Lapsis <img src="https://img.icons8.com/ios-glyphs/20/000000/star.png"/><img src="https://img.icons8.com/ios-glyphs/20/000000/star.png"/><img src="https://img.icons8.com/windows/21/000000/star-half.png"/>

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.

Comments

Two Prosecutors

This Stalinist 'thriller' sets out its stall early, with a snowy prison yard holding our attention (or not) for a good few minutes. Prisoners are herded in, most very old and on the verge of pegging it. One such geezer is tasked with burning hundreds of letters to Josef himself, pleading with him to hear their case. The old guy saves a letter written in blood and so begins the story. The note is from an ex-academic, party member and proud Bolshevik, asking to see someone from the prosecutors office. Enter Kornev (Alexander Kuznetsov), newly appointed and eager. His meeting with the ancient political prisoner, Stepniak (Alexsandr Filippenko) opens his eyes to the creeping dread of the times. Kornev makes the trek to Moscow to see the Procurator General (Anatoliy Beliy) to make his case against NKVD corruption brough to his attention by Stepniak. It's not an easy mission. The bureaucracy and interminable fucking waiting throughout the first two acts of the film would make Kaf...

The Quiet Girl

This is a great film, especially in the way that it manages to create something interesting out of a reasonably mundane synopsis. A young girl is sent away to a relative's house for the summer where she is treated better than at home. Sounds like it could have a bit of Rohmer-style youthful awakenings? Or maybe some gritty Loach-ian societal comment? Even perhaps a revenge tinged 'fear the youth' theme? Well, it's none of the above, and more power to its style. The Quiet Girl herself (Cáit) is a newcomer, Catherine Clinch, and she was apparently found via an Irish language school call out. She's incredible - meek, direct, no airs nor graces whatsoever, with a clear-eyed awkwardness. She's almost like a little female Bowie in The Quiet Girl Who Fell to Earth (no, not a film but I thought I'd italicise anyway). There are orbiting performances that complement her perfectly. Carrie Crowley and Andrew Bennet play Eibhlín and Seán Cinnsealach, the couple who tak...

Ainbo: Amazon Princess

A young Amazonian girl bounding around on a tree like Mowgli in The Jungle Book opens this Peruvian/Dutch/German co-production. We soon discover that this is the Ainbo of the title, and that her best friend, Zumi, is about to be crowned leader of their tribe. A relatively quick whip- round of characters introduces us to the two leads; a smarmy village thug called Atok; Zumi’s father and current tribal chief, Huarinka; Ainbo’s foster mother, Chuni; as well as two ‘loopy’ spirit guides, Dillo and Vaca (a bespectacled armadillo and a clumsy tapir). The environmental theme is also introduced early on, in the form of dying fish and disease in the village, attributed to a curse but, as we find out later, the result of something more real, and more troubling. Ainbo is convinced by her spirit guides to embark on a trek to find a magical root that will save the village. On her journey she must deal with various perils, ranging from a pursuing Atok, and a gigantic sloth in his volcano home, t...

The Voice of Hind Rajab

The Voice of Hind Rajab is a very confronting film that uses real emergency recordings to tell the story of Hind Rajab, a 6 year old Palestinian girl trapped under siege in northern Gaza in early 2024. Tunisian writer/director Kaouther Ben Hania apparently paused work on another film when she heard the audio of the calls between Hind and the Palestine Red Crescent Society in order to get this film made. And it's a timely reminder of the crimes of this current Israeli government. The film starts in the offices of the Red Crescent, a West Bank based rescue agency, when Omar (Motaz Malhees) gets a call from a man in Germany explaining that his family are stuck in a car that's been attacked. Omar contacts a young woman in the car but is cut off by the sounds of gunfire. When the call is reconnected, it's soon discovered that the only person still alive in the car is a 6 year old girl, Hind. The sole way to save her is to coordinate with the Israeli army, via the Red Cross to a...

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

I'm really getting into the 28UoTLCU (28 'Unit of Time' Later Cinematic Universe). This edition is directed by Nia DaCosta, and she picks up the reins from Danny Boyle and slots right into the landscape. The biggest takeaway from The Bone Temple is that Father Figure transference is rife, throughout both of these '28 Years' films, actually. If we choose the obvious link, Spike (Alfie Williams) is passed from parents, Isla (Jodie Comer) and Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) in the first film, onto two polar opposites, Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) and Jimmy Crystal (Jack O'Connell) in this one, and presumably to a certain returnee in the third installment. But there are also other relationships in the film(s) that explore the nature of dependency, and we have to assume writer Alex Garland, DaCosta, and godfather Boyle, have other, real-world settings in mind, not purely in the zombie genre. This manifests in the rapprochement of Dr. Kelson towards the 'infected', s...

We Bury the Dead

I went along to Luna Outdoor last Friday to see a preview of local lad, Zac Hilditch's Albany shot, Tassie set zombie drama, We Bury the Dead . The premise goes that the US government has accidentally detonated an experimental pulse weapon close to the east coast of Tasmania, killing more than 500,000 people. A side note to this disaster is that some of the dead are rebooting. Daisy Ridley plays Ava, an American physical therapist looking for her husband, who was in Tassie on a work retreat. She volunteers to be part of a body retrieval unit but is told she must not leave Hobart. She meets Clay (Brenton Thwaites) and they manage to cadge a motorbike and hit the road south. On the way, among the rebooted, they run into soldier Riley (Mark Coles Smith), who has his own reasons for being out of the capital. In a Q&A after the film with The Curb's Andrew F. Peirce, Hilditch mentioned that the film started out as a pure grief drama, and zombies were added to the script later. Th...

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 ...

Arco (Me) (Kid)

This is the first feature length film from French writer/director Ugo Bienvenu. It tells the story of futuristic kid, Arco, voiced by Juliano Crue Valdi in the English dub, and Oscar Tresanini in the French original - here I'll explain that I saw the preview of this with the English voice cast, so I'll mention them from now, unless I spy a notable Frenchy. Anyway, Arco is too young to fly to the past like his family do, but like any young ding-a-ling, he decides to chance his arm, and ends up in 2075. This is a more recognisable future for us than Arco's time, as we see climate change writ large on society. In this time-zone, Arco meets Iris (Margot Ringard Oldra) and her domestic robot, Mikki (voiced by a strange combination of Iris's parents, Natalie Portman and Mark Ruffalo). Iris wants to help Arco return to his time, but they're thwarted by a missing jewel that he needs in order to travel, as well as a trio of bumbling goons (Will Ferrell, Andy Samberg and Flea...

Sirat

Sirat is the fourth film by writer/director Oliver Laxe and it's a bit of a head scratcher, not just about what's going on, but also why? It stars the excellent Sergi López as Luis, a Spanish dad looking for his daughter in the raves of Morocco. Laxe apparently scoured music festivals and street performers' patches to cast the other characters in the film, and he's unearthed some nuggets here. Steffi (Stefania Gadda), Jade (Jade Oukid) and Tonin (Tonin Janvier) stand out, but all of the non-pros certainly feel like they might attend crusty raves in a desert. In its favour, it certainly drops the shock bombs and some of the scenes are extremely tense (there's a bit of mountain road driving, for example, that tightens the knot). But for the most part, I found it noodly, pretentious and lacking cohesion. There were even a couple of scenes that were cut from the middle, allowed to drift away, and Luis's central motivation just disappears off a Moroccan cliff. The s...

The Teacher Who Promised the Sea

This was the film chosen to preview the Spanish Film Festival for 2024 and it's quite the heart-wrencher. Based on a true story, from a book by Francesc Escribano, it tells of Antonio Benaiges (Enric Auquer), an idealistic teacher from Catalonia, who takes up a position in the small town of Bañuelos de Bureba in 1935. This town is probably like many others of the time - conservative, religious and fearful of outsiders. It's also full of kids who haven't seen the sea, which brings us to the title. Discovering that his charges have no idea about the sea, Antonio promises to take them on a trip to the Catalan coast, and much of the film is about his attempts to get permission from their inflexible parents. The depressing backdrop to all this is the impending Spanish Civil War between the Republicans and the Nationalists. Antonio ruffles a whole pelican's worth of feathers, from the politically pragmatic mayor, Alcalde (Antonio Mora), to the Snape-ish priest, the suitably ...

Film Shapes

Search This Blog