You Were Never Really Here

Saw this as a birthday treat at the Luna (free double pass with the Privilege Card) followed by a sub-par ramen. That's if you're in the camp that thinks 'sub-par' is a bad thing. To be fair, it may be only golfers that see 'sub-par' as a positive. But I digress. You Were Never Really Here (no shit, I just mis-typed Gere as the last word in the title and there's a whole new film!). More digression. I'll count to 39 or something.

So, Lynne Ramsey's fourth film after Ratcatcher, Morven Callar and We Need to Talk About Kevin certainly continues the trend of gritty realism but with a neat dichotomy. See, I reckon Joaquin Phoenix's character, Joe, would fit uncomfortably into a Marvel or DC film. He's a kind of chav Avenger, with none of the grandeur or witticisms but all of the emotion. Hawkeye with a hammer instead of a bow. And the film rides on Phoenix's bulky, bruised back. He's outstanding in this. The scene of him cracking a smile to himself in a mirror of a public sauna gave me the proper willies. A Cannes Film Festival prize for best actor was well deserved (Ramsey also landed one for adapting the screenplay).

The story is simple enough - troubled hard-man gets on the wrong side of some powerful establishment evil-doers and blood happens. The themes are equally prosaic - trauma (Joe had an abusive past), love (parental), brutality (hammer, above), revenge (you'll see) and maybe even hope (if I read it right...). But these seemingly straightforward aspects shouldn't detract from the big picture. You Were Never Really Here is more than the sum of its parts (those parts include Johhny Greenwood's ace score and Tom Townend's cracking cinematography). It moves along at a slow-burning pace until the conflict occurs and then it arcs up, only to slow down again until the next slice of viscera. It's sort of like the film version of a Pixies song.

One final note - I've been wracking my feeble mind for the relevance of the title and I'm still not happy with what it's come up with. The best it got was something to do with Joe's image of himself as a member of society. Not satisfied brain, lift your game!

See also:

Abel Ferrara's The Funeral (1996) and David Cronenberg's A History of Violence (2005) for other examinations of violent revenge.

SPOILERS IN POD!!!

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The Insult

After a few blockbusters and the like, I decided it was time to go off-road a bit so Roly and I hit a cheap Wednesday showing of The Insult at the Luna Leederville. This is only the fourth film to be directed by Ziad Doueiri (he also co-wrote) but he cut his teeth working as a camo with Tarantino. The film takes place in Beirut. It starts with a molehill and ends with mountain. Local Christian mechanic, Tony Hanna, played by Adel Karam, is miffed when a Palestinian Muslim construction foreman, Yasser Salameh, played by Kamel El Basha, fixes his outdoor water pipe without his permission. Tony breaks it, Yasser calls him a "fucking prick" and thus commences an escalating shitestorm of stubborn men, weary women, exploitative lawyers and opportunistic politicians, all waiting for the scab of religion and geopolitics to be ripped off.

The story is ostensibly played out as a courtroom drama but there are lots of other things going on here, including misplaced revenge, tired machismo, memory and loss. The film begins with Tony at a Christian Party rally and moves on to a sequence with him at home talking with his pregnant wife, Shirine, played by Rita Hayek. It sets Tony up as a loving family man, politically active and a 'good egg' of his local community. Unfortunately, he doesn't dig the Palestinian refugees too much and the insult is later returned ten-fold, amplifying the tension and bubbling hostilities. It's a rather cracking scenario, well played by all and with no little style by Doueiri. On the performance front, standouts for me were Salameh, who's a bit reminiscent of a slightly more gaunt Tom Wilkinson, and Hayek, who admittedly isn't given much to do, but canes it when required. The courtroom scenes are pretty bloody good, though I'm not sure the lawyers sub-plot was necessary. Most of the drama and pathos comes when the whirlwind is pared back down to the two antagonists (can't really call either a protagonist) encountering each other in alternatively prosaic and surreal situations.

I must come clean: I had to do some research after watching this to clarify who was where and when...and why. What a fucking rabbit hole! Some nasty stuff occurred and to this film's great credit, it doesn't really take sides. A hard job to attempt to balance this recent historical mess but Doueiri pulls it off. There was just one sour note - hypothetical situations proposed by two of the male characters consisted of threats of violence towards women. Maybe this was designed to get a rise from the audience or it was just very misjudged but either way, it didn't sit well with the rest of the film.

After watching The Insult I remembered something one of my old students in Japan once said to me. I had recommended a film called Carancho from Argentina for a 'Movie English' lesson I used to do and Kubo-san said she although she didn't think the film was great, she really appreciated watching it. I was a bit confused so I asked why. She said that if she hadn't seen the movie, she wouldn't know what a Buenos Aires street looked like. There's a reason to love films right there.

See also:

Asghar Farhadi's brilliant A Separation (2011) covers similar ground, and for a film about the creeping dread of past cataclysms, you can't go past Michael Haneke's Cache (2005).

SPOILERS IN POD!!

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