The Last Duel

As per the film's title, this is all about the last legally sanctioned duel in France. In 1386! Wikipedia gives a more recent 1547 and Ridley Scott himself directed a film (his first) in 1977 called The Duellists, set around the early 1800s, though I take it the duels in this film were not judicial. Anyway, The Last Duel is a pretty fine film. It's neatly structured into three parts, though crucially, not three acts. Each part is named 'The Truth According to....', covering the main characters, played by Matt Damon, Adam Driver and Jodie Comer. These are Jean de Carrouges, Jacques Le Gris and Marguerite de Carrouges respectively. Add Ben Affleck's delicious portrayal (replete with quality swears) of Count Pierre d'Alençon, and you have some excellent turns; just the right side of smallgoods.

The 'three truths' structuring will, of course, conjure thoughts of Rashomon (and the many examples of  films or TV shows using the Rashomon Effect), but the icing on this cake is the resulting similarity to an especially fine Game of Thrones episode, with Marguerite as the Tyrion proxy. You'll know the one. The crime that underpins the whole film, and the reason for the duel, is the rape of Marguerite. This obviously isn't seen in the first telling, as Jean is away when it occurs, so we get the reporting of the act from wife to husband. Jean's reaction is immediate disbelief but his reaction from his 'memory' isn't as ugly as from the third part - Marguerite's side of things. 

The second and third tellings show the rape in all its repugnance. Here's where I blanched a little - I didn't think a second version was warranted, even though I can see the absolute need to show the subtle changes before and during the rape that explain how a person (Le Gris) could completely believe his own story. His actions are virtually the same from part 2 to part 3, but Marguerite's are clearly different (she ACCIDENTALLY loses her shoes; she screams for help many times, NOT only once; she's visibly crying during and after, NOT just breathing heavily, etc). It's a smart way to let the audience see how viewpoints can crucially differ, but it's uncomfortable viewing nonetheless.

Another point of note is that the film was written (and produced) by three people - Damon, Affleck and Nicole Holofcener. As Damon told Entertainment Tonight, 

"It's a story about perspective... So, there are two knights and then there's the Lady Marguerite. So Ben and I wrote the male perspective and Nicole Holofcener wrote the female perspective. That's kind of the architecture of that movie."

And that architecture shines a light on the fact that the 'male perspective' hasn't changed a whole hell of a lot for many blokes. Affleck's Count (minus an 'o', if you like) is a prime example of the kind of dick that still muddies the waters of society. He's a charismatic enabler - encouraging his protégé in his carousing ways, and then covering up for him when the accusations are brought to light.

Sir Ridders needs mention here too. The old dude has still got the chops. His directing is custom-made for this kind of film - confident, showy, grandiose. The climactic duel is fantastically gripping and I'm sure the lead-up made it all the more so. Also, I'd been a bit of a Comer agnostic before this performance but I was put rightfully in my place and into the Comer Corner (Comer Corner, Karma Comer, Comer Chameleon?). Her withering look at the back of Damon's head near the end of the film is priceless.

The Last Duel is showing now at Palace (and other) cinemas.

See also:

I won't suggest the obvious GoT episode (alluded to above) but see that again, by all means. I also can't recommend Scott's early duelling film (mentioned above too), as I haven't seen it. So instead I'll give you two of my favourite duels in cinema, namely the fight at the top of the Cliffs of Insanity in The Princess Bride (1987), directed by Rob Reiner, and the gun vs knife duel in The Magnificent Seven (1960), directed by John Sturges.

LIGHT SPOILAGE IN POD!

Persian Lessons

This is a functional, yet tension-building film set in an internment camp in France during the Second World War. A Belgian Jew, Gilles, played by Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, trades a sandwich for an old Persian book, which turns out to save his life. Just prior to being shot, he proclaims to be Persian, not Jewish. Luckily, one of the local camp commandants is looking for a Persian to teach him lessons, and thus begins the high stakes bluff. Haupsturmführer Klaus Koch, played by Lars Eidinger, wants to open a restaurant in Tehran after the war and is eager to learn the language before he gets there. His excitement is moderated slightly by his suspicion that Gilles - or Reza, as he calls himself - is a fraud.

The beats are all here. After some initial hesitancy, Koch accepts the likelihood that Reza is legit, but then a word (invented by Reza) is repeated and Koch loses his shit. Reza convinces Koch that some words can have two meanings, and things return to an uneasy balance. Until the next dip on the tension rollercoaster when an English airman of PERSIAN descent is brought to the camp. The filmed events are exciting but there's an equal amount of satisfaction to be gained from the performances, especially of Eidinger and Biscayart. They spark off each other, their nerves are bristling to snap out - both of them being somewhat weak, maligned men. Koch worries that he'll lose the respect of his colleagues, though Reza obviously stands to lose much more should he be found out. They get additional support from Jonas Nay, Leonie Benesch and Alexander Beyer, but the spotlight is trained on Biscayart and Eidinger, and rightly so.

Much of my enjoyment came from the invention of the 'Farsi' language. At first, Reza is tasked with teaching Koch a new word every day, then more and more. Bread is 'radj', wind is 'lom', and so on. He stumbles upon a mnemonic method of remembering these words - by using the names of camp prisoners he is forced to record in Koch's ledger. This ultimately pays off in the emotional climax where he's being interviewed by Allied officers about his time in the camp. Writer Ilja Zofin (adapting from a novella) and director Vadim Perelman have turned out a nerve-wracking, moving, fresh angle on the Jewish experience in WW2.

[Added notes - Eidinger looks like a slightly less chiselled, young William Hurt. And Night Watch director, Timur Bekmambetov was a producer on this.]

Persian Lessons is screening now at the Luna.

See also: 

 

Perelman's first feature was the underrated House of Sand and Fog (2003), and Eidinger was also great in The Bloom of Yesterday (2016), directed by Chris Kraus.

Three Perfect Daughters

The St. Ali Italian Film Festival opens this week and one of the offerings is this old-fashioned family comedy by co-writer/director, Rolando Ravello. I say old-fashioned because it seems to have come from a vault, at least in the case of the fathers. The daughters in question are 2020s women, trying to get on with things, but their dinosaur dads hatch plans to thwart their love lives. The wives are sisters who just happen to have married these three buffoons. I'd like to think the whole thing is taking a satirical angle on this type of Italian father, though the sentimental way they're ultimately treated doesn't fill me with too much hope. The fact that it's a remake of an equally farcical looking Spanish film called It's For Your Own Good, seems to indicate it's not solely an Italian affliction, though.

Marco Giallini, Vincenzo Salemme and Giuseppe Battiston play the dads, and play them very broadly at that. The mums - played by Isabella Ferrari, Claudia Pandolfi and Valentina Lodovini - are cast as angry harridans or stern but sexy matriarchs, so if you like that kind of thing, have at it. The daughters - played by Matilde Gioli, Alice Ferri and Eleonora Trezza - are probably the pick of the performances, but in reality, the whole cast essentially blend together in this kind of cinematic potato salad.

I'm kind of at a loss to say much more about Three Perfect Daughters. It's not the worst film I've seen all year, and it has a kind of antiquated charm, but it's all so groaningly unlikely (or is it?) that it's hard to take much away from it. Also, as Merv noted, some of the translations seemed to be slightly off. That, or there are certain Italian phrases that just make bugger all sense in English.

See also:

As I can't really think of too many relevant film I've seen, I'll instead run you through some of the films from this year's festival that caught my eye (see link above for details):

• Rome, Open City (1945) Roberto Rossellini - (an amazing film) 
• Cam's War (2020) Laura Muscardin
• Hidden Away (2020) Giorgi Diritti
• Padrenostro (2020) Claudio Noce
• The Predators (2020) Pietro Castellitto
• Tigers (2020) Ronnie Sandahl
• You Came Back (2020) Stefano Mordini

Minari

This was a film that I didn't get to during its initial run last year (2020) but we needed to choose a film as part of a quiz night win so we landed on Minari. As you can guess from my lack of enthusiasm, I didn't necessarily have high hopes for this but I was impressed on the whole. It's an engaging family drama set in the 1980s about a Korean family who immigrated to California some time before, but are now trying to take a stab at country life in Arkansas. 

The dad, Jacob (The Walking Dead's Steven Yuen), is the driver of this attempt to go bush, while mum, Monica (Yeri Han), is less impressed. Throughout, their relationship appears to be entering the final innings. The kids range from hating the move, to putting up with it, to enjoying it - in no particular order. Regarding the kids, there's a lot for Alan Kim to do as David, much less for Noel Cho as Anne. She basically plays the family crutch; looking after younger bro, helping mum and dad, tolerating crazy granny when she comes to live with them. It's a pretty under-written role but she does what she can with it. Granny Soonja is played by Korean star Yuh-Jung Youn, and her supporting role Oscar is well-deserved. As you can imagine, she gets most of the laughs, as well as a hefty share of the pathos.

The 'fish out of water' trope with Minari is familiar but it's given a splash by the pieces in play. I can't remember ever seeing a film focussing on a Korean family in the 'hillbilly' region of the US. This freshness almost papers over the forced ending, which is kind of hard to reconcile with the rest of the film. Would minds be changed so quickly - surely, if anything, the situation has become worse?

In essence, the minari plant of the title explains writer/director Lee Isaac Chung's feeling towards the family (and perhaps Korean people in general), in that they're resilient and can 'grow' anywhere. Jacob's ultimate acceptance of the minari, and thus, his mother-in-law, shows that he can finally compromise. 

See also:

A couple of films spring to mind relating to farming troubles. The excellent Jean de Florette (1986), directed by Claude Berri, and the also brilliant Honeyland (2019), directed by Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov.

Lamb

Lamb is a foggy creepshow about a farming couple in the Icelandic foothills who happen upon a 'gift' from nature in the form of a child, and....well, urm, let's continue. Noomi Rapace and Hilmir Snær Guðnason star as Maria and Ingvar, the childless couple, and their routine has them miserably plodding along with the farm chores in this oddly treeless and rocky land. As dull as this might sound, it's actually a quietly fascinating start to the film, which may be down to the oft-mentioned 'otherworldly' landscape. Icelandic folk must be well pissed off with everyone going on about their topography. 

The opening is a slow tracking shot through a snow-swept exterior, via a herd of tiny horses. We end up in a barn full of frightened sheep (I guess they're always frightened) with the hint of something off screen - the eyes of the sheep are a clever way to suggest this. Later, as Maria and Ingvar are birthing lambs, an 'arrival' puts their gobs well into smacked position. For a good further 15 mins or so, I'm thinking, 'nah, surely not' until, yes, we finally see the child. Now, I'm sure the writers (Sjón and director Valdimar Jóhannsson) didn't plan for there to be titters and snorts, but unfortunately, at least at the reveal of the child, Ada, quite a few were had (I felt a bit immature but my mind wandered to Marenghi once more and Skipper, the Eyechild). 

The 'family' are content, except for the annoyance of the birth mother - A SHEEP - constantly bleating outside Ada's window. Maria sorts out this problem and things are going well until the visit of Ingvar's brother, Pétur, played by Björn Hlynur Haraldsson. Pétur is pretty much every member of the audience when he asks, "What the fuck is going on here?" some time after encountering Ada. Ingvar's reply of "Happiness" doesn't quite scan with Pétur, but after his initial shock, he reluctantly accepts this situation. 

There's a lot of food for thought on the intentions of the filmmakers here. I'm guessing it has its roots in Nordic folk tales, but it could be read as an anti-disablist statement or a pro-nature tract. Maria's insistence that "Ada is a gift" is no doubt magnified by the loss of her children (we see her tending to a small plot of graves at one point - one of which has the name Ada on the cross), but nature takes an alternate view on her understanding of this. And here's where I'll keep my trap shut, suffice to say, this is an odd, captivating film that will stay with you days after watching. 

Lamb opens on Oct 14th at the Luna and Palace cinemas.

[A slightly different version of this review was published on Film Ink - https://www.filmink.com.au/reviews/lamb/]

See also:

Try Hlynur Pálmason's A White, White Day (2019) for more Icelandic atmosphere, and Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (2006) for no reason at all...

Riders of Justice

This is a Danish film from Anders Thomas Jensen, and starring the guy who has been in every one of this director's films, Mads Mikkelsen. And that's basically all you need to know (though I'll waffle some more). The presence of Mads inserts just about any film into the 'worth a look' category. Mikkelsen is incredible in Riders of Justice, as a grieving husband who can't accept the fact that he probably needs help - he's all grey bearded intensity, and the slow unravelling of his machismo is fascinating to watch.

There are loads of elements to this film. On the surface, it's a blackly comic, revenge drama, with aspects of farce and slapstick, but deeper in it develops - in no particular order - into a gangland thriller, a crime procedural and a meditation on bullying and abuse. It doesn't end there. There are nods to family troubles, parental responsibility, freedom to choose ways to deal with grief (including violence and religion), depictions of mental health and the mathematics of probability. Oh, and even some odd Estonian-based bookends, which appeared to be based on fairytale imagery. It sounds like they've overdone it, but it works, regardless of how many of these strands you want to focus on.

The story has army tough guy, Markus (Mads), coming home from action overseas when his wife is killed in a train explosion. It's accepted that said explosion was a terrible accident until a passenger on the same train (who gave up his seat to Markus' wife - oh, I forgot, there's guilt as well) uncovers something more sinister involving bikie gangs and an assassination. Telling Markus this news sets the revenge angle to rampage level and the scene of Markus and his three awkwardly anti-social co-conspirators confronting the suspected train bomber is one of the best in the film. 

Nikolaj Lie Kaas as Otto is the counter-balance to Markus, more placid, more reasonable, and the development of this relationship is almost as important to the film as the one between Markus and his daughter, Mathilde, played by Andrea Heick Gadeberg. This father-daughter connection is the fulcrum of the story, where the theme of revenge is supplanted by one of self-honesty and acceptance. It's also the way to get the three nerds into the house - Mathilde mistakes them for the counsellors she has been asking her dad to accept. One of these guys is Lennart, played by Lars Brygmann, who was part of that great Danish police series, Unit One. In fact, he and Mikkelsen play extremely heightened versions of their characters from that show, La Cour and Fischer.

The only real misstep is the fist-pumping climactic standoff, though even this is allayed by the gang leader's final line of dialogue. The penultimate scene (not the Estonian bit) was a cracked mirror of About a Boy, where the camera pans around characters in a loungeroom who have found a new equilibrium. The actual end of the film is a nice little gazump but it happens around 20 minutes before the credits roll. 

Riders of Justice is showing at the Luna and Palace cinemas.

See also:

It'd be just plain wrong to not mention another Mads film here, so I'll go with Thomas Vinterberg's superb The Hunt (2012). And if revenge is your thing, check out Park Chan-Wook's Oldboy (2003), part of his vengeance trilogy.

Candyman

Who can take a mirror? Sprinkle it with goo? Cover it with viscera and an intestine or two? The Candy Man. Oh, the Candy Man can. That's where my mind strayed during this film - thinking of a variation on Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. In this version, Gene Wilder turns his hand to child-killing, and you don't have to stretch your 'pure' imagination too much to see that Wonka's not too far removed from that. So, I blame that song being played over the opening credits for my wandering thoughts.

This film (Candyman, not Wonka) is a remake of/sequel to the 1992 original of the same name, where a crazed ghost (?) is summoned to kill anyone who's thick enough to say his name in the mirror five times. The new version, directed by Nia DaCosta and co-written and produced by Jordan Peele, attempts to update the story by making it about gentrification of the projects (incidentally, a word that means bugger all to non-Americans, I'd reckon) and seems to go so far as to suggest that the pan-dimensional lolly-giver is a hero of sorts. The sort that cleaves and hacks people with a meat hook. The beginning sets out its stall to finger the white cops as the baddies, while holding fire on the glorification of the Candy Man, at least until the final third.

There are loads of confusing choices made by characters (and the writers), which had me scrabbling to remember if I'd seen the original, as there are quite a few references to that film. Let's just say the lead, Anthony, played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen ll, is inextricably linked to the events that occurred in 1992. The acting is pretty ropey, especially from the laundromat guy, but nobody really rises above the material here. The ending loses its way with about 10 minutes to go but I was well nonplussed by this time anyway.

Oh, I didn't mind the bees, so there's that, I guess. And the end credits were nicely done -  in a kind of silhouette marionette style. But crucially, there are precious few scares, a bit of a bummer for this kind of film. The body horror bits are the most uncomfortable but they're more squirm-inducing than frightening. Hands up, I don't really see many horror films but I'd wager this doesn't even satisfy its target market. I could be wrong.

See also:

For superior body horror, a David Cronenberg film should see you right. I'd favour Videodrome (1983). And try re-watching the aforementioned Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971), directed by Mel Stuart, but with Wonka as a serial killer. It probably should have been the Depp remake.

Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time

This Hungarian film is a slow-burning little gem. It balances itself somewhere between mysterious, psychological thriller and slyly satirical, deadpan comedy. And the amazing thing is you don't really notice what a number it has done on you until well after it's finished. Natasa Stork plays Márta, a successful neurosurgeon who decides to return home to Budapest to meet up with the man she met and fell in love with at a medical conference in the US. A planned rendezvous on a bridge doesn't eventuate and so Márta tracks down János, played by Viktor Bodó, to his hospital, whereupon he claims to have never met her in his life. Is he lying? Is she losing her mind? Could it be both? These questions are played with through the film and, though on the surface, they are answered, there's still lingering doubt about events just passed and crucially, preparations for the future.

The final shot is an absurd flourish, reminiscent of a few Coen Brothers films, and close to a belly laugh in that there are a few ways to read it (Roly and I immediately took different views on it). Without describing the actual visual, I'll simply say that interpretations of regret, instability, chaos and maybe even the shock of mature reality are all on the table. 

The two leads are great, and special mention must go to Benett Vilmányi as a well-meaning, lovestruck Alex, but it's Stork who holds the attention here. It's a cracking performance - we're not sure if she's fully looped, truculent, depressed or calculating, with slight changes of expression on her otherwise impassive face giving only minor clues away. As her psychologist says to her, "I think you want me to diagnose a mental disorder rather than have to think that your lover cheated on you."

Director Lili Horvát, in only her second feature, has given us a film that sets up puzzlers and doesn't quite give us all the answers. It's a clever, cool looking film that only the Eastern Europeans can really pull off. This awkward, Fry & Laurie-style translation of Janós singing as a child sums up the film for me, "The thief lost patience and made the brook obscure with crafty agitations." 

Yep, just what he said. 

Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time opens at the Luna on October 7th.

See also:

I got vibes of Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up (1966), as well as Denis Villeneuve's Enemy (2013), not to mention a few Coen Brothers films.