London Film Festival report 2019

I can’t believe that I’ve made it to my fourth film festival in London! I’ve been living here for a little over three years now, and so much has changed since I moved in 2016, but going to the festival was one of the most exciting things I got to do when I first moved and I still love finding the time to catch as many extraordinary new films as I can each year.

Thankfully my work trip this year was the week after the festival (in 2018, both events clashed and I could only catch two films on the very last day), but it was a crazy busy week at work and I crammed three screenings on Monday to Wednesday evenings, forgoing the sleep and rest I should really have been having.

It was worth it though, as I got to catch three very different and challenging films, all from unique contexts and dealing with very varied subjects. What struck me is all the films were overtly about the state of their respective nations and dealt with supremely personal stories within a wider political and social background.

And Then We Danced (2019, Levan Akin) 

I’ve never seen a film from or about Georgia before, so I jumped at the chance to see this (we were lucky to get in, the screening had sold out but we thankfully got some returned tickets waiting in the queue outside). Hearing stories about Georgia from a very good friend, and getting glimpses of the culture and food during a visit to Moscow a few years ago, I’ve ever since been fascinated in learning more and would absolutely love to visit Tbilisi one day.

This film centres around the importance of traditional Georgian dance, a distinct form of movement which tells stories of local customs and costumes, military events, family relationships and celebrations. We follow Merab, studying the dance at the Georgian National Ensemble and aiming to earn a coveted lead dancer role. He’s been dancing since childhood with his long-term dance partner and somewhat girlfriend Mary. He comes from a bit of a broken family, maligned in the wider community, with divorced parents and an older brother who can’t keep a job and has dropped out of dance classes.

Into this mix arrives Irakli, an unusual and charismatic new student who’s arrived from another town. He’s masculine but unconventional in a way which often rubs up the domineering dance teacher the wrong way. Despite knowing he’s a major rival for the lead dancer position, Merab finds himself drawn to Irakli in a way which he has never felt before, and which could shift everything for him.

The film itself is so handsomely shot, and the dance sequences are thrilling to see where the camera gets stuck in on the faces and gestures of Merab in particular. At first I wasn’t totally bowled over by the plot, which overall was predictable and followed the beats of other similar films, not least Call Me by Your Name in its depiction of youthful self-discovery and sexual awakening. But I found images and scenes kept coming to mind for days afterwards and there were particular sensations and sequences to it which moved me and appealed personally.

Levan Gelbakhiani gives a fantastically raw performance, occupiying so much of the frame and conveying so much with his big expressive eyes and physicality. As our guide to this world, he’s great company to be with and the resonance of getting to be a part of Merab’s personal journey was another thing which struck me more so in the days after.

There were also similarities in plot and structure to another film I saw this year called Rafiki, a Nigerian film about the blossoming romance between two girls in a homophobic society. Hearing the Q&A with director Levin Akin brought home the importance of films like these. Despite my misgivings about the conventionality of the plots for both films, both are brave documents of life in more hostile nations for repressed minorities and both attempt to offer a glimpse of the vitality and humanity of these people and hopefully offer a perspective to both those whithin the countries who lack understanding and outsiders like me who can’t fully grasp what life can be like in these nations I’ve never visited. Akin said the film was inspired by stories of how Tbilisi’s first small pride march in 2013 was beset by violent mobs and how he wanted to give voice to those who young people in the country.

La Llorona (2019, Jayro Bustamante)

And no, this isn’t The Curse of La Llorona, that film from the Conjuring universe of ‘jumpy jumpy scare scare ghosts running at the camera’ films. This is a serious and oblique Guatemalan film, although one which indeed uses the legend of La Llorona to tell a ghost story as allegorical fable.

The legend of La Llorona is known across Latin America as the tale of the Weeping Woman, who was abandoned by her husband and ultimately drowned her two children out of grief and anger. She is said to wander for all eternity looking for her lost children and bringing misfortune to those around her. The sound of a woman weeping is pivotal to this film.

Enrique is a former dictator of Guatemala whose army led a violent coup, resulting in the massacre of thousands of mainly indigenous people in the state. He is on trial for war crimes, and whilst found guilty ultimately escapes without punishment and is free to return to his mansion. Trapped inside by huge crowds of noisy protestors, he and his wife Carmen (who stood staunchly by his side despite knowing his infidelity), daughter Natalia (a doctor who supports the family but finds herself questioning her loyalties) and granddaughter Sara. One night, Enrique hears the sound of a woman weeping and almost shoots his wife attempting to stalk and find the woman. His family dismiss this as the delusions of a failing mind, but the story is enough to scare of the majority of the indigenous staff who take the legend seriously. In their place, they hire a new maid called Alma, an indigenous woman who’s long hair, blank expression and spectral movements makes her a ghostly presence in this new house.

Starting out with tropes of a ghost story, these quickly take a step back to address the consequences of real life horrors which must surely still ring raw within parts of South America. The beliefs and resolves of all the women within the house are pushed and tested as their forced isolation pushes them to greater degrees of madness. What I respected about this film was how it used the supernatural tropes, but didn’t allow these to overwhelm or distract from the more grounded subject matter. It’s a period of history which has left scars both physical and psychological, and this family in their gated community are forced to confront the traumas that were committed in their name. It’s subtly quite a powerful film which addresses difficult subject matter creatively, even if some themes and subplots were less well-addressed as I would have liked.

Divine Love (2019, Gabriel Mascaro)

Last but not least was one of the strangest and most beguiling films I’ve seen in a while. It wasn’t the easiest of viewings, and it was a film which refused to give simple explanations or offer any sort of conventional storytelling. I had to admire its imagination and how fully it ingratiated us in this near-future world, even if the amount of ideas covered can be a little much and ultimately some themes are disappointingly not explored as fully as others.

From what little I know about the current state of Brazilian politics and society, Divine Love reads as a scathing if subtle critique of the shift towards extreme right wing ideology and state interventions in everyday lives. In 2027 Brazil, society has become increasingly non-secular. Citizens are treated hierarchically – where married couples and pregnant women are prized above all others. Priests offer confessions at gaudily decorated drive-thru centres. Huge neon-drenched religious raves profess messages of God alongside the dance music.

We follow Joana, who works at the government offices dealing with citizen’s personal records. Her main duty is processing divorce requests, but frequently she uses her position to convince these couples to try to stay together, seeing it as her religious duty to fight for the longevity of every marriage. Often she invites these couples to an underground marriage therapy group called Divine Love, where a priestess leads group therapy and attendants perform unusual trust exercises and engage in ritualistic sexual acts.

But Joana’s faith is being tested. After many years together, she and her husband Danilo have still been unable to conceive a child. New age fertility treatments and Divine Love sessions can only help so much, and Joana finds herself increasingly distraught at what she figures as is punishment for her religious failings, despite her devotion and the large number of happy couples she has worked to keep together – seeing her desk job as fulfilling the Lord’s work.

The film is narrated prophetically and perhaps mockingly by a child, calmly setting the scene from an almost omnipotent standpoint. Divine Love tries to be both a parable of both a personal crisis of faith as well as speculative study of fundamentalist religion cohabiting with the state. Ultimately for me personally, the personal story was too allegorical to fully ingratiate me within Joana’s journey, with a story that prefers you ponder at arm’s length. But the overall setting of the story, the production design and vision of the future is remarkable and enthralling to watch.

Holy Motors

2012
Director/Writer: Leos Carax

Compared to previous years, 2012 personally hasn’t been a standout year for new films for me. There have been some entertaining rides along the way: Moonrise Kingdom was a charming love letter to young romance, The Dark Knight Rises was a sprawling, busy, flawed but ultimately epic film about the breakdown of socio-ethical values and the superhero myth while Skyfall simply re-affirmed my love of James Bond films. But there wasn’t much that that truly inspired or enthralled me to any great extent. There was Amour, Michael Haneke’s soul-crushing study of an elderly man’s devotion to his wife whose mind is slowly dying but for me the real standout this year was Holy Motors.

Despite not winning any prizes at the Cannes Film Festival this year, Holy Motors was the film which seemed to generate the greatest amount of buzz and fervour out of anything playing on all of the websites, blogs and reviews I was finding. I didn’t know anything about the director Leos Carax (this is his first film for 13 years) or any of the major actors in it. All I knew were some bizarre details about the plot which didn’t seem to make much sense and some glowing reviews praising its originality; it was intriguing. The trailer didn’t offer much more- just a series of distinct and memorable clips and images but it was enough for me. I couldn’t wait to see it.

So what is it about then? We follow a day in the life of the mysterious figure Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant), during his bizarre odyssey across Paris in the back of a white stretched limo driven by his dutiful chauffer Céline (Édith Scob). His day involves him engaging in a series of ‘appointments’, for each of which he has to perform a new character in public complete with new costumes, make-up and personality. He starts the day as a middle aged banker leaving his art deco home replete with luxury cars and armed security. Throughout the film he plays an elderly crippled woman begging for change, an ordinary man picking up his daughter from a party, an assassin assigned to kill his doppelganger and an actor performing stunts for motion capture animation on a soundstage, amongst several other roles. The reason why he does this is never made entirely clear and the only thing linking them is Monsieur Oscar himself.

To put it bluntly, this film is insane. A very funny series of surrealist stories, Holy Motors is not constructed like or driven by any narrative conventions but instead takes the fundamentals of cinematic form and genre and subverts them, inviting the audience into this strange dreamscape not through narrative engagement but through bold imagery, warped humour and a strong awareness of itself. It’s a massively self-conscious film, filled with loving homages to previous French cinema and playfully running wild with ideas that don’t make much sense together and encourage the viewer to be aware that they are watching a film. Some might get frustrated by its clear lack of structure or purpose but for me the real joy of this film was never being able to guess what was about to happen next. Surrealism is so hard to do but this makes it look easy, making something that can at once be crudely funny, deliciously disturbing or knowingly tedious and existential.

Filled with unique and unforgettable setpieces, Holy Motors is frenetic, vivid and schizophrenic. It is a film about cinema- beginning with a prologue in which the director Carax himself wakes from a dream in a hotel room and breaks through a wall with a giant key embedded in his hand, he emerges at the back of a packed cinema filled with a sleeping crowd. He’s transfixed by this new world, one formed by the artistic visions of the subconscious where anything is possible. Throughout the film, it asserts itself as a cinematic vision. Everyone in it is aware that they are performing for someone watching- indeed it is their professions. Each character M. Oscar plays is within its own cinematic realm- one time it is a violent thriller, another a languid melodrama about death filled with highly emotional performances and overblown cliché dialogue; it even turns into a musical as bizarrely Kylie Minogue turns up and sings a song about loss, heartbreak and change. Clips from early cinema of dancers and male bodies on display are spliced throughout. There’s even an intermission. The best bit is M. Oscar’s third appointment, a masterful sequence; he plays a revolting sewer dweller that emerges in the Père Lachaise cemetery to the theme from Godzilla, where he discovers a photoshoot by a deranged photographer and an American model whom he kidnaps and takes to his underground lair. So ludicrously funny, it’s also a scathing satire of contemporary France (sewers filled with illegal immigrants, a woman being disguised in a burka) and of self-obsessed celebrity culture.

Holy Motors is not like anything else I’ve ever seen recently. It’s refreshing to see something which doesn’t try to force overwrought thematic subtext down your throat. Instead you’re invited to simply enjoy the ride and marvel in the spectacle of a film that doesn’t take itself at all seriously. Certainly some viewers might dislike its unconventionality and puzzling content which is full of questions and secrets, but it’s just so much fun that these don’t matter. They’re not what this is about anyway; this is a hallucinogenic experiment of the capabilities of cinema, so wonderfully formed and put together.

*Spoilers* But seriously, what is it about? It can definitely be seen as treatise on the art of acting and the nature of performance. In his TARDIS-like limo seemingly bigger on the inside and filled with boxes of props, costumes and make-up, we see the upmost care M. Oscar puts into each of his performances, the vast amount of time he spends carefully preparing for each role. The true centrepiece of the film is Lavant’s extraordinary performance, he truly throws himself fully into each character and it’s delightful to watch.

Holy Motors could also be about the performances we ourselves put on everyday- how we mark ourselves in the world through our behaviour, appearance and manner and how this is distinguished from our true selves seen only in private. We catch only brief glimpses of the real Oscar, when he is alone in the limo with Céline- he’s gradually downtrodden and tired as the day continues. One wonders if he’s grown increasingly weary of having to play so many such exacting roles while his real self grows older and is increasingly exerted. We catch a brief snippet of his strain as he takes a sneaky cigarette before entering the house of his final performance of the day, sighing, knowing he has to do it all over again tomorrow. The only glimpses of the real world he ever gets during the day is by watching the Parisian streets glide past on a television monitor in his limo. He spends his day interacting with families and strangers but everything that occurs, all the emotions he feels, are false; he’s definitely a lonely man consumed by a wider societal need to perform, to entertain and to distract. This is applicable to everyone in the film- Céline at the end of the day puts on a mask, this perhaps being the performance she puts on in her personal life (as well as being a reference to the wonderful French horror film Eyes Without a Face (1960) which Edith Scob also starred in). Eva Mendes’s kidnapped model retains her emotionless public persona required for her work, even during the chaos happening around her in the sewers away from the photoshoot.

One theory I want to propose is how Oscar could be developing melancholia over his growing old and his lack of genuine human relationships. Each of his roles could in some way reflect his own phobias and insecurities. He has no genuine family, yet the film is filled with daughters or daughter-figures (the little girl saying goodbye at the start, the self-hating daughter leaving the party, the devoted niece by her dying uncle’s bedside, the chimpanzees), perhaps stating his own desire for a child or something to give him purpose. The sewer monster’s final descent into almost childlike dependency yet one tinged with a creepy sexual undercurrent belays his desperate need for interaction. The assassin’s murder of himself (which is then repeated vice versa) could be a sense of self-loathing. The crippled woman, alone and begging, or at the other end of the scale, the banker attacked in the street, could be his future- isolated and misunderstood by the rest of the world that demands homogeneity.

It seems the world is changing around Oscar- he describes how he started this work and his love of it for “the beauty of the act”, yet he laments the loss of the beholder to appreciate this beauty. This could be a protest at the state of modern technology in the world- he decries how he unable to see the cameras anymore, perhaps because they are too small, and therefore he can no longer be aware of the audience watching him. Further, we can see the acts he performs on the soundstage with the contortionist for the motion capture- here the camera lingers on the fluidity and form of their bodies and ultimately juxtaposes this with the final product their movements are helping to create: a crude animation about copulating dragon monsters. It’s not worthy of their efforts and it masks the real artists at work- the dedicated actors. Finally there is the wickedly silly scene at the very end of the film, where fears of being replaced and made inadequate by new machines are discussed by the limos, complaints about how people no longer want to see anything beyond what they use and want.

One major question is who is Oscar really performing for? It seems he’s in the business of creating filmic fiction for someone- it’s implied he’s be doing this for some time and we meet several other actors also engaged in acting for unseen audiences. Are the crowds unseen, and if so how are they watching? Oscar says he cannot see the cameras anymore, so does that mean they are actually there? Is anyone actually watching, or is this business (that of cinema itself and the art of performance) slowly dying, to be replaced cheap imitations and lazy commercialism? Or is the camera simply Carax’s, and the audience we ourselves watching right now? Few films have taken such measures as to make the viewer alert to the fact that we are watching something artificial and staged, created for artistic and entertainment purposes. Do we simply take for granted the efforts that go into creating cinematic art, and are we ignoring the truly deserving artworks in favour of those that pride novelty, technological gimmickry and convention over creative innovation? Oscar’s performance in the mo-cap studio is restricted and dictated by a demanding unseen voice, telling him exactly what to do; this then compared to his gloriously unhinged performance as the sewer monster.

Frankly, I could be way off the mark with all of these interpretations- Holy Motors is so dense in content which is so hypnagogic that it is open to any number of readings. People could easily hate this film, simply sit back and enjoy what’s happening or try hard to engage with its deranged content, but either way they can never say that they’ve ever seen anything like this before. Its refusal to follow the rules or frankly even simply make perfect sense is inspiring to watch and consider and that’s why for me Holy Motors is the best film of 2012.

Originally posted on my previous blog on 29th December 2012.

Dirty Harry

1971
Director: Don Siegel
Writers: Harry Julian Fink, R.M. Fink, Dean Reisner

With far too much time on my hands during holidays, they’re always a good time to catch up with films I haven’t seen for a long time. After a year supposedly studying film academically, I suppose I wanted to see whether my opinions on any of my favourite films would be any different. To be honest, I doubt they ever would, not unless I could now see some glaring flaw in any of them I wasn’t aware of before, but I have no idea what they could possibly be. I still don’t watch them in the same way as the films we study at uni- I’m not going out of my way to note the mise-en-scene or studying the editing techniques; to me they’re still simply films I love to watch. Although I’ve found that on some base level, I do keep an eye open for these things when I watch films for fun (especially if they’re particularly distinct), just not in as much detail as during lectures.

It’s from this slightly confused standpoint that I decided to watch a film I’ve always had a lot of love for: Dirty Harry. Along with the likes of A Clockwork Orange, Pulp Fiction, Being John Malkovich and several others, this is one of the few films that are actually quite personal to me in that they were amongst the ones I watched when I was around 13/14 and being more adventurous in my viewing. These were some of the films that showed me how diverse and captivating cinema could be and ignited my passion for film which remains today. Dirty Harry also has the honour of being my first introduction to the living legend that is Clint Eastwood, a man whose sheer screen presence and effortless cool is still a pleasure to watch. Dirty Harry is still my favourite Clint film and his most memorable role, revisited across four sequels of unfortunately widely varying quality.

It had been a few years since I last watched this and so I wanted to see whether my high regard of it was still deserved or whether I was simply looking at it through rose tinted glasses. It is very different to a lot of my other top films in terms of factors like its content, scale, the period it was made in and its visuals. Of course I’d be worried if all my favourite films were especially similar but I did wonder what it was about this film that kept leading me to look on it so positively.

The time: 1971. The place: San Francisco. The city is being held hostage by a sadistic serial sniper known only as Scorpio. He has already murdered a young woman by shooting her from a rooftop and now demands $100, 000 or else he will kill another person each day. With the police on high alert, Inspector Harry Callaghan is assigned to the case. His no-nonsense style, lack of respect for his superiors and unorthodox methods have helped form the basis of many onscreen maverick cop imitations ever since. They’ve also developed his infamous reputation in the police department- many different theories are suggested as to why he’s called ‘Dirty’ Harry, from the fact that he’s the one most willing to do all the dirty jobs to the point that he is simply a bit of a perv (as evidenced several times during the film). What starts as a routine investigation soon escalates into an intense battle between Callaghan and Scorpio, with the two men resorting to increasingly offhand tricks to win their own personal wars.

I think that’s where this film’s greatest strength lies: in its simplicity. It’s less a police thriller and more a study into two dark and violent men. Rewatching it this time made me realise how similar they both are; it just happens one is on the side of the law and one isn’t. Both are driven solely by single forces- Scorpio with his sadistic love of killing and Callaghan with his need to enforce the law, although as the film progresses his methods become increasingly unethical as his desire to overpower Scorpio overtakes. Very little is revealed about the lives of either man other than the events onscreen. Scorpio’s name or history is never discovered, his life seems to consist of nothing more than his insatiable urge to cause pain. A scene of him robing a liquor store shows he has no interest in money or gaining possessions; he’s simply there to retrieve a new weapon to restart his campaign, although he does slip a bottle of whisky on the way out. He’s always presented in a dehumanised manner- our first glimpse of him at the very start is simply that of the barrel of his rifle. We don’t see his face until about 10 minutes later and don’t hear his flat voice later still; even then it’s only on the other end of a telephone line where we can’t see him. The music distorts and becomes far more sinister in his presence.

Similarly, Callaghan is shown as being motivated almost entirely by his work. There is frequent reference to the fact that he doesn’t have a wife and the only time we do see him off-work, he’s using his time to follow Scorpio. We learn little more about him, other than brief glimpses into his voyeuristic tendencies and his general dislike for other people, especially those in power he sees as ineffective (although he does show increasing respect for his new partner Chico Gonzalez after he shows his capabilities in the field). Many critics and reviewers have pointed out the conservative right-wing tendencies of the character and the film and its series in general. This sort of view never really occurred to me the first times I watched this, as I tend to prefer to remain generally apolitical when I watch films, although now Callaghan’s desire to preserve justice over an need to follow rules or preserve human rights  is quite obvious. The controversy surrounding this film in the early 1970s doesn’t seem at all shocking now, although I can understand why it caused such concern over issues like police brutality and fascist ideals, with scenes such as Callaghan torturing information out of an unhelpful Scorpio or shooting a gang of African-American bank robbers being the most obvious. At times it does seem like a critique of the legal system, one which is slow, ineffectual and which preserves the rights of the criminal over those of the victim, a criticism which still rings around today. The film does definitely seem to side with Callaghan on this issue, most notably when Scorpio, having been captured, is released because the evidence is inadmissible due to it being collected without a warrant. However, Callaghan’s methods are so unusual and so extreme than they can hardly be called realistic; it seems this film is intended more as a study of Callaghan himself and how his determination to stop this criminal drives him to extreme lengths, with any sort of social commentary coming second in priority.

Dirty Harry is definitely intended to be an entertaining piece of action cinema and it’s in that sense that it works so well. The pacing is very brisk and precise; no time is wasted on showing anything which isn’t entirely relevant. Instead we get a series of strong and memorable set-pieces, the telephone chase around town and the school bus hijacking especially. Don Siegel directs this very well with a strong steady eye for detail- the violence in this film is convincingly messy and unchoreographed-looking yet retains a sense of style and clarity that makes it incredibly watchable and tense. There’s also an intelligent use of time and place; San Francisco is treated almost like a character in itself with numerous long shots of skylines tied with intimate filming right on the streets and alleys to give it a distinct feel. Several landmarks are used inventively in the action sequences; what stood out for me was the ironic use of religious imagery such as the cross in Mount Davidson Park and the neon ‘Jesus Saves’ sign outside the church, these two locations being home to some of the bloodiest violence in the film. These signs reflect the burgeoning tolerance and general peace of the city being put under threat by this maniac. The city is also distinguished here because of its association with the Zodiac killings that took place here in the late 1960s and that would have been still fresh in the memory of those who watched this when it was released. Those real life crimes were obviously an inspiration for the writers as similarities are drawn such as the sending of threatening letters and the threat of kidnapping a schoolbus full of children. This is referenced directly in David Fincher’s rich drama Zodiac (2007), based on the investigation of the murders, where investigators watching Dirty Harry at the cinema are shown to be visibly uncomfortable with how much overlap there actually is between reality and fiction.

My brother complains that Clint Eastwood always plays the same role no matter what film he’s in. I suppose there is an element of truth in that (definitely in his earlier films) although his demeanour is most definitely his own and for me that’s what makes him so watchable. Here he is cocksure and confident; you can’t imagine him taking any shit off anyone. Harry Callaghan is just such a distinct character, with a swagger and a smart-talking economy with words all to himself. His ironic tone with his superiors and the mayor are a lot of fun- I loved spotting the homage to this in The Naked Gun with Leslie Nielsen’s Frank Drebin repeating Callaghan’s ‘I shoot the bastard’ speech. And of course you can’t forget Andy Robinson’s chilling turn as Scorpio, who on first appearances seems so unlikely- director Don Siegel describes how he has “the face of a choirboy”. But often it’s simply the cold smirk on his face that makes him so horrendously unpleasant, this marring of supposed innocence with such evil. His disintegration from the calm controlled sniper to the maniacally driven monster is creepy; he is definitely one of the most horrible movie villains I can think of.

What’s stood out for me on this repeat viewing is just how unbelievably dark and grim this film is. Although age adds to this, it is definitely a grimy looking film as we’re introduced to some of the most inhospitable parts of San Francisco hidden in the shadows. Lalo Schifrin’s jazzy score does add a touch of class but ultimately this is a supremely gritty film. It’s so cheesy of me to say this but Dirty Harry is very much a dirty film, not necessarily because it is explicit but because it doesn’t hesitate from showing the dark underbelly of urban space, the impersonal machine-like working process of law enforcement and the blackest reaches of human depravity- there are no limits to which either Scorpio or Callaghan will go to which will stop them from overcoming the other. I’m surprised how much of this I missed when I watched it at around age 14. Then it was just a highly watchable thriller, one that has aged surprisingly well. It’s strange how much more disturbed I was by it this time, although I’m glad I was because seeing this in a new way was refreshing and it reaffirmed my respect for this film. I know this has ended up turning more into an essay than a review but I guess I just have a lot to think about with this- I’m glad I still like this film so much, it certainly makes my favourites list much more intriguing.

Originally posted on my previous blog on 28th August 2012 (back when I was in first year!).