Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 98: April/May 2023 i Little White Lies

Released 28 APRIL ‘Polite society’ is a turn of phrase that came to prominence in the late 1700s, epitomising haughty upper-class judgement that deemed certain behaviour to be unbecoming. As the title of Nida Manzoor’s completely delightful debut feature, the writer/director co-opts this atmosphere of Regency-era snobbery to represent modern Pakistani society as governed by an unofficial council of disapproving “aunties” – an adversary that assumes many guises for her action heroine to bring down. “When I’m older, I’m going to be a stuntwoman.” Karate-chopping her way onto a big screen near you is the irrepressible protagonist of Polite Society, who likes to remind anyone who will listen about her destiny, regardless of their interest or, in the case of her teachers and parents, lack of enthusiasm. Ria Khan (Priya Kansara)…

Released 14 APRIL To the extent that it’s even possible for a film about Islamic extremism and corruption within the Muslim faith to play it safe, Tarik Saleh errs on the side of caution in Cairo Conspiracy. The stilled cinematography favouring pensive, long takes brings a dignified air to what could’ve been a sordid potboiler plot, rich in intrigue and deception appropriate for a film revolving around what happens behind closed doors. That’s exactly how a private board of elders elects a new Grand Imam, the highest authority in the Sunni sect, at the world-leading al-Azhar University in Cairo. On one end of an ideological spectrum, there’s Sheikh Durani (Ramzi Choukair), a hardline conservative who may be mentoring a small cell of student terrorists-to-be. On the other, there’s an ageing, blind…

Released 28 APRIL “I ’m not a girl, I’m a woman,” are the stabbing words spoken by Dalva (Zelda Samson), a 12-year-old who wears heavy makeup, scrapes her hair into a bun and dresses in middle-aged women’s clothes. The film opens with officers taking Dalva’s father Jacques (Jean-Louis Coulloc’h) away. The camera resists lingering on Jacques, clutching onto Dalva’s gaze and capturing every flinch and tear of pain. Enraged and confused as to why she’s been ripped away from her father and placed into a temporary care home, Dalva initially refuses to comply with her new social worker Jayden (Alexis Maneti). She demands to be reunited with her father, who she only refers to by his first name, and the film unpacks the complexity of controlling relationships through Dalva’s eventual interactions with…

Released APRIL 21 ANTICIPATION. Strong festival hype on this one. Everyone who sees it seems to love it. 4 ENJOYMENT. Avoids moralising in favour of telling a compelling, vital and provocative story. 4 IN RETROSPECT. A taut ecological thriller with a stellar young cast. Now where’s that dynamite… 4 In an appearance on US talk show The View in February 2023, teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg commented, “If we look through history [at] people who were advocating for social justice, if they had only used the legal methods, then we wouldn’t be where we are today.” She was reacting to her recent arrest at a German protest against a coal mine planning to expand; two weeks later she was detained by Norwegian police for action against a wind farm being built…

Cambodian-French filmmaker Davy Chou creates an intimate, unpredictable character study in Return to Seoul, which documents a young woman’s journey to find her biological family in South Korea. Ji-Min Park gives an excellent performance as the headstrong and defiant Freddie – a character that’s close to Chou’s heart. He speaks to us about how the truth is stranger than fiction. “The story of Return to Seoul comes from a friend of mine, and if not for what we experienced together in 2011, there would not be a film. I was 28 at the time and my very first feature length documentary, Golden Slumbers, was having its world premiere at a film festival in Korea. I was super excited to go to Korea, and then I received a phone call from…

Blu-ray/DVD Released 17 APRIL David Cronenberg and William S Burroughs are a match made in heaven. Both are purveyors of grossness and grotesquery who also share an attraction to the most surreal and transgressive fringes of humanity: life’s most unthinkable and unimaginable things. So if anyone could successfully adapt a novel as unorthodox as Burroughs’ 1956 novel ‘Naked Lunch’, then Cronenberg it would be. A story about a junkie who becomes an unwilling secret agent, it takes the form of a series of vignettes designed to be read in any order, which are not intended to lead anywhere or make narrative sense. Cronenberg’s dryly comic adaptation is interesting – a remix that weaves in biographical detail about its author. William Lee (Peter Weller), the junkie-writer protagonist, struggles against a beetle-slash-typewriter that appears…

Blu-ray/DVD Released APRIL An underseen film recently granted a global second life following a new restoration, Govindan Aravindan’s ensemble portrait Thamp sees one striking image follow another as it showcases the practices, performances and daily life of a travelling circus over the length of a single stop in Kerala, from arrival to packdown. From a memorable opening that follows the troupe’s arrival in a long procession of overstuffed vehicles and their collective efforts to put up the main tent – a performance as well executed as any of the high-wire acts that follow – the film takes a systematic approach to detailing the ways a circus functions as well as its various symbiotic relationships, showing everything in fascinating detail and with consistently creative cinematography and framing. Aravindan cuts back and forth between…

Kicking off the first iteration of this column on queer cinema – the title of which is a reference to the gold star-adorned, meticulously detailed diary that Judi Dench’s character keeps in Richard Eyre’s unhinged Notes on a Scandal – with a little dispatch of noteworthy queer films from the 2023 Berlin Film Festival. The Berlinale may not hold a candle to big sharks like Cannes and Venice in terms of anticipated world premieres and red carpet glamour, but it does reign supreme as a showcase for boundary-pushing queer filmmaking. Its Panorama sidebar boasts an “explicitly queer, explicitly feminist, explicitly political” selection focusing on unconventional films that occupy a space close to the social and political zeitgeist. The festival’s own Teddy Award, inaugurated in 1987, is widely seen as one…

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Released 24 MARCH To say he’s 6’4 with perfect bone structure and the physique of a Rodin statue, Alexander Skarsgård plays a loser exceptionally well. We’ve seen glimpses of this talent in The Kingdom Exodus and The Diary of a Teenage Girl, but it’s more common to see him typify male peak performance than it is for a filmmaker to utilise his uncanny ability to subvert stereotypes and amp up the pathos. Brandon Cronenberg is perhaps like his father in that regard, who has turned handsome devils including James Spader and Viggo Mortensen into snarling strangelings. It’s difficult to avoid comparing Sr. and Jr. full-stop, given that they both make full-tilt body horror that plums the depths of human depravity. Yet where David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future was a darkly…

Released 24 MARCH This auspicious and enigmatic second feature from French filmmaker Léa Mysius unfurls like an ethereal remix of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining in its fantasy-flecked exploration of a pre-teen girl attempting to comprehend the romantic affiliations of her parents. It’s perhaps not as cutand-dried as that description makes it sound, and there are fewer explosions of violence. Passion, yes; violence, no. The Five Devils (a title referring – curiously – to a leisure centre in the film) instead employs ellipses, flashbacks and time switches as mechanisms to forge missing pieces from a narrative puzzle which is, from the outset, purposefully misshapen. Vicky (Sally Dramé) is the latch-key, biracial daughter of Adèle Exarchopoulos’ dour aquatic aerobics instructor Joanne and emotionally distant fire-fighter Jimmy (Moustapha Mbengue). Both parents appear to be…

Released 31 MARCH The bizarre work that les flics do is described by supporting character Marceau (Bouli Lanners) as “Good versus evil, with a wonky printer”. This could be the tagline of Dominik Moll’s The Night of the 12th, adapted from the novel ‘18.3: Une année à la PJ’ by Paula Guéna, which depicts the attempts of a crime investigation squad to solve a horrific murder case and the mundane dysfunctions that get in their way. The printer doesn’t work, they don’t have enough budget, plus the team’s own ghosts and prejudices cloud their vision. After the brutal murder of Clara Royer, monosyllabic police chief Yohan Vivès’ (Bastien Bouillon) and his squad aim to piece together the evidence and find the killer. Multiple suspects are unearthed, and systematic misogyny means that…

Released 24 MARCH The Beasts opens with Xan Anta (Luis Zahera) and his younger brother Lorenzo (Diego Anido) wrestling to get control of a wild horse. The scene, for all its muscular violence, is shot in close-up, which makes the struggle look peculiarly intimate, with the men’s grip on the beast’s neck a tough yet also tender embrace. This opening will later find its mirror when we the Anta brothers treat a human character similarly. Indeed, Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s feature is structured around symmetries and recurrences, highlighting not just the nuanced comparisons and contrasts in the story (co-written with Isabel Peña), but also the cycles of the seasons and rhymes of nature in this remote part of Galicia. Slow-witted (from a childhood accident with a horse), cruel Lorenzo and his even-meaner brother…

Released 14 APRIL The spectre of the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami hangs over Japanese cinema, particularly in the films of beloved anime director Makoto Shinkai. He cited the events as an inspiration for 2016’s time-switching romance Your Name, and the topic is broached in the climate-based disaster imagery of 2019 follow-up, Weathering with You. Shinkai’s new work, Suzume, is perhaps the most explicit film to tackle a topic that clearly fascinates them deeply, offering a retort to the notion of the human spirit breaking through to help another in tragedy. Suzume wastes no time introducing a road-trip across Japan as high-school student named Suzume meets the mysterious Sota on his way to seal a magical door in an abandoned city in order to prevent miasma seeping out and causing disaster-level earthquakes.…

Released 31 MARCH ANTICIPATION. A new film by The Fits’ Anna Rose Holmer, codirected by Saela Davis Go on then… 4 ENJOYMENT. Watson’s (still) a national treasure, and Mescal’s no slouch either. 3 IN RETROSPECT. All a bit mid and inconsequential in the end. Looks great though. 3 A black sheep boy returns to the family nest and causes all manner of emotional ballyhoo in Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer’s atmospheric psychodrama, God’s Creatures, the welcome if low-key follow-up to Homer’s feisty 2015 debut, The Fits. Said son, Brian, is played by man-of-the-moment and 2023 awards season darling, Paul Mescal, who slinks into the role of a dirty-rotten oyster farmer with a sideline in illegal salmon poaching, among other nefarious bits involving local songbird Sarah, played by Aisling Franciosi. While we’ve…

Released 12 MAY ANTICIPATION. It does sound like it could almost be real, which lends this speculative drama genuine intrigue. 4 ENJOYMENT. Involving and understated, though it tails off towards the end. 3 IN RETROSPECT. A film of haunting unease, but not perhaps the complete package. 3 As ’70s Hollywood sci-fi spectaculars Soylent Green and Logan’s Run suggested, the very idea that a society might deal with its population challenges by eliminating the elderly could only really be dramatically workable in a far-off future dystopia. Meanwhile in the real world, as of 2023, we find the Japanese government publicly admitting it’s facing a looming economic crisis, given the huge percentage of old people living longer and needing care, and the smaller portion of taxpayers picking up the tab for it all.…

Released 7 APRIL One of the questions that journalists tend to ask directors in interviews is, “How close is the film you made to the one in your head before you made it?” ​Filipino filmmaker Martika Ramirez Escobar’s delicious meta-screwball comedy Leonor Will Never Die offers a zany reverse extrapolation of that question by having an ageing, retired maker of cheapjack genre films dream the remainder of an unfinished script while in a comatose state. Sheila Francisco’s Leonor lives hand-to-mouth with her failson Rudie (Bong Cabrera) and the ghost of her beloved older son Ronwaldo (Rocky Salumbides), whom she has immortalised as a vest-and-headband action hero and funk-dance prodigy in her movies. This counterintuitive cine-fantasy paints cinema as a form of easy escapism that bridges the divide between life and death:…

Released 31 MARCH ANTICIPATION. Pettengill’s past work shows her prowess for using archives to illuminate lesser known stories. 4 ENJOYMENT. Part archival doc, part essay film, this is a lyrical portrait of how US history bleeds into the present. 4 IN RETROSPECT. A defiant critique of how political narratives are crafted to hurt communities. 4 In the 1960s, in plywood model towns reminiscent of children’s play sets, American soldiers practised riot control. These “riotsvilles” replicated the average Main Street in an American town, complete with painted shop fronts and glass windows – there’s the appliance store next to the pawn shop, Joe’s Place on the corner. As civil resistance movements and anti-police demonstrations took hold of some of the country’s major cities over the decade, these forces rehearsed their unrestrained methods…

Blu-ray/DVD Released 20 MARCH “Aman should never disturb a woman while she is dressing,” says Paul Held (Frank Morgan) in James Whale’s pre-code murder mystery The Kiss Before the Mirror after doing exactly that and being alarmed by what he finds. A story from the subgenre of men who decide to kill their wives, it is a work that is very much reflective of the interwar era in which was made, not only justifying but virtually endorsing the decisions the dastardly male protagonists take by suggesting that adultery, whether suspected or actual, is a crime worthy of death. The film’s setup, which was adapted by Ladislas Fodor from his own stage play, sees Held, an attorney, defend his friend Walter Bernsdorf (Paul Lukas) against the charge of murdering his wife, an act…

Blu-ray/DVD Released 17 APRIL “Never had nothing, don’t have nothing, never will have nothing,” says Barbara Loden in Wanda, evoking the forlorn, beaten, but never quite defeated attitude the titular character carries with her as she trudges through the film’s desolate, drearily realistic representation of contemporary Pennsylvania. Having walked out on her husband and kids, Wanda is demoralised and rootless, stepping out into the unknown away from a life that was never really her own. After leaving one man, she latches herself onto several others, each of whom ignore her, assault her, or otherwise treat her awfully, ultimately staying longest with a bank robber on the run played by Michael Higgins. Even if most of the film surrounds their attempted getaway, Loden’s low-level tabloid crime anti-narrative is nothing like Bonnie and Clyde…

Suleman Aqeel Khilji (b.1985.Quetta) is a Visual artist from Pakistan studying at the Royal Academy of Art London. He lives and works between Lahore and London. Dan Evans is an illustrator from London. He works with bright bold colours and loves using the toys and cartoons of his childhood for inspiration. ShinYeon Moon is a New York-based illustrator, educator and food-lover who enjoys drawing intricate linework and creating playful character designs. Vidhya Nagarajan is an illustrator and letterer. She specialises in bright and dense line-based drawings. Her work has appeared in magazines, books, newspapers, packaging and beyond. Stéphanie Sergeant is a French illustrator/animator living and working in Poland. She mostly works with watercolour and animates in 2D. She likes spaghetti and the dark, long process of animation. Shrujana N Shridhar is…

Released 17 MARCH ANTICIPATION. The first film in this proposed trilogy, X, kinda sucked ass. 2 ENJOYMENT. The focus on Mia Goth makes this one cook. Her performance is really something. 4 IN RETROSPECT. One to chalk up to that small but delightful sub-genre of retro slasher weepies. 4 During the twilight era of her screen career, Hollywood grande dame Joan Crawford found herself starring in a run of delicious low-rent horror movies, most notable of which were William Castle’s Straight-Jacket from 1964 and Jim O’Connolly Berserk! from 1967. Gone were the airs, graces and sense of walk-between-the-raindrops untouchability that came with the plush melodramas from which she made her name, and in their place came axes, blood and lots and lots of anguished yelling. And it worked surprisingly well! Ti…

Released 26 MAY Sometimes critics assume the position of armchair film distributors, especially when attending festivals. I am occasionally guilty of such posturing, as I could’ve bet my kid’s college fund that Éric Gravel’s propulsive Parisian thriller about a single mother trying to secure some childcare so she can attend a job interview would’ve been snapped up quick sharp via a vicious bidding war following its premiere at the 2021 Venice Film Festival. Its two awards – for direction, and Laure Calamy’s astonishing central performance – seemed to affirm my suspicions. But then… bupkis, until this modest roll-out 18 months later in the post award season lull. Maybe I’m missing something key that marks this as a distribution no-no, but it’s hard not to see the kinetic attraction of its moving…

Released 12 MAY ANTICIPATION. Making the history of feminist film theory more accessible can only be a good thing… 3 ENJOYMENT. Menkes’ accusations against other women directors border on misogyny. 2 IN RETROSPECT. The power dynamics of cinema spectatorship are better articulated by Laura Mulvey. 2 At the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, filmmaker Nina Menkes gave a presentation entitled, ‘Sex and Power, The Visual Language of Oppression’. It’s a bold and dramatic title, as is that of the documentary she’s made based on that talk, Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power. These words, along with the intense dread of Sharon Farber’s score, give the air of an industry-wide conspiracy about to be uncovered. No such pomp and circumstance was given to Laura Mulvey when she published her 1975…

Released 21 APRIL ANTICIPATION. What will mad Albert Serra come up with next, and how punsishing will it be for audiences? 4 ENJOYMENT. As close as we’re ever going to get to a straight thriller from this outlandish maverick. 4 IN RETROSPECT. One to see on the biggest screen possible. 4 All great filmmakers end up making their version of JosephConrad’s ‘HeartofDarkness’, andthisisSpanish eccentric Albert Serra’s breathtaking and languorous take on the material. A longtime prowler of the margins and festival sidebars, Serra’s slow, concept-driven and historically-entrenched cinema is build to provide a measure of caution to the uninitiated. His non-narrative previous film, Liberté, for instance, ran at close to three hours and captured the fluid-based realties of an 18th century aristocratic woodland orgy, almost in real time. (The film rules…

Released 5 MAY A here is a lot about intimacy, sacrifice and love to be found in the delicate, subtle nuances of Maryam Touzani’s deeply affecting second feature. Halim (Saleh Bakri) is a maalem, an expert tailor who runs a traditional caftan shop in one of Morocco’s oldest medinas alongside his wife of 25 years, Mina (Lubna Azabal). While Halim is the delicate artisan whose dying craft requires immense precision, Mina is the more stern, business-savvy of the pair, always intent on letting impatient clients know that their garments require so much time because her husband is “not a machine”. In fact, he refuses to use a sewing machine altogether, his craft solely relying on the hand-sewn tradition of textile work passed down to him by his father. Each intricate, handcrafted…

Released 5 MAY There is a romanticism around wanderlust which doesn’t always make sense. The idea of aimlessly travelling and taking in foreign cultures, customs and flavours is nice in theory, but what if you lose yourself in the process? Or started this whole thing hoping to find a way out, or back into yourself, but with no luck? Freddie (Park Ji-Min) hasn’t been lucky for a while. The spiky young French woman of Korean herritage at the heart of Davy Chou’s dynamic Return to Seoul takes two weeks off work to go to South Korea for the first time, quickly told her face is like a “longtime Korean” and her birth name, Yeon-hee, means “docile and joyful”. Nothing makes sense, but she has to live with it after the holiday…

Released 31 MARCH Newlyweds Suze (Andrea Riseborough) and Arthur (Harry Melling) are an ostensibly straight, beatnik couple living in a bizarre, fever dream version of a 1950s Lower East Side. The night that they witness the murder of a man by a queer-coded, leather-clad greaser gang outside their apartment building, Arthur is struck with lust, and Suze, with gender envy. Their confounding queer awakening unfolds in an outlandish greaser tale of love and violence that confronts the unspoken battle between gender and expression in West Side Story by means of inversion. Steeped in the candy-coloured iconography of old Hollywood musicals, the film wears all of its many, many cinematic and theatrical influences proudly and manages to never come across as derivative. Yet not everything works in Kramer’s neon-lit, sleazy, narratively minimal…

Released 28 APRIL ANTICIPATION. It won the Coup de Coeur Prize in the Un Certain Regard strand at Cannes in 2022. 3 ENJOYMENT. A film that fires on all cylinders… 4 IN RETROSPECT. …even if it does eventually run out of gas. 3 There are so many different modes of survival depending on all matter of circumstances including class, race, sexual orientation and gender. In Lola Quivoron’s daring debut feature, co-written with her life partner and actress Antonia Buresi, the main character relies on working outside a system full of structural barriers to persist. It plays out as a visceral crime action thriller, a detailed portrait of a subculture and a probing character study of a young French-Guadeloupian woman who enters the male-dominated world of cross-bitume (moto cross biking) in France.…

Blu-ray/DVD Released 27 MARCH At the start of Juliet Bashore’s pseudo-documentary Kamikaze Hearts, porn actor Sharon Mitchell is seen in close-up, the wind ruffling her hair as she speeds down a freeway in an open-top car. In this moment it’s clear she was born to be a star, but as the film makes equally apparent, stardom comes at a significant cost. Everything that Mitchell does in the film that follows is a performance of some kind, regardless of whether or not she is on set. Whether at home with her partner, Tina “Tigr” Mennett, another porn performer with whom Bashore co-scripted the film, or giving Bashore’s camera a tour around a porno wrap-party, the desperately charismatic Mitchell always wears a protective mask of some kind. Bashore’s inventive film plays with Mitchell’s image,…

Blu-ray/DVD Released 17 APRIL “He’s a rookie, it’s his first murder,” says a veteran detective about a new recruit heard puking off-screen after witnessing the aftermath of the shockingly gory murder. This sets the action of Bo Widerberg’s The Man on the Roof into motion. A thriller that feels both in tune with its mid-’70s moment and ahead of its time, it is a film of two halves: first as a slow and verbose procedural of the sort that might come under the bannder of “scandi-noir”; then an action-packed thriller when the man of the title makes his way onto the roof. It turns out the murdered man was a police officer, but the culprit and motive is unknown. When Detective Martin Beck (Carl-Gustaf Lindstedt) and his colleagues look into the case,…