Film Reviews by PD

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.

This highly original film from independent writer-director Mark Jenkin is a powerful and at times surreal study of fear and loathing in a Cornish fishing village, the dominant mood being, aka Bad Day at Black Rock, suspicion, outrage and doom. Shot in Cornwall, its microbudget production was partly crewed by staff and students from the film school at Falmouth University, where Jenkin is an associate lecturer.

Bait is grounded in simple, archetypal themes of tradition versus modernity, poor natives against rich invaders. Based on the various tensions between locals and tourists in a once-thriving fishing village, it’s an evocative portrait of culture clashes in an area where traditional trades and lifestyles are under threat. The surface plot has the stark feel of classic neorealism, being shot with a vintage Bolex cine-camera on black-and-white 16mm film, the director hand-processing his footage to give it a scratchy, antique feel, whilst all dialogue and sound effects were overdubbed afterwards.

Local Cornish comedian Edward Rowe is very watchable as the film's brooding anti-hero Martin Ward, a fisherman who has fallen on hard times, and who largely blames the big-city tourists who have colonised his once-thriving coastal village with vacation homes that remain empty most of the year. This conflict is personal for Martin, having been forced to sell the harbourside cottage where he was raised to a wealthy London couple, Sandra and Tom Leigh (excellently played by Mary Woodvine and Simon Shepherd), who have converted it into what they consider to be a charming holiday retreat but, having gutted the place and redecorated it in a twee ‘fisherfolk’ style with nets and maritime memorabilia on the walls, have of course effectively ripped out its soul in the process - as Martin growls: “Ropes and chains like a sex dungeon.”

As he scrapes a meagre living from the seafood that he nets along the rocky coastline at dawn every day, Martin dreams of buying his own boat and going back to full-time fishing. But suppressed anger is slowly eating him alive, and a minor dispute with the Leighs over parking his battered truck outside their cottage soon escalates into a full-scale class war, and the Pinteresque pressure-cooker mix of suspicion and resentment eventually boils over into confrontation, retribution and lethal violence.

Jenkin is perhaps guilty of exaggerating the locals’ resistance to change for contrived effect, but most of the film is sophisticated and intelligent, depicting a symbolic battle that resonates in a post-austerity Britain where the gulf between rich and poor only seems to get worse. And the Cornish landscape is deliberately and successfully desentimentalised, the director effectively turning it into an anti-picture postcard – I loved the raw, slightly depressed feel of the landscape, far more in keeping with mining traditions & fishing villages in Cornwall than current Rock / Padstow & Poldark associations. Yet at the same time everything – a pint of beer, lapping waves, brooding faces – is captured with an infectious love of tactile detail, and it is this that perhaps elevates the film into the quiet classic for which it should be recognised.

László Nemes’ film is set in Budapest on the brink of World War I and depicts a refined world careering towards chaos - his aim being to capture with disorienting images the period just before Europe’s leaders committed collective suicide. Some reviewers have suggested that “Sunset” could be his flip-side to Murnau’s “Sunrise”, a film similarly tackling human emotions buffeted by modernity, but for me I was more reminded of Holly Martins’ flailing attempts at constructing meaning in post-war Vienna during his search for the ‘third man’.

Irisz Leiter (Juli Jakab) arrives in Budapest from Trieste looking for work at the city’s most renowned millinery establishment, which not coincidentally bears her name. Orphaned in mysterious circumstances (never revealed) at the age of two, she’s trying to connect with her legacy through the shop her parents once owned, but the new proprietor Oszkár Brill (Vlad Ivanov) sends her away, clearly threatened by her presence. Stepping out of the boutique’s rarefied atmosphere into the cacophonous streets of 1913 Budapest thrusts her into the jarring hubbub of modernity. At a boarding house she’s attacked by Gáspár (Levente Molnár), an unstable coachman muttering something about the Leiter son; Irisz knows nothing about a brother, so tries to find some answers. The information she gathers is fragmentary and troubling, but she persists in her search, which is full of strange encounters with menacing figures who hint at things without ever revealing anything concrete.

By this time, it becomes obvious that script narrative coherence isn’t what Nemes is aiming for, and making sense out of how people are connected Dickens-style is something of a lost cause. But in terms of sheer visual impact, Mátyás Erdély’s screenplay impresses, wandering through the impressive sets with a dreamlike episodic quality worthy of Kubrick, as Irisz keeps searching for answers neither she (nor the audience) ever find. The mystery here is in what’s happening rather than why - the film creates a destabilising atmosphere in which the decadent upper classes indulge in perverse machinations while the city around them seethes with discontent and violence. This is all of course leading to an inevitable clash, which Nemes (perhaps unnecessarily obviously) thrusts home with a final shot in the trenches, which is presumably a premonition of an impending catastrophic war and a change in the world order, a bleak reminder of the carnage that marked the start of the modern era. Nemes pointedly uses an array of ultra-splendid hats as symbols of extravagant uselessness soon to be tossed onto the bonfire begun in Sarajevo, although here they remain objects of beauty rather than something, aka ladies’ day at Ascot, merely something to be ridiculed.

Jakab is barely off screen, often seen from behind as the camera prowls near her neck much as it trailed Géza Röhrig in ‘A Son of Saul’. And Erdély’s screenplay is used to disorientate, to deliver a deliberately convoluted narrative of a disconnected nightmare. As a result, the film will divide audiences, and many will find it totally unwatchable, but as long as you can cope with the lack of a conventional narrative thread, there’s much to admire here.

This latest film from the great South Korean director Lee Chang-dong involves the complicated, increasingly fraught relationships among three characters whose lives become intertwined. The story has the quality of a mystery thriller, but Chang deliberately subverts the genre to turn it into a tense meditation on what it means to live in a divided, profoundly isolating world that relentlessly drives a wedge between the self and others.

Jong-seo Jun gives a wonderful natural performance as the cryptic, inscrutable Haemi, (for example, she possesses an unseen cat and peels invisible tangerines) while Ah-in Yoo is quite brilliant as the socially awkward Jongsu. Their 'relationship', such as it as, is cleverly balanced by the wealthy enigma, Ben (Steven Yeun), and the three form an extremely awkward triangle with tragic results. And while each event expands the narrative — filling in the larger picture with nods at sexual relations, class divisions and a riven people — they don’t necessarily explain what happens or resolve the film's ambiguity.

For me, the second half lacked some of the tension of the first, and it's probably a tad overlong and repetitive, but the ending is beautifully handled and totally unexpected.

Mmmm ... had to think hard and long about this one. Here's where I'm at fwiw

First, the strengths: i liked the juxtaposition of the jarring, often startling imagery with the minimal dialogue, and the film certainly raises many interesting themes and ideas, generally painting a grim apocalyptic picture with humanity at war with itself aka Lord of the Flies (although to be fair it's not totally pessimistic). There's also an interesting counter-intuitive dynamic to the members of the ship, where the women are shackled to their beds while the men are permitted to roam free, whilst at the same time, upending the power dynamic with Binoche's Dr. Dibs in control over the relatively docile men, coercing them into submission by dangling the promise of return to Earth if they behave. Societal pressure is the only thing standing between men and their next “conquest”? Structurally, the film employs a clever non-linear story to weave the tale - one in 3 parts where we watch Part 2 first (Monte raising daughter on deserted ship), then part 1 (fragments about what led to the situation), then pt 3. There's quite a few exposition sequences to fill us in but because of Denis' minimalist style, she prefers to just jam this info into as short a space as possible, but you get used to this and anyone with half a brain can follow it, honest! And the fact that it will annoy some sci-fi enthusiasts is another plus for me - for (of course) it's less interested in humanity’s future than its present, and, aka JG Ballard, uses the sci-fi setting as an excuse to explore the human condition (esp its ugly side). Finally, Binoche's performance is emotionally packed, conveying deep pain, repression, and longing.

But, but - the weaknesses. As many critics have noted, it's (deliberately) highly disturbing at nearly every turn, creating a number of sequences that are not for the squeamish or easily offended. Now, I've not got a problem with this at all as such, but I'm feeling here it's a little too obvious and self-conscious in this respect, and the constant images of rape, assault, murder, grief, gore, claustrophobia, suffering, general despair, etc etc are pounded into you over and over without much reprieve, which simply wears you down in the end to the point that you just want to be released, frankly. Moreover, Binoche's Dibs apart, the actors are solid enough but leave you rather unmoved - it's difficult to care about any of them.

Taken as a whole, for me the form didn’t match the function and much of the film’s complexity is lost in the shuffle somewhat - too often the ideas here, visual and otherwise, feel haphazard: outer and inner space, Pattinson’s head, sexual taboo, apocalypse now or maybe then etc etc — more like material for a 'vision board' than something fully realised.

Benedikt Erlingsson's film raises some weighty themes but treats them with a very light touch and warm heart. It's basically an environmental drama wrapped in whimsical comedy and tied up with a bow of midlife soul-searching. The package is a little hit-and-miss, but is still very watchable due to to an engaging central performance and a cinematographer, Bergsteinn Bjorgulfsson, whose sweeping shots of frozen heath and lowering Icelandic skies tend to save us from extraneous distractions.

The movie’s heart and spine is Halla (Halldora Geirharosdottir), 50, a sunny choir director and fearless eco-activist. Intent on halting the construction of a new aluminum smelter outside Reykjavik, she sabotages power lines and does (literal) battle with the drones deployed to find her. Her exploits become increasingly daring, and when we see no partner or family other than an identical twin sister (also played by Geirharosdottir), we begin to wonder if her adventures are filling more than just a need to save her homeland, a suspicion strengthened after the arrival of a letter announcing that her application to adopt a child, filed years earlier, has been approved. Yet as Halla teeters between motherhood and vandalism, creation and destruction, her embrace of the natural world intensifies. Often she’s pictured moving through water or clinging to the earth, face buried in gorse and arms flung wide, as if trying to stop her world from spinning, whilst surreal touches, like pop-up musicians only Halla can see, give the movie’s politics a playful, fable-like quality.

There's quite a few implausible plot twists and the adoption sub-plot perhaps doesn't quite work as well as the main 'woman vs world' theme, but generally this is a poignant, intriguing piece of filmmaking.

Born in Ho Chi Minh City, the inspiration for Ash Myfair's debut film seems to comes from real-life stories of her grandparents and great-grandparents that have been passed down through the generations.

Set in 19th century Vietnam, this concerns the story of May (Nguyen Phuong Tra My), who is just 14 when, through an arranged marriage, she becomes the third wife of Hung (Le Vu Long), a wealthy landowner, whose word is the law on the silk plantation he runs. This sets the scene for a weighty yet in many ways subtle critique of rigid patriarchy, for while the wives snatch freedom wherever they can find it, life is confined to a transactional cycle of matrimony and reproduction at the behest of family honour.

Although the cycles of life and death that belong to the natural world are alluring, even peaceful in their persistence, there is a violent undercurrent that reveals an unjust (and enduring) feminine condition. So, even when Hung's son challenges the system by not consummating his marriage, it is, inevitably, his young bride who suffers most. And innocent as she is, May quickly perceives the wifely pecking order, so that when she gets pregnant, she innately understands that giving Hung a boy will secure her in his favour, thus recognising that as much as the women must co-operate in their pliant, companionable domesticity, they are also in biological and sexual competition with one another. Nevertheless, the possibility of freedom occasionally stirs with the breeze, and the film’s final scenes hint at desperate and defiant acts of resistance.

It's an apologetically quiet film, taking its time drifting through May’s coming of age, and its dialogue is sparse and its pace meditative. The camera lingers: on newly cut-hair flowing downstream, on Hung swallowing a glistening egg yolk from May’s tummy (a local fertility ritual?), and the bloody – and hard to watch as it looks so real – killing of a rooster. Cinematographer Chananun Chotrungroj's work is superb, and 13-year old Nguyen Phuong Tra My’s performance as May is pitch-perfect throughout. Sophisticated stuff.