friendship groups seem to cut across these distinctions, plus there’s a sense of generational camaraderie even in the sadistic hazing rituals.

However, like much of Linklater’s oeuvre, it’s a hang-out film where nothing really happens. People just cruise around and ping off each other — not as literally as the tangential sidetracking of Slacker (1990) — but still with no clear sense that they’re all working towards anything except the next beer or the next party. But that sense of aimlessness going towards college and the future, which is encapsulated in the final shot on the road, that’s something that Linklater’s been doing for decades in many of his films, capturing a mood or an era, a sense of uncertainty in his characters, and it’s perfectly done here, with lots of people who would go on to have acting careers (or not), but who just seem right for the roles.

CRITERION EXTRAS:

• There are plenty of extras, but the main one is Making Dazed (2005, dir. Kahane Corn), a pretty straight-down-the-line documentary about the making of a film, albeit one that had been in production for over a decade it seems. The director has extensive interviews with the cast both at the time of filming and a decade later, as several of them gather for an anniversary screening. Of course many of the faces are now familiar to us (or at least a bit more familiar) and they all clearly have fond memories of the film that was the first experience of filmmaking for a lot of them. It’s good to hear the stories, and see some of the making-of footage, and it’s good to think about how far some have come from these horny Texan teenagers, but it evokes a warmth of feeling at the very least.
• A lot of the footage from the making-of documentary is also available as extras, including the full clips of most cast members in the first week of filming explaining their characters, as well as interviews conducted on set and behind-the-scenes footage of the filming. Amongst these are also a few more recent interviews — including one with Linklater, his casting director and McConaughey speaking about how the latter got involved (some of which is also in the finished documentary) — and some brief footage from the anniversary cast reunion.
• Most of the audition tapes of the various cast members are also included as extras, which can be interesting to watch, although the quality is obviously rather poorer, being shot on video.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer Richard Linklater; Cinematographer Lee Daniel; Starring Jason London, Wiley Wiggins, Sasha Jenson, Parker Posey, Matthew McConaughey, Adam Goldberg, Ben Affleck; Length 102 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), London, Saturday 11 July 2020 (and earlier on TV at home, London, Saturday 19 April 2014).

Films by Valeska Grisebach: Be My Star (2001), Longing (2006) and Western (2017)

She’s only made three feature films, but on the basis of just that work Valeska Grisebach is one of the most interesting German-language filmmakers of the last few decades. She was trained at the Vienna Film School, though she isn’t Austrian (she was born in Bremen), and is often included in the so-called ‘Berlin School’ with Angela Schanelec (whom I’ll cover later this week), Christian Petzold and others. She makes unglamorous films with non-professional actors that often resist the more florid aspects of storytelling, not a million miles from say Kelly Reichardt or Claire Denis. This perhaps accounts for why she’s been able to make so few, but those she has made are all excellent and well worth checking out (though her graduate film, Be My Star, is somewhat rougher aesthetically).

Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020)

Back in the week commencing 15 May, I did a themed week around American indie films directed by women because of the release of this new Eliza Hittman film to VoD streaming services. I also reviewed her earlier film Beach Rats (2017) during that week. Naturally the new release was quite expensive those first few weeks but when the rental cost came down a bit, I did finally catch up with it, and I think it’s one of the strongest new releases this year.

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I don’t think there can ever be enough stories of this nature, testifying to ordinary people and the lengths they need to go to in order to keep their lives on an even keel. This is about Autumn (Sidney Flanigan), a young woman in a small Pennsylvania town, who’s in high school and clearly gets trouble off her classmates for being too serious — we are introduced to her at a show where the evident theme is 50s Americana, but she sings a doomy song about the patriarchy. At home, her mom has her hands full with Autumn’s younger sisters, plus has a boyfriend who’s a creep. It’s a set up that’s anything but supportive, so when she finds out she’s pregnant (presumably to the dude who’s being particularly aggressively bullying towards her), there aren’t really any realistic options, and the local clinic, while friendly, have their own priorities, leading her to get on a bus with her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder) and go to NYC without telling anybody. Flanigan is really solid at the core of this film, and a lot of what she’s dealing with remains unaddressed in the dialogue, instead communicated by posture and body language, surly aggressiveness towards her cousin at times, but at other times softening. It’s a quiet, undemonstrative film that works its magic slowly, and it’s the scene that gives the film its title which is the emotional core of the film, which never lapses into melodramatic territory, but just stays with the choice of its protagonist and her seeing that through.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Eliza Hittman; Cinematographer Hélène Louvart; Starring Sidney Flanigan, Talia Ryder, Théodore Pellerin; Length 101 minutes.
Seen at home (Amazon streaming), London, Sunday 9 June 2019.