Out This Week
Hail, Caesar! (Universal, cert 12)
To describe the Coen brothersâ Hail, Caesar! as a love letter to Hollywood is to understate the woozy, delirium these two middle aged men must have been in as they planned and put it together. But then their entire career has been marked by a regard, if not obsession, with the golden age.
So whatâs the plot? Josh Brolin plays a studio fixer trying to find a sword’n’sandal star (George Clooney) abducted by a bunch of blacklisted communists â the Hollywood Ten in all but name. AndâŠÂ erâŠÂ thatâs about it. Clooney is a Victor Mature/Richard Burton composite, a white-teethed naive whoâs sculpted a career on his looks, though heâs keen to prove (if only to his kidnappers) that he has brains enough to take in what communism is, if thatâs what theyâre talking about.
Over on left field is Alden Ehrenreich (the filmâs standout) as a hick actor suddenly asked to drop the lasso and play a suave high-tone lead, a part for which he is fundamentally unsuited. An Esther Williams type (Scarlett Johansson), more sexually active than her squeaky public image suggests. The supercilious, gay, foot-obsessed British director (Ralph Fiennes). A pair of gossip columnists, stand-ins for Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons (both played by Tilda Swinton and the only role(s) that doesnât work). Channing Tatum as a Gene Kelly style hoofer.
And on they go. Glueing all these people together â though to be honest itâs a stew of tasty bites rather than a dish in itself â is superb cinematography thatâs been colour graded to look like Technicolor, or in the black and white sequences steals from the aslant style of Welles, or Hitchcock at his most expressionistic.
The Coens repeatedly pull the same trick â one minute itâs a film about being in Hollywood, behind the scenes, at the studio. And then weâre suddenly inside a Hollywood film itself, the standout scene being Tatumâs On the Town style dance sequence, the sort of thing that would take days to film but is here presented as a finished item, as if it all happens just like that.
Donât expect satire or dirt-dishing, in other words; there isnât any â this is the Hollywood that people who go on studio tours want to see. Is Hail, Caesar! a great film? Nah. But itâs loads of fun, and great entertainment.
Hail, Caesar! â Watch it/buy it at Amazon
A Bigger Splash (StudioCanal, cert 15)
David Hockneyâs painting of the same name is the inspiration behind the second collaboration between actor Tilda Swinton and director Luca Guadagnino, an Antonioni-esque farce, if there could be such a thing, that looks at the lives of people whose cultural ground zero is the late 1960s.
Hockneyâs picture is a freeze-frame of a diving board, a pool, a modernist building and a splash where someone has just jumped in. Itâs notably empty and the film also mines that feeling of empty existential ennui, of having just missed something, as lived out by aloof, Bowie-like rock star Tilda Swinton, now silent after an operation on her vocal cords and recuperating in Italy.
Into her life of sunbathing, fucking new beau Matthias Schoenaerts and waiting⊠waiting⊠comes old husband Ralph Fiennes and his daughter Dakota Johnson. Husband Fiennes, it transpires, is back for the woman he âgaveâ to Schoenaerts. And after a while it starts to look like the daughter is after the younger man, especially once sheâs seen him strip down to his swimming trunks.
Thereâs great acting on a grand scale here, which lifts the film beyond its potential to be a farce in the style of Frayn or Fo or Feydeau. Fiennes in particular is aflame as the babbling ball of unmedicated mania, driving the drama as his character drives the people around him semi-mad.
Guadagnino and DP Yorick Le Saux, meanwhile, lay on the glamour, the upscale, savage Sicilian locations really helping deliver that feeling of bodies heated through to the point where gristle has given up being tough.
But maybe Walter Fasanoâs editing is the best thing of all, particularly as the film ups its pace and heads into the final third, when the jealousy and intrigue get particularly machiavellian and everyone (no spoilers) becomes dangerously implicated in everyone elseâs affairs.
Itâs a much better film than the previous Guadagnino/Swinton collaboration, the more Visconti-like I Am Love. But though Guadagnino and screenwriter David Kajganich know exactly how to get into the heart of the things, they arenât quite sure how to get out again. Antonioni had the same trouble, so that’s a quibble.
As a beautifully made essay summing up a generation, Guadagnino triumphs. And he’s nicer than some have been. This lot are dreadful and theyâre self-obsessed, but at least theyâre alive.
The Bigger Splash â Watch it/buy it at Amazon
Iona (Verve, cert 15)
Scott Grahamâs film Shell was a wow-some bleak beauty that made much of the face of its star, Chloe Pirrie, who played a young woman living a life of restricted expectation up in the wilds of Scotland. Shell was the girlâs name, and the name on the sign at the gas station where she lived.
Itâs a case of same/same with Iona â the name of the main character, played by Ruth Negga, and the small Scottish island sheâs returned to with her son after some bad stuff has gone down in London. And itâs again an almost Thomas Hardy-esque tale of woe about a woman having a tough time of it in pretty surroundings, Neggaâs fascinating features â as if giant eyes, eyebrows and mouth had been dropped onto a waiting face â doing the same this time round as Pirrieâs did last.
Graham is a good and perhaps a great film-maker and as soon as his film starts heâs stoking a sense of almost Wicker Man-like dread as he introduces one member of the community after another. What is Iona running from? Are her kith and kin really that pleased to see her? Why is her skin colour dark (Negga is half-Ethiopian) and is that a case of colour-blind casting or some part of the jigsaw? Is this tight-knit community perhaps a little too tightly knit?
Indeed it is, and as the story progresses Iona re-establishes connections with Daniel (Douglas Henshall), who might be a blood relative, or a former foster father, weâre not initially sure, and her son works up a fancy for Sarah (Sorcha Groundsell), a pretty local girl with paralysed legs and a look on her face that says, âsave me from my suffocating parents.â And what teenage lad doesnât like a girl who canât run away? Hardy again.
As in Shell, Graham and DP Yoliswa von Dallwitzâs do a lot without shouting about it, one minute focusing on detail, another capturing mood, using the camera in a non-dogmatic way, as a tool to do a job. They craft art in the process. I canât wait for Grahamâs next.
Iona â Watch it/buy it at Amazon
The Chambermaid Lynn (TLA, cert 18)
Lynn (Vicky Krieps) is a flatliningly shy, depressed woman whose life means nothing to her. She has a McJob, cleaning hotel rooms and, being OCD, sheâs really good at it. Sheâs also having half a fling with the greasy hotel manager, who reminds her âyou know itâs over,â meaning their affair, before she unzips him anyway and gives him a blow job.
Voyeuristic to the point of going through guestsâ stuff, trying on their clothes, Lynnâs life takes on new meaning when sheâs caught on the hop one day and ends up hiding underneath a guestâs bed after a guest returns unexpectedly. It turns out that the guest has booked an S&M session with a local whore.
Not long afterwards, Lynn summons the courage to book the same woman, Chiara (Deutschland 83âs Lena Lauzemis), for a session too, perhaps hoping that maybe extreme pain will break through her carapace. And here The Chambermaid Lynn itself breaks through, having been so far one of those shadowless dramas about anomie, shot in the sort of flat style thatâs been in favour in Germany at least since 2006âs grimly brilliant Requiem. And it becomes a film about love⊠of a sort.
Thatâs not to say Lynnâs anomie disappears. It doesnât. But her condition intrigues Chiara, and in Lynn Chiara finds someone who is sheer, pure, artless, uncomplicated. And she likes that. Clearly itâs a contrast to her other clients. Quite how much Chiara likes Lynnâs mental state of being is what the film is about. Whether it works because of beautifully observed detail (a Benny Hill movement of a bare foot by Chiaraâs client as a stiletto heel is driven into it), the vaguest suggestions that itâs dealing with Germanyâs dark past (Lynnâs motherâs obsession with crochet and the repeated use of the word âHakenâ (the crochet hook), as in âHakenkreuzâ â the Swastika). Or, less tenuously, because after the dry well of the opening scenes, The Chambermaid Lynn turns into the sweetest story of burgeoning emotion, and features an erotic seduction scene of exquisite tenderness.
Itâs a slight drama, but a very winning one.
The Chambermaid Lynn â Watch it/buy it at Amazon
Warsaw 1944 (Kaleidoscope, cert 12)
In 1944 the people of Warsaw rose up against the Nazis. The Russians, who were on the outskirts of the city on their advance towards Berlin, instead of ploughing forward and liberating the Poles, hung back, and waited while the Nazis blew them to bits â saves us a job, kind of thing. This ambitious Polish drama tells the gruesome story of that massacre from the eyes of Stefan (JĂłzef Pawlowski), a good-looking young man caught between two fine women â beautiful dark-haired city girl Kama (Anna PrĂłchniak) and rich landed blonde Alicja (Zofia Wichlacz).
The film is as handsome as the casting, and if there is one problem with Warsaw 1944 (aka Miasto aka Warsaw 44) it is that it always looks like a film â big, choreographed, aesthetically just so â which slightly undermines the message that director Jan Komasa and his crew are trying to get across, which is that war is hell, and that the Warsaw uprising was a particularly hideous corner of hell. At one point an explosion kills so many people that blood, body parts and human offal literally rain from the sky. Nor are enough of the characters sketched in well enough before the chaos of the bombardment starts. I found myself going âhang on, which one is that again?â
In Komasaâs favour, he presents the mostly young Poles as a group relying more on enthusiasm than discipline (deliberate foreshadowing of the 1960s, maybe?) and heâs absolutely averse to the âdeath or gloryâ notion so prevalent in war movies. There is much death here, very little glory. The gore apart, itâs a very fine war movie in the Sunday afternoon style.
Warsaw 1944 aka Warsaw 44 â Watch it/buy it at Amazon
Versus: The Life & Films of Ken Loach (Dogwoof, cert 12)
That this documentary about Loachâs career is so timely is down to luck to some extent. Loach came unexpectedly out of retirement in 2015 to âfight the powerâ after the Conservative party, slightly surprisingly, won the UK general election, presumably when director Louise Osmond was at least at the research stage of this handsome overview.
Then serendipity was added when Loach went on to win the Palme dâOr at Cannes this year. I wouldn’t bother with Versus if you have no idea about who Loach is, or don’t have at least a vague timeline already in place about what heâs been doing since the mid 1960s. This is an appreciation and celebration rather than a definitive A-Z or 101 on the left-wing director.
Though there are plenty of biographical details, particularly of the early years when this son of an electrician stood as a Conservative candidate in a school election (Loach looks sheepish in interview at this point). It was only later, at Oxford, he admits, when he saw the sheer scale of the privilege and realised that no one else really had a chance, that Loach became politicised.
His career breaks into four chunks â the early years at the BBC where, heavily under the influence of the Czech New Wave, he learned his craft telling stories from the streets, shooting in sequence and relying heavily on his actors. He parlayed success on realist teleplays such as Cathy Come Home into a film career with the massively successful Kes.
Then thereâs the Thatcher years of the late 70s and beyond, when Loach admits he simply didnât know what to do, couldnât get arrested and turned to making commercials (including, he admits with a shrug, one for McDonalds) and worked in the theatre.
Finally, as the Thatcher era ended, Loachâs career took an upswing with the likes of Riff Raff and Raining Stones. Heâs been busy ever since, having made around 26 films since the early 1990s, though you wouldnât know it from this documentary which moves at speed after the early years and starts to morph into a warm-up teaser for the new film, I, Daniel Blake.
Cillian Murphy and Ricky Tomlinson are among the names turning out among the more unfamiliar though more useful roster of writers and producers who have collaborated with Loach along the way. And thereâs lots from Loach himself, most productively, who is as thoughtful, gentlemanly and open as others attest. Itâs an admirable, short film, a lovely paean. Donât expect any real engagement with politics and you wonât feel shortchanged.
Versus: The Life and Films of Ken Loach â Watch it/buy it at Amazon
The Seventh Fire (Metrodome, cert 15)
A downbeat documentary about life on the White Earth Indian Reservation, Minnesota, where Native American guys grow up, sell drugs and go to jail. We meet Kevin, a teenage lad with a terrible mullet hairdo, on the cusp of adulthood and keen to be a gangbanger like the broâs. And we meet Rob, Kevinâs protĂ©gĂ© and father figure, but a man who realises, as he’s about to go down for a three year stretch, that heâs already spent 12 years of his life in jail and it’s getting too much.
âSome guys like it in prison,â says Robâs pregnant girlfriend with a touch of resignation, and if Jack Pettibone Riccobonoâs documentary does anything excellently itâs this â it makes it transparently clear that when you have a poor education, few life chances and very low expectations, hanging around in jail isnât much different from hanging around anywhere else. And having kids is what you do when you’re not on the meth pipe.
The philosophical nugget in this documentary comes from Robâs realisation that heâs a Native American man with a whole set of traditions and culture that comes as a birthright. But this package now includes drinking, drug-taking and gambling. Tradition is a mixed bag, the old ways aren’t always the good ways and, he reckons, he can assemble his own version of “Indian identity”, bricolage style, though he doesn’t use the word bricolage.
Rob comes to this understanding thanks partly through exposure to the La Plazita Institute, a gang of Native American self-help evangelists who include hot rocks, teepees and sweat lodges among the more practical detox and counselling services.
But is Rob’s change of heart, joyous to watch, going to have any effect on the younger Kevinâs life? As the film ends, we see Kevin out in the woods, legs dangling from a metal railway bridge, dwarfed as a huge freight train rumbles across it, dangerously close to his back. The image is symbolic (and might be influenced by executive producer Terrence Malick) but Kevinâs future is not clear.
This slight, in many ways depressingly familiar film doesnât offer solutions, but it does suggest the possibility of change.
The Seventh Fire â Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2016