Film Reviews by PD

Olivier Assayas’ latest offering concerns the impact of digital technology on media and the arts, literature in particular, although it could refer to developments in cinema also. The film follows two Parisian couples in which the husbands are connected to the world of publishing; there's no 'action' as such, 'just' rounds of conversations on this subject plus such matters as the rise of e-books, and quite a few of those modern Englishisms such as “le streaming,” “post-truth”, “fake news” and “autofiction.” The characters are preoccupied with — and have varying professional stakes in — the enormous changes that have already happened or are just about to happen, and their jobs, (as with their relationships with their partners) are in flux. Whether with grim resignation, shrugging amusement or evangelical zeal, everyone declares that everything is different, everything is new, although now and then, someone will demur: “But some things don’t change.”

In the vast majority of scenes, Assayas stages his arguments about the digital future in bars, restaurants and cafes, over informal dinners or hasty breakfasts, or else, a bit less often, in stretches of pre- or postcoital discourse. People almost always meet at table or in bed, (and in one case both at once). There are maybe 10 minutes in the whole film that don’t involve the immediate prospect of eating, drinking or sex. Hey, it's a French film. The original French title of “Non-Fiction” apparently means “Double Lives,” and the couples concerned dwell in a virtual world of data, social networks and endless quantification, a world that feeds their appetites for abstraction and disputation.

It's either a comedy of adultery disguised as a meditation on the future of civilisation, or the other way round - the fact that the one who works in politics is the least cynical, most ethical player in this game counts as a sly joke. Her job, which takes her away from Paris, gestures toward a dimension of reality that lies beyond the hermetic concerns of the others, but the film doesn't get into this in any depth.

There's some good moments, but it’s also very much a symptom of the condition it diagnoses, namely the profound complacency of the cultural elite (in France here, but of course could be anywhere). And whilst both 'Clouds of Sila Maria' and 'Personal Shopper' kept me engaged with the characters concerned, I found myself not really caring about this lot - you just wish they'd meet some 'real' people and get out of their little narcissistic worlds, and whilst I get that this is exactly what we're supposed to feel and that to react this way is to recognise them, and thus to be implicated their vanity, duplicity, self-delusion & whatnnot, it takes a Woody Allen or a Michael Haneke to bring this off and in the end I don't think Assayas has done so here. So well worth a look but don't get your hopes up.

Damien Chazelle’s intimate new film takes the conquest of difficulty as its inspiration. Retelling the story of the American space programme from the early ’60s to the Apollo 11 mission through the lens of Armstrong’s professional and personal life, Chazelle (drawing on James R. Hansen’s biography) unfurls a chronicle of setbacks, obstacles and tragedies on the way to eventual triumph. The film is good at helping us appreciate, almost 50 years later, how many times, and in how many ways, the moon landing almost didn’t happen. It's pretty good at restoring a sense of uncertainty of the vast unknown that Armstrong and his colleagues faced, and finds fresh set of images to convey the strangeness and sublimity of those moments at Tranquility Base just after the “giant leap,” so we might intuit at least a glimmer of the awe that Armstrong must have felt (although the music score is just a bland distraction). The rattling din of ascent and the eerie quiet of zero-gravity are also impressively rendered, whilst the fact that space travel, viewed from the inside, could look and feel so much more abrasive and hazardous than we might ever have thought is part of the film's power, the ships creaking and rattling like tin cans in a hurricane, and there's a great, darkly humourous moment just before lift-off when some guy asks for a Swiss army knife to fix something.

Chazelle’s interest in Armstrong is as much personal as historical: bureaucratic snags, political-turf battles and engineering puzzles provide the narrative machinery, but feelings are the film’s fuel. Armstrong’s progress from pilot to celestial pioneer traces an epic arc, and like some of the ancient epics “First Man” is primarily a character study, a space odyssey with a diffident and enigmatic Ulysses at its centre, and his Penelope — loyal, anxious, angry, exhausted — is wife Janet. Neil and Janet’s grief over the loss of their daughter Karen serves as a kind of Rosebud, a half-buried centre of emotional and psychological gravity, a source of motive and meaning. And Karen’s is not the only death to be mourned. Janet sometimes seems to move through her days in anticipation of widowhood, and the progress of the Gemini and Apollo programs is measured partly in lives lost. Even for viewers versed in NASA history, who will know the fates of certain characters as soon as they are introduced, the deaths come as a shock. They are dramatised with cinematic tact, so that what you register is not horror but a sudden, disorienting absence, as if the men had vanished into space.

But the film's centre is its attempt to illuminate the inner life of Armstrong, and this doesn't quite come off for me. It can be hard to tell if Neil possesses an extra-dry wit or if he’s just literal-minded. (When the astronauts are asked at a news conference what they’d like to bring to the moon with them, his answer is “more fuel.”), and he remains an enigma to everyone, including his wife & family. But Chazelle rather lacks confidence that the audience will warm to such a man, and so he pipes in a layer of sentimentality which I found simply irritating.

From time to time, grumbling is heard about the point of it all — the actual Apollo programme, that is, which gobbled up public money at a time of social unrest and military conflict. Chazelle cleverly inserts a performance of Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon,” a bitterly satirical protest song, although such dissent is washed away by the sheer sublimity of the astronauts' achievement. But ultimately the film is also strangely underwhelming. It reminds you of an extraordinary feat and acquaints you with an interesting, enigmatic man. But there is a further leap beyond technical accomplishment — into meaning, history, metaphysics or the wilder zones of the imagination, that the film is too careful, too earthbound, as it were, to attempt. So all in all a watchable piece but one, I fear, that won't be remembered for too long.

I'm afraid I was bit surprised at all the very positive reviews of this in the press. For it’s a special sort of achievement to take a collection of footage of the Apollo 11 mission and make it rather dull. For that, unfortunately, is what director Todd Douglas Miller has (for the most part) done here. Despite the attempt to focus on the heroic actions and extraordinary experiences of the three astronauts, and to display the vast concerted effort on the ground that their flight required, Miller manages only to provide a sketchy overview of the historic event, only intermittently and fleetingly illuminated by a telling or surprising detail.

The concept of a film composed entirely of found or pre-existing material is a radical one. It asserts that the material deserves to be treated as something special and invites an artistic approach that’s similarly distinctive. Fine in principle, but the composition and the editing, by contrast, have no identity, no form that reflects the discovery of the material, the sheer wonder of its very existence. Rather, the film sketches the story of the mission in haste, hitting dramatic high notes and scooting onward, and formulates the episodes of the mission superficially, in familiar chronological manner, as if working from a wikipedia entry .Throughout the film, the voice-over of Walter Cronkite, taken from news reports at the time, describes in grave tones the succession of events as they unfold onscreen; and the effect is to simply retransmit the long-sedimented version of the mission rather than redefining it on the basis to what the filmmaker experienced in the newly found footage itself. If you’re old enough, imagine the History of the FA Cup as narrated by David Coleman.

That sense of personal experience is what’s missing. (Peculiarly, the graphics, which provide intermittent breakdowns of particular stages of the mission, often have a greater sense of immediacy and drama.) Miller’s guiding principle appears to be shoehorning as much and as varied an array of footage as possible into the film's brief span and to edit it into a smooth unity. He hardly works closely with the images themselves, whilst the musical score, which is part action film banality and part lift musak, has the effect of cushioning the images to fit them into the standard audiovisual aural-wallpaper of Hollywood and television.

But the figures who suffer most from Miller’s approach are the astronauts themselves. You get a sense akin to those awful royal documentaries, that straightjacketed official portraiture; we remain remote from the astronauts’ characters, their own sense of experience. The one time the film does try to get close is a woefully misjudged montage, patched into a sequence of the astronauts suiting up that shows a brief flurry of their personal still photographs, depicting in flashes the Kodak moments of their earlier years, as if suggesting that, at the moment, those memories passed through their minds. The concept is both banal and superficial.

Some of the film’s most striking footage shows the hundreds of people who worked in Mission Control: rows and rows of scientists at long tables, each staring at monitors, banks of buttons & switches, some taking notes on paper. These images recur, and one in particular, a long tracking shot revealing vastly many rows of technicians, tightly arrayed in long lines, is awe-inspiring—but, inevitably, the speculative wonder that it inspires is instantly thwarted, because Miller never conveys the slightest sense of what any one of them is doing, so they become mere extras in the drama (take a look at James Burke's old 1979 documentary to see how it could be done).

The new footage is amazing, with plenty of fascinating incidental details, but the film's style, borrowed from conventional, documentaries, merely turns the whole thing into something bordering on the soulless. For enthusiasts like me, therefore, this felt like a missed opportunity.

Writer-director William McGregor’s debut film is more Thomas Hardy than Hammer Horror, and is all the better for it, in my view. The film is carried by a quite superb performance from Eleanor Worthington-Cox, whose bewilderment, fear, strength and sheer spiritual force is Tess of the D'Urbervilles meets Sue Bridehead. For this is a film where a lot more is going on than meets the eye, notably, what happens when a young person’s faith gets shaken, as Gwen begins to doubt her mum has what it takes to lead her out of the family's predicament - there's a great, very brief moment, when she throws a cross on the fire. And also, aka Hardy, it's about social change and the possibility that what Gwen’s family is facing isn’t a disease or a demon, but rather the inevitable end of agrarian life - for nothing could be more frightening than the inevitable industrial takeover. 'Gwen' is a well-crafted folk-style tale of fear, suspicion and isolation, nestled deep within the Snowdonian mountains, where the mundane quickly becomes sinister. Laughter turns into screaming, a passerby becomes a threat, and reality and nightmare bleed into each other. Gwen (and the audience) want answers – but we rarely get them, for McGregor does not pander to the audience.

It's not without its weakness, for while Maxine Peake is very good as the overbearing mother figure with hints of a gentler soul underneath, there's not quite enough to really get under her skin for me, whilst pretty much all the other characters are mysterious types, their motives and concerns unknown to us. And if you're going to do something unremittingly bleak (no problem with this at all in principle, and there are some truly skin-creeping moments, particularly when viewed as they are from Gwen's perspective) then somehow the audience has to be sustained along the way, and occasionally it is in danger of falling under its own weight, whilst the ending (for me) is not handled in such a way to make it convincing. Nevertheless, McGregor ultimately succeeds in creating a distinctly creepy, socio-political narrative.

Based on a 2011 novel by Canadian author Patrick deWitt, Jacques Audiard brings a distinctly outsider’s view to the western genre, one that both revels in the genre whilst subverting it.

At first glance the Sisters Brothers, aka Eli (John C. Reilly) and Charlie (Joaquin Phoenix), seem like tough prairie assassins, as fearsome as Clint Eastwood’s iconic 'man with no name' anti-hero. But the more time we spend with them, the more we realise that this pair of fortysomethings are actually childish, bickering improvisers who rarely know what they’re doing, nor, crucially, why they’re doing it. As with Cassidy and Sundance, they're fun to be with, and Phoenix and Reilly dig into their juicy roles with relish, with Reilly stealing the show as the big brother who touchingly imagines a quieter, more settled life whilst Phoenix plays Charlie as one who sees no sense in settling down. There are shootouts at every turn, but as the film proceeds we care more and more about what happens to these two uncivilised men grappling with the onset of civilisation. As the sensitive, prickly, blabbery Eli, Reilly is tremendous at bringing to life an essentially sweet soul who pines for the girl he left behind, and watching him get to grips with a toothbrush, a miraculous new invention, is like watching Homo sapiens experiment with fire for the first time. Phoenix, meanwhile, has a rare twinkle in his eye as hard-drinking, slightly mad Charlie. And their interplay is, aka Waiting for Godot, delightfully pugnacious but affectionate, with lots of gentle humour en route amidst the violence. As the film trundles along, it develops as a four-hander, and Riz Ahmed is fascinating as the film's cleverest and most idealistic character, a man who dreams of a utopian society and one who thinks he knows how to achieve it.

The film is deliberately meandering, unhurriedly throwing the shambling brothers into one awkward scenario after another. This West is undoubtedly wild, and brutal, and surreal, but Audiard paints it with an ironic eye, constantly puncturing the puffed-up posturings of the tough guys who inhabit it. Often restlessly moving his cameras rather than employing grand John Fordianesque compositions, Audiard keeps things authentically grubby, and it’s beautifully anti-mythmaking - the sort of film John Wayne would hate.

As with the book, the final section of the film is a bit contrived, and it's perhaps a pity that the book's ending has been changed which for me would have worked well on screen. Some might also say the film falls between two stools, being too 'light' for an insightful drama but too 'heavy' for a thriller or comedy. But on the whole I think the director has just about managed to pull it off, and comparisons with the Coen brothers are not far-fetched. Highly enjoyable.

Writer-director Deborah Haywood’s feature is interesting, challenging and very, very dark. Anchored by superb performances from Joanna Scanlan and Lily Newmark, Pin Cushion's complex portrayal of female relationships is a chilling reminder of how bullying can easily seep from school into adulthood. It's a bit uneven - some scenes are rather heavy handed, and she perhaps ultimately sells short the characters’ inner depths. It's also rather short and feels rushed in places as a result, whilst the ending is a tad contrived and (incongruously) sentimental. But the film is saved by the two leads' performances - Scanlan makes Lyn’s loneliness and pain tangible beneath the hand-knitted jumpers, and Newmark is absolutely terrific as the terribly vulnerable teen desperate to be part of the cool in-crowd whilst deep down knowing she doesn’t fit in at all. Deliberately disturbing stuff.

Nadine Labaki’s film is a truly astonishing piece of stark social realism generally told (apart from some pieces of rather irritating syrupy strings) without sentimentality. Set in Beirut, it starts off with the audacious (and admittedly rather dubious) premise of a young boy who's suing his parents for having him, and over the course of its two hours, by following the point of view of her young protagonist Zain, Labaki successfully articulates the impossibility of the lives that were bestowed upon him and other children he meets.

The title takes its name from the ancient fishing town of Capernaum, which in turn became the namesake for a word meaning 'disorderly accumulation of objects' or, simply, 'chaos'; and in the slums that Labaki’s characters inhabit, people, especially children, come to be a part of that disorderly accumulation as well. When the film opens, Zain (the incredible Zain Alrafeea), who guesses he’s 12 but whose stunted body looks much younger, is being taken out of prison to face his parents in court. He has a lawyer, and even though he’s already stood trial for a stabbing (the details of which we’ll come to learn) he's now the plaintiff: here to make the case that his very birth was a crime of neglect. Alrafeea is a startling, unforgettable presence, and his anger at the various cruelties and injustices around him surely mirror the director's - it's a very angry film. From the courtroom, we flash back to the series of unfortunate events that landed Zain in prison, starting with the heartbreak of seeing his 11-year-old sister Sahar sold off to be the bride of a grown man for a few chickens. It’s a devastating sequence, and 15 minutes into the film, we’re already sufficiently annoyed to wish for a life sentence for Zain’s parents. Much of the remainder of the film charts the developing relationship between Zain and Yonas, the baby boy of Rahil, an Ethiopian immigrant, and as their situation goes steadily from bad to worse, the film sometimes feels at risk of buckling under the weight of its own suffering, but is ultimately saved by the director's empathy for those lives attempting to survive in such squalor.

There's a touch of melodrama at times and some somewhat implausible sequences, but the sheer emotional force of 'Capernaum' makes this compelling viewing.

The first half of Alice Rohrwacher’s deliberately disturbing new film, takes place in a rugged valley somewhere in central Italy miles away from anywhere. The residents, an extended clan of sharecroppers, grow tobacco, lentils and chickpeas on land belonging to an aristocratic family. Though there are a few signs of modernity — a few electric lights, some motorised vehicles, a mobile or two (but no signal) — the feudal structure and pastoral rhythms of existence in this place seem timeless. The farmers, exploited and oppressed by an ancient social order, are sustained by their stoicism and solidarity, but Rohrwacher isn’t in the business of picturesque nostalgia or political piety. She draws from the past (tapping into literature and folklore as well as film) to forensically interrogate present conditions.

The film, a perfectly balanced combination of neo-realism and magic realism, centres around the 'happiness' of the title character (Adriano Tardiolo), a kindhearted young man of uncertain parentage. His contentment is genuine, in spite of his harsh circumstances; both simpleton and saint in the 'holy fool' tradition, he stands as an exception to the general human tale of treachery and domination. He is happy because he is good. By contrast, the noblewoman who owns the land — the Marchesa Alfonsina De Luna (Nicoletta Braschi) is brutally exploitative, whilst insisting that her power over her tenants, who are perpetually in her debt even as she appropriates the fruits of their labour, represents the natural order of things. While the workers mostly despise her, and engage in small-scale acts of resistance against her and her overseer, they are powerless to change anything: exploitation is as much part of the landscape as the trees and rocks, and a distinct change of scene half-way through the film merely leads to the replacement of one form of organised cruelty with another. For just as we’ve accepted the semi-fantastical parameters of Lazzaro’s world, notably his unlikely half-secret friendship bond with the Marchesa’s son, Tancredi (Luca Chikovani), our perspective suddenly changes. We suddenly see the landscape from above and hear an ancient folk tale in a woman’s voice, and the film takes a double swerve, into both a harsher realism and more explicit magic.

A rich sense of mystery pervades the film, and we find ourselves trusting the teller even when we don't fully understand the tale or know where it’s going. What makes it a great film though is the piercing clarity of Alice Rohrwacher’s vision. Even at its most fatalistic, the old cinematic neo-realism was grounded in an idea of progress, in the leftist faith that after feudal paternalism and predatory capitalism a better, more humane future could be imagined and struggled towards. The eclipse of that faith has had consequences for politics and also for narrative: if the passage of time merely led to one form of injustice being supplanted by another, the possibility of a happy ending, or an ending of any kind, seems out of reach. And to this end, the tragic final scene of “Lazzaro” is devastating but also fully convincing. An instant classic.

I was going to watch this 4-hour piece by director Hu Bo in short instalments, but found myself totally spellbound and instead watched it all the way through with the odd wine-break and gasp for air. I’ll be giving it another go after it has sunk in.

It’s an unremittingly bleak piece, depicting a world (literally and metaphorically) without colour - a world from which pretty much all human feeling has been lost. Instead, mistrust, manipulation, bullying, aggression, cynicism are what dominate; everyone on screen is involved in some way and to a greater or lesser extent with life's daily struggle and sheer survival.

Taking place over a single day and following the overlapping, increasingly desperate itineraries of four people, the film encompasses two suicides, several beatings, a shooting and the death of a dog; periodic eruptions of violence being a synecdoche of a deeper, widespread cruelty and alienation. For while the characters’ paths cross and recross, Hu’s sombre, careful compositions and slow takes emphasise their isolation and the social conditions that make solitude and defensiveness a protective strategy. There is occasional tenderness, but it seems fragile and fleeting, unlikely to survive the Darwinian realities: in this world, being selfish, suspicious and mean is a condition of entry.

“An Elephant Sitting Still” shows the influence of Jia Zhangke, arguably modern China’s principal cinematic depictor of disaffection and dislocation. But unrelenting as Hu’s anatomy of moral drift may be, his empathetic attention to lives defined by disappointment and diminished hope doesn’t leave us entirely bereft: by the end, the viewer is likely to feel soul-searched and deeply moved rather than simply beaten down.

But then, any catharsis may well be over-shadowed by the knowledge that this will be Hu’s only film — the sole testament to a career that ended when the 29-year-old director committed suicide in 2017. It would, of course, be a mistake to draw too direct a connection between that and what is displayed onscreen, but it’s also hard to avoid the impression that this persuasive portrait of a society in crisis reflects a deeply personal vision. Highly sophisticated and rewarding work.

Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's latest offering is another beautifully made and acted film. It’s typically unhurried of course, which some might lose patience with, but for fans like me it could have gone on for days and I wouldn't have minded at all - quite the contrary.

It's basically to do with childhood and returning to your home town and family with all this entails, aka Chekhov or Ibsen. The central character Sinan is superbly played by Aydin Dogu Demirkol, who you can't take your eyes off for a moment - every twitch, every expression speaks volumes. He's something of a misanthrope, an aspiring writer who is frustrated with what he sees as the sense of disappointment and failure in the lives of his local friends and family, but at the same time fears this will be his own future; the director is highly skilful at questioning Sinan's assumptions and takes great pains to display instead the locals' humility and acceptance, especially Sinan's gambling-addicted father Idris, again, beautifully played by Murat Cemcir, who is straight out of the pages of Hemingway.

There are lengthy dialogues about writing, life-choices, religion, modern Turkey, etc, but the film never feels forced or preachy. And there are some scenes that can truly be called 'great' - Siran's encounter with ex-girlfriend Hatice for example is breathtakingly good: the mood shifts are perfectly controlled as she teases him about his general pessimism and he goads her in turn about what looks like an imminent submission to marriage. And in another wonderful sequence Sinan has a discussion with a famous writer Süleyman (Serkan Keskin) in a bookshop which begins by Sinan ostensibly seeking advice but then increasingly drives Suleyman to distraction as Sinan doesn't seem to respect him - ultimately Sinan just wants to needle him about all the petty vanities and hypocrisies of the literary establishment. My favourite bit is a lengthy, circular conversation between Sinan and two imams during which, under the guise of small talk, they discuss truth, morality and the nature of religious belief. Wonderful, wonderful filmaking.

Plenty to like here: the film is something of a 'sensory epic' in which its characters revel in a riot of physical pleasure. And on a completely different note to the film's whirl of human chaos, there's also a extended documentary-style sequence of lamb birthing which is totally compelling. A genuine lust for life is undoubtedly at the centre of Kechiche’s filmmaking.

BUT unfortunately there are many weaknesses also. The main problem is the perspective of the film's main character Amin (newcomer Shaïn Boumédine), whose general uncertainty of himself and difference to the mass of humanity around him makes him a naturally sympathetic anchor for the film, but not a terribly compelling one: Kechiche’s script keeps him a largely passive presence throughout, his innermost thoughts and urges unknown to us. Similarly, the character of Ophelie is hardly fleshed out (no pun intended) at all beyond a few scenes on her family farm, which is a pity - what lay behind her choice of partner, whether she regrets her choice, what is going on in her head at any point - are all mysteries.

Then there's the well-documented male leering gaze and the endless bottoms - which are not only tiresome in the extreme, but rather baffling as it seems inconsistent given the thoughtful characterisation of the film's female cast — whose generation-crossing scenes together, as they gossip amongst themselves and analyse their life choices, are some of the film’s most meaningful and most authentic.

And finally whilst Blue is the Warmest Colour for me used its supersized running time to good use, mapping the extensive internal transformation of an unformed girl growing into adulthood, the 186-minute duration of this one feels a lot more ostentatiously stretched to the point of self-indulgence — the lengthy, gruelling nightclub sequence towards the end, in particular, is simply an endurance test. Rather frustrating viewing on the whole therefore, sadly.

This very clever and absorbing film, the latest from German director Christian Petzold, is set in a surreal German-occupied present-day France. It's part political allegory, part romance, part thriller, and deals with such themes as loss, trauma, statelessness and historical amnesia - think 'Casablanca' combined with Camus' 'L'Etranger' combined with a JG Ballard-style dystopia. The plot circles around Georg (a transfixing Franz Rogowski), who spends much of the film dodging shock troops with the result that the conventional sense of historical time, with its reassuring sense of progress, has been undone.

The film is based on a 1944 novel by the German-Jewish writer Anna Seghers that draws on her experience as a war refugee, and Petzold's adaptation, situating it in a historically indeterminate moment, overlapping past and present, is done subtly but effectively - you don't need a swastika or a yellow star to get the historical / inhuman backdrop, whilst Georg’s growing attachment to a dead writer's wife, paralleled by his delicate, paternal feelings for a young boy (Lilien Batman) forcefully underscore the story’s topical political resonance.

Early in the film, a narrator (Matthias Brandt) begins talking as Georg reads the dead writer’s novel. The narrator’s identity long remains a mystery; he drops in now and then to add or explain, but not always precisely or reliably (some might find this irritating, of course, but I rather liked it). The typewritten manuscript pages are excerpts from Seghers’s novel, which opens up assorted mind-bending possibilities: Georg could be unwittingly following someone else’s script; or he's caught in a time loop or repeating history; or he could be living in a present that is inseparable from the past. Petzold’s answer may can found in the crowded consulates in which Georg waits alongside despairing men and women, caught in the stateless, agonisingly familiar limbo reproduced in today’s refugee crisis.

It's possibly a tad melodramatic at times (the director seems to think the audience needs a few chase scenes or someone screaming or whatever to keep us interested), and maybe it's just a bit too self-consciously Humphrey Bogart trading melancholic regrets with Ingrid Bergman, but on the whole this is powerful (and brave) stuff.

This highly original film, director Lila Avilés' first, is a real gem. It invites us to share the life of this invisible woman, during which time we become ever more painfully aware of the world she tends but to which she has no access. Minutely attuned as Avilés and co-writer Juan Carlos Marquéz are to aspects of gender, race and class, their understated yet highly observational screenplay focuses on this young woman’s daily struggle and her desperate (and ultra-modest) hopes and dreams rather than the lives of her employers. From the opening scene, in which Eve uncovers a surprise while restoring order to a room that looks like it was ransacked by a herd of bulls, Avilés depicts with great skill the everyday unpleasantness that is her job, as well as the frequently condescending and often downright inhuman way the customers treat the 'help'. Some seem more considerate than others, but Eve is invariably forgotten in an instant.

Cleverly, the film takes place largely behind the scenes, following Eve and her co-workers up the service lift, into storage closets and amid the mountains of laundry in what appears to be the basement. Crucially, however, Avilés gives Eve a great sense of dignity throughout, ultimately giving her a heroic quality (as opposed to her complacent and spoilt class 'superiors'). The film is pitch-perfect at revealing the unspoken contract between the hotel guests and the anonymous maids who perform all manner of services for them ( for of course, these women are expected to clean up but never to cross the line), but more importantly, it also explores the dynamic between the staff, as in Eve’s budding friendship with co-worker Minitoy (Teresa Sánchez), one of the few people who actually seems to 'see' Eve.

The self-taught director apparently met and researched the maids working at the Intercontinental Hotel during pre-production and rehearsal phases, and this certainly shows. Indeed, Gabriela Cartol 's performance proves so unmannered, so utterly believable throughout, one could be forgiven for assuming that Avilés had found her working at the hotel. The film may feel overly minimalist to those accustomed to a more conventional narrative / action, but there’s an intricacy to all the seemingly mundane details Avilés opts to include, and a photographic instinct behind the way she composes each scene. Sitcoms and studio films have established a comfortable assortment of angles for covering spaces such as hotel rooms and hallways and whatnot, but Avilés render these areas as alien, sci-fi like spaces, particularly when we see them from Eve’s perspective, as in low angles that seem to decapitate other characters as for example when she retrieves lost objects from under the bed. Equally as importantly, Avilés never overplays her hand whilst making it crystal clear that Eve’s aspirations are tragically defined and diminished by the kind of moneyed guests she waits upon, and the final moment of the film, beautifully simple as it is, has a subtle power worthy of the great directors. As a result of this deeply empathetic piece, we are likely never to look at this invisible workforce in quite the same way again. Superb stuff.

Mmm - one of those that attempts to deal with some serious themes (loss, grief, desire for familial connection etc) by being self-consciously 'charming', but for me I'm afraid both the acting and the production didn't match Frank Cottrell Boyce's clever, wry and witty script. The styling of the film seems to stand separately from the dialogue, which is realistic by comparison, and this, which includes an abundance of Wes Anderson-style symmetrical framing and frequent use of tongue-in-cheek title cards, only serves to distract the audience from what's going on rather than reinforce any emotive power the film might have, whilst the deliberately low-key performances just seem to lack depth and nuance to me. Add to all this a truly horrible sentimental ending, I'm coming away thinking this one, though admittedly watchable, could have been so much better, sadly.

Joanna Hogg's latest film is never not engaging. Her protagonist, Julie (beautifully played by Honor Swinton Byrne), is a 24-year-old 'privileged' woman with a Knightsbridge flat who wants to make a film about a boy growing up by the docks of Sunderland. Quizzed by authority figures sceptical of her choice to stray so far from her own experience, Julie speaks of her insularity, her class privilege, her need to cultivate a socially conscious aesthetic. She pores over black-and-white footage of working-class boys in a school playground , leaning into her manual typewriter (it’s the 1980s) and struggling to concoct a story line. The people who question Julie’s motivation for telling this story are Men Who Explain Things to Her. Enter stage right, Anthony — seen only from the back at first — holding forth in a plummy voice on her proposed characters (“Why are they more real than me?”) and wondering whether she’s trying to peddle a “received idea of life on the docks.” He’s perhaps a bit too ridiculous (“You’re very special, Julie.” “Very normal, really.” “You’re a freak.” “I think I’m quite average.” “You’re lost, and you’ll always be lost”) to be entirely convincing. Indeed, you do wonder if they'd ever be in a relationship in real life - 'how on earth did they get together?' someone asks at some point, and we're inclined to agree, whilst we often want to shout at Julie for her indecision and inability to see the blindingly obvious, but perhaps that's exactly what Hogg wants us to feel. First impressions are soon revealed to be turned on their head, and while Anthony is denying and denying and playing head games (“I know you have a received version of what I’m supposed to be”), Julie is struggling in film school to learn to frame her experience. There’s some loose talk of the mechanics of Psycho and some stabs (no pun intended) at directing scenes, but no artistic breakthroughs. (Not in this installment, anyway: The Souvenir: Part II is in preproduction). Anthony claims to work for the Foreign Office, but a note of scepticism is in order for the simple reason that, as Julie slowly discovers, he has a habit of lying about nearly everything.

The title refers to a painting by the 18th-century French artist Jean-Honore Fragonard that Anthony and Julie view on one of their 'dates'. It depicts a young woman, scrutinised by her pet dog, carving letters into the trunk of a tree. “She’s very much in love,” Anthony says with his usual suave certainty, and perhaps he’s right. But there’s a lot more going on in the picture (as in the film) than that simple declaration would suggest. The woman is making a mark and putting down a marker, declaring her own presence with a mixture of shame and audacity, impulsiveness and deliberation. So, Julie does love Anthony, and sacrifices a great deal for him without quite realising what she’s doing. Over the span of the film her friends slip away, and the work that had seemed so urgent feels a bit more remote. But the interplay of forces in Julie’s life is subtle, as is the balance, in her own temperament, between decisiveness and passivity.

What's the point? Mmm ... well I suppose it's something to do with the director digging into her own past. In her stunning first film, Unrelated (2007), a story of a 40-ish woman who joins a friend’s family in Italy while trying to come to terms with not having children is steeped in honest sentiment, but without being sentimental. It feels detached, but when you get it, you’re overwhelmed by it. We don't get the same feeling here, and because Hogg rarely moves the camera, we might well feel marooned with people you don’t know for reasons we don’t understand. But Hogg usually convinces us that this is the only honest way to tell a story with any emotional complexity. An intriguing piece of filmaking with lots to offer for the patient and those who can live without a conventional narrative thread.