Category: ARTS (2022)

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

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

Perhaps it was because a few minutes in we were evacuated by a fire alarm, and then upon restarting found the film had to be further rewound because the sound had fallen out of synch… but I never found myself warming to Goran Stolevski’s Housekeeping for Beginners.

After an intriguing opening, it reveals itself to be a blandly tedious film, so focused on depicting the full breadth of LGBTQ+ experiences that it forgets to do anything remotely interesting with its cast or subject matter. All we have is a sequence of increasingly tiresome sublots which remain largely abandoned by the time the credits roll with a whimper.

These subplots concern a ragtag bunch of weirdos and punks who are outcasts owing to their sexualities, a thorny issue in Macedonia, and all living under the same roof.

Dita (Anamaria Marinca) is de facto matriarch of this safehouse and lives with her Roma girlfriend Suada (Alina Serban), her teenage daughter Vanesa (Mia Mustafa), and wrecking-ball six-year-old Mia (Dzada Selim). Swirling around them are other characters, all too uninteresting and thinly sketched to make any kind of impression.

Something exacerbating this is Suada’s swift death from terminal cancer – leaving Dita to raise the children. This is a shame for the audience as well, as Suada is by far the most compelling character Stolevski deigns to give us and her fiery ferocity scorch indelible marks on the rest of the film – one that never manages to recapture her livewire presence.

The tourism board of North Macedonia must have their head in their hands; Stolevski’s rendering of the country’s capital, Skopje, isn’t far above Borat in terms of nuanced cultural sensitivity. Stolevski was born in North Macedonia but emigrated with his family to Australia when he was a child, and clearly carries a deep anger with his native home to depict it as the backwards hovel it appears as in his film.

But at least it sounds nice. I’ve never seen a film from Macedonia before, and the language has a sharp and relentless cadence which at least lends the many, countless, scenes set around dinner tables a nice sense of pacing. It’s something which works well with Naum Doksevski’s handheld cinematography, which has a tendency to place intense close-ups of tired faces against blurred domestic backdrops; these people exist in a state of dissonance with the culture surrounding them. Occasionally, miraculously, the two align and the effect is subtly powerful. And sprinkled in with great frequency, like needles, are the vile slurs which transcend language.

When the film finally settles on one of these ragtag outsiders, it gains a certain degree of narrative drive; Dita first asks gay Toni (Vladimir Tintor) to enlist as Vanesa and Mia’s father, and then to marry her so that she can share custody. The film, briefly, manages to be very funny and the deadpan delivery draws genuine laughs. It’s an arrangement which upends the established norm in the house, and Stolevski’s ensemble rise to the challenge of depicting the shifting dynamics at play. Stolevski, acting as editor here, lets scenes run longer than most and it gives proceedings a deft, improvisational quality.

But these elements are too slight to make any real difference; Stolevski’s film runs on and on trying to tie up all these dangling subplots and fails to end any on a note of satisfaction.

The performances from the gung-ho cast are uniformly committed even if their characters fail to make any real impact, but the film is so bloated and unfocused that my fingers were crossed for another fire alarm. A real shame.

For more on Housekeeping for Beginners visit www.focusfeatures.com/housekeeping-for-beginners

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 National Geographic Documentary Films

Where is the line between faith and madness? Martyrdom and delusion? Friend or invader? They’re questions at the heart of Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss’ The Mission, a compelling documentary produced by National Geographic Documentary Films and screening in the BFI London Film Festival’s documentary slate.

Not to be mistaken for Roland Joffé’s 1986 film of the same name, McBaine and Moss’ The Mission is in an interesting concept for a documentary, but it’s one that eventually suffers from being too even-handed with regard to some of the groups it depicts.

The Mission explores the circumstances surrounding the death of John Allen Chau, an American evangelical Christian and would-be missionary. Chau was attempting to make contact with the still uncontacted people of North Sentinel Island which lies in between the East Coast of Southern India and the West Coast of Thailand. Previous attempts to broach contact have been met with hostility and violence, yet Chau, miraculously, thought he would be the one to bring God to them.

It’s a knotty subject for a documentary, made even more tragic by the fact that Chau’s diary is read in voiceover: “Is this Satan’s last stronghold?” we hear him ask. Or is he pleading? Chau’s voice sounds increasingly desperate, but it’s a device which is inherently manipulative. Chau is dead, we are hearing an actor; the inflections and pauses aren’t his, and the device ultimately adds an uneasy layer of artifice to a film which elsewhere takes a principled commitment in presenting the various attitudes towards missionary work with an even hand.

Missionary work, the film makes painstakingly clear, isn’t just hopping on a coach to Mexico to paint houses and build wells. Chau prescribed to a heavily romanticised, colonial view of missionary work. Juxtaposed with Chau’s diary is a letter written by Chau’s father and given to the filmmakers, again read by an actor.

Chau’s father recalls, with retrospective aching, how smitten Chau was with stories like Robinson Crusoe and Through Gates of Splendour. Chau’s father describes him as suffering a ‘predestined suicide’ and the film has the dreadful air of depicting an easily preventable tragedy.

Something the film takes real sensitivity in is depicting the colonial violence inflicted on the indigenous peoples of the Andaman Islands. It renders this trauma with a coolly anthropological voice, positing history itself as being itself an unreliable document.

Provocatively, it even questions the role of National Geographic in upholding these narratives of primitive savagery and prehistory simplicity, but this idea is promptly forgotten. So long as the Sentinelese people choose to remain isolated, the film argues, the historical narrative remains incomplete.

Where the film falters is in its oddly blameless treatment of the kind of evangelical thinking that led to Chau’s delusion. His father describes Chau as being effectively radicalised by his faith, yet the members of his church escape any genuine scrutiny. Religion is the closest to a modern mythology many in contemporary America still believe.

Compared to the incendiary power of recent documentaries like Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed or Ezra Edelman’s definitive 2016 work O.J.: Made in America, The Mission feels frustratingly toothless, clearly afraid to reckon too intensely with a history of American evangelical extremism. You can’t help but feel that those who encouraged Chau are getting off scot-free, those behind the camera remain almost silent.

As it is the film is often reminiscent of reading an article in a magazine: it’s a fascinating story and one which is told with an admirable journalistic rigour and refreshing historical clarity, but unlikely to linger in the memory like the great works the documentary format has given us.

The Mission – official trailer

For more on The Mission visit: www.films.nationalgeographic.com/the-mission

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 Elle Driver

A cause of celebration for lovers of the animated cinema, there is a lovely, bittersweet new thing for us all to savour. Pablo Berger’s Robot Dreams is miraculously his first foray into animation, yet it retains his trademark playfulness and builds to an uplifting – if overly protracted – crescendo of warm hopefulness.

Robot Dreams is about the helpfully named Dog, who lives in Manhattan’s East Village in the 1980s. Berger subtly and gently draws us an image of isolation and depression: Dog has no friends but watches longingly from his apartment window at the people passing below. He spends his nights playing pong and flicking through the television, numbly whittling away the hours.

Berger portrays Dog’s loneliness as a sad absence of feeling, of numbness. It’s not that Dog is depressed, rather we see that he has nothing worth living for because he has nobody in his life. He feels nothing because he has nobody; his gorgeously animated eyes containing fathoms of longing. For a film which will undoubtedly draw younger viewers, this feels important.

Dog finally finds a like-minded companion in Robot, who is ordered over the phone and delivered to his apartment. Robot tentatively leads Dog out into the busy streets of Berger’s rendering of the greatest city on the planet. It looks like the one we know but is populated exclusively by animals, and blossoms before us like a flower.

Robot Dreams is beautiful to behold, hand-drawn in a way which is reminiscent of Hergè’s The Adventures of Tintin or Goscinny and Uderzo’s Asterix. In an era in which animation artists find themselves beholden to computers and the whims of artificial intelligence, this film is a refreshing change of palette which lessens the impact of some sluggish pacing.

Berger’s vision of New York is exuberant: an octopus bangs drums on the subway, a duck flies kites in Central Park. His version of the East Village is full of wonderful real-life touches which add to the surreal sweetness like The Strand Bookstore and Vesuvius Pizza. Are we to believe that animals built these? That’s the logic of adulthood… Berger asks us to just enjoy the view. He also references the iconic shot of the Queensboro Bridge from Woody Allen’s Manhattan – bonus points from me.

The film begins to lose steam after Robot is stranded on the beach when his batteries die. How will he make it home? The beach is shut until the summer season begins again, although Dog, strangely, doesn’t really make much of an attempt to rescue him.

It’s on the beach that Robot is subjected to the full gamut of adult experience and emotion. Sleazy pigs hack off his leg for parts. A gentle little bird uses his armpit as a nest, and Robot watches with awe as her eggs hatch and candy-pink chicks stare up at him. It’s emotional stuff.

It makes it frustrating that Robot Dreams is an increasingly uneven film with a tone that manages to evoke genuine sadness through the sheer sweetness of its lovable central duo, but some scenes are genuinely upsetting – at least one child in the screening I attended was in tears. This looks like a film for younger viewers but wants to be a film for adults, striking an uneasy balance between both.

Not to say Robot Dreams isn’t worth a watch. For older children grappling with the emotional and social turbulences of puberty this especially this feels like it could have genuine worth, and the fact that not a single word of dialogue is said over the course of its 100-minute runtime gives it a universal appeal which transcends language and geography. Just make sure there’s tissues handy.

Robot Dreams – official trailer

For more on Robot Dreams visit www.elledriver.fr/en/movie/robot-dreams 

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

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