Mary Magdalene’s story hasn’t suddenly become the second greatest ever told, despite its radical expansion here. Garth Davis’s follow-up to Lion is, though, a profoundly thoughtful and convincing telling of the Christian main event.
film reviews
Saskia Baron
One of the oldest pleasures of cinema is the opportunity it gives us to look at beautiful people in beautiful places, possibly having beautiful sex. Often audiences get exactly what they came for but sometimes it isn’t exactly straightforward. Take The Square, the Oscar-nominated film from Swedish director Ruben Östlund that won the Palme d'Or at Cannes last year. Its cast includes Danish heart-throb Claes Bang (tipped as a potential James Bond), handsome Dominic West (of Wire fame) and lovely Elizabeth Moss (freed from her Handmaid’s Tale wimple). The setting is Stockholm’s fashionable art world so there’s a visual feast of ultra-cool art gallery interiors, gilded halls, luxury apartments, modernist offices and a Tesla slicing through streets familiar from all those Scandi noir series.
This isn’t a thriller, although it is certainly filled with jeopardy, and it isn’t a romance, although it has one of the most startling sex scenes I’ve seen since Toni Erdmann. Instead The Square is a post-modern farce – a string of terrible mishaps befalls museum director Christian (Claes Bang, pictured below) as he tries to hype a new exhibit and we watch his life spiral from cool to chaos. It’s also a satire, gleefully poking fun at the pretensions of the art world and liberal Swedes’ earnest efforts to promote a dialogue on immigration and racism.
But most of all, The Square is brilliantly acted and very stylish, if at times just a little bit too pleased with how clever it is. To describe the plot in any detail would be to spoil the film’s unfolding pleasures; suffice to say there is a theft, inept revenge, social and professional humiliation, and an actor impersonating an ape who should make Andy Serkis a tad jealous.
Östlund is following up his disquieting hit Force Majeure and his budget has increased exponentially. For the first time he’s working with actors famous outside Scandinavia. But his directing style hasn’t changed – gruelling improvisations and multiple takes until the performance is just as he wants. Director of photography Frederik Wenzel's elegant shots are held at almost uncomfortable length; the audience is given plenty of time to observe closely each character as their thoughts and feelings flicker in front of our eyes.
There’s much clever framing too, marginal figures edging into our vision. The spaces Christian navigates are both claustrophobic and hallucinatory. Confusing, faintly disturbing peripheral sounds come from off-screen with no explanatory cut-aways to their source. Dialogue is kept naturalistic and doesn't get in the way of the actors – Aaron Sorkin does not haunt this script.
The noodling a cappella score is a touch irritating in its over-signalling of wit and the child actors lack credibility, but The Square finds Östlund at the top of his game. It should provide the most fun to be had in an art movie this month if not an art gallery (installation pictured above). And Claes Bang's English accent, a homage to David Bowie, is startlingly good. This Danish actor would have no problem squaring up to Bond.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Square
Adam Sweeting
Mild controversy hovers over the new film by Alex Garland, the novelist-turned-screenwriter-turned-director. Garland’s 2015 directing debut, Ex Machina, was a slow-burning hit which found favour with critics and film festival juries.
Owen Richards
Arnaud Despelchin’s My Golden Days is a strange beast; it is both a sequel and prequel to the gloriously titled 1996 film My Sex Life…or How I Got into an Argument. Yet it tells its own story in the life of Paul Dédalus (Mathieu Amalric).
Tom Birchenough
The subtitle of Franz Osten’s 1928 film, A Romance of India, says it all: this Indian silent film is a tremendous watch, a revelation of screen energy and visual delight. An epic love story-cum-weepie with lashings of action and intrigue thrown in, it was an Indian-British-German coproduction (a curious strand of cinema history in itself) that was entirely filmed in India, and glories in having some of the country’s architectural wonders for locations: the Taj Mahal, central to the story, features primus inter pares.
German director Osten – he worked in India for close on two decades, making some of the classic films of the 1920s and 1930s, but never learnt an Indian language – also brings huge scale to its desert exteriors and crowd scenes, with hordes of camels, and a crucial elephant moment. It provided precedent for the Hindi post-war film industry as a whole, but there’s genuine feeling in the more intimate moments, as well as moments of realism that look forward even to the likes of Satyajit Ray’s classic Apu trilogy .
It all looks more than handsome in this BFI National Archive 4K restoration (there’s a short extra about that process), and the film’s new score from Anoushka Shankar is a treat. It must have been wonderful on the big screen with live ensemble when premiered as the LFF 2017 Archive Gala, but the combination of image and musical accompaniment certainly impresses from disc. Shankar has spoken of combining elements from the film’s 17th century historical setting, its 1920s production era and the present day, with the tastes of the latter dominating. As well as her own sitar – there are transcendent moments that sound so vibrantly alive, and gloriously lyric accompaniment for love scenes – she orchestrates for Indian bamboo flute and percussion elements, amplified at key moments by violin, cello, clarinet and keyboards.
An early intertitle, “Love, Sorrow - and Fame Immortal”, gives a hint of the action. British scriptwriter WA Burton worked from a treatment of Niranjan Pal’s play about Mumtaz Mahal, consort of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, who commemorated her with Agra's monument to undying love (the Taj Mahal, pictured above). It’s a very free treatment of her life story, beginning with a childhood ambush that sees her brought up by a peasant family, her nobility unsuspected; they name her Selima and treat her as a sister to their son, Shiraz (the film’s producer Himansu Rai plays that role in adulthood, opposite the enchanting Enakshi Rama Rau). Kidnapped by slavers, she arrives in the Emperor’s harem, where the Shah woos her. But Shiraz will always love her: he follows her to the palace, where emotions run freely. His suffering is finally redeemed when, already blind, he enshrines her memory in the Taj Mahal: “not hands but the warmth of a heart built this which stands like a dream.”
The accompanying booklet essays throw fascinating light on the unusual circumstances behind the film, and the context of Indian film-making in the closing decades of the British Raj. Films were aimed simultaneously at the local and international markets (Shiraz was a hit in Europe, but not in the US). Documentary and propaganda was never far away, illustrated by two extras here: Temples of India is a 1938 10-minute travelogue, shot in colour by none other than Jack Cardiff. The 1944 12-minute Musical Instruments of India was a public information film to promote Indian arts and culture, interesting because it didn’t follow more standard wartime lines to emphasise instead the wider cultural achievements of the soon-to-be-independent nation.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Shiraz
Jasper Rees
In recent months Woody Allen has been publicly disavowed by a conga line of major film stars. The latest who seems to have expressed regret for working with him – if not by name – is Kate Winslet. She stars in his latest film, and may also feel slight regret for artistic reasons.
Adam Sweeting
The gripping paradox of Lynne Ramsay’s terse, brutal thriller is suggested in its title. Adapted from Jonathan Ames's novella, it’s a film distinguished by the force of its images and the compression of its narrative, and while its impact leaves you dazed, you can’t quite believe that what you’ve just seen ever happened.
David Kettle
There’s a Big Reveal that comes right at the end of this new indie movie from first-time writer/producer/directors Scott Elliott and Sid Sadowskyj (whose names, in retrospect, should have given the game away right from the start). For (complete spoiler alert!) this is Elliott and Sadowskyj’s own story, dramatised and put up on the big screen, with two young newcomers playing them as the movie’s leads. The film escorts us through their journey from York sixth-formers to successful young entrepreneurs, guided by a list of dreams they plan to pursue. One of which is – you guessed it – to make a movie. Scott and Sid is that very movie.
You might be starting to imagine some kind of postmodern, self-referential, Charlie Kaufman-esque conceptual mindbender. Don’t bother. Scott and Sid feels more like a simple vanity project. It might aim to inspire young people to follow their dreams, and to imagine what they can achieve with self-belief. But with its meandering structure, its sometimes questionable morals and its often implausible plotting, it falls far short of those noble intentions. By the end of its draining 100 minutes, it feels instead like little more than a self-indulgent celebration of Elliott and Sadowskyj’s own wheeler-dealing.
It can't have been easy being directed by the two guys you're supposed to be playing
Implausible, however, is a tricky word to use in this particular context. There’s plenty that’s implausible about a head teacher showing a miscreant pupil his pay cheque, or gangsters picking on a nerdy schoolboy to flog illegal alcohol, or even launching a successful print magazine business today. No doubt all these things did actually happen in Elliott and Sadowskyj’s real lives, but unexplained and unexamined in the context of the movie, they simply fail to convince.
But autobiography aside, Scott and Sid even feels unconvincing as a straightforward drama. Tom Blyth and Richard Mason give creditable if somewhat flat performances as the pair, but they never seem entirely sure about how far they should go with their characterisation. But to give them credit, it can't have been easy being directed by the two guys you're supposed to be playing. Their school is a place that crushes dreams, and their brief taste of university lasts just a few frames. Instead, they get by on some miraculously successful business ventures – taking advantage along the way of the stupidity of a couple of local gangsters, and also inadvertantly supplying a garage’s worth of free booze to Sid’s long-term alcoholic mother.
There’s potential here – for an exploration of male friendship, or of the hard graft needed for success in any field, or of resilience and adaptability. But none of these themes gets much of a look-in. Watching Scott and Sid is an extremely bizarre (possibly uniquely bizarre) experience, like someone talking you through their Twitter feed of how great their life is, all the fantastic things they’ve achieved, all the obstacles they’ve overcome. In their own self-curated reality, of course. What Scott and Sid’s leads achieve, however, is rarely shown to benefit anyone but themselves. Perhaps that’s the point. In fulfilling their ambition to create a movie, and then making it about their own lives, Elliott and Sadowskyj have pretty much closed their own self-absorbed circle.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Scott and Sid
Jasper Rees
Hedy Lamarr really ought to be the poster girl for the Time's Up movement. “Any girl can look glamorous," she once said. "All she has to do is stand still and look stupid.” She was the model for Catwoman and Disney's Snow White. It's less well known that she patented an invention which led to the creation of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. If she were alive now, she might be sitting on a £30 billion dollar fortune.
Saskia Baron
The woman of the title is not the first person we meet on screen; we meet her lover, a 57-year-old silver fox Orlando (Francisco Reyes). He’s getting a massage in a sauna and then returning to his office where he owns a printing company. We meet him again later. He’s looking for someone, a beautiful merengue singer performing in a fancy hotel. Marina (Daniela Vega, pictured below with Reyes) sings "Your love is yesterday’s newspaper" and they lock eyes.
Marina has been Orlando’s lover for a year, they share his flat, she adores his dog Diabla. They enjoy a romantic birthday dinner in a Chinese restaurant. But Orlando has an ex-wife, a seven-year-old daughter and an adult son by a previous marriage. And Marina is not only 30 years Orlando's junior, but a young trans woman. She may long to be his life partner and a singer, but she is not destined for a long romance with Orlando.
Chilean writer-director Sebastián Lelio made the wonderful Gloria in 2013 and has deservedly won a 2017 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nomination for A Fantastic Woman. This is an extraordinarily moving romantic drama with shades of Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Marina finds herself accused of murder, humiliated, evicted, excluded, bullied and deprived of the right to mourn.
Through it all, the camera holds the actor Daniela Vega centre frame. We watch Vega’s beautiful, powerful face and her defiant body, scorned by a transphobic culture. Predominantly realist in style and set in the ultra-modern city of Santiago, there are several distressing scenes where Marina is brutally abused and yet stays strong. But these scenes are countered by Lelio’s more visionary elliptical sequences. Marina is framed over and over again in mirrors and the director's brief sequences of camp fantasy and ghostly sightings of Orlando recall Jean Cocteau at his finest. We see Marina walk in a trance through a series of underground, labyrinthine corridors, searching for her Orpheus.
As well as Chilean torch songs, the soundtrack pays homage to Bernard Herrmann and Cat Stevens while ruthlessly deploying Carole King’s ballad (You Make Me Feel Like A) Natural Woman and a superb Handel aria. It’s an audacious mixture of musical genres which matches perfectly the film’s daring subject matter and its refusal to conform to any one stylistic model. If Daniela Vega can be both a man and a woman, then Lelio can make a film that crosses genres and defies conventions too. A Fantastic Woman is magnificent in every way.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for A Fantastic Woman