Film
Markie Robson-Scott
“I never abandoned you,” says Jule (Ophélia Kolb; Call My Agent!) to her 10-year-old daughter Claire (Jasmine Kalisz Saurer), setting a fairly low bar as far as motherhood is concerned.Swiss-American director Jasmin Gordon’s first feature, with a screenplay by Julien Bouissoux, is a compelling, though too mysterious, portrait of a single mother versus society. Set in a wealthy town in the mountainous Lower Valais in Switzerland, Jule, a woman on the margins, gazes out from her window at the murmuring trees that, in a hypnotic, recurring motif, seem to offer a portal for escape.She lives in a Read more ...
John Carvill
Can a film’s classic status expire, or be rescinded? If it can, I’d say The Graduate is a potential candidate.Yes, it was formally groundbreaking (within the context of American cinema), and is often read as a metaphor for the clash of generations, the burgeoning freedoms and battles for equality being waged as the 60s reacted against the grey flannel stultification of the 50s. But try watching it back to back with, say, Bonnie and Clyde, and some aspects come across today as surprisingly staid, almost atavistic. Roger Ebert labelled Dustin Hoffman’s Ben Braddock an “insufferable creep Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Taking its title from a Sonic Youth track whose lyrics describe someone who seems good on the outside but is bad inside, this debut feature from the Slovenian director Urska Djukic is a small miracle. Its 90 minutes deftly draw us into the psychology of pubescent teens in a fresh, often funny, always transporting way. The narrative focuses on Lucia (Jara Sofia Ostan), an introverted, daydreaming 16-year-old who has joined an all-girls choir at her Catholic school. When her mother arrives to collect her from choir practice, it’s clear Lucia is kept on a tight rein. Her mother deplores the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Not even an animal would do what she did.” Jessica (Babette Verbeek) is speaking about her biological mother, who abandoned her when she was a baby, leaving her to grow up in care. Now Jessica, a teenager, is pregnant, just as her mother was, and is obsessed with finding her. She demands answers, as well as love.Brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s 13th feature film won the best screenplay award at Cannes (they’ve won the Palme d’Or twice) and it’s an extraordinarily compelling picture of life in a maternal support home. Less harrowing than some of their work, it’s set in Liège, Belgium, Read more ...
graham.rickson
British audiences of a certain age will note Finis Terrae’s similarity to Finisterre, one of the 31 sea areas listed in the BBC’s Shipping Forecast. Or previously listed – it was renamed Fitzroy in 2002 to avoid confusion with another Finisterre off the coast of Spain.This title translates as "End of the Earth", an apt one for a silent film which depicts a community and way of life largely untouched by the industrial revolution. Director Jean Epstein had recently completed an acclaimed but troubled 1928 adaptation of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. Feeling exhausted and burnt-out, he Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Two chimney sweeps sit by a window. The boss (Thorbjørn Harr) recounts a dream meeting with David Bowie, who disconcertingly looks at him like he’s a woman. Funny thing, his friend (Jar Gunnar Røise) replies. Yesterday, a male client asked him to have sex, and he did. It felt good. He hasn’t told anyone else, apart from his wife.Sex opened Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo Stories trilogy in Norway, and closes it here, forming an appropriate climax to his distinctive MO. The nameless sweeps’ 15-minute break-room conversation at its start, panning from widescreen one-shot to two-shot with sometimes Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I have a baby in me,” says Lydie (Naomi Ackie; Mickey 17). “What? Right now?” says her friend Agnes (Eva Victor), who may not be entirely thrilled at the news. “Are you going to name it Agnes?”Eva Victor (Rian in Billions) stars in, writes and directs their debut feature, which was produced by Barry Jenkins’s production house, Pastel. It’s divided into five sections, beginning and ending with The Year with the Baby. Its silly humour can be irritating, as can the dialogue, and it’s not as incisive as Girls, Fleabag or I May Destroy You, with which it has some themes in common.But it addresses Read more ...
graham.rickson
"Crazy comedy" was a recognised subgenre in post-war Czech cinema. Turn to this disc’s bonus features first and watch Michael Brooke’s video essay Those Crazy Czechs, an entertaining whistle-stop guide which piqued my curiosity about films such as You Are a Widow, Sir!, I Killed Einstein, Gentlemen! and How About a Plate of Spinach?Jindřich Polák’s time-travelling Nazis comedy Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea has been reissued by Second Run, and it’s now followed by Václav Vorlíček’s Who Wants to Kill Jessie? Released in 1966 as Kdo chce zabít Jessii?, this features Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Love was the Norwegian climax of Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo trilogy, the most lovestruck vision of his city and boldest prophesy of how to live there, beyond borders and bonds of sexual identity and shame. Released here between Dreams’ meta-memories of swooning first love and Sex’s look at desire undefined by gender, it also settles in Oslo’s heart.Gay nurse Tor (Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen) and his straight doctor colleague Marianne (Andrea Bræin Hovig) are complementary leads in a film as concerned with female desire as the queer lens Haugerud’s work is conceived through. The set-piece speech, Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“When have you ever gone off alone?” scoffs Magnus (Thomas W Gabrielsson) when his wife, Maria (Mirja Turestedt), expresses the wish to go to England rather than Morocco for their joint sabbatical. Famous last words.Caroline Ingvarsson’s debut feature, adapted from Swedish writer Håkan Nesser’s complex psychological thriller The Living and the Dead in Winsford, is big on atmosphere but leaves too much to the imagination, skimming over the surface of the book, which is well worth reading, and extracting only bare, unsustaining bones.Something bad goes down in a bunker, but it’s hard to tell Read more ...
James Saynor
Andrew Garfield was 29 when he played the teenage Spiderman and Jennifer Grey was 27 when she took on a decade-younger-than-her character called “Baby” in Dirty Dancing. So you’d think that directors and casting experts could find actors to advance on the screen through that kind of age gap readily enough.But this French kissing-and-clobbering epic opts to recast its romantic leads midway through as they jump from teens to twenties, and it’s one reason why the Hauts-de-France Romeo and Juliet – directed by Gilles Lellouche – wrings few tears or heart-skips over its two-and-three-quarter-hour Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The Canadian-Korean director Celine Song burst onto the scene with her debut feature, Past Lives, two years ago, a bittersweet film about a woman torn between her first love, a Korean, and her current one, her American husband. Song is back with another woman at a crossroads, but in Materialists her heroine’s decision is much less painful to make, and far less affecting. This film is a curio: if Song’s name didn't appear in the opening credits, you would see it as a well cast mainstream romcom for grown-ups, with passages of seemingly sober analysis of the nature of love and marriage. It Read more ...