Saint Omer

Here's a harrowing drama from director, Alice Diop, that's based on her own experience at the trial of a Senegalese-French woman who murdered her own 15 month-old daughter in 2013. It's nominally a courtroom drama, but it's like none I've seen before. In fact, the courtroom scenes are a framing device for our protagonist (Diop's surrogate), Rama, played with a calm intensity by artist Kayije Kagame, and her struggles with her own family situation. She's often seen in flashback as a kid dealing with her mother's apparent breakdown. I say apparent because this is one of the film's strengths - Diop doesn't spell things out for her audience. We, adults for the most part, are encouraged to draw our own summations on what's going on and why Rama is so encased in her own thoughts. Her mystery is mirrored by the more morally repugnant question of why the woman on trial, Laurence (Guslagie Malanda) would choose to commit infanticide.

Both the leads are fantastic, and there's one key scene where they hold eye contact for a moment before something simple happens that pivots Rama's whole outlook on the case specifically, and her life in general. That bit's a real kicker. In fact, I have to admit a slight boredom up until that point, especially in the lack of action in the court dialogue scenes. I now realise that I was setting myself up for a French John Grisham-style potboiler (as fun as those can be), instead of an essay on the Medea myth and a wider look at race, gender, culture and even post-colonialism in today's France. More fool me.

There's much to like about the film, notably the way Diop extends the possibility that nothing is black and white, even in such heinous cases as this. African witchcraft is mentioned as one possible reason for the murder - Laurence's mother, Odile (Salimata Kamate) even seems to assert this under oath - and there's a final speech from her female lawyer that pleads for understanding of Laurence's mental illness. Pretty sobering stuff. It's also noteworthy that the sanctimonious, yet entirely reasonable, white, male prosecutor isn't afforded any final words in the wrap up - there's not even a traditional judgement handed down, not one that we see, at any rate.

Saint Omer won't be for everyone and it flirts with visual inertia, but there's enough meat on the bones to find meaning within. Hopefully, Diop will continue to switch between documentaries and narrative features - she's got a pretty commanding voice.

Saint Omer is showing at Luna and Palace cinemas.

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Rama walks through what looks like Les Olympiades at one point, bringing to mind Jacques Audiard's stunning Paris, 13th District (2021). And speaking of France's problems dealing with its colonial past, there's no better film to watch than Michael Haneke's Cache (2005).

Renfield

This is a funny, sweary, extremely bloody take on the Dracula tale, focussing on his manservant, Renfield, and their 'complicated' relationship. It very much hangs on the casting, and the filmmakers have pulled an ace with Nic Cage as the Prince of Darkness. He's as hammy as he's ever been and his utterance of the word 'husk' is worth the ticket price alone. But, in theory, this is not Cage's film, as you might guess from the title. The lead is played by Nicholas Hoult and he's the perfect foil for Cage - meek and awkward (at least until he eats bugs), caring, to a degree, and loyal. Until now.

It appears Renfield is having a few qualms about his role in the uneven partnership, and this has led him to attend a co-dependency therapy group based in a New Orleans church hall. The writers handle this scenario better than might be expected, with some melancholy accompanying the chuckles. This schism in Renfield's life is bound to displease his master and so, when the count is strong enough (in a Voldemort fashion), blood is on the menu. 

There's a wrinkle in the story, about a local plod, Rebecca (Awkwafina), who seems to be the one incorruptible on the entire force, and of course, she crosses paths with Renfield in the process of going after a city crime family. This whole 'corrupt cops in the pocket of gangsters' shtick is a bit flat, but I suppose it suffices as the perilous element of the film - especially once Drac enlists them in his plans for world domination.

Creaky plot aside, director Chris McKay and writers Ryan Ridley, Robert Kirkman and Ava Tramer, place all their bets on the fusion of Cage and Hoult, and this pays off big time. If anything, it could have done with more scenes of them together. Still recovering, Drac bemoans to Renfield, "Get me a happy couple, some unsuspecting tourists, some nuns, a bus full of cheerleaders.... You mean female cheerleaders?.... Oh Renfield, don't make this sexxxxxual!" Cage skirts extremely close to Dr. Evil, by way of Kenneth Williams from the Carry On films, he really gives it the full welly.

One more draw is the comical bloody shredding that ensues in the fight scenes - Rebecca has to ask Renfield, "Did I watch you cut off a guy's arms with a decorative serving platter?" He also proper dismembers a dude, a la Chewbacca, in an apartment building scene that almost recalls The Raid, but with even more flowing claret. Cage even gets to quote Arthur Rimbaud at one point, while Hoult starts to look just like his character in Mad Max: Fury Road - these happy little cross-overs don't happen all the time.

Renfield is in cinemas now and it has more than enough to satisfy, particularly for Cage fans.

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The R-rated shenanigans bring another recent film to mind, Elizabeth Banks' Cocaine Bear (2023). For a younger Cage in vampire mode, try Robert Bierman's Vampire's Kiss (1988).

(Film stills and trailer ©Universal, 2023)

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3

This third 'volume' of the Guardians series of MCU films will likely be James Gunn's last behind the camera, and we'll all be sorry when he's gone. He has such a firm handle on things that it would probably be best for everyone if this actually is the final in the canon. As it stands, it's at least the equal of the first one, possibly even better - watching this feels like flopping down into a comfortably grungy couch.

The story eschews the big picture, galactic-level shitstorms that have hampered many of the recent Marvel efforts. The focus of this film is Rocket and his thus-far concealed back-story. At the start of proceedings he's attacked on Knowhere by a glittering gold twat, Adam Warlock, who critically injures him and escapes after a fearsome tussle. In trying to treat the little fella, it's soon discovered that he has a 'kill switch' inbuilt and any attempt to save him will activate it. Jeepers, time for a mission.

So Rocket spends most of the film in flashbacks, remembering his traumatic past in a comatose state. These scenes are required to flesh out the story and they're pretty affecting at that, but it's the present day shenanigans that hold the aces in terms of fun and tension. The heist on the Orgoscope, a sticky, biological space station; the trip to Counter-Earth (a reasonably cut price way of portraying an alien world); and the frankly brilliant corridor battle on the High Evolutionary's Borg-like ship, are all presented with the requisite balance of comedy and action. The film has a relaxed wit, every line delivered with a familiar ease, nobody struggles to land a joke or a gut punch.

All the cast are on form but Zoe Saldana, as Gamora, takes the plaudits for me. She has, arguably, the hardest job - she's, in fact, playing a totally new character (no spoilers from earlier MCU films). Whether brushing off 'Quinn' or slicing combatants, she's cold as a razor blade, tight as a tourniquet, dry as a funeral drum (© Pink Floyd). Pom Klementieff is fantastic as Mantis, Dave Bautista equally good as Drax and Chris Pratt can do goofy, tough, serious and 'puppy dog' wounded (see Karen Gillan's Nebula for this reference), and carry all on an equal footing. He's the best of the MCU Chris's, for sure.

Must mention that the soundtrack absolutely kicks it - when Faith No More's 'We Care a Lot' arcs up, you realise Gunn is firing (sorry), even though this is the Chuck Moseley era, before Mike Patton joined and they became the best band on the planet. Incidentally, the first film's soundtrack has the higher peaks, but for me, this one is more consistently great, especially in the way Gunn has positioned each track to match the action.

I had one or two minor issues, such as the cliched 'decision' Rocket makes in his coma, the repeated musical slo-mo walks to camera (I'd usually sneer but this shit gets me all the time with Gunn), and the use of children and cute little animals to give the heroes motivation and the audience a big 'awwww'. Also, Warlock was odd - he's unlike the character from the comics (I think) - but Will Poulter makes something of the smallish role.

The choice of Gunn to switch regularly between the highs of the Guardians on song, and the lows of Rocket's body-horror vivisections is certainly ambitious, but he pulls it off. This is a Marvel film with a message, but it's also chock full of laughs and emotion, shot and edited with vibrancy and visual flair. As we've seen with recent MCU films, it's not an easy task to deliver something that ticks all those boxes.

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The corridor sequence is supreme film-making, a brawl that owes something to Park Chan-wook's Oldboy (2003) and Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai (1954) but is quintessentially Gunn, as is his bloodier, swearier The Suicide Squad (2021).

Sisi & I

Here's a fictionalised historical biopic of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, seen through the eyes of her lady-in-waiting, Irma Sztaray. The political background was where the interest lay for me, whether it was hubby Emperor Franz Joseph calling Sisi back to court, or bro-in-law Viktor talking about Viennese orgies, or the trick of using a look-alike to stand in as Empress, even an odd meeting with Queen Victoria, but this is all white noise in the grand scheme of the film. The relationship between Irma and Elisabeth (or Sisi) is the bedrock. They begin as employee and employer, albeit in a slightly dysfunctional workplace, but soon they become firm, with Irma especially discovering deep feelings for the ratbag royal.

The film opens with Irma getting proper walloped by her horrid mother and shortly thereafter being seconded to Corfu to meet up with Sisi and her acolytes. Just when it felt like the majority of the film was going to be encased in this one locale, they up stumps to Algeria, then to Budapest, then to England, encountering hash in one place and a horny toff in another. It all winds up in a confusing (for me, anyway) tragedy by a lake, and if you know your late 19th century European history, you'll see it coming a mile off. Luckily, I was ignorant - hurray, no spoilers!

The tone of this film is a little tricky to land - one minute it's dealing with sensitive subjects like bulimia, the next a saucy play is staged with Viktor coming across all "Oooooh Matron!" Uneven, is putting it lightly. There are visible hints of Portrait of a Lady on Fire and The Favourite, along with Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette in the use of modern music in a period drama, which really didn't work here. There's a lizard motif that returns again and again (you can't keep it/her captive) and the 'sharp object' theme is also pretty prevalent, for reasons I won't give away here.

Sandra Hüller and Susanne Wolff give solid performances as Irma and Sisi, and director/co-writer, Frauke Finsterwalder (great name) weaves some nice moments into the story, but it's all bit messy and dull at the same time. Not terrible, just not as engaging as it could have been.

Sisi & I is showing as part of the German Film Festival at Palace cinemas around Australia from May 2-24.

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Going against type here, I thought I'd mention a few of the films showing at the German FF that look interesting. I've seen none of them, mind, but I've earmarked the following: A Thousand Lines (Michael Herbig); The Teachers' Lounge (Ilker Çatak); B-Movie: Lust & Sound In West Berlin 1979-1989 (Jörg A. Hoppe, Heiko Lange, Klaus Maeck); Lost Transport (Saskia Deising); Merkel (Eva Weber); and And Tomorrow We Will Be Dead (Frederick Steiner). 

Cairo Conspiracy

This film won the best screenplay award at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival for writer/director, Tarek Saleh, and it's clear to see why. A young man from a fishing village in Egypt gets some news from his local Imam that he has been accepted to Al-Azhar University in Cairo - apparently, quite the honour. On his arrival he is chosen, perhaps for his callowness, to keep an eye on a group of Muslim Brotherhood chaps, who may or may not have had some hand in the death of a fellow student. There's also the small matter of the death of the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar and, more pertinently to the government, who to replace him with. It's a belting little set-up, full of fish-out-of-water vibes and political/religious intrigue.

In fact, the film is almost a carbon copy of Jacques Audiard's classic, A Prophet, but with more Islam. The central character, Adam, played with moist intensity by Tawfeek Barhom, is no mug, but he is naïve to the ways of the big city, and if you replace the Uni with the Corsican prison of Audiard's film, you can pretty much see Tahar Rahim's fearful Malik wandering through proceedings. Look, whether or not Saleh had A Prophet in mind when writing this, you can't pick a much better film of this ilk to pay homage to.

Barhom is only surpassed in the acting stakes by the excellent Fares Fares, who plays Colonel Ibrahim, the shaggy, overlooked secret service agent handling the situation. His put-upon glances and shrugs belie the obvious menace he exudes, particularly noticeable in a scene up a tower where one hard-arse character swiftly becomes a blubbering wreck in his presence.  

The story gets slightly baggy in the centre but the machinations of the secret service and the state's relationship with religion manage to keep the tension ticking along well. Watching the dominoes be placed and then topple as both sides jockey for influence is fascinating, and it's all shown from the initially awe-struck viewpoint of Adam. Maybe Saleh's position as a Swedish/Egyptian filmmaker gives him a sort of outsider's perspective, giving the rest of us looking in a chance to digest the internal workings of the country. 

On a side note, this film is known as Boy from Heaven outside Aus, Eng, Ire and US - maybe that title sounded too 'faith-based', a proper red flag for most discerning filmgoers. In saying that, Cairo Conspiracy sounds a bit 'straight-to-video' as well. Luckily, the film itself rises above both titles.

Cairo Conspiracy opens at the Luna cinemas on May 4th.

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Obviously, Audiard's brilliant A Prophet (2009) is a touchpoint, but also the religious politics angle brought back Patrice Chéreau's lush Queen Margot (1994).