Film Shapes

Director/co-writer Anne Fontaine ( Coco Before Chanel , Gemma Bovery ) shines a light on the role of the police in modern France with her new film, Night Shift . It starts promisingly, showing the same situations in the same day from the perspective of the three central characters (similar to the money exchange sequence from Tarantino’s Jackie Brown ). This format teases out the personalities of each officer, revealing a tad more about them as the timeline repeats; one character appears out of focus in the background but is front and centre on the next pass, another is completely off screen except for his voice and is later shown at an adjoining table. Sadly, this style is only maintained for the first act, the rest of the film reverting to a traditional narrative for the titular night shift duty. The three leads, Virginie (Virginie Efira), Aristide (Omar Sy) and Erik (Grégory Gadebois) volunteer to escort an illegal immigrant from a Parisian detention centre to Charles de Gaulle airpo...

Mandibles is the latest film from French musician turned filmmaker, Quentin Dupieux (aka Mr. Oizo). It’s an odd film, veering between lovably surreal farce and nihilistic idiocy. The premise has our protagonists, Manu (Grégoire Ludig) and Jean-Gab (David Marsais), stumbling upon a grotesquely large fly in the boot of a car they’ve stolen. This scuppers the completion of a possibly dodgy job they’re on but these two will not be disheartened. Jean-Gab suggests training the huge fly, which he names Dominique, and putting it to work for them as a kind of thief drone – one that “doesn’t need batteries”. The action takes place in a less than idyllic South of France where Manu and Jean-Gab lurch almost involuntarily from one ludicrous situation to another, all the while giving each other a nerdy hand-shake called ‘The Toro’. After some initial criminal tomfoolery, Manu is mistaken for someone else and invited to a country villa by some young women. Offer accepted, they take advantage of th...

I was a little hesitant about The Father before going in. It looked austere, worthy, SERIOUS! These adjectives can often equate to dullness so I was chuffed to find that looks were pretty deceiving in this case. This is a tricksy little gem of a film. Sure, it has all those aspects mentioned above but it's handled more like a thriller to be unboxed, uncrinkled, smoothed out. Anthony Hopkins plays Anthony (bravely retaining the name), the father of the title, whose daughter, Anne, played by Olivia Colman, is struggling to deal with his creeping dementia. This manifests in Anthony falling out with carers, even accusing them of stealing and generally being a rude prick to everybody. The genius of the story is the way it presents Anthony's mental disintegration from his perspective. Without going into detail, the audience is riding along with the father as he attempts to make sense of all the comings and goings in his flat. This unknowing perspective is unsettling and not a little...

A bit late to this but I'm glad I decided to check it out. The Dry is a simmering, dusty mystery set in the drought-stricken Australian scrub. It's directed by Robert Connolly and co-written by Connolly and Harry Cripps, adapted from a novel by Jane Harper. Eric Bana plays Aaron Falk, a Melbourne-based federal police officer, who is urged by the parents of his old mate, Luke, to return to his hometown for said mate's funeral. Without going into the rabbit's hole, suffice to say, Aaron isn't entirely welcome in the town of Kiewarra (fictional, though Ballarat is mentioned as nearby). The crime leading to the death of Aaron's friend may or may not be linked to another crime 20 years before, which drove Aaron and his dad to abandon the town, but digging around for facts proves difficult. As one character says, "When you've been lying about something for so long, it becomes second nature." The way the film winkles out the details of both crimes is mas...

There are some films that you know you're probably going to like five minutes after the opening shot. And then there are those that slot into the opposite camp. Much like French Exit . This is a comedy drama that's very light on comedy, and whatever drama there is happens in a baffling, nonsensical way. Patrick deWitt adapted this from his own novel and, though he won me over with his script for The Sisters Brothers , he quickly lost me with this one. The film is nominally about a high class New Yorker, played by Michelle Pfeiffer, and her boring son, Lucas Hedges, who one day find themselves insolvent. Oh-so-whimsically a plan is hatched to move to Paris and after selling most of their belongings, off they sail. And I mean sail, the dickheads taking a cruise liner rather than flying. That's the kind of film it is. Oh, and there's a fucking cat wandering around, serving no noticeable purpose until later in the film, when things really go to pot. Pfeiffer is pretty good,...

So a trip to Busselton (pre-lockdown 2) coincided nicely with $10 tickets at Orana Cinema for a screening of Wonder Woman 1984 . Incidentally, why choose the year 1984? Is it simply that people may have an inkling of Orwell's novel? I couldn't find any other reason, aside from it allowed the writers to position the story just after the 'Star Wars' strategic defense initiative was set up, as well as having a Reagan-esque goose as President. If that's their reasoning, then it's no surprise that many things in the film require the audience to be in a pretty accepting mood. But let's begin with the positives. Gal Gadot as WW is great; she's clearly a good fit for the role and her acting stock has risen a touch in this - in her key scene with Chris Pine she displayed an unexpected emotional range. Pine is always a safe pair of hands in this kind of role - more boisterous than Evans, more serious than Hemsworth but less goofy than Pratt. Kristen Wiig and Pedro...

I realised a few weeks ago that I've been doing the Film Shapes blog since 2011. This got me thinking that it might be a doddle to put together an aggregation of the top tens of each year, a kind of 'best of the decade' list. Not such an easy task. I've had to stretch a mooted ten out to twenty and the order has been troubling me for some days. As it turns out, all these films were actually made between 2011 and 2020, otherwise titles like Inception may have snuck in. Anyway, I'll leave you with this for now and bugger the consequences. 20. Slow West (2015) An odd, melodic Western, directed by John Maclean (of The Beta Band), this has young Scot, Kodi Smitt-McPhee crossing the perilous US west, helped or hindered along the way by their excellencies Michael Fassbender and Ben Mendelsohn. As the title suggests, it's slow-paced but that's what sets it apart from other films of its ilk. Come to think of it, this is a pretty lonely ilk. 19. Bohemian Rhap sody ...

The Perth Festival is showing a bunch of interesting looking films at the Somerville Auditorium on the grounds of UWA. This one, The Mole Agent , runs Feb 1st to 7th. It's well worth a look. Documentary makers, like all film makers, are constantly on the lookout for ways to present their message. The styles available to documentary as a genre are seemingly limited, which is why Maite Alberdi’s The Mole Agent seems so fresh. She has chosen to couch her story in the figure of a genuinely sweet old widower named Sergio. His task is to go undercover in a nursing home in Chile and report back to a private detective regarding a client’s mother. And there is the simple genius in the telling of the story. Rather than staging this as a newsy expose, with lurid details and sensational confrontations, Sergio acts as a conduit for the very real, very lonely situations of the residents of the home. His conversations with them are basically interviews but these are portrayed with the empathy an...