My choice of the films, distributed in The Netherlands in 2024, I managed to see in cinemas and on streaming platforms. (I saw 75 films.) The following list with 34 titles is not a ranking of films. These films struck and appealed to me. The way I listed the films is based of affinities in theme and tone, or by contrast.
"Theories about world literature, of which fairy tale is a fundamental part, emphasize the porousness of borders, geographical and linguistic: no frontier can keep a good story from roaming. It will travel, and travel far, and travel back again in a different guise, a changed mood, and, above all, a new meaning.".
Once Upon a Time : a Short History of Fairy Tale, Marina Warner, 2014“You said you had from your earliest time, as the deepest thing within you, the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen to you, that you had in your bones the foreboding and conviction of, and that would perhaps overwhelm you.”
The Beast in the Jungle, Henry James, 1903.
“Ich, der ich von Natur aus weich, gutmütig und stets hilfsbereit war, wurde zum größten Menschenvernichter, der kalt und bis zur letzten Konsequenz jeden Vernichtungsbefehl ausführte“.
Rudolf Höss, Abschiedsbrief an seine Frau Hedwig. 1947
“Wie, wenn dir eines Tages oder Nachts ein Dämon in deine einsamste Einsamkeit nachschliche und dir sagte: ‘Dieses Leben, wie du es jetzt lebst und gelebt hast, wirst du noch einmal und noch unzählige Male leben müssen; und es wird nichts Neues daran sein, sondern jeder Schmerz und jede Lust und jeder Gedanke und Seufzer und alles unsäglich Kleine und Große deines Lebens muß dir wiederkommen, und alles in derselben Reihe und Folge – und ebenso diese Spinne und dieses Mondlicht zwischen den Bäumen, und ebenso die ser Augenblick und ich selber. Die ewige Sanduhr des Daseins wird immer wieder umgedreht – und du mit ihr, Stäubchen vom Staube!” – Würdest du dich nicht niederwerfen und mit den Zähnen knirschen und den Dämon verfluchen, der so redete? Oder hast du einmal einen ungeheuren Augenblick erlebt, wo du ihm antworten würdest: “du bist ein Gott und nie hörte ich Göttlicheres!” Wenn jener Gedanke über dich Gewalt bekäme, er würde dich, wie du bist, verwandeln und vielleicht zermalmen; die Frage bei allem und jedem: “willst du dies noch einmal und noch unzählige Male?” würde als das größte Schwergewicht auf deinem Handeln liegen! Oder wie müßtest du dir selber und dem Leben gut werden, um nach nichts mehr zu verlangen als nach dieser letzten ewigen Bestätigung und Besiegelung? “
Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, Friedrich Nietzsche, 1882.
“It's true that I have never met any man whom I thought altogether resembled me - but only because my faults are so enormous.“ Enzo Ferrari
La Chimera
Directed by Alice Rohrwacher. Italy, France, Switzerland, Turkey, 2023.
Arthur, masterfully interpreted by Josh O’Connor, is a young Englishman in love with the ancient civilisations. He and his friends earn their living looting Etrurian tombs, selling the artefacts on the black market to rich collectors. Arthur, haunted by a lost love, will go on a private and impossible quest to save himself and a forever lost past.
Filmmaker: The Etruscans are obviously a big part of Italian history. I was re-watching The Wonders, and there’s a part where the father jokes that everyone’s so obsessed. Etruscans this, Etruscans that—you don’t ever hear about people pondering about Milanese. What is the appeal of this ancient civilization for you?
Alice Rohrwacher: The Etruscans are a bit like the native inhabitants of my region of Italy, a population that was exterminated by the settling Romans. Unfortunately, this is a common historical thread for many places in the world: populations and people were exterminated by others for cultural reasons or for reasons of wealth and appropriation. The Etruscans always fascinated me because on the one hand, instead of building for the living the way the Romans did, the Etruscans would build to hide. The Romans left us the Coliseum and great theaters, but the Etruscans’ inheritance was hidden in the hypogeas, all these hidden sanctuaries underground. A people that creates to hide their creation is very strange, especially when you compare it to what happens today when we’re not even capable of making a cake without showing the entire world.
The other motivation is that when you think of the images this population left us, it looks like a society where men and women were together as equals. We can’t know for sure, but it looks like there was a condition of equality between the genders, who both seemed to be very free. The Etruscans convey to us an image of great happiness. I don’t know if this is a myth or not, but what is clear is that after them, there were 2,500 years that were quite dark in Italy. Knowing that I live in a land where the native population that was here before had reached a pinnacle of equality and held some values I deem beautiful was very appealing to me.
I also just want to add that while I was depicting this in The Wonders, I was focused on the touristic exploitation of the past. In La Chimera, I wanted to focus on something that comes before touristic exploitation, and that is the time when sacred items stop being considered sacred and become objects of commerce that can be sold and traded.
Filmmaker: When you talk about gender equality, I’m reminded of that fourth-wall break that happens in the film where one of the characters makes note of the Etruscans being a matriarchal society. This type of alternate society that runs counter to what actually exists is something that comes up throughout your work.
Alice Rohrwacher: Yes, it is a theme that’s very important to us. As you see in La Chimera, male chauvinism and patriarchy is a negative component of a society, not just for women, but also for men. When we see the tombaroli, they are locked in this prison of needing to show off to other men and almost become martyrs. They cannot have honest relationships with each other and put up a face that’s not authentic. This makes it obvious that such a system doesn’t work on either side. I was not only interested in showing the limitations of patriarchal society for men. I also wanted for us to remember that it is not a natural condition of human beings, but a choice imposed upon us at some point in the past. It’s not a condition of nature—it’s a condition of culture, and culture can be transformed.
Filmmaker, March 27, 2024.
La Bête (English title The Beast)
Directed by Bertrand Bonello. France, Canada, 2023.
La Bête jumps between past lives, each haunted by love. Three versions of Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) live very different lives in 1910, 2014 and 2044, with the same recurring ghosts: among them, an apocalyptic foreboding and a man – Louis (George MacKay).
As for the protagonist of Henry James’ novella The Beast in the Jungle, which the film loosely adapts, a sense of impending catastrophe secretly paralyses the 1910 Gabrielle. Confiding this in Louis fuels a precarious affair set against the Great Flood of Paris. A century later, in Los Angeles, the Louis of 2014 yearns for Gabrielle, an aspiring actor, with much greater malice. All the while, 2044’s Gabrielle relives these recollections to purge her ‘affects’ – a standard medical procedure in this bleak future of AI dominance and emotional sterility.
Roger Ebert : You’re known for manipulating time in your films. “The Beast” crosscuts between three time periods—1910, 2014, and 2044–but moves in accordance with emotional connections or discursive links more than any linear chronology. The film’s structure feels expansive, as if it’s rippling outward from an epicenter that exists outside of all the periods, outside of time. How did you want to work with time in this film?
Bertrand Bonello : It started with “L'Apollonide (Souvenirs de la maison close) ”, released in the U.S. as “House of Pleasures.” I was playing with time and distorting it, to use it in such a way that I could quit reality without quitting reality. Time and space are the main tools of direction, and of mise-en-scène, and I used time across “Saint Laurent” and “Nocturama” as well. Here, in “The Beast,” I decided to make this the subject of the film: distorting time and exploring how you can use time in a narrative way. It’s very obvious in this film. In the others, it’s more insidious.
Time is an amazing tool. It’s endless. In a way, losing one’s sense of time is losing one’s mind. And in “House of Tolerance,” at any one moment you don’t know if it’s one moment or one year. You lose the sense of time, and the characters lose their minds. We say “The Beast” takes place over 120 years, but it could be a thousand years or five minutes… When they meet at the party in 1910, the first sentence one of them says is, “We have met before. Do you remember?” “Yes, five years ago.” “No, seven years ago.” They’ve already missed each other, in a way.
Roger Ebert : Other distortions in your cinema are existential, such as your motif of actors seeing themselves reflected in these simulacra of humanity: shop mannequins in “Nocturama,” masks in “House of Tolerance,” inanimate dolls across “Cindy: The Doll Is Mine,” “The Beast,” and “Coma.”
Bertrand Bonello : I know, I do use them a lot… It’s filming a face whose expression you don’t know, which is both mysterious and scary. If you look at a doll’s face or see someone wearing a mask, it’s about what’s behind that. For example, one of my favorite scenes in “The Beast” is when Léa Seydoux is in the salon de thé and [impersonating] the doll; her face just stops moving. For a couple of seconds, you say, “Wow, she’s very beautiful.” And after another five seconds, you say, “She’s f—ing freaky.” I really like this because you do not know what she is thinking. I love this sensation.
Showing Up
Directed by Kelly Reichardt. United States of America, 2022.
“Things usually get done – just not on time.” Those wise words from the artist Lizzie, superbly underplayed by Michelle Williams, capture the paradox at the heart of this film. Making art is all about nurturing a flow of creativity, but everything to do with maintaining a career in art – catalogues, exhibitions, classes – implies deadlines, pressures and constraints. Even more pointedly, it involves managing a complicated set of social relations with gallery owners, critics, teachers and technicians – and, above all, rivals. For Lizzie, all of this is painful – especially when her major rival, Jo, is also her landlord and friend.
Slant Magazine : The film speaks for itself in terms of the way that you’re thinking about how art and work coexist and bleed into each other. From a personal perspective, how do you conceive of that separation—or lack thereof—between the two?
Kelly Reichardt : Probably differently at stages of your life. I mean, I’ve had so many crap jobs in my life that I felt were keeping me away from work. And then I worked in the Kino [Lorber] mailroom for a long time. That was working around a lot of people that love film, and some that loved music, and that ended up being a great job. Who knows! You think a great job is teaching at NYU, but that job ripped my soul apart. It all depends. For me, at this point in my life, teaching at Bard really has been well married with making film. It wasn’t a happy accident. I work too hard. I tracked down people. I was on a jury with Peggy Ahwesh and Ed Halter decades ago now, and I spent a weekend with them. I’m like, “I want to be where these people are.” I did what I could to get that gig. And I work with lovely people, and it’s a good environment.
But the working in Lizzy’s case, she’s not feeling it so much. But she’s also in a loop: very tied in with her family, feeling the weight of her family, and jumping back in with them. So it depends on the job, right? But you’ve got to balance these things. Most people need to balance what they love to do and what they need to have health insurance or pay the rent or whatever it is.
Slant Magazine : Whenever we see artistry dramatized on film, it is so often toward some goal of fame or recognition. And I get the sense that’s not the point of Lizzy’s show. What she does is makes art and exhibit it. Was that decoupling of art from some kind of culmination or competition something that drew you to this particular story? Maybe it’s not necessarily art for art’s sake…
Kelly Reichardt : Art for art’s sake, that’s what we were drawn to write about. Maybe that’s even a stage in someone’s life. I’ve been making films and teaching for…[mutters] a really long time now. Most interviews I do—maybe by now, it’s settling down—the implication is “When are you going to go do what you’re supposed to do, which is stop teaching and go do this other thing that obviously you must be wanting to do?” Which I don’t feel compelled to do! There’s a much bigger world out there. The other night, we went into a dive bar on 14th Street and Avenue B and this jazz swing band was playing country music from the ’30s. The musicians were great. I’m sure that band plays for that crowd of people every week, and they probably know everyone in that audience. They all have day jobs, they enjoy playing together, they’re making good music, that’s their scene, and that’s what they do. That’s happening in a million different ways, in different cities, in different holes in the wall, all over the country. That’s what’s going on!
There’s all this gearing up for the premiere or Cannes, and these are wonderful, lucky things. They bring a lot of anxiety, like what you’re going to wear and all that stuff. But last night, my old film played at the American Cinematheque, and we ate tacos in the back while the film was playing, then came out and talked to the audience. It was such a lovely night, and it can’t really get any better than that. Maybe that night wouldn’t happen if those other nights didn’t happen. But there’s another scale of enjoyment. America, we’re a capitalist society, but there’s another scale of looking at and making art that happens all the time and makes people’s lives better.
Aku wa sonzai shinai (English title Evil Does Not Exist)
Directed by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi. Japan, 2023.
A big-city firm comes to a village in the countryside with wild plans, and tries to win over the population there with nice talk. That turns out to be quite a task, because the calm but unyielding Takumi in particular is not convinced. Opening as a fable of a community standing up for a pristine environment versus a corporate developer, Evil Does Not Exist morphs into the re-evaluation of life’s priorities and continues to build a path leading deeper into this arcadia, shifting moods and perspectives. At an unhurried pace, the film offers pieces of the bigger picture, letting curiosity run through details and textures, seemingly translating the musical score by Ishibashi Eiko and quite typically for Hamaguchi, making the process of storytelling a part of the pleasure.
The Film Stage : The way you layer in comedy throughout is great, and quite unexpected in the way it contrasts with the grave, meditative, still nature of everything else. How did you choose to bring comedy into it?
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi : You know, I think comedy and a sense of gravity––those things are not the main objective, but rather byproducts of the main aim. Because ultimately what I try to do is imagine a certain character. And then “How do I build this character?” is really about thinking about their past, their histories, and the reasons behind how they move and operate. I don’t just use these characters as pawns to tell a story. Rather, these characters have histories of their own. So they may or may not do what needs to happen for the story and could sometimes even go against the plot of the story.
But what I try to do is follow and stick with my characters. And sometimes that means the characters don’t necessarily move in the way that it needs to compel the story. But I try to write dialogue and figure them out and stick with my characters until they start to move the story along. And by doing so, sometimes you end up with a relationship between characters that doesn’t exactly match up and they pass each other. And through that, comedy can tend to arise. And so, for me, comedy is not the main aim but a byproduct.
The Film Stage : Without getting into any plot details, can you speak to why you chose to execute the atonal, amoral end the way you did, with so much abstract symbolism?
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi : For me, it’s actually quite a natural ending to the film. That’s perhaps because the way I understand Takumi’s character might, in fact, be a little bit different from how the audience is interpreting what kind of character Takumi is. I think Takumi certainly has a side to him, a facet to him, that can very much live within human society and communicate quite well. However, I think inside me I kind of understand him as somebody who actually can’t communicate well with other beings and who perhaps can communicate a little bit better with nature or animals. And so once you move along with that rule, what you speak of as atonal, I think that rule starts to appear once we follow him and see how he moves through the world. So the first time you watch it, you might be surprised by the ending. However, perhaps upon second viewing––some people have said this––peculiarly the ending is quite acceptable once you watch again. And I’d be very grateful if people do.
Emilia Pérez
Directed by Jacques Audiard France, Belgium, Mexico, 2024.
Rita, forty, works at a large law firm assisting serious criminals as they move through the corridors of justice. Rita is underpaid, yet manages to win many a case for her clients - not to her satisfaction, for corruption is rampant in the Mexican legal profession and legal profession. Rita's boldness has not escaped the notice of the big drug cartel boss Manitas Del Monte. He kidnaps Rita and makes her an offer she can't refuse. She must help Manitas disappear off the radar and facilitate his new life as a woman, after a sex-change operation. Rita bites, and puts Manitas' new life - now as the stone-faced Emilia Pérez - on track. Things get a little more complicated when Emilia invites the widow and children of the vanished Manitas to move in with her....
W Magazine : In many of your films, there is a primal search for freedom, for the chance to live a different life. Emilia Pérez dramatically reinvents herself: not only her gender but her profession, relationships, and entire worldview.
Jacques Audiard : In my films, my question often is, how many lives do we have a right to? We have one original life, and we know the costs and benefits of that life. If we had the chance for another life, what would be the price? In Emilia Pérez, I was fascinated by the paradox of a person being very successful in a hyper-virile world and, at the same time, she is a woman. What is her life like when she is not able to express her true nature? She was, in fact, in a kind of prison. But even so, her new life comes at a cost.
W Magazine : Emilia Pérez took you many years to develop. Do you have other projects percolating? Does Hollywood pursue you?
Jacques Audiard : No. Hollywood doesn’t send me anything! [Laughs] And I don’t mind. I don’t think I would like working in Hollywood. But I do try to be contemporary to my time: 10 years ago, Emilia Pérez would not have occurred to me.
W Magazine : Who is an original to you?
Jacques Audiard : I prefer the term “renegade” because every true original is a renegade. To me, in cinema, David Lynch. In art, it’s Francis Bacon. In literature, Philip Roth. In order to put myself with these people, I have to accept my mediocrity. Those three are in another league. They are heroes.
W Magazine, October 11, 2024.
Bird
Directed by Andrea Arnold. United Kingdom, United States of America, France, Germany, 2024.
A coming-of-age drama set in Kent, England, Bird tells the story of Bailey ( Nykiya Adams) , a rebellious twelve-year-old girl with an eye for the innocent beauty around her. Bailey lives with her father Bug (Barry Keoghan) in a squat in Gravesend. Bug has little time for her, as he is getting married soon and has a great idea for making quick money. Bailey suddenly meets the eccentric and quirky Bird (Franz Rogowski) , who is looking for his birthplace nearby. Curious but cautious, Bailey decides to help him. Gravesend is a few miles away from Arnold’s birthplace of Dartford in Kent which is where she shot her Oscar-winning short Wasp (2003), a story about a poor single mum who bumps into a former flame, starring a young Danny Dyer and Natalie Press. Catapulting Arnold’s name onto the film industry’s radar, it was the first time that she collaborated with the now multi award-winning cinematographer, Robbie Ryan. Over 20 years later, they’re still working together.
Filmmaker: Your narrative work tends to have a sort of freewheeling structure, but these pieces always feel like they bring the viewer full circle, in some respects, by their close. I’m wondering what the writing process is like for you. Is it improvisatory and more discovery-based, or is there a set outline where you know you want to hit certain narrative points, without necessarily planning the getting there?
Andrea Arnold: It’s just my weird way of doing things. I usually start with an image, and that’s how I get into the story. I have an image that comes to me, somehow, and then I ask myself what that’s about. What does that image mean? I’ll ask questions of it, and try and figure out what the world is, who’s in the world. Usually, not always, but usually, the image will then occur in the film at some point. So it’s a key image in a way. I don’t start at the beginning. I start in the middle and work my way out. Other images present themselves, and it’s like a jigsaw puzzle. When I feel like I know enough about the character, and the world, then I’ll go back to the beginning. And when I’m writing, it’s just my own peculiar way of doing things, but I just ask myself, ‘What happens next?’, and never really follow any rules of structure or the received wisdom of screenwriting. I went to film school, but you’d never know it. People tell me they never know what’s going to happen next in my films. I don’t know why that is, but it is the case.
Filmmaker: What was the key image for Bird?
Andrea Arnold: I’ve blurted it out before, in Cannes. I’d had two hours sleep and just premiered the film, and it just came out. But I usually try to keep it a secret. It was a man standing on the edge of the roof of a tall building.
Filmmaker: This film has a metaphysical aspect that stands out from your previous work. I really don’t want to give anything away, but how did that come about?
Andrea Arnold: Well, the film is set in or near the area where I grew up. The sort of magical quality just started happening in the writing, and I didn’t stop myself. I allowed myself that imagination. I’ve operated with fairly robust rules to my filmmaking up to now, rules I made for myself. And on this one, I felt, maybe I’ll just bust the rules. I mean, they are my rules. I can bust them! But it just happened naturally. I gave myself permission and went along with it. It felt brave, and I knew it was going to be pushing it, but because it felt natural to me, I allowed it. I didn’t judge it. I didn’t get in my head about it. And to be honest, it felt liberating to extend myself in a direction I hadn’t before but also continue something that I have done before. If you can push yourself, and it comes naturally and feels right, then that’s all you need.
The Zone of Interest
Directed by Jonathan Glazier. United Kingdom, Poland, United States of America, 2023.
In
1943, Rudolf Höss, commandant of the concentration camp in Auschwitz,
lives with his wife Hedwig and their five children in an idyllic
home next to the camp. Höss takes the children out to swim and fish, and Hedwig spends time
tending the garden. Non-Jewish inmates handle the chores, and
the murdered Jews'
belongings are given to the family. Beyond the garden wall, gunshots,
screaming, and the sounds of trains and furnaces are often audible.
Glazer
has no interest in showing us atrocities. This film
is
possibly the least overtly traumatic film about the Holocaust ever
made, yet it’s devastating in the quietest way. The camera watches,
mouselike and still, as this little family goes about their daily
business, the older kids skipping off to school, Hedwig bustling
around the house. Their dialogue is muted, almost as if we shouldn’t
be hearing it. Most of it is so mundane we might wonder why we’re
eavesdropping, but every so often we pick up a detail that meshes
with historical details we know, as when Höss and a colleague
discuss a design for a new, improved crematorium, nodding approvingly
as they outline its ease of use: “Burn, cool, unload, reload.”
Jonathan Glazier : It was certainly a key area of discussion for us throughout the making of the film because the perspective of the film or the perspective of the people in the film is obviously that of the perpetrator. We’re looking at the perpetrator. The film is trying to look at our similarity with the perpetrator, rather than our similarity with the victim. So in that sense, it is about people who have step by step become mass murderers and how disassociated they are from their crimes. They have compartmentalized so completely what they care about and what they don’t, what they value and what they don’t.
That mindset that Hannah Arendt wrote so incredibly insightful about felt like the mindset of these real people when I read about them. The status, the petit bourgeois social ambition, property, health, space, all of these things are common to all people. So I wanted us to be able to project ourselves onto these people and see how grotesquely familiar they were to us. It was a very key text, of course, for the whole production, for the whole endeavor.
Jonathan Glazier : I’ve thought a lot about this, about what I should show and what I shouldn’t, about what is possible to show. And I certainly, for my part, didn’t want to reenact these atrocities visually, I didn’t want to see them. I feel that we understand these images, we know these images, we bring them with us, they are in our head. And so when you hear the sounds of these images we have in our heads, we see them again. So I didn’t need to reenact them. I suppose that became my own personal line of what I felt I could show and what I couldn’t.
It’s an extremely delicate balance. The whole project was very delicate because I wanted the experience to be that the victims of these atrocities were out of sight in a way that they would be for the perpetrator. That they would not be out of mind for us, but they would be out of mind for them. So if we have an emotional response to what we hear, what we see are these people who have no emotional response to what we hear. I think the horror is the house in this film. They say fascism starts in the family, which I believe is true. (We wanted) to show a family at this point luxuriating in achievement, let’s say, their success at this colossal human cost that they have no qualms about. It felt like the power of that, the awfulness of what we hear and what we see is the film. The space between what we hear and what we see.
Des Teufels Bad
Directed by Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz Austria, Germany, 2024.
In Des Teufels Bad Agnes (Anja Plaschg) is newly married and just crazy for her husband, Wolf (David Scheig). But he shows little interest in her, so Agnes fails in her most important task: having children. Her life becomes more and more depressing as she is trying to get acclimated with married life. As her mental health is lacking, her mother-in-law (portrayed by Maria Hofstatter) starts berating her until she just wants to give up. She starts believing that there's only one way out. The film is set in in a small fishing community in eighteenth-century Austria. Based on historical court records, this penetrating psychogram of a woman charts a true, previously unexplored chapter in European (women's) history.
Euronews : I had never come across a film before this one that showed quite how much Christianity and certain pagan rituals completely merged in this particular time. The drinking of the blood, for instance... Or totemic charms from body parts... Through the research you both did, were there any details that shocked you in particular?
Severin Fiala: The fact they used to collect artifacts like cut off body parts of people that had been executed because they thought it would bring luck. Or in case of the drinking of the blood, it was against melancholy. They tried to cure depression by having people drink the blood of executed people. Those were all things that were really fascinating to us.
Also, we have to say the atrocious act that the lead character commits is also described in great detail in the interrogation protocols. It's actually something that gave us both nightmares. We’ve never had research or working on a film that has led to us having a nightmares! And I think that was a reason for us to make this film. This woman is a victim of her times and the pressure she's put under. You feel so much for her, but then she does something that is totally horrific and makes you want to run away from her. This is the feeling we wanted to have throughout the film. We wanted the audience to understand and relate to Agnes, but still have her do something that's truly shocking.
Veronika Franz: I found it very shocking. How strong the suffering must have been so that you kill someone else. How dark must it be in yourself to go down that path? I felt so much for her.
Severin Fiala: And like you said, it's an interesting time the film is set in, because it’s 1750, the beginning of enlightenment... And at the same time, there were areas where there were a lot of the pagan ideas that you describe.
When we researched it, we found out that the priests quite often studied in big cities. They read a lot of books and when they came back to the countryside, they actually knew that there was no connection between, let's say, somebody committing a suicide and a hail storm devastating the fields. But people there would still believe it, and basically forced the priests to behave accordingly. Whenever somebody committed suicide for example, the priest would need to ring the church bells to protect the town. The priest knew this was total bullshit, but still he was forced to do it by the people.
Priests were also under immense pressure because they didn't have any fields or woods, and they were dependent on the people supporting them with food and fire log. And the people just said ‘If you don't do what we want, then you'll have a very cold winter.’ So at the same time, those people were feeling an immense pressure from all the dogmas of church and behaved accordingly.
It was a very absurd situation, and very absurd times. But not much more absurd than the times we're living in...
Euronews.com, June 28, 2024.
All of Us Strangers
Directed by Andrew Haigh. United Kingdom, United States of America, 2023.
Adam (Andrew Scott) lives in London in an almost empty tower block. One night, by chance, he meets his mysterious neighbor Harry (Paul Mescal), who breaks the rhythm of his daily grind. While a relationship develops between them, Adam is much preoccupied with memories of the past. He feels an urge to go to the town where he grew up and visit the house where his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) lived. There, it seems like nothing has changed since the day they died, 30 years ago. The film somehow blends somehow blends a love story, a ghost story, and a time-flipped coming-of-age narrative. The result is a masterful exploration of loneliness and grief, the relationship between children and their parents, and a demonstration of the fact that time, far from healing, can bring childhood trauma rearing up stronger than ever in middle age. But it’s also a tender, aching expression of the insatiable human need for love and connection, which Haigh depicts as being so powerful that it can annihilate the border between life and death.
Roger Ebert : All your films explore, to some extent, emotions reflected through time, but “All of Us Strangers” directly engages with queer temporality, that idea that queer people experience time differently, in opposition to heteronormative standards, due to marginalization or historical events like the AIDS crisis, which disrupted so many queer people’s expectations for how their lives would progress.
Andrew Haigh : We’re untethered from time as queer people. We don’t see ourselves in the history everyone else has. We don’t follow their traditional path. We’re all strangely stunted. We end up being teenagers for longer, because we weren’t allowed to have a traditional teenage life, to feel certain things and have certain ambitions. I wanted to throw the notion of time up in the air. I feel strongly that you can be dragged backward and forward through time so easily. Go onto the dance floor, listen to a song, and you can be back to where you were 10 years ago. You can feel what you felt 30 years ago.
There’s a time travel to feeling certain emotions, to smelling certain smells. The way memory works, and how powerfully it can take us back, was something I wanted to play with, so you lose all sense of existing in a present. It’s the same with how the film ends; there’s no sense of it being a linear progression of time. I was excited and nervous about that. All my other films have been very secure in their timescales. I wanted to go off-piste and do something else.
Roger Ebert : Tell me about capturing Adam’s movements through time and how you approached the film’s point of view, staying in the headspace of this character who’s stepping outside of reality.
Andrew Haigh: I found it difficult, not just going into myself emotionally but also trying to make that structure work. I’ve also reached a state where I don’t think it matters if people understand what’s real and what’s not. Films obviously aren’t real; they’re constructs. The whole film, in the end, feels like my subconscious telling the story I want to tell. That means you can go backward and forward in time. Things that aren’t real can feel as real as dreams. I was worried it wouldn’t work, that people wouldn’t buy it, that the conceit of the parents wouldn’t work. In the end, I loved that fear. How that made me feel is exciting.
Roger Ebert, December 21, 2023.
I Saw The TV Glow
Directed by Jane Schoenbrun United States of America, United Kingdom, 2024
Set in the late 1990s to 2000s, the film follows Owen and Maddy, two troubled teenagers who bond over their love for “The Pink Opaque,” a kids horror show akin to Goosebumps or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That is, until Maddy disappears, leaving only a burning TV in her backyard, and “The Pink Opaque” is mysteriously canceled soon after. As years slip by and Owen looks back on his and Maddy’s beloved show, becoming more disillusioned with the everyday motions of his unstimulating life, reality begins blending with his favorite childhood series. Glow is a transgender allegory that deals with the fear of living your truth, but articulates the truer terror of trapping yourself in what is not. The scariest parts aren’t the bone-chilling scenes of Owen being violently sucked into explosive sparks of a TV screen, but the frantic realizations Owen has as he loses time to a life that dissatisfies him.
Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences: Earlier, you said that Owen and Maddy are both parts are you. In hearing you describe it, it seems like Owen could be a cautionary tale and Maddy is more aspirational. When you watch the film back now, do you still see those parts in yourself? Or to be very simplistic, is there an evolution from Owen to Maddy?
Jane Schoenbrun :I think especially when people talk about the ending of the film, I've pushed back a little on the narrative of it being a cautionary tale. I do so because I wrote this film after two months on hormones. Culturally, that's the part of a "gender transition" that we tend to think of as the beginning. To me, it was very much not a beginning. In many ways, it was the catharsis of half of my life, but that moment of un-repression, that moment of the egg cracking — when you finally see yourself clearly in a way that makes it hard to unsee — was very hard one for me, because I really do think that repression is a survival mechanism. If I had transitioned in my own youth in the '90s — Well, first of all, I just didn't have the language to understand what that was, because the language of transness that was being fed to me was created by cis people who were making movies about trans people being monsters or being disgusting, and I didn't want to be either of those things. But to have come out to myself and started the process of transitioning would've been deeply unsafe. You always give up privilege when it happens, but doing that at 14 as opposed to 31, in the '90s as opposed to 2019 would have been a lot. I don't think I would be here if I had done that.
So, the process of un-repressing and getting to the beginning of what we classically think of as transition, to me, it's like, that's a hero's journey! Even if it doesn't look like the classic idea of the hero's journey. It was really important to me to not sugarcoat that, and to not pretend that after that catharsis and awakening, which is both the end of something and the beginning of something, that everything is okay, and things are happy now, and all of the trauma from a life in which you've been told from the youngest age that your true self is an imposter and you need to apologize for it, that that doesn't go away the next day.
I think of Owen at the end of the film as both an ending and at a beginning of something, and it was really important to me from within my own beginning to not sugarcoat how it felt, and all of the terror inherent with it. But to answer the question, I still have aspects of both characters inside me. The deeper one gets into transition, I don't want to say they are insulated or immune from dysphoria, shame, and the hegemonic fist of society — because those things are obviously very present for all people who are trans in America in 2024 — but I do think you get a little bit of a thicker skin about it, because you have to. I don't think that thicker skin is formed by inner resolve, unfortunately; I think it's formed by just sheer exhaustion. You learn to care a little less about the dude at reception misgendering you, because you can't let it ruin your day every day.
Kaibutsu (English title Monster)
Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda Japan, 2023.
Eleven-year-old Minato comes home with the story that his master beat him, and also called him a monster in front of the class. To which his single mother immediately goes to seek redress from the school. But if anything is clear from the film by Japanese master filmmaker it is that it is very difficult to determine who is a monster. Moreover, in Kore-eda's film we are presented with “the truth” from three different points of view. From the experience of Minato's mother, then through the eyes of his master, and finally as Minato himself experienced it all. So that in the end we are still not sure what the truth is, and who the monster is.
Film Comment :
I thought the structure was interesting because it clearly separates the world of children from that of adults. I remember being a kid and not knowing how to communicate, internalizing so much stress and guilt because you don’t realize that if you just talk you can fix a lot of problems.
Hirokazu Kore-eda : Let me first share that Yûji wrote this story from his own experiences—he had a friend at school with whom he couldn’t communicate his feelings, much like in the film, and he always carried that with him. That’s what he told me.
You know what I said earlier, about the question of whether the world can be reborn? You can also use the word “adults” interchangeably with “world.” Minato thinks he might be a monster. At the beginning, he feels something he cannot name. The fact that he feels there’s something wrong within him is because of the value system of the adults around him, how the grown-ups in our lives govern our understanding of what’s right and wrong—especially with regard to masculinity, and telling people, “This is normal” and “This is not.” In the film, it’s this attitude that ends up persecuting the kids. It’s a structure I’m referring to. Not the bullying itself—not the kid being a bully or being bullied or whatever—but the grown-ups who are telling these kids that certain things are not normal. That’s what leads to bullying. And the grown-ups do this without knowing it.
We have Yori and his father, who is a brutal, violent man. He should be prosecuted for what he’s doing, of course, but on the other hand, the little things we say, the throwaway phrases—like what Minato’s mother, Saori, says to the teacher: “You should make up like men”—these words can be violent also. We say these things without realizing it, without realizing the effect they can have on our children, which is so damaging. As adults, we’re completely ignorant that we might be monsters. The kids are the only ones who can shed light on that fact. And so, in chapters one and two, we look for the monster, but can’t find it, and in chapter three, of course, it’s revealed that we are the monsters, thanks only to the light of the children.
Film Comment : I read that you’ve wanted to work with Yûji Sakamoto for a long time. Given that Sakamoto is best known for his television writing, and you recently wrote and directed the series The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House, I wondered if you saw the two mediums converging in Monster.
Hirokazu Kore-eda : I’m of the generation that grew up watching television—serial television. I like serial television and I know what appeals it holds, but for me, film is something different. If I have a chance to, I would love to try my hand at serial television, but cinema… when you leave the theater, the world looks different. That’s unique to cinema, in my mind. You can’t get that from watching television or films at home. When I make films, I try to be conscious of that: to make sure my films provide this feeling.
Armand
Directed by Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel Norway, The Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, United Kingdom, 2024.
When Armand, the six-year-old son of Elisabeth (Renate Reinsve) is suspected of sexually abusing his friend , a fellow pupil, his mother and the boyfriend’s parents is summoned by the school. There, her first reaction when Elisabeth hears of the complaint is a fit of laughter (for five minutes!). Elisabeth thinks they are all out of their minds at school, but there it turns out they are taking the case dead seriously. Everyone can imagine what adults can do to each other when there are small children involved who may be telling the truth, perhaps fantasizing or exaggerating. Or maybe not having the right words, to which adults stick their own interpretation. Armand premiered at the Cannes film festival. Director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel was awarded the Caméra d’Or for the best debut film.
Cineuropa: When the film was still in progress, you showed some scenes at the Göteborg Film Festival, including that dancing scene with Elisabeth. Body language is so important in this movie.
Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel: I love seeing dancing in films, and I wanted to have this moment. It’s just beautiful when the camera and actors are in sync like that. This particular dance was supposed to be shorter. Then the choreographer showed it to me, two days before we were planning to shoot, and I loved it. Kubrick used to say that film should be like music; it should be a progression of moods and feelings. I didn’t want to just follow a plot. I guess some people are surprised by it, and they need some logical explanation – maybe Elisabeth is preparing for a play? Maybe that’s why she is dancing? For me, it’s not that interesting to explain everything. I like it when I watch something and wonder why people do what they do.
Cineuropa : The adults have to face something extremely uncomfortable here: children’s sexuality. Not only that – they actually have to talk about it.
Halfdan
Ullmann Tøndel:
I
used to work in a primary school when I was in my early twenties, and
now, I also have a small child. People get very uncomfortable when
they need to have these discussions. I thought about this moment,
when a teacher tells the parents about what happened between these
two boys. You immediately think: where did they learn it? It’s odd
because something that might feel natural in a kindergarten doesn’t
feel natural in school any more, but kids don’t know that! They
don’t know that line between what’s allowed and what’s not, and
it was very interesting to work with that.
Cineuropa : You don’t show the kids, and you don’t let them talk. Why?
Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel : This was never about the kids – it was about their parents. About how children mirror their behaviour, about how they see themselves in their kids. It felt like a stronger choice, never to reveal who Armand was – or his friend. You can imagine it only based on what their parents are saying.
Civil War
Directed by Alex Garland United States of America, United Kingdom, Finland, 2024
In a dystopian future, the United States has turned into a battlefield. Four photojournalists - three old timers (Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura and Stephen McKinley Henderson) and a rookie (Cailee Spaeny) - set out by pickup truck for Washington D.C. to capture the civil war and to interview the president in The White House before he is overthrown. Why the country is at war remains unclear in this visceral, violent road trip thriller from writer/director Alex Garland.
Vulture : Are you comfortable saying what the film is about in a very general way?
Alex Garland : What I can say is that Civil War is about a state. I don’t mean a state like a country; I mean a state of thinking, which is divided and contains a path to forms of extremism so there is something of the real world located within it.
Vulture
:
Every
science-fiction film is about the time in which it was made.
Alex
Garland :
For
sure. That’s one of the reasons I love sci-fi.
Vulture
: Therefore, Civil
War is
about our time too?
Alex
Garland :
Yeah,
I hope so — and I hope so in a kind of thoughtful and
conversational manner.
Vulture : What would you say to somebody who accuses you of being irresponsible for making a film like Civil War and releasing it during an election year?
Alex Garland : The truest thing I’d say about that is I honestly don’t know whether it’s responsible or irresponsible because I would need to know too many things I don’t know in order to be able to answer that question. But what I do think is that there’s a converse, a counter to that, which is “What’s the consequence of not saying things? What’s the consequence of silence? Of silencing oneself or silencing other people?”
Vulture : What is the film warning us about?
Alex Garland : Two things. If I was going to be reductive in a way, and I’m not inclined to be reductive, I would say that — paradoxically, considering the subject matter — the film is about journalism. It’s about the importance of journalism.It’s about reporting. The film attempts to function like old-fashioned reporters. That’s thing No. 1.
Vulture : What’s the other thing?
Alex Garland : Just a simple acknowledgment that this country, my country, many European countries, countries in the Middle East, Asia, South America, all have populist, polarized politics which are causing and magnifying extreme divisions, and the end state of populism is extremism and then fascism.
That relates back again to journalists because you have governments with checks and balances, but you need this other thing, which is the press — free, fair, but also trusted. And at the moment, the dominant voices in the press are not trusted. They’re trusted to a degree by the choir they’re preaching to but not by the other choirs. I’m in my 50s. When I was a kid, if in what the old days was called a “broadsheet newspaper” ran a story about a corrupt or lying politician, it didn’t matter whether you were a reader of that newspaper or not, the impact would be enormous and very likely would end that person’s career. That world has gone.
Firebrand
Directed by Karim Aïnouz United Kingdom, United States of America, 2023
England's King Henry VIII had six wives - two were disowned, one died and two he had beheaded. His sixth and final wife Katherine Parr (Alicia Vikander) is named regent when King Henry is battling abroad, but she must fight for her own survival when Henry (Jude Law) returns ill and paranoid.
Cinema Daily: I find it really engaging about the depiction of Henry VIII. Oftentimes, Henry VIII was presented as the most charismatic ruler, but what’s engaging about this film is that you describe him as a very cultured, actually mannered man. And he speaks in Spanish, Latin, French and Italian. And he’s also very active as a writer and a composer as well. So how carefully did you guys construct the film with these cultural elements of Henry VIII’s character?
Karim Aïnouz: I think it was very interesting to think of him not as a monster to begin with, but to think of him as a man that was born privileged, so he was just occupying the place that one should occupy if you were born like Henry. I think for me it’s much more interesting to understand that people are not born like this, that they are like this because of where they are in the context.
Also, I think what’s interesting here for me is to look at how a man of that stature is about to die. This is a man that probably thought that he was immortal. And he was also a very interesting young man. He was a really talented musician. He knew how to speak different languages. He was very cultivated. He was a sportsman. We did so much research about his daily life. He was also a romantic—a sort of perverse romantic because when he didn’t get what he wanted just got rid of people.
Cinema Daily : Okay, this will be the last question. Catherine Parr was the first woman to publish a book under her name in British history. I’m curious to know what kind of conversation you had with three female screenwriters because this film has a strong female perspective. But at the same time, this is actually a story about her surviving the marriage. So could you talk about how did you balance out the historical element, like surviving the marriage?
Karim Aïnouz:I think it was, this is a job that was done by the writers. This is a book that was adapted and then there were amazing screenwriters that did the drafts and the script that we shot.
And I think it was really interesting to come from this perspective. They were very young, and they were super talented and amazing screenwriters. And then they were really interested in the danger, you know, of the character. We took a lot of liberty from the book, but also I think of how the writers were very young—they had this energy which was really beautiful. You know that they really wanted this story to be the story of a woman who was resisting—moving around the circles of power and negotiating things through soft power. It was really exciting.
And I said it would be almost impossible for a man to tell that story. As a director, yes, but not as a writer. I don’t think I could have written that because it’s such a profoundly feminine way of dealing with power.
Cinema Daily US, June 16, 2024.
Ferrari
directed by Michael Mann United States of America, United Kingdom, Italy, Saudi Arabia, 2023.
We meet Enzo Ferrari ( Adam Driver) in 1957, when his company is facing bankruptcy, his son Dino has just died and his wife Laura (Penélope Cruz) wants to leave him. Ferrari decides to counter his losses by rolling the dice on one race - 1,000 miles across Italy, the iconic Mille Miglia. A meditation on grief and death, craftsmanship and beauty. Ferraro tells his drivers: “Make no mistake, all of us are racers- or have been. We are all certain, "It will never happen to me." Then my friend is killed. I give up racing forever on Monday. I'm back racing by Sunday. We all know it's our deadly passion. Our terrible joy. But if you get into one of my cars- and no one is forcing you to take that seat- you get in to win. Brake later. Steal their line. Make them make the mistake.” Ferrari tells his son Piero, (he had a son with his mistress Lina Lardi): “In all life, when a thing works better, usually it is more beautiful to the eye.“ Michael Mann first began exploring making the film around 2000, having discussed the project with Sydney Pollack (1938-2008). Mann had been developing the script with writer Troy Kennedy Martin, who died in 2009. (based on the biography by Brock Waters from 1991). The films is dedicated to Pollack and Kennedy Martin.
Vulture : What did you learn about Enzo’s personality once you started looking into him?
Michael Mann : Enzo was very particular about how he dressed, how he held his suspenders, the high rise, the pants, and everything. He had a kind of indefinite emotional status because he felt that no matter how good something was, something bad was around the corner. So he was highly defensive and strategic. That’s why he called his autobiography My Terrible Joys. It made him vigilant with kind of a strafing wit. I get a kick out of him. There’s this footage of him. He’ll walk into a crowd; nobody notices him. He takes off his glasses so everybody can see it’s him. Then they start coming around. So he puts the glasses back on to maintain the mystique. You realize his mystique is strategic. He didn’t want anybody to see what he was thinking.
Vulture : In Ferrari, Enzo is going in circles, at least emotionally. He’s got Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley), with whom he’s raising a child out of wedlock, in one home and his wife, Laura (Penélope Cruz), in the other. He doesn’t want that to change. He can’t decide whether Piero, his son with Lina, will get the name Ferrari. He wants to maintain Laura’s ignorance of this other family even though the whole town knows about it.
Michael Mann : The revelation for me with Enzo was the spectacular duality of the man. A lot of forces in his life are contrary to other impulses and forces. Now, if you said to him, “How do you explain your contradictory modalities of living a life?,” not only would he be bored and not answer you — he wouldn’t even credit what you’re talking about. And that’s the way things operate in life. We all carry things that are in opposition to each other. And they don’t get resolved. They get resolved in archetypal dramas that we craft. Because less complexity is the usual artificial dramatic construction of a character: He’s one dynamic; he’s a contradiction — it will resolve at the end of the movie. This is way different. To me, Enzo was a giant representational picture of something profoundly human. He’s bound to Laura; he’s repelled by Laura. How do these oppositions end in most of our lives? We sit around in a BarcaLounger, or watching daytime TV, and then we die — they don’t get resolved.
Vulture, December 25, 2023.
Boléro
directed by Anne Fountaine France, Belgium, 2024.
The work of French composer Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) is a mixture of modernism, baroque and neoclassicism, and in later compositions also jazz. He is best known for his immensely popular 1928 composition Boléro, the genesis of which is highlighted in Anne Fontaine's biographical film. In it, Ravel's working methods and life are intertwined, based on his encounters with three women: the Russian dancer Ida Rubinstein, whose commission initiated the piece of music, his patron Misia Sert and pianist friend Marguerite Long. The past seeps into the present with the help of subdued flashbacks, which add layers to this outstanding portrait of the skilled, sensitive artist. In the last 10 years of his life Ravel experienced a gradually progressive decline in neurological function. In the end he was inable to write down music.
CinéSérie
: How
did you come to make a biopic about Maurice Ravel?
Anne
Fontaine:
I was brought up in a very musical environment because my father was
a musician. He was organist at Lisbon Cathedral, so I've always lived
with orchestra rehearsals, choirs, the organ... Probably, when I got
attached to the idea of Ravel, the idea was to make a film where
music is at the centre of the story. I thought, which composer had
this strength and genius? I decided on Ravel, because he is
exceptionally rich musically. Then I asked myself how I could go
through his life in a non-chronological way. So I discovered his
existence, his life, through the Boléro. It's music that everyone
can relate to because it's so captivating. How did this man manage to
find such a contemporary, magnetic air, how did it come to him? The
idea was to see behind the scenes and put the spectator in that
place, in that incredible way of listening to sounds, and try to put
together a jigsaw puzzle, to associate pieces together. I thought it
was a very rich experience in terms of music and creation. That's
what attracted me most, to see how he was able to create this music
that he couldn't find.
CinéSérie
:
It's
this ambiguity that we fully feel in Boléro, the ambiguity of a
creator who almost refuses to create...
Anne
Fontaine:
You get the impression that he didn't want to find something, but
it's not that he didn't want to, it's that nothing was inspiring him,
so we see him drying up. And when you see a genius of his level not
being able to find a way to do it, it's quite spectacular, because
you think to yourself, it's not possible. How is he going to do it?
So there's suspense. And he does it, almost unwittingly, by saying:
‘Here, I'm going to repeat this theme seventeen times’.
CinéSérie
:
Boléro
tells the story of this emergence of musical genius, which was both
laborious and spectacular, and was greatly motivated by Ravel's
female entourage.
Anne
Fontaine:
What's interesting about the script is that these four women were all
around him. The one at the beginning, his mother (Anne Alvaro), whom
he loved deeply. He had an extremely close relationship with her.
Misia Sert (Doria Tillier), who represents an unattainable ideal, in
that he prefers, as he says, to compose music for her, like an
erotic, amorous transference. There's Emmanuelle Devos as Marguerite
Long, his favourite pianist, a bit maternal and at the same time a
collaborator. And then, of course, Ida Rubinstein (Jeanne Balibar)
who was this baroque character. These women formed a sort of
protective bulwark around him, because he was an eternal young man,
as they told him. Ravel has something of the Dorian Gray about him,
without the darkness of course. That's why I've aged him very little,
apart from his hair when he's sixty, because deep down he still has
that childlike quality. That's what I really liked about him.
Memory
Directed by Michel Franco. Mexico, United States of America, Chile, Germany, 2023.
Ex-alcoholic Sylvia (Jessica Chastain) , who has been dry for thirteen years (as long as her daughter is old), is a social worker who leads a simple and structured life. This is blown open when the early demented Saul (Peter Sarsgaard) follows her home from their high school reunion. Their surprise encounter will profoundly impact both of them as they open the door to the past. At first Sylvia is suspicious about him, but after some misunderstandings are cleared, they begin a relationship.
Filmmaker: You’ve spoken previously about how Saul’s degenerative condition, his early onset dementia symptoms, was interesting for you to explore because it’s directly related to your own fears.
Franco: I think the fear of losing one’s own mind is a massive one for me, but then I guess it’s most people’s greatest fear. Certainly one doesn’t want to lose any capacity, particularly a physical capacity, while aging, but for me, the most prideful thought is whether upon losing your mind, you are still yourself, and how that process is for you, how it goes. In the case of Saul, he is trying to keep living in the meantime. Also, with these cases, one can never be sure how fast it’s gonna go, if it’s gonna stop at certain stage.
Filmmaker: The subjectivity of memory that you play with here — Sylvia is plagued by her own recollections of abuse, but then early on in the picture she is contradicted by her sister Olivia and proven wrong. It’s because of this questioning of her own memories that she then contends with mistaking Saul for one of her abusers by reaching back out to him, and shortly after, growing close to him. This turn is the impetus in a sense, and sparks the bond that forms.
Franco: Absolutely. She’s a person who’s been living with trauma for a long, long time, as long as she can remember. She’s become used to being humiliated by life, and humbled time and again. She’s in the program [AA meetings become a major set piece for Sylvia’s character], and doing the best for her child, but at the same time, society is telling both Sylvia and Saul to stay away from life. Stay in the program, follow the rules for someone like [her], stay sober, don’t get into trouble, and don’t look for anything else. At the same time, she’s a decent person, to say the least, so she has to go and apologize to Saul. And an emotional door opens without her realizing.
Un Silence
Directed by Joachim Lafosse. France, Belgium, Luxembourg, 2023.
Joachim Lafosse is known for his sober psychological dramas about problematic family relationships. Here the focus is on the wife (Emmanuelle Devos) of a celebrated lawyer (Daniel Auteuil) who conceals a painful family matter from her young adult son. That silence affects other family relationships as well. As always, Lafosse does not hand you the moral compass on a silver platter, but lets you feel through the discomfort of messy reality. Based on a true case involving Belgian lawyer Victor Hissel, who was a beloved mouthpiece for justice on behalf of Dutroux's victims.
Filmtalk : You said that you started writing the screenplay in 2016…
Joachim Lafosse : …the first draft I wrote, was titled “Le fils de la loi,” from the point of view of the father, the lawyer. Two or three years later, I wrote another version, from the son’s point of view. In the final years of writing, I decided to tell the story from the mother’s point of view, considering the changes I had made for Emmanuelle and because of this person who had called me to talk about his shame. Then when we shot the film, it got a classic and modest look and feel. There are three basic rules to achieve that. The first one, don’t show the violence that you describe; secondly, focus on the strength of the characters, and the third one—when you’re editing—is to give the viewer the opportunity to ask what he or she would do in those very same circumstances. Despite Astrid’s silence and what Raphaël [character played by Matthieu Galoux] does, I tried to connect the audience with Astrid and Raphaël and let them empathize with those characters.
Filmtalk : The musical score is also crucial in how you tell your story, isn’t it?
Joachim Lafosse : Absolutely. “Un silence” is a tragic story, yet it tries to hold on to the viewer’s empathy for this woman whose silence has huge consequences for her whole family and for this young man who commits a terrible act. To make sure the audience can think and feel with them, you need an essential tool to keep them connected to the characters and the story, and that’s the score. To me, music is a very rewarding and very accessible art form.
Filmtalk, January 22, 2024.
Juror #2
Directed by Clint Eastwood United States of America, 2024.
A 12-member jury must decide whether a suspect is guilty of murder. Eleven jurors immediately think so, but one member doubts it. The doubting man, a journalist, played by Nicholas Hoult, turns out to be involved in the case himself. The ingenious script by debut writer Jonathan Abrams is characteristically calm and solidly developed by Eastwood (94 years old on release), with a fine group of actors. The result is an entertaining courtroom drama that raises engaging dilemmas.
GQ : You said that it was your idea to send it to Clint. Why was that? Was there a specific movie that he had made that had in your mind?
Jonathan Abrams : No, it was the 12 Angry Men thing! I mean, Mystic River is, of course, kind of the North Star, but that really was more of a function of, once he agreed to do it, I was thinking of his oeuvre, and which of these movies that he's made is the most similar to what I want this to be. So how can I, as I rewrite it with him, look at what's successful and what I love about said movie and try to import it into this one? Because it would have been weird for me to be like, “So, Clint, I really see this is a companion to Mystic River”—I can’t say that. It’d sound ridiculous. But that was secretly what I was hoping, and then he kind of confirmed it in our first meeting.
He didn't refer to any of his other movies, but he said, “I want to strip away all the things that are kind of pulpy and feel a little bit extra in the bells and the whistles, and I want to ground this and make this just a story about people caught in these difficult moral circumstances.” That was like a breath of fresh air to hear him say, and I'm like, “Oh, okay, we can try to make this like a Mystic River type of movie.” Just to be mentioned in the same breath when you talk about his films would be the high water mark for me with this.
GQ : I had this feeling, and I certainly heard it from others who saw the film as well, that it had a bit of a throwback appeal. Legal dramas were huge in the ’90s, but this is the kind of movie that doesn't get made too much anymore.
Jonathan Abrams : It wasn't a calculated thing. It was just a story that I wanted to tell and I was hoping in my heart that I had a big enough concept that when you say it to somebody in a sentence, they almost to a person go, “Oh!” As a screenwriter, when you can come up with an idea where they go, “Oh!”, you're onto something. Now, I fully recognize that this is a movie that they don't make anymore. But you know, guess what? They weren't making vampire movies and then they made Twilight. These are movies people love. I think that's part of why it's getting the response it’s getting, because we're starved for them. An original story that makes you think a little bit, but it's still entertaining, that's relatable. Those movies that I loved as a kid, going to see The Fugitive, and In the Line of Fire with Clint, and A Few Good Men, you know, they're just good stories. Aside from the train explosion, The Fugitive is essentially just, like, a dude running around the city with another dude chasing. It's a character movie, really, and it's so good
GQ, November 15, 2024.
Quand vient l'automne
Directed by François Ozon France, 2024.
Seventy-plus friends Michelle (Hélène Vincent) and Marie-Claude ( Josiane Balasko) are not lucky with their children; a selfish daughter and a criminal son, respectively. But would that be why Michelle is deliberately poisoning her daughter with mushrooms from the forest? As Michelle begins to doubt herself, the viewer gets to decide what kind of mothers these women were. With Ozon, older women with rich pasts are never boring, and as usual, the filmmaker plays with expectations and genres. Test your faith in humanity - and yourself! - with this deceptively open-minded drama about misfortune, intent or ill-fated good intentions. And see, respectively, a morality play, thriller or good-hearted pastiche thereon.
TDG : C’est l’une des premières fois que vous démarrez une intrigue avec un souvenir d’enfance. En l’occurrence un repas aux champignons cueillis le jour même, qui a envoyé toute la famille à l’hôpital.
François OzonOzon : Pas la première fois, en réalité. «Sous le sable» s’inspirait aussi d’un souvenir personnel. Celui de vacances estivales au bord de la mer avec mes parents, et d’un couple de Néerlandais qu’on voyait à peu près tous les jours, jusqu’à ce que l’homme disparaisse dans la mer. Dans «Quand vient l’automne», j’ai le souvenir de cette anecdote des champignons avec une certaine nostalgie, alors que le repas aurait pu virer à la tragédie.
TDG : Appréhendez-vous de manger des champignons depuis cet épisode?
François Ozon : Pas du tout. J’adore en manger. Je sais pourtant que leur consommation peut être dangereuse et qu‘il suffit d’un seul champignon empoisonné dans un plat pour contaminer l’ensemble.
TDG : Où êtes-vous précisément dans ce récit? Dans l’adolescent qu’on voit à la fin?
François Ozon : Je suis partout, dans tous les personnages. Je suis cet enfant, avec son innocence, mais aussi tous les autres membres de sa famille.
TDG : Au niveau du casting, vous avez retrouvé certains acteurs ou actrices que vous connaissiez. Est-ce plus facile?
François Ozon : Quand on s’entend bien avec quelqu’un, il est agréable de le retrouver. Mon moteur, avec ce film, c’était de donner des rôles principaux à Josiane Balasko et Hélène Vincent, en montrant la vieillesse sous un angle positif. Les deux comédiennes assument leur âge. En général, je travaille dans la complicité, j’en ai même besoin sur un plateau. Je n’ai pas envie de surhommes, juste de gens humains. J’aime que le cinéma soit complexe tout en conservant sa dimension humaine.
The New Boy
Directed by Thornton Warwick Australia, 2023.
When a nine-year-old Aboriginal orphan boy arrives at a remote monastery in the dead of night, he comes under the care of a renegade nun. The New Boy by Australian Aboriginal director Warwick Thornton, who once again digs into Australia's violent history. With a magical-realist touch, he tells a story based on his own childhood. The film is set in 1940s Australia. Featuring impressive acting performances by 11-year-old Aswan Reid alongside Cate Blanchett.
Concrete Playground : The New Boy isn't autobiographical, but it always feels personal. Set in the 1940s as the Second World War rages abroad, it sees the film's namesake (newcomer Aswan Reid) get scooped up by outback law enforcement and delivered to a church-run orphanage, where his Indigenous culture and spirituality comes into conflict with Christianity. It's a story about forced conformity and assimilation, and fighting back however one can. It's history in a microcosm. It also teams Thornton with another Australian cinema icon: Cate Blanchett.
"Rock 'n' roll! Aren't I very lucky! Isn't this amazing? Shit, Cate Blanchett's just called me and wants to make a movie — life's too short" — that's how Thornton reacted when two-time Oscar-winner and 2023 nominee (for Tar) gave him a call.
Thornton Warwick : "It's good for the ego, obviously. Then you go 'god, I've got to do something. I've got to come up with some brilliant idea right now that we can go and make while I've got her on the phone'. And obviously that doesn't happen. You slow down, and you take your time, and you're thoughtful about it. You don't just pitch any shit to Cate Blanchett, because she might go 'oh no, he's an idiot, that's a terrible idea'. So you've got to think about things, and plan some kind of attack on making yourself seem like you're really cool and you have lots of great ideas."
Concrete Playground : Thornton did have something up his sleeve: an 18-year-old script inspired by those boarding school days, but featuring a priest. In the project's past life, French The Big Blue and The Professional actor Jean Reno had been in talks to star. Swapping the character to a nun gave Blanchett a part — which Thorton tells us about, alongside drawing from his own life, finding the next David Gulpilil in Reid, sharing tales of Indigenous survival with the world, balancing tragedy and hope, Adam Sandler movies and the full cinema experience.
Concrete Playground : On reworking an old script for Cate Blanchett.
Thornton Warwick : "I hate writing. I think it's incredibly painful, and it takes me years. So if you do want to go down that process, well, we wouldn't be here having this conversation — I'd still be writing something. It takes a long time, and it's horrible. Writing is full of pain and angst — and you would rather go to the pub than actually write any words, because there's so much fear in a blank page, so much danger in it.
And, so much you happiness as well, but I'm so scared of the blank page — I write with pen and paper, I don't own a computer, I don't know how to type. So you just stare at a blank page and go 'ohh this it's going to hurt'.
Then, three years later, you come out of it and you've got something. Then it takes maybe another year to redraft it and get people's opinions. So remembering that I had that script kind of saved my arse, in a strange way, because I didn't want to go down another three-year process.
I've got other scripts, but they just they they wouldn't be right for Cate, that I have been writing. So it was either that script or I write something new — and we wouldn't be here talking, I'd still be writing, if I was actually going to write something."
Concrete Playground, July 7, 2023.
Club Zero
Directed by Jessica Hausner
Austria, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Denmark, Turkey, United States of America, Qatar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2023.
At an elite, international private school, Miss Novak (played by Mia Wasikowska) comes to teach a new subject to a group of teenagers: “conscious eating”. What begins with a few lessons on the benefits of a plant-based diet soon degenerates into dangerously manipulative and cult-like lectures in which the students are encouraged to stop eating altogether. Jessica Hausner (Little Joe, Lourdes) on modern Western phenomena such as cancel culture, overconsumption and climate awareness.
Senses of Cinema : How, then, did the story of Club Zero originate? The press kit mentions the Pied Piper of Hamelin and how he leads away all the children in a town. In the legend, he is actually hired to rid the town of the plague, and then they renege on payment, so it is an act of revenge. Obviously, that is not what interested you here, but it is a group of impressionable young adults who follow the call of somebody who looks benevolent, but then it all turns into a kind of cult.
Jessica Hausner : I think there is also a question of guilt in Club Zero, because you do ask yourself, maybe in the second half of the story: could the parents have done better? This is an important topic for me in this story, namely, as a parent, how do you connect to your child? Can you avoid a tragedy like that? Can you stay connected? And this is not only unfolding on a personal level – I also think that the younger generation in my film have very important issues to raise with the older generation. They are very rightfully saying: we have to stop the consumerism or else we’re all going to die. It might all sound like a crazy exaggeration in Club Zero, but let’s be honest: they are right. Where does the radicalisation come from? It comes from a moment where those young people feel neglected by their parents and by the whole society. After all, I don’t have the feeling that the governments of the world are really trying to achieve the goal of ending climate change. The younger generation’s lives are spoiled. It’s weird for me to say this because I know that the tone of the film feels as if I don’t take it so seriously, but I think we do, and have to, take it seriously.
Senses of Cinema : Yes, the climate movement and some of its radical approaches do come to mind when watching the film. All over Europe we have people gluing themselves to the street to protest the lack of action on climate change, etc. It is very serious, and we take seriously what our generation is passing on to the younger generation, not least because we teach students. But the film, which we really thought was interesting and provocative, does seem to be critical of that kind of radicality – it refuses to establish a middle ground in any way that could offer an effective activism or effective self-disciplining, which is certainly provocative.
Jessica Hausner : Yes, that’s the provocative thing about the film. It was interesting for me when I was talking with journalists about Club Zero, and I saw just how provocative the film was. Basically, we don’t know which position the film wants to take. Is the film making fun of the climate activists? Or is the film saying the parents did wrong? Because what Ms. Novak says is actually quite understandable, and she’s not at all depicted as stupid or evil. She’s actually a person who wants to do good, so we the audience are constantly confused in a moral way. Even people who want to do good are sometimes only following the lead of someone who tells them what to do. Not every hero is a brilliant hero, and this is the interesting thing for me: even if someone is right, they might also be ridiculous. Those contradictory things can live together in the same scene, in the same situation.
Senses of Cinema, November 2023.
Mantagheye bohrani (English title Critical Zone)
Directed by Ali Ahmadzadeh Iran, Germany 2023.
With
the bemused drug dealer Amir, who looks more like a welfare worker,
we ride along for a night through Tehran's illegal underbelly, past
customers from all walks of life. The almost divine, feminine voice
of his route planner smoothly guides him past police checks. The
thoughtful camera use is at times appropriately subversive: cranking
the steering wheel, swinging up with the tailgate. The sound track
even briefly takes on a life of its own. An insane trip,
clandestinely filmed, a middle finger to the stifling social
repression in Iran. Awarded a Golden Leopard at the Locarno 2023
festival.
W-Film : How did you manage to make the film that was not approved by the Iranian government? And how did it feel?
Ali Ahmadzadeh : We had a separate plan for each scene. Sometimes we had a hidden camera, other times a forged licence or a bribe from the authorities. The biggest challenge lay in the locations and settings. We had different strategies for different cases. "Critical Zone" is an urban film and everything in the city is 'observed'. This level of secrecy and the tension gave our team additional motivation. Personally, as a director, I utilised excitement and passion. This feeling of being in a fight helped us to realise the film. Sometimes the creation of a work of art and personal motivation come together, and this became an incredible moment in my life.
W-Film : The film seems to be divided into ten episodes. Why did you make this decision?
Ali Ahmandzadeh : Because of all the restrictions we encountered, we had to shoot over a long period of time. We were four people in the core group: cameraman, sound engineer, the main character Amir and myself. With this small group, it was as if we had to go into a short film production every time. Each part had its own requirements, locations, actors... It wasn't possible to shoot everything one after the other because of the energy of the crew and of course financial problems. I had to shoot one part at a time, then edit, then find a job and earn some money to prepare for the next step. I tend to structure the film according to the limitations, even the kind of story I want to tell. Maybe that's the definition of 'alternative cinema'.
W-Film, November 7, 2024.
Anora
Directed by Sean Baker United States of America, 2024.
Young, Russian-American sex worker Anora (Mikey Madison) prefers to call herself Ani - because that sounds more American - and works in an upscale brothel in Brighton Beach, New York. There, one day, loquacious Ivan ( Mark Eydelshteyn) comes along. The son of a Russian oligarch, he likes Ani so much that he hires her privately. Which leads to a hastily arranged wedding in Las Vegas and a host of comic complications when Ivan's mother learns of it in Russia. Anora’s fairy tale is threatened as Ivan’s parents set out for New York to get the marriage annulled.
The Film Stage : You talk about your role as an editor. I was reading your interview in The Creative Independent earlier and you mention that you take a roughly six-month break between shooting and editing. Why do you take that time?
Sean Baker : First off, you need a break. You definitely need a break. I don’t see how anybody who is editing their own film can go the next day and just jump into it. Filmmaking is like a battle. You definitely need some healing time, right? But then there’s also the distancing. I think that’s so important because––especially with the types of films I make––sometimes [they] rest on or cover the subject matter in a docudrama way. I’m using docu-techniques throughout, even if it’s narrative fiction. I want it to feel as real as a documentary.
Why I do that is: I remove myself enough so that I can come back to it a few months later, and hopefully I’ve forgotten everything I’ve done. Hopefully I’ve forgotten my coverage and I’m now diving in as an objective documentarian who’s putting all this footage together and making it make sense. I don’t even reference the script. I’ll just have to remember the story I was trying to tell and then retell it with this material that I’ve been given that’s sitting on this hard drive. Then, at that point, I’m not doing an assembly cut because I don’t think that’s how a documentary editor would do it. They’re taking all this footage and trying to make sense of it. So I never will do an assembly cut. I’ll start from the beginning and go chronologically, one scene at a time, and I’ll complete each scene––including its sound design––before moving on to the next so that I really see the film fleshing out in its full form. I never know until literally the last day of editing whether we have a good film on our hands or not. That’s the stressful part, because you’re living for a year not knowing whether you’re made an acceptable movie.
The Film Stage : Any time people talk about your movies, they seem to mention this idea of humanity. How do you capture these stories of people on the fringes? How do you do right by them?
Sean Baker : I try not to allow it to become overbearing. If that was all I was thinking about, I wouldn’t probably get through a day of shooting. But you do have to be very conscious of the representation. I want to feel like I’ve done right by my subjects. Whatever community or subculture I might be focusing on, I want them to love the movie and I want them to feel properly represented. As I move forward, especially with my last five films about sex work, we’ve learned to involve as many people with lived experience as possible to consult to tell you whether we’re doing it right or not. That’s so important; that’s on our minds, most definitely. And ultimately I want those communities to see the film and like the film.
The Film Stage, October 16, 2024
Los Colonos
Directed by Felipe Gálvez Haberle Chile, Argentina, United Kingdom, Taiwan, Germany, Sweden, France, Denmark, United States of America, 2023
Los Colonos is about an underexposed colonial period in Chile's history. Landowner José Menéndez (who really existed) sends three men on a reconnaissance tour of his estate in Patagonia, in the border region between Chile and Argentina, in the early 20th century. To explore possible trade routes, he says, but soon his intentions turn out to be more evil: to track down and exterminate the indigenous population. The raw and beautifully filmed narrative cleverly shows how historiography affects our sense of history, and contains poignant observations on themes of ownership, power, racism and twisted masculinity. Winner of the FIPRESCI prize in the Un Certain Regard competition at Cannes 2023.
Los Angeles Times : What was it about this period, the early 20th century in Chile, that you found particularly compelling to set your western in it?
Felipe Gálvez Haberle : What interested me was a photo of men posing with the bodies of the Selk’nam Indigenous people they have hunted, which I saw online in an independent Chilean publication. There were photos of this hidden genocide in Tierra del Fuego. That image was what captivated me. It urged me to go investigate that page of Chile’s history that had been erased. In Chile there are several pages that have been erased from history, but I was interested in going to a foundational one, one from the beginning of the century, to create a reflection about what happens when stories are deleted. Photos like this one began to circulate on the internet about 15 years ago.
Los Angeles Times : We are now having important discussions on colonization in Latin America, but we always focus on the initial arrival of the Spaniards many centuries ago and not on the colonization that continued to happen once sovereign nations were established.
Felipe Gálvez Haberle : The story they tell us in Latin America is that when the Spanish arrived, they killed the Indigenous peoples, and then the people of Latin America fought for independence. That’s the linear and official take we learn. But in reality, in Latin America we live in ambiguity. We recognize ourselves collectively as victims of colonization, but we never tell the story of when we were the colonizers. I was interested in telling the story of when these things happened under the Chilean state or the Argentine state, when the Indigenous people were still killed and colonized under these new independent countries across Latin America.
The Dead Don’t Hurt
Directed by Viggo Mortensen Canada, Mexico, United Kingdom, United States of America, 2023.
The film tells about the free-spirited Vivienne (Vicky Krieps), a French-Canadian florist who falls in love with Danish immigrant Holger Olson (Viggo Mortensen) in San Francisco during the American Civil War. The two begin a new existence on the outskirts of a small town in the Wild West. But when Olson goes to fight on the front lines, Vivienne must struggle to hold her own among the village's violent and corrupt cowboys. Both a tragic love story and a nuanced depiction of the conflict between revenge and forgiveness, The Dead Don't Hurt is a portrait of a passionate woman determined to stand up for herself in an unforgiving world dominated by ruthless men.
Rogert Ebert : While “The Dead Don’t Hurt” certainly has the physical look of a classic example of Western filmmaking, it subverts genre expectations in several ways, from the characters and thematic concerns to the flashback/flash-forward structure you employ.
Viggo Mortensen : I agree that there are things that make it different, even though it does fall visually into the traditions of classic Westerns. Just because you have an ordinary female character being your central figure, that already makes it different. The fact that your two leads are not Anglo-Saxon Americans who have English as their first language, that is different. I thought it was important to be as historically accurate with the decor and the lamps and the clothing and other details but to have a cultural and linguistic diversity to the story and racial diversity. You do see Mexican and Chinese characters in other movies, and in “Heaven’s Gate,” you had Eastern European characters and languages. Still, you don’t normally have the leads be anything other than Anglo-Saxon American characters.
As I wrote the story, I enjoyed getting to know Vivienne through that structure. I also like, as a spectator, when I am ahead of the characters—I like watching movies that work that way. There are several instances where we know a lot more than Vivienne does, like when Weston visits her when she is gardening—we know he is a vicious killer from what we have already seen, but she doesn’t know that. She knows he’s a bit full of himself from her encounters with him in the saloon, so she keeps him at arm’s length to be polite but has no idea of what we know. When she says, “Would you like some cold mint tea?” you’re thinking, “No, don’t do that!” Also, I don’t like people dying, but for the purposes of the story, a bunch of people die violently at the beginning of the story. Then, because of the structure, you get to know those people throughout the movie. You get to understand, among other things, why they had to die.
The editor and I took everything we shot and, just to remove any doubt, reorganized the material so that it was linear, just to see how that felt. It was all right, but I just didn’t find it as interesting. I didn’t like how we got to know Vivienne as much doing it that way, so I went back to how it was originally written. It was more effective for the story I wanted to tell.
Roger Ebert : The idea of focusing on characters who embody the immigrant experience is especially interesting here because, as you said, it is an undeniably important element of the experience of the time. Outside of the occasional likes of something like “Heaven’s Gate,” it’s far too often ignored in most Westerns.
Viggo Mortensen : Even in “Heaven’s Gate,” although you see that rich tapestry of cultures and languages, the leads are Anglo-Saxon Americans. I thought it was important to show the cultural diversity at the time in the United States, even in a remote small town on the Western frontier. That is the way it really was—unless you were an Indigenous Native American, people came from all over the place, and you would hear not only different languages and accents but different American dialects as well. That is also more historically accurate and different from what you see and hear in most Westerns.
Santosh
Directed by Sandhya Suri United Kingdom, Germany, India, France, 2024.
When her husband is killed during riots in North India, his wife Santosh - according to good Indian custom - is allowed to take over his job in the police force. Of necessity (she would otherwise lose her home), Santosh accepts, thus being confronted with power (of her uniform and of her office) for the first time in her life. The first big job is the murder of a girl from one of the lower castes. Santosh is pulled into the investigation under the wing of charismatic feminist inspector Sharma. For her first fiction film, Sandhya Suri, previously a documentary filmmaker, was inspired by a case of gang rape in New Delhi. Before shooting, she spoke to several police widows who had become officers under the "law of compassion".
The Film Stage : I also noticed how costumes play such a pivotal role. Early on, Santosh dons her husband’s uniform, signaling a new chapter. And there’s this visual contrast between the sari and the policeman’s uniform. Can you talk about your collaboration with your costume designer Bhagyashree Dattatreya Rajurkar?
Shandya Suri : You know, it’s so interesting––when you know that someone’s going to be wearing a police uniform for most of the film, the things that they’re wearing when they’re not wearing that uniform feel so much more meaningful. I felt that Shahana was so iconic as Santosh in that uniform; she wears it so well. I had many discussions with costume about how the police uniforms were stitched together and crafted. Because in India you actually get your uniform made yourself, usually with police tailors. And we were also conscious that in Bollywood, with the portrayal of female police officers, they’re usually wearing a uniform that’s very sexy––you know, like a super-tight blouse––and obviously we didn’t want that. So there was more discussions than you might think about the actual uniforms. Then there was also that moment where we see Sharma in a sari, which feels like quite a shock. She feels like a different person. Since we haven’t seen her in that way in the film, I feel like that sari carries significant weight and adds a lot of pathos to her character in that moment. Shahana is briefly seen as a wife before we learn she has become a widow. There’s also an important discussion in the film about jewelry––what she can wear as a wife, but not as a widow––which is an ongoing theme in the film as well.
The Film Stage : The film also has such a distinct visual style––immersive yet precise. How did you approach narrative filmmaking, and did any documentary techniques influence your approach?
Shandya Suri : For me, the allure of cinema––especially as someone who also writes––is in its economy and rigor. I love how much a single cut can convey and the challenge of being as precise as possible. I aimed for a filmmaking style that is meticulously crafted but doesn’t draw attention to itself––neither through the soundscaping nor the visuals. The goal was to create an experience that allows the viewer to be fully immersed in the space. This also meant the absence of a score, as the idea was to place the audience right alongside Santosh, letting them live through her experiences as closely as possible. It’s about using the tools of cinema to their fullest potential without overdoing it.
Los
Reyes del Mundo
directed by Laura Mora Ortega Colombia, Luxembourg, France, Mexico, Norway, 2022
Five homeless teenagers travel from the Colombian city of Medellín to the countryside to claim a patch of land. This was previously expropriated under the junta, but now given back to one of the boys. Along the way, they find shelter in a dilapidated whorehouse, meet an eccentric hermit in the jungle and are besieged by paramilitaries who call the shots in the region. Energetic road movie with amateur actors from the streets, set between dream and harsh reality. Thanks to director of photography David Callego the alternately still-symbolic, then dynamic-documentary-looking images are of a special, almost careless beauty. Voted best film at the San Sebastian Festival.
Caiman : The film begins in a very adrenaline-filled way, but soon the camera and editing slow down.
Laura Mora Ortega : The city is a frenetic, disorderly territory of movement and a lot of information. But the kids know it and move freely. They feel comfortable to pull out a machete or to run away. But not in the field. I liked to change their attitude towards a space they don't know, but above all because the form of violence in the countryside in Colombia, in the area where the film takes place, is very different from that of the city. It is a hidden violence, more contained, of silences. And that builds a tension immersed in the landscape that I wanted to explore. None of us, because of the history of violence we have, go quietly on a highway. I wanted to build that tension and for that I needed time, contemplation and silences.
Caiman : The kids face that violence, but they also find tenderness in the middle of the jungle.
Laura Mora Ortega : Those are the things that highlight this contradictory relationship I have with life and with the world. There is one thing I call the 'ethics of affection', and that is that despite the harshness and the shortcomings, there is always a place for a hug or for advice. The scene with the prostitutes I always conceived it as a 'matria'. That is, they are in a homeland but made by women in oblivion. There are also certain things that only affect the more local audience, because the scene is full of altered patriotic symbols, from the bloody Colombian flag to a country's coat of arms that says “freedom and order” woven by hand... I explained to the production designer and the photographer that this had to be Colombia, because it is a country where there are many women who have survived the war, have lost their children and partners and live with dignity despite the adversities.
Caiman, February 24, 2023.
Love Lies Bleeding
Directed by Rose Glass United Kingdom, United States of America, 2024
The film tells about the budding love between gruff gym manager Lou (Kristen Stewart)) and bodybuilder Jackie (Katy O'Brian). Together they set out to conquer the world, but after the mistreatment of Lou's sister, things take an increasingly violent turn, especially with the interference of Lou’s criminal father (Ed Harris). Love Lies Bleeding seems a classic crime thriller full of explicit violence and toxic family ties, but director Rose Glass (Saint Maud) has enough surprises up her sleeve to make her second feature a delightfully unpredictable trip.
Filmmaker: Was it always set in New Mexico, in a desert area, in the 1980s?
Rose Glass: By the time we started writing the script, we had settled on the time and place, but for quite a while while working on [the treatment], we went back and forth with that. Initially I was thinking of setting the film in the UK, maybe Scotland, but as the story grew, it just didn’t feel right. America felt like a much more appropriate backdrop for the story, [as it has] characters who have to get away with a number of murders and there are a lot of guns flying around, etc. The film is also, on some level, about ambition and taking a slightly cynical look at the pursuit of the American Dream. I guess it’s also about ego. There were a lot of elements in the film that made America feel like the most potent, crystallized world to set this story in.
Probably loads of filmmakers who aren’t from America are heavily influenced by American film and television. The influence on our cultural consciousness is huge, so anyone who wants to make films who isn’t from America probably hears some weird siren call coming from that side of the country, from Hollywood and this idea of “the American movie.” Love Lies Bleeding ended up inadvertently almost becoming a film about films, but not literally. Even without directly referencing specific films, the audience knows about these certain cinematic tropes, so setting this in America made those easier to play with and hopefully subvert those elements more boldly.
Filmmaker: I was curious about the film’s inclusion of anabolic steroids [Jackie is introduced to various kinds by Lou, who has been purchasing and distributing them discreetly in her gym]. They take on a more heightened role as the narrative progresses, but of course, steroids did (and, for all I know, still do) persist in the world of competitive bodybuilding.
Rose Glass: When Weronika and I were writing the script, we went back and forth on how real versus fantastical the drug Jackie’s taking should be. In our earlier drafts, I think it was much more explicitly a magical kind of thing, and I was flirting with the idea that anytime you see the steroids on screen, they may be glowing a bit or something like that. Ultimately, it just felt too distracting, so in the end we settled on a logic where, yes, anabolic steroids were and are around a lot back then (and I’m sure are used a lot in the bodybuilding world—but that’s quite a complex subject in and of itself and one I wasn’t interested in getting too deeply and literally embroiled in), but ours was probably not going to be the most strictly realistic depiction of steroid use. We always wanted it to be a little ambiguous as to whether all of this is happening because of the drugs Jackie is taking or if it’s due to the power of love making her mad in some way. Or perhaps it’s due to Lou’s corrupting influence? We have these slightly more heightened transformational moments being seeded throughout the film and they come, yes, after Jackie’s just taken steroids for the first time, but it’s also at the point where Lou and her are having sex for the first time. We took creative license with it.
Longlegs
directed by Osgood Perkins Canada, United States of America, 2024.
FBI Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe)is a gifted new recruit assigned to the unsolved case of an elusive serial killer. As the case takes complex turns, unearthing evidence of the occult, Harker discovers a personal connection to the merciless killer and must race against time to stop him before he claims the lives of another innocent family.
Osgood Perkins : I think I’m always compelled just by expressing some truth of my experience. I don’t know if my experience is better, worse, more privileged, or more damaged. I just know that it’s my stuff that I’m putting out there and what I’m trying to adhere to when I’m writing things. It keeps me honest, it keeps me interested, and there is a certain level of truth, no matter how fantastical everything becomes. So, I’m always setting out to do something that is about me. I choose female protagonists because it creates an additional layer of curiosity, right? It creates an additional layer of romanticism because I’m making stuff up. Everything I’m doing is about me, but all the cover is all makeup, it’s all make-believe, it’s all playing with action figures, it’s all painting, it’s all taking pictures, it’s all creating stuff that doesn’t exist. So, to be in the seat of a female protagonist, for me, creates like a useful distance from the material for me, a useful curiosity. I can’t know what a woman is thinking, I have no idea all the time, and I mean that in the best possible way, and I want to sort of glorify that mystery in the movies that I make by giving the center stage to a lady who’s probably more sophisticated, sensitive, and intuitive than I am.
Deadline : In deconstructing this film, it’s interesting that you show the inner life, thoughts, and loneliness of both Lee and Longlegs. A lot of horror films these days try not to let the audience know too much about what’s going on with the villain in their day-to-day lives. But in this film, we get a little bit of him without really knowing everything. Can you talk about the decision-making that went into pulling back the curtain?
Osgood Perkins : When it came to Longlegs, the way we were going to treat his presence in the movie was going to be two things. It was going to be the hunted monster who because you never really see him, holds a real power. Because he’s able to sort of be omnipresent, and affecting everybody, and doing all these terrible things, and no one can understand how, and you just can’t find him. You can’t even see him. He’s like the summative power, the unseen hand. And then we wanted to juxtapose that against the fact of like, yeah, sure, he’s that, but he’s also just like a shitty person, and he’s a shitty person who’s been through the wringer. It’s not interesting to have someone who’s worked for the devil be like, “Ooh, man, you know what I love? Working for the devil.” I think it’s more like, “Man, I’ve been working for the devil, and sometimes it’s really hot, and sometimes I really get off on it, and sometimes it’s a fucking drag.”
Deadline, July 13, 2024.
Poor Things
directed by Yorgos Lanthimos Ireland, United Kingdom, United States of America, Hungary, 2023
London, sometime in the late 19th century. Bella (Emma Stone) is the adopted daughter of the Frankenstein-like surgeon Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), whom Bella calls God for short. Bella is God's most successful experiment. She doesn't seem quite right in the head at first, until it becomes clear that Bella's brain is way behind her body, and that she's catching up at lightning speed. Hungry for the worldliness she is lacking, Bella runs off with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a slick and debauched lawyer, on a whirlwind adventure across the continents. Free from the prejudices of her times, Bella grows steadfast in her purpose to stand for equality and liberation. An adaptation of the novel of the same name by Scottish author Alasdair Gray.
Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences : Poor Things feels far and away your most visually experimental and expressive movie to date. In your early conversations with cinematographer Robbie Ryan, what did you share about your vision for the movie's visual style?
Yorgos Lanthimos : Robbie and I have known each other for a few years now. We made The Favourite together, and that experience was a good learning curve in understanding how we work best together. So, instead of talking too much about Poor Things' look, it was more about building on what we started doing on The Favourite. We knew, for instance, that we liked certain things from making that film and that we wanted to go even further and explore other things. We did a lot of testing to find out which lenses we liked that were slightly different from the ones we used before. We used these old Petzval lenses that bring a certain look to the film, and we used a lot of wide-angle lenses again. During those tests, we also remembered that we'd seen this lens when we were preparing to do The Favourite that created this black circular background in the frame. We didn't use that lens for The Favourite, because we thought it would be too much. But when we were testing lenses for Poor Things, we thought, 'Remember that lens? Why don't we use it here?' We actually weren't able to find the same lens again, but Robbie had the idea to use a 16 mm lens to create a similar circular effect. We ended up using that. Our work together for Poor Things was made up of a lot of those kinds of discoveries and just playing around with things, because we'd already developed a language between us. For reference, I showed him some Fassbinder films and talked about how the camera moved in them, because in addition to all the wide-angle lenses and physical camera movements in Poor Things, there are also quite a few zooms throughout the film that might not necessarily be noticeable, but they're there. We looked to Fassbinder's work with that in mind. The other thing that was important for us was that we knew this was going to be the first film we'd shot on a soundstage. Every set was built in a studio, and we knew that would require a lot of artificial lighting, which I'd never worked with before. Robbie only had a little experience with that too, because we didn't use any artificial light on The Favourite. On that film, we used natural light and practical lights, like candles. So, this time around, we wanted to make sure we weren't going to be trapping ourselves or forcing ourselves to adopt a different way of shooting.
Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences : There have been a lot of conversations of late about the necessity of sex scenes in movies. Poor Things seems to exist in opposition to those conversations. How do you think about the sex scenes within your films?
Yorgos Lanthimos : The whole time I've been making films, that's never been an issue for me. It's always just been about what I've felt is right for each film and for each character. We've always gone with that, and the people I've worked with have understood that. It's never been an issue for us. In this film, we're focusing on a woman who doesn't judge. She doesn't judge herself or others when it comes to nudity or sex or her own body. She deals with everything with the same attitude, whether it be friendship, education, politics, traveling, poverty, or medicine. She approaches it all with the same attitude of curiosity. We needed to do the same thing, so that's what we did. It would have been disingenuous for us to all of a sudden be prudish about that particular aspect of not only her story, but also her personality and character.
directed by Steve McQueen United Kingdom, United States of America, 2024.
World War II drama about single mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan), who sends her nine-year-old son George (Elliott Heffernan) to the countryside because the ongoing Nazi bombings in London make it too dangerous. But George wants to return to his mother, jumps off the train that is supposed to take him to the countryside, and begins the long, dangerous journey back to London. The film tells the stories of a group of Londoners during the darkest periode of recent British history.
Deadline : Don’t look back
Steve McQueen : None of my films have been similar to any other film, from Occupied City to Hunger to Small Axe to Shame. I mean, they are all very, very, very different. And that’s not just because I want to be different, it’s because the subject matter asks for it to be like that. It’s all about subject matter, and then making work that can enhance what I want to talk about. With Blitz, I wanted to look through a child’s perspective. Like a Brothers Grimm fairytale, it’s very dark, but it’s almost like a dream — and I think that seeing these things through a child’s perspective is what gives it a dreamlike quality. Because I’m putting you in a situation where you’re experiencing things for the first time. It’s a landscape we’re all familiar with, but it’s at the same time it’s unrecognizable.
Deadline : Dare to be Different
Steve McQueen : What’s radical about Blitz is that every single image on the screen has never been shown before. Every single image on the screen. You’ve never seen women in a factory making bombs. You’ve never seen firemen working the way they did to put out the fires. You’ve never seen [4ft 6in bomb shelter marshal] Mickey Davies, you’ve never seen the Café de Paris bombing, you’ve never seen the effects of a London tube station flooding like this. Every single image is revolutionary, just because people chose not to put it into pictures before. It was steeped in research, because I knew questions would be asked of it, particularly about how — as my historical advisor Joshua Levine, who wrote The Secret History of the Blitz, explained — London was so cosmopolitan at that time. I knew it had to be steeped in research because a lot of questions would be asked: Was it really like this? So, every single image is something you’ve never seen before, in the history of British cinema.
Deadline : Be true to the story
Steve McQueen : It wasn’t about ticking boxes. It’s a story about a boy, and it started with a photograph of a boy that I found during my research for Small Axe of a Black child being evacuated, with a cap and a suitcase. I wanted to know who he was. I felt so protective of him when I saw that photograph. He was just a sweet little boy. But the contrast is, he’s in the environment of war. So how did he come to be in this situation? Who were his parents? Where did he live? And then the story of George [played by Elliott Heffernan] spiraled out of that, taking him to broader, wider situations, once he leaves his bird’s nest. Most people didn’t really leave their neighborhoods in those days, their four or five streets. So, the fact that he goes out into a broader, wider environment would have been very unusual.
Deadline, November 17, 2024.
Bastarden (English title The Promised Land)
directed by Nikolaj Arcel Denmark Sweden Norway Germany, 2023.
Denmark, mid-eighteenth century. With the begrudging approval of the royal court, retired captain and social outcast Ludvig Kahlen (Mads Mikkelsen) sets out to the barren plains of Jutland, hoping to turn it into arable territory and secure wealth and honour for himself. However to achieve his goal, he must overcome the cold-blooded landlord Frederik De Schinkel, who sees Kahlen as a trespasser on his domain. While resembling a Western in its theme of civilisation wrought from the wilderness, Arcel’s film examines more intricate class and gender politics. Civilisation here appears both as a source of unbridled tyranny and an ideal to be constantly re-established through individual enterprise.
Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences : Were there other historical epics that you looked at as points of reference while you were making this film?
Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences : The movie also looks like it was physically taxing to make. Was that the case?
Nikolaj Arcel : It was like summer camp! It wasn't summer, of course, so it was slightly colder than what that implies, but we did really enjoy ourselves. Every day, we felt so lucky when we were out there on the heath. Sometimes, it got a little cold, but every day was beautiful. We would watch the sunsets and sunrises and we were all just in the elements. Making this movie was a really pleasurable experience in every way, and I think that's what happens sometimes when you have to travel to make a film. When you go outside of your hometown or your home country, everybody's just there. That's why I say it was like a summer camp kind of feeling on set, which is a very nice way to feel when you're making a film.
Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, January 31, 2024
Dune. Part Two
directed by Denis Villeneuve United States of America, Canada, United Arab Emirates, Hungary, Italy, New Zealand, Jordan, Gambia, 2024.
The second part of Denis Villeneuve's film adaptation of Frank Herbert's scifi classic Dune continues where the first part ends: Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and his mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) manage to escape just in time from the barbaric attack of the Harkonnens, which spells the downfall of Atreides family. They join the Fremen, the clever desert dwellers on planet Arrakis, with whom Paul plots to avenge his family, welcoming him as their long-awaited messiah. Like its predecessor, Part Two is a beautifully crafted, grand and sensuous cinematic spectacle.
Deadline :The character played by Peter O’Toole in the most revered of sandy epics, David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia ….
Denis Villeneuve : In Lawrence of Arabia, he fell in love with the Arabic culture and asked the Arabic people to fight for England. And at the end, he betrayed that culture and that kills him, it breaks his heart. And it’s that tragedy, that betrayal… I wanted it to be very clear for the audience. In order to do so, I gave Chani much more substance, and I gave her her own political views. The movie is seen through the lens of their relationship, the birth of their love, how their love grows, as Paul discovered the culture, learned about the culture. And then how their love is tested by the politics of the world and where there’s a separation between both of them. And in the third part, we suddenly follow from her point of view, which becomes our moral angle, the moral compass, as you described it.
Deadline : Why did you make that choice?
Denis Villeneuve : So, the audience could understand that Paul is moving in the wrong direction and she feels betrayed. I felt that Chani had that beautiful charisma, and anything she does on screen, she’s a movie star. She has that. As you’ve said, you cannot take your eyes from her. She is very magnetic, but I love actors that are good listeners, people that, when everybody is talking in the scene, you can keep your camera on. Like Zendaya, you can feel all grammar unfolding in the way she reacts and deep inside her eyes. I put a lot of chips on it, I put a lot of pressure on her shoulders because I removed all… she has no lines toward the end. The third act is almost there as a presence that reacts emotionally to what’s happening, and to the betrayal. I kept saying to my crew, “If we don’t believe in their love story, there is no movie.” So, my focus, the entire movie view, was to make sure that I will protect that journey between both characters, and to make sure that the relationship will come to life.
Deadline : Well, she doesn’t need words to get her point across. I feel like that last look from her, I’ve gotten that one from my wife. What did you say to her?
Denis Villeneuve : Listen, she’s a tremendous actress. She knew it was clear, from the screenplay. What’s important for me is that she can convey in her attitude that she’s been betrayed as a woman, but also as a Fremen. It’s a dual betrayal. Paul betrays her love, but more importantly, I think for her, is the fact that he takes power in the name of another culture. The idea was that they were supposed to bring Fremen to power, to relieve them from colonialism. And now Paul will embrace again this colonialist approach. That is the big betrayal, the political betrayal. I wanted both to be intertwined, embedded one into the other. It’s the end of the nobility, a very cruel moment where a human being is fighting to keep their dignity.
She’s trying to keep her dignity. I absolutely love the moment where we go from where the society will bow in front of the emperor, and we go straight into the intimacy of the interaction between both characters, and then the ones that are still standing are this princess who will become his wife for political reasons, and Chani, who is betrayed and leaves the room. It’s a moment that was essential to nail on the day as I was directing, and I am very deeply happy about how Chani brought it to the screen, and also how Paul ultimately did it. That was a deep sadness they brought to life.
Deadline, November 20, 2024.
