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.

Criterion Sunday 349: Kicking and Screaming (1995)

There was a story recently in the New York Times that sparked off a lot of online discourse about the Criterion Collection, specifically about its blind spot for African-American filmmakers, and the next morning I found myself watching Noah Baumbach’s debut film, which seems to exemplify something of the collection’s fixation on white American filmmakers. To stick with the discourse for just a moment, I think the sensible response is not to valorise the Criterion Collection as the ultimate arbiter of tastemaking, but for whatever reason it has de facto become that — and as someone who is literally invested in the collection (as my watching of their films has also been accompanied by acquisition of the physical media), I can only hope that they do diversify their titles, while acknowledging that other labels have much better records on historically interesting releases by Black filmmakers (Milestone and Kino Lorber being two examples of distributors some of whose titles I own). Just looking at 90s indie films, there have been plenty of titles by Black directors that are easily the equal of this one, for example Love Jones, or indeed much of the output of that film’s stars during the decade (several of them were in Dead Presidents, which even had a Criterion laserdisc release, I believe).

I was younger than the characters are when I first saw Kicking and Screaming, and revisiting it again now in the light of everything I’ve seen since, 25 years after its first release, it has become aggravating to me. The actors are all fine; instead the weakness seems to be the script, which attempts a sort of witty insouciance that it just doesn’t perhaps have the experience to achieve (Baumbach would go on to make films which I’ve liked very much, so it’s not that I don’t like his work). The presence of Chris Eigeman only underlines this, given his role in Metropolitan five years earlier (and not very far back in the Criterion Collection), which did this stuff a lot better and with more genuine wit and humour. Of course, perhaps part of the problem is that “this stuff” as I’m calling it is the spiritual succession to Woody Allen and his neurotic stories of WASPy New York types — but that’s not even a genre that is necessarily bad, just quite well covered already. Certainly these mopey graduates trying to make their way in the world feels as limited as their social spheres. I do remember much of my post-film discussion in 1996 or so was about the flashback structure (because all these filmmaking tricks were still new to me then), and Olivia d’Abo’s character Jane is probably the most interesting of everyone, so it’s a pity she gets short shrift to the tedious Grover (Josh Hamilton). Let’s just say there were a lot of things that Baumbach would go on to refine in subsequent decades, but this still very much feels like juvenilia.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Noah Baumbach; Writers Baumbach and Oliver Berkman; Cinematographer Steven Bernstein; Starring Josh Hamilton, Chris Eigeman, Olivia d’Abo, Parker Posey, Eric Stoltz; Length 96 minutes.

Seen at Paramount, Wellington, early-1996 (and most recently on DVD at home, London, Friday 21 August 2020).

بابيشة Papicha (2019)

A fiction feature debut film for its Algerian French director, and a fine one at that, is Papicha, whose title is taken from an Algerian French phrase used about a young woman, and its star Lyna Khoudri is clearly destined for great things (I believe she already has a role in the latest Wes Anderson film The French Dispatch, though who knows when that’s going to get a release). This is a fine film, though it rather takes aim at Islamic fundamentalism in a fairly direct way.

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There are a number of recent French co-productions that deal with religious intolerance in traditionally patriarchal societies; I think of the Turkish-French film Mustang as perhaps the most notable example, and perhaps closest to this one. In each case, the filmmaking is strong and the performances the director gets from her (in this case) French-Algerian cast, constantly switching between Arabic and French in their scenes, are really believable. The setting is the Algerian Civil War of the late-1990s, and a creeping Islamic fundamentalism that expresses itself particularly (as these things seem to do) in restricting the liberties afforded to women. And so we have aspiring fashion student Nedjma (the riveting Lyna Khoudri), who really wants to put on a fashion show and really doesn’t want to put on the hijab, negotiating the way these social standards seem to be evolving at a breakneck pace around her and her friends, all of whom are students at the university at a time when learning itself is under threat. I do wonder a little at a French-funded film dealing with hijab as such a central issue, given that country’s own views on the practice, but the drama as presented here is galvanising and, very swiftly, rather traumatic in the way that it unfolds. Nedjma has no desire to leave Algeria, but at the same time the conflicts taking place at this period (which were already apparently winding down by the late-1990s) put her and her friends’ lives in danger just for the freedoms that they take for granted. Like Mustang it harnesses a lot of the same female ensemble energy, though the camera here often stays far closer in to its protagonists, who move about in a blur at times. It’s a fine film, and one that suggests promise for her feature directing career, and especially for its standout star.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Mounia Meddour مونيا مدور; Cinematographer Léo Lefèvre; Starring Lyna Khoudri لينا خودري, Shirine Boutella شرين بوتيلا, Amira Hilda Douaouda, Marwan Zeghbib مروان زغبيب; Length 107 minutes.
Seen at Curzon Bloomsbury, London, Saturday 8 August 2020.

Drylongso (Ordinary) (1998)

Another interesting film touching on the African-American experience, is this low-budget indie from 1998 which can be seen online (on the director’s Vimeo channel). It may not be as polished as some of the debut films coming out in cinemas, but it has its own energy.

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There’s a lot that’s likeable in this low-budget indie production which I’d heard about back when I was first getting into films in the late-90s but which never reached me in NZ, and largely disappeared after its initial release. It’s on the filmmaker’s Vimeo account in the absence of any screenings, and it fizzes with a sort of foundational energy, of wanting to tell stories about Black women in their own communities that avoid the usual tropes (the ones that were so prevalent in the 90s, certainly). As a background to the action, there’s a hooded attacker attacking other people by night, but it’s not a gang-based thing, it’s just one of many issues touching directly on the lives of the two young women who are at the centre of the story. One (April Barnett) is trying to get away from an abusive relationship and the other (Toby Smith) is chafing against the restrictions of her photography course: she prefers to take polaroids of young Black men, whom she feels are under threat. It’s not perfect, but the performances are really solid and it has a low-key humour that underlines some of its more dramatic reaches.

CREDITS
Director Cauleen Smith; Writers Smith and Salim Akil; Cinematographer Andrew Black; Starring Toby Smith, April Barnett, Will Power; Length 86 minutes.
Seen at home (Vimeo streaming), London, Saturday 28 March 2020.

Black Christmas (2019)

So although I’m following a New Zealand theme this week, this horror remake of a 1970s classic isn’t strictly-speaking a NZ film. It was, however, shot there — and in that sense reminds me of 1996’s The Frighteners, another ostensibly American-set film shot in NZ (and coming across rather oddly for that reason) — and it gets a NZ co-production credit depending where you look, so I consider it NZ enough to include it. Though it’s not perhaps a perfect film by any means, it was written and directed by women, and probably for that reason attracted a lot of online derision. That said, the horror community is a passionate and cinephile one, so in not having a background in viewing that genre’s films, perhaps I went rather easy on it — then again, there’s a good case to be made that it was specifically aimed at non-horror afficionados.

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I haven’t seen the original 1974 Black Christmas, but as a non-connoisseur of horror cinema, I can say this film is not really as horrific or gory as some of the advertising might lead you to expect. Though it has a few effective jump scares, the vibe at times feels very much closer to something like Dear White People (2014) or other cutting (sorry) campus-based satirical films about (rich, white, male) entitlement culture, or an episode of a 90s TV show like “Buffy” (which is not necessarily a bad thing). Sure, a lot of the targets are fairly obvious, but those things do need to continue being targeted and it’s good to see a film explicitly calling out campus rape culture without being cringingly performative in its ideas about social justice — though there are a few scenes early on in which Kris (Aleyse Shannon), the Black woman in the ensemble cast, waves around a clipboard outside a class trying to get signatures for her petition, which feel a little bit phony (though I’d definitely sign it, if only to get the reliably wooden Cary Elwes off screen). On the whole, though, this is a solid and topical horror film that is fairly enjoyable.

CREDITS
Director Sophia Takal; Writers Takal and April Wolfe (based on the 1974 film written by A. Roy Moore); Cinematographer Mark Schwartzbard; Starring Imogen Poots, Aleyse Shannon, Lily Donoghue, Brittany O’Grady, Cary Elwes; Length 92 minutes.
Seen at Odeon Surrey Quays, London, Thursday 19 December 2019.

Grave (Raw, 2016)

Horror movies at their best allegorise traumatic experiences and Raw — or Grave in its original French title, which means something more like “serious”, and is a phrase thrown around a few times during the film in reference to lead character Justine’s changes — takes on that transition to university with aplomb. It is, to be sure, rather more disturbing than my own time as a first year but it captures something of that desire to fit in and also be a part of a larger group. Here the students are aspiring vets largely isolated at the edge of a small town, somewhere removed from society, running amok at parties in between scenes of lab dissection. There are other elements thrown in — the exploration of sexuality, most notably — which add further resonance to the film, as Garance Marillier’s Justine is led on by her older sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf). In this particular intersection of sex and gore, the film is reminiscent of Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day (though with less Vincent Gallo, thankfully). It looks great, it has a carefully chosen soundtrack, and there are some great trippy shots. Also, can I just add that I love the poster. It’s been all over the London underground for the last month or so, and it’s just the right balance of unsettling and suggestive without being graphic.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Julia Ducournau; Cinematographer Ruben Impens; Starring Garance Marillier, Ella Rumpf, Rabah Naït Oufella; Length 99 minutes.
Seen at Curzon Aldgate, London, Saturday 15 April 2017.

Peur de rien (Parisienne, 2016)

I love films about immigrant experiences, as they render tangible how a person encounters another society and negotiates their place within it (a feeling that I can relate to, in however limited a way) — and the outside perspective can provide real insights into the society under discussion, in this film no less. Parisienne (or “fear of nothing” in its original French title) is about Lina (played by radiant newcomer Manal Issa), who has moved from Beirut to Paris in 1993 — this, it turns out, is a period film, with requisite careful detail of fashion and music (and it seems the director was really into Frank Black back then). Lina is dealing with a volatile family situation and responds by throwing herself into her studies, not to mention a succession of somewhat interchangeable French boyfriends. In this respect, I really like the way the director Danielle Arbid sets up unequal relationships of power for her teenage protagonist, in some ways the core of the film’s characterisation — from early scenes as she fights off the untoward attentions of her uncle, to these entitled, slightly older, white guys (including Vincent Lacoste), most of them well meaning, but just unrelenting in their insistence; there’s a sublimated violence to their advances that’s nicely brought out (I don’t know whether on purpose but it seemed to be there).

At a narrative level, the film is somewhat meandering, and the camera echoes this at a formal level, being given to wandering off, or cutting in close-ups of gesture and set decoration. If at times it feels like there’s no real message exactly, then that is surely of a piece with the storytelling: Lina is a young woman still forming her ideas and trying these on via various social connections (she even falls in with some skinheaded neo-Nazis at one point, leading to a bit of discussion of Le Pen père, which suddenly feels not so distant in time). It’s a film about finding strength and seeking identity, and in that it’s very successful.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Danielle Arbid دانيال عربيد; Cinematographer Hélène Louvart; Starring Manal Issa منال عيسى, Vincent Lacoste; Length 119 minutes.
Seen at Barbican Cinema, London, Thursday 17 November 2016.

Mistress America (2015)

Screwball comedy seems to be back in with US cinema at the moment, perhaps an expression of yearning for a long-gone era when filmmakers got to just indulge their borderline-sociopathic characters with witty wordplay, showing little regard for the naturalism that seemed so important to the New American Cinema of the 60s onwards. It allows for a rush of pure cinephilia, but unlike Peter Bogdanovich’s recent She’s Funny That Way, Noah Baumbach’s film, co-written by his star Greta Gerwig, has a more contemporary feel. It’s still based around suffocating WASPy upper-middles making their idle way through life, a milieu familiar from Frances Ha (or the sitcom Girls, featuring co-star Lola Kirke’s sister), but it mines that for some excellent laughs. Much of this is at the expense of Kirke’s first-year college student Tracy and her pretentious literary fellows (she’s a budding writer), but the source is Gerwig’s irrepressible Brooke, just turned 30 and still living precariously in New York City. Brooke has big plans but a history of others taking them on to achieve the success she can only fantasise about, and Tracy steps into this role as a potential sister-in-law (thanks to their parents’ impending marriage). One imagines the film could collapse at any moment — plenty of the relationships within it do — but it all manages to nimbly keep afloat and keep the laughs coming, even when some of the emotional terrain becomes more fraught. Gerwig’s Brooke is a complex character, at once warm and good to be around but also with a streak of mean self-absorption, nothing near as excoriating as the literary poseurs of Listen Up Philip (another film sharing some of the same terrain), but certainly challenging to those around her. Baumbach’s style though seems to be lightening up a little, making for more enjoyable films, and this one is equally driven by its musical soundtrack, heavy on the 80s synth sounds of such bands as Orchestral Maneouvres in the Dark — and that at least is enough to keep me happy.

CREDITS
Director Noah Baumbach; Writers Baumbach and Greta Gerwig; Cinematographer Sam Levy; Starring Lola Kirke, Greta Gerwig; Length 84 minutes.
Seen at Picturehouse Central, London, Monday 17 August 2015.

Dear White People (2014)

It’s worth celebrating this film for what it is and what it achieves, rather than cavilling about the things I wish it had done. After all it is rare enough to see a mainstream depiction in a film from the United States of lives other than privileged white kids, especially within a stylistic framework that equally evokes Wes Anderson (the Ivy League-like setting additionally recalls his Rushmore) and Stanley Kubrick (whose Barry Lyndon gets referenced via some of the classical music cues), amongst others. In fact, given the film’s budget, it’s a wonder that it looks as good as it does, shot in crisp bright colours, beautifully lit and with a lot of frontal framing of the film’s black faces. It’s in these boldly direct images that the film scores highest, with challenges to such things as racial power dynamics (the myth of black ‘racism’ for example) and the crassness of media representations of minorities, generally delivered by its forceful leading lady Tessa Thompson (playing a character called Sam White, head of her college house’s student body).

Aside from the titular radio show in which Sam delivers further challenges to her collegiate audience, the film is filled with other references to the co-optation of ‘authentic’ black experiences by privileged white people (all the college’s houses are named after black jazz musicians, there’s a reference to the audience for aggressive rap music largely being non-black, while the denouement involves a staging of a hiphop-themed party at a white fraternity). Meanwhile, its other lead character, the student journalist Lionel (Tyler James Williams), moves from being stand-offish around his black colleagues as a show of resistance to black stereotypes, to being part of their movement to challenge campus-based racism. His arc seems to reference Spike Lee’s Mookie in Do the Right Thing, though his climactic rage at the white fraternity he was a part of has less of the power of Mookie’s trash can moment in that film, possibly because none of the white characters here are in any way sympathetic (or indeed given particularly rounded roles — not that that’s a problem, of course). The narrative also becomes more conventional as the film progresses, dissipating some of the early excellent character work and humorous barbs.

However, much as I wish it had been angrier — its target seems almost quaint within a media landscape currently dominated by stories of murderous police aggression — it never allows the power of its black protagonists to be co-opted or dissipated within the dominant power structures. I look forward to further films from this cast, and from writer/director Justin Simien.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Justin Simien; Cinematographer Topher Osborn; Starring Tessa Thompson, Tyler James Williams, Brandon Bell, Teyonah Parris; Length 108 minutes.
Seen at Picturehouse Central, London, Monday 13 July 2015.

22 Jump Street (2014)

I’m quite sure this film doesn’t need my review, and those who want to see it will go and see it regardless. I myself certainly wasn’t expecting it to be as fun or as silly as the original 2012 reboot of creaky 80s high school detective TV series 21 Jump Street, but I wasn’t expecting it to push through silliness to something quite so generic. Of course, having fun with genre signifiers is part of what it’s playing at, and there’s even a speech by the chief (an enjoyably Ron Swanson-ish turn by Nick Offerman) which could read as a meeting between the filmmakers and the studio about the need to do exactly the same thing in the sequel — a premise which sees this film move to a university for its otherwise identical drug-ring-busting plot, but also allows for the most fun bit of the film which is the end credits sequence imagining further sequels. I feel as audiences we’ve got used to the trope of ‘a film that looks like it was fun to make’ as code for ‘but not fun to watch’ and if it’s not ever entirely tedious (it has a few laughs), it certainly does skirt close to being that. The university setting allows for lots of jokes at the expense of its stars (Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum) and their age, which is a canny way not to alienate an adolescent audience, I suppose, yet it feels a bit condescending at times, though at least the scenes of deadpan student Mercedes (Jillian Bell) poking fun at Hill’s age are among the film’s funniest, and Mercedes gets to come into her own in the denouement. However, in riffing on audience expectations from this type of film, the filmmakers also spend a lot of time trying to push the cop buddy-film homosociality towards something affecting, but it never comes off as anything more than sophomoric, and the sheen of engaged awareness doesn’t elevate the bromance beyond pseudo-homophobic locker-room crassness. Which is all by way of saying, I didn’t really like it as much as I perhaps expected to, given the fine pedigree of its directors and cast at doing this kind of thing, though at the very least it is certainly aware of exactly what it is doing. And it was probably a lot of fun to make.

CREDITS
Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller; Writers Michael Bacall, Oren Uziel and Rodney Rothman (based on the TV series 21 Jump Street by Patrick Hansburgh and Stephen J. Cannell); Cinematographer Barry Peterson; Starring Channing Tatum, Jonah Hill, Ice Cube, Peter Stormare, Jillian Bell; Length 112 minutes.
Seen at Cineworld Wood Green, London, Sunday 22 June 2014.