Author: birminghamreview

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BFI London Film Festival at MAC: How to Have Sex is explosive exploration of consent and sexual expectation

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

The word incendiary feels too slight in describing the forceful power of Molly Manning Walker’s ludicrously good debut feature, How to Have Sex, which unfurls with dreadful inevitability but has the pointed urgency of a Molotov cocktail hurtling towards its target.

What makes the film feel so vital is not only the precision of its craft, but in the fact it feels so perfectly fine-tuned to the moral slipperiness of our current moment.

Manning Walker’s film follows three girls on a boozy holiday in Malia, ostensibly there to celebrate finishing their GCSEs (and anxiously await their results) but really looking to get drunk and have sex.

At the middle of this vortex of partying is Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), who is frequently captured in intense close-ups which register whole canvases of emotion and feeling.

For Tara the quest for sex is more important than anything else; she’s still a virgin, and even though that isn’t that important in itself, everyone around Tara acts like it is. When a sleazy rep refers to Tara as a “little flower” you suddenly realise how vulnerable the countless girls who go on these sorts of holidays really are.

But in another, bleaker, way Tara’s friends are correct. They inhabit a sex-obsessed culture and what Manning Walker’s snappy screenplay, drenched in colloquial flavour, captures so painfully are the ways in which these trivial issues can feel so unbearably high-stakes, and the cruel way our society has decided the threshold to adulthood is crossed by having sex.

Intensifying this dread is the fact that Manning Walker’s film often has the feeling of being witness to some natural disaster. The revellers are first heard over a black screen as the opening credits roll: it’s like hearing an earthquake thundering towards you.

The Malia strip is rendered with overwhelming sleaziness by production designer Luke Moran Morris, slathered in neon, alcopops, and sweat. And the morning after it looks like a battleground, rubble-strewn and smoking.

And at the heart of it are a trio of wonderfully committed performances. Em (Enva Lewis) handles her flourishing sexuality with understated, quiet joy. Skye (Laura Peake) paints a fascinating enigma, simultaneously carefree yet oddly jealous of Tara. Why?

The power of Manning Walker’s screenplay comes from the unknowable, that sometimes the actions of others elude simple explanation and that coming to terms with this is a part of becoming an adult. It’s a shame though that unlike Tara, both Em and Skye feel a tad underdeveloped. Depicting the loudness and horniness of the Malia strip lends the film a sense of first-person intensity, but it comes at the expense of a compelling supporting cast.

But these are small issues with the film and do little to dampen the power and urgency of its message. It is bleak and harrowing and feels like an essential piece of filmmaking not just for cinephiles but for anyone who has ever had – or will ever have – sex.

It seems borne from a genuine desire to depict and dissect our present moment and unfurls with a sense of harrowing inevitability, hurtling towards exactly what was always going to happen. It doesn’t have to be this way though, and so long as artists like Molly Manning Walker continue making films like How to Have Sex, one day it won’t be.

How to Have Sex – official trailer

How to Have Sex is set for release in UK cinemas on 3 November. For more on How to Have Sex visit: www.mubi.com/en/howtohavesex

LFF screenings ran at MAC from 4 October until 15 October, for more info 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 https://macbirmingham.co.uk

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

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BFI London Film Festival at MAC: Eileen is transfixing plunge into darkness but a disappointing adaptation of a great novel

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

It feels like a bit of a miracle that Eileen even got made in the first place. It’s adapted from the 2015 novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, the closest thing to a genuine enfant terrible that contemporary literature has and a true radical in her field.

Moshfegh’s interests are in sickness and repulsion and why society makes outcasts of certain people over others. I adore her novels; she writes about what disgusts her, so that reading her work is akin to subjecting yourself to a cold plunge of relentless unsettlement.

So, it’s of no surprise it’s taken this long for anyone to be audacious enough to adapt one of her novels for the screen, and it’s also of no surprise than an artist as exacting as Moshfegh has a screenwriting credit on Eileen with Luke Goebel.

Their adaptation skews closely to the beats of original novel: Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie) works as a secretary in a prison for horny, sex-obsessed teenage boys in 1960s Massachusetts, and the monotony of her everyday life is punctuated by violent fantasies of sex and suicide. She appears to be sliding inexorably towards death, when her life is abruptly upended by the arrival of the alluring Rebecca Saint John (Anne Hathaway), and while Rebecca is quick to take Eileen under her wing it becomes slowly apparent that she has other plans for this vulnerable, lonely young woman.

Key to conjuring this air of quiet deathliness is Ari Wegner’s cinematography, which gives the impressions of having been shot on grainy 35mm film. The world of Eileen has a pallid, sickly tinge to it. It is almost as if the world itself is retching with revulsion over what it’s turned into and is stained with a grimy nicotine tinge. Oppressive too is Craig Lathrop’s production design, all grubby and run-down. Everything is broken and nothing seems worth fixing.

When Rebecca slinks in (she is first seen in her car, blood red) you can’t blame Eileen for being drawn in. Hathaway turns in a performance that fluctuates between feline poise and hysterical weirdness. She gives Rebecca a silkily, predatory quality and when she’s on-screen the film has a perturbing, subtly frightening atmosphere. But she’s also incredibly strange, a thousand film noir stereotypes refracted into one body which is struggling to hold it all together. She is undoubtedly the film’s great pleasure.

It’s a shame then that the character of Eileen isn’t as well served by the transition to screen. The film captures the strangeness of Moshfegh’s writing, but feels oddly reluctant to plumb the depths of bodily repugnance the novel sinks to – where Eileen is an arse-scratching, finger-sniffing creature who refuses to wash her hands and maintains a spectacular thicket of pubic hair.

This dampening is effective in that it allows the film to better depict Eileen’s metamorphosis into a femme-fatale as she’s easier to root for, but you can’t help but feel that the spirit of the novel has been failed. McKenzie feels miscast: she evokes pity but never disgust, so that it’s confusing as to why she’s the outcast she is. Frustrating too is the decision to treat Eileen’s violent daydreams of suicide and murder as the fodder for cheap jumps, at odds with the slow-burn unravelling of the rest of the film.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway from Eileen is that maybe Moshfegh’s novels, being as singular as they are, simply aren’t made to withstand the transposition to another medium. The film, while certainly having its own twisted and warped pleasures, feels slight in comparison to the bona fide genius of the novel. It conjures an atmosphere of miserable dread which is disrupted and toyed with by Anne Hathaway’s pitch-perfect performance as Rebecca Saint John, though fumbles in capturing the first-person intensity of the novel.

But worst of all is that McKenzie feels woefully miscast as the lead, so that the first cinematic adaptation of an Ottessa Moshfegh novel winds up being the one thing it really, really shouldn’t be: forgettable.

Eileen – official trailer

Eileen is set for release in UK cinemas on 1 December. For more on Eileen visit www.neonrated.com/films/eileen

LFF screenings ran at MAC from 4 October until 15 October, for more info 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

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BFI London Film Festival at MAC: All of Us Strangers is beguiling, enchanting love story – and one of the best films of the year

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

This new film from director Andrew Haigh, adapting Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel Strangers, is a beguiling romance which blends the everyday banality of modern London with supernatural wonder. It is astonishing.

This is a profound and human portrait of love, loss, and longing in contemporary London – and by the end of it my notebook was so dappled with tears that the few notes I’d written were largely illegible. No matter: this is a film which draws you in so overwhelmingly that when you emerge the whole world seems aglow with possibility.

Haigh’s film follows Adam (Andrew Scott), a gay man living alone in a modern apartment building of which he appears to be the sole occupant. With a gently composed montage Haigh paints a softly compelling portrait of loneliness against a backdrop of sprawling urban modernity. The whole world is out there, so why can’t Adam bring himself to leave his flat? It’s a depiction of isolation that many of us will understand all too well.

And so, it comes as a shock to both Adam that one night there is a knock at the door. Wanting to be invited in is Harry (Paul Mescal), the building’s sole other inhabitant. Tentatively, a romance begins to blossom between the two. Harry is of a modern sensibility and labels himself as queer, but for Adam the word evokes memories of a bullied childhood in the suburbs.

But what Haigh’s film does with such wonderful ease is to lay alongside this the supernatural. When Adam is drawn back to his childhood home, he finds it exactly as it was left when his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) were killed in a car accident thirty years ago. More baffling is that they’re there, exciting to see him but slightly bemused. There are ghosts everywhere, and they are different for each person.

If it sounds like there’s a lot going on in All of Us Strangers; it’s because there is. But what lends the film its power is how admirably and artfully restrained it is. How it depicts, with such delicacy, how awful it can be to grow up different and how the difficulties of gay childhood have countless reverberations into adulthood.

Adam has never had a partner because he never saw himself worthy of being loved. But the film is told with a heightened poeticism that sidesteps cliché and instead depicts a beautiful longing to reconcile the impossible: the past with the present, slippery memory for firm reality.

Beautiful too are the performances from Scott and Mescal. It really is hard to put into words how powerful their chemistry is, and how it illustrates so sweetly the strangely disarming nature of intimacy. Cinematographer Jamie D. Ramsay often employs charged close-ups which seem to lay their very soles bare, in which you see that both men are simply lost little boys looking for somewhere, and someone, to call home. Scott wears his loneliness like a scar, Mescal his desperation for comfort like an open wound.

Quietly devastating too are Foy and Bell, as Adam’s parents. Adam was never able to tell his parents about his homosexuality but does now, and where it would be easy to push into crass melodrama Foy and Bell – plus Haigh’s script – instead opt for achingly hushed regret. They do so much here with what they allow to flash across their faces; sentences trailing off unfinished. So much hangs in the air, unsaid but present nonetheless.

All of Us Strangers is a ghost story, and Haigh honours the source material by shooting it through with a vein of warm surrealism that recalls not only Yamada’s works but also the novels of Haruki Murakami; everything is treated with a strange matter-of-factness, and nobody really stops to question what exactly is happening.

If you were presented with the opportunity to speak to your parents after their deaths, would you really stop and ask questions?

Haigh’s film reassures us the past is far nearer than it seems, those we mourn and yearn for are only a train-ride away, and nobody is really gone so long as they remain loved. This is cinema-as-hymn, an overwhelming and empowering love letter to those who keep going and make it through.

What an extraordinary and beguiling story of love and ghosts this is, which sings that so long as you live your life in the way you deserve to you are never truly alone. I can think of no film this year that has moved me so powerfully. It is a force from above.

All of Us Strangers – official trailer

All of Us Strangers is set for release in UK cinemas on 26 January 2024. For more on All of Us Strangers visit: www.searchlightpictures.com/all-of-us-strangers

LFF screenings ran at MAC from 4 October  until 15 October, for more info 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

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Proving nothing lives forever with Gang of Four at O2 Institute 05.10.23

Words & live pics by Matthew Osborne

The evening started well, with a conversation between my brother and I about our shared suspicion we might be invincible. Joe recounted to me a couple of pickles he had recently got himself into and out of, and I, of course, have been pronounced clinically dead in days gone by…

We’d never voiced these suspicions to each other before, but something in the arrogance of our shared genetic coding had led us both to the same conclusion. Armed with the knowledge of our own invincibility, we stepped boldly out into the blustery dusk of a Digbeth Thursday and loosened ourselves up with several pints at The Ruin, before heading to the O2 Institute to watch Gang of Four – one of the most influential bands of punk’s second wave – attempt to resuscitate their ageing audience and prove to me, in particular, that punk’s not dead either.

Things started a little ropily on stage, with the first two notes of ‘Return the Gift’ being played loosely and for what seemed like far too long by current guitarist David Pajo. But once the rhythm section of Sara Lee and Hugo Burnham kicked into the insect-like angular groove of what my brother loudly described as “their best song”, we began bopping along to the propulsive beat. As we were singing along to the chorus, “Please send me evenings and weekends”, I looked around at our fellow audience members and wondered why something felt wrong.

Was it that singer Jon King was parading, crablike, across the stage like Morrissey crossed with a post-butter John Lydon – wearing what looked like a slowly unbuttoning red ringmaster’s tunic?

Was it that Sara Lee’s bass seemed unusually large, or that Pajo’s undershirt was the exact colour of his flesh?

Could it be that there were five of them (in the Gang of Four) from time to time, as they were joined by a backing vocalist?

I was unsure and uneasy for a while, but when my jittery pogoing upset a third audience member I realised what it was; the crowd was not moving. Riotous applause followed every song, yet throughout the famously danceable post-punk outfit’s tunes, the audience could barely be seen to sway.

King worked hard to get something out of them, and I felt sorry for him when I wasn’t feeling embarrassed by him. Try as he might, there was no whooping and tearing up the furniture, even when he rhythmically introduced a baseball bat to a microwave for the unsettling ‘He’d Send in the Army’. What had seemed edgy, unusual and gripping when he performed a similar stunt on The Old Grey Whistle Test back in the Thatcherite eighties, was now more akin to a gimmick – not a statement of pent-up fury that we, in this country, are as much within our rights to feel now as people were back then.

My mind wandered to the logistics of performing this stunt every night. How many microwaves were they travelling with, and wasn’t that a terrible lorry-load of landfill I would rather we didn’t bury under the increasingly bulging earth?

Politics aside, the music was tight, loud, and jerky, just how I like my post-punk, and I tried to separate it from the politics and look at the concert objectively… but punk rock has always been intrinsically linked with politics.

And whilst I could hear huge chunks of the band’s songs that have been borrowed and resubmitted by bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Interpol, I felt as though Gang of Four themselves were past their prime. With nothing to say but the same songs they sang forty years ago, I wondered why we are currently lumbered with this trend for ageing rock stars wheeling themselves out once more before retirement for a victory lap.

I understand the desire to play again, myself, having been off the circuit for a couple of years since leaving my own band. The pull of a rapturous crowd is addictive. But I strongly adhere to the belief that the brightest flame burns quickest, and that punk is dead, and has been dead for some time.

My brother and I were amongst the youngest people in attendance, and we are both in our forties. Rock and roll needs the spark of youth to keep it alive, and modern music has a very different energy that makes it more relevant.

No matter how many of the songs I recognised, no matter how well the band played them, no matter how many kitchen appliances were destroyed, there was a lack of energy in the room that the band seemed incapable of adding to. As the encore inevitably came, I worried about the woman who was leaning on the banister in front of me, and wondered whether she may have actually expired. I hadn’t seen her move for quite a while before her husband hobbled over and led her out into the darkness of eleven o’clock and they both yawned and looked ready for bed.

My brother and I may have tipped the balance of alcohol consumption onto the higher end of the invincibility scale, and we staggered out into the night to find someone who would let us onto public transport and get us to some form of fast food.

In the morning I was woken early for work and realised with deep regret and sadness that I was not invincible after all. In fact, it was clear that I was a mere mortal and may even have slightly poisoned myself, which made the day at work an almost unbearable chore.

The evening and the unpleasant morning that followed had been a stark reminder that nothing lives forever, that we all age into irrelevance and immobility, and that no amount of smashing defenceless objects with baseball bats is ever going to change that.

For more on Gang of Four visit www.ffm.bio/gangoffour

For more from the O2 Institute, including a full event programme and links to online ticket sales, visit www.academymusicgroup.com/o2institutebirmingham

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Genre bending jazz fusion ensemble Corto.alto tour debut album at Hare and Hounds on Wednesday 18 October

Words by Ed King

On Wednesday 18 October, the jazz rooted but genre bending Calto.alto comes to the Hare and Hounds in Kings Heath – with support from mezzo-soprano and folk storyteller, Pippa Blundell.

With both acts hailing from Glasgow, they have been playing across the UK promoting new material throughout October, with the Birmingham gig marking a halfway point of their UK tour.

Doors open at 7:30pm, with tickets priced at £15 plus booking fee – as promoted by Leftfoot Events. Minimum age of entry is 14 with anyone aged 16 or under needing adult supervision.

For more direct gig info and links to online tickets sales, click here.

Corto.alto (meaning ‘short, tall’ in Spanish) is the musical moniker for a collective headed by Glaswegian based multi-instrumentalist, composer, and producer, Liam Shortall – who mixes jazz with electronica and a variety of genres, recording and preforming original compositions with some of Scotland’s most exciting young musicians.

Alongside Shortall, the current Calto.alto line up includes pianist Fergus McCreadie, trumpet player James Copus, drummer Graham Costello, and trombonist Anoushka Nanguy.

Their debut album, Bad With Names, was released in early October through New Soil Records and Bridge the Gap – receiving positive reviews from the jazz music punditry.

London Jazz News called it “a fine palette of live sounds and electronic music… with rich harmonies and exciting improvisation”, further celebrating the collective skill sets and ambitions from the “golden generation of Scottish jazz talent” who appear on the LP.

The Skinny goes on to praise the album’s “variety, honesty and personality”, calling it a “hypnotic blend of soulful jazz expressed through outstanding levels of musical ability”.

But Corto.alto is as ‘cross over’ as you can get without getting lost, as Shortall’s background in electronica production takes the album on brave and exciting twists and turns across its 12 instrumental tracks.

There’s jazz, for sure, but also soul, strings, the occasional rock riff, and a sprinkling of psychedelia over breakbeat, making me think of a Stan Getz and Maya Jane Coles lovechild. Not words you often get to write…

(It is also worth mentioning, at this point and in general, that tour support Pippa Blundell released her debut EP Sisters at the beginning of the UK dates with Corto.alto – and will no doubt be showcasing tracks from this, alongside her back catalogue. A phenomenal vocalist and folk artist, having Blundell on the bill alongside Corto.alto is certainly getting your money’s worth and a real gift for any audience.)

And even the most egotistical man of letters wouldn’t try and describe the ineffable – so I’m simply going to leave you with the appropriately named last track on Corto.alto’s debut album, ‘Bye’.

A beautiful example of the vison and delivery from this exciting Scottish ensemble, and a damn fine video too. Enjoy.

‘Bye’ – Corto.alto

Corto.alto plays at the Hare and Hounds in Kings Heath on Wednesday 18 October, with support from Pippa Blundell. For direct gig info and links to online ticket click here.

For more on Corto.alto visit: www.linktr.ee/corto.alto

For more on Pippa Blundell visit: www.inktr.ee/pippablundellmusic

For more on the Hare and Hounds, including full event listings and contact information, visit: www.hareandhoundskingsheath.co.uk

For more from Leftfoot Events visit: www.leftfootevents.co.uk