Author: birminghamreview

Words by Jimmy Dougan (follow him on Letterboxd here) / Press images courtesy of A24

There’s something a tad Bergman-esque about the premise of May December – a melodramatic and tedious comedy-drama from director Todd Haynes and the centrepiece of this year’s London Film Festival, which is sadly nowhere near the standout it was hoped to be.

With typical commitment, Julianne Moore plays Gracie Atherton-Yoo – a nervy woman married to her younger second husband Joe (Charles Melton).

Gracie, as the film makes painfully clear, is very stressed.

The source of her anxieties is Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), a respected actor coming to spend time with Gracie. You see, Gracie is a sex-offender: she seduced Joe when he was thirteen and she was in her thirties. Gracie was married with children at the time, discovered she was pregnant with Joe’s child, and was sent to jail. Miraculously, her and Joe are still together. Elizabeth is playing her in an independent film and promises Gracie the story will be handled with sensitivity and seriousness.

Haynes has a proclivity to shoot the two women standing next to each other, staring into a mirror and the camera. They look at each other like hungry beasts, circling and snapping. Portman is playing Elizabeth playing at being Gracie played by Moore. Where does one end? Where does the other begin?

Tentatively, both Gracie and Elizabeth deliberately strain the limits of the dynamic and it’s in these scenes that the film is strongest. Elizabeth draws Gracie’s ire when she interviews her first husband and hears about the trauma of finding out what his wife had done. Gracie, meanwhile, does Elizabeth’s makeup – but it’s in the image of how Gracie wishes to be seen and not what she really looks like.

Haynes is operating in a classic mode of camp filmmaking here, but the film skims uncomfortably close to being a poor imitation of Pedro Almodóvar. What makes Almodóvar’s films so thrilling is their rapid-fire dialogue and sumptuous production design, with a steady tension bubbling away beneath the surface before it inevitably explodes; Haynes’ film is characterised by bland interiors and a plot which strains credibility, but fixates itself on irony-tinged seriousness.

It’s not to say that May December isn’t worth watching. It’s never not-very-entertaining-to-watch; Portman and Moore lock horns, their strained attempts at keeping things civil despite the weirdness of the situation never failing to draw laughs. And there’s a lovely supporting turn from Charles Melton as Gracie’s husband. He plays Joe’s realisation that perhaps by staying with Gracie he robbed himself of the opportunity to do bigger and better things, with kind-hearted naivety.

But none of these things dispel the impression that May December should be a far better film than it is. The melodramatic zoom-ins (accompanied by serious piano and strings) start funny but become gradually unbearable, and the shots of Portman and Moore sizing each other up in mirrors lose their impact quickly.

The pacing of Samy Burch’s screenplay is sluggish and unfocused: is this about a method actor manipulating her way to a good performance, or an abuser reckoning with the awfulness of what she did? Or is it about a victim realising the trajectory of his life has been decided by the singular abhorrence of what he was subjected to as a child?

Each would make a fine film, but whilst May December strives to be all three it’s too slack to be a thriller and too shallow to be a compelling study of life after abuse.

Instead, Haynes goes through the motions, giving us a quotable film full of excellent screengrabs and GIFs that never quite takes on the power it should do. And it’s Moore who comes most unstuck, delivering yet another rendition of the vaguely hysterical woman she’s been stuck playing for most of her career. She deserves better than this.

May December – official trailer

LFF screenings begin at MAC on 4 October and run until 15 October, with tickets for all films and events on the programme now on sale. For full listings and links to online ticket sales visit:  www.macbirmingham.co.uk/london-film-festival-2023

To read more about the BFI London Film Festival go to: www.whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff

For more from MAC, including all events listings, visit www.macbirmingham.co.uk

To follow Jimmy Dougan on Letterboxed visit www.letterboxd.com/jimmydougan

Words by Jimmy Dougan (follow him on Letterboxd here) / Press images courtesy of A24

The gut-wrenching power of classic Italian neorealism lives on in Savanah Leaf’s Earth Mama, a quietly devastating portrait of a single mother fighting against uncaring bureaucracy to keep her family together.

It is a sad and slow film, but by pushing beyond straightforward realist trappings it ultimately conjures a gently radical relationship with the natural world and takes on a potent hopefulness that allows its protagonist – and us – to briefly graze the transcendental.

Leaf’s film follows Gia (Tia Nomore), a twenty-four-year-old black single mother in Oakland struggling to balance the increasingly desperate demands of her both ubiquitous and personal situation. She must work because she must pay child support, but also can’t work because she must attend classes and take courses on precisely the thing she’s not being allowed to do.

It’s in this premise that the film recalls classic neorealist works like Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Umberto D (1952) – one person struggling to meet the demands of an uncaring society.

The state is depicted as cold and harsh: when Gia rightly points out her predicament to a support worker, she’s painted as having an attitude. But from the opening shot of a black woman speaking directly to the camera, Leaf urges us to consider and interrogate the ways in which we see black women, and perhaps the subconscious ways we judge them before they’ve even begun speaking.

Indeed, the acts of, and differences between, looking and seeing form a vital component of Leaf’s vision of black motherhood. So much hangs unsaid in this film; so many vast silences. In them we realise how vital the act of articulation is in the defence of one’s principals, but how the harsh cruelties of systemic inequality sometimes mean that there simply are no words. In one extraordinary moment the sound gives way entirely, and we are left only with the image of what Gia really is – a frightened, overwhelmed young woman.

Miraculously, this is Nomore’s first professional acting credit. She is a rapper signed to San Francisco’s Text Me Records. Her work in Earth Mama is one of the finest performances of the year: the way she holds Gia’s stillness within her, sad yet never melodramatic, is wholly shattering. She looks so unfathomably tired.

Her face, shot in gorgeous 16mm film by cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes, is a suppressed force of nature. It’s an affect heightened by Leaf’s constant use of close-ups. Even when people are addressing her we focus intimately on Gia’s face and expressions, and see in her eyes the acceptance that the minute she raises her voice she becomes another stereotype.

Where the film flirts with the trappings of the transcendent – a filmmaking style coined by Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader to encompass the measured works of Robert Bresson, Yasujirō Ozu, and Carl Theodor Dreyer – is in the way it inextricably links Gia’s experience of motherhood with the natural world which lurks beyond the confines of Oakland.

When Gia relapses, we see her floor rendered as that of a forest. In another scene Gia’s two children read short stories written in care. When her son Trey (Ca’Ron Coleman) begins to speak, trees glimpsed through a window began to wave and sigh as if they are synchronised; for a moment it appears all creatures great and small are existing in perfect, steady harmony.

It’s one of many softly heart-rending moments in a slowly paced film that will certainly not be for everyone, but if you allow it to wash over you in the way it deserves to one that will stir your body and soul.

Earth Mama – official trailer

For more on Earth Mama visit www.a24films.com/films/earth-mama

LFF screenings begin at MAC on 4 October and run until 15 October, with tickets for all films and events on the programme now on sale. For full listings and links to online ticket sales visit:  www.macbirmingham.co.uk/london-film-festival-2023

To read more about the BFI London Film Festival go to: www.whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff

For more from MAC, including all events listings, visit www.macbirmingham.co.uk

To follow Jimmy Dougan on Letterboxed visit www.letterboxd.com/jimmydougan

Words by Jimmy Dougan (follow him on Letterboxd here) / Press images courtesy of Neon

With her sophomore narrative feature The Royal Hotel director Kitty Green establishes herself as a connoisseur of contemporary female dread, unfurling a tightly coiled cobra of misogynistic threat into what gradually becomes one of the most harrowing, intense films of the year thus far.

Even if the slippery moral is undercut by the bluntness of the film’s ending, The Royal Hotel is well worth your time.

The premise could almost be the start of a comedy: two skint American backpackers accept a job tending the titular bar deep in the Aussie outback. The Royal Hotel serves a mining town, though to their dismay ‘town’ here means a series of corrugated metal shacks and little else. The nearest inklings of civilisation are a six-hour drive away.

Liv (Jessica Henwick) takes to it quickly enough – after all, she’s the one in need of the cash. But Hanna (Julia Garner of Ozark fame) has reservations. Gruff owner Billy (Hugo Weaving) is a drunk, and his marriage to cook Carol (Ursula Yovich) is strained. And every night the men come, leaning on the bar like dogs chasing scraps and vying with escalating intensity for Liv and Hanna’s attention.

Watching The Royal Hotel is akin to watching a cruise missile head inexorably towards its target. You know, with every fibre of your being, that this isn’t a film that was ever going to end well.

But whereas Green’s 2019 breakout workplace-harassment-thriller The Assistant was about the oppressive normalcy of misogyny, The Royal Hotel instead focuses on the ways in which such attitudes are not only enforced but downright celebrated.

The mining town is the patriarchy made manifest, a hotbed of sexual desperation and chauvinist posturing. Billy is a drunk, but he rules the bar with an iron fist. When he’s hospitalised – hours away – you feel your stomach lurch with Liv and Hanna. It’s just them.

That’s not to say Hanna and Liv are entirely hapless. Garner is the image of hardened poise, and what’s so refreshing about the film is the way Green and Oscar Redding’s script firmly refuses to pigeonhole her into being a ‘victim’. There’s no doubting that Hanna is completely out of her depth, but the situation lights a fire of grim and determined pragmatism within her.

She isn’t not going to make it out of this, and she’s dragging Liv with her. She doesn’t even entertain the notion of the inevitable occurring. You see it in Garner’s eyes. It’s a performance of poised, quiet ferocity.

When that missile finally meets its target the film has an atmosphere of tenterhook suspense. But it never quite explodes in the way you expect it to, largely because Green firmly refuses to pass judgement on either the girls’ naivety or the men’s actions (it’s made very clear that Hana and Liv’s predecessors loved their time there.)

A stressful denouement is resolved by convenience, and the explicitly feminist nature of it undercuts the razor-sharp subtlety of the film up to that point. But perhaps that’s the point, and perhaps it really is that simple: the world is far more flammable than it appears. Let ‘em rip.

The Royal Hotel – official trailer

LFF screenings begin at MAC on 4 October and run until 15 October, with tickets for all films and events on the programme now on sale. For full listings and links to online ticket sales visit:  www.macbirmingham.co.uk/london-film-festival-2023

To read more about the BFI London Film Festival go to: www.whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff

For more from MAC, including all events listings, visit www.macbirmingham.co.uk

To follow Jimmy Dougan on Letterboxed visit www.letterboxd.com/jimmydougan

Words by Jimmy Dougan (follow him on Letterboxd here) / Press images courtesy of MGM and Amazon Studios

There isn’t a labyrinth at the heart of Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, though there is a perfectly kept hedge maze. And there is – of course, because there must be – a minotaur, waiting to be fed.

Fennell is the daughter of silverware magnate Theo Fennell. Privately educated, she went to Oxford University so credit to her for writing what she knows: this is a palpably sexy portrait of the uber wealthy in freefall, with a glorious mid-noughties soundtrack to boot. High class, low morals.

The film, the Opening Night Gala of this year’s BFI London Film Festival, is sure to raise eyebrows. It features some of steamiest antics of any film this year, with an unabashed sexual frankness that manages to be genuinely shocking, if tiresome by the film’s overdue ending. The use of bathwater? It must be seen to be believed.

And how wonderful to finally see Barry Keoghan in a fully-fledged leading role. He plays Oliver Quick, a twitchy fresher arriving at Oxford friendless and penniless in the halcyon autumn of 2006. There he meets the ludicrously hot Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi) and realises that their friendship is quickly blossoming into an unreciprocated infatuation. Oliver doesn’t just want Felix. He needs him: Keoghan practically convulses with longing. It’s sexy and weird in equal measure.

Touched by Oliver’s sad home life, Felix invites him to spend the summer in his family home, the eponymous mansion. The way Saltburn upends its established visual language for this change really is its ace. We are whisked away with Oliver, breathless and awed. And what a setting it is. It’s a grandiose maze of bedrooms, libraries, dining halls and parlours that deliberately fails to coalesce into a setting we get to grips with.

Like Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel, there’s a sense of Saltburn being a beast temporarily submitting to human control. Nothing quite adds up. Just when you think you know how Oliver’s bedroom connects, say, to the living room, Fennell wrongfoots us. It’s a hall of mirrors, of lust-charged glimpses and glances. Like the relationship between Oliver and Felix, the house seems to rearrange itself. Who is really in charge here?

Saltburn is captured resplendently by cinematographer Linus Sandgren. Many shot here are breath-taking, and this is consistently one of the year’s most beautiful films. The colour grading, coupled with the unique 1.33:1 aspect ratio, gives the impression of looking at Polaroid photography rendered as live flesh, an effect heightened by Keoghan addressing the camera directly, from the future, throughout. Saltburn is drenched in the warm fuzz of memory, knowingly imperfect and even more beautiful for it.

There are easy comparisons to make between Saltburn and The Talented Mr. Ripley, but it feels more helpful to suggest Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited with its longing to return to the past, as a helpful reference.

The Brideshead comparisons are also helpful in thinking about Fennell’s up-for-anything supporting cast. Richard E. Grant relishes playing Felix’s father Sir James. The audience are cackling before he’s opened his mouth. Rosamund Pike devours the script as mummy bear Elsbeth Catton. As the butler, Paul Rhys is quietly devastating and it’s refreshing to see Carey Mulligan briefly have fun as an eccentric, mentally unstable socialite. Saltburn is the perfect playground for these wonderful actors to flex their muscles.

Lurking in the periphery is Felix’s sister Venetia (Alison Oliver) who is perhaps more aware of what’s going on than her brother. Frustratingly, Fennell never really finds anything particularly interesting for her to do. The film, for better and worse, remains dominated by nasty, sex-charged boys.

Speaking of horny boys: Keoghan and Elordi are a pairing so charged with electricity that you worry the projector might blow. In one scene Elordi languishes barely clothed on the carpet, illuminated through drawn curtains by blazing sun: “So fucking hot,” he sighs. Oliver barely manages to stammer “I know.” When they aren’t on screen together, you itch to see them reunited.

It’s delayed gratification that Oliver’s after, so it’s disappointing that Fennell’s screenplay falters to really set the bomb off. She makes witty commentary on the rich but, perhaps owing to her own upbringing, seems afraid to twist the knife.

The film being set in 2006 works to a degree, ensuring Fennell doesn’t have to worry about how social media would affect the plot, but also stops Saltburn from feeling topical in the way it really, really should. In our post-Succession era, it just doesn’t cut it.

It’s exacerbated by the fact that Saltburn goes through four separate endings– each less interesting than the one preceding it – before settling on the cheapest. Like the end of a boozy holiday, you’ll no doubt be glad to depart the haze of Saltburn but that certainly doesn’t mean the trip isn’t worth taking; what a ride.

Saltburn – official trailer

LFF screenings begin at MAC on 4 October and run until 15 October, with tickets for all films and events on the programme now on sale. For full listings and links to online ticket sales visit:  www.macbirmingham.co.uk/london-film-festival-2023

To read more about the BFI London Film Festival go to: www.whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff

For more from MAC, including all events listings, visit: www.macbirmingham.co.uk

To follow Jimmy Dougan on Letterboxed visit: www/letterboxd.com/jimmydougan