JULY 2018 VOLUME 28 ISSUE 7

THE INTERNATIONAL FILM MAGAZINE

THE IRREPRESSIBLE

PLUS
CANNES UNDER PRESSURE
RUPERT EVERETT’S ‘THE HAPPY PRINCE’
ITALIAN GREAT MARCO BELLOCCHIO
DEBRA GRANIK’S ‘LEAVE NO TRACE’
BUDD BOETTICHER’S WESTERNS
£4.95
07

9 770037 480106
newfilms film of the month i, tonya
25/06/2018
let the
sunshine in
18/06/2018

All Rights Reserved.

phantom
thread
18/06/2018
Thread, LLC.
Phantom Thread - © 2017 Phantom

the shape
of water
25/06/2018

120 bpm
out now
LLC. All Rights Reserved.

dark river
25/06/2018
Darkest Hour - © 2017 Focus Features

loveless
11/06/2018
darkest hour
out now

westwood
18/06/2018

journey’s end
out now

the wound
18/06/2018 the mercy
out now
fopp stores
bristol college green // cambridge sidney st
edinburgh rose st // glasgow union st & byres rd
london covent garden // manchester brown st
nottingham broadmarsh shopping centre
oxford gloucester green Formats subject to availability, while stocks last.
Contents July 2018
28

FEATURES

20
Cannes: days of seeing wild
The Croisette may have felt a little
quieter than usual, but a selection of truly
outstanding, socially aware Asian films
– from the likes of Lee Chang-dong, Bi
Gan, Jia Zhangke and Palme d’Or winner
Koreeda Hirokazu – helped make the
festival one of the most memorable for
many years. By Nick James PLUS Nick
Bradshaw on the treats to be found in
Critics’ Week and Directors’ Fortnight,
which turned 50 in style this year

28
COVER FEATURE
The irrepressible Agnès Varda
After more than six decades working
contentedly in the margins, the artist and
filmmaker is finally gaining the wider
recognition she deserves. S&S contributors
discuss key aspects of her brilliantly
idiosyncratic work, outlining her central
role in the French New Wave and exploring
her rich visual style, deep love of play and
sharp sense of place. PLUS Kiva Reardon
talks to the director herself
46 40
Power politics:
Vanishing point the films of Marco Bellocchio
In a career steeped in Italian history,
Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace, about a teenager living in the Marco Bellocchio’s by turns defiantly
wilds of Oregon with a military veteran father, is a fine political and slyly anti-authoritarian films
have been marked by a mordant sense
film that taps into America’s pioneer spirit. By Ryan Gilbey of authority’s enduring appeal.
Henry K. Miller looks back at his career,
REGULARS and talks to the director about his time as
5 Editorial Field of vision Wide Angle a student in the London of the early 60s
14 Point of View: Christopher Small
Rushes unravels the truth about Manny
6 On Our Radar: forthcoming attractions Farber’s termites and white elephants
8 Interview: Christina Newland 17 P rimal Screen: Ellen Cheshire
meets Jonas Carpignano, whose explores the influence of silent cinema
neorealist The Ciambra explores on the work of Jane Campion
the lives of Calabrian Romani 19 Profile: Kieron Corless rediscovers
9 T he Numbers: Charles Gant on how Peter Emmanuel Goldman – a
Funny Cow gained northern exposure brilliant lost filmmaker
10 I ndustry: Mark Cousins celebrates
Belfast’s filmgoing heritage, PLUS 95 Letters
Sam Manning on the cinephile
haven of the Queen’s Film Theatre Endings
13 Interview: Anna Bogutskaya 96 Adam Scovell shudders through
talks to Ari Aster, director of the hauntingly violent last 40
the terrifying Hereditary moments of Witchfinder General
July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 1
 CLASSICS

“This is one of underrated producer/director Stanley Kramer's

finest humanitarian movies.” – Radio Times

Nominated for nine Academy Awards including Best Picture, Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones,
starring Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier broke new ground by delivering its message of racial tolerance
through a fast-moving blend of action and suspense.
On Blu-ray for the first time in the UK in a special Dual Format edition, featuring a new video interview with critic & author Kim Newman and more.

AVAILABLE JUNE 2018

Website: www.eurekavideo.co.uk AVAILABLE FROM
Twitter: @eurekavideo
Facebook: EurekaEntertainment

no way out
Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s No Way Out, starring Richard Widmark and Sidney Poitier, is an electrifying film-noir
about a doctor whose ethics are put to the test when he comes into conflict with a racist criminal.
Released for the first time ever on Blu-ray in a special Dual Format edition (DVD & Blu-ray),
featuring a two part documentary on the legendary director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, a reversible sleeve and more.

AvAilAble June 2018

Website: www.eurekavideo.co.uk AVAILABLE FROM
Twitter: @mastersofcinema
Facebook: EurekaEntertainmentt

PUBLISHED MONTHLY BY THE BFI
Editorial enquiries
21 Stephen Street London W1T 1LN
t: 020 7255 1444
w: bfi.org.uk/sightandsound
e: S&S@bfi.org.uk
Social media
f: facebook.com/SightSoundmag
t: twitter.com/SightSoundmag
Subscriptions 56 Lek and the Dogs
t: 020 8955 7070
e: sightandsound@
abacusemedia.com
Volume 28 Issue 7 (NS)
ISSN 0037-4806 USPS 496-040
CONTRIBUTORS
Anna Bogutskaya is events
programmer at the BFI
Ellen Cheshire is the author of
In the Scene: Jane Campion
Mark Cousins’s latest film is
The Eyes of Orson Welles
Rebecca J. DeRoo is the
author of Agnès Varda between
Film, Photography, and Art
Kat Ellinger is editor-in-chief
of Diabolique Magazine
Charles Gant is features editor
of Screen International
Ryan Gilbey is film critic of
the New Statesman
Pamela Hutchinson wrote the BFI
Classics volume on Pandora’s Box
Sam Manning is a research fellow
at Queen’s University Belfast
So Mayer is the author of Political
Animals: A New Feminist Cinema
Henry K. Miller is the editor of the
book The Essential Raymond Durgnat
Christina Newland is a
freelance film journalist
Kiva Reardon is a film programmer
and writer. She is the founding
editor of Cléo journal
Adam Scovell is the author
of Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful
and Things Strange
Jasper Sharp is co-editor
of the Japanese film website
MidnightEye.com
Christopher Small is a
writer and critic. He jointly co-
ordinates the Critics Academy
for the Locarno festival
Ginette Vincendeau teaches film
studies at King’s College London
and is the author of Brigitte Bardot,
the Life, the Legend, the Movies
Catherine Wheatley teaches
film studies at King’s College
London and is the author of
Michael Haneke’s Cinema
Contents Reviews
FILMS OF THE MONTH
52 The Endless
54 The Happy Prince
FILMS
58 All the Wild Horses
58 Arcadia
59 Avengers: Infinity War
60 Boom for Real:
The Late Teenage Years
of Jean-Michel Basquiat
61 The Boy Downstairs
62 Breaking In
62 The Ciambra
63 Deadpool 2
64 Freak Show
65 Hereditary
66 Ideal Home
66 In the Fade
66 Leave No Trace
68 Life of the Party
69 M
aquia: When the
Promised Flower Blooms
70 Mary Shelley
70 McQueen
71 Modern Life Is Rubbish
72 102 Not Out
72 Path of Blood
72 The Poetess
74 Postcards from the 48%
75 The Rape of Recy Taylor
75 Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda
76 Studio 54
77 Submergence
77 Super Troopers 2
78 Swimming with Men
79 Terminal
79 This Is Congo
80 Time Trial
81 Whitney
HOME CINEMA
84 The Birthday Party; The
Bloodthirsty Trilogy: The
Vampire Doll / Lake of
Dracula / Evil of Dracula; La
Cage aux folles; Cure; The
Effect of Gamma Rays on
Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds;
Garçon!; The Grifters; The
Henry Fool Trilogy: Henry 52
Fool / Fay Grim / Ned
Rifle; Intimate Lighting;
It’s the Old Army Game;
Little Murders; The Magic
Flute; Model Shop; The St.
Valentine’s Day Massacre;
Suddenly, Last Summer
DVD features
82 R
obert Hanks saddles up
to ride the Budd Boetticher
trail
85 Revival: Pamela 62
Hutchinson loves the
postmodern sparkle of
Olivier Assayas’s Irma Vep
90 Lost and Found: Kat
Ellinger revisits Zbynek
Brynych’s The Fifth
Horseman Is Fear
BOOKS
92 Jasper Sharp welcomes a
life of the great Japanese 79
actor and filmmaker
Tanaka Kinuyo
93 P
amela Hutchinson enjoys
a study of the funny
women of early cinema
71

COVER
Photo by Thomas Laisné/
Contour by Getty Images
Hand-drawn type by
Sarah J. Coleman at Inkymole

NEXT ISSUE
Digital edition available from 9 July
On UK newsstands: 12 July
And online this month Soundwalk Collective in Godard’s
archives | 1968 Ireland: Rocky Road to Dublin | 1968 Mexico: El grito |
Sheffield Doc/Fest | Israel’s DocAviv bfi.org.uk/sightandsound
July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 3
 “A FILM oF FERocIouS ENERgY ANd
oBSERvATIoNAL kEENNESS”
Jonathan Romney, Film Comment

“gRIPPINg ANd
HHHHH
VultuRehound
AuThENTIc”
new inteRnationalist
HHHHH
new inteRnationalist

Martin ScorSeSe PRESENTS A FILM BY JonaS carpignano

ouR TERRIToRY

IN cINEMAS JuNE 15
WWW.ThEcIAMBRA-FILM.coM #ouRTERRIToRY
 EDITORIAL
Editor
Nick James
Editorial Nick James
Deputy editor
Kieron Corless
Features editor
James Bell
Web editor
Nick Bradshaw
Acting production editor
Anna Coatman

FIELD OF VISION
Chief sub-editor
Jamie McLeish
Sub-editors
Robert Hanks
Jane Lamacraft
Researcher
Mar Diestro-Dópido
Credits supervisor
Patrick Fahy Three of the greatest filmmakers in the world have
Credits associates been in the spotlight of late. The 25th anniversary
Kevin Lyons
Pieter Sonke of Jane Campion’s Palme d’Or-winning The Piano is
James Piers Taylor
Design and art direction
being marked by a UK cinema rerelease. It will follow
chrisbrawndesign.com on the heels of Lucrecia Martel’s astounding 18th-
Origination
Rhapsody
century drama Zama, which is unlike any costume
Printer drama you’ve ever seen, if it can even be called one
Wyndeham Group
at all. And Claire Denis has been in the news for two
BUSINESS reasons. Her study of dating in later life Let the Sunshine
Publisher
Rob Winter
In, starring Juliette Binoche, has just been in cinemas,
Publishing coordinator while her next film, High Life, an English-language
Natalie Griffith
Advertising consultant
SF drama starring Robert Pattinson, is already being
Ronnie Hackston publicised in advance of its emergence later this year.
T: 020 7957 8916
That these three filmmakers are of the same gender
Jane Campion seems to draw out a
M: 07799 605 212
E: ronnie.hackston@bfi.org.uk is not my main reason for mentioning them here. finer essence from actors. Her work
Newsstand distribution I’m thinking more about what else distinguishes
Seymour
T: 020 7429 4000 them from the general run of filmmakers, and the
also treats the landscape setting as an
E: info@seymour.co.uk outstanding difference is that they all make films uncanny presence, almost a character
Bookshop distribution
Central Books
bearing a unique visual stamp. While the singularity
T: 020 8525 8800 of these films is presumably the result of collaboration enhanced visual acuity? Yes and no. I’m not suggesting
E: contactus@centralbooks.com
with cinematographers and, no doubt, deep obstinacy that there’s a particular kind of cinema that’s inherently
Sight & Sound is a member of the
Independent Press Standards
in the face of financiers, it’s obvious that these female, only that the wider the pool of life experience
Organisation (which regulates the UK’s directors all have personal approaches to visual brought to the look of films, the more multi-dimensional
magazine and newspaper industry).
We abide by the Editors’ Code of language. This is a short space in which to elaborate and startling cinema is likely to be.
Practice and are committed to
upholding the highest standards of what goes into these visions, so I’ll generalise. Two films I saw at Cannes substantiate this view.
journalism. If you think that we have
not met those standards and want to Campion loves actors, as much for their sensual Nadine Labaki’s Jury Prize-winning Capernaum (see my
make a complaint please contact
rob.winter@bfi.org.uk. If we are unable
presence, for how they move and touch things, as for Cannes report on page 20) looks at first like countless
to resolve your complaint, or if you their delivery of lines. You might say that all directors other neorealist films. It’s shot on the streets and in real
would like more information about IPSO
or the Editors’ Code, contact IPSO on should feel that way, but Campion seems to draw out interiors, and cuts quickly to capture the incredible
0300 123 2220 or visit www.ipso.co.uk
Sight & Sound (ISSN 0037-4806)
a finer essence from actors. Her films and television bustle of Beirut street life for dispossessed immigrants
is published monthly by British Film series also always treat their landscape setting as an and children, like its 12-year-old estranged hero. But
Institute, 21 Stephen Street, London
W1T 1LN and distributed in the USA uncanny presence, almost a character in itself. as you watch it you feel a different texture building,
by UKP Worldwide, 3390 Rand Road,
South Plainfield, NJ 07080 Martel and her cinematographers (she’s used a at a different speed to the more routine street-capture
Periodicals Postage Paid at South different one on each of her features) use camera of newsreels and telly series. It’s full-on but somehow
Plainfield, NJ
angles no one else would, often to give a more oblique more gentle than in other ballads of street survival.
POSTMASTER: Send address changes
to Sight and Sound c/o 3390 Rand sense of intimacy – sometimes, claustrophobic Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro has a more
Road, South Plainfield NJ 07080.
Subscription office:
intimacy – to her protagonists. She seeks imagery intuitive and rambling structure that takes in
For subscription queries and sales of that subverts expectation. The hierarchies of race landscapes almost as if they’re being drawn by hand as
back issues and binders contact:
Subscription Department and power in her portrait of Zama, the bureaucrat the fable unfolds. Individual shots might look ordinary,
Sight & Sound
Abacus e-Media stranded in a remote colonial outpost, are deliberately but their collective sense of space and region shapes the
3rd Floor Chancery Exchange
10 Furnival Street, London, EC4A 1AB
obfuscated to match the internal confusion he fates of the characters as much as changes of fortune.
T: 020 8955 7070
F: 020 8421 8244
constantly feels. Her films are full of images This is what happens if you see a lot of terrific
E: sightandsound@abacusemedia.com you would rarely, if ever, see in a TV drama. films at a festival. You come back with an elevated
Annual subscription rates:
UK £50, Eire and ROW £75
Denis is the most adaptable of the trio in the sense sense of the artform. Before Cannes I was getting
15% discount for BFI members that the physicality of, say, her renowned Foreign concerned that moving image culture was slowly
ILLUSTRATION BY SIMON COOPER AT WWW.COOPERILLO.COM

Copyright © BFI, 2018

Legion drama Beau travail (1999), with its magic becoming homogenised. And I still think that if
The views and opinions expressed
in the pages of this magazine or on hour desert-air dazzle, shares nothing pictorially more and more filmmakers follow the money and
its website are those of the author(s)
and are not necessarily those of the
with the close interior intimacy of Let the Sunshine freedom offered by TV series, the kind of distinctive
BFI or its employees. The contents
of this magazine may not be used
In except for a crucial understanding of how bodies visual language I’ve been talking about here may be
or reproduced without the written move around each other. It’s in the deft choreography gradually undermined. That’s why we need visionary
permission of the Publisher.
The BFI is a charity, (registration
of figures and camera movement through light filmmakers with the widest possible range of social,
number 287780), registered at that the work of Denis and her regular DP Agnès political, racial and gender perspectives to come
21 Stephen St, London, W1T 1LN
Godard becomes an experience special to them. through and resist this slow drift. Continuing lack
Ignoring gender, couldn’t I have chosen three male of support for women directors is not just a matter
directors or a random mixed trio who also share an of fairness, it’s an obstacle to new ways of seeing.

July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 5

 NEWS AND VIEWS

Rushes

ON OUR RADAR

p Edinburgh International Film Festival q Albert Finney: Son of Salford q Sheffield Doc/Fest
Venues across Edinburgh, 20 June – 1 July HOME Manchester, 3-24 June Venues across Sheffield, 7-12 June
The world’s longest continually running Albert Finney came to fame in 1960 with his Sheffield Doc/Fest is celebrating its 25th birthday,
film festival returns this year with a focus on blistering performance as Arthur Seaton, the and its programme this year features a series
Scottish cinema. Scottish films, filmmakers antihero of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning of live performances that reflect Sheffield’s
and acting talent and films shot in Scotland (pictured). The Salford-born actor went on to forge collaborative arts and music scene, including a
are all spotlighted in a programme that kicks a long and varied career – which is celebrated in new live score by GAIKA, responding to Khalik
off with the international premiere of Puzzle, this season of his films at HOME Manchester. Allah’s new film Black Mother (pictured).
in which Glasgow-born, Aberdeen-raised
actor Kelly Macdonald (pictured) stars as a
woman who finds an escape route from her
unfulfilling life when she discovers she has an
exceptional talent for solving jigsaws. Other
highlights from across the festival include
the UK premiere of comedy Swimming with
Men (see review, page 78); a live version of
Jaws (1975) accompanied by a performance
of John Williams’s score by the Royal
Scottish National Orchestra; and a pop-art
drama, Make Me Up, the latest creation of the
Glasgow-based video artist Rachel Maclean.

6 | Sight&Sound | July 2018

q Arcadia
Preview 26 May, Southend Film
Festival; in cinemas from 21 June
For his latest film (see review on page 59), Paul
Wright delved into 100 years of archive footage
and surfaced with a sensory musing on the British
people’s relationship to the land. Clips exploring
the beauty and brutality of rural carnivals and
fêtes, rites and rituals are stitched together and set
to an original score by Adrian Utley (Portishead)
and Will Gregory (Goldfrapp), alongside
folk music from Anne Briggs and others.
u Revolt, She Said: Women and Film After ’68
See independentcinemaoffice.org.uk for details
The queer feminist film collective Club des
Femmes and the Independent Cinema Office
have curated a new film tour, ‘Revolt, She Said’,
which reflects on the explosive events of May
1968. Radical films are travelling to venues
across the country, sharing intersectional,
queer and feminist stories of revolution.
Features include Vera Chytilová’s Daisies (1966),
Ula Stöckl’s The Cat Has Nine Lives (1968),
Mai Zetterling’s The Girls (1968, pictured)
and Pat Murphy’s Maeve (1981), alongside
documentaries such as Greta Schiller’s Before
Stonewall (1984) and Pratibha Parmar’s A Place
of Rage (1991), which weaves together the civil
rights movement of the 60s and the LGBT rights
movement of the 80s. One hundred years since
the first women got the vote in the UK and 50
years after the protests of May ’68, the season
asks: ‘Where is the feminist revolution now?’
u Earthworks: An Andrew Kötting Weekend
HOME Manchester, 8-10 June
Lek and the Dogs (see review, page 56) is the third
part of Andrew Kötting’s ‘Earth’ trilogy – a cycle of
films set on, above and below the earth. This Filthy
Earth (2001) is a story of sisters trying to survive in a
superstitious rural community and Ivul (2009,
pictured) explores a relationship between teenage
siblings, one of whom climbs on to the roof to
escape their father, vowing never to set foot on
earth again. The films screen at HOME over a single
weekend, with a live Q&A with Kötting on 8 June.
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND LUX, LONDON
p BL CK B X: Laida Lertxundi
WORDS, PLANETS
LUX, Waterlow Park Centre, London, 13 June – 7 July;
and Tramway, Glasgow, 22 June – 2 July
The first UK solo exhibition by artist-
filmmaker Laida Lertxundi takes place
across two venues, in London and Glasgow.
Los Angeles-based Lertxundi makes 16mm
films that combine ideas from conceptual
art and structural film with a feminist
perspective. Her new installation,WORDS,
PLANETS (pictured), was filmed in Havana,
Cuba, and locations around California.
q Bagri Foundation London
Indian Film Festival (LIFF)
London, 21-29 June; Birmingham, 22 June – 1 July;
and Manchester 29 June – 1 July
The largest South Asian film festival in Europe
returns for its ninth year, at venues around the
capital, as well as in Birmingham and Manchester
– a chance to discover the best in new Indian
film. Highlights include Bird of Dusk (pictured),
a documentary by Sangeeta Datta about the
late Bengali director Rituparno Ghosh.
July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 7
 RUSHES INTERVIEW

WORLDS APART
Jonas Carpignano explores the
lives of Italian Romani caught
between crime bosses and
the police in The Ciambra
By Christina Newland
Jonas Carpignano’s second feature, The Ciambra,
is a neorealist fable about a teenage boy forced
prematurely into adulthood. The film focuses
on a real Romani family living in Ciambra, a
cloistered neighbourhood in Calabria in southern
Italy, starring a 14-year-old from the area named
– in real life and in the film – Pio Amato.
A beetle-browed kid with a raft of unruly
siblings, Pio is thrust into Romani manhood
after his brother and father are arrested. He
steals cars and hocks stolen goods to help
support his family, who live under the yoke
of local organised crime and in constant fear
of police harassment. Carpignano’s film is an
authentic ethnography of a still-persecuted
group, and a thoughtful coming-of-age story
set against a backdrop of racial exclusion.
Christina Newland: Often, non-Romani
filmmakers struggle to get access to these
communities. Can you tell me about getting to
know Pio and his family prior to making the film?
Jonas Carpignano: I actually met them in 2011.
I was shooting a short film called A Chjàna
[The Plain], and one of Pio’s relatives stole my
car. That was the first time I ever went to that
community, to get my car back. I remember
meeting them and it was the first time I’d ever
seen this neighbourhood and this community.
I thought to myself, if I’m living in this town, I
want to know every facet of it. The relationship
was born out of genuine curiosity and wanting
to get to know people. A lot of filmmakers make
the mistake of just trying to approach and say, About a boy: Pio Amato (left) in Jonas Carpignano’s portrait of Romani life in Calabria, The Ciambra
“We want to make a movie.” Automatically
it creates a dividing line between subject and as a hopeful treatment of issues within like Pio would make a decision he makes in
filmmaker. But luckily that was something we the European Roma community? the film. To me, it’s respectful to them to say,
didn’t have. It felt like their voices would be JC: It’s a realistic assessment of the way life “This is good enough to be in the film.” I don’t
heard, and their participation was important. is there. It’s important not to exaggerate the like self-censorship where people say, “It’d be
CN: What challenges did shooting on circumstances or morph the psychology of more hopeful if…” That’s problematic. It’s a way
location, with real people, present? living there, just to appease other people. I feel of saying that the way you live your lives isn’t
JC: The entire film was shot in Pio’s house. good enough, so I’m going to put a first-world
That’s his neighbourhood, those are actually his The entire film was shot in Pio’s ideological spin on it that’s more palatable to
relatives. Those clothes are theirs. It was very other people. That’s wrong. I find the film to be
much a film that, as faithfully as possible, was house. That’s his neighbourhood, hopeful because it’s always hopeful when people
born out of what it is to live in this community.
It provided a lot of advantages and a lot of
those are actually his relatives. are given opportunities to speak about how they
actually live. Even though I don’t think we’re
challenges. On the one hand, I didn’t have to Those clothes are theirs there yet, where they feel like they can fully
worry about them not feeling comfortable in integrate into our town, I do think if there is some
their surroundings: shooting in their houses way to integrate, a path forward, it’s going to be
made them feel comfortable and lends an through someone like Pio. I do feel the film will at
authenticity to their performances. But on least make some people in our town realise that,
the other hand, there were moments when if that were to happen, it wouldn’t be so difficult.
people just didn’t want to go to work. So the CN: I want to ask you about your depiction of
same thing that was great about it was also the migrant African community and the Roma
bad about it. They never felt like they were in in Italy. While writing the film, what compelled
a movie and had to perform, but also because you to think about these groups side by side?
they didn’t feel like they were in a movie they JC: It wasn’t that I set off with the thesis of
would make us adapt to their rhythms and wanting to explore these two marginalised
what they wanted to do on a normal basis. communities. It just happened – we all lived
CN: There’s a bit in the film where Pio’s together. It became an important thing to look
grandfather says, “Remember, it’s us at, because the way things are happening with
against the world.” Do you see this film Jonas Carpignano the migrant community right now in Italy,

8 | Sight&Sound | July 2018


you see these tent places where they all live.
That is very much the way some people in the
Roma community used to live at the turn of
the century here. If you look at the way African
communities integrate and form ghettos on
the outside of these communities, it’s very
similar to the way the Ciambra formed. It was
important to look at whether there could be
solidarity, and what the limits of that solidarity
could be. Centuries apart, these two groups
have lived relatively similar experiences.
CN: Criminality has been associated with
gypsies for centuries. Some filmmakers
would want to smooth those edges off for
fear of negative stereotypes, but I think
your instinct not to do that was right.
JC: It’s too easy to say, “Not all gypsies are
criminals.” OK, that’s totally true. But what are
you saying about the people who are criminals?
That they are no longer worthy of sympathy
or cinematic portrayal because they do things
that are against your moral compass? That’s the
question I ask myself. Why does that person
become unworthy of representing being a
‘gypsy’? Because they do something you don’t
approve of? That’s very first-world stuff.
The Ciambra is released on 15 June,
i and is reviewed on page 62
THE NUMBERS
FUNNY COW
By Charles Gant
When it comes to releasing independent
and arthouse films, it’s accepted wisdom
among UK distributors that audiences are
more likely to be found in the south-east
corner of the country. But for the release of
Funny Cow – which tells the fictional story
of an aspiring stand-up comedian (Maxine
Peake) in the sexist pubs and working
men’s clubs of northern England in the
1970s and 1980s – UK distributor eOne was
determined this would not be the case.
As eOne marketing boss Chris Besseling
explains, “Depressingly, time and again with
quality indie films, 50 to 60 per cent of the
box office ends up being London and the
South-East. We felt that everything we did with
Funny Cow had to be focused on the North
– with marketing and publicity, in terms of
spend, use of talent and our launch events.”
On social media, spend can be accurately
targeted, and eOne assembled a media buy
skewed to women over 35 in northern cities.
Meanwhile content was widely promoted
through social channels by talent associated
with the film with particular pull in their
city or region of origin: Peake (Manchester),
Richard Hawley (Sheffield), John Bishop
(Liverpool) and Vic Reeves (the North-East)
– “Everyone from these different parts of the
Northern arts scene with huge followings
and respected voices,” Besseling says.
The film was launched with a premiere at
Sheffield Showroom and a Q&A screening at
HOME Manchester. The BFI Audience Fund
supported activity, including female stand-up
comedy nights at cinemas in the region. eOne
also hired a regional marketing officer – a
tactic it had tried successfully on a bigger
scale in 2016 with Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake.
Funny Cow opened on the sunny weekend
beginning Friday 20 April, debuting with a so-
so £68,000 from 62 cinemas. Notable bright
spots were the North and the Midlands – a
success skew that has only strengthened
over the course of the run. At press time the
film had reached £440,000 – an impressive
NORTHERN-SET INDIE MOVIES AT THE UK BOX OFFICE
Film
Billy Elliot
East Is East
Little Voice
I, Daniel Blake
Brassed Off
The Damned United
Looking for Eric
Control
Millions
Nowhere Boy
No joke: Maxine Peake in Funny Cow
6.5 times the opening number. And while
London and the South-East have contributed an
unusually low 32 per cent of the total, Yorkshire
alone has contributed 24 per cent, and the North
and Midlands collectively 57 per cent. Top venue
for the film is HOME Manchester, followed by
the Broadway in Nottingham, the Showroom in
Sheffield, Cineworld Sheffield, Tyneside Cinema,
FACT in Liverpool, Picturehouse Bradford and
City Screen York. Besseling says: “It is really
refreshing and rewarding that the audience we
went after was the audience that turned out.”
At HOME, Funny Cow ranks fourth in
admissions for the year so far, behind only
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,
Lady Bird and Isle of Dogs. Jason Wood,
the venue’s artistic director for film, says,
“Our audiences are attracted to films that
authentically depict their lives and experiences.
The fact that Funny Cow stars Maxine Peake,
a HOME regular, and features a strong female
character further convinced me that it would
be a success for us. I, Daniel Blake, God’s Own
Country and Lady Macbeth were likewise
great successes for HOME, and I think we’ve
built an audience base and a reputation for
supporting and nurturing those kinds of films.
Funny Cow, which seems to just run and run,
will, I’m sure, pave the way for more.”
Year Gross
2000 £18.4m
1999 £10.4m
1999 £8.50m
2016 £3.42m
1996 £3.39m
2009 £2.24m
2009 £1.31m
2007 £1,21m
2005 £1.50m
2009 £1.35m
July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 9
 RUSHES INDUSTRY

DAYS LIKE THESE

Over the past 50 years, the traumas
and triumphs faced by the people
of Northern Ireland have been
reflected in their moviegoing habits
By Mark Cousins
Moviegoing in most parts of the world in the
last 50 years has had swashes and backwashes.
In the West in the 1970s, blockbusters were like
a tidal wave, yet cinemas closed, as they closed
in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show
(1971). I was in towns and cities in Morocco a few
months ago in which all the cinemas were gone,
yet movie houses in China are multiplying, and
filmgoing has recently restarted in Saudi Arabia.
Zoom in to a small city closer to home and
you get a glimpse of some of the social, cultural
and emotional forces that drive such changes.
It’s a glimpse of a love affair between a city and
cinema, but with an interregnum, a wound.
The city is the one that formed me: Belfast. On
the 50th anniversary of the start of the Troubles
in 1968, and the founding of the city’s only
cultural cinema, the Queen’s Film Theatre (see
sidebar, opposite), and on the 20th anniversary
of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement that
ended the Troubles, Belfast moviegoing tells us
something about social change, and vice versa.
In antebellum Belfast, in the 1940s and 50s,
cinema attendance had a golden age. People went
to the pictures slightly more than in most of the
UK or Ireland. A large working-class population
and Ireland’s gaze westward, to America, meant Survivor: The Strand Cinema, opened in 1935 and still going
that Roy Rogers, John Wayne and Doris Day were
etched deep in the imagination of the place. Ocean’s Eleven (2001), Hunger (2008) and my needed it. In war you need bread and roses. I also
Then came the Troubles. The city centre slowly film I Am Belfast (2015), would say the same, I went to Iraq, and gave kids cameras to tell visual
closed down. Mainstream cinemagoing went into think, but his lifeline in the storm was music stories of their war. Again I was channelling
freefall. It wasn’t safe to be out at night and, even as much as film. And he stayed in Belfast. the cinema relaxant, stimulant, enrichment.
during the day, you had to keep your wits about Belfast’s most famous movie son, Kenneth Then, in Northern Ireland, the place on which
you; whereas, of course, watching a film is about Branagh, sought pastures new. So did thousands I’d turned my back, the Good Friday Agreement
not keeping your wits about it, it’s about letting of others, including me. Battered by the storm, came. And ceasefires. And we began to realise how
your defences down. At this same moment, and I went to Scotland, but was shadowed by what few places of entertainment or cultural exchange,
driven by some of the same social changes – the I’d learned about war and moviegoing in Belfast. especially for working-class people, Belfast’s city
ripple effect of the evénéments in Paris, which were When I started working at the Edinburgh centre had. Good things happened. The QFT kept
cinephile, for example – the QFT became a defiant International Film Festival, for example, I took a the cinephile flame alive. The Belfast Film Festival
Europhile place, and a bit samizdat at times. selection of the festival’s films to Sarajevo during was founded by a great bunch of activists and
Especially because of the war, cinema was its siege (when 10,000 people were killed). I didn’t movie-lovers and, unlike most film festivals, it was
a lifeline for people like me. John Wayne and realise it at the time, but this was a proxy Belfast explicitly about social change – policing, LGBT
Doris Day seemed a universe away from the for me. People wanted cinema in Sarajevo, they issues (a challenge to John Wayne and Doris Day),
working-class streets of Belfast where I grew up, etc. And, later, CineMagic, the successful film
but movies were a consolation, an unwinding. festival for children and young people, blossomed.
I remember seeing Steve Martin in Dead Men And guess what? Cinemagoing in Belfast
Don’t Wear Plaid (1982) in the New Vic cinema, recovered. Recent figures show that once again
and I think I was the only person there. Steve attendance is now a little higher than many
was doing it for me. We struggled to keep our parts of the UK or Ireland, on average. Old loves
heads above water when the war tide came in. die hard. And other parts of film culture came
Our lives were constrained. There were loads of back to life. Film and TV production is booming
no-go areas, but cinema can go anywhere. Valium in the new studios in Northern Ireland and is
prescription was far higher in Northern Ireland making other nations and regions of the UK
than other parts of the UK or Ireland – mostly for envious. And, even better, film education in
women – but cinema was another sort of relaxant. Northern Ireland is booming – the number
In addition, for people like me who were of pupils taking A-levels is, proportionally,
bad readers, and humiliated in school when far higher than in other parts of the UK.
we were asked to read out loud, this visual But this isn’t a happy-ever-after story. In the last
medium was an introduction into the world few decades, cities like Bristol, Cardiff, Dublin,
of creativity, art, plenitude and selfhood. It was Dundee, Galway and Manchester have invested
a bulwark against despair. The great musician in new film centres. Belfast hasn’t. It’s mostly
David Holmes, who did the soundtrack for The Belfast Film Festival mainstream American films that people in NI

10 | Sight&Sound | July 2018

are going to see – the John Wayne and Doris Day
movies of our times. Ticket sales for cultural
cinema – foreign films, classics, documentaries,
children’s films by non-American studios, art
cinema, etc – are just 0.8 per cent of the UK total,
when they should be nearer to three per cent.
The QFT continues to do a great job, but is
not in the centre of town and, as it has only two
screens, has to take films off its screens early.
Tourism to the North of Ireland has increased
fivefold in recent decades, but there are few
new places in the centre of Belfast where films
that tell the story of the place can be seen.
But things are afoot. The North of Ireland has
some great community cinemas. A new report
commissioned by Northern Ireland Screen found
that 44 per cent of the population of Belfast
would like to go to cultural film – just five per
cent did so in the last year. That’s a potential
increase in audience for arts film, docs, classics,
etc, of 200,000 per year. It’s also – let’s be honest
– a failure to serve the city’s citizens. If culture
heals the wounds of war, as the founders of
the Edinburgh Festival said in 1947, then the
fact that Belfast is far behind other comparable
UK and Ireland cities in film exhibition is a
disgrace. Luckily, lots of people know this.
Government agencies, Belfast City Council,
John Wayne seemed a universe
away from the streets of Belfast
where I grew up, but movies were
a consolation, an unwinding
politicians, the universities and festivals have
combined to argue the case for a new Belfast
Film Centre. This was announced at Cannes
in May. It’ll take co-operation and the setting
aside of vested interests, but the Good Friday
Agreement was a world-class example of that.
So this is a story about cinephilia suppressed
and bouncing back; neglect and regeneration.
Belfast is in transition. It has had a huge increase
in tourism, and restaurant culture, and a large
change in population diversity. Few people
migrated to the city in the 70s, 80s or early
90s. Now many people from Poland, India,
Africa, China, Lithuania and elsewhere live in
Belfast. The Belfast Film Festival, of which I’ve
taken over as chairperson, is announcing new
five-year movie plans in collaboration with
the Indian, Chinese and Polish consulates. We
want to be a centre of excellence in film. We
like that phrase that Jean Cocteau often used,
Etonnez-nous, astonish us. Watch this space.
Belfast’s trauma is mirrored in its moviegoing.
Its problems have not gone away. Its people live
segregated lives almost as much as they did at
the height of the Troubles. Some parts of the
city have the highest suicide rates in Western
Europe. The Troubles forced people’s lives, and
their imaginations, indoors and underground.
Yet we’re outgoing people. We’re not understated,
and cinema appeals to those who are not
understated. The small city of Belfast has been
bigger than life, just like cinema is bigger than
life. Wild places, places with high and low tides,
places with great amplitude, love movies.
PACK UP YOUR TROUBLES
For half a century, through the worst
years of the Northern Ireland conflict and
beyond, Queen’s Film Theatre in Belfast
has provided a haven for cinephiles
By Sam Manning
In 1968, Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) student
newspaper the Gown claimed that, other than
the university film society, “there is virtually
no cinema in Belfast that shows any films other
than John Wayne or Julie Andrews spectaculars”.
History lecturer Michael Barnes and Belfast
Festival director Michael Emmerson filled this
lacuna, creating an independent cinema similar
to the BFI-funded regional film theatres. On
16 October 1968, Queen’s Film Theatre (QFT)
opened in a converted lecture theatre at QUB
with a gala premiere of Louis Malle’s Viva
Maria! (1965). Later this year the cinema will
celebrate its 50th anniversary with a range of
screenings, lectures, exhibitions and events.
In its early years, QFT screened a range of
international films based on artistic merit
rather than on commercial appeal. It quickly
became clear that, though an important
cultural asset, QFT was not a sound financial
proposition. It remained open thanks to new
sources of finance and the astute management
of long-term administrator Michael Open
(1969-74, 1977-2005), whose complaints
that QFT received less funding than its
UK counterparts often fell on deaf ears.
While QFT’s south Belfast location was
largely free from sectarian violence, the Troubles
still had an impact on its programming and
operations. In 1970, for instance, the Film
Theatre Committee reported that a run of poor
attendance was “largely due to the civic unrest in
Belfast”; the following year, the cinema decided
to withdraw The Battle of Algiers (1966) from its
programme. Later, the 1974 Ulster Workers’
Council strike led to two weeks of closure. It did,
nevertheless, fare better than many other Belfast
cinemas and offered a haven during a period
of conflict. In 1977, it escaped a series of IRA
firebombs that damaged three Belfast cinemas.
One of QFT’s most idiosyncratic features was
its gloomy, concealed rear-alleyway entrance
which limited visibility and restricted passing
Door to door: the Queen’s Film Theatre entrance in the 1970s (left) and as it is now
trade in an era in which geographical mobility
was already severely curtailed. In spite of
these limitations, it attracted cinephiles from
all parts of Belfast. Filmmaker Brian Henry
Martin grew up in east Belfast and recalled
seeing Jean de Florette (1986) in the mid-1980s:
“I don’t think I’d ever been to south Belfast… it
was quite foreboding going up the alleyway,
you thought something terrible was going to
happen and you turned the corner and there
was this little bright entrance and in you
went to this completely different world.”
UK cinema audiences reached their nadir
in the mid-1980s, with the rise of home video.
In contrast to national trends, QFT survived
and prospered – in 1983, Open reported that
despite a lack of funding or capital investment,
patrons are “frequently astonished at the high
quality of the programming and the high levels
of audience in spite of the local civil unrest and
spartan conditions of the building”. Troubles
drama Cal (1984) broke attendance figures
and QFT welcomed high-profile visitors such
as producer David Puttnam and director Alan
Parker. Dolby sound was introduced in 1986
and a year later new projectors and cinema seats
were installed, replacing the uncomfortable
lecture-style seating. Prior to this, Open
suggested that patrons had to be “tolerant as
well as aesthetically astute to embrace the
QFT experience”. The conversion of another
lecture theatre in 1988 allowed the cinema to
provide a greater range of specialised films.
In the 1990s, QFT faced down the challenge
of the new Belfast multiplexes and retained
its reputation for serving up the best of
contemporary cinema. Yet its facilities still did
not match the standards of its programming.
This was addressed in 2004 when an extensive
refurbishment introduced a new café/bar and
the entrance was relocated to a more prominent
location facing the university campus.
In recent years, under the leadership of Susan
Picken (2008-17), and now Joan Parsons, QFT has
diversified its programme and regularly hosts
events such as CineMagic, the largest film festival
for young people in the UK and Ireland. The
introduction of dementia- and autism-friendly
screenings also provides a valuable service for
groups once excluded from cinema exhibition.
July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 11
 presents Summer 2018

FIVE TALL TALES: Budd Boetticher & Randolph Scott at Columbia, 1957–1960
5x film, 5x Blu-ray, limited edition (6,000) box set with 80-page book 28 May 2018

SAMUEL FULLER AT COLUMBIA: 1937–1961

7x film, 4x Blu-ray, limited edition (6,000) box set
with 4x 36-page booklets 18 June 2018

18 June 2018 18 June 2018 23 July 2018 20 August 2018 20 August 2018

Buy direct from powerhousefilms.co.uk

RUSHES INTERVIEW
GRIEF ENCOUNTER
Ari Aster’s Hereditary, a terrifying
portrait of a family coming apart
at the seams, channels the spirit
of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining
By Anna Bogutskaya
Hereditary, the debut feature by American
writer-director Ari Aster, premiered to great
acclaim at Sundance earlier this year, and has
had many hailing it as an instant genre classic.
A nightmarishly claustrophobic tale of grief,
madness and tension within a family, all anchored
by a vivid, emotionally violent performance by
Toni Collette, the film has drawn comparisons
with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) for
the way the horror of madness seeps through
the family, destroying it from the inside out.
A graduate of the American Film Institute
Conservatory, Aster had already made a name
for himself on the festival scene with his six
well-received short films, the first of which, the
very twisted The Strange Thing About the Johnsons
(2011), has spawned a roster of reaction videos
on YouTube that are just as worth watching
as the 25-minute film itself. With that film
Aster was working through some of the same
preoccupations that can be found in Hereditary
– in particular, the underlying darkness that
exists in the family unit. “When I was trying
to get Hereditary financed, I would pitch it as a
family tragedy that curdles into a nightmare,”
Aster recalls. “Stories set within the family are
a no-brainer for anybody who’s interested in
drama in general, but I get especially excited by
the power dynamics in relationships – and those
become especially insidious in a family dynamic.”
Hereditary opens with an onscreen text
informing us of a death in the Graham family
– that of matriarch Ellen, who leaves behind
her middle-aged daughter Annie (Collette),
a miniaturist model-maker artist of a meek
disposition. Ellen’s hold on Annie is palpable even
beyond the grave. Delivering the eulogy at her
mother’s funeral, Annie’s complicated feelings
about her death and the memory of their strained
relationship are obvious. The lingering presence
of the departed mother, whom we glimpse only
in old photographs and as she lies dead in her
coffin, places the film in a long gothic tradition
of ghostly female presences – think of Rebecca
in Hitchcock’s 1940 classic, or Mary Meredith
in Lewis Allen’s chiller The Uninvited (1944).
Annie in turn has strained relationships with
her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) and their two
children: son Peter (Alex Wolff), a withdrawn,
teenage stoner; and Charlie (Milly Shapiro), an
oddball pre-teen with a penchant for drawing
roadkill and making clicking sounds with her
mouth. After the fragile family dynamic is rocked
still further by a terrible accident – the shock of
which I won’t ruin by revealing here – Annie’s
character and the film take a dramatic turn.
She retreats even further into herself, pouring
her grief into her work with miniatures. These
small-scale models of places and moments in
the family’s life – from recreations of the family
home to the scene of the aforementioned accident
– work as creepy replicas of traumatic moments
Lost souls: Toni Collette as Annie in Ari Aster’s portrait of a woman reeling from loss
of her past, moments that are too painful for her
to process. “The miniatures served as a metaphor
for the family’s situation,” explains Aster. “It was
perfect for Annie’s character, who is someone
who feels she has no control over her own life
– this is her way of trying to exert some sort of
influence over her world. It gives her a feeling
of control, but it is ultimately a total illusion.”
Collette’s award-worthy performance as Annie
imbues the film with an emotional rawness that
echoes the probing family dramas of Mike Leigh
and Ingmar Bergman more than it does the more
physically visceral work of genre masters such
as David Cronenberg or John Carpenter. Annie is
one of the most richly drawn characters in recent
horror cinema, and gives the film an emotional
anchor. “Before I even started talking to Toni, I had
written this 15-page biography for her character,”
says Aster. “It began with her conception and
laid out her entire life up until the first scene of
the film. It was important to me that we really
tended to the family drama and the characters.”
Especially Bergmanesque is the way the
film explores troubled relationships between a
mother and her children – messy, raw and full
of unspoken feelings bubbling just beneath the
surface. Annie’s attempts at processing her grief
let us in on the tangled tapestry of dysfunction
that has enveloped her family. But after the
shocking accident, the little control she had is
lost and her behaviour begins to alarm the rest of
her family, a situation that only worsens when
she meets the sympathetic Joan (Ann Dowd)
after a help-group meeting, someone whose
intentions may not be as benevolent as they
seem. “It was very important that we make a
Annie is one of the most richly
drawn characters in recent
horror cinema, and gives the
film an emotional anchor
satisfying horror film that met the demands of
the genre but in a way that never deviated from
the heart of the story, what these people are
going through and their suffering,” says Aster.
“Ultimately, the film is about grief and trauma.”
As Annie dives deeper into her own feelings
and her family history, prompted in part by
Joan’s influence, the film becomes increasingly
unsettling, aurally and visually. For the most part
it is a claustrophobically quiet film, but events
are punctuated by low, rumbling sounds – as
of music or voices heard through a wall. The
purpose-built set of the family house also helps to
create this sense of undefined dread – as does the
perfect miniature replica of it modelled by Annie
in the film: “I was thinking about Freud’s essay
on the uncanny when I imagined the family’s
home,” explains Aster. “I wanted to evoke that
sense of something familiar becoming unfamiliar,
literally the home becoming unhomely. I
wanted to create a home that over the course of
the film becomes gradually unrecognisable.”
The film descends steadily into a hellish,
anxiety-inducing third act that eloquently
mixes elements of hauntings, possession and
psychological horror. “Ultimately this is a film
about people in the grip of something that
they have no awareness of,” says Aster. “They
have no agency, no control over what’s going
to happen to them. Everything that happens
to them is inevitable. But we’re with them so
we know as much as they do. And only at the
very end do we get a little more than they do.”
For my money, Hereditary earns its
comparisons to The Shining. Just like Kubrick’s
classic, it knows that when horror erupts in
a place of security and sanctuary, it can be
truly terrifying. And, also just like The Shining,
it’s a film rich in images that are not overtly
violent or gory, but that creep insidiously under
your skin and haunt you for days after.
Hereditary is released in UK cinemas
i on 15 June and is reviewed on page 65
July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 13

Wide Angle
POINT OF VIEW
SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT
The critic Manny Farber’s
most celebrated essay has
been widely quoted – but all
too often misunderstood
By Christopher Small
Among a great many other things, Manny Farber
loathed binaries, ideological or otherwise. Over
the course of a long, on-off career as a critic, he
resisted much of the standard lexicon for movie
criticism; what is immediately obvious in reading
his work is a desire to shun the binaries of even
the sharpest contemporary criticism – not
simply good or bad but also, for instance, auteur
or metteur en scène, low-brow or high-brow, and
so forth. So it is plainly ironic that the closest
Farber came to articulating his profoundly
idiosyncratic taste was in ‘White Elephant vs.
Termite Art’, his celebrated 1962 essay in which
he pits two whole hemispheres of style against
each other. As a result, Farber is best remembered
for a dichotomy that has come to stand for a
taste for pulp or, rather, a distaste for supposedly
middlebrow art. One side of the pairing, the
former, Farber lambasts as “overly preened”, the
other he praises as “eager”, “industrious”. Yet
within the piece itself, it is obvious that Farber
Binary relation: Manny Farber and his wife, the artist Patricia Patterson
14 | Sight&Sound | July 2018
EXPLORING THE BIGGER PICTURE
is uncomfortable even with his own direct
opposition of the two terms, finding things to
attack or ridicule about the Termites and to
reflect on carefully in the White Elephants.
This is part of the ambiguity of the pairing. In
particular, Termite Art is implied to be ephemeral,
rare in the cinema, difficult to define, appearing
only in spots and in the least promising places.
The term is far from monolithic. On the other
hand, Farber does not hesitate to outline the
characteristics of White Elephant Art and its
manifold sins. His assessment of “non-termite”
work is that its style is all-encompassing, “a
frieze of continuities” that treats “every inch of
the screen and film as a potential area for prize-
worthy creativity”. He chides Tony Richardson
for his skill in “settling a horse collar of gentility
around the neck of a scene…” Antonioni’s La
notte (1961) is, for Farber, a “good example of the
evils of continuity… the sin of framing, boxing
in an idea with a noble idea or camera effect
picked up from High Art”. Evidently, the crime of
elephantine art is that its makers are too shrewd,
too self-consciously gifted to turn out the kind of
slapdash, “go-for-broke” ingenuity of a termite,
who gives little consideration to structure or tact.
Farber’s fellow critics displayed little of his
contempt for the fully formed, the beautifully
mounted, the stylish and the modern. Even if
they sometimes derided an Antonioni, as he did,
what distinguished Farber was his unswaying
belief in the unsettled, diffuse, centreless quality
of any worthwhile work of art. Most Farber
acolytes acknowledge this but few carry the
notion around in their wallet; it is difficult to
resist the urge to assume that what one goes
to the mat for is termitic or that what one
produces as an artist is far from the “masterpiece
art” decried in the essay. It is possible to adopt
“termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art”, as Farber
called it, as one would a medallion of honour, a
boy scout’s badge for commendable film-buff
taste, a token of formal or critical smarts.
Reading the piece today, one struggles
with sentences that begin with a sprinkle of
enthusiasm (“Good work usually arises…”) and
lead to prickly, acerbic phrasing that, while
endorsing the temperament or worldview
expressed, reads like dismissal (“…where the
creators have no ambitions towards gilt culture
but are involved in a kind of squandering-
What distinguished Farber
was his belief in the unsettled,
diffuse, centreless quality of
any worthwhile work of art
© BECKY COHEN
beaverish endeavour that isn’t anywhere or for
anything”). Farber’s frame of reference in the
essay is surprising, repudiating the received
wisdom that his taste is fixed, ultra-macho,
director-driven. Not only does he speak chiefly
about painting for the first three paragraphs, later
declaring that “the best examples of termite art
appear in places other than films,” but he makes
little or no reference to the movie-makers he is
famous for championing elsewhere. There is no
Wellman, no Walsh, no Mann. Hawks appears
only as “the team of Howard Hawks and William
Faulkner”. Who he puts in the opposing camp
is more predictable, knowing Farber’s tastes:
Antonioni, Truffaut, Richardson, Jeanne Moreau,
Robert Motherwell. The “good” termite works
that earn a mention include Laurel and Hardy’s
Hog Wild (1930), Raymond Chandler’s personal
letters, the players in a TV production of The
Iceman Cometh directed by (of all people), Sidney
Lumet, Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952), and, perhaps most
surprisingly of all – given that Farber as a young
man tried and failed to join the US Communist
Party – conservative intellectual icon William
F. Buckley’s “TV debating style […] before he
relinquished his tangential, counterattacking skill
and took to flying into propeller blades of issues.”
With time, the phrase itself – “termite art”
– has morphed into a synonym for the kind of
glorious trash advocated for earnestly by not
Farber but Pauline Kael, with whom he shares
certain characteristics but a vastly different
worldview (it is not an insignificant difference
that Kael emphatically never returned to a film,
where Farber watched and rewatched them
ad nauseam, later stressing this ethos to his
students). Josh Safdie, one half of the fraternal
duo that made last year’s Good Time, declared his
and his brother’s intention to make “a piece of
termite art and a piece of pulp that at first feels
disposable but then you realise there are all these
nutrients in there”. In addition, Safdie casually
proposes two new definitions of the term: “a
popcorn flick that [is also] a reflection of society”
and, appearing with Robert Pattinson on the
Charlie Rose talk-show, that “[you] can consume
[the movie] and these termites will get inside and
force their way into your psyche […] and make
you ask questions.” What this indicates is the
transmutation of Farber’s slangy critical idioms
into pop-culture touchstones. Safdie gives the
dialectic a hipster spin: the spectrum of termite
styles is collapsed into a single totemic definition,
interchangeable with the ‘genre film’ or, even
more strangely, with a kind of viral infection that
contaminates the audience with loftier meaning.
In fact, what Farber imparts to the reader of
‘White Elephant vs. Termite Art’ is a freedom
to observe a work of art from any angle. He
invites you to enter into the thing and navigate
its interior, its crannies, its hidden passageways.
Reading him is like battling through an obstacle
course in which, over the course of a few
thousand words, you are put through the ropes
and schooled in the art of blowing up an odd
detail to life-size, developing the particulars of this
or that disposable, hell-bent movie into a lasting,
poetic critical insight. Hacking one’s way through
the dense thicket of Farber’s prose styling, with
all its off-kilter vocabulary, its frank jumbling
Cactus makes perfect: James Stewart and cactus in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
of registers and critical idioms, its bizarrely
casual, unannotated reference to obscure works
from any point in the spectrum of taste, it is
hard not to absorb some sense of his outlook
on art. It is unlikely that, reading the termite/
elephant essay, you’ll come across anything that
could be read as a statement of ‘intent’ or that
might represent an overriding precept. Instead,
as a reader, you are kept on your toes, ducking
and weaving, as Farber, like an ageing boxing
instructor teaching the ropes to the proverbial
Some Kid Off The Street, jabs and feints in perfect
circles around you. From the piece’s start, it
is impossible not to be thrown by his wacky
trick-tactics, unusual styling, contrarianism,
sarcasm, coyness, scholarly precision, batty
humour. (I’m thinking of him in another essay
randomly referring to the star of 1967’s La
Chinoise as ‘Jean Pee Loud’). ‘White Elephant Art
vs. Termite Art’ implies a clear-cut dialectic yet
its prose simply delivers on specific, occasionally
misremembered details from the movies and
a loose, subjective overall impression. That a
fully-formed taste emerges solely through the
force of the writing is a testament to its breadth
and specificity, its paradoxical mix of hard-boiled
single-mindedness and edgy circumlocution.
For Farber, the things that constituted termite
art were part of a continuum, all a long road to
some form of space-based realism. Reading him,
you get a sense of the shape, the contours of the
work, the way it plays before your eyes as a film,
‘Jean Pee Loud’: La Chinoise (1967)
the unaccountable reality that bleeds through
the artifice like light through cheap white flannel
curtains. Revealingly, in extolling the virtues of
his termites, Farber laser-focuses on moments
in which the camera pierces through the veneer
of movie trickery and records something with
an honest-to-God fidelity, like the prominent
cactus “just planted” in The Man Who Shot
Liberty Valance (1962) or Godard’s characters,
“defined to their teeth, exposed in space from
the awkward feet to their crazy heads.”
In this way, the continued dilution of the
phrase also dissolves its potent links to Farber’s
taste in later years for structuralist films by
Warhol, Akerman, Gehr, ‘Mike’ Snow, with
which a direct link can be drawn to Farber’s
championing of “action” directors like Wellman,
who were also “super-realistically” interested in
the actual materials of screen-space. Seeing things
through a termite lens implies liberation from the
terms of ad-men, from phrases like ‘genre movie’
or ‘a reflection of society’, and an involvement
with the life-like particulars that amass at the
edges of routine films. Farber is still shocking
because he moves from the inside out, nibbling
through the imbricated layers of performance and
style that make up a movie, soaking in the given
film’s peculiarities and turning them into lively
prose. He throws his prejudices in your face so
flagrantly that you hardly have time to recover
before he slugs you with a diamond observation
nobody would ever have considered including,
let alone as the centre of an essay on the movies.
The notion of termite art as a stand-in for genre
work with a disguised message, while besides
doing nobody any favours, is completely un-
Farberian. Josh Safdie is not alone; the phrase is
widely used and abused. It’s a well-intentioned
bastardisation of Farber’s original formulation
but we would all do better to take another
look at the work and admit a little of Farber’s
temperament into our thinking, to pursue
the flotsam and jetsam swirling around in the
margins of the least investigated of recent films.
Movie culture today could use less unfaltering
taste and more worm’s-eye-view pluralism.
Farber put it best in his description of the
philosophy of Jean-Luc Godard in the 1960s:
“Travel light, start clean, don’t look back.”
July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 15
 A film by Robin Campillo

HHHHH
The Guardian
HHHHH
The Observer

HHHHH
Empire
HHHHH
Attitude

HHHHH HHHHH
( B E A T S P E R M I N U T E )
The List Total Film

OUT NOW
ON DVD &
BLU-RAY while stocks last

A RELEASE
 WIDE ANGLE PRIMAL SCREEN

SILENT WITNESS
Over three decades of filmmaking, In the psychosexual thriller In the Cut (2003), ice and her father, unable to stop, slices her legs
Campion includes four sepia-toned sequences of a – much as the killer cuts up his female victims.
Jane Campion has helped give a young couple ice-skating. The colour-grading and The dream-world’s final appearance comes when
voice to women – often through camerawork of these scenes, reminiscent of early the killer is strangling Frannie: a flash-vision of
tinted films, contrast with the rest of the film’s her father skating towards the camera jolts her
a judicious use of silence hand-held colour cinematography. There is music to consciousness so that she can fight back.
but no dialogue, and the scenes serve different These scenes pay tribute to a time when
By Ellen Cheshire functions at various points in the narrative. After filmmakers were learning how to use a
Earlier this year, when Sally Hawkins was an initial short burst of the skating couple during medium in which emotional states were
winning plaudits for her role as the mute Elisa in the opening credits, we return to this silent- expressed predominantly through images, a
Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water (2017), film dream-world on three occasions. The first period of creativity and experimentation in
comparisons were drawn with film stars from envisions the romantic story Frannie (Meg Ryan) cinematography and editing. In Campion’s
a century earlier – and with Holly Hunter’s tells her half-sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) films, these ‘silent’ sequences take up only
acclaimed performance as Ada, an elective mute, about how her parents met and fell in love. The a few minutes of screen-time in total, but
in Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993). Twenty-five second time is after Pauline has been murdered by are always provocative, adding layers of
years on, that film remains a powerful example a serial killer: the golden-tinted dream becomes meaning to the narrative or insights into the
of visual storytelling, in which Hunter’s pale face, a nightmare in which her mother falls on the characters’ motives. More superficially, they
framed by dark hair that draws attention to her may offer a welcome moment of whimsy,
large eyes and subtle expressions, is captured In Campion’s films, these ‘silent’ or even form the basis of an amusing game
in long-held close-ups. Ada may appear waif- of ‘spot the film reference’. However you see
like but she conveys a strength and fierceness sequences take up only a few them, they were a risk worth taking.
which is enhanced by her self-imposed silence.
The ‘silent woman’ Campion created there and
minutes of screen-time in total, i
The Piano will be rereleased in UK
cinemas on 15 June, to mark the film’s
in the more recent short film The Lady Bug (2007) but are always provocative 25th anniversary
– part of the anthology film To Each His Own
Cinema – was used to explore female creativity
thwarted by male authority figures. But she has
also employed silent film aesthetics more overtly
and to different ends in two feature films and in
her second short, Mishaps of Seduction and Conquest
(1981, released 1984). This last, a 15-minute
black-and-white film, juxtaposes original archive
footage of George Mallory’s 1924 attempt to
conquer Everest with a fictional love story
between Geoffrey (a fictitious Mallory brother)
and Emma. Though their scenes have dialogue,
in other respects – shot in stage-like rooms with
limited camera angles and movement – they look
like films of the first decades of the 20th century.
By styling the film as a near approximation to
the period in which it was set, Campion cleverly
shifted it from low-budget student short to a
homage to silent cinema, the use of the original
Everest footage adding scale and drama.
In both The Portrait of a Lady (1996) and In the
Cut (2003) Campion essentially made two short
silent films, or as she terms them “otherworldly ‘Mental diary’: the fantasy sequence in The Portrait of a Lady (1996) evokes Murnau’s Sunrise (1928)
cutaways”, that serve as fantasy sequences within
the larger narratives. The Portrait of a Lady features
a 90-second black-and-white near-silent sequence
(there is some surreal use of dialogue/music) that
was shot and graded to give the appearance of an
aged 16mm 4:3 aspect-ratio silent film – the rest
of the film is 35mm colour 2.35:1. A flashback to
the Grand Tour of Isabel Archer (Nicole Kidman),
it at first seems to be a travelogue pastiche
but soon spirals into a psychosexual fantasy
montage. The Middle Eastern setting, evoking
ILLUSTRATION BY MICK BROWNFIELD WWW.MICKBROWNFIELD.COM

a Rudolph Valentino romance, is interspersed

with expressionistic or surreal images that
recall Murnau and Buñuel (Campion’s favourite
director): the superimposition of a man’s hands
caressing Isabel’s body brings to mind the couple
in Murnau’s Sunrise (1928), and surreal shots of a
pair of lips in close-up and a plate of talking beans
wouldn’t look out of place in Un chien andalou
(1929). Campion was aware that including this
sequence was a risk, but felt it worked as a kind
of “mental diary” to help explain why Isabel
chose to marry Osmond (John Malkovich). Freeze frame: the ice-skating sequences in In the Cut (2003) are reminiscent of early tinted films

July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 17

Documentaries from

I N C I N E M AS J U N E 2 2 I N C I N E M AS J U N E 2 9

I N C I N E M AS J U N E 2 2 I N C I N E M AS J U N E 2 9

www.modernfilms.com Modern Films ModernFilmsEnt ModernFilmsEnt

WIDE ANGLE PROFILE

ASHES AND DIAMONDS

Peter Emmanuel Goldman made
two startlingly original features
before he – and the films –
vanished. What have we missed?
By Kieron Corless
With another Cannes edition just wrapped, few
of us are unaware by now of the expectations
A-list film festivals exist to fulfil; not just
showcases for the major new films, they’re also
barometers of current cinematic and social
patterns and tendencies. But what about their less
publicised counterparts, the small film festivals,
of which there are a good many internationally
– what purposes do they tend to serve?
There’s no straightforward answer to that
question, but one or two ideas arose during a
long weekend’s stay at the beautifully curated
Play-Doc festival in Galicia in north-west Spain,
which takes place in the small town of Tui on
the Portuguese border. This year the centrepiece
was a remarkable feat of historical recuperation,
of the American filmmaker and photographer
Peter Emmanuel Goldman, who made a couple
of acclaimed films in the 60s – now very rarely
screened despite their legendary status – and
then, mysteriously, seemed to drop right off the
map. Goldman, it turned out, is now nearly 80
years old, resident in Florida, charismatic and Youth in revulsion: Pierre Clémenti and Juliet Berto in Wheel of Ashes (1968)
affable, with a fund of fascinating anecdotes.
Play-Doc showed all the Goldman films the Danish actor Ilona Lys) as she wanders the he suffers, so he sets about attempting to
available, two features and two shorts, plus streets searching for some elusive connection, eradicate said desires, by whatever means. I
the only 10-minute segment that exists of The an ambition that the threatening, isolating city think it’s fair to say this puts the film somewhat
Sensualists, a sexploitation film he made in 1966. seems designed to frustrate. Once again the at odds with what was happening politically
Let it be said straight off that Goldmann’s first mood is melancholy, pregnant with unfulfilled, and in cinema at this juncture in France.
feature-length film, Echoes of Silence (1965), is a inchoate longing and dissatisfaction. In fact, what’s fascinating about all these works
stunning, sui generis piece of work. Shot with a The spiritual torment that hovers over the by Goldman is their uniqueness, the degree to
16mm Bolex camera in high-contrast black and previous two films is given free rein in the which, in different ways, they don’t quite fit with
white, it follows three characters in their early astonishingly intense Wheel of Ashes, which contemporary orthodoxies. It’s as if Goldman was
twenties, one woman and two men, who live at was shot in Paris in 1968 (the film came about both profoundly of his time and simultaneously
various times in a flat in Greenwich Village, then thanks in part to Jean-Luc Godard, who’d not quite in synch with it. Echoes of Silence, for
one of the epicentres of countercultural ‘beatnik’ loved Echoes of Silence). Pierre Clémenti stars example, was supported by Jonas Mekas and
life. There’s no dialogue, just images overlaid as Pierre, adrift in Paris and searching for given a theatrical release, but Goldman recalled
with music – Mingus, Prokofiev, Stravinsky. meaning through sex, religion and solitary that the Filmmakers’ Cooperative crowd didn’t
The characters haunt the streets and cafes of the meditation. The more Pierre desires, the more really know what to make of it; it had little in
Village by day and night, seeking to assuage their common with the more abstract experimental
sense of isolation, but we also share intimate ‘Echoes of Silence’ is both a work other US underground filmmakers were
moments at the flat, including two brilliantly making around the same time. It’s almost as if
observed attempted seduction scenes, one convincing attempt to capture Goldman’s future lack of visibility was already
gay, one straight. It’s not only one of the most sexual desire and despair and prefigured. And the anguish depicted in his films
convincing attempts I’ve seen to capture young was in fact personal and real. He told audiences
people’s sexual desire and despair, but also one one of the great New York films at Play-Doc that he’d experienced “a terrible
of the great New York films. Incredible, then, spiritual crisis” at some point in the late 60s, not
that Goldman had no film training and, he told dissimilar to that undergone by Pierre in Wheel
us, knew little about cinema; he was literally of Ashes, which led him to abandon filmmaking
learning and making it up as he went along. and commit his life to Israel, becoming ‘Torah-
Part of what was so compelling about the observant’: hence his apparent vanishing.
trailer-plus-fragment of The Sensualists screened So Goldman’s retrospective at Play-Doc was
at Play-Doc was the degree of thematic kinship not only a welcome homage to a great ‘lost’
with Echoes of Silence, despite the less exalted filmmaker, but a chance to fill in gaps in cinema
framework. The film came about when a history, expanding, complicating and realigning
producer offered Goldman a large amount of the dominant narratives. It’s hard to imagine this
money and relative independence, provided coming to pass outside the slower, more intimate
there was enough female nudity to satisfy the and concentrated space created by a sensitively
burgeoning sexploitation market. The story assembled small film festival such as Play-Doc. If
appears to foreground women’s experiences a function of the A-list festivals is to make history,
of friendship and sexual desire, portrayed in what the small festival can do, on this evidence,
voiceover by the protagonist Karina (played by Echoes of Silence (1965) is remake it: a task that is every bit as crucial.

July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 19

 Festivals
CANNES
DAYS OF SEEING WILD
The Croisette may have felt a little quieter than usual, but a selection of truly outstanding, socially aware
Asian films – from the likes of Lee Chang-dong, Bi Gan, Jia Zhangke and Palme d’Or winner Koreeda
Hirokazu – helped make the festival one of the most memorable for many years. By Nick James
Take the Hollywood element away from any
festival and you find that the art of cinema is alive
and artistically thriving, mostly in Asia. The scarcity
of American films at Cannes this year – whether it
was Netflix-influenced or not – plus the bad odour
Harvey Weinstein has left hanging over the place
may have led to a dearth of billboards along the
Croisette and rumours of hotel bookings falling by
40 per cent; but what we got instead was a carnival
of cinema art, the best of it from Japan, South Korea
and China. This was Cannes at its most joyous: a
savvy jury responded to a programme of the
highest quality with good choices, and there was
room to breathe on the streets and in the screening
rooms to restore a cinephile ardour that has been
damped down for the last few years.
With the #MeToo and #OscarsSoWhite
campaigns perhaps in mind, jury president Cate
Blanchett primed her fellow jurors – including
Ava DuVernay, Kristen Stewart and Andrey
Zvyagintsev – to be aware of press expectations.
“The world is a very political place and the media
very quickly turns human issues into political
issues,” she said after the awards were announced.
“As artists working in cinema, we made a pact
with one another that we would look at each
film as a work of art in and of itself.” Awarding
Koreeda Hirokazu’s Shoplifters the Palme d’Or
showed they were true to her word and had
acknowledged, too, the strength of Asian cinema.
Like so many films in this socially aware
programme, Shoplifters describes an unstable
community of the dispossessed – in this case, an
outlaw family adept at petty crime and crammed
into the grandmother’s apartment. On a freezing
cold night, father figure Shibata Osamu (Lily
Franky) rescues a battered four-year-old girl
(Sasaki Miyu) left outside by abusive parents.
Resented at first by Osamu’s wife Nobuyo (Ando
Sakura), the girl is soon adopted by teenager
Aki (Matsuoka Mayu) and Osamu’s son Shota
(Kairi Jyo), whom she joins on thieving trips to
the shops. Osamu, Nobuyo and Aki all have full-
time jobs (Aki’s in a sex simulation parlour) yet
still have to live in a hovel and steal to survive. A
nuanced moral tale, in which Shota’s dawning
conscience plays a part, Shoplifters lifts the lid on
20 | Sight&Sound | July 2018
the grim realities of the Japanese labour market.
This subtle, tender, fine-grained family portrait
has the structure of a true-crime story, but is much
better written and acted than the director’s recent
films. In a golden year, it made a worthy winner.
Chinese director Jia Zhangke’s elegant,
slow-burn portrait of love, self-sacrifice and
disillusionment Ash Is Purest White came away
empty-handed. Perhaps that’s because it never
becomes the gangster movie the first half sets
up, sticking to the kind of character study Jia is
known for. It tracks an affair between a small-time
gangster (Liao Fan) and a gambling-den hostess
CANNES TOP TEN
NICK JAMES
1. Burning Lee Chang-dong
2. Cold War Pawel Pawlikowski
3. The Wild Pear Tree (below)
Nuri Bilge Ceylan
4. Long Day’s Journey into Night Bi Gan
5. Shoplifters Koreeda Hirokazu
6. Happy as Lazzaro Alba Rohrwacher
7. BlacKkKlansman Spike Lee
8. The Image Book Jean-Luc Godard
9. Capernaum Nadine Labaki
10. Ash Is Purest White Jia Zhangke
(Zhao Tao – who must have been in the running
for Best Actress) who goes to prison to save him.
It is steeped in political and artistic inference, but
the motives of some characters remained obscure.
The most blatant omission from the Un Certain
Regard prizes was Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey
into Night, a labyrinthine, noir-inspired dream-
logic film that would be easy to dismiss as all
style – especially when you’re given 3D glasses
and told to use them only at the moment
the protagonist puts them on. With a time-
hopping narrative of murder and betrayal
and a quest that takes Luo Hongwa (Huang
Jue) drifting into mines and permanent
darkness, this was among the most beguiling
films I saw; and once the 3D glasses go on,
the final 50 minutes is all one dazzlingly
choreographed take. It’s pretty awesome.
The saddest of Blanchett’s jury decisions was
to give nothing to Korean Lee Chang-dong’s
smouldering love-triangle thriller Burning, a
poetic, vivid adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s
short story ‘Barn Burning’ (which borrows its title
from a William Faulkner story). Deliveryman
Jongsu (Yoo Ah-in) has a brief romantic encounter
with the beautiful Haemi (Jun Jong-seo) – with
whom he was at school – before she goes off
to work in Africa. She asks him to feed her cat
while she’s away. But she returns with rich
smoothie Ben (Yeun Steven) in tow. Thus begins
the exquisite peeling back of class distinction
that marks this out as a future classic. I spent
a lot of time arguing with colleagues about
the ambiguities of the apparent crimes that
may have occurred; I won’t say more now than
that this film proves that there is no better
filmmaker in the world than Lee Chang-dong.
Nobody wanted to talk about the plot of
the Cannes opening film, Asghar Farhadi’s
Everybody Knows, a mild Spanish vineyard
whodunnit. Though Farhadi’s scripts have the
precision of timepieces, this is clumsily directed.
A cast that includes Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz
and Ricardo Darín, huff and puff through the dull
play of revelation and counter-revelation about
who among the villagers has kidnapped
returning expatriate Cruz’s daughter.
Life of crime: Koreeda Hirokazu’s Palme d’Or-winning Shoplifters tells the story of a family getting by on petty theft

July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 21

 FESTIVALS CANNES

Infant mortality
As one American critic remarked to me,
Cannes was a great place to be if you wanted to
feel good about cinema but a lousy one if you
wanted to feel good about the world. Probably
the grimmest of the many takes on social misery
here was Sergey Dvortsevoy’s Ayka. It starts with
an arresting image – four swaddled newborns
on a sheet, bunched and shot as if standing like
ninepins. Ayka (Samal Yeslyamova) is a Kyrgyz
immigrant in Moscow who has borrowed money
from loan sharks to set up a sewing business but
has got pregnant, left the baby in the maternity
hospital, been ripped off by a rogue employer,
and now, bleeding and in pain, needs to make
as much cash as she can. It’s a gruelling, jerky,
handheld-camera experience, so authentically
played it won Yeslyamova Best Actress.
Many journalists thought the Palme might
go to Nadine Labaki’s Capernaum, another tale
of desperate survival on city streets, this time in
Beirut. Cute 12-year-old Zain (the excellent Zain
Al Rafeea) flees from his destitute parents when
they marry off his tiny 11-year-old sister to their
landlord. He soon finds himself looking after the
baby of an Ethiopian immigrant who disappears.
Labaki goes, neorealist-style, for filth, bustle
and clamour, pulling back from sentiment and
melodrama (most of the time), letting Khaled
Mouzanar’s understated music direct emotion.
The courtroom framing device – an imprisoned
Zain suing his parents for bringing him into the Mean streets: Nadine Labaki’s Capernaum tells a desperate tale of survival in Beirut
world – doesn’t quite come off, but the rest of
the film has so much guts, emotion and energy That is also the message of The Gentle The film, which won the UCR Best Actor
you’ll want to see it. It won the Jury Prize. Indifference of the World, a downbeat, elegiac prize, involved a lot of pain and suffering,
Every year a handful of bad films – this time, Bonnie and Clyde from Kazakh director Adilkhan without being in any way grim. Huge applause
Girls of the Sun, Asako I and II and Knife + Heart – get Yerzhanov, in which Saltanat (Dinara Baktybaeva), greeted the end of Lukas Dhont’s Girl, about
into the Competition while some superb films the beautiful daughter of a village widow who’s a trans teenager Lara (Victor Polster), on the
(such as Long Day’s Journey into Night) end up in Un inherited her husband’s debts, is sent to get help path to her new body, who wants to be a
Certain Regard (UCR). Why Moroccan director from her uncle in the city, with doting labourer ballerina. Though it treads water at times, it is
Meryem Benm’Barek’s Sofia got relegated to UCR is Kuandyk (Kuandyk Dussenbaev) in tow. Saltanat is danced and acted with conviction and grace.
hard to calculate. Benm’Barek nearly out-Farhadis pimped off to a businessman and Kuandyk gets
Asghar Farhadi at his best with this intricate tale involved with racketeers; but before doom Barking mad
of the consequences that follow when 20-year-old descends, the two share a bedroom: “I expel gas at Sergei Loznitsa’s tough black farce Donbass
Casablanca singleton Sofia (Maha Alemi), in denial night,” he explains. Yerzhanov is like an embryonic offered near-surreal levels of gangsterism. Broken
about her pregnancy, goes into labour. Though Kaurismäki who hasn’t quite nailed the style. into 13 barely connected segments, Donbass is
her sophisticate sister whisks her off to hospital war as inexplicable hell, the Ukrainian border
without alerting the rest of the family, they’re soon ‘Long Day’s Journey into Night’, a conflict a brutal show run on both sides by
involved, bribing cops to keep Sofia out of prison mafiosi. We see the setting up of fake news
for transgressing laws against sex outside marriage. time-hopping narrative of murder events, a shit-bucket assault on a politician,
Like Ayka and Capernaum, Sofia is a lid-lifting
tale of how the world works for the convenience
and betrayal, is a labyrinthine, fabulously sleazy con men at work, obviously
Russian soldiers taunting naive reporters,
of powerful men, while the destitute suffer. noir-inspired dream-logic film an enemy captive being tied to a lamppost

Jia Zhangke’s Ash Is Purest White Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey into Night Lee Chang-dong’s Burning

22 | Sight&Sound | July 2018

for public abuse, fuss about holy relics and a
nightmarish wedding. Each segment has an all-
pervading air of futility and greed. Though shrill
at times, it is at once amazing and appalling.
Lars von Trier’s return to the festival, after
several years persona non grata, gave focus to
the #MeToo cause and sparked an explosion of
moral outrage. Brilliantly put together though
it is, von Trier’s auto-analysis of a serial killer
The House that Jack Built felt second-hand.
Matt Dillon (good in a treadmill role) trots
us through five major incidents from the
butcherous life he regards, with sixth-form
insight, as an artform. Some of the scenes are
unwatchably vile; all of them come with a
mischievous sidelong wink. Despite clips of
Glenn Gould playing Bach and references
to architecture and literature in a voiceover
interview with Jack conducted by the unseen
‘Verge’ (Bruno Ganz), the film becomes as
tiresomely obsessive as Jack himself. Nothing
feels more exhausted right now than the
Dane’s seam of ironic black comedy.
And nothing in Von Trier’s films was
as terrifyingly arresting as the close-up of
a growling attack dog that opens Matteo
Garrone’s Dogman. We soon learn that the
dog being hosed down gingerly but lovingly
by pet groomer Marcello (Marcello Fonte)
is just a metaphor for bull-necked human
terroriser Simoncino (Edoarde Pesce), to whom
tiny, wheedling Marcello supplies cocaine. Natural born killer: Lars von Trier’s The House that Jack Built
Simoncino never takes no for an answer and
soon Marcello is forced to betray the neighbours disappears, Sam is drawn into a graphic-novel officer who can literally sniff out smugglers.
who like him, dismay his daughter and worse. inspired conspiracy. Tonally all over the place When she encounters one miscreant who’s a
Garrone condenses the portrait of connected and clumsily put together, the film – though physical match for her, she lets him go. What
criminality that made Gomorrah so effective lovely at times – asks Garfield to do too much follows is deft, surprising and imaginative.
into a more intimate scale in a small, blighted facial angsting about its nightmarish plot twists. In Three Faces, Jafar Panahi once again
southern Italian coastal town. It condenses A more startling pair of barking and uses his own predicament, as a filmmaker
some of the flavour of Italian film history’s growling folk are found in Border, a Sweden- under suspicion from the authorities, to
finest moments while hammering its points set film by Iranian director Ali Abbasi which observe slender slices of Iranian life. Marziyeh
home. Fonte’s compellingly vulnerable central scooped the UCR prize for Best Picture. Based (Marziyeh Rezael), a hysterical young
performance won him the Best Actor prize. on a short story by John Ajvide Lindqvist aspiring actress from Turkish-speaking rural
There’s a moment in David Robert Mitchell’s (Let the Right One In), the film portrays the Iran – Panahi’s home region – emotionally
disappointing sub-Lynchian Under the Silver dilemma of Tina (Eva Melander), a bestial- blackmails actress Behnaz Jafari by sending
Lake in which several of the semi-clad young looking but uncannily effective customs her a scary cellphone video. This brings
women who decorate the film suddenly bark at Jafari and Panahi (playing themselves) to
his antihero with the sound of real dogs. Is the The disappointing sub-Lynchian Marziyeh’s village. The ensuing road movie
relentless misogyny meant to be a cleaving to has nice touches, many of them tributes to or
adolescent male fantasy? Since Andrew Garfield’s ‘Under the Silver Lake’ is borrowings from Kiarostami, though Panahi
Sam – a jobless, inconsistently interested Los
Angeles peeping tom, is in his early thirties, I
tonally all over the place and lacks his forebear’s wry humour. What I find
offputting, though, is a sense of self-
guess not. When a neighbour he was ogling clumsily put together aggrandisement and virtue-signalling.

Sergei Loznitsa’s Donbass David Robert Mitchell’s Under the Silver Lake Jafar Panahi’s Three Faces

July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 23

 FESTIVALS CANNES
Direct action
Spike Lee’s Grand Prix-winning
BlacKkKlansman would have been the most
outlandish political film here had Godard
not been on the bill. Lee’s hugely enjoyable
film meshes his head-on brashness with a
lampooning of Tarantino’s style. In 1970s
Colorado Springs, John Stallworth (John David
Washington), the county’s first black cop,
is assigned to an undercover unit where he
figures out how to infiltrate the KKK using
just a telephone and his dogged partner Flip
Zimmerman (Adam Driver) – this unlikely
scenario is apparently based on a real case.
Cartoonishly raucous though many of the scenes
are, they are always gracefully played – the
racists are just complex enough in their madness
and stupidity. And if the Saturday Night Live-style
humour sounds too cosy for the subject matter,
don’t be fooled. This film has many stings, not
least in its absolutely flooring newsreel tail.
Stéphane Brizé’s At War employs the style
and star of his 2015 Cannes entry The Measure of
a Man, but with less impact. Workers at an auto
parts factory in the south of France discover their
plant is about be shut down, despite being told
two years earlier that no such decision would
be made for five years. Vincent Lindon plays
Laurence, a bullish union rep who encourages
a strike that spreads to other factories. The first
hour of him haranguing his bosses with the
same point over and over again is not exactly
high cinema but Brizé treats these repetitions
like song verses, using the adroit music score
to drive us on. The film clamours with painful
truths about the way capitalist things are,
getting rounds of applause from the audience.
But the shock ending feels too sensational.
Among the most pleasing events at Cannes
was seeing Jean-Luc Godard’s The Image Book
get a big score in the Screen Daily Jury Grid, which
compiles star ratings from critics for Competition
films. Indeed it was in the lead for a few days
until Burning racked up the biggest score in the
chart’s history. Like all Godard’s recent films, this
makes you want to see it again before daring to
comment, but I will say that his gnomic cultural-
political pronouncements now have a Prospero
edge to them, as if he knows this might be his last
work. All the usual manipulation/destruction
of images and apt quotations of written texts are
present, but his rhythm now seems comfortably
similar to a series of memes. As I predicted online,
Stéphane Brizé’s At War
24 | Sight&Sound | July 2018
Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansmen
on the basis that it was the 50th anniversary
of his famous 1968 intervention at the festival,
he was awarded a Special Palme d’Or.
Do look back
Portraying a whirlwind, border-hopping amour fou
in gorgeous black and white, Pawel Pawlikowski’s
Cold War won him the Best Director prize. In post-
war Poland, pianist-composer Wiktor (Tomasz
Kot) tours villages with his lover, music teacher
Irena (Agata Kulesza), in search of folk-based talent.
At an audition, Zula (Joanna Kulig) cons her way
into a duet with a more talented singer. Though
Irena tells Wiktor that Zula is just out of prison
for murdering her husband, he feels that “she has
something”. Soon she is the star of a performing
troupe under administrator Kaczmarek (Borys
Szyc). When Irena objects to a hymn to Stalin
she is dismissed, while Wiktor’s affair with
Zula blooms. When the troupe performs in
Berlin, Wiktor asks Zula to cross to the West
with him; thereafter many borders are crossed,
many lines of fate are broken and re-intertwined,
jealousies and betrayals flourish and die, but the
two continue to attract and repel each other.
Much of the film is a thrillingly seductive
musical, shot and edited with the rhythm of
dance; but the surface whirl would not fascinate
without the luminous presence of Joanna Kulig,
‘Cold War’ would not be so
fascinating without the luminous
presence of Joanna Kulig, a
Jeanne Moreau for our times
Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War
a Jeanne Moreau for our times. The hopelessly
unsuited couple are fictionalised versions of
Pawlikowski’s own parents, and through them
we experience near equal disenchantment
with socialist and capitalist mores. I loved it.
I was very taken, too, with Christophe
Honoré’s Sorry Angel, set in the Paris of 1993 and
revolving around an affair between HIV-positive
playwright Jacques (Pierre Deladonchamps)
and Breton student Arthur (Vincent Lacoste);
it’s a work of high art, excellent craft and deep
feeling. Kirill Serebrennikov’s poignant Leto,
a rock ’n’ roll memoir of 1980s Leningrad, also
won me over, even though – as veteran singer
Mike (Roman Bilyk) admits – the Russian
music is a weak pastiche of Western stuff. The
film gets sludgy at times but its silly, frantic
music-video fantasy versions of early 80s New
Wave songs were a taste I happily acquired.
A different kind of nostalgia haunted Alice
Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro. I’m not
usually keen on holy fools but Rohrwacher’s
ragged folktale makes an uncanny mystery
out of a sharecropper exploitation scandal. At
Inviolata, an island estate seemingly frozen in
the 1930s, simpleton Lazzaro (Adriano Tardiolo)
is in thrall to his arrogant young master
Tancredi (Luca Chikovani), who is rebelling
against his aristocratic family. Lazzaro suffers
an accident followed by a recovery that reeks
of the miraculous; after which the saint-like
boy sets out to restore the community. The
film shared the Best Screenplay prize with
Three Faces. I think it outclassed that film.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s The Wild Pear Tree, the
final film of the festival, was, as you’d expect,
one of the best and most multi-layered on show,
but went without a prize. Is that to do with
Ceylan’s shift to an ever more literary cast of
filmmaking? There are many resonant images
in its three hours – not least one of a baby that
rivals Ayka’s opening image for impact – but
talk dominates. Sinan (Aydin Dogu Demirkol),
a mildly rebellious, naturally sarcastic would-be
novelist, is forced by lack of money to return
to his home village after graduating, to find his
family’s set-up and reputation being destroyed
piecemeal by his father’s gambling. How will
Sinan break free? Ceylan weaves too rich a
carpet of meaning and inference to unroll in
this report, but the setting in the coastal town
of Canakkale puts it just inside Asia, so I’ll
claim that too for my opening argument.
Christophe Honoré’s Sorry Angel
CANNES
50 UNTAMED
The harder they fall: Hosoda Mamoru’s extremely likeable Mirai follows a young boy learning to cope with the arrival of a new sibling
Beyond the Competition, a host of
treats were on offer in Critics’ Week
and Directors’ Fortnight, which
turned 50 in fine style this year
By Nick Bradshaw
“We weren’t a counter-festival, we were another
festival.” Half a century after Godard, Truffaut and
their fellow 68ers shut down the official Festival
de Cannes, the Directors’ Fortnight (Quinzaine)
– an independent fringe festival that duly arose
in 1969, and which in its time has introduced
Cannes to everyone from Tobe Hooper to Theo
Angelopoulos, Sofia Coppola to Lisandro Alonso
– marked its own 50th edition with a round of
festivities. Martin Scorsese took to the stage to
the strains of ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ to be given an
honorary award before a tribute screening of
Mean Streets (1973), and a sound performance
by Benoît Bories, Cinéma(s) en liberté, mémoires
sonores, gathered testimonies from the festival’s
long-serving founding director Pierre-Henri
Deleau and his early accomplices (Werner Herzog
unmistakable among them), emphasising the
festival’s story as an expression of the new and
free cinemas that were burgeoning around the
world in its early years. But this edition was also
a send-off for Edouard Waintrop, the Quinzaine’s
programmer for the past seven years, whose
contract has not been renewed. His employers
at the French Directors’ Guild say they want
fresh blood, but it must be tricky working for
the directors whose films you accept or reject.
As it happened, the best French films I saw
were even further down the Croisette from the
Palais des Festivals, where the official event is
based – in the Critics’ Week strand. Camille Vidal-
Naquet’s Sauvage is built on a formidable lead
turn by Félix Maritaud (Max in Robin Campillo’s
120 BPM): he plays Léo, a teddy bear of a rent
boy who we follow on a no-holds-barred tour
of duty – not that duty is a concept that this
instinctive hedonist and social innocent shows
any recognition of; he’s the Boudu (Saved from
Drowning) of sex work. Naturally, the street is
not always reciprocally gentle, but Vidal-Naquet
shows a spectrum of pleasure, intimacy and
kindness as well as brutality and abjection. Also in
Critics’ Week, Jean-Bernard Marlin’s Shéhérazade
is a youth crime drama with the energy of Jacques
Audiard’s A Prophet (2009) and the innocence of
something like Peter Sollett’s Raising Victor Vargas
(2002); set on the streets of multi-ethnic Marseille,
it also has an eye-catching lead performance from
Dylan Robert as Zac, a charismatic teen parolee
who falls in as partner and pimp to Shéhérazade
(Kenza Fortas), a former schoolmate, only to
find adult moral choices pressing in fast.
Far less questioning of materialism was the
Quinzaine’s own gangster comedy, The World Is
Yours, directed by Costa-Gavras’s son Romain,
who on this evidence aspires to be France’s Guy
Ritchie. It’s rich in supporting turns (Isabelle
Adjani as the bling tiger mother of Karim Leklou’s
whey-faced protagonist, Vincent Cassel as an
Illuminati-spooked sidekick), and occasionally
sassy; but the rambling plot hardly justifies
the overarching self-satisfaction. Then there
was Guillaume Nicloux’s confusingly stolid
drama Until the End of the World, a listless and
meandering heart-of-darkness revenge fantasy
extrapolated from opaque historical anecdote
about the French colonial wars in 1940s Vietnam.
Of course, the most sensational French entry
was Gaspar Noé’s latest, Climax, a senseless,
semi-wonderful dance feature that plays like Luis
Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962) but with
lissom young party people (a dance troupe on
final-night celebration) and, in lieu of our deepest
self-perpetuated unreason, the hazards of drugs.
The one-room body-popping choreography –
supposedly set in 1996 – quickly drives home
that, with his sinuous camera and shotgun
editing, Noé is the perfect filmmaker to put
krumping and the like on screen. As ever,
July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 25
 FESTIVALS CANNES
Ognjen Glavonic’s The Load
he finds it salutary to dwell on our baser,
bestial potential, but if you didn’t heed
his warning to flee the cinema in I Stand Alone
back in 1998, you might as well sit tight now.
Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace is all about the
urge to flight – with Ben Foster as a grizzled single
dad raising his daughter deep off the grid, and the
great backwoods spaces of the American north-
west here giving resonance to the wild voids in
our hearts. It’s also about the yen to connect, with
Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie, as the teenage
Tom, gingerly limbering into the kinds of social
give and take that he can bear no part of. As
Granik noted, it was perfect fringe programming.
(See feature on page 46 and review on page 67.)
On a theme of children growing away from
their parents, Leave No Trace made a good
double-bill with Dear Son (Weldi), Mohamed
Ben Attia’s follow-up to 2016’s Hedi. This is a
gently despondent portrait of a middle-aged
Tunisian couple (Mohamed Dhrif and Mouna
Mejri) stretched to breaking by the stresses of
working apart and scrimping to put their frail
student son Sameh (Imen Cherif) on the path
to an incrementally better life. It is attentive to
our passing accommodations and hypocrisies;
and its horizons become international with a
halfway surprise that puts Dhrif’s now retired and
uncertain father travelling through a strange land
that, like Leave No Trace’s terrain, emphasises the
gulfs that can swallow what we hold to be secure.
In the same vein, I also enjoyed Amin,
from Fatima director Philippe Faucon,
although perhaps to some degree because
of the handsomeness of its players and
sentiments. An acknowledgement of the
sacrifices made by migrant workers and
their families, it judiciously balances scenes
between different characters and continents,
dramatic through-lines and passing thumbnail
scenes as it steers its Senegalese husband
and father Amin (Moustapha Mbengue)
into a fraught but comforting liaison with
Emmanuelle Devos’s French single-mum
contractor. A little more of Dear Son’s fringe
disquiet would have leavened the film’s
slightly platitudinous plotting, but there’s
power in the film’s simple acts of testimony.
The wounds and ghosts of war were raked
over in a handful of films. Beatriz Seigner’s The
Silences floats between the exiled and grieving
and the dead from Colombia’s civil war, on a
flooding, enchanted island on the Brazilian
26 | Sight&Sound | July 2018
Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt’s Diamantino
‘Diamantino’ is a gothic political
spy caper in which a witless
footballer is beset by evil twin
sisters and lesbian state spies
border; it plies a taciturn, wounded realism at
some length before blossoming into a kind of
magical nonfiction in its last act. (I arrived too
late to see another Colombian story, the much
liked Quinzaine opener Birds of Passage, a tribal
gang saga from the makers of Embrace of the
Serpent.) Ognjen Glavonic’s The Load (Teret)
confronts its terrible secrets slowly – or in
character terms, it harbours guilty compromise
and denial. Where his 2016 documentary Depth
Two forensically mapped a criminal enterprise
CANNES TOP TEN
NICK BRADSHAW
1. Leave No Trace Debra Granik
2. Mirai Hosoda Mamoru
3. Dear Son Mohamed Ben Attia
4. The Load Ognjen Glavonic
5. Sauvage Camille Vidal-Naquet
6. This Magnificent Cake! (below)
Emma De Swaef and Marc James Roels
7. Chris the Swiss Anja Kofmel
8. Amin Philippe Faucon
9. Shéhérazade Jean-Bernard Marlin
10. Diamantino Gabriel Abrantes
and Daniel Schmidt
to transport the bodies of Kosovans murdered
by Serbian state forces during the 1999 war,
this picks up the case in fiction, following a
truck driver for hire as he wrestles with his
conscience through a grey, rainy, bomb-smeared
landscape. Of course his padlocked cargo
stands for Serbia’s national amnesia, but what
brings the film alive are the driver’s encounters
with an inquisitive younger generation, not
least when he finally makes it home.
There was also a pair of semi-animated
documentaries exploring recent wars: Israel’s
2009 bombing of the Gaza Strip, Operation Cast
Lead, in Stefano Savona’s Samouni Road, and
the conflicts in Croatia in the early 90s in Anja
Kofmel’s Chris the Swiss, in Critics’ Week. Savona
filmed traumatised survivors of an extended
family amid the rubble, then recreated the
terrors of indiscriminate bombing and killing
by erstwhile neighbours with scratch-drawn
animation of their testimonies, and mock
aerial-can footage that apparently visualises
the records of a war tribunal. It’s humane and
disturbing, but Kofmel’s is the richer film – an
investigation of why her late Swiss cousin was
drawn to Croatia as a war reporter, then joined a
paramilitary group, only to be strangled to death
in a forgotten field. The film yokes its story to
its process, retracing Chris’s travels, meeting his
surviving fellow travellers, reading between the
lines of his diary and speculating on the mixed
motives and urges of young men in war. Plus the
story is a mad historical palimpsest, with bit parts
for everyone from Carlos the Jackal to Opus Dei.
Anime finally got a look in at Cannes: you
could hardly say no to Mirai, from Hosoda
Mamoru (Wolf Children, The Boy and the Beast).
Pinpoint accurate as a realist account of a
contemporary bourgeois family’s reactions
to the advent of a second baby in the
household – with the emphasis on toddler
Kun and his feelings of displacement – it
also plants a secret magical mystery garden,
through which Kun makes deeper and bolder
leaps across time and his family tree.
Similarly wondrous in both craft and
imagination, though in a more gnomic, tersely
poetic resister, was Emma De Swaef and
Marc James Roels’s This Magnificent Cake!,
screened for the Quinzaine’s 50th anniversary
celebration night. Like the pair’s fêted 2012 short
Oh Willy…, it’s made with stop-motion wool
puppets who convey a stone-faced horror at the
caprices of the universe, in this case through
a medley of five dovetailing short stories that
travel from King Leopold’s court in Belgium
to his new Congolese colony and back again.
There was, however, only one shaggy
celebrity conspiracy satire in which an innocent
and witless Cristiano Ronaldo-alike football
superstar is beset by evil tax-evading twin sisters,
lesbian state spies and gene-tampering EU
exit conspirators. Perhaps there only ever will
be; I suspect Diamantino will prove to Gabriel
Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt’s oeuvre what
the OTT, camp The Adventures of Iron Pussy is
to Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s. I wasn’t the
only one who would have liked it to have been
a tighter hour-long featurette, but it won the
Critics’ Week Grand Prize and a lot of hearts.
 COMME MORATIN G T H E
75 TH A NN IVER SA RY OF
THE FAMO U S WWII RAID

STUNNING NEW RESTORATION

5 DISC COLLECTOR’S
EDITION INCLUDES
64 Page booklet with
foreword from Dan Snow
Brand new essays
Never-before-seen
documents and stills
A copy of a rare photograph
taken of the Mohne Dam after
the attack and signed by the
original 617 Squadron
RAF poster of the
Chastise Lancasters
5 Artcards
Feature presented in both
1.37 and 1.75 aspect ratios

ON DVD, BLU-RAY, EST AND

COLLECTOR’S EDITION JUNE 4TH

Join us on the Vintage Classics Facebook page to

find out more about our classic film collection

/VintageClassicsFilm
AGNES VARDA
THE IRREPRESSIBLE
AGNES VARDA
After decades working contentedly in the margins, the artist and filmmaker is finally gaining
the wider recognition she deserves. Over the pages that follow, our writers discuss key
aspects of her brilliantly idiosyncratic work, outlining her central role in the French New Wave
and exploring her rich visual style, deep love of play and sharp sense of place
– while Varda herself discusses her career
For someone whose artistic lifetime of more than six decades has
been spent contentedly occupying the position, as she puts it
herself to Kiva Reardon in an interview on page 37, of a “princess”
of the “margins” of film culture, the past year has seen 90-year-old
Agnès Varda enjoying a more mainstream visibility. Perhaps the
times have at long last caught up with her work, both aesthetically
– with her long-held disregard for supposed artistic and cinematic
boundaries and categories chiming with our new more porous
film culture – and politically and socially, for Varda is a touchstone
figure for many in the debates swirling around film culture in the
wake of the #MeToo movement and the long overdue heralding
of the work of female filmmakers from earlier generations.
Defying her age, Varda seems as busy as ever. Last year’s Cannes
saw the premiere of Faces Places, a collaboration with her artistic
“comrade”, French artist and photographer JR. Over the past year
Varda has received an honorary Academy Award, been elevated
to the status of a grand officier de la Légion d’honneur, had her work
presented in a major retrospective at TIFF in Canada, given two
lectures at Harvard University, and just last month walked the
red carpet at this year’s Cannes beside Cate Blanchett, as one of
82 women protesting in solidarity against discrimination in the
film industry. Her front and centre position in that protest was a
recognition of her status as a veteran pioneer of intensely personal
filmmaking that has made her an inspiration to so many.
In the UK this summer, Varda’s films play in a two-month
retrospective at BFI Southbank in London, with a tour of eight
features playing at cinemas across the UK from late July. And in
recognition of her achievement as an artist beyond the cinema,
she has been commissioned to make a new installation artwork
by the Liverpool Biennial, which will also screen her 1982 short
Ulysse, while a film season plays at Liverpool’s FACT gallery.
If Varda has enjoyed operating in the marginal space she has carved
for herself, she has never adopted a stance of wilful obscurity. As
her enthusiastic recent adoption of Instagram shows, her approach
to her life and to her work has always been defined by generous
inclusivity. We’re welcomed in to her thoughts and fears, to the lives
of her children and relatives, to her home and her quirks. There’s
always, in her work, a warm, genuinely inquisitive interest in the
people she meets and the stories they have to tell, whether they
are real figures in her documentaries or characters in her fiction.
From the beginning of her film career, when she was first off the
blocks among the loose group of filmmakers who would come to
constitute the French New Wave, Varda has always followed her own
self-invented path. She made her 1954 feature La Pointe Courte despite
28 | Sight&Sound | July 2018
having no prior filmmaking experience and, by her own admission,
without the obsessive cinephilia of Godard, Truffaut and the other
‘Right Bank’ group whom Varda and her ‘Left Bank’ group – Alain
Resnais, Chris Marker and her future husband Jacques Demy – stood
together with but apart from. Where others saw boundaries, or were
more obviously channelled by filmic influences, Varda brought a
more idiosyncratic pool of inspirations to her work – such as her
experience in still life and documentary photography, felt so keenly
in 60s features such as Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) and Le Bonheur (1965).
That openness surely fed into Varda’s willingness to move
between fictional and nonfictional styles – something obvious
as early as La Pointe Courte, with its observational sense of place
and time, and on documentaries such as L’Opéra-Mouffe (1962).
That open curiosity also naturally led her to embrace the joys of
travel – as when in 1967 she left France with Demy for California,
where she made a series of films (including one on the Black
Panthers). Again, it feels entirely in keeping that she should have
been out of step with many of the other New Wavers, back in
France for May ’68 and fired by the political radicalism of the day.
That’s not to say that Varda is not a political filmmaker. Returning
to France in the early 1970s, she was invigorated by the second wave of
feminism. Though she was less prolific during that decade, when she
was raising her children, the rallying cry of the feminist movement
that ‘the personal is political’ never feels truer than in her work of
that time. Take One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977), which parallels the
contrasting lives of two former friends, Pauline and Suzanne, along
separate paths, or her 1975 documentary Daguérreotypes, about the
people who live and work on rue Daguerre, the Paris street where
Varda has lived since 1951. She is also one of the great character
portraitists, especially of women. Think of Cléo finding her sense of
self in Paris or the unforgettable young Sandrine Bonnaire as Mona
Bergeron in Vagabond (1985), and films about those close to her – such
as Jane B. par Agnes V. (1987), about Jane Birkin, and the beautifully
true and warm tribute to her late husband Jacquot de Nantes (1991).
The new century saw Varda embrace the possibilities of new digital
technology but using it entirely in keeping with her approach all
along. In the pages that follow, our contributors consider some of
the abiding themes that characterise Varda’s work and finally Varda
discusses her latest film, Faces Places, due out in the UK later this year.
i
Aseasonoffilms,‘AgnèsVarda:VisionofanArtist’,playsatBFI
Southbank,London,throughoutJuneandJuly.TheUK-wide
eight-filmretrospective‘GleaningTruths’startson27July.Anewly
commissionedVardainstallationwillshowatFACTGalleryin
LiverpoolaspartoftheBiennial,whichbeginson14July
July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 29
AGNES VARDA

Varda’s role as pioneer (as opposed to the

patronising ‘mother’ or ‘grandmother’ label
with which she is often tagged) of the New
Wave was unjustly ignored both at the time
and for decades afterwards, as attention
focused on the male ‘Young Turks’. Yet Cléo
from 5 to 7 (1962), her return to fiction film
after several documentaries, spectacularly

PIONEER
combined the New Wave methods she had
pioneered and a unique feminist gaze. The

OF THE film – produced, scripted and directed by Varda

– follows singer Cléo (Corinne Marchand)

NEW WAVE over a couple of hours during which she

anxiously awaits the results of a medical test
and simultaneously reassesses her life and
by relationships. Shot in black and white (with
Ginette Vincendeau an opening sequence in colour) on location
in Paris in June and July 1961, Cléo from 5
In 1954, after studying philosophy and art to 7 ranks as one of the greatest city films,
in Paris and working as a photographer, the while also offering a profound reflection on
25-year-old Agnès Varda decided to make a the construction of female identity. Varda
film set in La Pointe Courte, a neighbourhood places her examination of female creativity,
in Sète on the western Mediterranean coast. romance and friendship in a dense network of
A simple story: a young Parisian couple, references to contemporary French culture and
played by stage actors Silvia Monfort and society, notably (and unusually) the Algerian
Philippe Noiret, spend a few days in the War. But she also pays generous tribute to CREST OF THE WAVE
area, where the husband grew up, deciding her New Wave colleagues in a humorous Varda shooting La Pointe
Courte in 1954 (top); with
whether to stay together or not. Varda knew film-within-the-film, which features among Jean-Luc Godard during
Sète well, having lived there as an adolescent others Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina. the shoot of Cléo from 5 to
during the German occupation, and she Varda was for too long relegated to a 7 (above); and with Alain
Resnais, Silvia Monfort and
embeds the sometimes cryptic discussions marginal role in the history of the New Philippe Noiret (below)
of the central couple in the life of La Pointe Wave, treated as an adjunct to her famous
Courte and its community of fishermen. colleagues in the more socially and politically
The result is astonishing in its beauty, social aware ‘Left Bank’ strand of the New Wave,
commentary and modernity. How could a which included her husband Jacques Demy,
young woman with no formal training and, Alain Resnais and Chris Marker. It took
according to her, no knowledge of cinema the work of feminist historians, notably
history, produce a groundbreaking film that, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis in the 1990s,
in the words of historian Georges Sadoul, to reinstate her at the heart of the New
was “truly the first film of the New Wave”. Wave and of post-war French cinema.
Beyond its autobiographical aspect and
meshing of documentary and fiction, La
Pointe Courte anticipated the New Wave
in its production methods. Varda’s own
tiny company Ciné-Tamaris, which still
exists, produced the black-and-white movie
completely outside the mainstream film
industry and on a budget one-tenth that of
the average French film. Just as importantly,
Varda’s authorial control over scriptwriting
and directing, for which she coined the term
cinécriture (cine-writing), the exclusive use
of location shooting, the combination of
professional and non-professional actors
– all this was innovative in France in the
mid-1950s, and foreshadowed the methods
and aesthetics of Claude Chabrol, François
Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. La Pointe Courte’s
complex modernist narrative construction,
borrowed from William Faulkner’s 1939
n0vel TheWild Palms, also anticipated
a more ‘intellectual’ type of New Wave
cinema, in particular that of Alain Resnais,
not coincidentally her editor on the film.

30 | Sight&Sound | July 2018


THE (SELF)-
PORTRAITIST
by
Catherine Wheatley
Agnès Varda has for a long time been interested
in self-portraiture, not only in film form
but literary and photographic form too. Her
1994 book Varda par Agnès is as complicated
and personal in structure as her films, while
early experiments in self-portraiture, such
as Autoportrait devant une peinture de Gentile
Bellini (1962), hint at an early fascination
with finding the self in images of others.
“It should be like I’m taking your hand,
taking you through the film,” she told Sight &
Sound in 2015. “I’m not really telling a story, I’m
telling you what cinema is in my life.” Thus
Varda’s experiences of pregnancy inform her
short film L’Opéra-Mouffe (1958), made while
she was expecting her first child, Rosalie, and
One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977), which
investigates the possible implications of
pregnancy from a variety of angles,
incorporating fiction, documentary and
autobiography. Motherhood, meanwhile,
literally shapes Daguerréotypes – made in
1974-75 while Varda was caring for her
two-year-old son Mathieu and unwilling to
undertake a film which demanded long
periods away from him. Among other things a
study of the restricted range of a working
mother, the film’s range is confined within a
90m radius of Varda’s home: the length of the
electric cables for her equipment.
Varda’s presence is made more explicit in the
frequent appearances she and her family make
in her films. Daguerréotypes and L’Opéra-Mouffe
feature glimpses of Varda, whose presence
is also foregrounded by her narration. (Her
voiceovers imply her presence in other docs,
too, such as Mur Murs, 1981.) Rosalie pops up
in several films; Mathieu – a professional actor
– stars in works such Kung-Fu Master! (1988),
in which he plays the leading role alongside
Jane Birkin, and Documenteur (1981), a barely
fictionalised account of Varda’s temporary
split from filmmaker husband Jacques Demy.
Even her cat, Zgougou, has a featuring role
in Varda’s cinematic universe, as the mascot
of her production company Ciné-Tamaris.
Her portraits of others – of friends and lovers
as well as strangers and invented characters
– are double-portraits, upon which her own
image is superimposed. In Jane B. par Agnès
V. (1987), Agnès tells Birkin, “It’s as if I was
going to film your self-portrait,” while the
camera travels around a picture of Jane in
front of a mirror, reflecting first Jane’s face,
then the camera, then Varda. Jane, for her part,
tells Agnès that the important thing is not
the sitter, but the portraitist, the eye behind
the camera. Nowhere, perhaps is this more
true than in the three films Varda dedicates
to Demy: Les Demoiselles ont eu 25 ans (1993),
The World of Jacques Demy (1995) and Jacquot
de Nantes (1991). The last interweaves Demy’s
own memories with footage from his films,
to carve out what Varda describes as the dying
Demy’s “autobiography, filmed by his wife”: a
synthesis of husband and wife’s subjectivities.
Demy haunts the exhibition L’Ile et Elle
(‘The Island and She’), which ran at the
Cartier Foundation in Paris in 2006. The
exhibition poster shows Varda sitting on
a chair on the beach, next to another –
empty – chair. The video installation Les
Veuves de Noirmoutier includes footage of
Varda alongside other widows on the island
of Noirmoutier, where for decades she
holidayed with Demy. While other women
talk, Varda cries silently before the camera.
“I wonder if the only real portrait isn’t a
death mask,” Varda muses in Jane B. par
Agnès V. Her films increasingly register what
she describes as “the sharp sensation of time
passing and the erosion of feelings which
inflict on us mould and rust, undigested
humiliations and wounds which don’t close”.
The Gleaners and I (2000) sees Varda scrutinise,
in extreme close-up, her wrinkled, liver-spotted
hand, an image which in itself recalls similar
close-ups of her husband’s hands in Jacquot de
Nantes. In her latest documentary Faces Places
we witness the physical indignities age has
wrought, as Varda endures an injection meant
to alleviate her encroaching blindness; and
resorts to having artist friend JR push her
around the Louvre in a wheelchair.
The Beaches of Agnès (2008), Varda’s
self-described auto-portrait, condenses all
these concerns, combining re-enactments,
snippets of old films, family photos, and
latter-day footage of Varda herself to distil
her childhood, her career, her life with Demy,
and her widowhood into 110 minutes. The
film reveals new aspects of Varda – with a
range of personal materials and work hitherto
unseen by her most loyal devotees – while
deploying qualities associated with old age
(nostalgia, forgetfulness) to destabilise any
idea of accuracy. Throughout, Varda highlights
her continuing process of reconstruction and
enduring belief in the incompleteness of her
story. The film is a collection of memories,
of “reveries”, of “something imaginary”;
her oeuvre as a whole a moving picture of a
fragmented, multiple self, or selves. Shards of
a woman, shattered apart. “If we opened up
people we’d find landscapes,” she tells us in
the film’s opening scenes. “If we opened me
up, we’d find beaches.” From the shorelines of
Sète (in La Pointe Courte) to Venice Beach (Mur
Murs) to Normandy (Faces Places), wherever
there is a beach, there is a piece of Agnès.
SANDS OF TIME
Varda and her family in The
Beaches of Agnès (2008, left)
and with Jane Birkin in Jane
B. par Agnès B. (1987, above)
July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 31
AGNES VARDA
AT PLAY WITH
THE WORLD
by
Pamela Hutchinson
“I play the role of a plump and chatty little old
lady,” announces Agnès Varda in her “auto-
bio-filmo-puzzlo self-portrait” The Beaches of
Agnès (2008). It’s a disarming introduction
from a distinguished figure in world cinema,
but typical of Varda’s warm, playful tone,
which is often generous to the point of
self-parody and self-deprecation. Unlike
certain famous cineastes who hide behind
dark glasses and caps, Varda appears in many
of her recent films, beaming towards the
lens, walking backwards, whizzing through
the Louvre in a wheelchair or ‘driving’ a
cardboard car. If Varda isn’t channelling her
own inner child, she is pointing her camera
at others. Children, including her own,
appear frequently in her films. Likewise cats,
a continuing and adorable obsession from
1954’s La Pointe Courte onwards. Aged 90, she
is not precious enough to hide the ageing
process: several inches of grey regrowth
circle the top of her chestnut bowlcut and
32 | Sight&Sound | July 2018
she directs her digital handheld camera
to impertinent close-ups of the wrinkles
and liver spots on the back of her hand.
Instead of retreating inside studios and
editing suites, Varda goes out in the world,
meeting people, gathering stories. She may
dress up as a potato (for her Patatutopia show
at the Venice Biennale in 2003), pose for
selfies with fans or adopt larky postures on
her charming Instagram account (@agnes.
varda). If she’s not present in the flesh, she
may substitute a mosaic, or a caricature,
such as the triangular pipe-nosed portrait
drawn by her friend Christophe Vallaux.
Most recently, she charmed sectors of the
world’s press who may have been unaware
of her theories of cinécriture by sending
full-size cut-outs of herself to the Oscar
nominees’ luncheon, including one in which
she is holding a beloved cat. Luminaries
including Meryl Streep and Greta Gerwig
appear as delighted by the cardboard
Varda as they might be by the real deal.
The Beaches of Agnès encapsulates Varda’s
frolicsome persona: although she discusses
losses and struggles, she approaches her own
life and work with an endearingly sunny
surrealism. If everyone has a landscape inside
them, she says, then she contains a beach.
Amid reminiscences of childhood holidays
and happy years in California, Varda addresses
the audience from inside a giant whale on the
sands, and builds a miniature shoreline in a
busy street. The office staff of her production
company Ciné-Tamaris decamp to the urban
beach, film cans, phones, computers and
all, absurdly completing their daily work
YOUNG AT HEART
Varda in a snap from The
Beaches of Agnès (2008,
left), and uncovering a
heart-shaped potato in The
Gleaners and I (2000, above)
with sand between their toes. Likewise, Faces
Places sees her and artist JR crossing France
with an oversized photo booth, redecorating
the landscape around them to be a little
more human, a little less mundane.
Varda’s joyful generosity reached its
peak, perhaps, in The Gleaners and I (2000),
a soft-hearted film about a serious topic.
While travelling with her camera to meet
people who choose to, or are forced to, forage
their daily food, Varda contemplates the
subject of gleaning, in art and society, while
examining her own ageing self. Adapting to
her wrinkled flesh and grey hair, she finds
joy in damaged objects, such as a clock with
no hands. From a pile of discarded potatoes,
she chances upon a heart-shaped tuber,
and collects all its likenesses. A follow-up
film, shot two years later, reveals that fans
still send her heart-shaped pommes de terres,
and Varda is delighted by them, even as
they turn purple, shrivel and sprout.
All of which is to say that Varda is playing
the role well. A mistress of disguise, Varda
coats her most serious messages in a sugar
shell – like the gorgeous, pop-singer heroine
of 1962’s Cléo from 5 to 7 contemplating her
mortality in a feathered cap. As she said of her
1965 adultery drama Le Bonheur, saturated
with primary colours and sunflowers: “I
was trying to make the shape of the film so
lovely and nice that if you don’t want to face
what it means you don’t have to.” Even a
heart-shaped potato will rot, a joyful feminist
is still angry, and regardless of her humble
self-presentation, Varda is a visionary artist
who is always serious, even when she isn’t.
 MULTIMEDIA
ARTIST
by
Rebecca J. DeRoo
Agnès Varda has joked that at the beginning
of the 21st century, when she was in her
early 70s, she became a young visual artist.
Audiences saw her visual artwork as new,
as Varda has been primarily known as a
filmmaker. Historically, critics praised her as
the innovative ‘mother’ of the nouvelle vague,
with her first film, La Pointe Courte (1954), a
precursor to the movement, and Cléo from 5 to
7 (1962), made at its height. This identity has
long overshadowed other parts of her career.
More recently, scholars have recognised
her as an essential feminist filmmaker.
At the same time, Varda has continued to
create new work, making films as well as
multimedia art over the last two decades.
Yet Varda has been working among
various media across her career. Before she
pursued cinema, she studied art history and
practised photography, and her cinematic
work reveals a rich knowledge of these
traditions. A well-known filmic example
is The Gleaners and I (2000), in which Varda
includes 19th-century paintings of gleaners
(depicting women walking the recently
harvested fields gathering stray grains) as
a metaphor for her own cinematic practice
(travelling throughout France with her
handheld digital camera, gleaning images for
her documentary). Less well known is that
Varda has quietly yet subversively woven
references to histories of art, photography,
and film throughout her work, evoking
among other visual traditions Renaissance
painting in La Pointe Courte, documentary
photography in Daguerréotypes (1975), and
surrealist painting and photography in
The Beaches of Agnès (2008). They form a
sophisticated commentary on controversial
issues, subtly broadening some of the most
advanced aesthetic and political discourses
of her times. Dialogue among media is a
core characteristic of her work across the
long trajectory of her prolific career.
Today Varda creates films and artwork in
various forms. Her magisterial installation
at the Cartier Foundation in Paris, L’Ile et Elle
(‘The Island and She’, 2006), uses different
media to mediate her memories of the
island of Noirmoutier, where she holidayed
with her late husband, the director Jacques
Demy. She made one work literally out
of film: My Cabana of Cinema has a metal
roof and frame, and walls of celluloid film,
the structure recalling seaside shacks or
cabanas. The material is her own earlier
cinematic work, Les Créatures (1966), which
starred Michel Piccoli and Catherine
Deneuve and was made on the island and
dedicated to Demy. Varda originally referred
TAKING STOCK
A still from Varda’s Les Trois
Vies d’Agnès (above) and
her forthcoming Liverpool
Biennial installation, with the
working title 3 Mouvements
to the structure as “My Cabana of Failure”,
because she felt the film was commercially
unsuccessful on its release – but here she
recycles the film, giving it a new lease of life.
Varda sometimes calls this work a way to
“dwell in her house of cinema” – punning
on the idea of an arthouse cinema, but also
signalling that here she uses the medium
differently – creating a three-dimensional
house as artwork. Light penetrates the film,
not through projection, but via ambient light
in the gallery; we can see the materiality of
35mm film and its 24 frames per second.
Varda has continued to realise major
exhibitions, such as the one at the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art, where she
created artwork based on her late 1960s Los
Angeles films, and at the CAFA Art
Museum in Beijing, where she exhibited
new installation art structures along with
photographs she took in China in 1957. Her
latest installation work is one commissioned
for this year’s Liverpool Biennial. With the
working title of 3 Mouvements, the piece is a
three-channel video installation that
combines extracts from Vagabond (1985),
Documenteur (1981) and The Gleaners and I.
As is so clearly demonstrated in Agnès Varda
from Here to There (2011), her five-part
film and television series chronicling her
conversations with other artists and
activities in the art world, Varda’s artistic and
cinematic pursuits nourish one another.
July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 33
AGNES VARDA
LE CHAT
DÕUNE POETE
by
So Mayer
In February this year, Agnès Varda gave
two Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at the
Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard,
beginning her first lecture, ‘The 7th Art and
Me’, with three words that she said describe
her practice: ‘imagination’, ‘creation’ and
‘sharing’. Of the last, she noted, “I don’t make
films for myself [but…] to have what is called
feedback. I wonder,” she mused, “why is it
not called feelback, because we want feelings
to go through [the film] and be shared.”
For Varda viewers, such linguistic
playfulness – often across more than one
language, as here where she is punning in
English – will be familiar; perhaps so familiar
that it is undervalued despite her coining
of cinécriture to describe her filmmaking. As
the film historian Haden Guest, who invited
Varda, told Harvard paper the Crimson, “She’s
a poetess. One of the aspects of her work that
is rarely spoken about is her skills as a writer.”
Varda has only published one book: 1994’s
Varda par Agnès is a memoir as catalogue
raisonné, a project fusing the enumerative
impulse of Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse
and “l’imagination des matières” practised
by Gaston Bachelard, whose lectures
Varda attended at the Sorbonne in 1946-47
(although she was too shy to talk to him).
Film scholar Sandy Flitterman-Lewis notes,
in To Desire Differently (1990), that Varda was
“particularly interested in this theory… in
which certain personality traits were found
to correspond to concrete elements in a kind
of psychoanalysis of the material world.”
Here is one early entry in Varda’s book,
addressing the imagination of a remembered
object, like the radios and cars that so
poignantly populate Jacquot de Nantes (1991):
“C commes Cahiers: Je les aimais, petite. Le
désir qu’on en avait les choisissant. Leur odeur…
Une anecdote de maman: Les bombes dégringolent
sur Bruxells. C’est le 10 mai 1940, le début de
la guerre. Il faut quitter la ville. Maman met en
valises un minimum d’effets pour chacun… Je
la regarde, elle emplit un carton avec du sucre,
des crayons et une cinquantaine de cahiers
34 | Sight&Sound | July 2018
neufs… Oserai-je me lancer à sauter des cahiers
de maman aux Cahiers du cinéma?…”
(“C for cahiers [notebooks]: I loved them,
when I was little. The desire when one got
to choose them. Their smell… An anecdote
about my mother: the bombs fall on Brussels.
It’s 10 May, 1940, the start of the war. We must
leave town. Mother packs the minimum
of luggage for each person… I watch as she
fills a box with sugar, pencils and 50 new
notebooks… Dare I launch into a leap from
my mother’s notebooks to Cahiers du cinéma?’)
Varda, écrivaine: here is her typically
poetic thought process, from the new-book
smell that excited a child who wanted to
grow up to be an artist, to the cultural wave
in which she would take part. There is also
a modest suggestion of her identification
with the small, everyday notebooks used
by her mother over the cultural capital
of the capitalised Cahiers du cinéma.
Varda’s films are not – unlike her mother’s
cahiers – diaries, but they could be called
scrapbooks: bricolages, with a trace of the
influence of the French surrealists who
crossed between artforms in order to realise
the way materials are always imagining
themselves as something else. Varda is not
often called a surrealist, and yet: in Jane B.
par Agnès V. (1987), Jane Birkin appears
rampant as Joan of Arc, taking the place
of a heroic male statue on a Paris quay, as
Varda’s cat Zgougou will similarly replace
a bronze lion in a later short. Voilà! Her
fondness for magicians, for sleight of hand
equal to her deflationary sleight of word
and image, is evident in the café magician
who introduces another punningly titled
documentary: Daguerréotypes (1975).
TRACK OF THE CAT
Varda’s films, such as The
Beaches of Agn•s (2008,
below), are scrapbooks with
a trace of surrealist influence
Like the surrealists, Varda sometimes stages
verbal puns visually, and vice versa. How
can one translate the bilingually punning
title of her 1981 documentary about murals,
Mur Murs? Perhaps ‘whispers of walls’, the
way a mural calls out to the passerby the
secrets of the community it lives in. To such
whispers, Varda’s ears attend and call the
viewer to become fully an audi-ence by doing
the same. That associative, often punning
logic shapes the voiceovers that frame both
fiction features such as 1977’s One Sings, the
Other Doesn’t (delivered by Varda herself)
and 1981’s Documenteur (delivered by her
collaborator, actor and filmmaker Delphine
Seyrig) and her late documentaries.
It is still rare that a woman’s voice takes up
the space of the voiceover; when Varda made
Mur Murs and One Sings…, that was truer
still. In Documenteur – whose title is a rich
pun on documentaire and menteur (liar) – she
muses on this absence of the female voice
by casting the editor of Mur Murs, Sabine
Mamou, as a film company secretary who
finds herself delivering the voiceover… for a
documentary about murals. Just as women
have taken to the streets in her films since
Silvia Monfort in La Pointe Courte (1954), so
too they have been using their voices: Cléo
is not the only singer; Pomme, backed by
Groupe Orchidée, sings about women’s right
to choose in One Sings, with lyrics by Varda
that include a fitting (both thematically and
metrically) quotation from Friedrich Engels.
Today there is an alleyway named Varda
in Sète, where her family fled during
World War II and where she shot La Pointe
Courte. This seems highly appropriate: that
a filmmaker whose play with language
often increases the spaciousness within
words should herself have become a
place. The 21 cats that walked through
her first film could now sun themselves
on their great cine-poet’s cobbles.

SPACES
PLACES
by
Adam Scovell
Varda is a cinematic cartographer. She travels
widely to make her films, sometimes following
her own paths of interest, as in documentaries
such as The Gleaners and I (2000) and the
forthcoming Faces Places; at other times
following in the footsteps of wandering
characters, such as Cléo (Corinne Marchand)
in Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) and Mona (Sandrine
Bonnaire) in Vagabond (1985). A sense of place
is incredibly important to her work, either as
a fixed locale within which people live out
their lives or as a constantly evolving backdrop
which reflects a journeying momentum. If
the characters in focus are static, the films
tend to traverse the same places again and
again, heightening their unusual essence
via repetition. If the characters are itinerant,
place constantly fluctuates, as unstable as
the emotions of the walkers themselves.
In her documentary Daguerréotypes
(1976), Varda concentrates on the lives of
her neighbours in Montparnasse, zooming
in on the very locality of her own street. The
film pays enjoyably eccentric attention to
seemingly random everyday moments, but its
key significance lies in showing how people
are embedded within a sense of place. The
same fixed setting can be found in her debut,
La Pointe Courte (1954), which observes the
fishing town of Sète in minute detail during
a visit by its married protagonists. There’s a
clear knowledge and affection for the place,
expressed in vivid footage of real people
from its streets. Varda’s apparent desire for
authenticity, undoubtedly deriving from
her time as a street photographer, sees her
explore each place with passionate curiosity.
Meandering through space, she maps it
through time via her camera’s gaze. Detail is
gleaned literally, gathered up as she passes,
in much the same way as the collectors
after the harvest in The Gleaners and I.
Varda always links people and place, one
explicitly defining the other, something
recognised in the title of Faces Places. In
it, with the help of artist JR, she explores
the connection in the most overt of ways:
people’s faces and bodies, including her
own, are fixed to walls in the form of giant
photographs. Eyes stare out as towns and
buildings become personified. As a director,
she has a rare understanding of the ineffable
importance place holds over us all, a conveyor
of our need for some fixed position in an ever-
changing environment. An image of her toes
is mischievously placed by JR on the side of
a train in Faces Places. The landscape changes
PARIS, JE T’AIME
A sense of place has always
been central to Varda’s work,
as witnessed in Cléo from
5 to 7 (1962, left) and in her
documentary portrait of her
own street Daguerréotypes
(1975, below)
constantly but the person is now frozen
in a continuous photographic moment.
But place is far from always being benign
in Varda’s filmmaking. With her more settled
characters, the stasis means her settings can
create an uncomfortably jovial disjuncture.
In Documenteur (1981), the melancholy of
its lonely lead character, Emilie (Sabine
Mamou), is almost mocked by the blazing
summer of Californian beaches, while in
Le Bonheur (1965), François (Jean-Claude
Drouot) drifts from his marriage with
such ease, it almost seems as inevitable
and natural as the changing of the seasons
around him. Following the death of
François’s wife, the brutal replacement of
her by his mistress sits in stark contrast to
the gleaming yellow daffodils and beautiful
summer landscapes. Place in this case
parodies masculine privilege. And such
gendered colouring of place is suffered by
Varda’s other wanderers. In Vagabond, Mona
struggles through the wintry landscape
of Hérault, fighting with the land and its
people until the place eventually destroys
her, her body taken under the hoar-frost.
Even with all her globe-trotting, Varda
still makes her way back to the house where
she’s lived since the 1950s, just behind
Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris where
her late husband Jacques Demy is buried.
That quaint building on rue Daguerre,
with its painted walls and sauntering cats,
is her ultimate place of return: home. Even
wanderers as adventurous as Varda need
somewhere finally to drift back to.
July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 35
AGNES VARDA
THE VISUAL
STYLIST
by
Isabel Stevens
A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY
Le Bonheur (1965, above),
interrogating happiness in
full glare, and One Sings, the
Other Doesn’t (1977, below)
36 | Sight&Sound | July 2018
That Agnès Varda had visual verve was evident
from her first foray into filmmaking in 1954:
La Pointe Courte was clearly a photographer’s
film. Varda’s first feature delights in the
quiet spectacles of the fishing quarter of the
Mediterranean village of Sète. The attention
paid to objects, texture, light and shadow
and Varda’s unexpected compositions all
betrayed the filmmaker’s background as a
prowling shutterbug with a love of landscape.
One year later, in O saisons, ô châteaux
(1957), a short commissioned by the
French Tourist Board, Varda’s signature
was more flamboyant. In her idiosyncratic
exploration of castles in the Loire region,
models in colourful haute couture stroll
along the ramparts, before Varda makes a
characteristic digression, and follows the
castle’s caretakers. Over the next six decades,
Varda has never really stopped experimenting
with style, whether in her films, her
installations or with her own appearance.
Characterising her visual style, however,
is not easy, as it constantly changes. Just
as in O saisons, ô châteaux, clothing and
landscape take a central role in many of her
films: in Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), the streets
of Paris and singer Cléo’s appearance loom
large. Meanwhile, in Vagabond (1985) –
the antithesis of Cléo in many ways – a
homeless woman in muddy clothes roams
the countryside. Tracking shots figure
heavily in both films – as indeed in many of
her others – as Varda gives the impression
of walking along with her flâneuses; just
another instance of realism and overt
stylisation going hand in hand in her work.
Varda likes intertitles and formal
tricksiness, as shown by the chapters of
Cléo, and the pointing hands that direct
us back and forward in time throughout
Jacquot de Nantes (1991), her portrait of the
early life of her husband Jacques Demy.
Colour is clearly important to her. Cléo
starts with an abrupt jolt to monochrome
after the colourful tarot cards credits
sequence, as if to contrast Cléo’s seemingly
perfect life, as seen from the outside, with
her own experience of it. And famously,
there’s Le Bonheur’s (1965) tale of marital
infidelity sketched in vivid Eastmancolor,
where happiness is interrogated in full glare.
Upending aesthetic expectations is one
of Varda’s hallmarks. So her film about
abortion, One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977),
is an unusually optimistic tale – indeed,
a musical! – with a soft lyrical bent. Later,
with The Gleaners and I (2000), Varda
embraced nascent digital technology that
other filmmakers sniffed at and gleaned an
overlooked charm from its lo-fi fuzziness.
Fiercely independent, she has never had to
compromise her vision in the way that other
filmmakers, chasing bigger budgets, have
had to do. How her films are presented to the
outside world is another crucial factor – she
made her own posters for Vagabond, fly-
posters asking the question: “Have you seen
this girl?” Artisanal is a good way to describe
her style: she is a folk filmmaker at heart, as
her new film Faces Places further confirms.
However, her audacious aesthetics haven’t
always been appreciated. François Truffaut
found La Pointe Courte “a little too framed”,
while the critic Georges Charensol dismissed
her visual choices in that film as “gratuitous”.
Cléo’s visual flair was welcomed by more
critics, but not Stanley Kauffmann of the
New York Times, who dismissed Cléo as a
“flashily dressed-up conventional tear jerker”.
The charge of frivolity was always more
likely to haunt a female director, particularly
one who in Cléo explores a so-called frivolous
singer questioning her objectification.
The endless mirrors and reflections in Cléo
highlight a woman trying to discover her true
identity (rather novel for 1960s cinema). What
Kauffmann missed was that Cléo’s changing
wardrobe shows how, as the film progresses,
she gradually dresses to please herself.
Varda, with her purple and grey bob, has
always dressed to please herself (not least with
her potato outfit at the 2003 Venice Biennale).
Now she is celebrated for her formal
adventurousness, but for years her visual
sensibility – easily dismissed as simply
whimsical – was perhaps one reason she went
under the radar as an auteur. But for all her
visual playfulness, Varda’s aesthetic quirks are
underpinned with meaning. What would Le
Bonheur be like with dampened hues? Not
nearly so caustic, strange and claustrophobic.
Or what if The Gleaners and I (2000) was a
polished, orderly documentary? It’d be far
poorer as a celebration of the imagination, and
would lack that vital questioning of what is
counted as cinematic.
 ‘CURIOSITY
IS GOOD’
The following discussion is an
edited extract taken from an
interview originally published in
April in Vol 6, issue 1 of ‘Cléo: a
Journal of Film and Feminism’

Kiva Reardon: You once said you never went

to film school, but instead went to the theatre
and walked in the streets. This strikes me
as saying so much about inspiration.
Agnès Varda: I was curious. Curiosity is a
good thing. I was curious about different
people. I waited until something was
strong enough to disturb me or inspire
me to make a film. That’s how I ended up
making a documentary on my own street,
Daguerréotypes, in 1975… can you believe it?
KR: And you’ve gone back to subjects too.
AV: Yes, I did a sequel with The Gleaners and I. I
was so impressed that when you do a
documentary, people applaud you – well, they
applaud the people in the film. I felt gauche. I
said, “I need to go back to see these people.” So I
did, two years later, or I tried to go back,
because sometimes they had no address. I went
back because I felt I owed them something.
Not just respect, but friendship. I thought,
“There is something between us. They trusted
me to tell others about their lives.” By meeting
them again, I felt a little better. Making a
documentary about people in a difficult New kid on the block: JR with Agnès Varda in Faces Places
situation is difficult, also. Since I discovered
with the new century the new little [digital] Faces Places I [worked] for the first time with I enjoyed it very much because we had a ball.
cameras, I have been shooting sometimes by somebody else [co-director JR]. We enjoyed We were discovering each other also, because
myself, not with what can be a frighteningly shooting because the people we met were we didn’t know each other before the shoot,
big crew. Is it a saying, “To play it by ear”? very nice, and we tried to get them to invest and he’s more secretive than me, with his
KR: Yes. in making the film with us. It was not about dark glasses. I’m more open – at my age I have
AV: This is what I wanted – not planning too questioning them, saying: “What is it you nothing to lose. I think he took advantage of
much, not asking too much. For Faces Places, do?” What we wanted to get from them my good will when he took a photo of my
we had the same approach. We had decided was not just words but some imagination. feet and put it on a train. But it’s nice because,
some things, but felt luck would bring us a I remember, about the goats: there was a in a way, he says, the train is going to places I
surprise. So when we started on a subject like, mechanic we met who said they should will no longer go, because it’s clear I’m old.
“Did you notice goats no longer have horns?”, put ping pong balls on the horns so they KR: He also introduced you to Instagram…
we laughed. But then we started to discuss it, won’t hurt themselves – I love this idea! He AV: I have to do it! I stopped for a month.
how the [farmers] burn the goats’ horns when suggested something, he participated. That’s I’m not used to doing it every day.
they are babies [so they don’t injure each other]. what I love, and JR too; we want people KR: Do you think it distracts from the work?
And then we met this beautiful woman who to be creative when they speak and say AV: No. Because what makes sense in the
said, “Animals should be in their own shape. something the audience will appreciate. film is still there. The people we wanted to
I would never [burn their horns], even if they KR: Do you think you bring something to these shine a light on are there. We respect them,
were hurting each other.” It’s about entering encounters? Because not everyone is always we gave them light, and size, and we honour
into the mentality of other people with so open, and your films emanate empathy. them. And we got the best we could get out
more than questions and answers. It’s about AV: We make them laugh. We’re like of them, including some sad pieces, like the
entering a real conversation in which they Laurel and Hardy, me and JR. There are man who is about to go into retirement. And
can express something important to them. so many years between us – 55 years! on the other side, we enjoy the men in the
KR: Chance and documentary are so And people take it as a good feeling. port of Le Havre – these strong macho men –
linked; do you feel the same in fiction? KR: Do you feel you and JR each brought but I said I wanted to meet their wives. And
AV: Yes, it is the same thing. When shooting something unique to the film? then this became a big celebration
starts, I feel: “Something will happen.” But on AV: I had never done [co-directing] before, but of women. And these men helped

July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 37

AGNES VARDA
us to do it. We helped to push the
cliché, the préjugé. We helped them
to see something different about how we
can look at women. It was the little steps.
JR exaggerates and says art changes society.
I don’t believe that but it’s an attempt to
share the hope that mentalities will become
better, between men and women, [in] how
we look at other people. And with our ‘artist’s
look’, we give another perspective. We have
nothing to hide, nothing to win; there’s no
money at stake when we do the work.
KR: Thinking about the progress women
have made, have you been following the
#MeToo movement and #BalanceTonPorc?
AV: I’ve been with the feminist movement
for years, and we have always said, “Speak
out,” “Complain,” “Scream.” I have been
marching in the street often since the 1960s
and 70s. What’s happening now is good
in a way because it pushes the women to
say something. But the fact is true: power
in society leads to sexual power. If men
can understand they should not hurt
somebody just because they have the power,
or strength to, that might change society.
It’s good it’s become this sort of drama
because of one man [Harvey Weinstein]
I disliked totally anyway. But changing
society is three steps forward and then
two back. Behaviours change slowly – but
they change. I remember when I was a
feminist in the 60s, how it was difficult
with the problem of abortion. When we
fought for the freedom of just birth control,
that was a victory. And then abortion was
next. But we need the right to decide.
I made a musical, One Sings, the Other Doesn’t
[1977], and the first song is: “It’s no longer
Papa, the judge, the king, the lawyer, the
doctor…” I can’t really remember. But they [the
men in the song] are no longer the ones who
decide if we have a child or not. That’s a big
difference. Still now, in some families, women
have to obey their father and brothers. It’s still
going on in the world today. But it used to be
everywhere. There has been change. I recently
had an operation and my surgeon was this
young woman – she looked so fresh, so nice,
and she has two children, she operates three
days a week. And I thought: “Look at this
woman! I could not have imagined a woman
like this when I was young.” The power is
still in the hands of men but it has slightly
changed. And if women have confidence in
themselves, they can do incredible things.
KR: I get annoyed when people describe your
work as ‘charming’. It feels dismissive, as if a
film can’t be both tender and intellectual.
AV: I don’t think [my films] are
charming, I think they’re warm.
KR: What’s the difference?
AV: Warm is empathy. Charm is making
a fuss. If a relationship has some charm,
38 | Sight&Sound | July 2018
The big picture: Jeannine, a resident of a former coal-mining town in northern France in Faces Places
It seems my films stay in people’s
memories. I have a small
audience, but in my category, in
the margins, I feel like a princess
there’s nothing wrong with that. Like with
JR, we are comrades. I always call him that.
KR: Collaboration isn’t given a lot of
attention in the canon of the ‘great auteurs’.
There’s this idea of directors being alone.
AV: I was alone, and then I wasn’t. Plus,
there’s the fact that I’m weaker than before.
We shot only one week a month. Then we
would think about other things; he did an
installation, I did an exhibition… I’ve become
a visual artist in the 21st century. I made a
big shack made of film [which visitors could
walk into] in Los Angeles, like at the end of
The Beaches of Agnès [2008]. I do that now. I’m
preparing another that will open in April.
Faces Places
KR: Which film strips did you
use to make the houses?
AV: The first one I did, I used [film strips
from Varda’s 1966 film] Les Créatures.
KR: Because there are no surviving prints.
AV: Yes. And in Los Angeles, I made the
shack with the film I made in Los Angeles:
Lions, Love (… and Lies). Next month will be
a film shack of Le Bonheur [1965]. But since
there are such beautiful sunflowers at the
beginning of this film, it will be a greenhouse!
It will grow sunflowers. I try to use my
imagination to always build something.
Not only recycling the object, but recycling
our own relationships with things.
KR: Do you get frustrated when people ask
about your legacy? You’re still working.
AV: My films never made money. They never
brought money for me or the company. But
they’re loved. Cléo from 5 to 7 – I did that film
in 1961. Everyone still speaks about this film. I
go to South Korea, north Brazil, and they speak
about Cléo, about Le Bonheur, about Vagabond
[1985], which was a very important film to
me. It seems that my films stay in people’s
memories, or in people’s minds, as meaning
something. That’s the best thing: to exist in
other people’s minds, to know there’s an
audience that has been following my work.
It’s a small audience. It has nothing to do with
big success. But in my category, in the margins
where I am, I feel like a princess. Because in
the category of marginal films I really have a
good reputation. Sometimes Faces Places plays
and people applaud; I think it’s because it
touches people and makes them understand
they can share. And we need that. Because we
need links. The world is difficult and things
go to pieces very often. But to create things, to
make people witnesses of links, we don’t hurt
anybody with this. But it’s just a little drop in
the world of art, and in the world of creation.
 AGNÈS VARDA
HONORARY ACADEMY AWARD® 2017

Contains over 6 hours of special features

and exclusive 100 page book

OUT NOW
ON BLU-RAY
TM

Available at

Free Super Saver Delivery and Unlimited One-Day Delivery with Amazon Prime are available. Terms and Conditions apply. See Amazon.co.uk for details. Amazon, the Amazon logo and Amazon.co.uk are registered trademarks of Amazon EU SARL or its affiliates.
40 | Sight&Sound | July 2018
 In a career steeped in Italian history, and
spanning more than half a century, Marco
Bellocchio’s by turns defiantly and slyly anti-
authoritarian films have been marked by a
mordant sense of authority’s enduring appeal
By Henry K. Miller

POWER
POLITICS
THE FILMS OF MARCO BELLOCCHIO
Jean Renoir’s dictum that “everyone really only makes
one film in his life” ought not to apply to directors as
shaped by Marxism as Marco Bellocchio. As the world
has changed over the more than 50 years of his career so
far, so should have the films. The themes of a late-career
peak like Dormant Beauty (2012) – the performance of
normality; the toll taken on those who can’t or won’t
achieve it, and the bad faith of those who do – are all
there in his first two films Fists in the Pocket (1965) and

© SIMONE MARTINETTO
China Is Near (1967). But this remarkable consistency is
itself a critique of a culture in stasis. For a time those first
two films seemed to have presaged the decade of revolu-
tionary high hopes that followed 1968; in a longer per-
spective – one which Bellocchio’s often self-referential DEATH WISH
oeuvre provides – they foretold its bitter end. Lou Castel as antihero
Produced outside the industry, with his brother’s Alessandro and Paola
Pitagora as his beloved sister
money, and in his mother’s house, Fists in the Pocket – a Giulia in Fists in the Pocket
story of fratricide, matricide, madness and incest in pro- (1965, left), the provocative
vincial Emilia-Romagna – was hailed by the critic Ken- debut of director Marco
Bellocchio (above)
neth Tynan as the most impressive debut since Jean-Luc
Godard’s. Indelibly played by Lou Castel, Bellocchio’s
antihero Alessandro seeks to kill himself and the rest of
his ailing family – even his beloved sister Giulia (Paola
Pitagora) – so that his better adjusted elder brother Au-
gusto might escape their grasp, marry his fiancée and
prosper in the new Italy of the economic miracle. Fists
still shocks, but it was especially controversial in 1960s
Italy, where the Christian Democrats, the dominant
party between 1948 and the early 1990s, stood for the pri-
macy of the family above all other loyalties. As Pauline
Kael noticed on the film’s arrival in New York, “the mate-
rial is wild, the direction cool and assured”, but Belloc-
chio’s ironic distance from a manifestly personal subject
makes the film all the more richly disturbing.
He wrote it in London, where he had come in
1963, that autumn joining the Slade School of

July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 41

MARCO BELLOCCHIO
Fine Art’s new film department, led by the veteran
director Thorold Dickinson. Bellocchio had gradu-
ated from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia,
the most prestigious film school in Western Europe, and
might otherwise have taken the conventional appren-
ticeship route to the director’s chair. Instead he chose
quite self-consciously to leave Italy to prepare his debut.
One’s first film, he wrote in his application, is a summary
“of a life still free from the tyranny of art”; but “only by
forgetting the nostalgia of a lost childhood can one find,
at the appropriate moment, the universal terms in which
to describe it without any subjectivity… in England I can
think about my life in Italy.” He proposed to write a thesis
comparing acting styles in Michelangelo Antonioni and
Robert Bresson, though what survives of the result, re-
cently discovered by Slade archivist Liz Bruchet, is far
from being a dry academic exercise.
Instead, it is a fascinatingly involved study of Anton-
ioni the man as much as the auteur, with elements of self-
portrait and self-projection. Having cited an article from
the Italian film magazine Bianco e nero from the time of
Il grido (1957) on Antonioni’s “closed, proud, miserable”
provincialism, Bellocchio writes that with L’avventura
(1960), Antonioni “goes outside his province, his moralis-
ing, his frustrations [and] becomes part of the world, inte-
grates himself, makes intimately his own the experience
of others”. In other words, Antonioni had finally brought
off, with his sixth feature, what Bellocchio wanted to do
with his first. Through a close reading of Antonioni’s
interviews – his words and his gestures – Bellocchio
identifies the process he himself sought to undergo:
the cinematographic rendering of “an autobiography
made up not of past experiences, but of the rhythms, the
tempos, the electrocardiograms of his life”.
Bellocchio’s obvious admiration for Antonioni’s abil-
ity to “classify his emotivity and set it into motion” is,
however, tempered by suspicion of its obverse, what he
calls Antonioni’s “absorbent condition”, his “desire to
42 | Sight&Sound | July 2018
remain in suspension, to preserve an absolute disponibil- The wave of
ity [openness] towards words and things”. For left-wing
critics such as Goffredo Fofi, with whom Bellocchio student protests
would later collaborate, the Antonioni of La notte (1961) began in Italy in
and L’eclisse (1962) represented the “ideology of ‘the end
of ideology’” – exquisitely melancholy, but finally too November 1967
“disponible” towards the coming technocratic society. and Bellocchio
Bellocchio’s second film, though as cool as his first,
would be no such thing. China Is Near (1967) is a mer- was instantly
ciless political satire in which an aristocratic professor, swept up by
again in Emilia-Romagna, is prevailed upon to stand as
a Socialist candidate in a local election – the Socialists events, taking
having been in coalition with the Christian Democrats, part in university
under the premiership of Aldo Moro, since 1963. In one
scene the professor explains to his Maoist younger broth- occupations in
er: “I might not believe in what I’m doing, but I continue Turin and Rome
doing it; therefore I believe it.” After the Maoists plant a
bomb in the Socialists’ office, he scolds him for not in-
stead bombing the Communists, “the official opposition
that doesn’t feel like opposing any more”. When China Is
Near was unveiled at Venice, where it won a joint prize
with Godard’s La Chinoise (1967), Bellocchio told Sight &
Sound that he sympathised with the Maoists – something
by no means evident from the film – but that “they don’t
represent any political force or alternative to the official
left wing parties”.
The wave of student protests and occupations which
culminated in Paris in May 1968 began in Italy only a
couple of months after Venice, in November 1967. One
of the first universities to erupt was Bellocchio’s alma
mater, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan,
a notable nursery of Christian Democrat politicians;
part of the protesters’ critique was that the centrality
PRIME TARGETS
of the family in Italian politics precluded collective (Clockwise from top left)
action. There was now no question of remaining in sus- Bellocchio’s films include
pension. Bellocchio was instantly swept up by events, China Is Near (1967), Good
Morning, Night (2003), Blood
and took part in university occupations in Turin and of My Blood (2015) and In the
Rome. In the summer of 1968, with Elda Tattoli, lead Name of the Father (1971)
 CITY LIGHTS
Marco Bellocchio wrote his 1965 debut ‘Fists in the Pocket’ in a
bedsit in Belsize Park, while studying at the Slade School of Fine
Art. He talks to Henry K. Miller about his time in London
After I earned my diploma at the Centro
Sperimentale di Cinematografia, in
1962, I went to London just to learn
English. I used to go to the National
Film Theatre [now the BFI Southbank],
and there I found out about the Slade
School of Fine Art’s film department.
Its chief lecturer Thorold Dickinson
was on good terms with the director of
the Centro Sperimentale. As a young
person at the Centro, I had had some
criticisms, for example towards its
excessive bureaucracy, but Dickinson
held the Centro Sperimentale in
high esteem, and consequently he
had a certain esteem for me.
During the summer of 1963, I
went to a college outside of London
[possibly at Dillington House, in
Somerset], and there I was able to
shoot a short; there you could not
only conceive, but also realise a short
film, do everything from A to Z within
those weeks. It’s a beautiful memory.
The short has apparently disappeared,
but it’s not a loss for mankind.
The Slade film department was not
a real school; it was four or five rooms,
a small group of students, and there
were meetings at home, and there
were dinners. It was not a situation
in which you are obliged to go, today,
to the lesson – no. We were very free.
There were classes devoted to editing,
analysing several aspects of film on an
editing machine, in particular a film by
Mr Dickinson himself, Gaslight [1940].
These sessions were very small, there
were three or four people maximum.
I was able to obtain a grant
through the Slade in order to write a
dissertation on this theme: Antonioni
and Bresson’s work with actors. It
allowed for me to travel, for example
to Paris, to interview Bresson, and
back to Rome, to interview Antonioni.
I am and I was a great admirer of
Bresson. He usually took on non-
professional actors. He didn’t use
improvisation in his films; he obliged
his actors to learn the part perfectly,
by heart. The target was for them
not to have any difficulty at the
© SIMONE MARTINETTO
moment of acting, in order to reach a
‘naturalness’, speaking as we speak
normally. Otherwise the actor, if he
has to improvise, or if he has to make
Marco Bellocchio
the effort to remember, loses this
natural reaction, this natural character
which we have automatically.
I wrote the first version of Fists in the
Pocket at the same time as I was writing
the dissertation – which I delivered
on time, though I don’t remember
whether they gave me a diploma.
Besides going to see many, many
films at the National Film Theatre,
another cinema that I went to very
frequently was the Academy Cinema
[in Oxford St], where I was able to
watch Italian films – I remember
watching a film by Patroni Griffi [Il
mare, shown in the spring of 1964, a
favourite of another Slade student,
Derek Jarman]. In London I also began
to discover British cinema, especially
Free Cinema, which was not much
known in Italy. And a very important
dimension of this discovery was to
access films in their original language,
because in Italy all films are dubbed.
I spent time with other Italians I
found in the city, who were working
in bars and restaurants, and learning
English. An important meeting during
that time, still outside of the Slade
School, was with Enzo Doria, with whom
I began to plan the production of Fists in
the Pocket. Enzo had studied acting at
the Centro Sperimentale, and appeared
as a paparazzo in La Dolce Vita [1960],
but had started to be interested in
production. We came back to Italy in
1964, at the end of spring, beginning
of summer, and began to prepare it.
The shoot began in January 1965.
With thanks to Carla Scura
and Loreta Gandolfi
actress and co-writer of China Is Near, he filmed a con-
tribution to the anthology film Love and Anger (1969),
himself playing – deliberately sarcastically – a reform-
ist lecturer whose class is overrun by Maoist students,
who then quote books at one another, including the
little red one: “We do not want war; but war can only
be abolished through war.” Shortly afterwards, Belloc-
chio collaborated in the making of two agit-prop films
for the Unione dei Comunisti Italiani (M-L), one of the
many groupuscules which emerged to the left of the
official Communists in these years.
As Paul Ginsborg writes in his A History of Contempo-
rary Italy, “the Italian protest movement was the most
profound and long-lasting in Europe”, spreading from
the universities into the factories and beyond. Belloc-
chio’s films from the 1970s, after his return to commer-
cial production, are attacks on institutions, sometimes
allegorical, sometimes direct: the church, represented
by a decrepit Jesuit boarding school in the quasi-auto-
biographical In the Name of the Father (1971), set in the
late 1950s; the right-wing press in Slap the Monster on
Page One (1972); psychiatric hospitals in the collectively
made documentary Fit to be Untied (1975); the military in
Victory March (1976), inspired by Bellocchio’s unhappy
period of national service in between making his first
two films; the cinema itself in the television documen-
tary La macchina cinema (1978), from the same collective
as Fit to be Untied.
None of these are optimistic. A common theme is the
allure of power, even among its victims. In the Name of
the Father is in part a reflexive parable about the limits
of political cinema, in which one of the boys devises a
play intended “to ridicule, with farcical overtones, the
hypocrisy of our religious institutions”, hoping that
the audience will “erupt into a liberating laugh”; the
priests instead are canny enough to applaud. His more
clear-sighted friend Angelo (Yves Beneyton), when he
eventually leads the students in revolt, offers only an ac-
commodation with technocracy; and whereas the priests
condescend to the boys – pliant, mediocre children of the
bourgeoisie – Angelo holds them in contempt. The most
dynamic character in Slap the Monster, a cynical editor
played by Gian Maria Volontè, would rather embrace the
role the system has allotted him than delude himself that
he can change it, on the grounds that “it’s better to write
consciously for a shitty newspaper than expect to save
your soul by biting the hand that feeds you”.
The end of the post-1968 period was registered in two
films, A Leap in the Dark (aka Leap into the Void, 1980) and
The Eyes, The Mouth (1982), in which Bellocchio again
“integrates himself”, goes beyond autobiography even
while referring directly to his own life and work. In the
latter, written with Catherine Breillat, the star of Fists in
the Pocket – played by Lou Castel, but not strictly “as him-
self” – returns from Rome to Emilia-Romagna after the
suicide of his twin brother. Himself accused by his uncle
(Michel Piccoli) of overacting his own grief, he tells his
brother’s faithless fiancée (Angela Molina), who refuses
to simulate the same emotion, that his brother wanted
to marry her only “because he had no ideas” other than
to conform. But while still at odds with his conservative
family, he finds scant solace in his career as a rebel for
hire, telling her: “I’ve become almost a caricature…
The years have gone by and nothing has changed.”
July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 43
MARCO BELLOCCHIO
None of
Bellocchio’s
films have had
the leaven of
Anglo-American
stars, and they
often demand
acquaintance with
Italian culture and
politics, and so
with Catholicism
ASTUDYINTYRANNY
GiovannaMezzogiornoas
BenitoMussolini’sloverIda
Dalser,whowasdisavowed
andinstitutionalised,along
withtheirillegitimateson,as
soonasthefuturedictator
camewithinsightofpower,
inBellocchio’sVincere(2009)
44 | Sight&Sound | July 2018
Bellocchio’s reckoning with the public dimen-
sion of the aftermath of 1968 came two decades
later, in Good Morning, Night (2003), a dramatisation of the
abduction and murder of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades,
in the spring of 1978, on the advent of the Communists’
‘Historic Compromise’ with the Christian Democrats.
For most of the intervening period, Bellocchio’s films had
fallen under the influence of the renegade psychoanalyst
Massimo Fagioli, eventually his screenwriter, and were
largely disengaged from political questions. The positive
legacy of their collaboration is a distinctive freedom with
flashbacks and fantasy, which has carried over into the
current phase in Bellocchio’s career, beginning with The
Nanny (1999). An adaptation of a Pirandello short story,
set around 1900, in which a doctor hires the illiterate
wife of an imprisoned revolutionary as a wet-nurse for
his children, The Nanny is a return to Bellocchio’s most
enduring theme – bad faith. “You express yourself with
love,” the doctor tells her at one point. “You don’t need to
learn how to write.”
The Nanny marked the screen debut of Maya Sansa, in
the title role, as well as Bellocchio’s first collaboration with
Daniela Ceselli as screenwriter; both returned for Good
Morning, Night. Told from the limited perspective of one
of Moro’s captors, who begins to lose her faith as negotia-
tions for his release drag on, the film’s conceit is that the
terrorist cell, for all its vaunted rejection of convention,
is a family, isolated from society no less than the family
in Fists in the Pocket, and with all the role-play that entails.
The role the terrorists proclaim for themselves, despite
their isolation, is that of the proletariat, making Moro less
a person than the personification of the idea of Christian
Democracy; but more deeply ingrained identifications
supervene. In one of the film’s comic scenes, Sansa’s char-
acter returns to her actual family for a memorial service,
and sees the older generation – now members of the pros-
perous middle class – singing communist battle anthems
of the resistance years, believing themselves still to be ad-
herents of the ideals which she and her comrades believe
themselves to be putting into practice.
Bellocchio returned to Italian history from a woman’s
perspective in Vincere (2009), also written with Ceselli, in
which Mussolini’s rise is seen from the point of view of his
lover Ida Dalser, who was disavowed and institutionalised,
together with their illegitimate son, as soon as Mussolini
came within sight of power. The film begins with the
future dictator – socialist, republican, anti-clerical – break-
ing ranks with his comrades and endorsing Italy’s entry
into the Great War with words that anticipate (or echo)
Mao’s: “This war will kill all wars.” Ida, played by Giovan-
na Mezzogiorno, keeps faith with Il Duce because, as his
first supporter, she helped make him what she believes
he has become; but while she rejects a sympathetic doc-
tor’s advice that “this is the time to be quiet, to be actors”,
in order to improve her lot, Mussolini himself, replaced
within the film by newsreel footage, becomes the ultimate
historical actor, abandoning his principles so comprehen-
sively that he even signs an accord with the Pope.
By apparent contrast, Dormant Beauty, Bellocchio’s next
major production, was set almost in the present – Febru-
ary 2009 – but the continuities, though inexact, are ines-
capable. Toni Servillo plays an ex-Socialist turned Forza
Italia senator who is leaned on to vote for Berlusconi’s
cynical anti-euthanasia law, against his vestigial con-
science; Isabelle Huppert, meanwhile, is an imperious ac-
tress whose greatest role will be that of a devout, self-
sacrificing mother to a daughter on life support. When she
tells a priest, in tears, “I don’t have faith, I act, I’m always
acting, even now,” he is unfazed; who isn’t? A psychiatrist
remarks of the politicians he treats: “If TV doesn’t call
them, that’s the tragedy... In front of the cameras, you’re a
character actor, not a walk-on.” Like the younger brother
in China Is Near making sure his reflection matches the
look of a Maoist poster, like Lou Castel going to see his
younger self on screen, like the terrorists raptly watching
the consequences of their actions play out on the news, the
characters of Dormant Beauty inhabit a hall of mirrors.
There is another kind of consistency to Bellocchio’s
career. His films have almost invariably premiered at
Cannes or Venice, the earliest of them belonging to a time
now mythologised by the former. Most have subsequently
come to the London Film Festival – but few have come
much further. More than a decade separates the British re-
lease of his debut, in 1966, from that of the next of his films
to win a release here, In the Name of the Father, in 1977. The
15 years since Good Morning, Night have seen a revival, but
even then Dormant Beauty was never picked up.
This may be accounted for by a second kind of consis-
tency – Bellocchio’s films are thoroughly Italian. The inevi-
table comparison is with his near contemporary Bernardo
Bertolucci, another son of Emilia-Romagna, whose Before
the Revolution (1964) belongs to the same moment as Fists
in the Pocket, but whose films have long been international
in scope, and have always had more to do with the nouvelle
vague and with Hollywood. In fact, at 78, Bellocchio is em-
barking on his most ambitious production to date, based
on the life of Mafia supergrass Tommaso Buscetta, with lo-
cations on three continents. But none have had the leaven
of Anglo-American stars, and they often, as with Dormant
Beauty, demand some acquaintance with Italian culture
and politics, and so with Catholicism – not infrequently
an awkward aspect of outwardly post-religious Britain’s
relationship with European film culture. The irony here
is that, as Bellocchio’s films have indicated, whether in the
cool 1960s, the hot 70s, or in his mellower current incarna-
tion, the hour of religion, no matter our pretensions to the
contrary, has not yet passed.
i
Aseasonoffilms,‘SatireandMorality:TheCinema
ofMarcoBellocchio’,playsatBFISouthbankandthe
CinéLumière,London,throughoutJuly.Aweekend
event,includinganonstageinterviewwith
Bellocchio,isatBFISouthbankon23-24June
CONNECT WITH
SIGHT & SOUND ONLINE
/SightSoundmag
@SightSoundmag
/sightsoundmagazine
bfi.org.uk/sightandsound
VANISHING
POINT
Debra Granik’s ‘Leave No Trace’, the tale of a teenager living
in the wilds of Oregon with her military veteran father, taps
into the pioneer spirit of the American past but emerges as a
product of our own times – a political film that sits alongside the
work of directors such as Kelly Reichardt and So Yong Kim
By Ryan Gilbey
46 | Sight&Sound | July 2018
They’re called the flyover states. Originally a term for the
maligned and neglected bits between the east and west
coasts of America, it has come to mean pretty much any-
thing that isn’t New York on one side or California on the
other. They’re in the middle of the country but if they
were food you’d push them to the side of the plate. If they
crop up at all in news reports or popular culture, it is usu-
ally because they have contributed to an electoral upset
(see 2016) or an unlikely media phenomenon, such as
the recent hit revival of the blue-collar – and now Trump-
cheerleading – sitcom Roseanne. In popular music they
have been invoked as a reminder of the wholesome, au-
thentic or true. The Talking Heads song ‘The Big Country’
finds David Byrne’s snooty but secretly envious narrator
gazing from his plane window at the “shapes I remember
from maps… I guess it’s healthy, I guess the air is clean/ I
guess those people have fun with their neighbours and
friends.” In ‘Fly over States’, the country singer Jason
Aldean is also up in the clouds looking down, eavesdrop-
ping on businessmen who disparage those “little towns
with funny names/ Who’d want to live down there in the
middle of nowhere?” before putting them right: “I bet
that mile-long Santa Fe freight train engineer’s seen it all/
Just like that flatbed cowboy stacking US steel on a three-
day haul.”
If a post existed for poet laureate of flyover cinema,
there would be several contenders, all of them female.
The most established is Kelly Reichardt, who has shown
in a series of finely detailed rural studies a curiosity about
lives, desires and communities commonly hidden from
view. Wendy and Lucy, her 2008 ode to Italian neorealism,
transposes elements of Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Umberto
D. (1952) to an economically depressed milieu of petrol
station forecourts, vacant lots and bottle depots where
homeless people queue to get cash for trash; the sound
design by the innovative Leslie Shatz conjures mythic
music out of rattling boxcars and honking freight trains.
The situations in Reichardt’s films may change – from
an anti-Bonnie and Clyde yarn (River of Grass, 1994) to
a buddy movie (Old Joy, 2005) and a tentative romance
(Certain Women, 2015) – but the revealing and painstak-
ing loyalty to the realities of poverty are consistent. It is
felt most strongly in her parched western Meek’s Cutoff
(2010), which trails three families inching across the
Oregon desert by foot and wagon in 1845. “I wanted to
give a different view of the West from the usual series
of masculine encounters and battles of strength, and to
present this idea of going west as just a trance of walk-
ing,” Reichardt told me. “Some of the actors were saying
the most intense thing for them was when they left at the
end and flew over the area we’d been filming in. It took
two minutes – whoosh! – and they were over it, whereas
they’d just spent a month walking across it.”
The work of the Korean-American director So Yong
Kim is moderately sweeter, less gritty, though a similar
inclination to venture far from the beaten track charac-
terises films such as For Ellen (2011) and Lovesong (2016),
both of which hinge on road trips.
Somewhere between these two approaches sits Debra
Granik. The 55-year-old former documentary-maker
is best known for Winter’s Bone (2010), the Ozarks-set
fairytale-cum-neo-noir starring Jennifer Lawrence, whose
performance as a young woman searching for her crys-
tal-meth-cooking absentee father launched her career.
Finding diamonds in the rough is one of this director’s
specialities. Her addiction drama Down to the Bone (2004)
gave Vera Farmiga her breakthrough role, while Granik’s
latest film, Leave No Trace, does the same for the 17-year-
old New Zealander Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie, who THE CALL OF THE WILD es in favour of a clear, authoritative realism which permits
is bewitchingly wide-eyed as Tom, a girl living wild in the Thomasin Harcourt the tensions between father and daughter, wilderness and
McKenzie as Tom (opposite,
parks of Oregon with her father, Will (Ben Foster), an Iraq top), a girl living wild in the civilisation, to emerge organically with a minimum of
War veteran who gets by selling his PTSD meds. parks of Oregon with her narrative prodding or encouragement. The squirrel-skin-
Parent and child are fully off the grid. (An early alter- father Will, played by Ben ning scene in Winter’s Bone showed Granik’s commitment
Foster (top), in Leave No
native title for the picture was ‘Ways of Disappearing’.) Trace, directed by Debra to the detail of everyday rural life but there is nothing so
When they do have to venture into towns or cities, they Granik (above) baldly eye-catching in Leave No Trace. Where the earlier
use ‘grey man’ techniques to blend in, and even a simple film ended with a dead man’s hands being removed by
supermarket jaunt has an air of rigour about it. (“‘Want’ chainsaw, this one concludes with a walk in the woods,
or ‘need’?” asks Tom, inspecting the chocolate bar her albeit one loaded with meaning. Granik should take it as
father has placed in the trolley. “Both,” he replies.) Will a compliment that one review from Sundance this year
home-schools Tom, only they have no conventional chided the film for its lack of “ticking-clock suspense” and
home to speak of, setting up camp wherever they can “marketable hook”. This is storytelling so hushed and at-
out of sight of the authorities. Regular drills help prepare tentive that Tom’s discovery of a silver seahorse pendant
them for an ambush but they can’t prevent one. And in the mud, or her acquisition of a pair of plastic horses,
when the inevitable does occur, Will and Tom’s lifestyle count as tiny detonators of dramatic poignancy. Granik’s
is subjected to scrutiny and suspicion. During a brief frugal approach is something she shares with Reichardt,
stopover in a children’s home, another teenager asks who observed of her own work: “I feel like a lot’s being said
Tom why she has been taken into care. “I wasn’t where all the time, it’s just not in dialogue.”
I was supposed to be,” she says. Portraying this world sincerely and without conde-
As suggested by the title – which alludes simultane- scension was never going to be a problem for Granik. (She
ously to Will’s fastidiousness, the seven principles of adapted the screenplay with Anne Rosellini from Peter
small-footprint ethical living and the social invisibility of Rock’s factually inspired novel My Abandonment.) Where
people like Will and Tom – issues of nonconformity are at she had to tread carefully was in challenging the sort of
the core of the movie. The same subject has been treated anti-government, right-wing, survivalist connotations
as zany, in Matt Ross’s facile comedy-drama Captain Fantas- that tend to surround these characters in news reports or
tic (2016), or mined for political content, as in Sidney Lu- in novels such as T.C. Boyle’s 2015 The Harder They Come.
met’s Running on Empty (1988), or harnessed to apocalyptic “What the film had to almost toil against was this idea
horror, as it was in John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac of ‘survivalism,’” she explains. “This more nefari-
McCarthy’s The Road (2009). Granik avoids all those cours- ous, clandestine movement that is sometimes

July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 47

DEBRA GRANIK LEAVE NO TRACE
in service to militia or to apocalyptic worst-case
scenarios. I tried very hard to differentiate in the
film between that and what Will’s lifestyle represents
for him, which is more about philosophy and primitive
skills.” For that reason, it is important that Tom is found
to be educationally advanced when she is tested by child
protection services. “This is not the Western equivalent
of the Taliban. Will has not been subscribing to a restric-
tive or dogmatic philosophy. He would like Tom to be
worldly. And he has more guidance over what his child
learns and when she learns it than probably anyone else
on the planet. He can say, ‘Okay, today it’s comestible
herbs or foraging or solar.’ It’s very far from the nonlin-
ear digital culture, these massive pipelines of informa-
tion going into the heads of ten-year-olds, dumping all
this unfiltered material on to a small person’s hard drive.”
The film is torn between admiring Will’s approach and
lamenting the isolation it imposes on his daughter. A
sense of patience and watchfulness suffuses the camera-
work, as though Granik is trying to pinpoint that elusive
moment when conscientiousness begins to curdle. The
mood is not sinister, as it is in Reichardt’s eco-terrorism
thriller Night Moves (2013) and the line between idealism
and insanity nowhere near as starkly delineated as in Peter
Weir’s film of Paul Theroux’s spoiled-paradise novel The
Mosquito Coast (1986). It’s more contemplative than either,
as suggested by those occasions when characters express a
desire to do “the right thing”. Would that it were that easy.
While no explicit mention is made of the current tem-
pestuous climate in the US, Leave No Trace is still a highly
political work. But is it a product of its times or of Amer-
ica more generally? “It’s all related to this cycle we have
in my country,” Granik says. “We have these devastating
wars in which large groups of men, and now women too,
are left with a long-term imprint on their minds, bodies
and consciences, and we like that to go away pretty
quickly. Cultural amnesia is very strong in this country.
We can deal with the headlines and suicide statistics for
about two or three years and that’s it. But research shows
there’s a balloon payment for many people who try to
drink or drug or work it away. There’s still a lot to reckon
with long after anyone wants to hear about the fallout.”
Within the American character there is an undeniable
element of yearning and romanticism, manifested most
strongly in Thoreau’s Walden and the transcendentalist
movement, and tied also to the pioneer spirit. But Granik
is careful not to idealise that. “It comes in big waves. Some
of it is indeed yearning and some is the brutal vicissi-
tudes of capital. There’s been an unprecedented number
of Americans living on federal lands, some for very
gnarly reasons to do with drugs and alcohol but others
ousted on an economic level. They’d lived in mountain
towns in the middle of the country, some of which had
48 | Sight&Sound | July 2018
I spent a student
year in Edinburgh
and ended up
being informed
by these Scottish
Marxists during
the Miners’ Strike.
So the filmmakers
that influenced me
were Alan Clarke
or the ‘kitchen
sink’ tradition
POSTCARDSFROMTHEEDGE
DebraGranik’sWinter’s
Bone(2010,above),Kelly
Reichardt’sWendy and Lucy
(2008,belowleft)andSo
YongKim’sFor Ellen(2011,
belowright)
become rarefied resorts, and now these workers could no
longer afford to live in the towns they serviced. I would
call them economic fugitives. They work 40 hours and
they can’t afford to live. And in a society where self-worth
and identity are predicated on material acquisition, we’re
left with a very brutal measurement of what it means to
be successful.”
Granik insists that she doesn’t feel anomalous in either
her concerns or methods. “There’s a strong neorealist
tradition that comes through most commonly in the
documentary world,” she says. “It’s there that you can
find this search for survival and what it means to live
in a complex, convulsive country with bizarre layers of
mythology. They’re hard to penetrate because we deny
the existence and prominence and day-to-day impact of
social class. You have to cut through a lot of tall grass to
see what’s really there.”
Even outside documentary, this century has not
been short of examples of US neorealist cinema, from
films such as Frownland (2007), Ballast (2008) and Sugar
(2008) to the more calculated work of Ramin Bahrani,
including Chop Shop (2007), Goodbye Solo (2008) and 99
Homes (2014). (He has also recently completed a version
of Fahrenheit 451 for HBO starring Michael B. Jordan.) It
was in A.O. Scott’s New York Times overview of ‘Neo-Neo
Realism’ in 2009 that Bahrani asked himself: “Why re-
alism?” Pondering that question now in relation to her
own career, Granik sounds clear about the path she has
chosen, or which chose her.
“I happened to spend a student year abroad in Edin-
burgh and ended up being informed by these Scottish
Marxists. It was during Thatcher, the Miners’ Strike,
the whole fricking thing. So the filmmakers that influ-
enced me, that cut into me deeply, were Alan Clarke or
the ‘kitchen sink’ tradition. I like to know about how
people live their lives without fame or glamour. Plenty
of people take on the subject of material wealth, high
stakes money, big pharma, big everything. I wondered:
‘Aren’t there supposed to be some of us who are assigned
the beat of everyday life?’ You know – the ordinary lives
of everyday Americans. That’s what I signed on for be-
cause that’s where my wonder goes. I get enough intel on
celebrity culture. I don’t get enough on how you survive
when you’re not on Easy Street.”
i
Leave No TraceisreleasedinUKcinemas
on29Juneandisreviewedonpage67
 DISCOVER 80+ YEARS
OF UNIQUE FILM
CRITICISM & COMMENT
Pay by
Direct Debit (UK)
and get a
12 MONTHS PRINT+DIGITAL EDITION*
FREE
BFI DVD

+ £50*
£75
(UK)

(WORLDWIDE)

12 MONTHS DIGITAL EDITION

£35 (UK/WORLDWIDE)

COMPLETE ONLINE ARCHIVE

FREE WITH ALL SUBSCRIPTIONS

80+ YEARS OF SIGHT &

SOUND AND MONTHLY
FILM BULLETIN

Image: Call Me By Your Name – voted one of the best films

of 2017 by Sight & Sound © 2017 Frenesy Film Company bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/subscribe
SRL and La Cinefacture SARL. All Rights Reserved.
Available now on Blu-ray & DVD. +44 (0) 20 8955 7070
 2 for £25
on Criterion
Blu-rays
Choose from
over 40 titles

ORDER FROM
BFI MEMBERS ENJOY
On selected stock until 17 June only. Offer available online and in-venue. Online purchases exclude P&P. AN ADDITIONAL 15% OFF

98 Journal of Film
Journal of Film Preservation
04.2018 Preservation The Journal of Film Preservation is published
twice a year by the International Federation
of Film Archives (FIAF). It offers a forum for
both general and specialized discussions on all
theoretical, technical and historical aspects
of moving image archival activities. Articles
are written in English, French or Spanish, with
summaries in the other two languages.

PURCHASE THE CURRENT ISSUE,

OR SUBSCRIBE TO THE JFP
1-year subscription (2 issues): 40€ + shipping costs
2-year subscription (4 issues): 70€ + shipping costs

www.fiafnet.org

Dedicated to the preservation of, and access to,

the world's film heritage since 1938
81 Whitney
Rather than revel purely in her tragicomic status, ‘Whitney’
highlights the less publicised tragedy of a woman denied
ownership, or rather authorship, of her own image, and
so in many senses doomed to the imagination of others

52 Films of the Month 58 Films 82 Home Cinema 92 Books

July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 51
FILMS OF THE MONTH
Vicious circle: Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s film follows two brothers returning to the commune where they were brought up after their mother’s death
The Endless
USA 2017
Directors: Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead
Certificate 15 111m 40s
Reviewed by Anton Bitel
Spoiler alert: this review reveals a plot twist
Bound as it is by its linear shape as a feature
film, The Endless comes with a beginning and
an ending, which it marks formally with
introductory text and closing credits. Yet from
the outset the film conjures its central idea of
endlessness by plunging us in medias res. When
we first meet its principal characters, Justin
(played by writer-director Justin Benson) and
his brother Aaron (co-director and director of
photography Aaron Moorhead), they are stuck
in a repetitive rut that has already lasted many
years – a seemingly inescapable cycle of low-paid
jobs and social disconnection in the city, as they
struggle to meet their rent, or indeed any girls
they don’t quickly frighten off. They have been
playing this broken record for a decade, ever since
they fled ‘Camp Arcadia’ – the rural commune
52 | Sight&Sound | July 2018
that took them in as children after their mother’s
death in a nearby car accident. Justin insists
that Arcadia was a “UFO death cult”, whose
brainwashed members were castrated and suicide-
bound – but the younger Aaron, sex-starved and
lacking much will to live, remembers Arcadia
only as a childhood idyll, and longs to return to
its fresh food, open air and sense of community.
Right at the beginning of The Endless, a
mysterious videotape – not unlike the ones in
David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) and Michael
Haneke’s Hidden (2005) – is delivered to the
brothers’ doorstep, with an ambiguous recorded
message from one of the Arcadians, Anna (Callie
Hernandez), heralding a coming “ascension” and a
“round trip”. One glimpse of the camp again – and
of pretty Anna – and Aaron is hooked like the fish
he used to enjoy catching. Justin is more sceptical,
but reluctantly agrees to take his brother back
to see their former adoptive ‘family’ – if indeed
they are still alive. Both quickly sense, though,
that the collective’s hippieish membership
may after all be right and that there really is
something out there, watching over anyone who
has strayed into this zone across the decades –
something ineffable but palpable that is trying
to bring about Justin and Aaron’s eternal return.
The Endless opens with a quote from H.P.
Lovecraft concerning “fear of the unknown”
– programmatic for a film involving an
observant, aerial entity that is never seen, let
alone understood, and whose essence various
characters struggle to articulate without resorting
to obscure metaphor or mystic mumbo jumbo.
Yet the quotation is also, for anyone who has
been following Benson and Moorhead’s shared
career in transgressing genre boundaries and
contemplating death, something of an in-joke. For
while it became a cliché among critics to describe
their previous collaboration, the tentacular
romance Spring (2014), as ‘Lovecraftian’, the
filmmakers themselves protested their complete
ignorance of the author and his works at the time
they made the film. Now, it seems, they – and
we – have come full circle, and Lovecraft, once
denied as an influence, has been retroactively
woven into the texture of their films.
I use that plural advisedly here, because not
only do all Benson and Moorhead’s films share
the theme of everyday experience brought into
 The directors use elements physics for a wild spin and entraps everybody
within the fixed if flexible parameters of their
from their other films, and even own narrative trajectory. In other words, The

FILMS OF THE MONTH

Endless is a science fiction and monster movie
their own physical identities, that deals with psychological, theological and
to construct a very personal, metaphysical matters – and is meta in other
respects too, given that it reflects on storytelling
‘Marienbad’-like play box itself, in all its inexhaustible cyclicality.
The finale may seem escapist, but Justin and
stories who is (like the all-seeing viewer) always Aaron only end up heading right back to where
just beyond the screen’s frame – and it is a film we first found them, having got away from
whose characters (two of whom are played by Arcadia for the second, and therefore perhaps not
the actual writer and director) are in search of an the last time, as they perform their own rather
author. “You want to know what it is that runs all complicated figure-of-eight circuit through a life
this?” asks Arcadia resident Hal (Tate Ellington) that keeps resetting itself. Benson and Moorhead
at one point. “A higher power, a governing use elements from their other films, and even
force, God, infinity solved?” Hal’s own quest to their own physical identities, to construct a very
nail down the invisible, alien macguffin that personal, Marienbad-like play box. In it, they toy
overlooks the camp and its environs is conducted with big ideas about human imperfection, about
through the medium of a thorny mathematical tales whose characters’ agency comes heavily
formula, while fellow campers Tim (Lew Temple), circumscribed, and about our awe and angst,
Shane (Shane Brady) and Lizzy (Kira Powell) try defiance and despair, in the face of otherness and
to get at it through perfecting, respectively, the implacable, inscrutable authority. The results, all
art of beer brewing, illusionism and painting. at once witty and weird, ask us to gaze into the
Justin must do battle with his inner control abyss, and then to gaze again, ad infinitum.
freak, learning to cede the steering wheel if not to a
supreme being, then at least to his brother. Aaron,
meanwhile, is on a nostalgic search for his barely
remembered mother. “Oh, the boobs!” he declares
with boyish recognition, as he and Justin drive
past two distinctively domed silos on their way
to Arcadia and, this side of the camp’s perimeter,
to a roadside memorial for their mother. Aaron’s
is a return to the nourishing bosom, making it
only natural that he should be drawn to Anna,
the woman who looked after him as a child and
who now – impossibly – seems to be the same age
as him. Naive Aaron sleeps with Anna, without
having sex with her, finding in her a comforting
substitute for his deep, unresolved sense of
maternal loss. And in a climactic scene that is at
once end and beginning, he will finally meet his
mother/maker head-on in a time-confounding
vehicular collision, becoming the driver of his
own tragedy even as he leaves it forever in his trail.
What the brothers, increasingly confused
and terrified, find on their twin quests are tales
within tales and circles within circles, in a
paradoxical landscape that takes spatio-temporal Lost highway: Benson, Moorhead

confrontation with mortality (and its monstrous

Credits and Synopsis
opposite), but also turn out to occupy the same
universe, expressly unified by a common pool
of characters recurring – in dialogue or onscreen Produced by Justin Benson Companies Cast Shane Brady In Colour
David Lawson Jr Aaron Moorhead Snowfort Pictures Aaron Moorhead Shane [2.35:1]
appearances – across their apparently different Justin Benson Production Designer presents in Aaron Kira Powell
storylines. The Endless has a particularly close, Aaron Moorhead Ariel Vida association with Justin Benson Lizzy Distributor
Thomas R. Burke Original Music Love & Death Justin David Lawson Arrow Films
albeit involuted, connection to the filmmakers’ Leal Naim Written & Productions and Pfaff Callie Hernandez Dave
feature debut Resolution (2012). Much as the Written by Performed by & Pfaff Productions Anna Emily Montague
Justin Benson Jimmy LaValle a Moorhead & Lew Temple Jennifer Danube
two movies’ very titles serve as a sort of call and Director of Sound Mixer Benson film Tim Peter Cilella
response, the earlier film’s characters – Mike Photography Bryn Hubbard Executive Producers James Jordan Mike Danube
Aaron Moorhead Robert E. Pfaff ‘Shitty’ Carl Vinny Curran
(Peter Cilella), his wife Jennifer (Emily Montague), Edited by ©Arcadian Film Frederick A. Pfaff Chris Daniels
Tate Ellington
his friend Chris (Vinny Curran) and Chris’s Michael Felker Production Hal
memorably named acquaintance Shitty Carl Los Angeles, the present. Seemingly stuck in a cycle watching and toying with the Arcadians. Informed by
(James Jordan) – all make a return here, still of menial jobs, Justin and his younger brother Aaron Hal, one of the other residents, that the ‘Ascension’ is
locked in their own endless cycles of dysfunction, receive a mysterious video message from the rural coming, Justin tries to leave the camp, but gets lost.
even as the looping scenario of The Endless runs community that raised them as children after their He learns from angry loner Shitty Carl that everyone
circles around their stories, before crashing mother was killed in a car accident, and which they fled in the area is trapped in endless loops of varying
a decade ago. Justin reluctantly accompanies Aaron duration by an observing, story-loving entity. Justin
headlong into them. It is as though Benson and
on a trip back to ‘Camp Arcadia’, whose residents – a goes to the cabin of meth addict Chris to get a gun for
Moorhead’s disparate experiments in genre are in ragtag collective including a beer brewer, a former Carl, and meets Mike there; attempting to end his and
fact recycling motifs and characters to elaborate psychiatric patient, a magician-in-training and a Chris’s loop, Mike sets fire to the cabin. Justin finds
one complex, overarching campfire myth. frustrated mathematician – seem not to have aged Aaron (sent by Hal) and, disorientated, they return
The Endless is, like Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation since the brothers last saw them. While Aaron feels to the camp, where the Arcadians’ loop is violently
(2015) and Philip Gelatt’s recent They Remain, a at home and hangs out with Anna, a resident who restarting. Reconciled, the brothers drive away from the
looked after him as a child, Justin has a series of odd destructive ‘higher power’, colliding head-on with their
cult film about a cult. It is also a story about an experiences that lead him to believe there is something mother’s car on their way out.
obsessive, otherworldly collector of recordable

July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 53

 The Happy Prince
FILMS OF THE MONTH

Germany/Belgium/Italy/United Kingdom 2018

Director: Rupert Everett

Reviewed by Philip Kemp

“I am dying beyond my means.” Even on his
deathbed, succumbing to the effects of tertiary
syphilis at the age of 46 in a dingy Paris hotel,
Oscar Wilde could not resist another sardonic
epigram. Rupert Everett, in his magisterial
triple role as writer, director and star, catches
this theatrically self-mocking aspect of the
flamboyant littérateur almost from the start.
When a fight breaks out in a seedy Rive Gauche
café-cabaret, Wilde calms the audience by
mounting the stage and performing, in a ripe
falsetto, a spirited rendition of Marie Lloyd’s
music-hall hit ‘The Boy I Love Is up in the
Gallery’. Not for him the torpid melancholia
of another doomed gay expat, Gustav von
Aschenbach in Death in Venice (1971) – though
we get a nod to Visconti’s film when Wilde
wistfully watches youngsters on a Normandy
beach. (Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony
provides an aural through-texture for The Happy
Prince, much as Mahler’s Fifth did for Visconti.)
These English youngsters, though, are far less
meltingly passive than Aschenbach’s adored
Tadzio. Recognising Wilde, they aggressively
pursue him and his two friends through the streets
of Dieppe, yelling abuse at him until, at bay in a
church, he turns on them and drives them off. But
this brings on memories of the most humiliating
and degrading moment of his downfall, when,
sentenced to two years’ hard labour for ‘gross
indecency’ (ie, having sex with men), he was Days of being Wilde: Colin Morgan as Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas and Rupert Everett as Oscar Wilde
forced to sit for half an hour handcuffed on the
platform at Clapham Junction en route to Reading Bosie exactly the same thing with the names title: his moralising tale of a swallow and a
Gaol, being mocked and spat on by a jeering swapped over. Never missing a chance to self- golden statue who sacrifice themselves to
crowd. Everett underlines the precipitous disaster dramatise, he tells a gaggle of young French bring succour to the poor and needy. The film
of Wilde’s fall by intercutting this grim scene with poets who come to fête him in Dieppe how opens with Wilde’s narration of the story in
the spectacle of the playwright, only three years moved he is that “these tender buds of French thin, whispering tones – the voice we will hear
earlier, addressing the delighted audience after art should find their way to this desert outpost when he is approaching death – which then
the premiere of Lady Windermere’s Fan. (Their in order to welcome and raise this bruised and segues into his stronger, younger voice as in
response, he tells them, “persuades me that you trampled life from the slough of despond”. (The flashback he tells the story to his two young
think almost as highly of the play as I do myself”.) speech is delivered in French, which admittedly sons. Later, we’ll see him narrating it in French
More than once, Everett makes telling use makes it sound marginally less flowery.) to the two Parisian street kids he picks up.
of montage to remind us of Wilde’s dramatic Wilde’s more sentimental aspect plays out The version of the story he tells diverges a
backstory. When, after his tour de force in the story from which the film borrows its little here and there from its published text, to
rendition of ‘The Boy I Love’, he staggers and falls
unconscious on the floor of the Paris cabaret,
we get a rapid series of vignettes: that first-night
triumph; the judge at his trial censoriously
passing sentence; the vindictive smile on the face
of his nemesis, the Marquess of Queensberry,
father of his lover Lord Alfred Douglas (‘Bosie’);
Wilde on arrival at Reading Gaol, having his head
brutally shaved; and finally slumped in his cell,
his hairless head in his hands in utter despair. Yet
while inviting our pity for the wretched victim,
it is to Everett’s credit that he doesn’t gloss over
Wilde’s darker side – not so much his ‘purple
moments’ with street urchins or handsome
Italian waiters as his wilfully self-destructive
urges. “Why does one run towards ruin?” he asks
himself. “Why does it hold such fascination?”
Even more unattractive is Wilde’s fickle delight
in playing off one lover, the faithful Robbie
Ross (Edwin Thomas, making an impressive
feature debut), against another, the arrogant
Bosie (Colin Morgan). Having woundingly
told Robbie, “Bosie loves me, Robbie, in a way
that you will never understand,” he then tells Wilde tales: Morgan as ‘Bosie’ Douglas and Everett as Wilde

54 | Sight&Sound | July 2018

 time – taking lead roles in An Ideal Husband
(1999) and The Importance of Being Earnest (2002)
and playing the man himself on stage in David

FILMS OF THE MONTH

Hare’s The Judas Kiss. (“The performance of
his career,” judged the Guardian.) Now, as the
writer in terminal exile, features increasingly
ravaged by absinthe and disease, Everett gives a
richly grandstanding performance that makes
previous onscreen portrayals (Peter Finch,
Robert Morley, Stephen Fry et al) seem pallid by
comparison. Still, if you can’t grandstand when
you’re playing Oscar Wilde, when can you?
This does mean, though, that the rest of the
cast, which includes Colin Firth as Wilde’s
friend Reggie Turner, Tom Wilkinson as his
deathbed priest and Emily Watson as his
estranged wife Constance, don’t get much of a
look-in. In particular it would have been good
to see more of Watson, who in her relatively
brief screen time movingly hints at the tension
between Constance’s abiding affection for
Wilde and her resentment at his betrayal of her.
“He’s hurt you too, hasn’t he?” she asks Robbie.
But this is Everett’s film first and last, and any
limitations he reveals as a tyro director, such as
slightly too much fondness for shaky handheld
shots, scarcely register beside the impact of his
passionately full-blooded performance.

Rupert Everett, in his magisterial

triple role as writer, director and
star, catches the theatrically self-
mocking aspect of the flamboyant
littérateur almost from the start

enhance its relevance to Wilde’s own situation. Credits and Synopsis

As printed: “I see a young man in a garret… In a
tumbler by his side there is a bunch of withered
violets. He is trying to finish a play… but he is
Producers Corporation, In association with Concorde Filmverleih Cast Monsieur Dupoirier
Sébastien Delloye Tele München, Raindog Films Supported by Belfius, Colin Firth Ronald Pickup
too cold to write any more.” In Everett’s script Philipp Kreuzer Proximus, RTBF Supported by Wallimage, screen. Reggie Turner judge
Jörg Schulze (Télévision belge) FilmFernsehFonds brussels, Ministero Emily Watson Matteo Salamone
this becomes, “At a table sat a broken man… He Written by Production Bayern, German dei Beni e delle Constance Wilde, Léon
was a writer, but he was too cold to finish his Rupert Everett Companies Federal Film Fund Attività Culturali e del ‘Constance Holland’ Antonio Spagnuolo
Director of BBC Films presents DFFF, German Turismo - Direzione Colin Morgan Felice
play.” And there, of course, is Wilde at a Paris café Photography in association with Federal Film Board Generale Cinema, John Standing
Alfred Douglas, ‘Bosie’
table, beside an array of empty absinthe glasses. John Conroy Lions Gate UK, FFA, Eurimages, Film Commission Edwin Thomas Dr Tucker
Editor Movie Management Tax Shelter of the Regione Campania Benjamin Voisin
Here, as in a few other places, the film feels a Nicolas Gaster Corporation, Daryl federal government of Executive Producers
Robbie Ross
Jean
Rupert Everett
touch plonky. There’s a clumsy moment when, Production Designer Prince Productions, Belgium, La Wallonie, Azim Bolkiah Oscar Wilde Tom Wilkinson
preparing to leave Naples after Bosie has departed, Brian Morris Casa Kafka Pictures Centre du Cinéma et Connie Filippello Franca Father Dunne
Music/ Movie Tax Shelter de l’Audiovisuel de la Ged Doherty Abategiovanni Julian Wadham
Wilde glances despondently out of the window Orchestrated by empowered by Fédération Wallonie- Colin Firth Felice’s mother Mr Arbuthnott
only to see Vesuvius obligingly erupting. And Gabriel Yared Belfius, Zielke, Strat Bruxelles, Région de Andreas Zielke Alister Cameron
Sound Mixer & Go International Bruxelles-Capitale, Sébastien Delloye Mr Howard In Colour
to cap this, the figure of his wife Constance, Dirk Bombey a maze pictures Italian Tax Credit Christine Langan Anna Chancellor [2.35:1]
whom we last saw awaiting a spinal operation Costume Designers and Entre Chien et In association with Joe Oppenheimer Mrs Arbuthnott Part-subtitled
Maurizio Millenotti Loup production in BBC Films, Lions Gate, Zygi Kamasa Béatrice Dalle
in Heidelberg, now appears to him; the next Gianni Casalnuovo co-production with Movie Management Nick Manzi Distributor
manager café concert
morning, all too predictably, a telegram arrives Palomar, cine plus Corporation, Daryl Thorsten Ritter Tom Colley Lionsgate UK
©maze pictures, Filmproduktion, Tele Prince Productions, Dirk Schürhoff
announcing her death. Earlier in this Neapolitan Entre Chien et Loup, München Gruppe, Casa Kafka Pictures, Herbert G. Kloiber
Maurice Gilbert
Johanna Kirby
sequence the comedy turns over-broad. The Palomar, British Proximus, RTBF Zielke, Strat & Go Markus Zimmer nurse
hotel proprietress, furious that Wilde, Bosie, Broadcasting (Télévision belge) In co-production with André Penvern
her son and other comely young men may be
Paris, 1900. Oscar Wilde, living in exile from England former lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, known as ‘Bosie’. Bosie
entertaining hookers, is mollified and all smiles after his release from Reading Gaol, visits a local meets Wilde at Rouen station, and they travel together
when she discovers it’s merely a gay orgy. cabaret with street kids Jean and Léon. When a fight to Naples. Learning of this, Wilde’s estranged wife
Still, these are relatively minor weaknesses breaks out, he pacifies the audience by performing a Constance cuts off his allowance. Bosie’s mother does
in a film that conveys a strong sense of song, then collapses. likewise. Wilde and Bosie live it up in Naples, enjoying
personal commitment – to the story, and to its May 1897. Released from jail, Wilde travels to Dieppe, erotic sessions with the local youths. But the money
contemporary relevance. “Homosexuality wasn’t where he is met by his friend Robbie Ross. At the hotel, runs out, and Bosie departs after a quarrel.
where Wilde checks in under the name Sebastian Wilde settles in Paris, living in cheap hotels. He
even a word before Oscar Wilde, and it certainly Melmoth, they’re met by another friend, Reggie Turner. meets the teenage Jean, whom he pays for sex, and
wasn’t a thing that was discussed by society as Some young French poets arrive to pay homage, and his younger brother Léon. Constantly in debt, Wilde
a whole,” Everett has said. “And in 100 years… Wilde hosts a riotous dinner. This causes the hotel becomes a familiar figure in the city’s cafés and
we’ve gone from a man who was assassinated manager, who has discovered Wilde’s true identity, to cabarets. News comes that Constance has died. Wilde’s
for his sexuality to where we stand now, and ask him to leave. Wilde and his friends move to another health deteriorates. In November 1900, as Wilde lies
hotel along the coast. In the town they’re harassed dying, Robbie summons a Catholic priest to perform
we should take heart from that, because Oscar by some loutish young Englishmen, but Wilde drives the last rites. At the funeral, Robbie punches Bosie and
is the beginning of that journey.” Everett has them off. Against Robbie’s advice, Wilde contacts his storms off.
circled around the character of Wilde for some

July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 55

FILMS OF THE MONTH
Apocalypse now: Xavier Tchili as Lek in Andrew Kötting’s film, inspired by a play about a real-life Russian child who lived with a pack of dogs in Moscow
Lek and the Dogs
United Kingdom 2017
Director: Andrew Kötting
Certificate 15 92m 4s
Reviewed by Ben Nicholson
French actor Xavier Tchili first played a character
named Lek for Andrew Kötting in the 2001 film
This Filthy Earth. A reimagining of Emile Zola’s
1887 novel La Terre by way of John Berger’s Pig
Earth, it channelled Bosch and quoted the Polish
surrealist filmmaker Walerian Borowczyk in a
familial tragedy of myth, mud and madness. In
it, Lek was a foreign farm labourer, an observer
and scapegoat (“Away, darky! Away!”) who was
ultimately unable to convince a young woman
to escape her plight. Tchili played another Lek
in Kötting’s Ivul (2009), this time the mute
servant to a family whose exiled son vows never
to touch the ground again, living on rooftops
and in trees; in that film, Lek occupied the roles
of voyeur and would-be protector, though
again his efforts were in vain. In the Sight &
Sound review of Ivul, a reference was made to
a mooted third appearance from Tchili as Lek.
If This Filthy Earth was about people living on
56 | Sight&Sound | July 2018
the soil, and Ivul about someone living above it,
Lek was next to venture underground. Almost a
decade later, he does exactly that in the science
fiction-inflected tragedy Lek and the Dogs.
Both of the previous films in this loose
‘Landworks’ trilogy are about people trapped
on the margins and tied to the land, struggling
to survive. Kötting could hardly have found a
more fitting source of inspiration for a third
instalment than Hattie Naylor’s 2010 play Ivan
and the Dogs. Lek had occupied a position on the
fringes of the earlier films but takes centre stage
here, replacing the eponymous Ivan. The play was
based on the true story of Ivan Mishukov, who
spent two years living on the streets of Moscow
as a feral child with a pack of dogs. On stage, the
story was relayed in a monologue by an older
Ivan, accompanied by ‘soundscapes’ and projected
imagery that brought memories crashing into the
present. All of this makes it a perfect jumping-off
point for Kötting’s typically singular new work.
The focus on a social outcast allows him to
push Lek to the furthest periphery yet, while
the play’s own multimedia texture prefigures
the filmmaker’s employment of various visual
and formal techniques that blur recollection,
imagination and warped psychology. The narrative
itself is relatively easy to follow, presented in
linear fashion from Lek’s flight from the family
nest, aged four, through his time with the dogs,
his capture by the authorities and his adulthood.
However, both visual and audio channels are
composed of several different streams that
intertwine, resulting in a dense tapestry of
meanings around an ostensibly straightforward
tale. Chapter titles appear regularly, offering
a rabbit hole of interpretation by quoting, or
alluding to, philosophers such as Montaigne and
Emil Cioran, writer W.G. Sebald and modernist
poet Basil Bunting. Abstract archival footage,
newsreels and home movies commingle with
empty landscapes and Tchili’s strange, sad,
absorbing performance. Voiceover commentary
punctuates a symphony of echoing confession, as
Lek speaks to the camera, is heard via recordings
or listens to tapes of himself as a child – and all the
while distorted screams interject from the past.
The most striking of these layered component
parts is the post-apocalyptic framing that is
unique to the film, shot in the Atacama Desert.
Tchili wanders a barren landscape, initially
naked and scrambling on all fours, later clothed
and on two feet, as a minimalist electronic score
emphasises the ruin. This is a desolate future that

The trauma of Lek’s childhood
keeps clawing at him even when
he has discovered contentment.
The dogs will be with him always
Sand and freedom: Tchili’s Lek in a desert wasteland which was filmed in the Atacama Desert in Chile
Lek inhabits, one in which he is forced to spend at him even when he has discovered some form of
much of his time ‘underland’. In this shadowy contentment. The dogs will be with him always.
subterranean home, he is recording his testimony Another observation from Moore argues that
FILMS OF THE MONTH
to the camera, like an artfully composed talking time is a solid in which everything is occurring
head in a documentary. “I don’t remember simultaneously. In this model, linear time is
everything because I was so small,” he admits, just our experience of passing through the solid.
in an apparently gibberish approximation of Moore asserted something similar in Kötting’s
Russian. The real Ivan was able to relearn human Edith Walks (2017), and the collapsing of time was
language when he returned to society, but Lek also employed in By Our Selves (2015). These films
has been more deeply altered by his experiences, saw the respective spirits of Edith Swan Neck
it seems. Various other voices are heard over (Claudia Barton) and John Clare (Toby Jones)
footage of the arid Chilean landscape, offering summoned to transcend chronology and join
expert opinions on the implications of Lek’s Kötting and his compatriots on contemporary
experience. These voices – listed in the credits pilgrimages through a psychogeographic
as a ‘body psychotherapist’, ‘child psychologist’ British landscape. In these films, place acts as
and ‘animal behaviourist’ – all stress the import a unifying point through which the solid can
and permanence of what he learned on the street. effectively be traversed in multiple directions
Even if he wanted to forget, Lek will carry his dogs simultaneously. In Lek and the Dogs, these events
and their instincts with him. A number of the are linked with the neurological networks of
landscape shots that accompany these diagnoses “a disrupted mind”. A polarised image of tree
prominently feature the animals – including dogs branches flashes on the screen, and we again
– that still inhabit the otherwise lifeless environs. hear the abusive holler of Lek’s stepfather.
Lek shares their will to survive, and eventually The film ends with a Eugene O’Neill quote:
reveals that this saw him abandon his wife and “There is no present or future, only the past,
child to escape the impending, disastrous end happening over and over again, now.” And Lek
of civilisation; they would not come with him. walks away across the Yorkshire landscape
In a separate voiceover, frequent Kötting at the end of This Filthy Earth. And Lek
collaborator Alan Moore – credited as ‘wizard and abandons his incantations and his master to
eternalist’ – talks about planetary and individual the flames at the end of Ivul. And Lek wanders
destruction, speculating that they are perhaps between gravestones, tied to the earth but
the same thing. He posits that we encode one on never its people, and longs for his dogs.
to the other because the end of the world is easier
to comprehend than the end of our individual Credits and Synopsis
lives. There is suddenly a crack in the reality of
Lek’s post-apocalyptic survival in the suggestion
Produced by The BFI presents a Black Dog
of a conflation with personal demise. The extent Nick Taussig Salon production Sarah Lloyd
to which the audience is, in fact, witnessing Paul Van Carter of an Andrew voice of body
Words Kötting film psychotherapist
the internal workings of Lek’s own psyche Hattie Naylor Made with the Antonia Beamish
becomes a valid question. Visual glitches that Andrew Kötting support of the voice of child
Inspired by the BFI’s Film Fund psychologist
had seemed to be purely genre embellishment stage play Ivan Executive Schneider
now suggest psychological strain. “I think back and the Dogs by Producers voice of animal
Hattie Naylor Lizzie Francke behaviourist
to everything,” says Lek, “no longer certain of Director of Ian Berg Alan Moore
what I can remember, but I relive and revisit the Photography Christopher voice of wizard/
past… Maybe I have changed some of it.” As the Nick Gordon Smith J. Reynolds eternalist
Editor
horrifying sound of Lek’s abusive stepfather barks Andrew Kötting In Colour and
through time at him, an unwanted connection Music Cast Black & White
Jem Finer Xavier Tchili Part-subtitled
is formed. Lek’s abandonment of his own young Sound Recordings Lek
family suggests the instigation of a terrible Nick Gordon Smith Clay Barnard Distributor
cycle. Thinking back to This Filthy Earth and Ivul, Andrew Kötting voice of Lek as
a young boy
HOME Artist Film
we are compelled to focus on his ostracisation ©Salon Workshop Catherine Tchili
and inability to save those he cares for – in this Limited/The British
Film Institute
Mina
Anamaria Marinca
instance hamstrung by his unshakeable canine
knack for self-preservation at all costs. The
Production
Companies
voice from radio
Kobi McCannon
tragedy and trauma of his childhood keep clawing
A devastated landscape, the near future. Lek roams
an abandoned terrain, sometimes naked and on all
fours, at other times clothed but dazed. Hiding in the
dark, he listens to recordings made by himself as a
child; using these as prompts, he relates the story of
his life among the dogs on the Moscow streets.
His story begins at a time of deprivation, with
families struggling to find enough food. Despised by
his stepfather, Lek runs away from home. He tries to
follow other street children into an underground lair,
warmed by pipes, but they shun and subsequently
beat him. Lek feels threatened by older vagrants and
other adults, seeing safety only among the dogs.
The dogs are wary of Lek, but when a man attempts
to hurt him, they come to his aid and he joins their
pack. Voiceover excerpts provide context for Lek’s
developing psychology and attachment to the dogs.
Lek lives with the dogs for several years, surviving
as best he can, until he is caught by the authorities
and the dogs are slain. Back in civilised society, Lek
is adopted by a woman whose generosity teaches
him that people can be kind. Despite finding love and
having a child of his own, Lek ultimately flees back
underground, abandoning his family to survive.
July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 57
 All the Wild Horses
United Kingdom 2017
Director: Ivo Marloh
Certificate 15 93m 10s
Reviewed by Hannah McGill
From Trigger to Seabiscuit to the recent Lean
on Pete, the horse has proved itself the most
REVIEWS
cinematic of creatures. Like the most beloved
movie stars, onscreen horses compel by
embodying contradictory qualities – power
and vulnerability, tenderness and destructive
potential – while their intimate interconnection
with the history of human warfare and industry
makes them a source of both pride and guilt.
Quite possibly the influence of cinema – the
romance it has attached to wide-open spaces,
the rugged machismo with which it imbues
solitary riders and calmers of wild beasts – is
part of the draw of an event like the Mongol
Derby, the punishing 1,000km endurance
race depicted in this documentary. One rider
sets out in the hope that galloping across the
world’s second-largest landlocked country on
one of its indigenous wild horses will provide
him with “an amazing spiritual experience of
an otherworldly place”. What the film goes on
to show us, however, is a little more prosaic: a
cross between promotional material for a high-
end extreme sport and a competitive reality-TV
show, without that much attention given to the
horses themselves, the local people who look
after them, or the landscape they command.
“You definitely need to be either brave or
stupid,” declares one rider, Paul, before the
race begins. You also need to be well off: the
cost of entry isn’t specified in the film, but
this year it’s almost $13,000. Whether it’s
“brave”, exactly, to pay an enormous amount
of money to do something very dangerous to
yourself is another matter entirely. Paul falls
and breaks his collarbone almost immediately.
Another rider punctures a lung and fractures
her pelvis. Someone else fractures his neck.
A horse is injured and is put down.
Amid all these incidents – to which medical
and veterinary professionals are of course
summoned across vast distances – we don’t see
much that’s spiritual or otherworldly. We do
experience some striking attitudes, however,
such as that of fund manager Simon, a white
South African who is struck by the fact that
there is a black South African in the race.
Mongolians, he asserts, will be “intrigued” by
the sight of a black man, while for the black
rider himself, Mongolia will be “like going to
the moon”. Then there is American competitor
Devan, robbed of victory in a previous year by a
Credits and Synopsis
Producers Martilo Pictures In Colour
Darcia Martin presents a 3rd-i [2.35:1]
Ivo Marloh Films production
Filmed by A film by Ivo Marloh Distributor
Ivo Marloh in association with Guerrilla Films
Cinematography Guerrilla Films,
Michael J Sanderson The Adventurists,
Ivo Marloh Twickenham Studios
Edited by
Executive Producers
Ivo Marloh Anthony Ward
Music Thomas
Christopher Barnett Marcus Browning
Location Sound David Nicholas
Kevin Augello Wilkinson
Sunny Vohra
©3rd-i Films Andrew Boswell
Production
Companies Dolby Digital
58 | Sight&Sound | July 2018
Steppe on it: Devan Horn
veterinary penalty for overtiring her horse, and
still upset – not about the damage to the animal,
you understand, but about the not winning.
This is what Devan says about how she chooses
a horse: “If he has a ‘fuck you, let’s go’ look in
his eye, and fire in his heart, and I can see it, and
connect with it, I’ll pick him.” This is how we see
Devan choose a horse: she asks the Mongolian
guide which is the fastest and takes the one
he points to. Subsequently she succumbs to
heatstroke, and persistently phones her father
back in the States to tell him how sick she is.
If the filmmakers were aware that these
individuals might come across as a little spoiled
or sheltered, it doesn’t show. The whole piece has
the oblivious, boastful sweep of an advert, and a
clear agenda to promote the race – it’s anxiously
asserted, for instance, that the horse fatality is the
first since the race was launched in 2009, “a great
record although a very sad day”. But low numbers
of equine deaths aside, it’s hard to tell what is
meant to be particularly inspiring or meaningful
here. And it’s harder still not to wonder what
people with this much money, energy and
bravado might be able to achieve if they set their
sights on a project with a more public-spirited
agenda behind it than “fuck you, let’s go”.
A documentary about the Mongol Derby, a 1,000km
horse race based on the postal service established
by Genghis Khan in the 13th century. It is the longest
event of its kind in the world. Riders must master
semi-wild horses and over ten days must negotiate
the challenging terrain of the Mongolian Steppe.
On the first day, two competitors suffer injuries and
are forced to leave the race. American rider Devan,
who is determined to win after a narrow loss in a
previous year, sees victory slip away again when heat
exhaustion gets the better of her. A further competitor
falls face-first and fractures his neck. Two Irish riders,
Donie and Richie, take the lead. A horse is found to
have a badly broken leg and is put down – a first in
the history of the race. Donie is the eventual winner.
Arcadia
United Kingdom 2017
Director: Paul Wright
Certificate 12A 78m 30s
Reviewed by Trevor Johnston
After the critical buzz generated by Scottish
filmmaker Paul Wright’s first feature, For Those
in Peril (2013), a striking, hallucinatory piece
about a survivor’s grief after a tragedy at sea,
it’s perhaps a surprise that his follow-up is a
found-footage collage on the theme of the British
landscape. But in fact the two films make quite
a pair, sharing much thematic and stylistic
kinship, and it’s refreshing to see a talented
young director following his muse rather than
taking the career-building route into high-
profile drama that might have been expected.
While For Those in Peril blended a social-realist
rendering of life in a Scottish fishing town with
a mesmerising visualisation of its protagonist’s
disintegrating interior state, Wright’s textural
use of numerous film stocks and his personal
approach to editing (highlighting the potency of
unexpected transitions) are given even freer rein
here. Since he evidently relished having the run
of the National Archive to plunder documentary
and fiction-feature footage from the silent era
onwards, we never know quite what’s coming
next. What unfolds is an exhilarating (if perhaps
slightly exhausting) audiovisual journey through
shifting perceptions of our native landscape.
“Once upon a time in the heart of the British
countryside,” runs the opening voiceover, over
a startling image of a sinister shadowy figure
looming above broken soil; the narrator goes
on to describe a “fair maiden” who is followed
everywhere by “a great darkness”, until a dream
reveals that “the answer to her problems lay
within the land around her”. The words are
Wright’s own, one of the few sections of voiceover
not lifted from an existing source, and hence a
thematic key to the whole undertaking – one
that, incidentally, almost immediately chimes
with a similar device in For Those in Peril, where a
mother’s tale of the devil lurking at the bottom
of the sea sets the tone for the story. In both
instances, what drives the proceedings is an
anxiety about something malign in land or
ocean – a vivid flip side to the sort of pantheistic
euphoria that Terrence Malick, for instance,
has been channelling in his latter-day output.
Given its otherwise gritty depiction of bored
small-town youth and dead-end jobs at a fish-
processing plant, For Those in Peril demanded
a leap of faith from the viewer to buy into this
underlying notion, but the defining idea proves
a better fit here. Assailing us with a torrent of
images and a potent, multifaceted score from
Adrian Utley and Will Gregory of avant-rock
bands Portishead and Goldfrapp, Arcadia
effectively works the audience into a kind of
reverie, making us more open to perceptions
beyond familiar rationalist or religious
worldviews. This kind of collage cinema isn’t
perhaps the best place for precisely delineated
arguments but, driven by fast-cut highs picturing
bacchanalian liberation and contrasting
moments of doomy frisson in pixellated images
of surviving folk traditions, its cumulative impact
takes us out of ourselves into an altered state
somewhere between waking and dreaming.
The seasoned cinephile, of course, will try to
spot the provenance of the clips, but that turns
out to be a fool’s errand, since the wealth of
 Avengers Infinity War
USA 2018
Directors: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo
Certificate 12A 149m 9s

Reviewed by Kim Newman

The interconnectedness of Marvel Comics’
universe has been a distinguishing mark of the

REVIEWS
publisher since the water-vs-fire battle of the Sub-
Mariner and the Human Torch in Marvel Mystery
Comics #8-9 (1940). In the early 1960s, writer Stan
Lee and artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko (among
others) revived Marvel’s key characters – bringing
Kirby’s WWII icon Captain America back to life,
for instance – and invented a new range of bizarre,
flawed heroes. The so-called Marvel Universe
evolved quickly, predicated on the notion that
each of the publisher’s titles was set in the same
world. Huge, all-in crossovers became customary
with Fantastic Four Annual #3 (1965), where pretty
much every Marvel hero and villain showed up at
the wedding of Mr Fantastic and the Invisible Girl.
Since Jon Favreau’s Iron Man (2008), Marvel’s
cinema arm has been patiently merging its
output on this model, forced to work around
the inconvenience of not owning the film
rights to some of its core characters. Each film
has been salted with elements of a larger plot,
which is finally tied together in this epic space
opera. It’s not so much a crossover as a mosaic,
and it sets out – among other impossible
tasks – to shuffle the colourful, light-hearted
hijinks of James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy
films and Taika Waititi’s Thor: Ragnarok with
the angstier, despairing, politicised tone of
the Russo brothers’ Captain America sequels,
Spiral eyes: Arcadia while at the same time reconciling the science-
fictional and magical worlds of Iron Man,
material – and the velocity with which it leaps a fair amount of bouncy vintage naturist footage Black Panther, the Hulk and Dr Strange.
at us – pretty much demands that we go with and seeming propaganda images enshrining The macguffin bringing it all together is the
the flow. There’s always something fascinating a bucolic ‘Merrie England’ of mock Tudor and Infinity Gauntlet, added to the Marvel Universe by
on screen, from early cinema ethnography of cricket on the village green. Wright must be writer Jim Starlin, creator of the groove-chinned
English country life to some choice 1970s TV commended for avoiding the obvious, and while purple thanatophile Thanos. The gauntlet
reportage (the woman who has had her pet his intriguing choices retrieve the likes of Kevin imposes a plot structure that’s like something
poodle stuffed is desperately sad, shamefully Brownlow’s Winstanley (1975), David Gladwell’s out of a 1940s serial – such as The Adventures
amusing and unexpectedly disturbing all at once), Requiem for a Village (1976) and Chris Newby’s of Captain Marvel, which featured a different
Anchoress (1993) from the margins of British Captain Marvel from the character whose
Credits and Synopsis cinema history, the expansive archive survey future screen debut is teased here – whereby a
on view here is ultimately in thrall to his own villain has to get hold of the components of a
overall design. Hence dividing chapters lay out superweapon over many chapters. The heroes
Producer in association Mark Bell
John Archer with BBC and BFI Mary Burke both the liberating and chastening aspects of fight valiant battles and escape from various
Editor National Archive Clara Glynn rural life, before suggesting how urbanisation perils, until a final chapter in which the great
Michael Aaglund with Crossover Ross McKenzie
Music Labs and Common has distanced us from our previous affinity gadget is unleashed but the villain thwarted.
Composed by Ground a Hopscotch with the land, while scientific footage of natural This is the scheme of Infinity War, up to a point
Adrian Utley Films production With regeneration tops and tails the proceedings where it breaks radically with convention.
Will Gregory Supported by the Ian Sexon
Sound Palette National Lottery Laura Rennie to express the cyclical potential of renewal. With so many characters – not just headline
Dario Swade through Creative voices
Scotland
Overall, it’s weirder and gnarlier than, for heroes, but also their supporting casts – to be
©Peavor Limited/ Creative Scotland In Colour and example, Penny Woolcock’s 2012 national found room for, it’s no surprise that this is an
The British Film BBC Scotland Black & White portrait From the Sea to the Land Beyond, though extra-long instalment of the franchise, and a
Institute Made with the [1.78:1]
Production support of the not perhaps as compact and purposeful as few lines have to be thrown in to account for
Companies BFI’s Film Fund Distributor Benedikt Erlingsson’s splendid combination of absences. A peril of crossover comics, evident
BFI and Creative Executive BFI Distribution
Scotland present Producers spectacle and social history in 2015’s The Show in some of Starlin’s cosmic trips, is that no
of Shows, among relatively recent rival found- one gets to carry the story, and sheer vastness
A feature-length collage themed around the
British people’s relationship with the land, using footage features. Where it really scores, though, makes for page- or screen-filling spectacle that’s
found footage from documentaries and dramas is in Wright’s instinctive, somewhat Lynchian simultaneously amazing and uninvolving.
from the silent era onwards, as well as television feel for the unexpectedly disturbing quality that After so many films and with some of
archive. Bucolic images of country life show how seemingly benign images of soil or folk costumes the canniest casting on record, Marvel has
the notion of a green arcadia remains strong in take on when they are slowed down or magnified. managed to create screen versions of its
the national consciousness, yet the film suggests
that this perception masks darker aspects such
Meanwhile, Utley and Gregory deploy string heroes so vivid that the recasting common in
as rural poverty, the traditions of hunting and the quartet, analogue synths and a vocal ensemble the Batman or Spider-Man franchises would
survival of various seemingly pagan rituals and to create a musical tapestry that wouldn’t have be a real problem. Whenever the universe-
festivals. The film uses a cyclical form, returning been out of place in a Stanley Kubrick film. spanning storyline threatens to flag or become
to images of growth and regeneration, proposing It’s all a bit wiggy and woolly, but there’s schematic, there is always some neat character
that a balanced relationship with the land should
an authentic and highly personal artistry at interplay – especially in the quadrant
accept both the light and dark within it.
work here that’s surely to be cherished. of the action teaming Robert Downey

July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 59

 Boom for Real
The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat
USA/Greece/France/Portugal 2017
Director: Sara Driver

Reviewed by Nick Pinkerton

The subtitle of Sara Driver’s documentary
– ‘The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel
REVIEWS

Basquiat’ – suggests an ultra-focused look at a

very specific stage in the creative development
of its subject. The film delivers more than a
little of this, but as it proceeds it gives an equal
amount of scrutiny to the years in question
and the place where Basquiat spent them.
Driver, partner of filmmaker Jim Jarmusch,
lived in New York’s Lower East Side at the same
time as Basquiat, moved in the same circles, and
draws on a large group of common acquaintances
for her interviewees here: there’s Jarmusch
and author Luc Sante from the white hipster
set, Al Diaz and Fab 5 Freddy speaking for the
burgeoning graffiti scene, and a smattering of
Multiple choice: Tom Holland, Robert Downey Jr, Dave Bautista, Chris Pratt, Pom Klementieff friends and ex-girlfriends. Basquiat, naturally,
can’t speak for himself, having died in 1988
Jr’s Iron Man, Benedict Cumberbatch’s with sequels in development for characters who at the age of 27, and so is by necessity a sort of
Dr Strange, Tom Holland’s Spider-Man seem to be permanently written out in a tragic structuring absence in the film – a practical
and Chris Pratt’s Star-Lord in a contest of male finale that’s also an old-fashioned cliffhanger. necessity that Driver emphasises for effect. He
ego and geekery – that allows a seam of Marvel The weight of ten years’ worth of Marvel films is present both in the form of work from the
humour to survive in a fairly genocidal (and, requires screen time for fan-favourite characters/ period under discussion, much of it culled from
in its implications, genre-ocidal) sea of story. performances and plot threads giving each the collection of confidante Alexis Adler, and in
Elsewhere, Thanos – emoted by Josh Brolin, something to do: Thor’s quest to get a new a bounty of filmed footage and photographs, but
augmented by CGI – strains to be the villain hammer, Bruce Banner’s spat with his Hulk alter his voice is never heard – a decision that gives
the saga merits, with one great moment (tears ego, Steve Rogers’s outlaw status. Not all have him a mythic, phantom-like quality. Photographs
sliding into the grooves on his face) but too the space to tie up carried-over plots, and some illustrate the naturally grave air of the Artist
much standing about speechifying. A situation regulars – Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow, as a Young Man, his striking looks accentuated
whereby a self-sacrificing goodie begs a loved one Sebastian Stan’s Bucky – barely get a look-in. by a succession of provocative reshapings of
to kill them to save the universe recurs so often On this scale, soap opera and comedy skit his hairline; while on film he appears an antic
it seems lazy repetition rather than a theme. bytes can only go so far, and Infinity War presence, sprinting through the desolate streets
Given that the plot motor is Thanos’s manages a succession of double-page-spread of the Lower East Side like Alice’s White Rabbit,
worry that the universe is overpopulated, sly awe that sells the cosmic saga: a marvellous dashing off cryptic sloganeering graffiti so quickly
self-awareness is shown as the filmmakers trompe l’oeil shot as a camera move reveals the that the letters run – a no-no among professionals.
embrace drastic solutions to the problems of sorry state of Thanos’s rebel adoptive daughter Often, however, Driver’s deceptively ambling
braiding multiple franchises into one – though Nebula, the by-now-obligatory mass urban documentary loses sight of Basquiat entirely,
some jiggery-pokery with Dr Strange’s time- destructions and battles with monster hordes digressing to discuss the larger scene of which
juggling amulet (and Cumberbatch’s knowing on open planes, and gorgeously imaginative he was a part: the gathering-places Club 57 and
line readings) suggest any shocking plot outer-space vistas. Kudos also for the witty/ the Mudd Club and their drugs of choice; the
developments can be rolled back later, especially chilling envoi: “Thanos will return.” renegade arts scene largely disdained by the
Soho establishment; the rundown flops where
Credits and Synopsis you crashed on floors while living by your wits
and trying to get something, anything, going.
As Basquiat wends in and out of the narrative
Produced by Daniel Laurie Cast Tom Holland ‘Winter Soldier’ Josh Brolin
of the Lower East Side, you have a sense almost
Kevin Feige Costume Designer Robert Downey Jr Peter Parker, Idris Elba Thanos
Screenplay Judianna Makovsky Tony Starl, ‘Iron Man’ ‘Spider-Man’ Heimdall Chris Pratt of knowing him as many at the time seem to
Christopher Markus Stunt Co-ordinator Chris Hemsworth Chadwick Boseman Danai Gurira Peter Quill, ‘Star-Lord’
Stephen McFeely Sam Hargrave Thor T’Challa, ‘Black Okoye have done, as a peripatetic figure prodded on
Based on the Marvel Mark Ruffalo Panther’ Peter Dinklage Dolby Atmos by a hunger for success, fleetingly everywhere
Comics by Stan ©Marvel Bruce Banner, Zoe Saldana Eitri In Colour
Lee, Jack Kirby Production Gamora Benedict Wong [2.35:1]
while always on his way to somewhere else. As
‘The Hulk’
Director of Company Chris Evans Karen Gillan Wong IMAX prints: Driver presents him, he is both peripheral to
Photography Marvel Studios Nebula Pom Klementieff [1.9:1]
Trent Opaloch presents
Steve Rogers,
Tom Hiddleston Mantis
this scene and something like its apotheosis.
‘Captain America’
Edited by Executive Producers Scarlett Johansson Loki Dave Bautista Some screenings Boom for Real is Driver’s first directorial
Jeffrey Ford Louis D’Esposito Natasha Romanoff, Paul Bettany Drax presented in 3D effort since 1993’s When Pigs Fly, and this is
Matthew Schmidt Victoria Alonso ‘Black Widow’ Vision Vin Diesel
Production Designer Michael Grillo Don Cheadle Elizabeth Olsen voice of Groot Distributor an extended absence to be regretted, for her
Charles Wood Trinh Tran Colonel James Wanda Maximoff, Bradley Cooper Buena Vista 1986 feature Sleepwalk announced a unique,
Music Jon Favreau Rhodes, ‘War Machine’ ‘Scarlet Witch’ voice of Rocket International (UK)
Alan Silvestri James Gunn Benedict Anthony Mackie Gwyneth Paltrow fully formed sensibility, lending a touch of
Supervising Stan Lee Cumberbatch Sam Wilson, ‘Falcon’ Pepper Potts fairytale fancy to downtown decrepitude
Sound Editors Doctor Stephen Sebastian Stan Benicio Del Toro
Shannon Mills Bucky Barnes, The Collector
– Driver’s outlook is essentially a romantic
Strange
one, as Jarmusch’s has revealed itself to be in
his late, heart-on-sleeve works. A little of the
Believing the universe overpopulated, Thanos is of Titan, Thanos’s home world, a group led by Tony
collecting six infinity gems – powerful objects scattered Stark (Iron Man) battles Thanos, but Strange eventually same sense of grimy enchantment is sprinkled
throughout the cosmos – to enact a plan of genocide. surrenders his gem. In the African nation of Wakanda – over Boom for Real, which gains piquancy
The gems’ guardians include Earth’s Sorcerer Supreme where his minions have died in battle with Steve Rogers from well-chosen period tunes (the Pagans’
Stephen Strange and the synthezoid the Vision. While (Captain America), King T’Challa (aka Black Panther) ‘Street Where Nobody Lives’, for example)
gathering the gems, Thanos and his minions come into and an army of heroes – Thanos collects the Vision’s and a trove of top-shelf archival footage.
conflict with many heroes and their allies. Thanos also gem. He uses the combined power of all six gems to
has to sacrifice the only person he loves, his adopted kill half the universe. In New York, spymaster Nick Fury
The result isn’t a major film – the artist
daughter Gamora, to gain one of the prizes. In the ruins sends a distress signal to the universe’s last hope… documentary being almost by its nature
adjacent or supplementary to art, rather than

60 | Sight&Sound | July 2018

 The Boy Downstairs
United Kingdom/USA 2017
Director: Sophie Brooks
Certificate 12A 90m 31s

Reviewed by Pamela Hutchinson

With The Boy Downstairs, writer-director
Sophie Brooks has crafted a crisp and appealing

REVIEWS
romantic comedy, albeit one in a familiar vein.
Her film takes place in Brooklyn, or rather a
placid, tastefully dressed and well-lit space we
might call Nora Ephron-land. While it has a
little in common with recent female-written-
and-directed millennial urban comedies
such as Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture (2010),
Gillian Robespierre’s Obvious Child (2014)
and Desiree Akhavan’s Appropriate Behaviour
(2015), here the edges are all sanded down.
The only spikiness that remains is in the keen,
humorous dialogue, expertly handled by
lead Zosia Mamet, and the deft way the film
frequently undercuts genre expectations. Ex and the city: Zosia Mamet, Diana Irvine
Mamet plays Diana, a twentysomething writer
struggling with her first novel, who returns to Diana, a characterisation far from her gauchely
New York after three years in London on some effusive Shoshanna in Girls. As with many a male
Boy wonder: Jean-Michel Basquiat unspecified professional development mission. lead in a romantic comedy, Diana’s emotional
We’ve already been warned by the first of several flaw is a failure to commit – here it is Ben who is
a freestanding work in itself – but it is at ease flashbacks that before she left for London she the torch-carrier, set on achieving marital bliss.
in its unassuming approach, cherishing its broke up with her boyfriend Ben, so it’s a shock Diana receives a bruising critique of her draft
subject while avoiding the clichés of Great Man to her to discover that he is her new downstairs novel halfway through the film: the friendships
hagiography. Perhaps Driver felt the need of her neighbour. The building they share is a spacious, are well drawn but the romantic lead is a blank.
late, famous friend’s assistance in returning to elegantly renovated brownstone, overseen While it’s true that Ben (Noah Baumbach stalwart
filmmaking after all these years; it’s to be hoped by a maternal, endlessly supportive landlady, Matthew Shear) is fairly enigmatic, this is as
that she’ll be working on her own again soon. widowed former actor Amy. Here Diana, who stark a description of Diana’s emotional life as
supports her writing by selling wedding dresses you could hope for. She has a marked facility for
Credits and Synopsis to snotty rich girls in an upscale boutique, and female friendship, exemplified by her honest
musician Ben live out their days dressed in relationship with her landlady and also her fierce
expensive-looking neutrals, with plenty of time attachment to her sharp and very likeable best
Produced by Productions Wild Style (1983)
Sara Driver presents in Permanent to dwell on their romantic entanglements. The friend Gabby (an excellent comic performance
Rachel Dengiz association with Vacation (1980) most helpfully fantastical element, however, is by Diana Irvine). Tellingly, Diana expresses
Director of Faliro House, Le
Photography Pacte, Leopardo In Colour that no one is glued to their cell phone, which is more jealousy over Gabby finding a new female
Adam Benn Filmes, Bunny [1.78:1] partly why any and all emotional heartpourings pal than the discovery that the same woman
Edited by Lake Films a Hells
Adam Kurnitz Kitten production Distributors
must be performed out loud, preferably in public. is also Ben’s new girlfriend. It’s only a shame
Sound Mixers A film by Sara Driver Modern Films It could all go horribly, indulgently wrong, that Gabby’s storyline dissolves so swiftly.
Dennis Rainaldi Executive Munro Films
Drew Joy Producers
and yet The Boy Downstairs has enough wit and The flashbacks to Ben and Diana’s former
Christos V. intelligence to keep everything on the right track. relationship are the plums here, a series of
©Hells Kitten Konstantakopoulos Ultimately, it’s funny, engaging and even moving. romantic and comic set pieces spilling over
Productions, LLC Jean Labadie
Production Paulo Branco The credit for this must largely go to Brooks’s into the more tentative present-day storyline.
Companies Film Extracts Sauvignon-crisp script, essaying a fine sardonic By combining both strands, The Boy Downstairs
Hells Kitten Downtown 81 (2000)
sense of humour, but much is also due to Mamet’s succeeds as a winning romance and very
introspective, brittle performance as wisecracking promising feature debut from Brooks.
A documentary exploring the early career of the
artist Jean-Michel Basquiat in New York in the late
1970s. In a bankrupt and crumbling city, a cluster Credits and Synopsis
of outsiders and artists congregate in the rundown
Lower East Side. Interviewees who experienced the
scene first-hand include filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, Produced by production Shannon Brooklyn, present day and four years before. Aspiring
David Brooks A Motion Picture Peter Oliver novelist Diana returns to New York after three years
writer Luc Sante, graffiti artist Al Diaz, gallerist Dan Clifton Capital production Julian
Diego Cortez and Jean-Michel Basquiat confidante Producer Executive Producer Theo Stockman away. After finding a suitable apartment, with a landlady
Alexis Adler, whose collection of ephemera from the Leon Clarance Paul Brooks Elliot called Amy, she is mortified to discover that her ex-
period is drawn on extensively. The interviewees, Written by Jaime Fernandez boyfriend Ben is her downstairs neighbour. Flashbacks
whose testimonials are mixed with vintage archival Sophie Brooks delivery man tell the story of their relationship from their first date
Director of Cast Fabrizio Brienza
and meeting each other’s parents to their break-up.
footage, describe a downtown scene centred on Photography Zosia Mamet waiter
the Mudd Club and Club 57, and recall the arrival Stephan Weinberger Diana Carolyn McCormick Ben is hostile to Diana at first; his new girlfriend
of precocious Haitian-Puerto Rican teenager Edited by Matthew Shear mother is Meg, who warns Diana to stay away from him. One
Basquiat. Diaz discusses his creation, with Basquiat, Matthew Friedman Ben Doug Trapp night, Ben and Diana go to the theatre. Ben says
Production Designer Deirdre O’Connell doctor that he has split up with Meg and kisses Diana, but
of the graffiti persona ‘SAMO’, a tag that Basquiat Meredith Lippincott Amy Arliss Howard
eventually took for his own. As uptown graffiti, Music by/Score Sarah Ramos Jack she pulls away. Ben says he doesn’t want to be just
hip hop and breakdance culture begin to cross- Produced by Meg friends. Soon afterwards, Amy tells Diana that Ben is
pollinate with the downtown arts scene, Basquiat, David Buckley Diana Irvine In Colour moving out. A few days later, Diana, shocked to see
Sound Mixer Gabby him, trips on some ice. Ben takes her to the hospital
convinced of his own genius and determined to
Austin Plocher Jeff Ward Distributor
find fame and fortune, refines his practice as an Costume Designer
and then home, where they say a final goodbye.
Marcus Altitude Film
artist, along the way attracting the attention of Keri Langerman Liz Larsen Entertainment Diana realises that she has made a mistake, and
Andy Warhol, whose dilettantish, multidisciplinary Susan that she is in love with Ben. She goes to his new
approach influenced Basquiat’s own. Basquiat’s ©Reliance Sabina apartment and tells him she loves him and wants
Entertainment Friedman-Seitz to try again. He says no, and she is devastated.
contribution to ‘The Times Square Show’ and the Productions 5 Ltd Jenny
Cortez-curated ‘New York New Wave’ exhibition in Production David Wohl Sometime later, Diana finds Ben sitting
1981 launches him on his way to a brief, dazzling Companies Barry on the steps of their old building. They
career, which will end with his death in 1988. A Cliffbrook Films Deborah Offner walk off down the street together.

July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 61

 Breaking In The Ciambra
USA/Japan 2018 Italy/Brazil/USA/Sweden/France/Germany 2017
Director: James McTeigue Director: Jonas Carpignano
Certificate 15 88m 6s Certificate 15 117m 58s

Reviewed by Lisa Mullen Reviewed by Violet Lucca

Spoiler alert: this review reveals a plot twist Burning wires to get the
If you’re planning to have your home invaded See Rushes, copper inside or trying to sell
REVIEWS

in the near future, bear in mind that there are page 8 a stolen iPad isn’t traditionally
rules. First, you had better own a nice-looking cinematic in the way that
house, preferably sprawling and/or secluded. bank robberies and high-
Second, you, as the homeowner, will need to kiss speed chases are. These are tedious, long and
goodbye to your phone and any other useful barely-worth-it ways to obtain cash, predicated
items, though a length of hose or a Zippo lighter on commitment rather than skill or patience.
may be permissible. Third, you will need home Although poached tablets and recycling copper
invaders who are rather poorly armed for the are just two of the ways in which Pio Amato and
occasion, and must possess impressive reservoirs his family get by, this is the particular type of
of incompetence and bad luck. Once your nice hustler rhythm – imbued with a sense of purpose
quiet evening at home has ticked all these boxes, but forced to meander, alternating between
please enjoy the ensuing carnage responsibly. urgency and languor – that The Ciambra beats to.
James McTeigue’s entertaining B-movie effort The second film in Jonas Carpignano’s
never strays far from this trusted formula. In projected trilogy about life in the Italian port town
this case, the house is a handsome mid-century of Gioia Tauro (and an extension of a short of the
number with plenty of teak panelling and Get out: Ajiona Alexus, Gabrielle Union, Seth Carr same name), The Ciambra follows Pio (Pio Amato),
plate glass, stuck out in the lonely woods of a Roma teenager, after his father and older brother
Wisconsin. It used to be the fortress hideaway reversal points in this case, the upstanding citizen Cosimo are incarcerated. In their absence, Pio
of a paranoid old man with a dodgy past, but he and her family are people of colour, doing battle takes it on himself to earn cash by any means
has been run over in New York under suspicious with a ruthless gang of stupid white people – necessary – even though his mother specifically
circumstances and his daughter Shaun (Gabrielle plus a psychopath (Richard Cabral) played by tells him that he hasn’t been promoted to man of
Union, who also co-produced) has arrived with an actor of Mexican heritage, for good measure. the house yet. (Still, she doesn’t force him to go
her kids (Ajiona Alexus and Seth Carr) to take Sadly, though, the script declines to make any to school, and takes the money he brings back to
possession. Shaun has Unspecified Issues with use of this scenario’s potential as a commentary her.) While out on his petty-crime expeditions
her dead dad, but it’s handy that she’s amassed on white attitudes to conspicuous black wealth; – stealing luggage from a train that’s about to
some survival skills along the way. It turns perhaps more troubling is the implied glee with leave and dropping it off in a giant pile of other
out that the house, far from being empty, is which we are invited to watch Shaun being snatched suitcases – Pio often runs into or seeks
infested with ne’er-do-wells intent on cracking dragged around and beaten up by the bad guys out his best friend Ayiva (Koudous Seihon), a
a hidden safe full of the old man’s ill-gotten – one of the more dispiriting staples of the genre. 32-year-old migrant from Burkina Faso. The pair
loot. When they take the kids hostage and lock Despite this, along with the film’s dialogue share cigarettes, scooter rides, beers and advice,
Shaun out, it’s up to Bitch Mom From Hell to inadequacies (“You… broke into the wrong house!” always willing to lend each other a hand: if Ayiva
fight her way back in, past the house’s state- is about the level of Shaun’s one-liners) and a doesn’t want to buy something that Pio is selling,
of-the-art surveillance and security features. marked tendency to lapse into incoherence, he connects him with another African migrant
It’s rare, outside the home-invasion genre, Union gives the whole thing her considerable all. who does. Most importantly, Ayiva knows when
for a middle-aged woman to be the strongest, Her committed, nuanced performance flatters to treat him like the kid he is (even though Pio
smartest and most resourceful person on the Ryan Engle’s ropy script and really deserved to resists it) and when to treat him like the man he
screen, which might be why these films are so be in a more thoughtful, complex film. Still, pretends to be – unlike the rest of his family.
much fun – more fun, anyway, than the po-faced it’s always nice when the underdog – or in As in Mediterranea (2015), the first film in
dad-heroics of Taken and its ilk. For added role- this case, the under-bitch-mom – wins. Carpignano’s trilogy, their friendship runs deeper
than simply being fellow outsiders in Gioia
Credits and Synopsis Tauro. Eschewing ‘unlikeliest pals’ clichés, Pio
and Ayiva’s closeness is entirely felt through the
rapport between the two actors, who are playing
Produced by Presented in In Colour US, present day. Shaun arrives with her daughter
Gabrielle Union association with [2.35:1] Jasmine and son Glover at the secluded mansion
semi-fictionalised versions of themselves; there is
James Lopez Dentsu Inc./
she has inherited from her father, a money launderer no emotionally loaded dialogue to spell it out for
Sheila Hanahan Taylor Fuji Television Distributor
Craig Perry Network, Inc. Universal Pictures who has been killed by the criminals he worked with. us. Carpignano’s camera buoyantly manoeuvres
Will Packer Executive Producers International Shaun and the children discover that the house is through empty streets, tiny homes, bars and
Screenplay Jaime Primak Sullivan UK & Eire packed with hi-tech security equipment, though
Ryan Engle Jeff Morrone
nightclubs to give extra life to their extended
Story
this has possibly been tampered with. While Shaun hangout sessions. While it would be wrong to
Valerie Bleth Sharp
Jaime Primak Sullivan is outside, a gang of four thieves – who have broken
Director of into the house to raid a safe full of money – take the call the film’s style ‘immersive’ (there are cuts,
Photography Cast children hostage; when one of them, Peter, attempts variations of shot sizes, multiple angles of the
Toby Oliver Gabrielle Union to snatch Shaun, she takes him hostage in turn. She same scene, ellipses, a repeated vision of a white
Film Editor Shaun Russell
Joseph Jett Sally Billy Burke then uses her knowledge of the house to break in, and horse that symbolises past traditions, and so on),
Production Designer Eddie when she learns that the gang need Peter to open the the framing and commitment to naturalistic
Cecele M. De Stefano Richard Cabral safe, she attempts a hostage swap. But gang leader
Score Duncan Eddie simply shoots Peter – it was a sim-card hidden
dialogue allow the viewer to feel more stitched
Johnny Klimek Ajiona Alexus
in his necklace that the thieves needed, not him. The into the action. Sometimes this comes at the
Production Jasmine Russell
Sound Mixer Levi Meaden remaining three intruders get the money and plan to expense of narrative clarity – the names of
Chris Giles Sam kill the children, but Shaun climbs on the roof to reach most of Pio’s family members and fellow Roma
Costume Designer Jason George them through a skylight. The youngest thief, Sam, dies
Jason Sky Bland Justin Russell
aren’t mentioned until about three quarters of
in the ensuing chaos; the psychopath Duncan is run the way through the film, if at all. Nevertheless,
Seth Carr
©Universal Studios Glover Russell over as Shaun, Jasmine and Glover try to escape in their
car. Outsmarting Eddie, Shaun and the children run eliding such facts is a type of confusion that
Production Christa Miller
Companies Maggie Harris back into the house and lock themselves in. But Shaun’s doesn’t exist in conventional documentaries
Universal Pictures Mark Furze husband arrives unannounced, and she is forced to but very often does in real life; it adds to the
presents a Will Packer Peter
Productions, Practical Damien Leake
open the door. When Eddie looks set to make a deal with feeling of simply tagging along with Pio.
Pictures production Isaac Paulson her, Duncan – who is still alive – stabs him in a rage. While Pio prides himself on being
A James Shaun and her daughter kill Duncan. The family huddle
McTeigue film Dolby Digital together on the porch waiting for the police to arrive.
preternaturally clever (even though he’s
illiterate), the question of what he thinks he

62 | Sight&Sound | July 2018

 Deadpool 2
USA 2018
Director: David Leitch
Certificate 15 119m 12s

Reviewed by Kim Newman

In contrast to Marvel/Disney’s measured, pass-
it-forward rollout of the ‘Marvel Cinematic

REVIEWS
Universe’, Fox’s treatment of the slice of Marvel
Comics’ rights it controls has shifted into ‘try
anything’ mode. Generally conceding that Brett
Ratner’s X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) was a
misstep after Bryan Singer’s first series entries,
Fox had Singer tinker with the timeline in
X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), which shunted
everything that didn’t work in any of the films
into an alternate reality. While mainstream
Marvel aims for convergence in big team-up
efforts like Avengers: Infinity War, Fox takes risks
with its film and TV X-Men spinoffs, including
the elegiac Logan (2017) and the experimental
Legion (2017-). In the offing are the horror-themed
The New Mutants and X-Men: Dark Phoenix,
revisiting material bungled in The Last Stand.
Deadpool, introduced in the X-Men comics in
the 1990s, has been a frame-breaking surprise hit
Family law: The Ciambra on several runs of his solo title. Ryan Reynolds
first played the role in the middling X-Men Origins:
knows is what wreaks irrevocable havoc on his Pio is kicked out of his home by his father, and Wolverine (2009), which is revised in a funny
life. After his brother and his father return home spends the next few nights sleeping on the street black-out gag here, and fits into the X-Men film
from prison, Pio suggests that he too should or wherever Ayiva can put him. Cosimo finds Pio universe as a scattershot gadfly, poking fun at
start dealing with ‘the Italians’ (who are very and gives him an unbelievably cruel ultimatum, the series in particular and superhero cinema
possibly ’Ndrangheta, the Calabrian version of one predicated on proving he understands in general. When grim cyborg Cable shows up
the Mafia), the men Cosimo assists in the stealing that it is his family versus the rest of the world, in the person of a scarred, metal-armed Josh
and reselling of goods. Cosimo laughs in his and only certain outsiders are acceptable. Brolin, Reynolds cheerfully greets him with,
face, and Pio retaliates by attempting to steal The Ciambra’s ending is a stark contrast to “You’re dark – are you sure you’re not from the
from one of the Italians. (When first entering most coming-of-age tales: rather than moving DC Universe?” The polar opposite of downbeat,
the man’s house, it seems as if Pio isn’t looking towards something like self-discovery, Pio is slightly pompous Logan, Deadpool 2 opens with
for things to steal, but simply admiring the bullied into burrowing back into the safety of Reynolds’s cancer-ridden, unkillable wiseass
order and beautiful furnishings, far removed his (dysfunctional) family. Cosimo even treats mocking an action figure of the skewered
from his messy, shared bedroom.) The man him to a plump, middle-aged prostitute once the Wolverine and promising to one-up Hugh
returns earlier than expected, catches Pio in the deed is done, to “make him a man”. Rather than Jackman’s onscreen demise by blowing himself
act, and forces him to confess his crimes to his reassuring us that exceptional people will grow literally to pieces. These are scooped up by
entire family – small children included. Having up to do exceptional things, the film dares to steel-skinned stooge mutant Colossus in order
destroyed this fruitful business relationship, show that, very often, the world gets in the way. to drag the protagonist into something closer
to a story than the thin, jokey Deadpool (2016).
Credits and Synopsis Tim Miller, director of the first Deadpool film,
has been replaced for this follow-up by stunt
specialist David Leitch, billed in the snark-heavy
Produced by Nicoletta Taranta Culturali e del Turismo Sophie Mas Rocco Amato Jennifer
Paolo Carpignano Direzione Generale Lourenço Sant’Anna Rocco Kingsley Asimung Bond-parody opening credits as “one of the guys
Jon Coplon ©Stayblack per il Cinema Daniela Taplin Nicolas Damiano Kingsley who killed John Wick’s dog”. The story is complex
Gwyn Sannia Productions SRL and With the participation Lundberg Amato U Ciccareddu
Ryan Zacarias RT Features U.S. LLC of Aide aux cinémas Alessio Lazzareschi Cocchino Grandad Emiloano enough for a straighter film, with the reluctant,
Written by Production du monde - Institut Joel Brandeis Riccardo Amato Koudous Seihon inept hero prodded and poked into taking a moral
Jonas Carpignano Companies français, Centre Dario Suter Riccardo Ayiva
Rodrigo Teixeira RT Features, Sikelia national du cinéma Simona Amato
stand to protect a chubby, rage-fuelled teenager (a
Marc Schmidheiny Productions, et de l’image animée Simona In Colour very funny Julian Dennison) from the Terminator
Christoph Daniel Stayblack Ministère des Cast Cristina Amato [1.85:1]
type who wants him dead. An extended
Director of Production with Rai affaires étrangères Pio Amato Cristina Subtitles
Photography Cinema present et du développement Pio Antonella Amato feint introduces a team of characters
Tim Curtin In association with international Iolanda Amato Antonella Distributor
Editor Film i Väst, Haut and the contribution Iolanda Gesuele Massimo Peccadillo Pictures
Affonso Gonçalves et Court, Filmgate of LuCa Damiano Amato Amato
Production Designer Films and DCM Supported by the Cosimo Nagnolo Italian theatrical title
Marco Ascanio Viarigi Recognized film Sundance Institute Patrizia Amato Francesco Amato A Ciambra
Composer of cultural interest Feature Film Program Patatina Cosimo Amato
Dan Romer with the economic Executive Producers Francesco Pio Amato family members
Sound contribution of Martin Scorsese Keko O’Marrochinu Pasquale Alampi
Giuseppe Tripodi the Ministero dei Emma Tillinger Susanna Amato Raffaele Guerrasio
Costume Designer Beni e delle Attività Koskoff Susanna Faith Uchenna Eburu

Gioia Tauro, Calabria, the present. Fourteen-year-old
Pio wakes up and brings his grandfather breakfast.
He spends time with his family and hangs out with
his friend Ayiva. The police arrive at Pio’s Roma
neighbourhood and arrest his father and older brother
Cosimo. Pio delivers a car to a man who was going to
buy it from Cosimo, and gives his mother the money.
He steals some luggage from a train that’s about to
depart; Ayiva helps him to sell it. Ayiva shows Pio
a storage locker full of computers and electronics,
which he hopes to sell at home in Burkina Faso and
then retire. When Pio’s grandfather dies, his father
and brother are allowed out of jail for the funeral.
Pio offers to take over dealing with ‘the Italians’
(gangsters) for Cosimo, but Cosimo laughs in his
face. Pio retaliates by trying to steal from one of
the Italians. He is caught, and forced to confess to
his entire family. Pio’s father kicks him out. After a
few days, Cosimo gives him an ultimatum: help the
Italians to steal the goods from Ayiva’s locker, or
never come home again. Pio resists at first, but then
gives in. Cosimo buys Pio oral sex from a prostitute.
Indestructible: Ryan Reynolds

July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 63

 Freak Show
USA/United Kingdom/Sweden 2017
Director: Trudie Styler
Certificate 12A 90m 51s

assembled by Deadpool to rival the X-Men, Reviewed by Manuela Lazic

a couple of whom (Zazie Beetz’s Domino, When announcing his run for his high school’s
Lewis Tan’s Shatterstar) originate from the same homecoming queen on camera (are American
REVIEWS

1990s run of the comic (commercially huge, prom nights usually newsworthy?), teenager Billy
artistically dire). Beetz wryly fits in with the tone, Bloom (Alex Lawther) is asked by the supportive
while Tan and a bunch of others are made the butt local reporter (played by trans actress Laverne
of gruesome, effective jokes that clear the decks Cox) how he defines his gender. His semi-serious
for more classic X-folk to show up. The Juggernaut suggestion of “gender-obliterator” is soon shouted
– Professor X’s evil stepbrother – overwrites down by a more ambiguous and charged word,
Vinnie Jones’s damp-squib version in (yes, again) “freak” – an insult hurled by an angry classmate.
The Last Stand, though his exit includes an anal Drag queen Billy’s hazardous ambition to
assault that’s among a gusher of gay-panic reappropriate this pejorative and othering term
jokes now probably past their tell-by date. is representative of the entire enterprise of Trudie
Reynolds’s underlying sweetness takes the Styler’s debut feature Freak Show. Awkwardly
edge off the comic’s homicidal self-pity, though and unconvincingly, this teen movie aims to Escape to victory: Alex Lawther
the endless shtick (partially from the pen of do away with labels to invoke an all too nice
Reynolds himself) has a miss-to-hit ratio of about and frankly disrespectful universalism. At a Zelda Fitzgerald in front of his literature class;
three to one. The film has hectoring, wearisome time when millions of Americans still support Billy’s decision to present a book report to
stretches – with some routines poor enough for a homophobic and transphobic president, his teacher via a full-blown metamorphosis
a Wayans brothers joint – before things gel in arguing tearfully that “we’re all freaks after all” is enjoyable on its own terms, without
the mid-point assault on a jail convoy. However, comes off as a particularly unhelpful denial. pointing towards self-actualisation clichés.
in the climax, Reynolds milks a parody of Freak Show overflows with good intentions, Billy envisions his drag act as an escape from
Jackman’s chatty death scene until the udders which may be why its wilful erasure of the brutality of the world, and film should be
are dry. A final fillip of self-flagellation has the particular pains still inflicted on non- the ideal medium to give him the visual power
Deadpool use a time machine to intervene in heteronormative people leaves such a bad taste. he works hard to evoke, but Styler struggles to
Ryan Reynolds’s timeline, perhaps consigning Billy, whose style inspiration is his mother evade the script’s origins as a novel. Nowhere is
Green Lantern (2011) to an alternate universe. Muv (Bette Midler), is a character rarely seen this more apparent than in the film’s sporadic
in cinema, especially as a lead in a fictional use of voiceover. Evidently meant to echo
Credits and Synopsis coming-of-age drama; save for RuPaul’s excellent, trailblazing gay author Oscar Wilde, Lawther’s
affirmative reality show, drag queens sadly aren’t multi-octave delivery of melancholy witticisms
currently flooding our screens, big or small. makes the film more heavy than profound. These
Produced by Jonathan Eusebio Cast The lanky Lawther is never uncomfortable redundant monologues also see Lawther coming
Simon Kinberg Scott Ateah Ryan Reynolds
Ryan Reynolds Wade Wilson, in the many wigs and fake eyelashes he gets to dangerously close to parody – perhaps of Quentin
Lauren Shuler ©Twentieth ‘Deadpool’
Donner Century Fox Film Josh Brolin
wear, and his ease in this physically demanding Crisp, and his memorable 1975 screen incarnation
Written by Corporation and Cable role is laudable. But his glamorous outings are by John Hurt in The Naked Civil Servant.
Rhett Reese TSG Entertainment Morena Baccarin
Paul Wernick Finance LLC
typically used as metaphorical devices in a In its attempt to counter stereotypes, Freak
Vanessa
Ryan Reynolds Production Julian Dennison predictable story arc. The bridal look he dons Show ends up surpassing them to become
Director of Companies
Photography Twentieth Century
Russell Collins, one day in class loses a bit of majesty when vulgar. Billy’s difficult trajectory through school
‘Firefist’
Jonathan Sela Fox presents Zazie Beetz ascribed a narrative purpose; lying beaten in the is ultimately presented as helpful to others:
Film Editors in association Domino arms of Flip (Ian Nelson), the straight boy he he has shown everyone around him that it is
Dirk Westervelt with Marvel T.J. Miller
Craig Alpert Entertainment a Weasel
fancies, he’s too obviously a damsel in distress. OK to be different. His suffering hasn’t really
Elísabet Kinberg Genre/ Brianna Hildebrand One wishes that Billy’s various transformations righted any wrongs, however. His Trump-
Ronaldsdóttir Maximum Effort Negasonic Teenage
Production production Warhead
were allowed to speak for themselves, like quoting blonde rival remains popular and, in her
Designer Executive Jack Kesy his dazzling performance as a burning-alive shadow, the freak show must go on, quietly.
David Scheunemann Producers Black Tom Cassidy
Music by/Guitars/ Stan Lee Leslie Uggams
Guitarviol Jonathon Blind Al Credits and Synopsis
Tyler Bates Komack Martin
Sound Mixer Kelly McCormick Dolby Atmos
Mark Noda Ethan Smith In Colour Produced by Production Designer Maven Pictures Bruno Wang Flip Dr Veronica Vickers
Costume Designers Aditya Sood [2.35:1] Jeffrey Coulter Franckie Diago presents a Flower Samantha Perelman Celia Weston Michael Park
Kurt Swanson Rhett Reese Bryan Rabin Music Films production Bobby Sager Florence Principal Onnigan
Bart Mueller Paul Wernick Distributor Ember Truesdell Dan Romer in association Cathleen Ihasz Willa Fitzgerald
Stunt Co- 20th Century Fox Chris Miller Supervising with Bruno Wang Nicole Ihasz Tiffany Tarbell In Colour
ordinators International (UK) Trudie Styler Sound Editor/ Productions and Laverne Cox [2.35:1]
Celine Rattray Re-recording Mixer CoMade Sthlm Felicia Watts
When his girlfriend Vanessa is killed, mutant Charlotte Ubben Lewis Goldstein Executive Producers Cast Larry Pine Distributor
Screenplay Costume Designers Drew Barrymore Alex J. Lawther William Miracle
mercenary Wade Wilson (aka Deadpool) attempts Patrick J. Clifton Colleen Atwood Nancy Juvonen Billy Bloom Bette Midler Communications
suicide. His friend Colossus tries to get Wade to Beth Rigazio Sarah Laux Pierre Lagrange Abigail Breslin Muv
pull himself together by taking him on a mission Director of Maya Sanbar Lynette John McEnroe
as a trainee X-Man. An attempt to calm down angry Photography ©Freak Show Sawsan Asfari AnnaSophia Robb Carter, coach
Dante Spinotti Films, LLC Sir Ivan Mary Jane, ‘Blah Charlotte Ubben
teenage-mutant outcast Russell Collins ends with Film Editor Production [i.e. Ivan Wilzig] Blah Blah’ Sesame
Wade and Russell both sent to prison. Time traveller Sarah Flack Companies Jenny Halper Ian Nelson Mickey Sumner
Cable arrives in the present to kill Russell before
he can become the villain who will murder Cable’s US, present day. Teenager Billy Bloom has been finding of students who have been waiting for someone like
family in the future. Cable attacks the prison and escape by dressing in drag ever since his mother Muv Billy to help them overthrow the abusive reign of the
Wade defends Russell. After escaping, Wade forms a showed him her collection of dresses. But Muv suddenly rich girls in school. Suddenly, Muv returns home, but
super-team called X-Force and tries to rescue Russell, leaves, and Billy is forced to relocate to the home of Billy’s joy is quickly overshadowed by the realisation
who rejects him to team up with the monstrous his rich but disdainful father in Long Island. At his that what he took for his mother’s boundless joviality
Juggernaut. Cable joins forces with Wade, and new school, his theatrics are met mostly with hatred, was in fact alcoholism; her love for her son was also
concedes that Wade should have a chance to talk but he strikes up a friendship with Flip, a straight boy a love of his father’s parental support money. At the
Russell out of killing his first victim and change he is attracted to. After a brutal ambush by angry school prom, Billy doesn’t win the crown, but his speech
his own future. Wade convinces Russell not to classmates leaves him briefly in a coma, Billy decides calling for everyone to admit they are all freaks like
become a murderer by sacrificing himself, but Cable to run for homecoming queen. Although Flip turns his him moves his father, who has attended as a surprise.
uses his time machine to save Wade’s life. Wade back on Billy after being called gay, Billy finds a friend As he walks on the school field the following year,
uses the same gadget to undo Vanessa’s death. in Mary Jane, and in ‘the shadow people’ – a group Billy returns grateful glances from former enemies.

64 | Sight&Sound | July 2018

Hereditary
Director: Ari Aster
Certificate 15 127m 15s

Reviewed by Anton Bitel

A family has lost its head.
See Rushes, The text that serves as a

REVIEWS
page 13 formal prologue to Hereditary
announces the passing of
78-year-old matriarch Ellen
Taper Leigh in the home of her daughter Annie
Graham, after a prolonged illness. “She will be
missed,” are the words that close the obituary –
but there is little evidence that Ellen’s estranged
family really do miss her. Annie (Toni Collette,
travelling convincingly through a range of
nuanced emotions) delivers a tactful eulogy that
not only stresses Ellen’s secrecy but is also clearly
straining to keep hidden the difficulties of Ellen’s
personality. Annie’s husband Steve (Gabriel
Byrne) and teenage son Pete (Alex Wolff) seem
barely to care – and if Pete’s 13-year-old sister
Charlie (Milly Shapiro) was without question
Ellen’s favourite, she is herself a strange, troubled
child, too affectless to express any notion of loss.
Hereditary opens with a long, fluid take
of three different but proximate houses, as
Pawel Pogorzelski’s slow-spinning, sinuous
cinematography first reveals a treehouse (also
the film’s final image) seen across the garden
through a window, then pulls back from the
window to show an artist’s workroom within
the house opposite, and finally pans over the It’s a family affair: Milly Shapiro, Toni Collette
workroom to a table bearing a scale model of
the house (with the wall removed from the suppressed demons must eventually out. Still, the Grahams are being carefully manipulated.
front to expose the elaborately crafted interior). Aster will take his time parcelling out all their The big reveal, when it comes, is played
As the camera moves closer to a bedroom in tortuous secrets, compartmentalised within the with a disarming literalness – but its unhinged
the model, and to a figurine lying in the mini- bourgeois veneer of suburban life, or hidden in irrationality also makes it an effective and
bed, we hear a knock, and – impossibly – Steve plain sight in boxes, lofts and images. Though affecting metaphor for a family’s inheritance
walks right in to wake Pete for Ellen’s funeral. primed to expect that Ellen’s legacy, genetic or of guilt, recrimination and madness. Aster’s
This uncanny trick of blurring a scale model otherwise, must come home to roost, viewers are artistry here is phenomenally assured, even
with the larger reality is something that has been kept in excruciating suspense as to what precise classical, as he deftly mixes subgenres, while
seen before in films with themes significantly form it will take, as recurring motifs of fire and focusing more on his bewildered characters
parallel to Hereditary’s, whether the facsimile decapitation, dissociative identity disorder and than on the horrors that either they or we
of the school in Nick Murphy’s The Awakening ritual beleaguer the film’s structure in a campaign can see (often as blurs or shadows). Hereditary
(2011), which similarly stages the burden of grief, of confusion. Aster throws in a whole palette might be regarded as a psychological or
the persistence of the dead and the seductiveness of haunted-house tropes (seances and spectres, supernatural thriller, an insidious ghost
of delusion, or the display model of the labyrinth creaky corridor and creepy attic, infestations of story, a literal cult movie, or Rosemary’s Baby
in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), which also ants and flies) as much to confound as to clarify, (1968) after the infant has come of age. On any
pits child against unravelling adult. Yet in opening given that we are being misdirected no less than view, it is a diabolically assured debut.
with this lifelike doll’s house, constructed by
artist Annie to work – in microcosm – through Credits and Synopsis
her family’s long, tragic history and her own
difficult relationship with Ellen, debut writer/
director Ari Aster establishes two things: first,
Produced by Editors Production Windy Hill Pictures Cast Gabriel Byrne
Kevin Frakes Jennifer Lame Companies Executive Producers Toni Collette Steve Graham
the uneasy sense, right from the start, that the Lars Knudsen Lucian Johnston A24 and PalmStar Ryan Kreston Annie Graham
Buddy Patrick Production Designer Media present a Jonathan Gardner Alex Wolff In Colour
Grahams are somebody else’s playthings, like Written by Grace Yun Kevin Frakes and Toni Collette Peter Graham [2.00:1]
the dolls that Charlie collects; and second, that Ari Aster Music Lars Knudsen Gabriel Byrne Milly Shapiro
Director of Colin Stetson production in Charlie Graham Distributor
this mood of play-box paranoia, introducing Photography Costume Designer association with Finch Entertainment Film
Ann Dowd
tension at the outset and from then on never Pawel Pogorzelski Olga Mill Entertainment and Joan Distributors Ltd
once relenting, will be managed with the sort
North America, present day. After secretive 78-year- set fire to Pete, Charlie and herself. At a tense dinner,
of painstaking attention to domestic minutiae old matriarch Ellen dies, her unloving artist daughter Annie openly blames Pete for Charlie’s death. Joan
that Annie herself brings to her art. In these Annie, son-in-law Steve, teen grandson Pete and teaches an initially sceptical Annie a seance ritual.
layerings of houses within houses, and in the beloved but affectless 13-year-old granddaughter Annie performs the ritual at home with a reluctant
dreams within dreams (Annie’s, Pete’s) that will Charlie struggle to grieve. Annie sees Ellen’s ghost. Steve and Pete, and all three – but especially Annie
soon interpolate themselves into the narrative’s Steve conceals news that Ellen’s grave has been and Pete – begin to have supernatural experiences.
desecrated. Charlie also has ghostly visions, and Finding a mutilated photograph of Pete in Joan’s
reality, Aster merges naturalism with unnerving decapitates a dead pigeon. At a support group, Annie candle-strewn apartment, Annie realises that Joan was
allegory to present an increasingly hallucinatory reveals her guilty resentment towards the controlling in a coven with Ellen, trying to conjure the demon spirit
family portrait in which the psychological Ellen, and her sorrow at the earlier deaths of her Paimon. Annie discovers Ellen’s decapitated corpse in
is reified and the devil is in the details. father and son. After going into anaphylactic shock the attic. Steve brings a self-injured Pete home, and
The strange graffiti etched into the Grahams’ at a party, Charlie is decapitated on the way to the spontaneously combusts. Assailed by Charlie’s ghost,
wallpaper – and of course reproduced by Annie hospital – with a stoned Pete at the wheel. Distraught aged cultists and a possessed Annie (who decapitates
with grief, Annie meets Joan at the support group, herself), Pete leaps out of the attic window. In Charlie’s
in miniature – can be recognised as the writing and reveals how once, while sleepwalking, she almost treehouse, Joan crowns Pete the resurrected Paimon.
on the wall for a dysfunctional clan whose

July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 65

 Ideal Home
USA/United Kingdom 2017
Director: Andrew Fleming
Certificate 15 91m 27s
Reviewed by Leigh Singer
If the title Ideal Home calls to mind, to British
audiences at least, a long-running interior
REVIEWS
design magazine or (unaffiliated) lavish annual
exhibition marketing the latest in desirable
domesticity, then Andrew Fleming’s comedy
shares their goals in shaping perceptions of
modern living. The film’s chief success is its
depiction of a middle-aged gay couple – one
older, camper and English (Steve Coogan), the
other surlier, more streetwise and American
(Paul Rudd) – as largely uncontroversial and,
eventually, suitable parents to a young kid.
At any rate, it isn’t their sexuality that makes
them more likely to screw it up than any other
affluent, immature, media-bubble elites.
In times of growing global intolerance, once
again depressingly disproportionate towards
minorities, perhaps we underestimate such
normalisation. And despite its overreliance
on broad humour – at one point the action
almost stops for a skit on the tired gag of movie-
inspired porn titles – inside a big soft heart is
where Ideal Home resides. Fleming has declared
that this is his most personal movie, a notion
underlined by the closing-credits stills of real-
life same-sex couples and their children. What
is also apparent, certainly compared with his
cult high-school coven movie The Craft (1996)
or underrated Nixon-skewering satire Dick
(1999), is that this is also far from his best.
Since his previous Coogan collaboration,
2008’s Hamlet 2, Fleming has largely concentrated
on television – and while it’s presumably
coincidental, the sketchy, stop-start narrative here
feels as if it’s been hastily reconstructed from a
more developed sitcom series, patched together
with clunky montages. All shorthand and short
cuts, as renovations go it’s got ‘cowboy builders’
written all over it. Angel (or Bill, as he prefers
to be called), the young grandson that Coogan’s
Erasmus and Rudd’s Paul must care for, switches
from sullen and naive to mouthy and worldly-
wise as convenient. Alison Pill’s social worker
gets two reproachful scenes, then vanishes.
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by Alexander Gruszynski Costume Designer
Maria Teresa Arida Editors Judith R. Gellman
Lucia Seabra Jeffrey M. Werner
Gabrielle Tana Byron Wong ©Enchanted
Aaron Ryder Production Designer Land, LLC
Clark Peterson Anthony Fanning Production
Maxime Remillard Music Companies
Written by Martin Simpson Remstar Studios
Andrew Fleming John Swihart presents a Lucky
Director of Sound Mixer Monkey Pictures,
Photography Andrejs Prokopenko Raygun, Baby
US, present day. Flamboyant British TV chef
Erasmus Brumble lives with his long-time boyfriend
and show producer Paul in their luxurious Santa
Fe mansion. Their carefree life is disrupted when
Angel, child of Erasmus’s estranged son Beau,
suddenly shows up on their doorstep. Arrested
by the police, Beau helped Angel escape by
scribbling his grandfather’s address in a Bible.
Angel refuses to talk and, despite Erasmus’s fine
cuisine, will eat only fast food. Stunned by his arrival,
Paul and Erasmus clash more than ever as they face
their new responsibilities. Angel requests that he be
called Bill. Erasmus and Paul enrol him at a local school.
Paul becomes increasingly frustrated by the ongoing
66 | Sight&Sound | July 2018
Bill of rights: Steve Coogan, Paul Rudd
The climactic custody battle with Erasmus’s
ne’er-do-well son Beau is so perfunctory
it’s surprising that it made the final cut.
Since all supporting characters are ciphers,
much depends on Coogan and Rudd’s chemistry.
Both are clearly straining to play between, even
against, the script’s lacklustre lines (one wonders
how much improvisation was required) to
generate momentum. Yet despite the admission
that Erasmus and Paul’s speciality is to “drink
and argue”, the actors appear at cross-purposes,
never really gelling with each other or, crucially,
with Jack Gore’s strangely muted Angel/Bill. The
net result, even as the film plays, is to prompt
recollections of spikier mismatched-adults-and-
kids efforts: Paper Moon (1973), Bad Santa (2003)
or even Rudd’s own superior Role Models (2008).
What truly fascinates, however, is to watch
Coogan (on board as executive producer) within
the confines of a rare, mainstream American
lead role. Hollywood’s demand for comedy
characters to be ultimately loveable rubs against
his bravely abrasive British creations – Alan
Partridge, 24 Hour Party People’s Tony Wilson
– and love of meta-self-dissection (A Cock and
Bull Story, The Trip’s various excursions). He’s
too skilled a performer to flounder; but it’s also
hard to deny that his best US onscreen outing is
probably still in Jim Jarmusch’s 2003 anthology
Coffee and Cigarettes, playing ‘Steve Coogan’.
Cow production Cast Jack Gore
in association Paul Rudd Bill
with Fortitude Paul
International and Steve Coogan In Colour
Mustard & Company Erasmus Brumble [2.35:1]
A film by Andrew Alison Pill
Fleming Melissa from Child Distributor
Executive Producers Signature
Protective Services
Steve Coogan Jake McDorman Entertainment
Lisa Wolofsky
Beau Brumble
disruption. A social worker visits and is horrified to see
that Bill has had access to the couple’s pornography
collection when searching for a DVD. Erasmus and
Paul throw Bill a lavish birthday party, and gradually all
three form a close bond. During a prison visit, they are
dismayed to discover that Beau is set for early parole
and plans to reclaim his son and start a new life in Texas.
Beau takes Bill away on Christmas Eve. In the
turbulent aftermath, discovering Erasmus cosying
up to another man, Paul decides to accept a job
in New York. Eventually, however, he relents and
stays. When Beau causes a reckless car accident
and is returned to jail, the court decides that
Bill should remain with Erasmus and Paul.
In the Fade
Germany/France/Italy 2017
Director: Fatih Akin
Certificate 18 106m 22s
Reviewed by Nick Pinkerton
The great filmmakers have style, the worst
have affectations. Fatih Akin, who by almost
every measure ranks in the second category,
has never encountered a scene that he can’t
belabour to death with the help of his DP, and
over the course of In the Fade he empties out the
whole trunkload of emphatic camera moves:
a dolly-zoom ‘Vertigo shot’ to accompany a
moment of terrible revelation, some highly
significant rack focuses, a split dioptre or two
and a howler of a final heavenward crane shot.
There’s nothing wrong with a filmmaker
using the entirety of the tool kit at their disposal,
of course, but Akin muffles any possibility of
achieving expressionistic oomph under several
layers of drab naturalistic padding, including
the requisite grey-blue palette, the formalwear
of the respectable festival film. Such instances of
competing impulses at odds with one another
can make for extraordinary and vivacious
work – take, for instance, the filmography of
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, animated as it is by
seemingly contradictory impulses. Only a little
over a decade ago, around the time of his The
Edge of Heaven, Akin was routinely garnering
comparisons to Fassbinder, presumably by virtue
of the fact that he was a German director whose
films are self-consciously contemporary in their
subject matter, and that Hanna Schygulla was
seen in that woebegone production. But where
Fassbinder managed to synthesise the direct,
emotional appeal of popular cinema and the
removed, intellectual approach that characterised
European modernism without appearing
to betray either, Akin seems to vacillate. His
films feel less like fields for confrontation and
reconciliation between disparate elements than
occasions of triangulation, splitting the difference.
In the Fade is a melodrama made by a director
serenely convinced that there is nothing so
moving to an audience as a leading lady sobbing
her guts out repeatedly and at length, and
accordingly star Diane Kruger is given plenty of
lingering, tear-streaked close-ups. The part won
Kruger a best actress prize at Cannes, and she does
indeed give a jagged, harrowing performance of
grief, often undermined though it is by Akin’s
incessant directorial interventions, such as the
absurd prettification of a bathtub suicide attempt
revealed when the camera glides underwater to
capture gouts of blood blossoming from opened
wrists, then gloried over in a God’s-eye-view
shot. The flashy bad taste of such a decision isn’t
the issue – it’s the presentation of tawdriness
with an air of sombre solemnity. One almost
wishes Akin would just embrace his crassest
impulses, for somewhere swimming in this
prestige package there’s a tough, dirty thriller –
and, in fact, the last chapter of the movie, when
it switches gear into revenge mode and the
score by Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme
comes to the fore, is its most effective. (There are
chapters, announced by onscreen title cards, a
dunning reminder of Akin’s formalist fronting.)
The set-up goes like this: a mother, Katja
(Kruger), loses her Kurdish husband Nuri (Numan
Acar) and her five-year-old son in a targeted
bombing. The tragedy sends her into a tailspin
– and here, as well as in the later trial scenes,
 Leave No Trace
Director: Debra Granik
Certificate PG 108m 36s

Reviewed by
Pamela Hutchinson
See Feature Debra Granik’s third fiction

REVIEWS
on page 46 feature treks through a territory
of backwoods and dysfunctional
families that is only a few steps
removed from her garlanded Sundance success
Winter’s Bone (2010). In Leave No Trace, we’re in
Oregon, on the outskirts of Portland, trailing a
father and daughter as they are forced from their
illicit camp in a state park through a series of
temporary homes and shelters, in a rustic variant
on Ken Loach’s Cathy Come Home (1966). The
opening scenes reveal the practicalities of their
hideaway home – building a fire, boiling eggs,
patching the tarpaulins that provide shelter
from the insistent rain, practising drills to avoid
detection. When a jogger spots their camp,
however, the police arrive with sniffer dogs that
Tom and Will can’t outrun, and they are forcibly
evicted. The film is loosely based on Peter Rock’s
2009 novel My Abandonment, which was itself
Blood wedding: Diane Kruger, Numan Acar inspired by newspaper reports of an off-grid
father and daughter discovered in the same way.
Akin’s script does capture something about the moved past. Her domestic life, seen briefly The film deviates substantially in its plot, and
nature of processing the violent death of a loved in the present tense and then remembered its new title offers an intriguing commentary
one, the degree to which the indignity of their in smartphone videos, was one of blue skies on its protagonists’ precarious situation:
physical violation becomes an idée fixe. The loss, unruffled by a single cloud, and her grief combining a mantra of wildlife conservation
as well as the posthumous character assassination and fidelity to the memory of the departed is with an imperative for fugitives to avoid arrest.
of her husband, is almost too much for Katja to accordingly absolute. (If Akin has some insights The local officials deem Will (Ben Foster) and
bear, but when she receives a vindication of sorts into sorrow, his imagination of happiness is his teenage daughter Tom (Thomasin Harcourt
in the news that the culprits are native-born fatuous in the extreme.) Further simplifying McKenzie) homeless, but the word doesn’t
Nazis, she composes herself to face them down matters, those responsible for the destruction really describe their situation. For one thing,
in the courtroom. Despite a preponderance of Katja’s family unit are unquestionably evil they both insist that the camp they live in, albeit
of evidence of their guilt, the killers go free, and deserving of termination – Akin even illegal, is as efficient and comfortable a home
and so Katja follows them to Greece, where grants them a snarling Nosferatu of a defence as they need. Will has managed (somewhat
she plans to exact justice on her own terms. lawyer, guilty by association. In this absence of improbably) to educate Tom to a higher level
The conflict en route to the film’s explosive complication, it takes a goodly bit of lugubrious than she would have achieved in school, and
finale is largely confined to Katja’s breast. There pacing and contemplative compositions to both are physically healthy and strong. Will
is a suggestion of some tetchiness between pad things out before the final ka-boom, a bang is an army vet, though, and his mental health
Katja’s family and Nuri’s, but this is quickly of an ending for a whimper of a movie. has been ravaged by PTSD; harrowingly, selling
his prescription drugs to addicts is the only
Credits and Synopsis way he can rustle up money to buy supplies.
And as becomes increasingly apparent, a
permanent home is the last thing he wants.
Producers Written by/ Production Filmförderfonds, Johannes Krisch Distributor
Nurhan Sekerci-Porst Produced by/ Companies Die Beauftragte der Haberbeck, advocate Curzon Artificial Eye In the same way that Winter’s Bone showcased
Fatih Akin Performed by Warner Bros. Bundesregierung Samia Chancrin Jennifer Lawrence’s talents, Leave No Trace presents
Herman Weigel Joshua Homme presents a Bombero für Kultur und Birgit German
Ann-Kristin Homann Sound Recordist International and Medien, Film- und Numan Acar theatrical title a potentially star-making turn from its young star
Screenplay Kai Lüde Warner Bros. Film Medienstiftung NRW, Nuri Sekerci Aus dem Nichts Harcourt McKenzie: she is excellent – watchful,
Fatih Akin Costume Designer Productions Germany Filmförderungsanstalt Ulrich Tukur
Co-writer Katrin Aschendorf production In collaboration with Jürgen Möller
sensitive and ambiguously aged. At times her
Hark Bohm In co-production Canal+, Ciné+ Adam Bousdoukos character’s lack of peer-group socialisation leaves
Director of ©Bombero with Macassar Knacki
Photography International GmbH Productions, Pathé, Rafael Santana
her stranded in childhood, while at others she is
Rainer Klausmann & Co. KG/Macassar Dorje Film, Corazón Cast Rocco Sekerci wise beyond her years. At pivotal points in the film
Editor Productions/Pathé International Diane Kruger – when she catches herself in the act of wishing
Andrew Bird Production/Corazón Supported by Katja Jessen, In Colour
Production Designer International GmbH & Filmförderung Katja Sekerci [2.35:1] for a life not ruled by her father’s paranoiac
Tamo Kunz Co. KG/Warner Bros. Hamburg Schleswig- Denis Moschitto Subtitles regime – she seems to stretch and grow older
Original Score Entertainment GmbH Holstein, Deutscher Danilo Fava
before our eyes. Foster, who won acclaim for his
Hamburg, Germany, the present. Nuri, a Kurdish drug suicide by slitting her wrists in the bathtub. This news supporting role in 2016’s Hell or High Water, offers
dealer, emerges from his prison cell to be married to gives Katja the will to stay alive to see justice done in another quite remarkable performance. Will’s
his sweetheart, German-born Katja. Subsequently we court. But although the evidence against the culprits, deep instability is never in doubt, but Foster keeps
see them living as model citizens, raising their five- a young couple, is almost overwhelming, there is it at a simmer, without indulging in exuberant
year-old son Rocco. One day Katja drops Rocco off at enough reasonable doubt to keep them out of prison. displays. In fact, he provokes one of the film’s rare
his father’s office on her way to a spa visit. Returning After the trial, Katja follows the defendants to Greece,
later, she finds the street closed due to a bomb where they are holidaying near an inn owned by a white laughs at one of Will’s lowest moments, as he
attack, and becomes hysterical. The police confirm nationalist whose false testimony at their trial helped struggles to cope with psychologically probing
that Nuri and Rocco are among the dead. Suspecting to set them free. She crafts a homemade bomb of questions fired at him by a machine – a scene
gang retaliation, the police question Katja, asking the type that killed her family, but then hesitates to of grim absurdity that recalls Loach’s I, Daniel
her if Nuri had continued his drug-dealing activities. use it. After Danilo begs her on the phone to return to Blake (2016). This is a film of few, and restrained,
Katja insists that the culprits must be domestic Nazi Germany so that she can begin the process of appeal,
terrorists, a suspicion finally confirmed in a phone she strengthens her resolve and walks into her targets’
emotional outbursts. Tom’s tears when she frets
call from her lawyer Danilo after she has attempted camper, detonating the device and killing them all. about how her potential classmates will
torment her are brief but indelible.

July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 67

 Life of the Party
USA 2018
Director: Ben Falcone
Certificate 12A 104m 39s

Reviewed by Pamela Hutchinson

Following her long-running ditzy sidekick
character on Gilmore Girls (2000-07) and her
REVIEWS

breakout supporting role in Bridesmaids (2011), it

has been a joy to see Melissa McCarthy deservedly
elevated to a comic lead. Sadly, however, misfires
such as Life of the Party may threaten her star
status. This prolonged college comedy captures
the atmosphere of a sleepy afternoon lecture
rather than a wild night at a campus kegger.
Wearing a helmet of unflattering curls,
oversized specs and a ‘proud mom’ sweater,
McCarthy appears as middle-aged wife and
mother Deanna, heartlessly ditched by her grump
of a hubby Dan (Matt Walsh) on the very day they
deposit their daughter Maddie (Molly Gordon)
at college for her senior year. Deanna grieves
for her marriage with the help of uninhibited
bestie Christine (a disappointingly screechy
turn from Bridesmaids co-star Maya Rudolph),
but within a week she has conceived a plan for
her post-marriage life. Having dropped out of
university two decades earlier, she decides to re-
enrol and finally finish her archaeology degree.
Deanna has a passion for her subject, and
is delighted to discover that one of her former
classmates is now her professor, but Life of the Party
Into the wild: Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie, Ben Foster takes very little interest in her love of learning.
Instead, this is an episodic fish-out-of-water
In fact, this is a drama so understated wrapped. Similarly, as Tom thrives on the brightly comedy, following Deanna as she braves college
that its emotional climax plays out with coloured clothes and social opportunities of a life in a class of millennials. She is a hit, though,
barely any dialogue, and more attention needs new life, Will shrinks and withers. In a fairy- and soon dishing out motherly advice along
to be paid to fluctuations in background noise light-strewn clearing, Tom may find a best-of- with her homemade lasagne, joining a sorority,
than to any speech. Granik’s film is structured both-worlds she can call home, but her father hooking up with Jack (Luke Benward), a hunky
by a series of visual and aural contrasts: the will always feel most secure among the bracken, student half her age who worships her as his
rustling leaves and animal calls of the park are dwarfed and protected by the forest canopy. “sexual Dumbledore”, and incessantly touring the
set against the blaring traffic of urban Portland; Consistently downplayed, and with little party circuit after a quick bathroom makeover
the forest, thick with giant Douglas firs, against a of the shocking squalor or violence of Winter’s courtesy of her ever-understanding daughter.
regimented farm of diminutive Christmas trees, Bone, Leave No Trace may struggle to make Life of the Party hews to a familiar formula,
which are to be selected for their symmetrical the same impact as Granik’s earlier film. It’s then, but adds up to far less than the sum of its
perfection and shipped off to customers in a rewarding experience, nonetheless: a story parts. The problem here is not that there are
California. It’s in the latter seemingly civilised of deep emotional poignancy, with a grim not enough jokes but that none of them lands.
space, not the wilderness, that Will’s PTSD is political relevance. Tom and Will’s tragedy McCarthy is reliably engaging, sweet and game
most painfully triggered, when helicopters began in a conflict on foreign shores, but for some mildly gross slapstick, but director Ben
buzz overhead, unloading trees to be machine- modern urban America offers no safe haven. Falcone (McCarthy’s partner, who also co-wrote
the film with her) maintains a maddeningly
Credits and Synopsis sluggish pace. Each punchline dribbles into
dead air – less the life of the party than a damp
Produced by Michael McDonough Production Andy Pollack Dale Tiffany
Anne Harrison Editor Companies Michael Bloom Jeff Kober
Linda Reisman Jane Rizzo Bron Creative and Adam Pincus tree farmer In Colour
Anne Rosellini Production Designer Tropic Studios Isaiah Stone [1.85:1]
Screenplay Chad Keith present a Harrison Tom’s neighbour
Debra Granik Original Music Productions, Reisman Cast Dana Millican Distributor
Anne Rosellini Dickon Hinchliffe Productions, Ben Foster Jean Bauer Sony Pictures
Based on the novel Sound Mixer Still Rolling Will Ayanna Berkshire Releasing UK
My Abandonment Christian Dolan Productions film Thomasin Harcourt Dr Berkshire
by Peter Rock Costume Designer Executive Producers McKenzie Alyssa Lynn
Director of Erin Orr Aaron L. Gilbert Tom Valerie
Photography Jason Cloth Dale Dickey Ryan Joiner

Portland, Oregon, present day. Teenage girl Tom and
her ex-military father Will live in a camp in the state
park. They live off the land, topping up their supplies
with cash that Will earns by selling his PTSD drugs
to other veterans camping nearby. One day, the
authorities discover Will and Tom’s camp and take
them into state care. After assessing them, social
services find them a home in a small house on a
farm where Will can work. Tom settles in but Will is
increasingly uncomfortable. He and Tom flee for a
new camp, going by bus, hitchhiking and then trekking
through the woods. Dangerously cold, hungry and
lost, they finally find a cabin. Will leaves to look for
supplies but doesn’t return. While he’s away, Tom
finds a newspaper cutting that reveals the cause and
extent of her father’s PTSD. The next morning, she
finds him unconscious – he has fallen in the woods.
Passers-by take him to the home of a woman, who
arranges for a former army medic to treat his injuries
and offers father and daughter a caravan to stay in, in
a woodland trailer park. Tom settles in once more but
Will is eager to leave as soon as he can walk without
crutches. They set off together, but Tom can’t bring
herself to leave again, so they part ways. Tom returns
to the caravan and Will heads into the woods. Tom
leaves her father a parcel of food in the forest.
University challenge: Melissa McCarthy

68 | Sight&Sound | July 2018

 Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms
Director: Okada Mari
Certificate 15 114m 28s

squib. While mother and daughter are the Reviewed by Jasper Sharp
height of blandness, their friends have mostly For all the prevalence of young women
been blessed with some intriguing quirks, yet protagonists in Japanese animation, female

REVIEWS
these are never explored or capitalised on. directors remain something of a rarity. Following
When they’re not simply slow, many of Yamato Naoko’s A Silent Voice (2016), Maquia:
the scenes are so messily staged or crashingly When the Promised Flower Blooms becomes
predictable as to be pointless. McCarthy’s big just the second anime feature directed by a
physical comedy set piece, when nerves cause woman to receive a UK theatrical release.
Deanna to sweat and growl uncomfortably Working from her own original script, first-
through a class presentation, ends up not time director Okada Mari presents a heartfelt
as cringe-comedy but merely mortifying. allegorical fantasy that posits motherhood
It’s a bogglingly low-stakes drama anyway, as a supernatural gift, yet ultimately a lonely
as she’s aceing her course and the upshot business. At the beginning of the tale, the
of her humiliation is no more than a pair of eponymous heroine lives a carefree if cloistered
sweaty jeans. She pulls off the mandatory existence as a member of the Iorph clan, a
comic dance sequence with aplomb, though, mystical people famed for their longevity A separation: Maquia
dressed to the nines for an 80s disco – it’s a rare and the legendary magical cloth into which
moment of energy in this flatlining movie. they weave their memories, emotionally constructed chronicle of Maquia’s relationship
With such a strong lead, Life of the Party might connecting themselves to one another. with her ward. If there is occasional confusion,
have scored high with generation-gap giggles, The plot unfolds over the course of a lifetime: it is due to the sheer timespan covered and the
or as an inspirational comedy about a woman not that of Maquia herself, but of the baby boy large number of peripheral figures popping in
converting her midlife crisis into a life-begins- she discovers abandoned in a forest after she and out of the narrative. The animation – a first
at-40 adventure. Instead it barely scrapes a pass. has been wrenched from her homeland by an theatrical feature from the new P.A. Works studio
aggressive and thoroughly masculine invasion. – is generally impressive, if slightly generic. The
Credits and Synopsis In accordance with Iorph custom, Maquia’s character designs by Yoshida Akihiko, best known
loving embrace of this outsider infant, whom for his work on the Final Fantasy videogames,
she names Erial, sees her become one of ‘The adhere to the anime standard of limpid blue eyes
Produced by Day production Jack
Melissa McCarthy Executive Jessie Ennis Clan of the Separated’, raising the foundling and paedomorphic features – though the script
Ben Falcone Producers Debbie as her own in the enemy city of Mezarte. provides some justification for this, since the
Chris Henchy Toby Emmerich Heidi Gardner
Written by Richard Brener Leonor Maquia’s entry into the world of motherhood Iorph characters’ physical form becomes fixed
Melissa McCarthy Michael Disco Chris Parnell happens without any intimation of sexual once they reach adolescence. The locations and
Ben Falcone David Siegel Mr Truzack
Director of Debby Ryan
activity, in contrast to the trajectory of her costumes are drawn from a Hanseatic-era Middle
Photography Jennifer childhood friend Leilia, who is abducted to Europe, with the Iorph homeland, rendered as
Julio Macat Cast Yani Simone
serve as consort to the Mezarte tribe’s Prince a prelapsarian Rivendell-like utopia, providing
Edited by Melissa McCarthy Trina
Brian Olds Deanna Miles Jimmy O. Yang Hazel. When the child of their loveless a stark contrast to the industrial-military base
Production Gillian Jacobs Tyler consummation fails to manifest Iorph powers, of the Mezarte city, crammed with grinding
Designer Helen
Rusty Smith Maya Rudolph Dolby Digital Leilia is forcibly separated from her offspring, cogs and Boschian jets of steam and flame.
Music Christine In Colour and takes to tending instead the dragon-like Maquia is clearly aimed at a young to
Fil Eisler Julie Bowen
Sound Mixer Marcie Distributor creatures kept at the foot of castle, whose mid-teen demographic, but its underlying
Todd Weaver Matt Walsh Warner Bros. powers, harnessed for the purposes of warfare, idea – that the maternal spirit is eternal and
Costumes Dan Miles Pictures
Designed by Molly Gordon International (UK)
have similarly waned in Mezarte captivity. cyclical, unlike the transient physicality
Louise Mingenbach Maddie Miles Okada’s background as a prolific screenwriter of men, and endures in people’s memories
Stephen Root
©Warner Bros. Mike
with two decades’ experience in the anime right up until the point of death – results in
Entertainment Inc. Jacki Weaver world comes across in this by-and-large tightly some undeniably affecting moments.
Production Sandy
Companies Adria Arjona
New Line Cinema Amanda Credits and Synopsis
presents an On the Luke Benward

US, present day. Immediately after dropping their Producers Production Sakurai Yuki The people of Iorph lead a timeless existence apart
Kikuchi Hirohisa Companies young Erial from the world, ceasing to age once they reach their
daughter Maddie at university for her final year, Dan
Endo Naoko Bandai Visual, Hikasa Yoko
Miles tells his wife Deanna that he wants a divorce Takenaka Nobuhiro Cygames, Hakuhodo Dita mid-teens. Maquia, an Iorph girl with no parents, is
– he is in love with a woman named Marcie. Deanna Kyotani Tomomi DY Music & Pictures, Kaji Yuki warned never to fall in love with an outsider, lest she
is distraught, but decides that now is a good time to Screenplay Lantis, P.A. Works Krim face centuries of solitude. When the warring Mezarte
finish her own degree, having dropped out of college Okada Mari clan invades and abducts Maquia’s friend Leilia, forcing
Based on the manga In Colour
when she was pregnant with Maddie. Deanna is full her to marry Prince Hazel to bear him a child with
by Sato Mito Voice Cast [1.78:1]
of enthusiasm for her studies, but struggles with her Director of Iwami Manaka Subtitles Iorph powers, Maquia is torn from her homeland in the
goth roommate and with bullies who mock her age. Photography Maquia mêlée. Lost in a forest, she comes across an orphaned
One night, Maddie and her friends take Deanna out Namiki Satoshi Irino Miyu Distributor baby boy. She carries him to a nearby farmhouse and,
Editor Erial National naming him Erial, decides to raise him as her own.
to a party. Deanna beds fellow student Jack and they
Takahashi Ayumi Kayano Ai Amusements
subsequently have a series of sexual encounters, Art Director Leilia Years pass, and Maquia and Erial move to the
though she tells him the relationship can’t be serious. Higashiji Kazuki Kaji Yuuki Japanese Mezarte city. Here, Maquia is reunited with her
Deanna excels at her course and is inducted into a Original Character Clear theatrical title Iorph sweetheart Krim, who disappeared during
sorority, but nerves get the better of her when she Design Sawashiro Miyuki Sayonara no Asa the Mezarte invasion. Together they plan to free
Yoshida Akihiko Rashine ni Yakusoku no
has to give a presentation in class. On a night out with Art Design/ Hana o Kazaro
Leilia from the castle. Leilia, meanwhile, has been
Hosoya Yoshimasa
old friends, she meets Dan and Marcie, who announce Concept Design Lang separated from her daughter, who manifests
that they are getting married in a week. She also Okada Tomoaki Satou Rina no signs of the Iorph’s magical abilities.
discovers that Jack is Marcie’s son. Deanna and her Music Mido Neighbouring clans invade the Mezarte city.
Kawai Kenji Hikasa Yoko Now an adult, Erial is recruited into the Mezarte
friends crash the wedding and trash the reception.
Sound Director Tita
Marcie, furious, announces that Deanna will be cut Wakabayashi Kuno Misaki army. When the city falls, Leilia is liberated. Erial
off financially. Deanna and her friends throw a party Kazuhiro Medmel flees to his wife Dita, the daughter of the farming
to raise money for her tuition fees, which Christina Chief Animation Sugita Tomokazu household that initially harboured him and
Aguilera performs at. Deanna gives a successful Director/ Isol Maquia, arriving just as she gives birth to their
Character Design Hirata Hiroaki
presentation, and graduates alongside her daughter. Ishii Yuriko Baro
own child. Maquia and Leilia return to Iorph.

July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 69

 Mary Shelley McQueen
Ireland/Luxembourg/United Kingdom/USA/Australia 2017 United Kingdom 2018
Director: Haifaa Al-Mansour Director: Ian Bonhôte
Certificate 12A 120m 42s Certificate 15 111m 15s

Reviewed by Graham Fuller in Frankenstein derived from her own isolation. Reviewed by Lisa Mullen
Although her film is timed to coincide with the Less convincing is the proposition that in Like the movie business, fashion’s stock in trade
200th anniversary of the publication of Mary writing fictions appropriated by Shelley and is spectacle. If you can’t enchant the audience,
REVIEWS

Shelley’s Frankenstein, director Haifaa Al-Mansour, Byron, Mary and Polidori – whose The Vampyre repel them; for maximum impact, do both.
who has made bold films about women’s issues was initially published under Byron’s name This, Alexander McQueen excelled at. He made
in Saudi Arabia, notably Wadjda (2012 ), has – created monsters of the two literary lions. clothes that told stories about magic and death;
taken the opportunity to make a movie more This notion is intended to align with the poets’ about madness and beauty and fury. Dressed by
topically concerned with the persistence of piggish attitudes to women. A subplot involving McQueen, the female body became an unruly
abuses against women than with the novel’s Byron’s sexual exploitation of Mary’s stepsister piece of tech, always threatening to explode or
critique of Prometheanism. While it’s otherwise a Claire Clairmont echoes and exaggerates malfunction: forms were wrapped up, mummy-
conventional biopic hingeing on Mary Godwin’s Shelley and Mary’s scandalous elopement. tight, only to erupt in unexpected directions.
romantic relationship with a feckless Percy As for the famous Romantics’ Walpurgisnacht When McQueen sent models down a runway,
Bysshe Shelley, the film has its #MeToo and at Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816, Mary jaws dropped and things literally caught fire.
Time’s Up moments: Mary is sexually harassed Shelley merely creates nostalgia for the prelude And yet fashion is mostly about money,
by Shelley’s friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg; the to James Whale’s camp Bride of Frankenstein and this film makes no bones about the fact.
anonymous publication of Frankenstein, and the (1935) and Ken Russell’s lurid Gothic (1986). Chubby, normal, cockney Lee McQueen, son
imputation that it was written by Shelley because Al-Mansour’s failure to make it different from of a taxi driver, never had the necessary, so he
he contributed the preface, is an outrageous any other night chez Byron is disappointing. made his way up on sheer chutzpah and hard
sexist violation of her authorial rights. So too is the film’s frequently didactic tone. work, learning skills from old-school tailors,
These contemporary issues work organically God forbid that a modern audience should be then crafting showstoppers out of cheap market
in Emma Jensen’s screenplay, and mesh with the familiar with such icons of Romanticism as fabric spliced with cling film and gaffer tape.
pre-Raphaelite-ish opening scene, in which Mary Mary Godwin, Shelley and Byron. There is a His genius barged through all obstacles. Was
is seen scribbling a gothic tale as she sits by the tendency for the characters to declaim thoughts that it? Another story seeps in around the edges:
grave of her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, author that should have remained subtextual, as when McQueen as a charmer, a magnet for patronage.
of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), at St Shelley patronisingly praises Frankenstein: “It Like a Renaissance guttersnipe with a twinkle
Pancras Old Church in London. Unfortunately, exceeds even what I believed you capable of.” in his eye, he shazammed the wealthy and
Mary Shelley gives its title character little The acting is also simplistic. Douglas Booth’s influential into helping him. “I found myself
agency. After the groundwork for her creation portrayal of Shelley as an irresponsible offering him a place on the course,” Bobby
of Frankenstein is laid by her seeing a frog pretty boy and Tom Sturridge’s execrably Hillson remembers, barely able to say exactly
galvanised at a theatrical phantasmagoria, and flamboyant performance as Byron reinforce why she made room for him at Central St Martins
by a dream she has of the physician John the cliché of the pair as Romanticism’s School of Art. His aunt raided her savings to
Polidori infusing a corpse with life, it takes rock stars. “You have to understand, pay the fees, and why not? He was brilliant –
her a scant minute of screen time, filled with Mary, that I have always loved this way,” even if he was a nightmare to work with.
a montage, to write the novel. This brevity drawls Shelley, expecting her to swallow The film looks gorgeous, of course:
is especially frustrating in the context of his libertine cant. Unfortunately, Elle McQueen’s archive does most of the work.
tiresome earlier scenes in which Shelley and Fanning neither has the gravitas to Forget the pieces that made it on to the padded
Samuel Taylor Coleridge spout their poems. make Mary a serious feminist heroine hangers of the one per cent, we’re here for
Al-Mansour and Jensen adequately nor conveys the novelist’s considerable the adrenaline-washed strangeness of the
address the idea that Mary’s inspiration intellectual bandwidth. In contrast, Bel catwalk shows. Even at this distance, they are
for the Monster’s crushing loneliness Powley espouses the kind of guile and difficult to watch. There was real darkness in
guilelessness that may have been integral McQueen’s hinterland, and he projected it all
Elle Fanning to Claire Clairmont’s rumoured volatility. on to women’s bodies; there’s nothing pretty
about a collection called ‘Highland Rape’, or
Credits and Synopsis one that references surgery and straitjackets.
For good measure, directors Ian Bonhôte and
Peter Ettedgui have added some creepy digital
Produced by Costume Designer Metrol Technology Scannán na hÉireann/ Compton Ross Dr John Polidori
Amy Baer Caroline Koener a co-production The Irish Film Board Emma Jensen Maisie Williams effects – natural forms writhing into life, growing
Alan Moloney with Juliette Films Produced with the Joannie Burstein Isabel Baxter into and over skulls and McQueen’s own face
Ruth Coady ©Parallel Films for Ralfish Films participation of Rebecca Miller Bel Powley
Written by (Storm) Limited/ A Parallel Films HanWay Films, Irish Mark Amin Claire Clairmont – amplifying the sense of impending doom.
Emma Jensen Juliette Films SA/ and Gidden Media Film Board, Film Tom Sturridge Among the interviewees, two voices are
Additional Writing Parallel (Storm) production Fund Luxembourg, Lord Byron
Haifaa Al-Mansour Limited/The British Produced in Parallel Films, Head Cast notably absent. The first is that of Katy England,
Cinematography Film Institute association with Gear, Gidden Media, Elle Fanning Dolby Digital once McQueen’s stylist, wrangler and right hand;
David Ungaro Production Sobini Films Juliette Films, Sobini Mary Wollstonecraft In Colour
Edited by Companies Developed with the Films, Ingenious, BFI Godwin, Mary Shelley [2.35:1]
they parted ways in 2007. The other absence is
Alex Mackie Hanway Films and BFI assistance of Screen Executive Producers Douglas Booth Isabella Blow, who committed suicide, also in
Production Designer present in association NSW, Screen Australia Johanna Hogan Percy Bysshe Shelley Distributor 2007, three years before her most famous protégé
Paki Smith with Filmfund With the support Peter Watson Stephen Dillane Curzon Artificial Eye
Music Luxembourg, Bord of the Film Fund Matthew Baker William Godwin did. It is Blow’s ghost, not McQueen’s reticent
Amelia Warner Scannán na hÉireann/ Luxembourg Isabel Davis Joanne Froggatt shadow, that haunts the film as a vivid, bristling
Sound Mixer The Irish Film Board, Developed with the Charles Auty Mary Jane Godwin
Philippe Kohn Head Gear and assistance of Bord Phil Hunt Ben Hardy spectre, centre stage in the archive at first, but
crowded out of the frame once cash begins
London, 1814. Sixteen-year-old Mary Godwin lives Lord Byron. In 1816, Mary, Shelley and Claire stay at to shower down from global corporations.
with her father William, his second wife Mary Jane, her Byron’s rented villa on Lake Geneva. Shelley learns that No one can be adorable for ever; having
daughter Claire Clairmont and a stepbrother. Mary is Harriet has drowned herself. One night, Byron coaxes charmed the fashion business with his misfit
harangued by her stepmother. Her father sends her his guests, including his physician John Polidori, to perspective, McQueen made sackloads of money
away to stay in Scotland, where she falls in love with write a ghost story. Mary conceives ‘Frankenstein’;
the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Back in London, Shelley Polidori begins ‘The Vampyre’. Mary, Shelley and Claire
but found himself chained to the bottom line
apprentices himself to Godwin. Harriet Shelley, the return to London after Byron rejects Claire. Shelley and trapped by the mythology he had once
poet’s estranged wife, warns Mary to stay away from vanishes. Mary writes ‘Frankenstein; or, The Modern dismantled so cheekily. Old media reports and
him. Mary and Shelley elope, accompanied by Claire. Prometheus’, which is published anonymously. ‘The shaky camcorder footage track the changes
Mary gives birth to a daughter, Clara. It seems that Vampyre’ is published under Byron’s name. Mary and – his body neatened up with liposuction, his
Shelley and Claire may have slept together. Clara Shelley are reconciled when he proclaims Mary’s
mind flayed by paranoia. This nightmarish
dies after a few weeks. Claire begins an affair with literary achievement at a gathering held by Godwin.
metamorphosis screams out of his later work,

70 | Sight&Sound | July 2018

 Modern Life Is Rubbish
United Kingdom/USA 2016
Director: Daniel Jerome Gill
Certificate 15 103m 34s

Reviewed by Sam Wigley

Spoiler alert: this review reveals a plot twist
There was an advert on TV a lot circa the year

REVIEWS
2000, depicting a separating couple squabbling
over custody of their CD of David Gray’s White
Ladder – the album having become such a
sleeper smash that it got its own TV campaign.
An adult lifetime later, this first feature from
Daniel Jerome Gill plays like a long-form
exploration of the same Nick Hornby-ish idea:
that memories from a relationship are inscribed
in the music we discover or share together.
Modern Life Is Rubbish was developed out
of a 13-minute short film of the same name
that Gill made in 2009, which hinged on this
CD-collection-dividing moment of a break- Off-key: Josh Whitehouse, Freya Mavor
up, with Rafe Spall’s music nerd still waxing
lyrical about Kid A’s inner sleeve to his ex, instead Gill’s film takes its title from Blur’s
heedless of the fact that it’s this very navel- quarter-century-old second album, the name of
gazing that fuelled the rot. Gill’s new version which also encapsulates Liam’s earnest, anti-iPod
pads out this situation, incorporating some Luddism. Tellingly, no Blur songs were licensed
of the same dialogue and including the Kid for the soundtrack, and in fact Modern Life Is
Stitch perfect: Alexander McQueen A scene seemingly verbatim. Now running Rubbish takes place an unspecified number of
longer than a double LP, it uses a structure years after Britpop, in that post-David Gray dead
but it can’t really be explored in a film that somewhat similar to Michael Winterbottom’s zone when Britain’s indie balladeers became
wants to sell a kind of pure essence of creativity 9 Songs (2004), in that the rush and later ruin increasingly wet and anachronistic. When
as the secret of his success. The tortured-genius of a love affair are recalled via a succession of Liam finally gets his fame-making moment on
cliché dissolves into tales of feral temper and musical memories – in this case, Proustian stage (with a ballad about liquorice allsorts),
brutal rejections, told by friends reduced to moments brought on by the dilemma of, for it’s by breaking down and crying mid-song.
tears at the memory. A backstory is sketched example, whose copy it is of Blur: The Best Of. Realising what he’s lost in Natalie, he becomes
about childhood abuse and nagging self-doubt; But, from the meet-cute in a record shop, it’s a YouTube sensation as ‘The Crying Guitarist’.
clearly, when he died he must have been very a relationship in which the woman is left to As bystanders, we viewers are given zero
ill. Once, he knew the knack of finding help play sounding-board for a man’s passions and skin in the game of what is a transparently
exactly where and when he needed it, but at opinions. As in the short film, aspiring indie toxic relationship, so it’s dispiriting when this
the end, McQueen seems to have forgotten frontman Liam (Josh Whitehouse) gets to drone breakdown signals an arc heading towards
how or who to ask – or what to ask for. on disparagingly about how best-of compilations reconciliation. Where Mia Hansen-Løve’s
are “shortcuts to enlightenment”, part of his Eden (2014) elegiacally showed the best years
Credits and Synopsis sustained Chinese-water-torture campaign of its similarly music-obsessive protagonist
of boorishly mansplaining music to hapless simply passing beyond his reach, Gill’s film
Natalie (Freya Mavor), who looks on adoringly indulges its hero’s own indulgences, in an
Co-directed by ©Salon Galahad Ltd John Jencks
Peter Ettedgui Production Jay Taylor at first but is soon swimming frantically for extended ode to handwritten notes and physical
Produced by Companies Peter Ettedgui the life raft of her corporate advertising job. media that – being shot in Instagram-ready
Ian Bonhôte A Salon & Misfits Kinvara Balfour
Nick Taussig production in Isabella Marchese ‘Charmless Man’ would have worked, but soft focus – is as hypocritical as it is twee.
Paul Van Carter association with Rangona
Andee Ryder Creativity Capital & Ian Berg
Written by Embankment Films, Credits and Synopsis
Peter Ettedgui The Electric Shadow In Colour
Director of Company, Time [1.85:1]
Photography Based Arts & Moving Produced by Made with the The Curve London, the 2000s. Music obsessive Liam and his
Will Pugh Pictures Media a Distributor Dominic Norris support of the girlfriend Natalie are breaking up and sharing out the
Editor film by Ian Bonhôte Lionsgate UK Written by BFI Film Fund In Colour
Philip Gawthorne Executive Producer [1.85:1] belongings in their flat. Liam barely lifts a hand to
Cinzia Baldessari & Peter Ettedgui
Production Executive Director of Christopher Figg help, underlining the passivity that has created a rift
Designer Producers Photography Robert Whitehouse Distributor in their relationship. As Natalie sorts through their
Darren Williams Patrick Fischer Tim Sidell Norman Merry Picturehouse CDs, we see flashbacks to scenes from their love affair,
Music David Gilbery Editor Peter Hampden Entertainment
Peter Christelis
beginning with their first encounter in a record shop.
Michael Nyman Richard Kondal Samuel Potter
Sound Recordist Tim Haslam Production Designer Simon Laub They attend gigs and listen to records together, with
Stephen Hopkins Hugo Grumbar Charlotte Pearson Daniel Jerome Gill Liam proclaiming the authenticity of vinyl and CDs and
Music decrying the shallowness of the digital experience.
Orlando Roberton Liam is the lead guitarist and singer in an aspiring
A documentary about the life and work of fashion Production Cast indie band called Head Cleaner. They get a no-nonsense
Sound Mixer Josh Whitehouse
designer Lee Alexander McQueen, told via Keith Tunney Liam new manager, but their inability to break through
interviews, archive footage and expressionistic Costume Designer Freya Mavor – and Liam’s consequent difficulty in contributing
digital animations. The film presents McQueen as a Hannah Glossop Natalie financially – begins to put a strain on his relationship
driven genius who turned his demons into clothes Will Merrick
©Modern Life Ollie
with Natalie. Over time, the pair’s lives diverge, as
that shocked and enchanted the cognoscenti. Natalie’s career heads into the corporate sphere.
Pictures Limited Matt Milne
His sister and nephew explain the family dynamic Production Gus After they break up, Natalie begins a relationship
and the history of abuse that shaped his early life, Companies Tom Riley with a work colleague, who invites her on a trip to
while friends, colleagues and patrons testify to his Piccadilly Pictures Adrian Florence. Head Cleaner get a high-profile support gig,
dynamic originality. The film traces his rags-to-riches and Sqn Capital Daisy Bevan
present in association Layla and Liam plays a new track that wins over the audience.
narrative and the toll that success took on him with Lipsync, Jessie Cave Mid-song, however, he breaks down at the thought of
personally. His troubled inner life made it hard for Masnomis and Trail Kerry losing Natalie. Footage of the moment goes viral on
him to forge relationships; addiction and poor health Blazer Pictures a Sorcha Cusack YouTube, and when Natalie sees it she realises that she
– compounded by exhaustion, anxiety, depression Serotonin Films Mary
production Steven Mackintosh
is still in love with him. Liam leaves her a treasure hunt
and the recent death of his beloved mother – led of hidden messages across town, which leads to the
A film by Daniel Lenny
him to take his own life in 2010 at the age of 40. Jerome Gill Ian Hart pair being reunited and Liam declaring his devotion.

July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 71

 102 Not Out Path of Blood
Director: Umesh Shukla United Kingdom/USA 2018
Certificate 12A 101m 59s Director: Jonathan Hacker
Certificate 18 91m 3s

Reviewed by Naman Ramachandran Reviewed by Philip Kemp

In Indian social tradition, adult children are Not surprisingly, western awareness of Islamic
expected to care for their elderly parents, as fundamentalist terrorism has focused mainly
REVIEWS

exemplified in the Hindu epic The Ramayana, on such atrocities as 9/11, the Madrid train
where dutiful son Shravan Kumar takes his bombings in 2004, the July 2005 London transport
aged mother and father across the country on bombings, the 2015 Bataclan killings in Paris,
a pilgrimage. In real life, the opposite is often the 2016 Bastille Day truck attack in Nice and so
the case, and this is perhaps why Leo McCarey’s on. But as has been pointed out, the jihadists of
classic Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), in which a al-Qaeda and its offshoot and successor Isis have
retired couple are forced to separate after losing targeted, injured and killed considerably more
their home and have to rely on their ungrateful of their fellow Muslims than western ‘infidels’.
children for shelter, has resonated with Indian In particular, it’s often forgotten that for three
filmmakers, resulting in similarly themed films years, from 2003 to 2006, al-Qaeda carried out a
such as Oon Paoos (1954), Avtaar (1983) and persistent campaign of attacks, bombings and
Baghban (2003). In Umesh Shukla’s 102 Not Out, propaganda aimed at overthrowing the House of
based on the play by Saumya Joshi, Bollywood Saud and setting up a fundamentalist state in Saudi
veteran Amitabh Bachchan (the patriarch in Arabia. (This despite the fact that Wahhabism,
Baghban) is the feisty 102-year-old Dattatraya, the ultra-rigid form of Sunni Islam practised in
determined to bring joy back into the life of his Saudi, is widely considered to be the source of
crotchety 75-year-old son Babulal, played by most Islamic extremism. Fifteen of the nineteen
Rishi Kapoor. Dattatraya’s agenda is to remove 9/11 hijackers were Saudi, as was Osama bin
the blinkers of paternal affection from Babulal’s Laden.) The campaign, though largely dormant,
eyes regarding the US-based grandson who has isn’t wholly extinct: in July 2016, Isis carried out
not visited in 19 years and is returning to India four suicide-bomb attacks in Saudi Arabia.
with a view to securing the ancestral property. Man of the century: Kapoor, Bachchan Jonathan Hacker’s eye-opening documentary
The film begins as a flat-out but uneven brings al-Qaeda’s three-year Saudi campaign
comedy, with Dattatraya putting Babulal some of the all-time classics of Indian cinema, into vividly close focus. Remarkably, the Saudi
through a series of tasks intended to trigger including Amar Akbar Anthony (1977) and authorities granted Hacker and his team
nostalgia and reawaken his lust for life. When Naseeb (1981), and the chief pleasure of 102 exclusive access to footage shot by the jihadists
the real agenda is revealed, the film finds its Not Out is seeing them on screen together after themselves, often inside the ‘boot camps’ where
groove and becomes the sort of sentimental decades. Shukla’s direction is functional at their young recruits were trained, and by the
melodrama that mainstream Indian audiences best, often reflecting the story’s stage origins, Saudi security forces charged with rooting them
have embraced time and again. All the main despite the addition of scenes in iconic Mumbai out and defeating them. (Hacker, along with his
players are on familiar territory here. Director landmarks and a swelling background score co-producer Thomas Small, has also turned this
Shukla has previous experience adapting a to indicate emotive cues in case anyone has material into a book bearing the same title as the
stage play with OMG: Oh My God! (2012), and missed them. The actors soar above these film, published in the UK by Simon & Schuster.)
interpreted the Shravan Kumar tale as All Is Well limitations; Bachchan’s trademark deep baritone Throughout, this raw testimony is allowed
(2015), with Kapoor as the patriarch. Kapoor comes to the fore at serious moments, as does to speak for itself; there are no interviews or
memorably played a 90-year-old grandfather Kapoor’s gravitas. They effortlessly riff off one talking-head commentaries. A narrative, placing
in Kapoor & Sons (2016), and Bachchan has another in a manner reminiscent of The Best the events we see in their chronological order,
played several spirited elderly characters, the Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011) or Quartet (2012). is provided by Samuel West, and extracts from
standouts being in Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna And while discerning audiences accustomed the al-Qaeda online magazine Voice of Jihad are
(2006), Cheeni Kum (2007) and Piku (2015). to subtler fare might find Joshi’s script over- read by Tom Hollander. (Hollander was chosen,
Bachchan and Kapoor have also co-starred in the-top, it packs real emotional heft. Hacker explains, “as he’s got a sort of warm yet
slightly brittle texture to his voice which makes
Credits and Synopsis it engaging and dangerous at the same time”.)
Perhaps the most immediately striking
Produced by Ganesh Acharya Dhiru Mumbai, India, the present. Dattatraya, 102, lives in a element of the al-Qaeda training footage is
Umesh Shukla Dharmendra Gohil sprawling bungalow with his 75-year-old son Babulal. that, far from presenting us with the wild-eyed,
Written by Production Amol Valharia
Saumya Joshi Companies Mukesh Hariawala Dattatraya is young at heart and wants to become shaggy-bearded fanatics of popular myth, many
Based on his play Sony Pictures neurosurgeon the world’s longest-living person, while Babulal is of the recruits come across as perversely likeable,
Director of Releasing a grumpy hypochondriac who is set in his ways. despite all the pernicious stuff they spout. At the
Photography International presents In Colour They communicate with one another via their young
Laxman Utekar in association [2.35:1]
assistant Dhiru. One day, Dattatraya announces that very start we meet a youngster called Abdulaziz,
Editor with Treetop Subtitles
Bodhaditya Banerjee Entertainment & he is sending Babulal to an old people’s home. When known as ‘Ali’, from whom his instructor is trying
Production Designer Benchmark Pictures a Distributor Babulal protests, Dattatraya lets him stay, on condition to elicit a statement for the camera. Chubby-faced
Mansi Dhruv Mehta film by Umesh Shukla Sony Pictures that he perform several tasks. These tasks, designed and patently none too bright, Ali is having trouble
Song Music Produced by Releasing UK to make Babulal rediscover his ‘joie de vivre’, include
Salim Merchant Sony Pictures understanding what he’s being asked. “Don’t use
remembering his late wife and the childhood of his
Sulaiman Merchant Entertainment
son Amol. Amol left for the US 19 years ago and hasn’t
such big words,” he pleads, giggling. “I’ll do better
Amitabh Bachchan Films India, Treetop
Rohan-Vinayak Entertainment visited India since, having married without informing if the questions are shorter.” Later we see some of
Lyrics Co-producer: his parents. He is now planning to visit. Dattatraya’s his fellow recruits goofing around, even passing
Saumya Joshi Benchmark Pictures
Hiral Brahmbhatt Executive Producers
final condition is that when Amol arrives, Babulal will the time running wheelbarrow races. Yet these
Amitabh Ashutosh Goswami sever what is left of their relationship, on the grounds are the same blinkered zealots who can pride
Bhattacharya Laxman Utekar that Amol cares only for the valuable real estate themselves on “growing closer to God” in their
Kaifi Azmi that he will inherit. Babulal refuses, threatening to
Background Score sue Dattatraya for the property. Dattatraya reveals campaign to kill and maim innocent people.
George Joseph Cast Their leaders, as might be expected, present
Sound Designer Amitabh Bachchan that he won’t live to see a court hearing, as he has
Sanjay Chaturvedi Dattatraya Vakharia a brain tumour. When Amol arrives, Babulal meets quite a contrast – articulate and well lit, staring
Costume Designer Rishi Kapoor him at the airport and disowns him. Dattatraya and balefully into the camera and proclaiming, “Do
Veera Kapur Babulal Vakharia, Babulal enjoy life together. When Dattatraya dies, he
Choreographers ‘Babu’ not think you can defend yourselves from the
leaves behind an audio recording for Babulal, telling
Feroz A. Khan Jimit Trivedi
him that he should break the longevity record.
soldiers of God.” The results of their strictures
are made horribly, graphically clear in the

72 | Sight&Sound | July 2018


Terror unleashed: Path of Blood
security-forces footage that’s interspersed with
al-Qaeda’s input. “Just write ‘female child’,”
instructs an officer at an atrocity site, as the
broken, nameless bodies are classified before
being carted away. “Just put ‘Lebanese’ for now.”
Deliberately, the filmmakers trim this footage so
that we’re never shown the faces of the victims.
Similarly, though we see something of the
maltreatment of a wretched elderly American
captive, Paul Marshall Johnson Jr, under al-Qaeda
interrogation, the screen cuts to black before the
beheading with which the video originally ended.
At times, the film arouses memories of Chris
Morris’s black comedy Four Lions (2010) in
Credits and Synopsis
Producer Sound Supervisor Page 1 present an OR
Jonathan Hacker Stevie Haywood Media production
Editor Executive Producers
Peter Haddon ©OR Media Ltd Mark Boal
Composer Production Abdulrahman
Chad Hobson Companies Alrashed
Using archive footage shot by al-Qaeda
militants and by the Saudi security services,
this documentary traces events in Saudi Arabia
between 2003 and 2009, when al-Qaeda militants
were using terrorism to attack and – as they
hoped – overthrow the Saudi government.
In March 2003, Fahd al-Saadi, a Yemeni member
of al-Qaeda, accidentally blows himself up in a
safe house in Riyadh, alerting the authorities to a
potential threat. A month later, a shootout takes
place in west Riyadh between the police and militants
commanded by Turki al-Dandani, leader of AQAP
(al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula). All the militants
escape. Over the next three years, al-Qaeda carries
out bomb attacks at various sites around Saudi
Arabia, killing mainly Muslims, though some of the
attacks target foreigners. It broadcasts propaganda
videos boasting of its successes and exhorting pious
revealing, as Hacker has commented, “the degree
of naivety and incompetence… prevalent among
the young Saudi kids in al-Qaeda”. Not that the
security forces are always much brighter. When
in 2009 undercover al-Qaeda suicide bomber
Abdullah al-Asiri wangles an interview with
security chief Prince Muhammad bin Nayef,
we’re told that he has been searched three times
and that he is observed to be sitting down rather
awkwardly; but no one seems to have sussed
that he has a bomb up his rectum. (Luckily, the
prince escapes with only minor injuries.) Such
near-farcical elements only accentuate the horror
of this revelatory and deeply disturbing film.
Adel Alabdulkarim Voice Cast [1.78:1]
Narrator Tom Hollander Part-subtitled
Samuel West voice of jihad
Distributor
Dolby Digital Trinity Filmed
In Colour Entertainment
Muslims to enlist. The Saudi security forces, under
the command of Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, step
up their efforts to detect and prevent the attacks.
Several senior militants are killed; younger al-Qaeda
members, taken into custody, are subjected to a
programme of re-education, their confessions shown
on Saudi television. A US expatriate, Paul Marshall
Johnson, is captured by al-Qaeda, which broadcasts
videos of his interrogation, torture and beheading. In
December 2004, al-Qaeda storms the US consulate
in Jeddah, killing guards but failing to break into
the main consulate building. In April 2005, Saudi
forces begin a three-day siege of a villa in the town
of al-Rass; 14 militants are killed and five arrested.
Over the next year, most of the militants are killed or
rounded up, and al-Qaeda activity dies down, but in
August 2009 a suicide bomber attempts to kill Prince
Muhammad. The prince survives with minor injuries.
The Poetess
Germany/United Arab Emirates/USA 2017
Directors: Stefanie Brockhaus, Andy Wolff
Reviewed by Hannah McGill
Spoiler alert: this review reveals a plot twist
If the meanings and mores of so-called reality TV
REVIEWS
remain as elusive as a definition of how exactly it
relates to reality, it’s evident that television shows
centring on ‘ordinary’ people can do a fast and
forceful job of thrusting awkward social issues
into the mainstream consciousness. Whether
this process can activate material change or is
limited to the brief sensationalising of matters
that demand much more formal and considered
attention remains a moot point – though not
one that receives much consideration in The
Poetess, an earnest but distinctly surface-level
account of a Middle Eastern pop-culture upset.
The Emirati television show Million’s Poet,
produced in Abu Dhabi and funded by the
Abu Dhabi Authority of Culture and Heritage,
is a talent show for poets working in Arabic.
Contestants compete for five cash prizes of up
to 5 million dirhams ($1,360,000) and are judged
on both their writing and their recitation. The
show is tremendously popular across the Persian
Gulf region, outstripping televised football; so
when in 2010 it selected its first female finalist,
Saudi Arabian Hissa Hilal, who then performed
a poem that attacked fundamentalist religious
leaders, a degree of kerfuffle occurred.
The film shows Hilal receiving warm responses
from judges and studio audience alike, and
ultimately coming third overall, but emphasises
the outraged and threatening reaction from the
inevitable online trolls and the response of the
international news media, which seized on the
story as an example of Arab intolerance of female
autonomy. It’s worth noting, of course, that one
does not need to home in on Arab countries to find
women receiving online death threats for asserting
opinions in public. Hilal, meanwhile, doesn’t in
real life wear the burqa that she donned for
her TV appearances, and is generally no
Us verses them: Hissa Hilal
July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 73

straightforward candidate for victimhood.
“People were astonished!” she declares of
her own performances. “How would a woman
REVIEWS
write poetry with such meaning and depth?”
The fact that the film gives scant attention
to the qualities of Hilal’s work, doesn’t place
her within a wider context of female writers or
performance poets, and doesn’t pause to examine
why – as we hear in passing – “poets in the Arab
world are superstars” all leaves it feeling a little
thin. But its interviews with its confident, spiky
and likeable protagonist and her elegant, eloquent
writer husband push beyond the simplistic
stereotype of – as one American news segment
puts it – “a voice from behind the veil, heard all
over the world!” A potted history of Saudi Arabia’s
treatment of its female citizens, meanwhile,
provides the important reminder that the
religious conservatism exemplified by insistence
on the veil is no permanent state, but a recent
and shifting phenomenon. “People have become
struck with a strange case of rigidity,” says Hilal.
At the close of the competition, Hilal comes
first in terms of the judges’ scores, but the public
vote bumps her down to third. “The tribes won’t
vote for a woman as they would for a man,”
her husband explains. Hilal’s own response to
winning 3 million dirhams, meanwhile, is one
to which artists of all nationalities and genders
can relate. “How I felt when I bought a house
with my own money? Money I earned writing
poetry… poetry I always felt was unacceptable?
I can’t describe that feeling. Poetry ended
up getting me a house! Does it even make
sense that poetry can get you a house?”
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by Films, ZDF/Das In Colour
Andy Wolff Kleine Fernsehspiel [1.85:1]
Cinematography in collaboration with Subtitles
Tobias Tempel ARTE and University
Stefanie Brockhaus for Television and Distributor
Film Editors Film Munich DocHouse
Hansjörg Weissbrich Funded by FFF Film-
Anja Pohl und Fernsehfonds
Music Bayern and SANAD
Sebastian Zenke Abu Dhabi Film Fund
Sound Design With the support of
Christoph von Abu Dhabi Cultural
Schönburg Programs & Heritage
Festival Committee,
©Brockhaus/ Pyramedia
Wolff, ZDF, HFF Productions and
Production Consultancy, Women
Companies Make Movies
Brockhaus/Wolff
Abu Dhabi, 2010. The television talent show ‘Million’s
Poet’ capitalises on the popularity of poetry in
the Arab-speaking world by having poets of many
nationalities compete for large cash prizes. In 2010
the show includes, for the first time, a female finalist:
Hissa Hilal, from Saudi Arabia. Hilal discusses how
she sought the permission of her husband and
family to appear on the show, how their concerns
convinced her to cover her face with a burqa while
on screen, and her own feelings regarding the
waxing and waning of religious conservatism in her
homeland. In the third round of the competition, Hilal
attracts controversy by performing a poem critical of
extremist religious leaders and their deployment of
fatwas. International media reports seize on Hilal as
a defiant opponent of Saudi Arabia’s suppression of
women. Hilal makes it to the finals of the competition,
and comes first in the judges’ scoring, but a weaker
showing in the public vote brings her down to third
place. She uses the prize money to buy a house.
74 | Sight&Sound | July 2018
Postcards from the 48%
United Kingdom 2018
Director: David Nicholas Wilkinson
Minority report: Postcards from the 48%
Reviewed by Matthew Barrington Postcards is released at a time when a slew of
The tagline for crowdfunded documentary think pieces and documentaries are examining,
Postcards from the 48% is “How Do We Stop 50 years on, the global discontent of 1968. At a
Brexit?” But instead of addressing this seemingly recent Q&A with the 90-year-old William Klein
impossible question, director/producer/narrator following a screening of his film Maydays, a
David Nicholas Wilkinson focuses on setting portrait of the Paris protests, the veteran director
out why the 2016 decision to leave the EU will was asked: “What can Brexit protesters learn from
prove disastrous for the United Kingdom. ’68?” Just as in 1968, there is anger in the air, and
This is essentially a work of protest, made up of grassroots political movements are using visual
largely disconnected interviews, or ‘postcards’, media to get their voices heard. But you can’t help
presenting reasons to carry on the fight against feeling that those still campaigning under the
Brexit. Although the film begins with footage of a flag of Remain lack the inspiration seen in the
large pro-EU march through the streets of rebellions of 50 years ago. Wilkinson, through
Westminster, it avoids a London-centric perspective, his one-on-one interviews, presents in a clear and
presenting arguments from a multitude of UK coherent manner why places as unconnected
cities as Wilkinson travels across the country as Fife, Stoke-on-Trent, Gibraltar, Poole, Dover
speaking to business owners, local politicians and and Gwynedd have specific local reasons for
community leaders who express trepidation at concern and dissatisfaction at the prospect of
what Brexit might bring. The most successful Brexit. In doing so, he provides a genuine public
sections come from visits to Northern Ireland, service in articulating, without hyperbole,
where the potential ramifications of leaving the EU these different perspectives. The tone could
are many, and to the cities that are badly affected by best be described as one of sincere sobriety. But
post-industrialisation and seemingly kept afloat by Wilkinson’s choice of high-profile interviewees
European redevelopment funds. such as Vince Cable, Nick Clegg, Bob Geldof and
Alastair Campbell pulls his film away from this
Credits and Synopsis focus on the local and unwittingly reveals why
the Remain camp was ultimately unsuccessful.
One particular scene demonstrates both
Producer Emanuele Correani Bill Lawrence
David Nicholas Rory Smith Don McVey the film’s and the Remain campaign’s lack of
Wilkinson Brian Gray Ben Richards engaging and inspiring rhetoric. At a rally in
Writers David Sohanpal
David Nicholas Ian Powell In Colour Manchester, the broadcaster Bonnie Greer
Wilkinson Jack Bowman [1.78:1] provides a rare moment of soapbox rabble-
Emlyn Price
Director of ©Postcards Distributor
rousing, but the film then abruptly cuts to
Photography Films Limited Guerilla Films Campbell playing the bagpipes at the same event,
Don McVey Production
Editors Companies
followed by a keynote speech by Lib Dem leader
Jon Walker 572 remainers & Aziz Cable and a presentation by Tories Against Brexit.
Michael Bradsell McMahon presents The sincerity of Postcards is unquestionable,
Composer a Guerilla Docs film
Christopher Barnett Executive and the snapshot it provides of a United
Sound Recordists Producers Kingdom confused as unanswered questions
pile up, feels accurate. As the image of a post-
In a 2016 referendum, almost 52 per cent of the Brexit landscape becomes less blurred, there
UK population voted to leave the European Union.
are undoubtedly going to be more attempts
‘Postcards from the 48%’ is a documentary
articulating why those who voted Remain are still by filmmakers to explore these changes.
fighting to block Brexit and stay part of the EU. Postcards feels like an early entry into what
will be a growing field of British cinema.
The Rape of Recy Taylor Ryuichi Sakamoto Coda
USA 2017 USA/Japan/The Netherlands 2017
Director: Nancy Buirski Director: Stephen Nomura Schible
Certificate 15 90m 33s

Reviewed by Kate Stables Reviewed by Tony Rayns

A piercing and potent mix of personal testimony Moderately interesting but deeply unsatisfying,
and revelations of wider injustices, Nancy this not-very-intimate portrait of the musician

REVIEWS
Buirski’s moving documentary on the interracial Sakamoto Ryuichi covers a lot of ground
gang rape of young mother Recy Taylor, in without revealing or even suggesting anything
rural Alabama in 1944, displays commendable surprising to anyone who has followed
ambition. Hymning the bravery and tenacity Sakamoto’s career. It’s in most ways a standard
of Taylor herself and the black women activists TV documentary (Japan’s national broadcaster
who campaigned for her, it’s unafraid to go big NHK is involved), using footage of Sakamoto
(there’s a quart of black history in this pint pot) in his New York apartment – discussing his
or get atmospheric. Around an engrossing base cancer diagnosis, playing his Steinway grand,
layer of family testimony from Taylor’s elderly musing on his aesthetic and environmental
siblings, tangy with veracity about her abduction Campaign for justice: Recy Taylor interests, experimenting with sound, all as he
and rape by six local teenagers, Buirski weaves works on his album async – to frame ‘flashbacks’
new impressionistic images to create a moody still, it hails the campaign’s success in getting a to earlier episodes in his life, including brief
visual setting. Bumping down dark country roads, second hearing as a key event in female black glimpses of his long stint as a member of
stumbling around woods or shotgun shacks, civil rights activism, weaponising the black Yellow Magic Orchestra. His private life was
the camera is alternately prey and predator as a press and making a tidal wave of petitions and evidently off-limits: there’s no mention of
woman in a white dress flees unseen pursuers. letters force an investigation, as Taylor held either of his marriages, or of his reportedly
Expanded beyond the Ken Burns template of fast through intimidation and firebombing. on-going relationship with his manager, with
interview, expert comment and archive ‘kinestasis’, The film uncovers how hard black women whom he has two children. As far as the film is
the film’s novel use of images illuminates the fought for the rights they were denied, and as concerned, Sakamoto lives and works alone.
testimony. Still, the viewer, required to retain in Buirski’s 2011 documentary The Loving Story, Sakamoto is obviously a fascinating subject:
the verbal story thread while the screen hops its through-line is a public battle for justice. his evolution from techno/ambient pioneer to
from Buirski’s misty visuals to a pertinent Since a second grand jury hearing (all white, avant-garde experimenter makes him Japan’s
scene from an Oscar Micheaux ‘race film’, feels local and male) failed to get an indictment, the classically trained answer to Brian Eno, while his
a certain dissonance sometimes. For all this, it’s necessarily muted ending contends that from journey from the theatrics-and-make-up days
the remembered details that sting, Taylor’s father the ashes of this injustice (and the campaign’s of YMO to today’s thoughtful and anguished
searching for her “till his shirt was wet with hard work) grew the roses of civil rights success. neo-classical composer parallels David Bowie’s.
sweat”, the quiet aside that “after they were done Though the film doesn’t sprawl or speculate, its And his readiness to stand up for causes is almost
mutilating her, they played in her body”. Over it reach occasionally exceeds its grasp here, using un-Japanese. But Stephen Schible’s meandering
all, the music is affecting, if a tad heavy-handed, “the struggle for bodily integrity” to yoke the structure brings none of that into focus, preferring
creating a mournful tone that makes the film Montgomery bus boycott to Taylor’s ordeal. Like anecdote to analysis and a grab-bag of film and
smoulder rather than blaze with rage, even when the McGuire book on which it’s based, it fights archive clips to coherence or point-of-view. To
an all-white hearing fails to indict the boys. to make black female resistance visible. It’s a be fair, the reluctance to reach for insights into
Making its one story stand for many, the film battle it wins emphatically, allowing the mid- Sakamoto’s past selves or the ch-ch-changes
includes historian Crystal Feimster and author century history of racial and sexual injustice to he’s been through no doubt reflects a certain
Danielle L. McGuire’s insights on widespread resonate loudly with today’s Black Lives Matter reticence on the subject’s own part, informed by
interracial sexual violence in the Jim Crow and Time’s Up movements. Its triumphant final the new sense of mortality which has coloured
South. This fuelled the energetic campaigning of reveal is Taylor herself, dignified and still battling his recent years. But that doesn’t excuse the sheer
NAACP investigator Rosa Parks’s Committee for in extreme old age: “I can’t do nothing but tell randomness of much of the material presented
Equal Justice for Mrs Recy Taylor. Going wider the truth about what they done to me.” here or the failure to ask any searching questions.
The juxtaposition of a clip from The Revenant
Credits and Synopsis with DiCaprio facing imminent death and
Sakamoto’s quiet musings on how long he may
have to live is glib and borderline offensive.
Produced by Augusta Films LLC Voice Cast A documentary in which Recy Taylor’s elderly siblings
Nancy Buirski Co-produced by Thomas Bernardi recount her gang rape in Abbeville, Alabama, in 1944 Television’s appetite for films like this
Beth Hubbard Transform Films, Inc. Billy Howerton/
Claire L. Chandler in association with and her subsequent fight for justice. Their account is
Hugo Wilson
Susan Margolin Artemis Rising and Tom Gibbs interwoven with audio testimony from Taylor herself.
Written by Matador Content Luther Lee/ There are also interviews with the author Danielle L.
Nancy Buirski A film by Nancy Herbert Lovett McGuire and the historian Crystal Feimster, discussing
Story Development Buirski Jack Kyser
Beth Hubbard Executive Producers Rosa Parks’s campaign for justice for Taylor, the
Dillard York/Willie
Susie Ruth Powell Regina K. Scully Joe Culpepper era’s widespread interracial sexual violence and the
Inspired by At the Geralyn White John L. Payne case’s role in black women’s civil rights activism.
Dark End of the Dreyfous John O. Harris
Street Black Women, Amy Tiemann
Taylor’s assailants’ siblings share their views. The
Cynthia Erivo
Rape and Resistance Mark Trustin Rosa Parks
interviews are illustrated with extracts from ‘race films’,
– A New History CarolAnne Dolan archive material and new impressionistic footage.
of the Civil Rights Derrick Harkins In Colour Taylor was abducted and raped by six white
Movement from Rosa Nick Stuart-Jones
Parks to the Rise Barbara Dobkin
teens. The sheriff failed to arrest them, and Taylor’s
Distributor
of Black Power by Bobby Kondrat Modern Films
house was firebombed. Rosa Parks investigated
Danielle L. McGuire Jack Turner the story for the NAACP, despite harassment, and
Director of Film Extracts helped form the Committee for Equal Justice for
Photography The Blood of
Rex Miller Jesus (1941) Mrs Recy Taylor. A local hearing dismissed the case.
Editor Veiled Aristocrats Petitions, a postcard campaign and black newspaper
Anthony Ripoli (1932) coverage forced Alabama’s governor Chauncey
Sound Ten Nights in a Sparks to open an investigation. The evidence and
Wes Morgan Bar-room (1926)
Donald Hooper The Scar of the boys’ statements supported Taylor’s story, but
Keith McManus Shame (1927) a second grand jury hearing failed to indict them.
Ryan King The Girl from In 2011, following an online petition, the state of
Chicago (1932) Alabama issued a formal apology to Taylor. The 97-year-
©Augusta Films LLC Birthright (1939)
Production The Symbol of the old Recy Taylor appears at the film’s end, explaining
Companies Unconquered (1920) why she continued to talk about what happened to her.
A production of A final credit reveals that she died in December 2017.
Keyboard jungle: Sakamoto Ryuichi

July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 75

 Studio 54
USA/United Kingdom 2018
Director: Matt Tyrnauer

one is so voracious that most pass by more

or less unexamined; criticism of the form of
such ‘arts docs’ remains stuck at a fairly primitive
REVIEWS

level. Recent successes in the genre such as Francis

Whately’s two David Bowie films Five Years
(2013) and Bowie: The Last Five Years (2017) – not
to mention many cinema-related essay docs by
S&S contributor David Thompson – approach
their subjects with a clear sense of the power of
images and a keen eye for the ways that visual
motifs can resonate with each other, yielding
an understanding of the way that creative and
other processes actually work. Such films are
rooted in (a) a cinephile sensibility, (b) a manifest
grasp of the subject’s defining characteristics Hot club time machine: Liza Minnelli, Bianca Jagger, Andy Warhol, Halston
and (c) a mastery of editing and film grammar.
Schible’s film is far from the worst offender Reviewed by Trevor Johnston down gives this film a core of authority – not
among recent arts docs, but it lacks all three of Received wisdom has it that the 1977 advent of least because the Schrager of today, now a leading
those qualities. Its picture of Sakamoto recovering landmark New York disco Studio 54 brought to hotelier, has some dubious past business practices
from cancer and getting his musical juices the mainstream the social and musical liberation to own up to. Indeed, to see him squirming under
flowing again is mildly diverting, but its impact already unfolding in the city’s underground persistent questioning about the illicit ‘skimming’
is minimal and its methods are desultory. gay clubs. With its glittering aura of glamour by which Studio 54 employees squirrelled away
and sexual freedom feeding into the music of thousands in cash from the nightly bar takings
Credits and Synopsis totemic artists such as Chic, 54’s seemingly gives the film a present-tense frisson that adds
ephemeral moment has become something value to an otherwise carefully assembled array
canonical in cultural terms. But, as Matt Tyrnauer’s of archive footage and talking-head comment.
Produced by Borderland Media Subtitles
Stephen Nomura production in co- documentary makes clear in diligent detail, this As in his previous offering, Citizen Jane: Battle
Schible operation with NHK Distributors potted version of what Studio 54 represents is but for the City (2016), which tackled conflicts over
Eric Nyari Production support: Modern Films
Producer Documentary Japan Munro Films a fraction of the venue’s whole fascinating story. New York’s 1960s urban regeneration projects,
Yoshiko Hashimoto In co-production After all, before it was a legend, Studio 54 was Tyrnauer and his team are evidently tireless in
Directors of with AVROTROS
Photography Made possible
a going concern, created and operated by two tracking down visual source material, showing
Sora Neo S. with the generous Jewish entrepreneurs from Brooklyn, Ian Schrager us myriad eye-popping photographs of just
Tom Richmond support of Ueno
Editors Munenori, Andreas
and the late Steve Rubell – the smiley one played about every celeb in town hanging out at Studio
Kushida Hisayo Vagelatos by Mike Myers in 1998’s Miramax-hobbled 54 (what was classical piano maestro Vladimir
Oshige Yuji Executive fictionalised fiasco 54. Schrager was never the Horowitz doing there?), and winkling out sundry
Sound Designer Producers
Tom Paul Kadokawa Tsuguhiko front-of-house glad-hander but appears to have TV news reports giving a sense of the media
Wakaizumi Hisaou been key in every other aspect, and his decision to feeding frenzy during the place’s 33-month
©SKMTDOC, LLC Machida Shuichi
Production Sora Norika open up for the first time about what exactly went lifespan. One little vignette, in which a spotty,
Companies Film Extracts sweet-natured Michael Jackson wanders into
Presented by The Revenant (2015)
Kadokawa, Avex Burning Ice (2010) Credits and Synopsis Rubell’s office while cameras are there and
Digital, Dentsu Music off-handedly chips in, is a little treasure of a
and Entertainment In Colour
A Cineric/ [1.78:1] Produced by Matt Sanchez Robert Sharenow time capsule, heartbreaking in its own way.
Matt Tyrnauer Elaine Frontain The film is less interested in covering the club’s
John Battsek ©Beyond the Bryant
A documentary portrait of the keyboard and Corey Reeser Velvet Rope, LLC Andrew Ruhemann
musical policy and how it fitted into the wider
synthesiser musician Sakamoto Ryuichi, seen mostly Director of Production progress of the disco subgenre, but it does
in his Manhattan apartment as he recovers from Photography Companies In Colour deliver a moment of reconstructed magic, as
treatment for his 2014 diagnosis of stage 3 throat Tom Hurwitz A&E IndieFilms [1.78:1]
Editor presents an vintage footage sweeps us through the entrance
cancer and begins composing again – initially the
Andrea Lewis Altimeter and Distributor and along the mirrored hallway, LGBT icon
score for ‘The Revenant’. Older footage (some of Original Score Passion Pictures Dogwoof
it archival) shows earlier episodes in his career. A Lorne Balfe production Sylvester’s anthemic ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty
2012 visit to Miyagi Prefecture (to see and play a Sound Mixers A film by Matt Real)’ flooding out of the soundtrack at top
grand piano ‘drowned’ in the 2011 tsunami) and the Peter Miller Tyrnauer
Roger Phenix Executive volume as the doors to the dance floor open.
devastated nuclear power plant at Fukushima turned Mark Roy Producers It is rare for an archive-based doc to create
him into a public anti-nuclear activist. A 1979 clip Taylor Roy Molly Thompson
shows him playing ‘Tong Poo’ in concert with the
such a vivid, you-are-there feeling, but the sheer
Yellow Magic Orchestra, and he discusses his early A documentary telling the story of legendary accretion of information elsewhere also works in
enthusiasm for techno music in a 1984 interview. 1970s New York discotheque Studio 54. the film’s favour, as staffers and regular patrons
A clip from ‘Solaris’ (1972) leads into a discussion Two Jewish entrepreneurs from Brooklyn, recall the design process, working practices,
of Sakamoto’s interest in Tarkovsky’s use of Bach social gadfly Steve Rubell (who died in 1989 from narcotics consumption and sexual debauchery
chorales – and into his growing preference for an Aids-related illness) and canny introvert Ian
Schrager (now a leading hotelier, here interviewed
that created the all-enveloping Studio 54
incorporating natural sounds into his own music,
which led to field-recording trips to Africa (2002) for the first time) had ambitions in the nightclub experience. Given that this marked a key point
and the Arctic (2008) and a public commitment to business, and found an ideal Manhattan venue in the mass media’s intoxication with celebrity
environmentalism. The lengthiest ‘flashback’ details in a disused former theatre on 54th Street. They for its own sake, we’re perhaps lacking comment
his involvement as composer (and sometimes actor) created a glamorous pleasure dome that was soon from an A-lister of the time on what they got
in the Jeremy Thomas productions ‘Merry Christmas attracting celebrities and beautiful people, while a
out of being seen there. Still, in just about every
Mr Lawrence’ (1983), ‘The Last Emperor’ (1986) and strict door policy kept hoi polloi outside. The cultural
‘The Sheltering Sky’ (1990). He recalls being at home and societal impact was huge. However, the owners other respect this is an engrossing, exhaustive
on the day of the Twin Towers attack and New York were skimming off cash from the nightly takings; portrait, shaped around the deep bonds of the
being devoid of music for a week afterwards. Other a raid by the IRS eventually led to the venue’s central odd-couple Rubell/Schrager partnership,
clips show him performing/conducting his music in closure, and both Rubell and Schrager going to jail. which plays out its own Shakespearean trajectory
front of rapt audiences. While his immune system Schrager recalls his recovery from reputational of ambition, elation, hubris and downfall. It’s
remains depleted by chemotherapy, he resolves to damage, and his subsequent business renaissance,
while regretting the loss of his close friend Rubell.
extraordinarily rich material, and we’re much
play the piano every day to keep his fingers warm.
the wiser for this extensive survey of it.

76 | Sight&Sound | July 2018

Submergence Super Troopers 2
Germany/Spain/USA/Belgium/France 2017 USA 2018
Director: Wim Wenders Director: Jay Chandrasekhar
Certificate 15 111m 38s Certificate 15 99m 24s

Reviewed by Vadim Rizov link between the two’s seemingly disparate Reviewed by Nick Pinkerton
With the extremely arguable exception of professions. Danielle is interested in the potential I have, I know, seen the first Super Troopers film,
2005’s Sam Shepard collaboration Don’t Come for life deep in the ocean, whose darkness has released in 2001. Like most people who saw it,

REVIEWS
Knocking, for nearly two decades (from 2000’s led the scientific community to write off that I did so as an undergraduate, and like most of
The Million Dollar Hotel onwards) every narrative possibility. “We refuse to value what’s down the people who saw it as an undergraduate, I’m
Wim Wenders feature has been received with there because it’s dark,” she opines. “We want quite certain that I saw it under the influence
critical vitriol and public indifference. It’s a to forget there is darkness in our world.” Her of some substance or another. This may
perversely impressive achievement; while work has implications for climate change explain the totality with which every single
his non-fiction work (especially 2011’s Pina) and survival on the planet, while James’s detail of the movie has drained from my brain,
continues to meet a positive reception, the mission is to focus on the darkness of jihadist as has almost every plot particular of Club
narratives stagger out one after another, landing Islam (which, in this hypothetical context, is Dread (2004) and Beerfest (2006), subsequent
high-profile festival premiere slots despite an apparently an under-discussed topic). Danielle’s productions by Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin
utter lack of interest. Duly warned, I’d seen none work places her in large bodies of water; Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter and Erik
of these late-period works until now, save for James’s story ends with him wading into one. Stolhanske, known collectively as Broken
2004’s Land of Plenty (dreadful as advertised). It may work on the page, but here the Lizard, which I also know I have seen.
Submergence does not make the case for diving in. metaphor is turgid and strained, much like the One’s individual response to Super Troopers 2,
An adaptation of war correspondent J.M. film itself. The dialogue is mealy-mouthed and I suspect, will be determined by the amount of
Ledgard’s acclaimed novel, Submergence begins in often inelegant, as in the commendation from nostalgia one has for Broken Lizard’s heyday, the
medias res, intercutting between ocean scientist one of Danielle’s colleagues that makes perfectly vintage of their inscribed audience being dated
Danielle Flinders (Alicia Vikander), preparing for clear what’s at stake: “We all feel you are close approximately by their pop-culture references –
a deep dive in the Greenland Sea, and journalist to a breakthrough, that would forever change the name of The Wonder Years (1988-93) actor Fred
James More (James McAvoy), being held in brutal the understanding of the dimensions of life on Savage is used as a running joke, and American
conditions by Somali jihadists. Flashbacks show Earth.” Vikander spends much of the film in Uggs, Pie (1999) franchise star Seann William Scott
how the two met at a luxurious hotel in duly thanked as a costume sponsor in the end shows up in the movie’s gonzo dream prologue.
France, embarked on a tony affair credits. The ship her character sails on is named Super Troopers appeared, like American Pie, amid
(copulation in front of a roaring L’Atalante, which may seem like a too-cute a bumper crop of cult US comedies that sprang
fireplace) and agreed to meet again allusion to Jean Vigo’s 1934 classic but turns forth around the end of the millennium – Austin
later in Nairobi. Danielle doesn’t out to be the real name of the vessel provided Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, Office Space,
know James’s real profession, by the Ifremer Fleet, also thanked in the Pootie Tang, Wet Hot American Summer. In contrast
only his cover story as a specialist credits. Such dreary particulars are more to Mike Judge’s sometimes bleakly satirical bent
in bringing water to impoverished emblematic of the film’s sluggish torpor or the absurdist/surrealist inclinations of Louis
areas; when he lands in Somalia and than its ostensible concerns. Submergence C.K. and David Wain, Broken Lizard’s comic style
is instantly captured, she initially could be analysed as a case study in was defined by bro-social, prankish, ball-busting
takes his phone silence for loss of the visibly legible particulars of improv riffing, the sort of thing that’s usually
interest. After a month, she’s the financial mechanisms of called ‘fratty’ – and in this case not unfairly,
not sure what to think. contemporary productions since all the troupe’s members are veterans of
Per its title, Submergence buoyed by carefully leveraged Colgate University’s Beta Theta Pi fraternity.
makes a metaphorical sponsorships, but hardly They seem palpably to enjoy being reunited
taken seriously with on a set again, kicking around bits like an old
James McAvoy regards to its overt goals. hacky sack, and the movie leans heavily on the
assumption that this pleasure will be contagious.
Credits and Synopsis The result is both amiably brainless and,
yes, eminently forgettable. My failure to retain
Produced by ©Backup Studio, Filmförderfonds, In association Cast Maria previous Broken Lizard comedies may have
Cameron Lamb Neue Road Movies, Filmförderungsanstalt, with uFund Alicia Vikander Adam Quintero something to do with my shabby stewardship
Written by Morena Films, Medienboard With the support of Danielle Flinders, Gustavo
Erin Dignam Submergence AIE Berlin-Brandenburg, the Tax Shelter of the of my precious grey matter, but it also indicates
‘Danny’
Based on the novel Production Centre National du Federal Government James McAvoy In Colour a flimsiness in the movies themselves, which
by J.M. Ledgard Companies Cinema et de l’image of Belgium and the James More [1.85:1]
Director of Backup Studio and animée, Provence- Tax Shelters Investors have faded at a much faster rate than those of
Alexander Siddig
Photography Lila 9th Productions Alpes-Côte d’Azur Executive Producers Dr Shadid Distributor their cult contemporaries. This latest gets a great
Benoît Debie present a Lila 9th Region in partnership Pilar Benito Celyn Jones Lionsgate UK
Editor production with the CNC Sarah Johnson
deal of mileage from Canada-vs-US comedy,
Thumbs
Toni Froschhammer A co-production of In collaboration with David Beal Reda Kateb German a vein that has been tapped out by now, as
Production Designer Backup Studio, Neue Atresmedia Cine Andrew Banks theatrical title
Thierry Flamand Road Movies, Morena With the participation Michael Giles
Saif
Grenzenlos
well as a plenitude of pratfalls and low
Jannik Schümann
Music Composed by Films, Submergence of Movistar+ Stephen Bowen Paul comic bits such as Rob Lowe using a
Fernando Velázquez A.I.E., UMedia and with the support Jeff Kalligheri Jean-Pierre Lorit
Production Sound In association with of Instituto de la Buddy Patrick Captain Anctil
Daniel Fontrodona Embankment Films, Cinematografía y las Robert Ogden Marie-Anne
Costume Designer Waterstone, PalmStar, Artes Audiovisuales - Barnum Cambon Bonavita
Bina Daigeler Green Hummingbird Gobierno de España Kevin Scott Frakes Science Officer
Stunt Co-ordinator With the support A film by Wim Lisa Wolofsky Marie-Anne
Philippe Guegan of Deutscher Wenders Dr Andreas Pense Andrea Guasch

The Greenland Sea coast, the present. Scientist Danielle
Flinders prepares for a deep-sea dive to confirm her
bold theories about ocean life. Meanwhile, in Somalia,
journalist James More is held captive by jihadists.
Flashbacks show how the couple met at a hotel
in France, embarked quickly on an affair and agreed
to meet again soon in Nairobi, where James lives.
Having not heard from James in over a month, Danielle
supposes that he has lost interest in her. After a period
of brutal captivity, James is released into the care
of local doctor Shadid. Danielle’s voyage begins, but
she requests a week’s stay on the Faroe Islands to
focus on her calculations. Maintaining his assumed
identity as a charity employee specialising in bringing
water to isolated villages, James is transferred to the
custody of another group of jihadists, who intend to
kill him if he does not convert to Islam. Danielle and
her fellow scientists successfully perform their dive
and begin collecting samples of marine life, but their
submersible’s battery goes off. James overhears
that the location he has been transferred to is close
to a US forces base and activates a tracker-device
chip implanted in a fake tooth. Danielle and her crew
successfully activate the ship’s emergency battery and
ascend to the surface. As US forces arrive and begin
bombing the jihadists, James wades into the sea.
Called to border: Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme

July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 77

 Swimming with Men
United Kingdom/Sweden/Belgium 2018
Director: Oliver Parker
Certificate 12A 96m 49s

limp penis as a miniature speed bag. Reviewed by Kate Stables in devising spinning circles, flowers and
The interplay between the ensemble Now that 90s cinema is old enough, like its pyramids. Diving underwater like a seal, the
is itself cosy and more than a little limp, since fashion, to be termed ‘vintage’, are we seeing camera traces the frantic hard work of looping
REVIEWS

outside Heffernan’s grating, gum-snapping, the nostalgic return of the ‘crisis of masculinity’ chains of swimmers. Sleekly constructed, the
double-dog-dare-issuing Farva, the boys lack truly movie? ‘The Full Monty in Speedos’ is the chirpy film’s deft visual compositions range from the
distinctive, complementary comic personas; tagline for Oliver Parker’s light, low-key comedy number-blizzard projected on to Eric’s face
they’ve been hanging out together for so long about an amateur male synchronised-swimming at his numbing job to a neat cut that makes a
they’ve started to resemble one another. Now in team – although, unlike The Full Monty (1997) or drunken fall at home end in a pool plunge.
their forties, it must be said that they’ve managed Brassed Off (1996), whose performing ensembles Body issues are given only the smallest of
steadfastly to defend their comedy style from any found themselves redundant due to Thatcherite nods (“If you’ve got bellies, don’t suck ’em in, use
risk of ‘maturing’ – but that’s only good news for industrial decline, there are no hard edges here. them”). Well cast and well played if occasionally
those who found it precious cargo to begin with. The Swim Club only combats male ennui: “We’re predictable, Aschlin Ditta’s script presents
just a bunch of middle-aged men who meet up in conversational glimpses of the men’s lives
Credits and Synopsis trunks that are too small for us and make funny rather than effortfully sharing out the narrative
little patterns in the pool,” is the rueful verdict between their various burdens as widower,
of Daniel Mays’s redemption-chasing Colin. divorcee, worrier or cheerful teen thief. The
Produced by Industries and Ursula
Richard Perello Cataland Films Tyler Labine As much self-help club as sports team, they cast, rather like the club, keep the performances
Written by production Mountie Bellefuille provide solace and support when depressed light and level, Rupert Graves’s posh organiser
Broken Lizard Executive Hayes McArthur
[i.e. Jay Producers Mountie Podien accountant Eric (a deadpan Rob Brydon) plunges Luke as amiable as Thomas Turgoose’s pert
Chandrasekhar Charles Stiefel Will Sasso into the deep end. Brydon, who has extensive delinquent Tom. If the film drifts periodically
Kevin Heffernan Peter E. Lengyel Mountie
Steve Lemme Todd Stiefel Archambault
male-midlife-crisis form from TV’s The Trip, into TV-movie stylisation (Eric’s family
Paul Soter Brent Stiefel Rob Lowe adopts a different register here, insecurity breakdown is a convenient misunderstanding),
Erik Stolhanske] Michael Hassan Guy LeFranc
Director of Richard Hassan Brian Cox
prompting camaraderie rather than wisecracking its light touch pays off elsewhere.
Photography Kris Meyer Captain O’Hagan rivalry. He underplays nicely, his pinched, blank Once Swimming with Men becomes a quest,
Joe Collins Justin Begnaud Seann William face transmitting the Groundhog Day boredom with an international competition in Milan, the
Editor Jamie Greene Scott
Spencer Houck David Gendron Trooper Callaghan of work and the unhappiness of an alienated pace (and the bickering) quickens. Compared
Production Michael Hansen marriage. He’s the dramatic device, kickstarting with its 1990s predecessors, however, the stakes
Designer Ali Jazayeri In Colour
Cabot McMullen [1.85:1] and [2.35:1] a story loosely based on Men Who Swim (2010), are low, and jeopardy non-existent. Determined
Original Music a documentary about the Stockholm Art to sidestep melodrama, the film softly unwinds
Eagles of Death Cast Distributor
Swim Gents (who make a skilful appearance the team’s worries – a crush on the coach, a
Metal Jay Chandrasekhar 20th Century Fox
Sound Mixer Thorny International (UK) in the film’s international competition). teenage sporting loss to redeem, Tom’s potentially
David ‘Daveed’ Kevin Heffernan
Alvarez Farva
Nimble rather than broad, Swimming with Men disastrous electronic tag. A smarter successor to
Costume Designer Steve Lemme keeps its comedy strictly sympathetic, even Parker’s tin-eared Dad’s Army (2016), it eschews
Debra McGuire Mac faintly dignified. Rather than dipping into slapstick, shaming or raucous rivalry,
Stunt Co-ordinator Paul Soter
Scott Rogers Foster synchronised swimming’s traditionally hewing to its wry, placid tone. A tale of
Erik Stolhanske female status for cheap laughs, it shows sporting amateurs, underdogs shambling
©Twentieth Century Rabbit
Fox Film Corporation Lynda Carter a 21st-century gender-blind ease about through the shallow end or dodging a
Production Governor Jessman male water ballet. Parker’s montage kid’s turd in a peeling lido pool, it couldn’t
Companies Emmanuelle
Fox Searchlight Chriqui
sequences concentrate on the steep be more English. Full of camaraderie and
Pictures presents Genevieve Aubois learning curve of training community, it’s the polar opposite of
a Broken Lizard Marisa Coughlan
Eric in ‘egg-beater’ legwork, the spiky, relentless male rivalry
US, present day. Disgraced Vermont state troopers and his geometrical flair of, say, Chevalier (2015). In today’s
Farva, Mac, Rabbit, Thorny and Foster are working in male-crisis cinema, it would seem
manual jobs, having been fired from the force after Rob Brydon that kindness is the new black.
a catastrophic ride-along with actor Fred Savage.
However, after going to Canada on the pretext of
Credits and Synopsis
a fishing trip with old boss Captain O’Hagan, they
are offered a second chance in law enforcement – a
redrawing of national boundaries has awarded a Produced by Ben Baird Film and Anyway Chris Reed Ted Michael
small Quebec town to the US, and they have been Stewart le Maréchal Costume Designer Productions Gabrielle Stewart Rupert Graves
selected to set up a new state troopers’ station, Anna Mohr-Pietsch Jo Thompson Developed with the Peter Watson Luke In Colour
taking over from the Canadian Mounted Police. Maggie Monteith support of the MEDIA Ian Dawson Daniel Mays [2.35:1]
Screenplay ©SWM Film Programme of the Norman Humphrey Colin
Tensions soon escalate between the Mounties and Aschlin Ditta Company Ltd European Union Ben Friedman Charlotte Riley Distributor
the troopers – who engage in a war of increasingly Director of Production Supported by the Bastien Sirodot Susan Vertigo Films
vicious pranks – and also between the troopers Photography Companies Tax Shelter of the Adrian Politowski Thomas Turgoose
and the townsfolk, whose mayor, ex-hockey star David Raedeker Dignity Film Finance Federal Government Tom
Guy LeFranc, owns the local brothel. The troopers Editor and Kerris Films of Belgium and the Jane Horrocks
Liana Del Giudice present in association Tax Shelter investors Cast Heather
investigate the source of hidden ‘contraband’ – items Production Designer with HanWay and Executive Producers Rob Brydon Nathaniel Parker
banned in the US but legal in Canada, to be passively Amanda McArthur Umedia a Met Paul Webster Eric Lewis
smuggled with the shift of the border. Rabbit Music Film production in Guy Heeley Adeel Akhtar Christian Rubeck
begins a romance with cultural attaché Genevieve Charlie Mole association with Dylan Williams Kurt Jonas
Sound Designer Shoebox Films, Amp Erik Pauser Jim Carter Robert Daws
Aubois, interrupted when they are kidnapped ‘in
flagrante delicto’. The rest of the troopers ride
to the rescue, encountering the Mounties, their London, present day. Middle-aged City accountant sessions, then appears wearing an electronic tag on
prime suspects in the smuggling ring, en route. Eric is depressed by his life, and paranoid about his ankle. The team hide him from police, who are
Both parties are ambushed by LeFranc, the real wife Heather’s closeness with fellow local councillor seeking him for breaking curfew. Eric quits his job
mastermind. A shootout ensues, and the troopers Lewis. He leaves home after a fight. Befriended by rather than create a dodgy tax-evasion scheme. In
and Mounties, working together, prevail. Genevieve, the men’s amateur synchronised swimming club Milan, teammate Colin is too nervous to perform. Eric
revealed to be working with LeFranc, is exposed at the local pool, he joins them. Performing at a rallies the team, saying they have changed his life.
as an agent of the Ontario Provincial Police. children’s birthday party, the team are challenged Their routine, ending with Tom’s triumphant back flip,
Ill will between the troopers and the Mounties by a Swedish rival to compete in the unofficial World gains second place. Teammate Luke gets together
dissipates briefly after the gun battle, but flares Men’s Synchronised Swimming Championship in Milan with Susan. The Swim Club perform their routine in a
up again with the news that the redrawing of the following month. The team enlist coach Susan dance outside the council offices, as Eric’s romantic
the border has been delayed indefinitely. to train them. Young thief Tom misses vital practice gesture to Heather. He and Heather are reconciled.

78 | Sight&Sound | July 2018

Terminal This Is Congo
USA/United Kingdom/Ireland/Hong Kong 2017 Canada/USA/United Kingdom/Austria/Qatar 2017
Director: Vaughn Stein Director: Daniel McCabe

Reviewed by Vadim Rizov Reviewed by Hannah McGill

“There is a place like no other,” hitwoman Annie In a coinage much quoted during this film’s
(Margot Robbie) says in the opening voiceover, run of festival appearances, director Daniel

REVIEWS
setting up the premise of Terminal: if she kills McCabe referred to the Democratic Republic of
all the hitmen vying to be the main contractor the Congo as “Narnia on acid”. Neither fantasy
for the shadowy Mr Franklyn, she’ll get all his wilderness nor psychedelia really springs to mind,
business. This place like no other is specifically however, when watching his up-close and clearly
a much stupider version of the assassins-only hard-won portraits of individuals enmeshed in
John Wick universe, shot in looming sets Congo’s multiple overlapping and intractable
constructed on location in Budapest, and conflicts. Instead, a variety of documentary
structured by constant quotations of the most approaches is deployed to produce something
famous parts of Alice in Wonderland (“Some say sporadically intriguing but rather less complete
to survive it you have to be as mad as a hatter”). Kill list: Margot Robbie and authoritative than that hubristic title suggests.
Wandering between a limited number of High-ranking army officer ‘Kasongo’ (a
sets – primarily an all-night café and a dingy and McDonagh: the movie that Terminal most pseudonym) and rebel leader Sultani Makenga
apartment – a small group of characters, resembles is Joe Carnahan’s execrable Smokin’ must have been difficult to access, and each has a
mostly assassins, have extremely tiresome, Aces (2009), an endless parade of macho posturing fascinating backstory. Yet the film opts to treat each
inadvertently meaningless conversations, and would-be philosophical contemplation of of them as an odd mix of narrator and interviewee,
killing time until the end, when a number of death. Intentionally or not, Terminal quotes a lending their thumbnail accounts of Congolese
people can finally kill each other instead. line of that film’s unforgivably faux-insightful history the authority of voiceover and presenting
It’s no surprise to read in interviews that exchange between an assassin and his victim: them without corroboration or counter-narrative.
debuting writer/director Vaughn Stein is a big “I’m dying.” “We’re all dying.” One strand of the Their words are backed by collages of news
fan of Quentin Tarantino and Martin McDonagh; absurdly convoluted plot involves English teacher footage, photographs and snatches of reportage,
he’s not half as clever as either at their best, but Bill (Simon Pegg), who’s dying from an unknown which are uncredited and uncontextualised
this kind of film will be very familiar to anyone disease, leading to all kinds of dialogue about death except when the name of a TV channel happens
who remembers the post-Reservoir Dogs boom that aspires towards tough philosophy while to show on screen. Who is that, stating that Congo
of would-be postmodern noir. There are endless actually coming off as absurdly glib. This feigned is “one of Africa’s most chaotic countries”? Are
conversations between characters who self- nihilistic wisdom isn’t just its opposite, but an we to take her words as fact, or as an example of
consciously highlight the unreality of their active insult to anyone who’s ever lost a loved one, media distortion and generalisation? Who are the
situation, sprinkled with Guy Ritchie-style lad or even just contemplated their own mortality. “leaders abroad” responsible for denuding Congo
mayhem (“I’m gonna put you six feet under Trudging to its remarkably nonsensical twist of its abundant natural resources? Ronald Reagan?
the ground, mate”) et al. The neon signage of ending, Terminal (the title referring to both a Or is a still of Reagan intended to represent foreign
Enter the Void (2009) is overtly ripped off for train station and our own final destination – powers in general? Precision matters. In an age of
the opening credits and even for a title card two meanings, clever movie!) alternates wide industrial fake news production, it matters a lot.
reading “three weeks earlier”; the sickly slick shots (mostly canted) and medium and extreme Other interviewees include a battle-scarred
lighting is modelled on Nicolas Winding Refn. close-ups with metronomic regularity; it aims young colonel who boasts to camera of his
If there is such a thing as ‘bro cinema’, this is for style but registers as automated. A vast word own heroism, and two civilians, a tailor and a
both its purest essence and absolute nadir. count normally worth according only to a piece smuggler of gemstones, whose stories are more
The dialogue is clearly meant, judging by the on an actual film worth considering, let alone gently and poetically presented. Individually,
rhythm and delivery, to be darkly hilarious, but the describing for the record, would be needed these sketches have their forceful and moving
actual effect is extreme tedium. Forget Tarantino to detail everything else wrong with it. moments. Collectively, they constitute a showily
chaotic narrative in which certainties are
Credits and Synopsis avoided, barring the trusty truism that western
colonialism is to blame for all that’s awry.
Produced by Williams Miscellaneous D. Todd Shepherd Simon Pegg Raymond Unquestionably, the history of Congo is
David Barron Anthony Clarke Entertainment, Shelley Madison Bill Jay Simpson complicated. By foregrounding his subjects’
Molly Hassell Supervising Bh Ruyi Media Joe Simpson Dexter Fletcher Danny
Arianne Fraser Sound Editor and Subotica Alex Hammer Vince Ben Griffin
often contradictory testimony about it, McCabe
Teun Hilte Nikola Medic Produced in Delphine Perrier Max Irons Toby presumably intends to emphasise that even
Margot Robbie Costume Designer association with Henry Winterstern Alf Robert Goodman those fighting this war are vague on its origins
Tom Ackerley Julian Day Rapid Farms John Jencks Mike Myers priest
Josey McNamara Stunt Co-ordinators Productions Limited Simon Williams Clinton/Mr Franklyn Paul Reynolds and objectives. As a viewer, however, it’s
Written by Gáspár Szabó A LuckyChap Charles Auty Katarina Cas doctor frustrating and ideologically troubling to be
Vaughn Stein Ildikó Szucs Entertainment Megan Forde Chloe Merryweather
Cinematography production Mila Zdravkovic Nick Moran In Colour besieged by assertions that come with no sense
Christopher Ross ©Mr. Lively, LLC A BeaglePug Ted Cawrey Illing [2.35:1] of whether the filmmakers are endorsing,
Edited by Production production Michelle Samardzic Les Loveday
Alex Márquez Companies Executive Producers George Waud young Clinton Distributor exposing or merely airing them. A sense lingers,
Johannes Bock Highland Film Aoife O’Sullivan Jourdan Dunn Arrow Films meanwhile, that McCabe is more interested
Production Designer Group presents Tristan Orpen Lynch Conejo
Richard Bullock Hassell Free Matthew Jenkins Cast Matthew Lewis
in foregrounding his own derring-do than in
Music Productions presents Habib Paracha Margot Robbie Lenny being coherent about Congo. While it must
Rupert Gregson- in association with Viktória Petrányi Annie/Bonnie Thomas Turgoose have been thrilling and frightening to ride with
An anonymous city, present day. Assassin Annie night, dying English teacher Bill walks in and gets the army as it fired on rebels, what does the
contacts shadowy businessman Mr Franklyn and into conversation with Annie. Annie kills Bill, who was footage add to knowledge of the conflict?
makes him an offer: she will kill all the hitmen currently deliberately led her way by Mr Franklyn; the teacher One matter the filmmakers are clear about,
vying for his business if he gives her all his future molested her as a child in the orphanage. Back in the seemingly, is their right to depict the imperilled,
work. In an apartment, assassins Vince and Alfred wait present, Annie and Alfred set up Vince and kill him. suffering or lifeless bodies of anonymous people.
for their target, in a hit contracted by Mr Franklyn. Soon afterwards, Annie kills Alfred. Having completed
In flashbacks to three weeks earlier, Vince and her contract, Annie earns Mr Franklyn’s business. Mr The appropriateness of documentarians making
Alfred are at an all-night station café, where Alfred Franklyn – who regularly disguises himself as Clinton use of such imagery is of course debatable; but in
flirts with Annie, who is pretending to be a waitress – is abducted by Annie, along with her previously a film as unfocused as this one, it’s a particularly
there. Annie brings in Clinton, the station attendant, unrevealed twin sister Bonnie. He is their father; he set questionable choice. If the film intends to be
who plays Alfred a recording of Vince talking to their apartment on fire after their mother witnessed no more precise about Congo than to declare
Mr Franklyn on the phone and agreeing to kill his him committing a murder, leading to the sisters being
partner after their hit is completed. On another sent to an orphanage. The twins lobotomise him.
that it’s a mess, its use of hurt and dead
Congolese can only be sensationalist

July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 79

 Time Trial
United Kingdom/Sweden 2017
Director: Finlay Pretsell
Certificate 18 81m 1s

Reviewed by Trevor Johnston

For those not versed in the lore of professional
cycling, the time trial is a very specific race
REVIEWS

format. Instead of the whole peloton competing

at once as is the norm, in the time trial the
competitors set off individually at arranged
intervals, and the fastest against the clock takes
the day. It was a discipline in which rider David
Millar excelled, though as we soon realise in
the course of this documentary portrait, that
title carries another connotation: in 2014, at
Land of uncertainty: This Is Congo the age of 37 and in his final season, time with
a capital ‘T’ was something the articulate and
set dressing. And given that its one solid charismatic Scot could no longer hold at bay.
contention is that said mess is attributable The scene is set, then, for a sports film focusing
to exploitative colonial powers, did no one notice on a rider who, as much as the fallen Lance
the dubious overtones of a white American Armstrong, became emblematic of this attritional
director making such liberal use of black bodies? sport’s ongoing struggle with performance-
One doesn’t have to subscribe wholeheartedly to enhancing drugs. Unlike Armstrong, Millar took
the fashionable notion that only certain people the rap, served out a ban and returned to the fray
have rights to certain stories to discern something as a vociferous campaigner for riding clean.
unwholesomely prurient here. Perhaps the current What we don’t get here, though, is a study
thirst for documentaries about conflict, injustice of the individual at the acme of his sport.
and human-rights abuses made it inevitable Millar’s form plummets, as if he’s just taken on
that some filmmakers would begin to emulate one season too many, and while a sense of an
aspects of the Mondo school of exploitative ending looms large and leaves him in reflective
pseudo-documentary: nihilistic, dehumanising mood, he simply lacks the mental energy or
luridness loosely clad in an educational agenda. inclination to open up to the camera about his
past exploits – thus denying director Finlay
Credits and Synopsis Pretsell much of the narrative fibre one might Winding down: David Millar
have anticipated. However, the absence of such
conventional sports-doc ingredients proves to quality of a rider oblivious to the passing blur of
Produced by association with Joslyn Barnes
Geoff McLean T-Dog Productions, Gernot Schaffler be the making of this arresting piece of cinema, the streets around him; one memorable sequence,
Producers Sabotage Films & Thomas Brunner since Pretsell and cameraman Martin Radich showing a bitterly cold Millar precariously riding
Daniel McCabe Thought Engine Michael Cohl
Alyse Ardell Spiegel Bertha BRITDOC, Eli Cohl conjure up a fragmented, impressionistic affair hands-free while struggling to get the wrong
Brendan Lynch Cinereach, Alcira Cappola that effectively communicates the daily lot of gloves on his freezing hands, offers a compellingly
Filmed by Corus-Hot Docs William Ashley
Daniel McCabe Development Martin Fisher
the journeyman professional flogging his body elemental image of man confronting a
Edited by Fund, Doha Film Arni Johannson out on the roads in the service of team orders. universe seemingly aligned against him.
Alyse Ardell Spiegel Institute Post Paul Dillman
Music Production Grant,
Given that tightly controlled television rights There’s much more context in Millar’s own
Johnny Klimek Sundance Institute are a key component of the cycling scene, it’s recent memoir The Racer, but what Pretsell has
Gabriel Mounsey Documentary Film Voice Cast remarkable that the filmmakers managed to produced is as much about feeling as information.
Supervising Program, Open Isaach De Bankole
Sound Editor Society Foundations, Kasongo embed their own camera team – augmented A former semi-pro himself, he obviously knows
Brian Langman Ford Foundation Just by various mini-cameras attached to riders and the terrain, but the interlinking sequences
Films, Worldview In Colour
©Shortcut Films, Executive [1.33:1] their bikes – into the middle of two significant shot with Millar off the bike and capturing the
Inc./Vision Producers Subtitles 2014 races, the Milan-San Remo one-day expressive physicality of a man tormented by
Film Co, LLC Ian Hague
Production Martha Rogers Distributor
classic and the Tirreno-Adriatico stage event. all that he can’t control, show genuine creative
Companies Defne Tabori Dogwoof The results deliver an unprecedented and guile and a cinephile instinct. Erik Skjoldbjaerg’s
A Turbo/Vision
Film production in
Karol Martesko-
Fenster
vivid picture of life in the worker-ant zone of the Insomnia (1997) and Claire Denis’s Beau Travail
peloton, whether it’s fetching drinks bottles from (1999) seem obvious touchstones here, indicative
the team car, keeping tabs on potential breaks or of the ambition and achievement in a film that
A documentary about the conflict in the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, viewed through the
indulging in some fairly salty banter with fellow looks beyond the sporting stats to evoke the
perspectives of some of the individuals affected. competitors. There are images capturing the implacability of time itself, and the one contest
‘Kasongo’, a high-ranking Congolese military officer grace of a mountain descent and the in-the-zone that neither David Millar nor any of us can win.
whose face, voice and real name are obscured,
describes how more than 20 years of war have Credits and Synopsis
affected life in his country, and how his own
frequent defections between the army and rebel
groups illustrate the chaos and corruption of the Produced by Dino Jonsäter A Cycling Films Developed and Iain Smith Distributor
conflict. Another interviewee, Mamadou, a young Finlay Pretsell Original Score production supported by the Ian Davies Scottish
army colonel, emphasises the sincerity of his Producer Dan Deacon Creative Scotland, National Lottery Noé Mendelle Documentary
Sonja Henrici Sound Design Scottish through Creative Avril Millar Institute
own support for President Joseph Kabila. General Director of CJ Mirra Documentary Scotland Leslie Finlay
Sultani Makenga, leader of the M23 rebel faction, Photography Institute present Developed through Sylvie Richards
sketches out Congo’s history as a rich source of Martin Radich ©Cycling Films Ltd in association with Creative Scotland
minerals and hence a flashpoint of colonial power Editors Production CommonGround Open Fund In Colour
struggles. Two civilians, tailor Hakiza and gemstone Kieran Gosney Companies Pictures Executive Producers [1.78:1]
smuggler Mama Romance, strive to continue A biographical portrait of professional cyclist David cycling. By the spring of 2014, it is clear that his powers
their lives amid continual disruption. Mamadou Millar as he undertakes his final season in 2014 at the are in decline, as he struggles to make any impact in the
succeeds in crushing a rebel insurgency in 2013, age of 37. A brief résumé of his career draws a picture early season races. What motivates him is the prospect
but is subsequently killed. Onscreen captions of a talented young rider who became embroiled in the of riding in his 12th and last Tour de France, the race
explain that his murder was arranged by jealous doping culture that was rife in the sport during the early that fired his imagination as a young boy. However,
colleagues; and that President Kabila cancelled 2000s. Millar subsequently served a ban and returned he is not selected for the team – a crushing blow that
2016 elections that would have curtailed his rule. to the peloton as a fervent campaigner for clean makes him realise he can’t beat the clock after all.

80 | Sight&Sound | July 2018

Whitney
United Kingdom/USA 2018
Director: Kevin Macdonald
Reviewed by Kelli Weston
Whitney Houston endured considerable public
mockery and contempt in the final years of her
life, when she was plagued by a very visible
struggle with the drug addiction that would
ultimately upend her career. Predictably, perhaps,
the six years since her death in 2012, aged 48, have
led to a more generous, considered appreciation.
Already no fewer than three films have sought to
resolve, each in its own way, the curious question
of her tragedy – not an especially uncommon
tragedy, but no less confounding: how could
a woman of such grace, such beauty, such
unequivocal talent, meet such a grievous fate?
The made-for-television biopic Whitney (2015),
directed by the singer’s Waiting to Exhale co-star
Angela Bassett, arrived first, and on the heels of
Nick Broomfield and Rudi Dolezal’s documentary
Whitney: Can I Be Me (2017) comes Kevin
Macdonald, returning to his documentarian roots
with this deeply sensitive portrait of Houston,
also called Whitney. The two documentaries
naturally overlap, in coverage and in themes;
and in part, the project of unravelling Whitney
Houston is a twinned task, for her life was so:
hers is a tale as timeless as Jane Eyre and Bertha
Mason, White and Black Swan. Both films
recognise the disastrous split between Houston’s
wholesome public persona as an entertainer
and the complicated woman she actually was,
a consequence of celebrity hardly specific to
Houston alone. If Whitney bears many similarities
to Asif Kapadia’s Amy (2015), it is because Houston
and Winehouse shared a remarkably similar
descent, a path paved with fraught relationships
with their fathers and husbands, a dense social
circle of enablers, and a crushing melancholy
they sought to quell with drugs and alcohol.
Where Can I Be Me seemed especially
concerned with the implications of Houston’s
appeal to white audiences and the most salacious
elements of her personal life, what Whitney
achieves, more admirably, while covering the
very same material – backlash from the black
community early in her career, tumultuous
marriage to singer Bobby Brown, relationship
with long-time friend and rumoured lover Robyn
Crawford – is something beyond the nature of her
prison, a glimpse of the woman herself and the
interiority she was so often denied while living.
In his efforts to get to the bottom of her
suffering, Macdonald relies somewhat half-
heartedly on an increasingly trendy convention
popularised by OJ: Made in America (2016),
which firmly anchors its narrative in a necessary
sociohistorical framework, one that somehow
feels less vital here. A hurried montage
announces the age when Houston’s star rose:
Ronald Reagan makes an appearance, as does
Princess Diana; so, too, do familiar images
of black Americans struggling, battered and
brutalised. Far more pertinent, and missing from
Whitney, is the musical landscape with which
Houston’s sanitised persona was so incompatible:
the rhythm and blues of Houston’s era was
heavily sexualised, and her peers included the
likes of Janet Jackson and Toni Braxton, who
embodied a more palpable sexuality, physically
and musically (although the film features
Houston disparaging Paula Abdul’s singing).
REVIEWS
In the eyes of others: Whitney Houston
Whitney, at least, makes a more credible Thankfully, the film dwells equally on
case than its predecessor for the way Houston’s her natural charisma, her exuberance and
early years determined so much of what would her talent. At one point, an audience is left to
come. It was not just that Houston was born marvel at her acrobatic voice, nimbly crooning
into a poor family that graduated to the middle the opening lines of ‘I Wanna Dance with
class when she was still young, robbing her of Somebody’ free of music. Unseen footage and
a perceived ‘rawness’ or a realism that she was interviews with the singer showcase a woman
either prevented from expressing or unable who, though struggling, was charming and
to translate as a singer. Nor was it as simple as full of spirit, well suited to the spotlight.
the fact that she had been booed at the Soul A host of by now familiar relatives, close
Train Awards on the very night she met her friends, celebrities and former employees
husband – so often painted as the villain in chronicle her fall. Brown and Houston’s
her life, he was a man who seemed to possess mother Cissy disappear as the film delves
the ‘realism’ she may well have been after. into Whitney’s later, darker years; Brown
The film suggests, in fact, that all these threads refuses to discuss her drug addiction, and
stemmed from a theme that had surfaced long the film uncovers explosive revelations –
ago. In the early moments of Whitney, several most shockingly, allegations of sexual abuse
subjects close to the family gush about what a inflicted by her cousin, soul singer Dee Dee
beautiful child Houston was, and hint at early Warwick, younger sister of Dionne. Friends
anticipation of a bright future; one begins to to whom she revealed her trauma consider
see the origins of a life stalled by immense the way the abuse may have derailed her life,
expectation. By the time she became a young while her brother, also a victim, sees in this
star, the image of her as a kind of porcelain the roots of his subsequent drug addiction.
doll had stuck, and would continue to trouble These allegations – timely and undoubtedly
her throughout her journey to ‘authenticity’. critical to her story – are likely to eclipse
Rather than revel purely in her tragicomic other triumphs of Whitney, such as its deft
status, Whitney highlights the less publicised storytelling and thoughtful negotiation of
tragedy of a woman denied ownership, or rather Houston’s image. But with any luck, what
authorship, of her own image, and so in many remains underneath all the scandal and tragedy
senses doomed to the imagination of others. is some measure of the woman herself.
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by Lisa Erspamer Beat Street (1984) A documentary detailing American singer Whitney
Simon Chinn Entertainment and The Bodyguard Houston’s life, from her childhood to her death in
Jonathan Chinn Lightbox present (1992)
Lisa Erspamer in association Sparkle (1976) 2012. She begins her career singing in her local
Director of with Altitude Film Sparkle (2012) church but attains stardom thanks to her family’s
Photography Entertainment a film musical connections. She and her brothers begin
Nelson Hume by Kevin Macdonald In Colour dabbling in drugs during their adolescence. Houston’s
Film Editor Executive Producers
Sam Rice-Edwards Distributor
drug use spirals out of control with the pressures
Nicole David
Music Will Clarke Altitude Film of celebrity and her turbulent marriage to Bobby
Adam Wiltzie Andy Mayson Distribution Brown. Close friends reveal that as a child she
Sound Designer Mike Runagall was sexually abused by her older cousin Dee Dee
Glenn Freemantle Zanne Devine Warwick. Houston becomes estranged from her
Rosanne Korenberg
©WH Films Ltd Joe Patrick father after he attempts to sue her, and she neither
Production Pat Houston visits his deathbed nor attends his funeral. She dies
Companies Film Extracts shortly after appearing in the 2012 film ‘Sparkle’.
July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 81
 Home cinema
HOME CINEMA
A man’s gotta do…: Randolph Scott and Maureen O’Sullivan in The Tall T (1957)
ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST
Budd Boetticher’s vision of
masculinity might feel reductive,
but his westerns with Randolph
Scott are small miracles of craft
FIVE TALL TALES: BUDD
BOETTICHER & RANDOLPH
SCOTT AT COLUMBIA, 1957-1960
THE TALL T / DECISION AT SUNDOWN
/ BUCHANAN RIDES ALONE / RIDE
LONESOME / COMANCHE STATION
Budd Boetticher; USA 1957/1957/1958/1959/1960;
Powerhouse/Indicator; Region-free Blu-ray; Certificate
12; 380 minutes; 16:9. Extras: audio and filmed
interviews with Boetticher; interviews with Elmore
Leonard, critics Christopher Frayling and Kim Newman;
audio commentaries on The Tall T, Ride Lonesome and
Comanche Station; appreciations by Martin Scorsese,
Taylor Hackford, Clint Eastwood; analysis of Ride
Lonesome by Cristina Alvarez López; Scott documentary
by Edward Buscombe; home cinema version of
Comanche Station; trailers; image galleries; booklet.
Reviewed by Robert Hanks
There is a tendency among critics – perhaps
I only mean that I detect it in myself – to
underestimate the importance to art of efficiency,
the ability to churn product out fast, cheap and
competently: romantic notions about genius
82 | Sight&Sound | July 2018
and individuality cloud the view. The obverse of
that tendency is the urge to compensate through
hyperbole, something you sometimes find in
writing about the films of Budd Boetticher. So
in 1970 Paul Schrader predicted that Boetticher
would one day be recognised as superior to “such
presently acclaimed directors as Von Sternberg,
Hitchcock, Lubitsch, or Hawks”. But don’t we all
tend to over-praise the things we love? Boetticher
had severe limitations as a filmmaker – among
other things, he had his own romantic notions
about manhood, which in his teens had taken
him to Mexico and a career in bullfighting,
and his films don’t show any curiosity about
women or even different kinds of men. But
when you compare what other directors were
doing at the same period in similar genres,
with similar budgets, each of his films – taut,
funny, peopled by attractive, unpredictable
characters – seems like a small miracle of craft.
The five Ranown westerns of the late 1950s
are generally taken to be the high points of
Boetticher’s career as director, and Randolph
Scott’s as leading man. Scott set up the Ranown
company with the producer Harry Joe Brown
to make westerns for Columbia, recruiting
Boetticher, who had directed Scott in 7 Men from
Now (1956) for John Wayne’s company Batjac,
and Burt Kennedy, who had written that film.
(7 Men isn’t in this set; nor is the other Scott-
Boetticher collaboration Westbound [1958], a
contractual obligation flick for Warner Bros
which nobody involved seems to have liked
much.) The films were shot in three weeks, all
around Lone Pine, up by the Sierra Nevada in
eastern California; not too many indoor scenes,
but sharp blue skies, patches of gentle green
around the rivers, yellow stony deserts and
mountains, the colour and detail all impeccable
on these transfers. The casts were on the small
side, no big names, often actors on the way up
(James Coburn in Ride Lonesome), or the way
down (Maureen O’Sullivan in The Tall T). The
stories are all variations on a formula, which
Boetticher summed up as “Here comes Randy.
He’s alone. What’s his problem?” That’s not quite
accurate – Scott starts The Tall T and Buchanan
Rides Alone without a problem, but runs into
somebody who gives him one; in the others, the
problem is the loss of a wife through, variously,
suicide, murder and abduction by injuns. Along
the way, he usually encounters a woman; she
is attracted to him – he is more manly than
the other men in her life – and the audience
might gather that he feels a little bit same way,
but he doesn’t let on. And there’s a likeable
bad guy, as manly as Randy but a touch more
easy-going, a touch more slippery: under other
circumstances, he and Randy might be friends…
Westerns have carried so much freight over
 HOME CINEMA
the years – meditations on America, masculinity,
race, money, and have offered so much beauty
and terror. It’s easy to overthink them. If there’s
a flaw with Powerhouse’s excellent set, it’s the
super-abundance of apparatus – stories get
repeated, contradicted, theories get set up. I’d
settle for Cristina Alvarez López’s very short
film essay, Playing in the Open, which offers
simple, practical demonstrations of the way
Boetticher set up his shots and told his stories.
Otherwise, there isn’t much about these films
that can’t be explained in terms of the imperatives
to shoot fast and cheap, to compress the story into
a 75-minutes-or-so running time, and to get the
audience to come back the next time. The
template plays to Scott’s strengths: too old to be a
plausible romantic lead – there weren’t many stars
working in the 50s who had served in World War I
– but still fit and lean enough to be a cowboy. Scott
was a Virginia gentleman by upbringing (hard to
see how the amiable cowpoke Pecos, in Buchanan
Rides Alone, clocks him as a fellow West Texan),
and in some of his earlier films he was a smooth
man about town. But in his fifties he had
weathered into an outdoorsman. He was by
all accounts a superb horseman, and had the
unhurried manner of a man who knows he can
handle things – watch the calm, deliberate way he
greets a band of Comanches and lays out his trade
goods at the start of Comanche Station.
At this point in his career, he had pared his
acting style down to two basic modes: tough and
grim, or tough and cheerful; but within those
modes, he manages some subtle effects – even
at his grimmest, he introduces the ghost of a
smile, as if to suggest he can see a joke or an
irony that has escaped his opponents; he can
afford to laugh. And the films often teeter on
the edge of laughter – in Comanche Station, a
Comanche attack is repeatedly punctuated by
some comic business with a water trough; several
characters – Pecos, Dobie in Comanche Station,
the stagecoach driver Rintoon in The Tall T – are
almost Shakespearean comic rustics. The balance
between laughter and violence might be the
nearest Boetticher comes to an auteurist touch.
The quality of the films is so consistently
maintained that it’s hard to rank them. Perhaps
I’d agree with Boetticher that Decision at Sundown
is the least satisfying (no coincidence that it is
the only one Kennedy didn’t write). Sundown is
actually the name of the town where the action
takes place, and it has the cramped, bright look
of a TV episode; while Scott’s character, Bart character, in Dobie (Richard Rust), proudly
Allison, chasing a revenge that turns out to be Westerns have carried so much showing off his ability to read and nursing
misconceived, is hard to like – though the novelty freight over the years – meditations aspirations for a wider life; and it also has the
of that is some compensation. Maybe I’d place most explicit and thoughtful interrogation of
Ride Lonesome at the top, partly because its revenge on America, masculinity, race, manliness, through the absent figure of John
plot is so patiently worked out and so thoroughly Lowe, who sends other men off into Comanche
resolved, rounded off with the striking image of
money. It’s easy to overthink them territory to search for his wife. Buchanan Rides
a tree in flames; it helps that for once the likeable great names) might have something to offer. Alone stands out, perhaps, as a genuine ensemble
bad guy is let off the hook – Lee Van Cleef turns In between – well, The Tall T has the most picture, with the three obese, corrupt Agry
up in time for the shoot-out, and almost steals attractive villain, in Richard Boone’s sand-blasted, brothers, their feline henchman Carbo (Craig
the picture; and Carrie Lowe (Karen Steele) is the imperturbable Frank Usher; the Elmore Leonard Stevens, TV’s Peter Gunn), Manuel Rojas’s fiery
most interesting leading lady, unafraid to pick short story it was based on was in effect reworked young Mexican good guy and L.Q. Jones’s amiable,
up a rifle, plausibly balanced between grief for as the basis for his novel Hombre: again, Boone drawling Pecos. After a while, the films blur
her husband, murdered by Apaches, and a sense played the villain in the film version. Comanche together, into one saga of loneliness and courage
that Ben Brigade (some of Scott’s characters had Station has the most touching supporting in the West. It’s a story that doesn’t get old.

July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 83

 New releases
THE BIRTHDAY PARTY
HOME CINEMA
William Friedkin; UK 1968; Kino Lorber; Region A Blu-ray;
123 minutes; 1.78:1. Extras: William Friedkin interview.
Reviewed by David Thompson
Arguably all of Harold Pinter’s major plays
have made their way to the big screen, most
notably Clive Donner’s The Caretaker (1963),
Peter Hall’s The Homecoming (1973) and David
Jones’s Betrayal (1983), the last yet to be released
on disc. Like all those films, William Friedkin’s
version of The Birthday Party is faithful to the
original – unsurprisingly, given that Pinter
himself was responsible for all four screenplays.
Friedkin originally saw the play in the USA in
1962, four years after its first run in London.
That production was famously a disaster,
with a rave review from the Sunday Times
critic Harold Hobson coming too late to save it
from closure, but since then the play has been
frequently revived (and is enjoying packed
houses in London’s West End as I write this).
The Birthday Party is exact in its period and
setting – the late 1950s, a run-down boarding
house in a bleak seaside town – but its true
subject, the confrontation between authority
and weakness, makes it timeless. Stanley is the
house’s only guest, a one-time piano-player who
believes he has evaded his past until a couple of
sinister gentlemen call by to torture him with
verbal assaults and ambiguous accusations.
The ethnic origins of this odd couple – Jewish
(Goldberg) and Irish (McCann) – are very specific
in the text, and the casting of Sidney Tafler
and Patrick Magee endorses that. The house is
presided over by Meg, wonderfully incarnated
here by Dandy Nichols. Stanley is played by
Robert Shaw, here astutely suppressing the
overt menace that pervaded his roles in From
Russia with Love (1963) and Jaws (1975).
Friedkin adds very few exterior sequences,
and keeps stylistic flourishes to a minimum. His
decisions to shift from colour to black and white
when the stage action is lit solely by a torch, and
to use occasional point of view shots to heighten
tension, are ultimately less effective than what
is experienced in a theatre. Pinter’s screenplay
cuts little from the stage version, though the
Ain’t nothin’ but a fang: The Bloodthirsty Trilogy
84 | Sight&Sound | July 2018
weakest character in the play, the twenty-
something Lulu, has even less of a presence. But
those now quaint references to Fuller’s teashops
and Boots Libraries stay, and on the whole – as
Friedkin himself acknowledges – it’s a solid
record of a fine cast performing a great play.
Disc: A serviceable transfer, and
Friedkin’s interview is entertaining.
THE BLOODTHIRSTY TRILOGY
THE VAMPIRE DOLL / LAKE OF
DRACULA / EVIL OF DRACULA
Yamamoto Michio; Japan 1970/1971/1974; Arrow Video;
Region B Blu-ray; Certificate 15; 85/82/87 mins; 2.35:1.
Extras: video essay by Kim Newman; stills gallery; trailers.
Reviewed by Anne Billson
Since the publication of Kikuchi Hideyuki’s first
Vampire Hunter D novel in 1983, vampires have
become such a mainstay of manga and anime
that it’s easy to forget they’re a relatively recent
phenomenon in Japanese pop culture. In an
indigenous folklore packed with phantoms and
monsters, you could get your blood sucked by
trees, flying heads or sea nymphs, but it wasn’t
until the worldwide success of Hammer’s Dracula
(1958) that the more urbane European-style
bloodsucker infiltrated Japanese cinema.
The influence of Hammer is nowhere more
evident than in Yamamoto Michio’s densely
plotted Bloodthirsty Trilogy, though the
denouement of The Vampire Doll (1970) owes as
much to Poe as to Stoker. A young man learns
his fiancée died in an accident. When he goes
missing, his sister and her boyfriend go searching
for him, and unearth a dark family secret.
In Lake of Dracula (1971), a young woman is
haunted by a childhood nightmare of a golden-
eyed vampire, but when other women turn up
with puncture wounds in their necks she begins
to suspect it wasn’t a dream. In Evil of Dracula
(1974), a new teacher at a girls’ school realises
that he and his pupils are in deadly peril; the
plot echoes Hammer’s Lust for a Vampire (1971)
with shades of Roger Vadim’s Blood and Roses
(1960) and even Martin Scorsese’s Silence (2016).
All three films are modern dress (just the
occasional kimono) and feature gothic mansions
in remote provinces where the landscape (often
with mountains in the background) seems less
immediately ominous than Hammer’s Black
Park. But Yamamoto (whose filmmaking debut
in 1957 was as assistant director on Kurosawa
Akira’s Throne of Blood) makes elegant use of
spooky woods, roads lit by headlights, and
eerie sobbing or singing on the soundtrack.
Anyone conversant with the Hammer house
style will feel at home with these old dark houses,
thunderstorms, beautiful female vampires
with bloodcurdling smiles, hapless ingénues,
helpful doctors, lurking handymen, and heroes
wrestling, mano a mano, with supernatural
villains. At first glance, the transposition into
Japanese culture seems to have added nothing
original to vampire lore, but the films do cast a
dreamlike spell, their subtly off-kilter sense of
otherness making them at once familiar and
unheimlich, the very definition of uncanny.
Disc: The new transfer enhances shadow detail
and the almost Bava-esque use of colour and
lighting. Extras consist of original trailers,
still galleries and a video essay in which Kim
Newman provides a potted history of Japanese
horror cinema and the trilogy’s place in it.
LA CAGE AUX FOLLES
Edouard Molinaro; France/Italy 1978; Criterion; Region B
Blu-ray; Certificate 12; 91 minutes; 1.66:1. Extras: interview
with Molinaro, archive TV sketches, clip of Jean Poiret and
Michel Serrault in original stage production, interview
with Professor Laurence Senelick, essay booklet.
Reviewed by Kate Stables
Edouard Molinaro and screenwriter Francis
Veber infuse dignity and tenderness into their
adaptation of Jean Poiret’s broad stage farce about
gay parents masquerading as straight, making it
the best of the piece’s many incarnations. Keen
to give it heart (“My comedies work because I
have no sense of humour”), Molinaro gives it a
conventional staging that grounds it effectively.
Damping down Serrault’s clowning and pairing
it with Ugo Tognazzi’s suave irritability gives
the besieged central couple a heartfelt bond,
one that overcomes even Tognazzi’s patently
re-voiced performance. Groundbreaking in
its portrait of a gay family, under the spangles
it’s a classic French farce of concealment
(Laurence Senelick is fascinating about this in
the extras). Serrault puts a poignant injured
pride into Albin, alongside the theatricality and
the tutorial in ‘virile’ toast buttering. There’s
an intriguing doubling too, between peacock-
shrieking Albin, and Michel Galabru’s excitable
ultra-conservative politician, enunciating with
deathly pauses his boss’s death in bed with a
black, underage prostitute. The film’s long-lasting
mainstream success however, is less down to
its flamboyant fun, than its prescient portrait of
gay marriage. For all it’s épater les bourgeois 70s
St Tropez daring and cock-shaped curios, what
it’s shamelessly flaunting is family values.
Disc: Like Albin/Zaza, the Blu-ray transfer buffs
up splendidly, as does Ennio Morricone’s jaunty
score, its rapidly quickening tango suggesting the
farce’s tight turns. An excellent package of extras
includes Senelick’s potted history of drag, and a
chunky extract from the original Paris stage
play, filmed for TV, for Cage completists.
Revival

HOME CINEMA
A META OF CONSEQUENCE
Two decades on, Olivier
Assayas’s hip, self-conscious
filmmaking comedy is a
sharp-looking cinephile joy
IRMA VEP
Olivier Assayas; France 1996; Arrow Academy; Region
B Blu-ray; Certificate 15; 99 minutes; 1.66:1. Extras:
audio commentary by Assayas and critic Jean-Michel
Frodon; On the Set of Irma Vep, featurette; interview
with Assayas and critic Charles Tesson; interview
with Maggie Cheung and Nathalie Richard; Man Yuk:
A Portrait of Maggie Cheung (1997), short film by
Assayas; black-and-white rushes; theatrical trailer.
Reviewed by Pamela Hutchinson
Olivier Assayas’s experimental cinematic
palimpsest Irma Vep was his unlikely
international breakthrough, even though it
stumbled at the French box office. The critic-
turned-director pointed his camera back at the
movies with this punkish, hip comedy, which
the critic Kurt Halfyard dubbed a “loathe-
letter to the foibles of French cinema”.
The premise is simple, not to say slight.
Washed-up director René Vidal (a world-
weary turn by Jean-Pierre Léaud) has been
commissioned by a TV channel to remake Louis It shouldn’t happen to a Vep: Maggie Cheung in catsuit
Feuillade’s silent serial: Les Vampires (1915-16).
Vidal’s film will be shot in black and white and source, which seems to puzzle the characters as Cheung is presented as an icon of Hong
as a silent, out of respect for its source, but his much as inspire them. Where Vidal approaches Kong action cinema, but a rather odd one, who
reverence only goes so far. His master-stroke Feuillade with veneration for his atmospheric confesses she can’t fight and patiently bats away
of reinvention is to hire a star of Hong Kong effects, Assayas borrows his quick-and-dirty a French reporter’s eager questions about John
action cinema to play the lead character, the practice. Written and shot fast, like Les Vampires, Woo. Cheung, who was later married to Assayas,
anagrammatic jewel-thief heroine Irma Vep. That Irma Vep was filmed on Super 16 with handheld had a more interesting CV than this movie allows,
star is Maggie Cheung, who plays herself – Vidal cameras. Zoé and her film-crew friends watch having already worked with Wong Kar Wai in
says he spotted her in The Heroic Trio (1993), a cinéma militant favourite Classe de lutte (1969) Days of Being Wild (1990) and more to the point,
which he saw while slumming in a fleapit in on TV, while Vidal glugs Coca-Cola and takes played the lead in Center Stage (1991), the biopic
Morocco. Where her predecessor Musidora wore ideas from Hollywood blockbusters, deepening of tragic Chinese silent star Ruan Ling-yu. With
a black body-stocking in 1915, Cheung’s costume the divisions on set. Played by Léaud, of course, her soft British accent (Cheung spent some of her
for this 1990s reboot is a sculpted latex affair, Vidal also provides a link back to the French childhood in Kent) and lack of authority on set,
modelled after Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman get- New Wave – especially Truffaut’s similarly self- Cheung makes for an unlikely action heroine, and
up in Batman Returns (1992). Cheung is no vamp, referential Day for Night (1973). The director a dubious heir to the diva Musidora, but slowly
but a self-deprecating, befuddled fish out of water, hired to usurp Vidal is played by Lou Castel, who she begins to inhabit her character Irma off-set:
buffeted by the harassed and argumentative carries his own baggage – having played a version leaping through windows and stalking through
Parisian crew. As costume designer Zoé (Nathalie of Rainer Werner Fassbinder in that director’s hotel bedrooms in the early hours, looking out
Richard) both takes Maggie under her wing and film-set drama Beware of a Holy Whore (1971). for jewels. A rehearsal sequence reveals that she
falls in love with her, the production falters. Snarky allusions to Hollywood abound, has the requisite “eyes that fascinate”, even if
Meanwhile Vidal, no less infatuated with his including a spurned lover berating her man she’s just going through the motions for Vidal.
star, loses confidence in the project and himself. because she has watched Steven Seagal Irma Vep is a dazzling film, bursting with a
The premise of Vidal’s commission is films while waiting for him, a crime she tangible passion for the best of cinema, as well
hackneyed and avant garde at the same time. The can never forgive. There’s no corresponding as vitriol for its foibles, and so it’s a joy to see it
crew roll their eyes at the idea of a remake, but respect for the French film industry, which restored so smartly here, in a crisp 2K version
a Feuillade reboot is hardly a franchise movie. emerges as staid and unadventurous, with that maintains its essential, often ragged textures.
Likewise, Vidal’s movie appears from the rushes cynically written office scenes bookending Arrow’s package offers a strong supporting slate of
to be a clunker: leaden, and unconvincing. A the film: rarely can insurance have been so extras offering clues to the film’s many influences
replacement is hired, a leftwing relic who in prominently discussed in a meta-movie. and references, including an excellent booklet
turn wants to replace Cheung. But perhaps, essay by Neil Young. On the disc itself, interviews,
following his mid-shoot breakdown, Vidal can This is a dazzling film, a trailer and the unedited rushes for Vidal’s Les
make something more stimulating out of his Vampires are joined by Assayas’s 1997 film about
material – drawing on and scratching the film bursting with a tangible passion Cheung and a half-hour making-of documentary,
itself, in the style of the artist Isidore Isou.
Irma Vep is a cacophony of clashing film
for the best of cinema, as well which like the feature itself has an optional audio
commentary that is really a stage interview with
cultures, beginning with its enigmatic silent era as vitriol for its foibles the director by the critic Jean-Michel Frodon.

July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 85

 New releases
CURE
HOME CINEMA
Kurosawa Kiyoshi; Japan 1997; Eureka/Masters
of Cinema; Region B Blu-ray and Region 2 DVD dual
format; Certificate 15; 111 minutes; 1.85:1. Extras: new
and archival interviews with Kurosawa; interview with
critic Kim Newman; trailer; booklet note by Tom Mes.
Reviewed by Trevor Johnston
Impressive box-office returns for Hollywood
game-changers The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
and Se7en (1995) created the commercial
context for Kurosawa Kiyoshi to deliver this
theatrical serial-killer policier, which marked
his international breakthrough. From today’s
vantage point, it’s not only one of the key
titles in his filmography, but an unarguable
landmark offering, clearly ahead of the J-horror
curve. Perhaps it was too far ahead, since it
was never theatrically released in the UK and
is only now making its home-entertainment
debut with this desirable dual-format edition.
Perhaps unfortunately, what was pioneering
back then has been somewhat overworked in
the meantime, though in Kurosawa’s hands the
soundtrack drone, the shadowy figures creeping
in the depths of the frame, and the modern city
as locus of festering unease are not just there
for superficial effect, but suggest a questioning
peek behind the façades of social convention.
Kurosawa’s signature leading man, the
versatile Yakusho Koji, is the cop on the case
trying to find connections between a series
of seemingly random slayings across Tokyo,
gradually realising that the bloodshed has as
much to do with the explosion of repressed
quotidian yearnings and the disintegration of
moral coherence as the handiwork of some
evil-genius bogeyman. Certainly, the expert
direction gets great mileage from the insidiously
unsettling framing and murk-tastic art direction,
but it’s the bone-deep anomie on view – material
usually the stuff of Euro arthouse kingpins
like Haneke or Antonioni – that gives the film
genuine substance to go with its highly effective
frissons. Enthusiastically recommended.
Disc: The new Blu-ray transfer copes well with
Kurosawa’s washed-out palette and occasional
low-light filming. Useful supplementary
interviews, including the characteristically
thoughtful Kurosawa and reliably astute critic
Kim Newman, plus worthwhile notes from
Japanese cinema expert Tom Mes contribute
to a mandatory purchase for genre fans.
THE EFFECT OF GAMMA RAYS ON
MAN-IN-THE MOON MARIGOLDS
Paul Newman; USA 1972; Powerhouse/Indicator; Blu-
ray Region B; Certificate 12; 101 minutes; 1.85:1. Extras:
commentary by Adrian Martin; John Player Lecture by
Paul Newman (audio); Guardian Interview with Joanna
Woodward (audio); 1973 Cannes Festival press conference;
music and effects track; TV spot; image gallery; booklet.
Reviewed by Philip Kemp
Paul Newman’s third film as director serves,
like his first (Rachel, Rachel, 1968), as a showcase
for his wife, Joanne Woodward. She is cast
against type as a domestic monster: Beatrice
Hunsdorfer, the drunken, cantankerous mother
of two teenage daughters. The film is almost
stolen, though, by Newman and Woodward’s
daughter Nell Potts, who plays Matilda, the
86 | Sight&Sound | July 2018
serious-minded and science-mad younger
daughter; her quiet, watchful gravity now and
then shows up her mother’s performance as
self-indulgent and overblown. Her older sister
Ruth is played by Roberta Wallach, Eli Wallach’s
daughter, here making her screen debut; her
caricatured send-up of Beatrice, for the school’s
drama class, is a tour de force in itself.
Shot in Bridgeport, Connecticut (standing
in for Staten Island), the film is adapted from
a Pulitzer Prize-winning off-Broadway hit by
Paul Zindel. Get past the cutesy title, and some
stage-derived verbosity of dialogue, and there’s
a bleak humour in the portrayal of selfishly
dysfunctional parenting and the damage it can
inflict on offspring. Newman directs soberly and
unshowily: like many actor-directors, he puts his
camera almost entirely at the service of his cast.
The comedy at times turns sour – though
avoiding sentimentality – but the film ends on a
note of hope at least for Matilda, self-containedly
taking refuge from her mother’s cruelty in the
passion for science that’s been nurtured by a
sympathetic physics teacher. No surprise to learn
that, prior to his success as a playwright, Zindel
taught science at a school on Staten Island.
Disc: A flawless 4K restoration that shows
up the interior of Beatrice’s house in all its
garbage-strewn, slatternly detail. Informative
commentary from Adrian Martin, but
otherwise rather scrappy extras.
GARCON!
Claude Sautet; France 1983; Pathé; Region-free Blu-ray
and DVD; 88 minutes; 1.66:1. Extras: deleted scenes;
La fin d’un cycle documentary by Jerome Wybon
Reviewed by David Thompson
Garçon! – the cry that traditionally goes out in
French restaurants when you want to summon
a waiter – was one of the two films Claude
Sautet made in the 1980s. Situated between his
run of popular dramas dealing with bourgeois
relationships in the 1970s and his final arthouse
successes Un Coeur en hiver (1991) and Nelly et
M. Arnaud (1995), Garçon! was on the surface a
distinct change of pace, a star vehicle for Yves
The anomie within: Cure
Montand – then at the height of his fame –
delivered with a lighter, more comic touch.
Inspired by the antics of a real-life figure
observed by Sautet and his regular collaborator
Jean-Loup Dabadie, the script went through
major developments to reassure an anxious
Montand that he wasn’t just playing a man who
carried dishes. Alex is seen often in commanding
form as a head waiter in a busy Paris brasserie,
but we learn he is a former dancer and hotelier
who easily charms women into his bed, while
his latest dream is to establish a children’s
amusement park by the sea. Although accused
by his best pal Gilbert (Jacques Villeret) of being
self-centred, Alex’s more vulnerable side is
exposed when he falls for Claire (Nicole Garcia),
an English-language teacher with an absent lover.
So far so soapy, but what sets Sautet apart
from the crowd is the sheer brio of his direction,
especially in the masterfully choreographed
scenes in the restaurant (all filmed on a studio set,
though a convincingly atmospheric one). The
editing is brisk and often surprising; according
to the testimony of his colleagues, Sautet was
obsessive about removing unnecessary exposition,
even cutting down his films in projection booths
after their cinema release. Deleted material
included on this disc reveals how he originally
opened the film with scenes of Montand’s life
outside of his job, which he then wisely took out
to launch the audience directly into the frantic
bustle and acerbic repartee of the restaurant world.
Disc: An excellent transfer available
with English subtitles, though these
are not to be found on the extras.
THE GRIFTERS
Stephen Frears; USA 1990; 101 Films; Region B Blu-ray and
Region 2 DVD dual format; Certificate 18; 106 minutes; 1.85:1.
Extras: Making of documentary; booklet (limited edition only).
Reviewed by Philip Kemp
With a script by Donald E. Westlake adapted from
a novel by Jim Thompson, The Grifters secretes a
double helping of deep-dyed noir. Stephen Frears’s
film – his first Stateside foray – faithfully renders
the pulp-writer’s bleak skid-row world. The plot
embroils three con artists in an Oedipal triangle:
two women at daggers drawn over a guy. One
of them is (probably) his mother, Lily (Anjelica
Huston), avid and trash-blonde, driven by greed
and terror into a spiral of self-destruction. Dragged
down with her are her son Roy (John Cusack)
and his toothsomely slutty girlfriend Myra
(Annette Bening). The cast also features such
reliable supports as J.T. Walsh, engagingly sleazy
as ever, and Pat Hingle as Lily’s boss Bobo Justus,
an unnerving mix of bonhomie and brutality.
Egged on by a taut, jazz-tinged score from Elmer
Bernstein, the plotting is tight and lethal, keeping
us guessing just who’s scamming who. Much of
the dialogue is drawn straight from Thompson’s
novel. (Myra, describing the guy who inducted
her into con-artistry: “He was so crooked, he could
eat soup with a corkscrew.”) Bening, fresh from
playing Mme de Merteuil in Valmont (1989), the
non-Frears version of Dangerous Liaisons, channels
Gloria Grahame, who she would later portray
in Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool (2017). Martin
Scorsese, producing, speaks the brief voiceover
intro. And as might have been predicted from
his feature debut, the private-eye spoof Gumshoe
(1971), Frears proves a master of the noir idiom.
He deservedly picked up an Oscar nomination
for the film, as did Huston, Bening and Westlake.
Disc: An impressively cleaned-up restoration.
Sole but highly worthwhile on-disc extra is a
72-minute making-of, featuring new interviews
with Frears, cinematographer Oliver Stapleton,
editor Mick Audsley, executive producer
Barbara De Fina and co-producer Peggy Rajski.
THE HENRY FOOL TRILOGY
HENRY FOOL / FAY GRIM / NED RIFLE
Hal Hartley; USA 1997/2006/2014; Possible Films; Region
1 DVD; 341 minutes; 1.78:1. Extras: documentary, Making
Fay Grim or How Do You Spell Espionage? (2007); promo
clip: Some Days in April (2014); optional English, Spanish,
French, German and Japanese subtitles; booklet with
rare production photos, new essay by Tom McSorley.
Reviewed by Craig Williams
His seventh feature film, 1997’s Henry Fool
remains Hal Hartley’s richest, most rewarding
picture. Following his celebrated early movies,
including his debut The Unbelievable Truth (1989)
and the outstanding Trust (1990) – arch, erudite
stories of young love in suburban Long Island –
Hartley embarked on a trio of transitional features
which broadened his thematic outlook and set
the foundations for Henry Fool and its sequels,
Fay Grim (2006) and Ned Rifle (2014). Parental
legacy and lost innocence, the two ideas at the
heart of Simple Men (1992) also inform Henry
Fool; the appropriation of genre elements into
the Hartley milieu seen in Amateur (1994) and
the structural ambition of Flirt (1995) serve as
important stylistic touchpoints for the sequels.
The first instalment opens with Henry
(Thomas Jay Ryan) arriving out of the blue one
day in the Queens home of siblings Simon (James
Urbaniak) and Fay Grim (Parker Posey). Henry
– described in Tom McSorley’s booklet essay as
“part Byronic satyr, part Bukowskian anti-hero”
– is putting the finishing touches to his multi-
volume “confession” (“It’s gonna blow a hole right
through the world’s own idea of itself”), and he
sets out to inspire binman Simon to compose his
The Effect of Gamma Rays…
own poetry. It’s a film which excels in its dualities:
that of Henry himself, poised between mythic
promise and real-world disappointment, and that
of legacy, both familial and creative. This notion
of legacy reverberates throughout the sequels,
which are concerned with the intersection of
Henry’s art and life during protracted spells of
absence, with the focus shifting to Fay and his son
Ned, both struggling to emerge from his shadow.
With their singular aesthetic and repertory
company of actors, Hartley’s films have always
felt of a piece, and while the sequels work as
distinct, melancholic reflections on the themes
of Henry Fool, they also demonstrate Hartley’s
increasing engagement with larger American
ideas, such as post-9/11 malaise in Fay Grim and
Christian evangelicalism in Ned Rifle. The former,
a brilliant Rivettian anti-thriller, in which Fay
goes to Europe at the behest of the CIA in search
of Henry’s notebooks, was a bold new direction
for Hartley in 2006, whereas the latter, an Oedipal
black comedy which sees Henry’s son (Liam
Aiken) on the path of vengeance, brings Hartley
back full circle to the disaffected suburban
teenage wastelands of his breakout films.
Disc: There are two making-of documentaries on
the sequels, as well as a copy of Hartley’s related
LP After the Catastrophe. The box-set is available
to order direct from www.halhartley.com.
INTIMATE LIGHTING
Ivan Passer; Czechoslovakia 1965; Second Run;
Region-free Blu-ray and DVD (separate releases);
Certificate PG; 74 minutes; 1.37:1. Extras: short
film A Boring Afternoon; interview; booklet.
Reviewed by Michael Brooke
Despite the excellence of the likes of Cutter’s Way
(1981), Ivan Passer arguably never surpassed the
films that he made in his native country and
language. Both of them, with a total running-
time of less than 90 minutes, are presented here.
A Boring Afternoon (1964) adapts a Bohumil
Hrabal story about a pub on a sweltering
Sunday afternoon, its habitués playing subtle
games of one-upmanship with each other; their
manoeuvres are charmingly underscored by
folksongs unselfconsciously sung by a quartet of
female card-players in the corner. It’s the perfect
amuse-bouche for Passer’s only Czech feature, a
little miracle of a film that takes a seemingly
inconsequential subject (two old friends reunite
for a country weekend) and applies such a
Renoiresque generosity to all its characters,
principals to one-shot bits, that even the most
HOME CINEMA
Intimate Lighting
throwaway moment (for instance, the brief looks
exchanged between a city visitor and a gaggle
of village women as they march past her car,
rakes proudly aloft) seems ineffably profound.
Passer had previously co-scripted his
schoolfriend Milos Forman’s early films, and
he applied similar methods here – notably the
near-exclusive use of non-professional actors,
in this case picked more for musicianship than
acting experience. (The central set piece, in which
Eine kleine Nachtmusik is shredded by a quartet of
decidedly varying competence levels, is rendered
more comically effective by the fact that they
are clearly playing it for real.) Along the way,
hearts are unburdened, ambitions thwarted and
home truths conveyed, but Passer’s touch is so
light throughout – as the Mozart should have
been, if played properly – that nothing ever feels
didactic. Had he never made anything else, his
mark on film history would still be indelible.
Disc: A substantial advance on Second Run’s
old DVD, the newly high-definition picture
is now spotlessly clean, and the subtitles are
more thorough. The booklet recycles an essay
by Phillip Bergson, with Trevor Johnston
now adding much valuable contextual detail,
especially about the music. A 2005 interview
with Passer includes the sobering revelation
that the sadness in lead actor Karel Blazek’s
eyes was most likely related to the leukaemia
that would kill him six weeks after filming
finished, something he had kept to himself.
IT’S THE OLD ARMY GAME
A. Edward Sutherland; USA 1926; Kino Lorber; Region A
Blu-ray and Region 1 DVD (separate releases); 75 minutes;
1.33:1. Extras: organ score by Ben Model; audio commentary
by James L. Neibaur.
Reviewed by David Thompson
W.C. Fields is surely now a remote figure,
his films rarely if ever shown on television.
It seems more likely that the silent comics
Chaplin and Keaton will persist in the general
imagination, their supreme visual qualities
overcoming the barriers of period dialogue
and attitudes. Fields, a popular vaudevillian
before he entered the movies, successfully
straddled both the silent and sound era. From
the former only about half of his films survive,
this one in remarkably good condition.
In all his work, it’s Fields’s misanthropic and
anarchic persona that dominates, and It’s The Old
Army Game was largely forged out of comic
routines he had honed on stage, some of
July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 87
 New releases
which – his hopeless attempts to sleep on a
HOME CINEMA
porch without interruption and to silence
a crying baby – he reprised in It’s A Gift (1934).
He plays an “apothecary and humanitarian” in a
small town, a bachelor privately smitten with his
counter assistant. She is Louise Brooks, a former
dancer who knew Fields well from the stage and
who was just beginning her Hollywood career –
immortality as Lulu in Pandora’s Box (1929) would
come three years later. Already in this small part
her natural, unforced playing marks her out from
the more caricatured figures surrounding her.
Brooks – who went on to marry the film’s
director – wrote later that the filming in Florida
was mainly conducted in an alcoholic haze
(one key gag refers explicitly to this being the
era of prohibition). The plot, such as it is (a
visitor appears to be ruining the townspeople
with a real estate scam, but it turns out to make
them rich), is just there to string together the
set pieces and bizarre title cards – a memorable
example being Fields’s final desperate
comment to the noisy baby: “Uncle will give
you some nice razor blades to play with”.
Disc: A beautifully detailed, sepia-tinted
print, well transferred, apparently at sound
speed – unlike a copy available on YouTube
which clocks in at 105 minutes, half an
hour longer. The ideal running time would
probably be between the two. Unobtrusive
musical accompaniment, and a commentary
that is more enthusiastic than informative.
LITTLE MURDERS
Alan Arkin; USA 1970; Powerhouse/Indicator; Region B Blu-
ray; Certificate 15; 108 minutes; 1.85:1. Extras: Commentaries
by Elliott Gould and writer Jules Feiffer and by critic Samm
Deighan; new interviews with Alan Arkin, Elliott Gould, Jules
Feiffer; radio spots; trailer; booklet note by Jim O’Rourke.
Reviewed by Trevor Johnston
Pitched, uniquely, somewhere between drawing-
room comedy and the urban paranoia of Death
Wish (1974) or Taxi Driver (1976), actor Alan
Arkin’s still-startling directorial debut would
undoubtedly go down as one of the great early
70s cult movies if anyone had ever seen it. Born
out of satirist, cartoonist and screenwriter Jules
Feiffer’s contention that the assassinations
of JFK and MLK marked a corrosive moment
in the disintegration of American values and
institutions, this chamber-piece of discontent
is still worryingly relevant, though perhaps
today’s audiences will be a bit more wise to the
confrontational glee with which it dismantles
the traditional comforts of comic reassurance.
A sort of defiant apathy is photographer Elliott
Gould’s stand against the unfolding nightmare
of a New York plagued by blackouts and random
violence, but co-star Marcia Rodd remains
determined to shape him into acceptance of
love, marriage, and her sitcom-type family.
Bitter laughter is the order of the day as
bullets and whip-smart dialogue ricochet.
This is Gould in his pomp, on Altman-level
form, slightly zonked yet somehow irresistible,
while subtly bringing an underlying aching
vulnerability into play. Arkin’s direction is pitched
just-so, neither softening the extremes of mood
nor blowing it all by over-pitching the kookiness.
In the end it’s a marvel, with Feiffer’s anguished
88 | Sight&Sound | July 2018
Gould standard: Marcia Rodd, Elliott Gould, Donald Sutherland in Little Murders
wit setting up Donald Sutherland and Arkin
himself for memorable one-scene cameos as hip
priest and seriously frayed detective respectively.
It is marvellous that the film is available, but still
hard to comprehend why it’s been undervalued
for so long – though not by Jean Renoir, whose
fan-letter (included in the booklet) is spot-on.
Disc: Admirers of Gordon Willis’s work will
relish this expert transfer, while a crammed
disc conveys both ample background info
and wider cinematic context in abundance.
THE MAGIC FLUTE
Ingmar Bergman; Sweden 1975; BFI; Region B Blu-ray
and Region 2 DVD dual format; Certificate PG; 137
minutes; 1.33:1. Extras: three short films – Lotte Reiniger’s
Papageno (1935), In Mozart’s Footsteps (1938), Anthony
Asquith’s On Such A Night (1955); UK trailer; booklet
Reviewed by David Thompson
In Ingmar Bergman’s highly personal spin on
gothic horror, Hour of the Wolf (1969), a group
gathers before a puppet theatre to watch a scene
from Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. The hero of
the piece, Tamino, is searching for the woman he
has fallen for, Pamina, and is plunged into a lonely
night from which he is told by a mysterious
chorus that he will either emerge soon, or never.
For those who were surprised by the infamously
gloomy Swede making a film of such a basically
joyous work, the clues were already long there.
For darkness and light, ignorance and wisdom,
dream and reality are as much the themes
of The Magic Flute as Bergman’s universe.
Mozart’s opera – or rather Singspiel, a popular
entertainment featuring dialogue and musical
numbers – drew on various sources from fairytale
to masonic ritual. Two couples, the aristocratic
Tamino and Pamina and the earthy bird-catcher
Papageno and Papagena, are required to go
through a series of strange rituals to be united in
love. Tamino is set on his mission by the Queen
of the Night, Pamina’s mother, who asserts her
daughter is wrongly being held captive by a
demonic figure, Sarastro. Yet the latter occupies a
place of benign authority in his own world, and
Bergman’s twist is to make him Pamina’s father,
so we have more a drama over child custody than
a Manichaean struggle between good and evil.
Unlike the other high-prestige filmed operas
of the 1970s and 1980s, which directors such as
Joseph Losey and Francesco Rosi chose to set in
naturalistic environments, Bergman’s The Magic
Flute is very much a theatre piece. He recreated
the 18th-century Drottningholm theatre in
Stockholm in a studio, making full use of archaic
scenic effects while liberating the camera to
travel all round the stage. For the overture, we
see faces of every nation and race (including
Bergman himself), the main focus being a young
girl whose delighted reactions pop up from time
to time during the action. Since it was originally
made for a local television audience, the language
spoken and sung is Swedish (not the original
German), the performers are chosen partly for
their photogenic qualities and acting ability, and
much is shot in close-up for greater intimacy.
All of which makes for arguably the most
successful transposition of an opera to film yet,
one both joyous and deeply moving which fully
realises the sublime nature of this immortal work.
Disc: A fine transfer. The extras are interesting,
but it is a shame the revealing documentary
about the making of the film was not included.
MODEL SHOP
Jacques Demy; USA 1969; Twilight Time; Region-
free Blu-Ray; 97 minutes; 1.85:1. Extras: isolated
music track; TV spots; original theatrical trailer.
Reviewed by Nick Pinkerton
The knock on Model Shop, Jacques Demy’s first
English-language film and his only American
one, is that the dialogue is a tad maladroit and
Gary Lockwood isn’t a particularly expressive
leading man – or at least isn’t as interesting
as Demy’s preferred star, Harrison Ford,
might have been. In fact I find Demy’s script,
Americanised by Carole Eastman, rather blank-
verse beautiful, and have more time than most
for the ex-jock stolidity of 2001: A Space Odyssey
star Lockwood; but none of this touches on
the movie’s essential quality – as man takes a
backseat to extraterrestrial machine in Kubrick’s
movie, the car is the real star of Demy’s.
The film’s story, such as it is, is set in motion
when George (Lockwood), a trained architect
who’s dropped out of the rat race to leech off
his actor girlfriend in South Bay Los Angeles
while living under the shadow of the Vietnam
draft, almost has his green 1952 MG TD Midget
repossessed from under him by men from the
dealership – a death sentence for an Angeleno.
He peels out in search of a loan to pay off what he
owes, but is instead ensorcelled from the straight
and narrow path by a beautiful woman in a white
1968 Mercury Park Lane convertible. The woman
is played by Anouk Aimée, reprising her role
from Demy’s Lola (1960), the onetime cabaret
girl now a little older and a lot sadder, posing
for paying customers in the eponymous peep-
show storefront. From here we get a bit of rueful
romance and existential angst and an extended
appearance by the band Spirit, but the real
accomplishment of the movie is capturing the
slightly melancholy, solitary pleasure of drifting a
day away in an automobile, its series of sweeping,
swoony car-mounted long takes combining to
give LA the sweetest city symphony that it ever
received. Rolling along, George at times seems
as much chauffeur as character, though he
does get to voice something like Demy’s thesis:
“To think some people claim it’s an ugly city
when it’s really pure poetry, it just kills me.”
Disc: Not much in the way of add-ons for this
one, but the image is sharp and true and when
it moves you can feel the wind in your hair.
THE ST. VALENTINE’S
DAY MASSACRE
Roger Corman; USA 1967; Powerhouse/Indicator; Region
B Blu-ray; Certificate 15; 100 minutes; 2.35:1. Extras: brief
Corman interview; discussion of the film by Barry Forshaw;
discussion of uncredited narrator Paul Frees’s career by Ben
Ohmart; Super 8 home-cinema digest version; theatrical
trailer, booklet with new writing by Neil Sinyard and reprinted
writing from Corman, Philip French and Tom Milne.
Reviewed by Tony Rayns
Made on Twentieth Century-Fox’s coin in
between The Wild Angels and The Trip, this
was Roger Corman’s first film for a Hollywood
major. He was so shocked by the slowness of
the large crew and by mysterious below-the-
line studio costs that he immediately reverted
to low-budget indie production; it also rankled
that Richard Zanuck talked him out of casting
Orson Welles as Al Capone. But Corman enjoyed
having a decent budget and recycling sets
built for Hello Dolly, The Sand Pebbles and The
Sound of Music, and he relished the chance to go
beyond what he’d done for the gangster genre
in Machine Gun Kelly and I, Mobster (both 1958).
Corman fans were nonplussed by the film
from the day it opened (just before Bonnie and
Clyde) because it approaches modern horror
from the opposite direction to the one he took
elsewhere. There’s no neo-expressionism, there
are no arthouse flourishes in the camerawork
and there are no twisted Freudian backstories.
(Also: fake snow rather than fake fog.) Instead
there’s a quasi-documentary objectivity and
an almost diagrammatically clear exposition
Birdman (or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance): Hakan Hagegard and Irma Urrila in The Magic Flute
of the power-struggle between Capone and
‘Bugsy’ Moran, complemented by an omniscient
narration which tells us who everyone is, where
they came from and how, where and when they
will eventually die. An opening caption insists
that everything is solidly factual, although
Capone’s revenge murder of aspiring Mafia
boss Aiello on a train is actually invented.
Jason Robards, Ralph Meeker, George Segal
et al are all splendid in leading roles, but the
eye goes to Corman regulars in bit-parts: Dick
Miller, Leo Gordon and Jack Nicholson. Plus, of
course, Barboura Morris in the opening scene,
Corman’s perennial screaming witness to horror.
Disc: Excellent 4K transfer. Odd that nobody in
the extras mentions the next-best movie depiction
of the massacre: in Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959).
SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER
Joseph L. Mankiewicz; USA 1959; Powerhouse/Indicator;
Region-free Blu-ray; Certificate 15; 114 minutes; 1.85:1.; Extras:
interviews with Mankiewicz (1990), assistant editor John
Crome, continuity supervisor Elaine Schreyeck; Elizabeth
Taylor on Montgomery Clift (1966); Gary Raymond on
Suddenly, Last Summer; Michel Ciment analysis of the
film; theatrical trailer; Dan Ireland trailer commentary.
Reviewed by Kate Stables
Mankiewicz’s rich and lurid rendering of
Tennessee William’s psychological melodrama
The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre
HOME CINEMA
makes explicit what was only touched upon
on stage. Gore Vidal’s script, spinning the one-
act play into a series of tense confrontations,
has a deft ventriloquism that defies you to spot
the joins. A Southern Gothic exploration of
predation, paedophila, quasi-incest, repressed
memory and a little light cannibalism, it’s
unabashedly operatic in tone (Mankiewicz called
Elizabeth Taylor’s final truth-drug revelations
“an aria”). Pitching Katherine Hepburn’s
gloriously theatrical monster-mother against
Taylor’s writhing Method neurosis, it tackles
the language-centred claustrophobia of the
original by doubling down rather than opening
out. Against their highly strung speechifying,
neuro-psychiatrist Montgomery Clift’s calm,
reactive performance provides welcome ballast
(in an interview included as an extra, assistant
editor John Crome gives good insights into
how his on-set fragility was overcome).
Oliver Messel’s overwrought art direction,
underlining the themes of predator and prey with
a lushly death-tinged jungle garden and a snake
pit of an asylum, is sumptuously shown off in
this 4k version. So are director of photography
Jack Hildyard’s atmospheric monochrome
compositions, alternating pale blazing heat and
shadowy interiors, Hepburn’s witchy white garb
playing off Taylor’s dark silhouette. As critic
Michel Ciment points out in his excellent analysis,
despite the heroic length of the monologues,
Mankiewicz is far from a mere ‘dialogue director’
here. Positioning a suicidal Taylor in a zoo-like
confrontation with asylum inhabitants, or
blending her anguished face into the blazing,
fractured footage of the finale, he created some
of the most startling images of his career.
Disc: A transfer that is ravishingly easy on the
eye, capturing the fleshy detail of a Venus flytrap
or the regal twists of Hepburn’s throne-lift. The
fat package of extras is heavy on crew memories,
but features a playful Mankiewicz hitting a
French interviewer’s questions out of the park.
Ciment’s impressive analysis of everything from
scabrous themes to set design is, as ever, spot on.
July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 89
 Lost and found

THE FIFTH HORSEMAN IS FEAR

HOME CINEMA

OVERLOOKED FILMS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE ON UK DVD OR BLU-RAY

An unexpected message of hope and
freedom emerges from the horror
in Czech director Zbynek Brynych’s
exceptional Holocaust drama
By Kat Ellinger
Despite winning international acclaim for his
dark masterpiece The Fifth Horseman Is Fear
(1965), as well as another of his earlier features,
Transport from Paradise (1962), the director Zbynek
Brynych still remains obscure in comparison
with some of the other names to come out of
the Czech New Wave – figures such as Milos
Forman, Vera Chytilová, Jirí Menzel, Jan Nemec
and Jaromil Jires. Much of Brynych’s work –
which includes dramas, comedies, romances
and television work (some of it produced in
Germany) – remains almost impossible to
find on DVD or Blu-ray in English-speaking
territories. Transport from Paradise – set in the
Nazi-run ghetto of Theresienstadt, as the Jewish
inmates await deportation to the death camps –
is the only one of the director’s films to receive
a semi-high-profile release in the UK. The Fifth
Horseman Is Fear has yet to get the same treatment
and its profile has suffered as a result of lack The sacrifice: The Fifth Horseman Is Fear (1965)
of availability. (The director would produce
a third film on Holocaust themes in 1968, I, full of books, musical instruments, and then
Justice, which is equally hard to get hold of.)
Brynych exploits the sense of finally, clocks. These items can be taken as a
But The Fifth Horseman Is Fear seems to have the oppression to conjure his fifth representation of a world where creativity and
potential to appeal widely, especially through its learning are forbidden. The clocks give out an
kinship to the horror genre, as well as presenting horseman. Fear is everywhere. even starker metaphor, standing in for lost time.
a powerful drama, which examines a man in Brynych exploits the sense of oppression to
existential crisis fighting to save his sense of
Paranoia and suspicion run rife conjure his fifth horseman. Fear is everywhere.
self in an increasingly oppressive culture. Using a highly stylised approach, loaded with Even though people seem to be going about
As The Fifth Horseman Is Fear winds down symbolism, the director is able to convey many their everyday lives, the cracks soon start to
to its parting shot, the message is clear. A of the film’s key messages simply through visual show – people argue and whisper behind closed
radio bellows out in the background with a motifs. When we first meet Braun at his current doors, and fight or gossip about their neighbours.
broadcast from the Third Reich, while a man workplace he is surrounded by confiscated Paranoia and suspicion run rife, as Braun
lies dead in a stairwell, and another laughs at items, uniform in their presentation: a room attempts to carry out his quest to get morphine
the absurdity of it all: “We all know that great for the injured man; the walls start to close in
sacrifices will be required of everyone.” around him and the feeling of claustrophobia
Throughout the course of the film – an WHAT THE PAPERS SAID heightens. The director uses some impressive
adaptation of Hana Belohradska’s 1961 thriller Bez set pieces during these moments – crowds of
krásy, bez límce – Brynych explores the notion of people standing deadly still, staring, or leaning
sacrifice within the context of the Nazi occupation ‘The work of a master… over bannisters on a spiral staircase, looking
of Czechoslovakia, presenting the plight of a Jewish [has] what Fellini and very down accusingly on Braun. The film foreshadows
doctor who has been forced to sacrifice his sense few other directors are other films that exploit the feelings and themes
of self, his profession, and his life mission, in order able to achieve: a sense of of horror films without employing the genre’s
to serve the needs of a totalitarian regime. Under rhythm. It is not a series conventions – Roman Polanski’s The Tenant
newly imposed regulations, Dr Braun (Miroslav of scenes cut together, (1976) and Andrzej Zulawski’s The Third Part of
Machácek) is no longer able to practise medicine. not a series of statements the Night (1971), as well as The Cremator (1968), by
Instead, he is made to work as a warehouse made one after another, Brynych’s former assistant Juraj Herz. It also draws
assistant, cataloguing confiscated items. Conflict but a total film, conceived as one complete on the spirit of Kafka and the Eastern European
comes when he is challenged to save a man’s life, idea… a beautiful, distinguished work’ absurdist tradition to produce unsettling results.
forcing him to break the rules in order to complete Roger Ebert July 30, 1968 The film has only had a single English-friendly
his mission. Through this journey, which takes ‘Unquestionably of the 60s in design and DVD release, in the US on the Facets Video label
on the form of an existential crisis, he is able to scoring… stylised and in places absurdist, –now out of print, and of questionable quality.
regain a sense of self and to recover what the it’s a striking portrayal of a society in moral With Czechoslovak cinema slow to arrive on
regime has taken from him: his identity. As bleak meltdown’ restored home video, it may be some time before
as the film can be at times, it does succeed in Gareth Evans ‘Time Out’ The Fifth Horseman Is Fear receives the treatment
offering a strong message of hope and freedom. it deserves. But it will be worth the wait.

90 | Sight&Sound | July 2018

ADVERTISING FEATURE
FRENZY
By Ian Cooper, Auteur/Devil’s
Advocates, 96pp, paperback, illustrated,
£9.99, ISBN 9781911325369
“With excellent diversions and
delvings, this is a smart, thoroughly
entertaining reassessment of
Hitchcock’s most divisive film.
Repellent and misogynistic or a black
comic masterpiece? Like all good film
books, it makes you want to watch
it again. And again.” Stephen Volk
Frenzy (1972) was Alfred
Hitchcock’s penultimate film,
and arguably one of his most
misunderstood and neglected.
Whereas even Psycho eventually
became respectable, Frenzy
remains problematic for many. In
this Devil’s Advocate Ian Cooper
discusses the evolution of the film,
its production, reception and place
in Hitchcock’s oeuvre, as well as its
status as, the author argues, a key
film of “sleazy 70s” British cinema.
facebook.com/
DevilsAdvocatesbooks
EARTHWORKS
BOOKWORK
(hereon – hereover –
hereunder – hereafter)
By Andrew Kötting, badbloodandsibyl
– UCA, 420pp, hardback, illustrated,
£30, ISBN 9780956873378
The Earthworks Bookwork takes
Kötting’s trilogy of narrative
films – This Filthy Earth, Ivul and
the soon-to-be-released Lek and the
Dogs – and digs into them as if they
were an archaeological find.
With pages from sketchbooks,
journals, scripts, notes and
photographs from the three films
as well as contextualising essays,
the book is a must-have for anyone
interested in the thing that is
Kötting’s oeuvre. Contributors
include Gareth Evans, Sarah Lloyd,
Rebecca Palmer, Dr Terry Perks,
Julian Rowe, Philip Jenkinson,
Vicki Jung, Dr Andrew Mitchell,
Hattie Naylor, Sophia Phoca, John
Roseveare, Iain Sinclair, Xavier
Tchili and Ben Woolford.
“My brain hums with scraps of
poetry and madness.” Virginia Woolf
bit.ly/2s0rXvI
bit.ly/2x5SbCy
NANG
A 10-issue magazine
dedicated to cinema in Asia
Publisher and editor-in-chief Davide
Cazzaro, Intellect Books, info@
nangmagazine.com, two issues per volume,
Subscription price $23, ISSN 25314912
NANG is a film magazine which offers
an in-depth focus on the cinema of
Asia, structuring each issue around
a specific theme. It has a pre-planned
programme of ten issues and is
published twice a year. Each issue will
be created by different guest editors
and contributors based both within
and outside Asia. NANG appears in
print-only editions, as the publisher
believes that the beauty, tactility and
permanence of the print medium will
best amplify the voice of the visual and
textual materials which will make up
every issue. The magazine is published
in English to make it accessible to as
many readers as possible.
bit.ly/2LicWhD
STAIRWAYS TO HEAVEN
Rebuilding the British Film Industry
By Geoffrey Macnab, I.B. Tauris, paperback,
320pp, £14.99, ISBN 9781788310055
Over recent decades, the British film
industry has emerged from peril
into a new golden era. British films
have won Oscars and Cannes Palmes,
and releases like the Harry Potter
series have found enormous success.
The UK industry has seen huge
investment, both from Hollywood
studios and National Lottery funding.
This book portrays the visionaries
who helped to reshape the industry.
Through vivid first-hand accounts,
film critic Geoffrey Macnab provides
in-depth analysis of how and why
the British film industry has risen
like a phoenix from the ashes.
www.ibtauris.com
September 2012| Sight&Sound | 91
 Books

THE LIFE OF KINUYO

BOOKS

TANAKA KINUYO

Nation, Stardom and Female Subjectivity

By Irene González-López and Michael Smith,
Edinburgh University Press, 272pp,
ISBN 9781474409698
Reviewed by Jasper Sharp
If Japanese cinema appears to the distant
observer a predominantly masculine domain,
it is largely because much of the scholarship
has been framed through an auteurist emphasis
on its directors. This is arguably reflective
of the industry itself, particularly in its
golden age studio heyday, in which directors
historically wielded a far greater degree of
power in the corporate hierarchy than the stars
and, as in Hollywood, the system offered few
opportunities for women to progress in any
role other than that in front of the camera.
The ‘star as auteur’ approach in this anthology
of seven essays by a mixture of Japanese
and Western scholars therefore provides a
welcome redress to this imbalance, while
exploring issues surrounding gender and the
onscreen construction of national identity
in Japan, especially as the star in question is
Tanaka Kinuyo (1909-77). Tanaka will be most
familiar to international audiences through
her roles in the 1940s and 1950s for Ozu
Yasujiro, Kinoshita Keisuke and, most notably,
Mizoguchi Kenji. These, however, reveal
just one facet of a screen persona that shifted
over the course of a career of more than 250
appearances from the formative years of the
studio system right up to its decline in the 1970s.
Tanaka’s accomplishments as a performer are
impressive. Raised in poverty, her natural musical
talents playing the biwa saw her first appear on
stage as part of the Biwa Girls’ Operetta Troupe at
the Rakutenchi amusement park in Osaka at the
age of ten, and she was soon earning enough to
support her widowed mother and four siblings.
She made her first film appearance, aged 14,
playing a minor part in A Woman of the Genroku
Era (1924), filmed at the recently established
Shochiku’s Shimonoseki studios near the family
home. When the studio shifted production to
Kamata in the suburbs of Tokyo, Tanaka moved
eastwards and swiftly rose up the ranks as its
archetypal moga (‘modern girl’) performer in the
studio’s stock-in-trade dramas and comedies set
in a present-day of increased urbanisation and
cosmopolitanism, such as Ozu’s I Graduated,
But… (1929) and Dragnet Girl (1933), and Japan’s The sky’s the limit: Tanaka Kinuyo played a central role in Japanese cinema’s golden age
first talkie The Neighbour’s Wife and Mine
(1931). By the age of 25, she had reached the top context of the changing social and legal status (1937) and Kinuyo’s First Love (1940) even bore her
daikanbu (‘executive rank’) status for an actress. of women in Japan before, during and after name, there is another aspect to her centrality
The comprehensive introduction by the World War II. While her presence shaped the to discussions of depictions of womanhood
book’s editors and opening essays detail Tanaka’s narratives of the films she appeared in to the and women’s issues in Japanese cinema. After
life and the construction of her image in the extent that titles like Kinuyo the Lady Doctor her return from a US tour as an ambassador of

92 | Sight&Sound | July 2018

goodwill in 1949, Tanaka was encouraged by a
producer at the newly established rival studio
Shintoho to step into the director’s chair herself.
Responses to the public announcement, made
just prior to the release of her debut Love Letter in
1953, were disparaging. Many saw the move as a
publicity stunt aimed at distracting attention from
the declining post-war status of an actress now
seen as specialising in mother’s roles. Some might
find this criticism odd in light of the fact that her
most iconic appearances, as far as international
audiences are concerned, were from around this
time, in Mizoguchi’s The Life of Oharu (1952), Ugetsu
Monogatari (1953) and Sansho the Bailiff (1954).
While certain directors who had worked with
her rallied behind the decision, including Ozu,
who had co-written the script that would later
become Tanaka’s second film, The Moon Has
Risen (1955), Mizoguchi himself, with whom
she had been romantically linked, damningly
proclaimed: “Kinuyo does not have enough
brains to be a film director.” It seems to have
been enough to put paid to their working
relationship, with A Woman of Rumour (1954)
the last in their series of 15 collaborations.
Tanaka’s importance as the first woman in
Japan to sustain a directing career has resulted
Tanaka will be most familiar
through her roles for Ozu and
Mizoguchi, but these reveal just
one facet of her screen persona
in analogies with her Western contemporary
Ida Lupino. While her directing work is an
acknowledged aspect of her life in film, the six
films she made between 1953 and 1962 are not
easy to see. Even in Japan they are rarely screened
and little discussed, perhaps because the woman
that formed the focal point of so many works
by other directors remained conspicuously
absent from the screen in her own films.
The final chapters attempt to remedy this
critical lacuna, which Irene González-López
and Ashida Mayu attribute to the apparent
lack of any distinct or cohesive visual style or
ideological message and the differing genres
and historical settings they take place in.
Nevertheless, the authors do argue justifiably
that Tanaka’s early directorial offerings mark the
emergence of the first female gaze at post-war
Japan. It is doubtful that a film like Tanaka’s The
Eternal Breasts (1955), based on the poet Fumiko
Nakajo’s autobiographical account of her final
years with breast cancer, would have been made
with the same sensitivity and authenticity by
a male filmmaker. Ayako Saito’s analysis of
Tanaka’s handwritten notes on the shooting
scripts for this film and for Girl of Dark (1961),
both of whose screenplays were written by
another woman, Tanaka Sumie, puts forward a
strong case that she was certainly not reliant on
falling back on the talents of others in staging
and shaping the cinematic form of her work,
imprinting her identity on the films she directed
as much as the films she appeared in.
SPECTERS OF SLAPSTICK &
SILENT FILM COMEDIENNES
By Maggie Hennefeld, Columbia University
Press, 384pp, ISBN 9780231179478
Reviewed by Pamela Hutchinson
Long represented as a male domain, slapstick
comedy of the silent era was in fact home to
many female performers, and even directors.
Growing interest in the role of women in
early cinema has prompted the celebration
and recognition of these women, their skills
and their popularity. Maggie Hennefeld’s
rich and provocative book, Specters of
Slapstick & Silent Film Comediennes, carries us
several steps further in our understanding
of a pivotal period in cinema history.
Hennefeld takes the early and transitional
eras as her subject and investigates how actresses
performed slapstick on screen for a variety
of audiences and with a range of strategies.
Along the way, she posits a refreshing and
productive new approach to transitional
cinema, and challenges received ideas about
the development of narrative film and screen
comedy. She makes time to explore the value and
purpose of laughter, to reappraise D.W. Griffith’s
early comic work and to examine the political
impact of suffragette comedies. Hennefeld’s
opening argument is that the corporeality
of female comics shaped the development
of the fiction film: “Slapstick comediennes
are the specters of our earliest film histories.”
And it all begins with exploding domestics.
In a rash of trick-enhanced films such as
Mary Jane’s Mishap (1903) – one of the many
British films discussed – or The Kitchen Maid’s
Dream (1907), female servants combust, or
are dismembered (or both) in the kitchen.
Hennefeld argues that this is a reflection of both a
concerning real-life danger brought about by the
Victorian fashion for hooped skirts (“crinoline
conflagrations”) and the dangerous clash of the
female body with technology (the housemaid
and the domestic appliance/the actress and the
film camera), a creative collision on the path to
the formation of narrative cinema. In the popular
British film Daisy Doodad’s Dial (1914) Florence
Turner mugs away as Daisy, a housewife keen
to enter a face-pulling contest. Daisy grimaces
further when she first contracts a painful
toothache, and is then arrested for clowning
in public. Alone in her bed and tormented by
nightmares, she is haunted by superimpositions
of her own distorted features. Similarly, when
Mary Jane is forced up the chimney following
a kitchen explosion, her dismembered limbs
rain down to earth only to reassemble in
ghostly form so that she can haunt her own
gravestone (etched with the grim joke “rest in
pieces”). For Hennefeld, the destruction and
reconstruction of female bodies in this strain
of comic cinema represents the growing pains
of the medium itself: “comediennes’ wayward
bodily gestures perform the inconsistency
and incongruity of films from this period”.
Like many of the arguments in this engaging
book, it’s a compelling theory, not least because
BOOKS
Hennefeld so deftly throws the emphasis on to
strands of early cinema that are underexplored or
have been explained away elsewhere. With D.W.
Griffith, Hennefeld first rescues the director’s
slapstick efforts from the dustbin of critical
oversight, then moves to debunk the “myth
of male authorship by revealing the repressed
places of slapstick comediennes as counter-
authorial forces in his filmmaking”. Mabel
Normand, heroine of many a Griffith comedy
also appeared in the director’s melodramas
and in those films, thanks to her “corporeal
unruliness”, embodied the former of two female
types identified by the director: the voluptuary
and the spirituelle. The slapstick comedienne
takes her place in opposition to the waif, typified
for Griffith by the ethereal Lillian Gish.
The third part of the book is devoted to
“Slapstick Politics” and the meanings and
motives of films that dealt with the campaign
for female suffrage. These range from whimsical
affairs imagining a topsy-turvy world run by
women, such as When Women Win (1909),
to more vicious attacks on the campaigners
themselves, including the notorious depiction
of a male chauvinist fantasy Milling the Militants
(1913). The import of “cartoonish abuse
inflicted on suffragette bodies” is clear, but the
intended response to carnivalesque fantasies of
matriarchal authority can be less clear: should
they, asks Hennefeld, “provoke disciplinary
mockery, or revolutionary laughter”? Perhaps
neither, and both, as “nonsense” is one way to
navigate a period of social and political turmoil.
Hennefeld’s book concludes with a call
to “make visible the forgotten histories of
feminist social struggle and of women’s
cultural visibility”. Rather neatly, Specters
of Slapstick offers an engrossing and
energising example of that very work.
In the popular film ‘Daisy
Doodad’s Dial’ Florence Turner
mugs away as Daisy, a housewife
keen to enter a face-pulling contest
Daisy Doodad’s Dial (1914)
July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 93
INSTITUTIONAL
DIGITAL
SUBSCRIPTIONS
Multi-user access to a digital archive of
Sight & Sound and Monthly Film Bulletin

• A new, comprehensive research tool

• Available exclusively to institutions, universities and schools
• Explore the magazine’s historic 500+ issues
• Delivered on the Exact Editions platform

For more information visit

bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/institutional-subscriptions

09
July e 19 Issue 7 £3
.9

SIGHT &
Volum

SOUND
Sigh
t&So

BINDERS
und

E
AZIN
MAG
AL FILM
TION
RNA
INTE
THE

Keep your issues in

tip-top condition
July
2009
| Vo
lum
e 19
| Iss
ue 7

Cann
es 20
09 |
Inglo
urio
us Ba
sterd

£9.99 (UK)
s | Ke

To order:
nnet
h An

£11.50 (Europe) Call +44 (0)20 8955 7070

ger |
Stra

£12.50 (ROW)
nger

Email sightandsound@
s on
a Trai

abacusemedia.com
n | So

Price includes p&p

i Cow
boy
FEEDBACK
READERS’ LETTERS
Letters are welcome, and should be
addressed to the Editor at Sight & Sound,
BFI, 21 Stephen Street, London w1t 1ln
Email: S&S@bfi.org.uk
THE HATEFUL EIGHTIES
I was a teenage cinephile during the 1980s, and
read the superb S&S retrospective on that decade
with interest and a certain sense of déjà vu (‘The
other side of 80’s America’, S&S, June). As Nick
Pinkerton writes, “History repeats itself – well,
sort of.” The blockbuster summer of 1989 –
and Batman in particular – was a harbinger of
what was to come. 1989, however, was also the
year of sex, lies, and videotape and Do the Right
Thing. Tarantino lay just around the corner.
Nick James’s candid mention of “young
audiences with different priorities” (Editorial,
S&S, June) also felt familiar. An article in the
The Film Yearbook 1986, ‘Turning the Teen Tide’,
looked hopefully to a future where that – then
hugely influential – demographic didn’t shape
the cinema. Observing that Spielberg hadn’t had a
recent mega-hit, it suggested, “Perhaps Hollywood
is escaping from the dominance of teen taste.”
It’s easy to forget that the 80s were a difficult
time for the cinema worldwide – arguably
harder than today. It would be nice to see “a
rebirth of cinema as an artform that astonishes
people”. It could yet happen if filmmakers
embrace the present instead of looking longingly
back at an imagined past that never was.
Will Goble Rayleigh, Essex
AND ‘THE BEAST’ GOES ON
I agree with Philip Kemp’s comment in his review
of the film Beast (S&S, May) that the ending lets
it down badly (spoiler alert!). Moll and Pascal
are seen affectionately kissing just before their
car crashes – after which Moll crawls out of the
car to strangle the injured Pascal. There seems
no logic to her change of attitude. It does not
help that the sensitive-looking Johnny Flynn
was never believable as a killer.
Trevor Brown York
REFERENCE SHOTS
I recently saw two splendid BFI-supported
films and was particularly interested to
see the final shot/sequence in each.
The prolonged last shot of Andrew Haigh’s
Lean on Pete seems to be more or less a direct
tribute to François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows
(1959), minus the seaside and freeze frame; while
in its intensity, the final sequence of Michael
Pearce’s Beast bears a striking resemblance to
the confrontation between Gregory Peck and
Jennifer Jones at the end of Duel in the Sun (1946).
These were unremarked in your reviews and
interviews, so perhaps I’m just being fanciful,
but I’d like to think there was some knowing
input in at least one instance, if not both.
Michael Hudson Sheffield
SPOILING FOR A FIGHT
As a long-time Sight & Sound reader I am
continually irritated by the number of spoilers in
your reviews section. In the June issue I counted
six out of a possible 32 films. That’s nearly 20
per cent and 100 per cent of the films I hoped to
LETTER OF THE MONTH
A HIGHER CALLING
The Ken Burns and Lynn Novick interview
(Sight & Sound, May) provided a great insight
into how they do what they do. However,
I was disappointed that it at times took a
rather clichéd, predictable and snobbish
approach to the film experience. Interviewer
Eric Hynes says, “Going in the direction
of mass consumption might sound like
appealing to a common denominator. You
are doing something else, which is much
more sophisticated and takes a lot of
work.” And he asserts that the challenge
is “to get people to realise the complexity
and artistry of what they are watching”.
see that month: L’Amant double, Lean on Pete and
A Quiet Place. It really does give your readers a
dilemma regarding the films they are thinking
about going to see. One could wait until after
seeing the film to read the review, or obtain
reviews elsewhere. I’m increasingly resorting to
the latter, making me question why I keep buying
your magazine. Could you ask your reviewers to
be more sensitive about revealing plot twists or
remove them before they get to the newsstand?
Oliver Charles Surrey
FORBIDDEN COLOURS?
Luke McKernan (Primal Screen, S&S, April) and
Clyde Jeavons (Letters, S&S, May) are outraged by
the idea of colourising black-and-white archive
footage. Jeavons says the practice “suggests
an arrogant disregard for film history and
aesthetics”, and McKernan thinks that colourising
news footage “does not bring us closer to our
ancestors; it increases the distance between us”.
The arrogance is on their part, trying to impose
their academic approach to history. With due
attention to contemporary sources, colourised
actuality can give a picture of the past far more
‘real’ than black and white can ever be; far from
creating a barrier, it makes the people filmed
The problem is the all-too-easy leap to the
use of the phrase ‘common denominator’,
with its inference of lowest common
denominator, which Ken Burns picks up on.
And forgetting that the purpose of a piece
being created is to inform or entertain, not
create the ‘Gosh, aren’t I clever’ effect.
Can I suggest to readers and reviewers that
there is such a thing as a highest common
denominator. Try telling Hitchcock, Ford or
indeed Mozart and The Beatles that you can’t
be popular and good. And never tell a magician
that how he does it is the raison d’être of a trick.
Pete Watkins Collingwood, New Zealand
seem more human. Their attitude suggests that
film as a medium is more important than what
it is used to record: the tail should wag the dog.
Hugh Parkin Gloucestershire
SLEEPING BEAUTIES
I enjoyed Elena Gorfinkel’s article ‘Somnolent
screens’ (Wide Angle, S&S, May) and would like
to suggest a couple more entries to the canon of
sleepy cinema. In Rodney Graham’s film Halcion
Sleep (1994), the artist is seen knocked out by
powerful sleeping pills, dozing in satin pyjamas
in the back of a mini-van as it’s driven around his
hometown. And in Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg
(2007), the drowsy protagonist/narrator has to
“film his way out” of Winnipeg, “the sleepwalking
capital of the world”. Interestingly, in both cases,
sleep is connected to the past, and home.
François Levy Montreal
Additions and corrections
June p. 58 L’Amant double: Certificate 18, 108m 19s; p. 59 Anon:
Certificate 15, 99m 58s; p.64 The review of Edie was written by Elena
Lazic, not by Trevor Johnston as stated; p. 66 Filmworker: Certificate 15,
93m 54s; p. 69 Mansfield 66/67: Certificate 15, 85m 22s; p. 71 My Friend
Dahmer: Certificate 15, 07m 25s; p. 71 New Town Utopia: Certificate 15,
81m 8s; p. 77 The Strangers Prey at Night: Certificate 15, 85m 12s; p. 56
That Summer: Certificate PG, 80m 11s; p. 78 Truth or Dare: Certificate
15, 99m 57s; p. 80 The Young Karl Marx: France/Germany 2016; p. 81
Zama: Certificate 15, 114m 40s
July 2018 | Sight&Sound | 95
 ENDINGSÉ
WITCHFINDER GENERAL
The bloody violence that closes
Michael Reeves’s visceral horror
film is destined to haunt its
protagonists long into the future
By Adam Scovell
Orford Castle sits at the edge of the coastal
village of the same name in Suffolk and was
constructed under the orders of Henry II in
the late 1100s. The keep still stands as a fine
architectural achievement but is one also
connected with the area’s folklore. Legend has
it that the Wild Man or Merman of Orford – a
seemingly unearthly creature who was caught
by local fishermen – was imprisoned and
tortured within the castle’s walls for months
on end, without saying a word. It is with this
resonance that the shockingly brutal ending
of Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder General (1968),
filmed in the same tower, gains a disturbing
layer of mythic history. Seemingly miles away
from every other location in the film, Reeves
clearly chose the setting for the culmination
of his film with a care and attention that feels
at odds with the visceral chaos on display.
Throughout the film, the witchhunter Matthew
Hopkins (Vincent Price) has been roaming East
Anglia indulging in sadistic violence, especially
towards women, under the guise of religious duty.
His sadism led him earlier to the household of
Sara (Hilary Heath), who was raped and tortured
before her father was murdered. Her lover, the
96 | Sight&Sound | July 2018
roundhead Richard Marshall (Ian Ogilvy), seeks
revenge and gives chase to Hopkins and his
accomplices, but is captured along with Sara.
Reeves opens the final scene of his film with
a framing shot of Orford Castle, and the couple
being led up the hill towards it in silhouette
before being dragged into its dungeons. Through
the weight of its very real history, the building
seems to resist the artifice of the fiction. Perhaps
this is why Reeves selected it and why the rest
of his film generally feels rawer than most other
horror films of the 1960s, spared some of the
camp theatrics that were common to the genre
at the time. Even Price is on his best behaviour,
trying to keep hidden the fraught relationship
he had with the director throughout.
Sara’s torture begins, and Richard is forced to
watch. The test of witchcraft is impossible to pass
– screaming at being burned by a scalding metal
cross supposedly reveals occult tendencies – and
death feels like a foregone conclusion. Unlike
most of Reeves’s influences – the bright, bloody
shootouts of pre-1970s Sam Peckinpah and Don
Siegel – the action here is difficult to watch. The
blood might have the lurid, gloopy unreal quality
of poster-paint, but the characters’ reactions
make it unbearable. The pain here lingers and the
Unlike most of Reeves’s influences
– the bright, bloody shootouts of
pre-1970s Peckinpah and Siegel –
the action here is difficult to watch
cries echo around the walls as if the building was
designed to amplify the sounds. The characters
are not simply in pain but simultaneously
confronted by their own reaction to the torture.
It could be said that because the couple
are ultimately saved, the ending is not
entirely pessimistic. But Reeves knows that
violence carries reverberations, that the
pain will continue after they have escaped;
scarred for life with unseen wounds.
In the final scenes Richard’s men arrive and
fight their way down to the dungeon, providing
a distraction that allows him to escape. He sets
upon Hopkins in a frenzy with an axe, but one of
the soldiers puts the witchfinder out of his misery
with a flintlock pistol, depriving Richard of his
revenge. While Hopkins is spared his final agony,
the couple’s anguish will continue. Over the sorry
scene, Sara screams more and more. Reeves shows
the castle’s steps and rooms again as the cries
reverberate, even over the freeze-frame shot and
the final credits with their pleasant ‘Greensleeves’-
style music by Paul Ferris. The space knows pain.
There are undercurrents here connecting
folklore and history to this final scene, the
Merman’s ordeal echoing through the years.
Hopkins may be dead but the violence he
unleashed lingers like a disease, spreading
from person to person. The true horror of the
scene is not the narrow escape for our heroes
or even the brutal violence – so brutal that
the BBFC cut the scene savagely – but in the
realisation of what the constant circularity
of violence can do to us all in the end.
 ‘CAPTURES THE NIHILISM OF
PUNK LIKE NOTHING ELSE’
The Guardian

The 40th anniversary edition of

Derek Jarman's 1978 cult classic,
newly remastered in 2K from the
original camera negatives.

Also available Jarman Volume One

1972-1986 box set

ORDER FROM
BFI MEMBERS ENJOY 15% OFF

THE CHILDREN’S
HOUR
Well overdue UK Blu-Ray release
for this rarely seen adaptation of
Lillian Hellman’s groundbreaking
and controversial play

Starring
Audrey Hepburn and Shirley Maclaine

ORDER FROM
BFI MEMBERS ENJOY 15% OFF
© 2018 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved.
 2 5 TH A N N I V E R S A R Y R E L E A S E

Holly HUNTER Harvey KEITEL Sam NEILL Anna PAQUIN

“MAGNIFICENT” “EXTRAORDINARY”
THE INDEPENDENT FINANCIAL TIMES

“ B E A U T I F U L” “ S E N S AT I O N A L”
D A I LY T E L E G R A P H E V E N I N G S TA N D A R D

A film by Jane CAMPION

RETURNING TO CINEMAS JUNE 15

O N D V D A N D B L U - R AY J U LY 1 6
Special Anniversary edition including original soundtrack and booklet

/StudiocanalUK #ThePiano