Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn

Winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, this film by prolific Romanian writer/director Radu Jude is a mixed bag of satire, realism and surrealism, and porn. Let's get that out of the way - as one character says, "It's not porn because there's no transaction taking place", but he's IN the film, we're watching, having paid the ticket price. Confused? The first few minutes of the film are taken up with a shakily-filmed, clearly amateur sex-tape - and it's extremely graphic - 'featuring' a Romanian school teacher and her husband. Said tape (or video file) somehow finds its way onto the internet and pretty soon, outrage occurs.

The film is broken into three distinct chapters. The first is basically Romanian New Wave, with a meandering camera following Katia Pascariu's Emilia around Bucharest while she attempts damage control. As she makes her way to the apartment of her school Headmistress (Claudia Ieremia), she fields calls from her husband regarding the video, all the while dealing with toxic humanity in the streets. This section, as prosaic as it sounds, is nonetheless fascinating, giving us a weirdly voyeuristic angle on the life of a city. The camera often seems to forget it's trained on Emilia, instead lingering over some unimportant signage or a decrepit building façade. 

The second chapter is less accessible. It's basically made up of dictionary entries, all of which have something to say, but admittedly, many of which went sailing over my head into Bay 13. Each one is subtitled with explanatory text (oddly without vocals, meaning they were written in Romanian originally?) and accompanied by what seems like stock footage. These are all reasonably short but they add up to a fair old chunk of the film, and I feel this is where 'art' and comfort parted ways slightly.

The third section is the parent/teacher meeting, and I hope I never have to go to one like this. Emilia is forced to sit at a desk outside - masks are worn and social distancing is being observed, making this one of the first COVID-era films I've seen - while receiving insinuations and insults from her students' parents. It's a fine example of where we're positioned as a society - hypocrisy, self-interest, perceived affront and faux-outrage, it's all here. Also present are the aggressive, intolerant, wildly right-wing views of some self-proclaimed community leaders. Checked off the roll are misogyny, anti-Semitism, homophobia, Romaphobia (anti Gypsy sentiment) and just pure fuck-headed-ness. And we all think this shit only goes on in Eastern Europe.

This is a depressingly common story of bigoted attitudes that Jude has decided would be best served up as blackly comic farce, with some explicit sex to act as the motivating agent. Not the greatest film of the year, but almost without peer in originality. It's unlikely you'll see anything similar anytime soon and for me, that's a win.

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn opens at Luna Cinemas on Nov 25th.

See also:

I'll suggest two more Romanian films here, firstly, the excellent Collective (2019), directed by Alexander Nanau, and secondly, Police, Adjective (2009), directed by Corneliu Porumboiu.

SPOILERS (AND PORN TALK) IN POD!!

Titane

Here's this year's Palme d'Or winner and it certainly underlines Cannes' predilection for 'envelope-pushing' films. Broadly, it's a sweet story of two people who are searching for love, it's just that it's dressed up in body horror and violent killings. Don't let that put you off (unless you find long, bone hairpins in orifices beyond the pale), because this film has some pretty fine things going for it. 

Director, Julia Ducournau, in only her second feature, shows a steady, confident hand. Oddly, for a film that's so provocative, she lets the audience assume details and, maybe reluctantly, accept certain events. Alexia, played by newcomer Agathe Rouselle, is involved in a car accident in her childhood, and is patched up with a titanium plate in her head. Fast forward 10 years or so and she's an exotic dancer at underground car shows (least, that's what it looks like). After one such show, a sleazy dude tries it on her, much to his detriment, and thus begins (or perhaps it had already begun?) Alexia's sloppily brutal spree. On the run, with Un Flic closing in, she - stay with me - convinces Vincent Lindon's Vincent that she's his missing son, gone for 10 years but now returned, scarred but alive. Oh, I've forgotten the car sex thing, and I don't mean sex IN a car, but.... anyway, aside from convincing people that she's a young man, she must try to conceal a growing baby, through the means of some tightly wound bandages. Actually, now that I write about it all, I can kind of see why some filmgoers fainted and/or vomitted during screenings. It's probably worth mentioning that I did find myself curling a lip and feeling slightly uneasy at times. 

Titane has some special scenes, specifically one of young firemen dancing in slo-mo to a fantastic song (Future Islands - "Light House"). It's one of those moments of repose in a film like this that can act as a super mellow counter-balance, and it's top notch film-making. Vincent Lindon is great, as usual, in his strange role of not seeing the nose on his own face (is this even a saying?), and his relationship with Alexia (or, as he knows her, Adrien) is the weird heart of the film.

This is a confronting, often shocking film, and while I didn't love it in its entirety, it had enough moments to satisfy, if only for the utter ballsiness of it. 

Titane opens at Luna cinemas on Nov 25th.

See also:

The missing person element reminded me of the uneven, but thoroughly watchable The Imposter (2012), directed by Bart Layton. For more great work by Vincent Lindon, check out Fred Cavayé's Anything For Her (2008).

Last Night in Soho

Edgar Wright's newest film is something of a return to his early days, but without the comic elements. Last Night in Soho, starring Thomasin McKenzie and Anya Taylor-Joy, is an astral projection murder mystery set in London, now AND in the 1960s. McKenzie's Eloise gets a bursary to study at the London College of Fashion and leaves her country town for the big smoke. She quickly gets fed up with her student digs and takes a room in a house in Goodge Place owned by Ms. Collins - Diana Rigg in her final film. The first night she dreams (travels?) herself as hopeful music star, Sandie, with Taylor-Joy's image reflecting back at her through the mirrors in the Café de Paris. So far, this is all exciting stuff, but things start to go pear-shaped for Sandie/Eloise when Matt Smith's Jack shows his true, nasty colours.

Now, unlike some folk, I went along with this film. It's very clever, plot points are set up to pay off later, the story by Wright wears it's influences openly, and the screenplay by Krysty Wilson-Cairns does the job of keeping us on the edge and not being too outrageous - for example, there are always 'real' characters to anchor us in the present day. Wright is a proper film nerd, and his references are such that I could recognise them, without knowing where I'd seen them before. The ones I can recall would be Don't Look Now (Ellie's second sight and raincoat - white though, not red); Peeping Tom (all the voyeurism and Soho setting); Blowup (London 60s setting), Shaun of the Dead (zombie ghosts?); and possibly Blade Runner (overhead shot of rain falling on a body in the street) and some Giallo stuff (eyes reflected in a bloody knife). The last two are guesses because I'm not at Wright's encyclopaedic level of film memory, the bastard.

The street scenes are beautifully shot by Chung-hoon Chung (Park Chan-Wook's regular collaborator), with some wonderful wet work, perfect for the viewer who misses London as much as I do. Going by the end credit photos of London's streets, it's pretty clear this film was Wright's love letter to the city. The music is also crucial to the big picture. Like James Gunn and Tarantino, Wright puts a lot of stock in finding just the right tracks for his films, and he's picked some old gems here, with a special mention for Barry Ryan's, Eloise. The scene where the excellent Terence Stamp sings along to this at the bar is worth admission alone. I have some minor quibbles about the general story outcomes, but I'll leave that sitting there, and just say that the same issues I had with the end of Baby Driver resurface here. Maybe that's been Wright's modus operandi since Spaced and Shaun but I just loved those too much to pick any negatives.

Last Night in Soho opens on Nov 18th.

See also:

It would be remiss of me not to plug the best TV show of all time, Spaced (1999-2001), and this film was oddly similar to the film I saw the day before (see previous entry), Tigers (2020), directed by Ronnie Sandahl, in that a young person swaps home for the big time and has to deal with mental health issues. And, yes this is irregular but for a third choice, the body inhabiting element brings up Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich (1999).

(Film stills and trailer ©Universal, 2021)

Tigers

This film by Swedish writer/director, Ronnie Sandahl is based on the book In the Shadow of San Siro, Martin Bengtsson's autobiography. Bengtsson was a footballing prodigy in the early 2000s and this is the story of how he tried to deal with going to a professional club at an early age. The club in question is Inter Milan, but it could probably have been any big club in Europe. A disclaimer of sorts in the end credits says how these clubs are improving their handling of mental health issues, and I guess we take their word for it.

The film is neatly blocked into seasons, starting with his impending arrival in Italy in spring and finishing in winter. Along the way, he encounters hardships; such as envy, bullying (though not as much as I'd expected), alienation and loneliness. He also seems to be getting some things right: friendship with an American keeper in his team, and crucially, a love interest in the form of a Swedish model, Vibeke (a fantastic Frida Gustavsson). Bengtsson himself is played by Erik Enge, and though he nails the distress, it's pretty hard to warm to him. 

The animals in captivity theme is rife throughout - Martin freaks out some party-goers by replicating a pig squeal he heard from another player back in Sweden; there are finches, seen on a wire when Martin is kicking seven shades out of a skip bin AND in the cage at the young footballers' share house; and of course, the tiger of the title. This relates to a story told to him by Vibeke where a tiger bided years of his time in a zoo until his trainer dropped his guard once and, well, chewy, chewy.

Martin drives himself to the limit, and his burning ambition, coupled with a lack of adult support, are potential reasons for his mental decline. There aren't enough football scenes for my money, but there is one nicely delivered scene of how lost he was on his first team debut. Whiplash is a touchstone, especially in his, frankly hard to understand decision to ditch his girlfriend to concentrate on football. Methinks this is a dramatic flourish, it's not like the lad was being tempted at Maradona levels.

Overall, Tigers is a well structured, biographical docu-drama cataloguing of the life of a small fish with a big future in a big pond. It also acts as a cautionary tale for young footballers (or any young people, really) who exchange home life for a vastly different one, when they clearly aren't ready. I guess for every Messi, there are more Bengtssons.

See also:

Damien Chazelle's Whiplash (2014) for character similarities, and Gabriela Cowperthwaite's Blackfish (2013) for thematic ones.

Eternals

This latest Marvel edition is on a slightly different tack, in that this crew predate the MCU by a few thousand years (leaving aside all the wunderbar time travel malarkey). A Celestial called Arishem sends the Eternals to Earth around 5000 BC to protect humanity from a breed of monsters called Deviants. The Eternals are slightly in thrall to a semblance of the Star Trek 'Prime Directive', meaning they can't interfere in disputes (or even genocides) but can, and must, stop the Deviants killing people. After wiping out these buggers around 1500 years ago, our space Highlanders are kicking their heels, waiting to be told what to do, when some shit starts to go down again. 

The urge to do things differently in this phase of Marvel output is clear, perhaps due to the director Chloe Zhao, fresh off an Oscar for Nomadland. She brings a sense of balance to proceedings, and even manages to be slightly more serious, albeit with some comedic touches. She has A LOT of characters to deal with and giving them all something to do is tricky. The main immortals are Sersi, played by Gemma Chan, and Ikaris, played by Richard Madden, and they bear the weight of the narrative, while Angelina Jolie's Thena, Salma Hayek's Ajak, Kumail Nanjiani's Kingo, and Lia McHugh's Sprite add much of the filling. The tough unit from Train to Busan, Ma Dong-seok, and Dunkirk's Barry Keoghan, are both standouts for me, though I kind of wish Keoghan hadn't thinned out his Irish accent. He's too easy to understand.

Thematically, there are strong links to another Marvel story thread - one that pitted one side of friends against the other - you follow, I'm sure. In this film though, the stakes are slightly higher, and the agents potentially more nihilistic. On that, I'm just about done with the old story beat of 'humanity is capable of such great things, to laugh, to love, to dream, etc.' When will a film like this just accept that we're planetary fuck-ups and leave the Celestials to their obliterating whims? Only a thought.

Robb Stark comes across very Ozymandias from Watchmen, by way of Cyclops from the X-Men. Meanwhile, Jon Snow hides his light under a drippy bushel until the very end, hinting at a IP to get his Longclaw into. The powers of this crew are oddly mismatched. Lauren Ridloff's Makkari is super fast, Thena is great with her magic blades, and Gilgamesh (Dong-seok) has a massive smashy fist, but Druig (Keoghan) can only do mind control and Bryan Tyree Henry is good at making stuff. Not the best in a scrap, though they make do in concert with one another, and I guess that's the point.

About halfway through, we see one of these lovely brawls, this one in the Amazon jungle, between Deviants and Eternals, where the later marginalised monsters show some odd behaviour. They now seem to be draining the powers from our heroes. Anyway, this thread is pretty much abandoned when the bigger fish need frying. That Celestial fish, once filleted, is only the start of the trouble for the Eternals, but these issues will likely get ironed out sometime during the coming phase. The MCU will outlive us all.

See also:

There are echoes of Ridley Scott's Prometheus (2012) in the whole 'ancient off-worlders designing our fate/future' thing, and it looks like Highlander is getting a reboot soon, so let's revisit the 1986 original, directed by Aussie Russell Mulcahy. With my sword and head held high, got to pass the test first time...

No Time to Die

The best Bond films have always been more than what we associate with 007 - the theme, the women, the gadgets, the villains, the song, etc. Which is why No Time to Die may go down as one of the best of the franchise. It stands alongside Casino Royale, On Her Majesty's Secret Service (keep an eye out for echoes of this film) and From Russia With Love as a high water mark, mainly due to what's going on behind the veneer of glitz and cool. This fifth film of Daniel Craig's tenure wraps up a lot of the threads that began with Casino Royale and continued on and off through the subsequent films. It acts as a pretty perfect bookend to that first film.

Running over the plot seems irrelevant. On paper, it's as you were with 007 films - uber-villain has nefarious plans for world domination or, at least, some sort of large-scale crime; Bond is called in to stop him; there are great action set-pieces; Bond cheeks it up with M, Moneypenny and Q; the CIA get involved; and of course, there are gorgeous women floating about. But in this case, the women are, for the most part, integral to the story. Lashana Lynch, as another double-O agent, Nomi, is excellent, perhaps poised to strike out on her own in the future. Her early entrapment of Bond, and henceforth continual annoyance with him, are superbly done, not over-played but showing them as begrudging equals. Léa Seydoux, as returning Madeleine Swann, has some of the toughest emotional lifting to do, and is terrific too. Only Ana de Armas seems slightly under-used here, for all the poster/trailer work she does for the film, you'd think she'd be in it for a tad longer. 

Rami Malek's baddie, Safin, is creepy and recalls a few past Bond villains, as does his volcanic lair, complete with moving parts. And I'm almost certain that his main henchman also plays second keeper for Spurs (check the pics, it's uncanny). It's the motivation for Safin's master plan that was a bit wooly. There are weaponised nanobots and DNA involved but his ultimate goal eluded me. Just the classic Bond film nutter excuse might be acceptable, I'm willing to overlook that script vagary. The cinematography is lush, especially the action sequence in a misty Norwegian wood, and the Raid-inflected staircase rumbles near the end. DOP Linus Sandgren has pulled out all the stops here. 

Where No Time to Die elevates itself is in the writing, specifically of the humanising of James Bond, though this process admittedly began at the start of Craig's arc of five films. The script was done by old Bond hands, Robert Wade and Neal Purvis, with extra polish added by the director, Cary Joji Fukunaga and Fleabag's Phoebe Waller-Bridge. If you are old-school 007, and you want your man to be granite, with absolutely no sign of human frailty, then best you dig back into the Connery or Moore films. Here, Craig portrays Bond as a vulnerable, desperate man who has been burned many times and is angry, yet searching for a semblance of happiness. This even stretches to weeping on occasion, though he can still dispatch dudes with a flourish. Needless to say, Craig is excellent, his delivery of "You can imagine why I've come back to play" is one of the great lines of recent times. A suitably fitting end to the Daniel Craig Bond-era, and one of the best 007 films to date. 

No Time to Die opens on Nov 11th almost everywhere.

See also:

I'd once again recommend Casino Royale (2006), directed by Martin Campbell, and let's stick with Bond and take a look at On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), directed by Peter R. Hunt.

BEWARE!! QUITE A NUMBER OF SPOILERS IN POD!!

(Film stills and trailer ©Universal, 2021)

Ali & Ava

The preview for this year's British Film Festival was a warm, inclusive relationship drama in the Mike Leigh vein called Ali & Ava. This is directed by Clio Barnard and stars Adeel Akhtar and Claire Rushbrook as our titled pair. It's probably the simplest plot to explain - guy slowly separating from his wife, meets a woman from another circle. They get along, but will respective influences allow them to be together? That's pretty much it, but it's the kind of film that doesn't require plottage - a functionally viewed genre pic. If we can assume the likes of Barnard, Shane Meadows, Leigh, Ken Loach, and going further back to Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, etc, all worked on and off in the Kitchen Sink Realism genre, then these lines from Warren Buckland (in Teach Yourself Film Studies) seems apt:

"The genre film sets up hopes and promises and brings pleasure if these hope and promises are fulfilled. In studying genre films, we first need to isolate the patterns and themes that appear repeatedly in them. For genre critics, these recurring patterns are not merely formal patterns; instead, they reflect the basic questions, problems, anxieties, difficulties, worries and, more generally, the values of a society and the ways members of that society attempt to tackle those basic questions and problems."

Barnard's film follows these 'patterns' but with an added racial and cultural angle. Ali is from a Sub-continental background, whereas Ava is Irish Catholic (it's notable that she once mentions her father was angry when she took up with not her daughter's Indian father, but her son's English one). The multi-cultural setting of Bradford, Yorkshire, makes this pairing likely but it's all a world away from John Osborne's kitchen.

The two leads are very natural, unsure of themselves at certain points, comfortable in other situations (Ava doing a karaoke number on 'Dirty Old Town' is a highlight). They're just a couple of middle-aged, working folk, trying to get by in the bleak north (apologies to northerners but, jeez, Bradford looks like a miserable old place). It's not too often you see a couple so normal, so 'unfilmic' on the big screen, and this is probably the main reason to see Ali & Ava.

Ali & Ava is now showing at Luna and Palace cinemas. See the above link for details.

See also:

Some potential highlights from the 2021 British Film Festival. Such as:

• The Duke (2020) Roger Michell
• Belfast (2021) Kenneth Branagh
• Best Sellers (2021) Lina Roessler
• Boiling Point (2021) Phillip Barantini
• It Snows in Benidorm (2020) Isabel Coixet
• Last Night in Soho (2021) Edgar Wright
• Operation Mincemeat (2021) John Madden
• The Electrical Life of Louis Wain (2021) Will Sharpe
• The Last Bus (2021) Gilles MacKinnon

As well as '7 from the 70s':

• A Clockwork Orange (1971) Stanley Kubrick
• Barry Lyndon (1975) Stanley Kubrick
• Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) John Schlesinger
• Quadrophenia (1979) France Roddam
• Straw Dogs (1971) Sam Peckinpah
• The Go-Between (1971) Joseph Losey
• The Railway Children (1970) Lionel Jeffries