Breaking Bread

This is a documentary about the first Muslim Arab to win Israel's Masterchef TV cooking contest, Nof Atamna-Ismaeel. and her idea of running the A-Sham Arabic food festival. This brings chefs from all over Israel - some Arab, some Jewish, some Christian - and gives them a specific Levantine dish to make that has fallen out of favour or just been forgotten. Each chef is nominated to pair up with someone from a different background, town, religion even, and herein lies the interest (great looking food notwithstanding).

We get to meet about 3 main pairs, as well as a few minor 'characters' through the course of the film. I'd say the spotlight is probably on Shlomi and Ali. Shlomi is an Israeli Jew, whose grandparents came from Eastern Europe, after surviving the Holocaust, and Ali is from Ghajar, an oddly placed town, half Israeli, half Lebanese. They are tasked with making a yoghurt based delicacy called Kishek, and the intricacies of the preparation are fairly extreme.

The city of Haifa, on the northern coast of Israel, hosts the festival. I'd only heard of this place via Maccabi Haifa, the football team so it was nice to hear that it's a politically and religiously moderate place. The mayor is interviewed and he comes across as quiet a reasonable dude. Proud too, but not in a bad way. The whole issue of politics is treated quite lightly, the most left-wing moment being a sign at the festival saying something along the lines of "If you're a racist, sexist, homophobe or an asshole, don't come in". But for the most part the religious and geo-political problems are, perhaps naively, looked at through a lens of delicious grub. The director, Beth Elise Hawk, and Nof posit the idea that food is a workable jumping-off point to achieve peace in the region. Nof says "I don't believe that there is any room for politics in the kitchen" but that she hopes to change the mind of one or two people. Maybe so, maybe not, but it's worth a shot.

The whole film is shot and presented like a slick promo video, a super glossy TV ad for the festival. It's chaptered with titles like 3 Days, 35 Restaurants, etc. and the slow motion camerawork actually smells like cheese, though, in fairness, it's probably the best way to present these dishes. Stand-outs for me include the aforementioned Kishek (made as a kind of soup), a type of fried rice thing called Maqluba (without the octopus, though, thanks), and a dumpling number called Kreplach. And of course hummus is everywhere because as the film says, hummus has no borders.

Breaking Bread opens in Perth on June 3rd at the Luna.

See also:

The format and style reminded me a bit of The Booksellers (2019), directed by D.W. Young, and the superb drool of Campbell Scott and Stanley Tucci's Big Night (1996), still the best food film ever made.

A Quiet Place Part 2

Leaving aside the honking great clanger of giving birth during an alien invasion, especially when those aliens are really, really good at hearing AND want to feck da human up (youth speak), I found the first A Quiet Place to be a compact little sphincter clencher. Pandemically disrupted cinemas forced the delay of A Quiet Place Part 2 - in fact, I remember earmarking this as the next film to see just as the doors closed. Well it's here now and it covers similar ground, exactly the same physical ground with respect to the setting, down to the sand trails and the local town from the first film. 

The opening is almost the best thing about AQP2, as we flash back to DAY 1 and get more beasty action than in the first one. During these scenes there's a neat trick of POV switching from John Krasinski's Lee to his daughter Regan, played by Millicent Simmonds. As Regan is deaf, the scenes from her viewpoint are completely silent, and when there are emaciated, murderous Skeksis roaming about, this is fucking terrifying. The transitions from silent to sound often come via a touch from another character, bringing some sense of audience relief as well. 

As you can imagine, the jump scares are well done. You may know they're coming but they still make you spill your skittles. Around the end of the second act, three exploration situations are gradually intercut with one another and the craftsmanship here is lovely. The tension is near unbearable and the resolution in one of the three is purely belter (hint: docks). Sound design plays a big part in these films and if you buy into the story, the world, you find yourself holding your breath a little, not opening that Violet Crumble until a bit later, mirroring the parts where the characters must keep shtum. It may be a minor thing but it's a testament to A Quiet Place 2 (and films in general) that people go along with all that.

The cast are fine. Emily Blunt is always watchable and the kids (Simmonds and Noah Jupe) give tense support. Cillian Murphy joins this film and such is his prowess, that I was constantly sus of him. He had this to say about his role to Ryan Gilbey in The Guardian:

“Well, it felt like enough for me to try to give a performance. And I don’t think it’s a bad thing if the premise is the star of a movie, if it’s a good premise. If the job is to serve the concept the best you can, I’m totally down with that.”

Pretty bloody altruistic of old Tommy Shelby, but he's got a point about the premise being the star. On that, I had an inkling that this whole shitshow, with sightless, almost oblivious muthas devastating the world, is basically a metaphor for climate change. Hear me out. This is some horror mess going down but Regan in the first film and both her and her brother, Marcus in this one are the driving force behind dealing with it. Marcus in particular, has the personal growth arc in this film, from nervous boy (often being told to simply breathe) to avenging alien killer. Some adults try and fail, some adults don't even try, but it's the kids that fight to save themselves, their family and the planet. As Ween said, If You Could Save Yourself, You'd Save Us All. Maybe I'm being naïve but it's possible that Krasinski has more hope for the next generation than the current one.

A Quiet Place 2 is showing now, probably everywhere.

See also:

Murphy in his break out role in Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later (2002) and Blunt in more alien killing tomfoolery in Doug Liman's Edge of Tomorrow (2014).

Lapsis

Lapsis is the first feature of fiction from documentary-maker, Noah Hutton (son of Debra Winger and Timothy Hutton) and it's an odd'un. The budget was evidently quite small but Hutton has squeezed every cent out of it with some measure of success. The story involves a low-rent James Gandolfini, Ray (played by Dean Imperial) who is struggling to pay for his brother's Omnia (this reality's ME or Chronis Fatigue Syndrome) treatment. This leads Ray to take some dodgy, 'gig economy' job, cabling through the woods. Said cabling is all to do with Quantum computing and best if we don't try to analyse this too much. 

The tension from here on is two-fold. One of those folds is that Ray is given a suspiciously-sourced 'medallion', the device you need to log in at work, kind of like a punch card of old. This medallion used to belong to a person with the trail name (pseudonym for work on the trail) of Lapsis Beeftech, someone who is not roundly admired among colleagues, shall we say. The second fold is that there are mechanized workers, little robotic cabling machines, that can force the human cablers to lose their pay for a course, if they are beaten to the finish. The political undercurrents of this workplace inequity drive the film's outlook and stance. Workers of the world, unite!

There are many promising ideas in Lapsis, some of which hit the mark. The fake empathy on the part of the company rings true, as does the situation of enforced competition between workers - i.e. 'Watch out! That guy wants your biscuit.' A few angles don't quite find the right mood. The pace is a touch slow in parts, the acting veers perilously close to 'indie naturalism', and the ending could have done with a little more verve. But there are enough pros to just outweigh the cons. It's a clever story, set in an ambiguous time period and it deals with some prevailing issues. And Greg from Flight of the Conchords is in it too.

Lapsis opens in Australia on June 3rd.

See also:

It's pretty reminiscent of Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985) in parts and also the more current Sorry We Missed You (2019), directed by Ken Loach.

The Godmother

A gall bladder removal (mine) prevented me from seeing this during the Alliance Francaise French Film Festival back in February, but happily, I got another chance last week. I say happily because The Godmother (or La daronne in France, Mama Weed in UK/USA) has bags of charm to go with its bags of hash. Isabelle Huppert is some sort of ageless wonder - she's 67, playing mid-50s, I'd reckon, and she sparkles in the role. C'est incroyable! 

Huppert plays Patience Portefeux, a police translator, who is tasked with keeping tabs on a pending drug deal. Someone she knows inadvertently gets involved and she is suddenly given a choice - play it by the book and help the cops, one of whom she's going out with, or save the young trafficker. The decision is made quickly and this informs the rest of the film. The film, directed by Jean-Paul Salomé, handles her transformation from professional widowed mother of two adult daughters, to North African drug dealer, Mama Weed in a playful manner. The very real danger of ripping off violent gangsters is left on the fringes, though the ramifications are explored later, in a darkly funny scene at a Wenzhou wedding.

The film is based on a 2018 novel by Hannelore Cayre and it, ever so lightly, looks at modern French society and some of its issues with race, tolerance and incarceration, especially of North African Muslims (some neat echoes of Jacques Audiard's excellent Un prophete). Portefeux is part Moroccan and her father AND husband weren't shy of a spot of the old law-bending, so her actions are not so hard to explain. She's also a bit hard up, caring for her infirmed mother and struggling with the payments to the nursing home. Her exchanges with the low-level dealers, Scotch and Cocoa Puff, are highlights. Another is the slow, collegial/criminal bond she forms with her apartment landlady, Mrs Fo, played by Nadja Nguyen. 

The film is pitched just about right, the performances are spot on and the cinematography depicts the grungier side of Paris. If you like your crime drama/comedies packaged as a light soufflé, you can't go far wrong with The Godmother. 

An incidental - a poster on the wall of the police chief, Phillipe's office is of Polanski's Le Pianiste NOT Haneke's La Pianiste, which starred Huppert. This must be deliberate, but why?

The Godmother opens at Palace Cinemas and the Luna on May 20th.

See also:

As mentioned above, Jacques Audiard's A Prophet (2009) covers similar ground, though much more grittily, and Huppert is great in Bertrand Tavernier's Coup de Torchon (1981).

Wrath of Man

Let's start out with an admission. I haven't seen Swept Away, Guy Ritchie's 'love letter' film to his then partner, Madonna. Nor have I seen Aladdin, because, well, have a guess. But I have seen all Ritchie's other films and this one, Wrath of Man, may just be his third best. Of course, Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels will likely never be budged from spots one and two (that's my ordering, you may differ) but the rest of his catalogue is pretty dismal - and I'm including the Sherlock Holmes films here (though they had their moments).

Wrath of Man is based on a French thriller from 2004 with Jean Dujardin and Albert Dupontel called Le Convoyeur. Jason Statham takes the lead as H, in his fourth film for Ritchie, and is joined by an assemblage of familiar faces, if not A-list names. Holt McCallany (him out of Mindhunter), Josh Hartnett, Scott Eastwood (yep, son of...), Andy Garcia, Eddie Marsan, Niamh Algar, Rob Delaney, all add pretty straightforward but solid support to Statham. There's something about the Stath, it's quite clear he's not going to trouble Daniel Day Lewis or Ralph Fiennes in the acting stakes but he's as watchable as those guys, maybe more so, probably due to the tongue-in-cheek 'aaard geezer' niche that he has made his own. There's a line in this where Hartnett asks him what he should do and the Stath leaves a perfect pause before saying with his inimitable cockney sounds, "You can do watcha faaahking like."

Look, there's nothing ground-breaking about this film. The story is a revenge thriller where the 'whodunit' angle is so telegraphed that the 'who' refreshingly just owns up to it at one point, almost like it was decided that they couldn't be arsed trying to find the right spot for the reveal. The title is biblically foreboding and there are a few hints early on that the Stath is some kind of avenging angel of death but that's all kind of ushered to the side when the mechanics of he plot, such as they are, begin to develop. Ritchie avoids his usual idiosyncrasies of the swishing, point-of-view camera moves and the irritating laddish humour and just focuses on delivering a fractured timeline in the style of Tarantino, complete with the index card chapter titles and all. It's not brilliant but we've got a suitably diverting, misanthropic B-movie on our hands. Let's just appreciate the Stath while we can.

See also:

Well, if you haven't seen Ritchie's Snatch (2000), then do yourself a favour. But listen here you fucking fringe. If I throw a dog a bone, I don't want to know if it tastes good or not. And for more avenging, I remember Tony Scott's Man on Fire (2004) being a fair watch.

Out in the Open

Intemperie, the Spanish name for Out in the Open, means ‘outdoors’ or ‘the elements’ in English and these translations precisely describe the look of the film. Nearly the entire running time is spent in the hot, arid landscape of Andalucía, so rarely does the action venture indoors that it seems alien to even be ‘in’ a room. In fact, the occasional time spent away from the elements takes place mostly inside wells, caves or roofless huts. It’s as though the director, Benito Zambrano, is averse to conventional housing.  Nevertheless, the depiction of the Southern Spanish savanna is one of the many highlights of Out in the Open. The cinematography by Pau Esteve Birba is amazing, the sweeping pans and intimate close-ups equally affecting.

Zambrano, with writers Pablo and Daniel Remón, won a Goya for best adapted screenplay (from the Jesús Carrasco novel) and the script is laden with themes of guilt and forgiveness, as seen through the lens of post-war, Francoist Spain. The first shot is of a boy running through the fields, shortly followed by scenes of farm hands chasing a hare during a harvest. The excitement is cut short, and the foreshadowing begins, when the foreman shoots said animal dead. Luis Callejo plays this bastion of landed power with ugly menace.

The runaway boy, or Niño, is played with incredible maturity by Jaime López and as the film progresses, we gradually learn what it is he’s running from. Early on in his flight, he tries to steal some food from a wandering shepherd, the Moor, and after some initial mistrust on both sides, they begin to warm to one another. Luis Tosar is gruff and resigned as the Moor, an ex-soldier whose default setting appears to be practical nonchalance, and he has a nice line in aphorisms - “You don’t need to buy a village to burn it down. You just need fire and guts. But with fire and guts, you may get smoke in the head.”

The pace is just about perfect, there’s no baggage and the set-pieces are extremely well handled. One confrontation at a well around the end of the first act is a properly satisfying sequence, tense and bloody, with a clever call-back to a throwaway line from the foreman about the boy’s marksmanship.  Another scene at another well involving a desperate disabled war-veteran is full of edge and pathos. And the climax is suitably rewarding with an added gesture from the Moor to Niño that will most likely set him on the path to a rosier future than he might have been afforded earlier in the piece. When the Moor tells him that children ‘can’t be held responsible for the actions of men’, it’s tempting to read this last line as a kind of catch-all apology for the crimes and transgressions of the past.

Out in the Open is showing at the Spanish Film Festival.

[This review was also published on the Film Ink website -  https://www.filmink.com.au/reviews/out-in-the-open/]

See also:

The 'showdown' takes place in an abandoned town and reminded me of a sequence in Sergio Leone's The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966) and Luis Tosar also appears in Iciar Bollain's Even the Rain (2010) about the Cochabamba Water War. Definitely worth a look.

The Goya Murders

The machinations of the serial killer have long been fertile ground for filmmakers but the quality of the final product can vary greatly. For every Zodiac or Se7en there’s one like this. The Goya Murders (or El Asesino de los Caprichos) starts with a reasonably sound premise – a killer is poisoning his (usually well off) victims and recreating scenes from Goya prints as deathly exhibits. Imagine the murders scenes in Se7en but with less gore and more artistry. Investigating these are Madrid detectives, Carmen Cobos and Eva González, played by Maribal Verdú and Aura Garrido, and though the actors are fine, they have the writing to overcome. Their characters are broadly painted, there’s not a lot of light and shade here. Carmen immediately takes against her younger partner for no apparent reason. Eva is a fun-loving, karaoke singing, happy mother-of-two, while Carmen drinks from a hip flask and drives erratically. At one point a fellow officer tells Carmen that her ‘bad cop’ routine is too much. Thanks for the nudge.

But the plot has to take most of the blame. It’s incoherent and vapid with obvious telegraphing – the camera lingers on one character, which is enough to solve the whodunit angle, yet confusingly, later the same thing happens to another character with no resulting pay-off. There are threads that start to develop and are then dismissed summarily. Carmen is removed from the case after a personal error of judgement but is then brought back within 10 minutes of screen time. Even more curiously, in one of the most promising ideas of the script, a high level obstruction of justice is uncovered, and then completely sidelined, never to be revisited. It could even be argued that the motive of the killer, the mechanism driving the whole plot, borders on complete irrationality.

The most egregious misstep is the ending. There’s a gruesome incident in the stereotypical final confrontation and then a short coda that serves no clear purpose. In fact, only the fade to black indicates that the movie is over. Very odd. The writer, Ángela Armero has more credits for Spanish TV than feature films so perhaps this story could have been better served over a run of episodes.

The Madrid streets scenes are well shot and the director, Gerardo Herrero, has a lot of experience but he really should have made some sense of this. Or avoided it entirely. The Goya Murders is a film that hangs its constituent parts together with no visible cohesion, leaving the viewer to try to imagine the reasoning behind everything or, more likely, to dismiss it as a waste of ninety minutes.

Side note: anybody know what an 'Autonomic President' is? I'm guessing this was lost in translation.

The Goya Murders is showing at the Spanish Film Festival.

[This review was also published on the Film Ink website - https://www.filmink.com.au/reviews/the-goya-murders/]

See also (or instead, in this case):

The clearest parallels are with David Fincher's Se7en (1995) but The Sea Inside (2004), directed by Alejandro Amenabar, won 14 Goya awards. The award is actually a small bust of Goya himself.

MANY SPOILERS IN POD!