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Sharp Stick
Like a lot of Lena Dunham’s work, Sharp Stick is a quirky dramedy set among the delusional and self-obsessed. With its strong autobiographical element it sits neatly alongside her early web series Delusional Downtown Divas (which kind of says it all), her breakthrough movie Tiny Furniture, and her TV show Girls. Dunham appears in it, and also produces, writes and directs, but it all hangs on one-time model and star of Netflix’s The Society Kristine Froseth, as a spectacularly naive woman who lives at home with her jaded mother and influencer sister and then gets into sex all of a sudden, aged 26, after seducing the father of the kid she babysits. Dunham … Read more
The Ear
When director Karel Kachnya was making The Ear (aka Ucho), released in 1970 but not seen until 1990, he must have known it wasn’t going to be seen. Surely? How could he not? We’re in Communist Czechoslovakia, where a married couple are coming home from a Party party. Anna (Jiřina Bohdalová) is drunk and bursting for a piss, Ludvik (Radoslav Brzobohatý) is tired and anxious. Has it been a good evening? Has he said the right thing to the right people? Was the party they were at another leg up in his reasonably glittering career or something else? Ludvik isn’t sure. And now, it seems, they can’t find the keys to the front … Read more
The Eight Mountains
Slow cinema? Not quite, but there’s definitely an aspect of slow cinema in the exquisitely paced The Eight Mountains (Le Otto Montagne), an Italian-language boys-to-men journey through the decades. They meet as 12-year-olds, Pietro a blow-in from the city with his parents, Bruno the local lad and only kid left in this dying village, where his family still milks cows and does things the old way. Initial nervousness out of the way, the two boys become a fierce unit – patrolling the area, examining the many abandoned buildings, swimming in lakes, climbing the hills, the idyllic relationship, Pietro the effete city boy, Bruno the solid country toughie. And then, on the small adventure … Read more
Mr Klein
Mr Klein is a film about a mindset as much as a man or an event. The event is the Holocaust, the mindset is of a man called Mr Klein, played by Alain Delon, a French art dealer who, one day in 1942 in Nazi-occupied Paris, is tagged as being a Jew. But he isn’t Jewish, Mr Klein insists. Why the idea is laughable, absurd. Somewhere in Paris there’s obviously another Monsieur Klein who is Jewish, but I’m not that guy. This is nothing more than a simple case of mistaken identity. And for the rest of the film Monsieur Klein keeps up his protestations, turning detective to try and flush out the … Read more
Zero Fucks Given
Zero Fucks Given, or the similarly blunt Rien à Foutre in the original French, sometimes also goes by the title Carpe Diem, in parts of the world where fucks actually are given about rude words. No matter what you call it you get the same thing: a detail-rich portrait of the life of the flight attendant, and smuggled inside that a sensitive drama about a young woman whose life is emotionally as up in the air as her job. Don’t worry too much about the sensitive drama bit. You could almost ignore it – though it eventually brings plenty to the table – and still be mightily entertained by this film by Julie … Read more
La poison
The misdirection starts early in the superb dark French farce from 1951 La poison (no prizes for guessing it translates as Poison). Right with the title, in fact, which suggests that poison, or a poisoning, is what the film is going to be about. It isn’t. Or it is, but not in the way the title might suggest. But first – more sleight of hand – writer/director Sacha Guitry, a boulevardier of the old school, introduces his cast, by their real names, starting with his star, Michel Simon, a big bear of a man Guitry praises effusively before moving on to Simon’s co-stars, all of whom get the buckets-of-praise treatment. Then on to … Read more
L’immensità
Preferring to watch movies unprepped, I hadn’t realised when I started watching L’immensità that its director, Emanuele Crialese, was a trans man (ie started life as a woman). What I did know is that I liked the earlier stuff, movies like Nuovomondo and Respiro, which were beautifully crafted stories demonstrating the writer/director’s way with emotionally engaging characters. The world didn’t know Crialese was trans either, by which I mean the media. Crialese “came out” at the Venice Film Festival as a way of explaining his film, which is set in Rome in the 1970s and focuses on a girl on the verge of puberty who really wants to be a boy. Since Crialese … Read more
The Letter
Melodramas don’t start much better than 1940’s The Letter. A man fleeing from a bungalow on a balmy evening in Malaya. A woman fires at gun at him. He falls to the ground, obviously dead. She continues firing, not stopping until all the chambers are empty. “He tried to make love to me and I shot him,” the woman explains to her husband later. From the cold way we saw those chambers being emptied, we suspect this is not the entire truth. Nor do we entirely believe that the woman and the dead man barely knew each other. Because the woman’s explanation seems just a touch too blithe and high-handed. And because the … Read more
The Passenger
The psychopath as psychotherapist is The Passenger’s fresh offering, though it serves up this unfamiliar idea in pretty familiar trailer-trash style. So, no, not the iconic Antonioni movie from 1975, nor the iconic 1977 Iggy Pop song, though thematically this The Passenger is in the same territory – it’s about a guy who is not in the driving seat and is spending his time letting the world go by. Agency is the name of the game, in other words, with Randy (Johnny Berchtold) learning how to get it, and Benson (Kyle Gallner) learning the perils of having too much of it. Randy works at a fast-food joint tacked on to a semi-derelict gas … Read more
America as Seen by a Frenchman
In the late 1950s the French documentarian François Reichenbach took his camera to the USA for 18 months. America as Seen by a Frenchman (aka L’Amerique Insolite) is the result, a snapshot of a country caught at a moment in time, where the tension between homogenising mass consumption and the individual pursuit of happiness runs through almost every frame. Reichenbach starts out in California and then winds his way across the country, finally ending up in New York. The opening shot is eye-catching – two American sailors staring out from a ship as it pulls into San Francisco Bay and under the Golden Gate Bridge – and Reichenbach continues to deliver seductive imagery at … Read more
Medusa Deluxe
“Who scalps a hairdresser?” The key line in Medusa Deluxe, an ingenious low-budget whodunit set entirely inside a regional hairdressing competition, where big characters vie to produce the hairdo that will grab the judges’ eye. Or they would have vied, if one of their number, Mosca, hadn’t wound up dead, the victim of the bizarre scalping incident. Who might have done it? An old flame, a rival, a cranky judge, an angry security guard or any one of a number of young female models, all of whom have enough spare energy to murder any number of people who get in their way. Now, the paramedics are here tidying away Mosca’s scalped body and … Read more
To Live and Die in LA
To Live and Die in LA – the title is almost an invitation. Its director, William Friedkin, though born in Chicago, did live in Los Angeles, and that’s where he died aged 87 last week (I’m writing this on 18 August 2023), till the end a combative, charming, rough-edged, cultured man of many parts. The director who gave us the magisterial The French Connection and the blood-thinning The Exorcist stumbled at the box office with 1977’s Sorcerer (for all its merits nowhere near as good as the film it’s based on, The Wages of Fear) and then as good as fell off the edge of the world with Cruising, a film that looks … Read more
