Sundown

Here's a film I knew next to nothing about, except that it starred Tim Roth and Charlotte Gainsbourg, both ticks in my book. Oh, and that it was set at a resort somewhere. And Roth mentioned something about money. But that's it. And I'm glad I was mostly in the dark, because Sundown crept up like a stalking horse. In fact, a stalking thoroughbred, because it's a slow-burning triumph.

The film starts with a shot of a load of fish on a boat, eyes in sharp focus. Roth's Neil is staring down at them, looking as distantly bored as anyone has ever looked. The rest of the family - Alice (Gainsbourg), Alexa (Albertine Kotting McMillan), and Colin (Samuel Bottomley) - are enjoying their beach resort holiday in Acapulco (though we don't know where until some time into the film). The dynamic is very 'cool parent' as the teenage kids seem to be settling into an peer-like relationship with the adults. A phone call disrupts the idyll and the group must head back to London, initially due to an ill mother, later it turns out, for her funeral. 

This is where the metaphorical eyebrows of the film start raising. Neil can't find his passport and tells the others to go without him and he'll follow on the next flight. But does he go back to the hotel to look for his passport? Does he bollocks. He gets a taxi to another, more rundown hotel by a beach, and proceeds to flomp. By flomp, I mean he does sweet fuck all. He walks to the beach, has a feed, has a beer, goes to bed. Rinse, repeat. This is Roth's second film for writer/director, Michel Franco after 2015's Chronic. Roth's fantastic again - he was recently in Bergman Island - and hopefully this is the start of a mid-career renaissance for him. He plays a normal geezer like no one else does.

After a few days, Neil meets a local shop clerk, Berenice (Iazua Larios), and starts to have it away. All the while, we're wondering 'what is this guy playing at?' Alice calls him several times only to be fobbed off with excuses about closed consulates and delays. Nothing is given to us, the audience, at least nothing black and white. Around this point in the film, I recalled a kind of thought bubble Neil was having earlier on, near the fish eyes. Could that be something? Surely, it's not simply a film about a dude who goes on holiday and stays there. Well, obviously, it isn't and the mystery here is unthreaded really delicately, with incidents landing so as to be paid off later (see beach shooting).

Sundown is quite a wonderful look at fatalism and societal strictures, and the story is superbly teased out for us, allowing the viewer to actually think about what might be occurring. By the end, Neil's flomping, his absolute dedication to inactivity, reads as a kind of unpublicised credo that is selfish, and at the same time understandable. This is a cracking film.

Sundown opens on July 7th at the Luna and Palace cinemas, with an earlier Movies with Mark screening at the Luna on June 26th.

See also:

Roth and Gary Oldman were great in Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead (1990). You could even see Roth's character here as a super-serious, holiday version of Jeff Bridges' Dude in the Coen Brothers' The Big Lebowski (1998).

The Third Man

This brilliant classic was screened at The Backlot cinema in West Perth as part of the current Book to Film season. It's in my top five favourite films of all time but I think it was the first chance to see it on the big screen and it's as good as I remembered it. Set in post-war Vienna, it stars Joseph Cotten, Orson Welles, Alida Valli, Trevor Howard and Bernard Lee. Harry Lime (Welles) has invited Holly Martins (Cotten) to Vienna with the promise of a job of some kind but when he arrives, he learns the Lime has been killed in a traffic accident. In fantastically economic storytelling, Martins meets various folk - Major Calloway (Howard), Anna Schmidt (Valli) and assorted acquaintances of Lime - and during his ham-fisted investigation he discovers Lime had been watering down penicillin and selling it on the black market. Also, crucially, there was a third man at the scene of the accident, not just the two friends as previously thought. 

So begins Graham Greene's intelligent screenplay, adapted from his own novella, which he used as a base treatment for the film. The director, Carol Reed, is almost at the end of his purple patch of Odd Man Out (1947), another Greene-penned film, The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949), though the film he followed these with, Outcasts of the Islands (1951), is interesting. He returned to yet another Greene text in 1959 with Our Man in Havana, and then virtually signed off his career with the terrific Oliver! in 1968. That's a bloody fine legacy. 

Something I should really have known, but heard from the presenters (Michael and John) at the talk after the film, was that the cinematographer, Robert Krasker, was actually from Perth (in fact, born in Alexandria on the way to Perth, but close enough). Along with all the other geniuses at play here, Krasker is a huge part of the success of The Third Man. The look of the city streets bathed in moist shadow and rubble, the angular tilts, the high and low vantage points, all German Expressionism galore, really make this a visual feast, of course shot in starkly stunning monochrome.

There are iconic scenes throughout. The cat sitting at the shoes of somebody obscured in a doorway. The conversation at the top of the Wiener Riesenrad, the huge Ferris wheel in Vienna's Prater Park (massive thrill to ride on this in 1998 with Crips and Hutchy). The sewer chase sequence. The fingers reaching through the grate. The bleak cemetery staging one of the best final shots in cinema history. And most of this accompanied by Anton Karras's memorable zither score. 

Look, you get the idea. The whole thing is right out of the top drawer. Chase it down if you haven't seen it. You won't regret it.

See also:

Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) is a masterpiece and, as mentioned above, Reed's Odd Man Out (1947) and The Fallen Idol (1948) are fine films also.

Men

All right, Garland, fair dues. You had a crack, picked out the top corner from the halfway line. It just skimmed the bar, didn't it? This is Alex Garland's third feature directing effort, after Ex Machina and Annihilation, and he certainly has some ideas. It seems to be that he struggles to bring them into focus in the wash-up, though. As with Annihilation, Men does really well setting up the conceit, drawing the viewer into this odd, uncomfortable world, where things are slightly askew and we're always on guard. But once again, all this good work is undone by some frankly batshit stuff at the end. Actually, I'm being a bit unfair on Annihilation. That kind of worked, I just felt it petered out a bit. Men, on the other hand, doesn't peter out as much as fucking explode in viscera and placenta.

This is the story of Jessie Buckley's Harper, a woman who decides to take a respite in the countryside after a traumatic experience that has left her a widow. The cottage she arrives at is owned by Rory Kinnear's Geoffrey, an old-fashioned but well-meaning member of the landed gentry. The two leads are excellent, Buckley mirrors our unease while Kinnear amplifies it. The first half hour slowly gathers pace as Harper takes a stroll through the woods until she arrives at a damp tunnel. After singing a couple of echoey notes down its length, she spots a figure at the opposite end, who starts running towards her. This creepy interlude seems to have awakened a naked forest tramp, who proceeds to stalk Harper. The police are called and weirdo is arrested. The realisation of who this guy is (or more accurately, is played by) signals the end of any 'regular' narrative events.

There are moments throughout where Harper has flashbacks to her husband's death, and these are important in that they have a bearing on the events to follow. I'm trying to dance around certain things here - when you see Men, you'll know why. It's probably enough to say that there are themes Garland wants to deliver about toxic masculinity, abuse (both mental and physical) and the repercussions of it, and societal acceptance of all kinds and levels of gender discrimination, personified in the film by police officers, young boys, priests and chavvy pub patrons - all male.

We had lots of questions, including; Are aliens involved? Is Harper mentally destroyed and imagining everything? Is she manifesting misplaced guilt into this serene locale? Could it be a version of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Or The Midwich Cuckoos? Or The World's End? Or even The Wicker (Wo)man? Roly reckons Garland is actually gaslighting us, blaming the audience for being too stupid to understand it. Maybe. For me, he's riding high on ambition and intent but not quite following through with a coherent climax. A very weird, squirm-inducing climax, yes, and somewhat satisfying too (see Harper's resigned 'yeah'), but ultimately defective.

Men opens at the Luna and Palace cinemas on June 16th.

See also:

Garland's Ex Machina (2014) shows how good he can be, and I guess Julia Ducournau's recent Titane (2021) is a kindred spirit in a way.

PLENTY OF SPOILAGE IN POD!!!!