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Reviews
Adaptation. (2002)
Postmodern shallows but fun
So you have a book, and its author, and you suggest to the author you turn the book into a film, but the film strays - halfway - from the book in quite radical fashion by adding a loverstory, a murder twist, three dead people, lots of blood, and a happy ending of sorts. All this self-reflexively cast into a film about the process of turning the book into a film, with the screenwriter as the main protagonist. And, not incidentally, portraying the actual screenwriter.
So there are several betrayals at work: the book author gets dragged from quasi-documentary terrain into pure pupl fiction. The screen writer, and with his alter ego, conveniently cast as his twin brother, gets dragged from the documentary terrain of his writing Being John Malkowitch into a persiflage of himself as a neurotic imposter syndrom ridden inhabitant of plant Holywood. And the real world protagonist too of the book, John Laroche, is betrayed, dragged from his real world court case for stealing orchids, into that pupl fictionesque part of the film adaptation of the book.
Philosophical potential, the Darwinian motive to adapt to one's niche or die, is left unexplored, aside a persiflage of CHarles Darwin the Voctorian. Women are beautiful and flirtatious, men are rough and edgy, postmodern reflexivity is so exciting that the movie has to scream it in your face, in all thus a very turn of the millenium movie that is fun to watch and no doubt was even more fun to write and produce.
Les rencontres d'après minuit (2013)
Footballer Eric Cantona's 'forgotten' film
A famous footballer cast in a French experiment. A party of sorts with a tension that is deliberately burdened by constructed pretense to tease the viewer into the figure of the voyeur, which is the only figure not figured in the cast of party invitees. Those include Cantona as 'the stallion' for example, invited to the party on strength of the stallion's famed endowment. Alongside others like 'the star', the teen', all called to the event for their various fantasies about relationship and sex to mix and play out, to mutual disillusionment and perhaps, fulfillment. In the end, none of it quite comes together, but perhaps that was director Yann Gonzalez's intention all along. But one is left haunted by the lighting, the interplay of black and white, of shadows, of movement and voice.
Eaten by Lions (2018)
Wonderfully quirky
What do you do if your short film hits a nerve and takes off? Well, go turn it into a full feature film , best with as many of the lead actors as you can. That, in a way, is the DNA of Eaten by Lions. Has director Jason Wingard, who also co-wrote the script, bitten off a bit more than he can chew in taking this leap? That would be too facile a verdict to cast, and only possible if you approached his creation with any other than a taste for daringly independent film making.
But it's worth sticking with this film and its cast, a good few of them growing into it from the short. Technical set pieces, paying homage to static frames and canvasses. A selection of pastiches riffing on second and third generation British Indian culture and its in-jokes and contradictions. Half-brotherly love, shaped by a dynamic also rooted in an implicit reflection on and of disability. Racism, cutting both ways, playfully mocked throughout.
But ultimately, a coming of age story where opposites meet, then mesh, difference is overcome, prejudice cast away, culminating in a wild house party and its sober aftermath, none of which intended at all to resemble an even marginally plausible unfolding of events.
Eaten by Lions ultimately therefore turns into an homage to transgression, muted to remain within the bounds of tolerance of the common viewer's taste buds.
Now & Later (2011)
An ode to the empowered woman
Angela (Shari Solanis) embodies the qualities of a woman set free. She is self-sufficient intellectually, emotionally, sexually and financially. She picks the men she would like to have, in her life and otherwise, like the books she keeps on her shelf: Reich on psychology, a treatise on Chi power. A lover from Nicaragua who roams the world as a journalist. A wanted trader, seemingly the main protagonist (James Keller Northam's Bill) who decides to flee to Nicaragua, the country the violence of which she left for a better life as an illegal immigrant in LA where she works as a nurse.
Embodying that implausible archetype of female eros 'set free' to conform, in Phillippe Diaz's film, to the male fantasy of the strong woman who wants nothing more than lovingly dominate a man, expose him to his hidden desires to serve her needs and expose his weaknesses and fears, but ultimately offering him all the bells and whistles of no strings attached intimacy.
An abandoned menage a trois cannot rise to more than a faint premonition of what Gaspar Noé would achieve so masterfully in Love a few years later. But it stands as perhaps the best example of Now and Later's fascination with the normalisation of sexuality as a main staple of everyday life, which some critics have mistaken for an unfortunate slip into soft pornography.
The underlying motif, that of living in the moment versus blindly falling forward in strive, may be sailing very close to kitsch but there remains an unapologetic authenticity in Solanis's and Northam's acting that gives this film its unexpected sparkle and mystery. Diaz is far from the pinacle of achievement in breathing fresh life into the well worn common places of cinematic voyeurism and politico-critical subtext. Now and Later nevertheless stands as a valid citation of these clichés in ways that not many other films have dared to attempt in such disarming lack of pretence.
The Time That Remains (2009)
World history through the history of the mundane
E.lia Suleiman, director and main protagpnist, lays bare his past and his identiy as an 'Israeli-Arab' who grew up in the occupied territories of the West Bank. Filmed mostly in Ramallah, well known as a hotspot of the first Intifada of the late 1980s and presently seat of the Palestinian National Authority, this is Suleiman's first Israeli, rather than Palestinian, Cannes entry and while it does snot really labour a cause it serves as a powerful memento of the fate of Arab Christians.
We see 50 years of Palestinian history through the lense of a family, from the surrender of the protagonist's grandfather, in his role of major, to the Isreali army, via his father's time in the resistance, to his own youth until he is expelled and has to leave.
He visits years later, his parents having passed on, to visit his ailing aunt, seemingly the one strong tie that binds him to his past, where he is from, and in a way, who he is. Two friends still recognise him, and the three of them spending time together in a street cafe, observing the ever recurring pattern of life locked away in the eternal melancholy of what has been lost, is perhaps one of the most memorable images captured by Suleiman.
The film begins, and ends, with absurdly cast scenes from the protagonist's last visit that he pays to his aunt as she lies dying. Present-day Palestine as a horror cabinet of a community decendet into farce. How else to portray the lived contradictions of the Palestinian people, the unbearable fate of the boy who grew up to be man through leaving behind what made him in order to break free.
Toni Erdmann (2016)
German humour for you
So there you have it: ever wondered about what makes for a perfect joke? Maren Ade, director and author of Toni Erdmann, gives you the answer. You have to be absolutely committed and sincere in your delivery, and voila comedy will happen as a by-product. We are never quite sure as a result of this recipe whether the joke is on the other character, on the stereotype of father-daughter relationships, or on business consultancy careers, or, on us the audience. In the academic context that has been shaping Ade's trajectory, this somewhat too obvious reflexivity may be forgiven though.
With an epochal display of the dishevelled characters of fallen teacher father and ambitious careerist daughter, Peter Simonischeck and. Sandra Hüller take us to the brink of fragility of middle class existence that cannot reflect on its sense but through a persiflage of its absurdity. What remains is the authentic encounter with the other, where we are all mirrors of each other in our tenuous hold on the narratives we give our lives.
Limbo (2020)
Refreshing take on migration and ethnic diversity in rural Scotland
We need more Scottish film makers with Ben Sharrock's patience for dialogue that is carried as much by the silences as by what the protagonists actually end up saying, with his endurance when it comes to depicting over-romanticised landscape as void and inhospitable enough for it to reveal itself in moments of depth.
The obligatory reverence towards Danny Boyle's Trainspotting remains obscure enough for it to develop its own creative moments. In the beginning, the protagonists, four asylum seekers from Syria, Ghana, Nigeria and Afghanistan, find themselves cast in the middle of an Outer Hebridean plain in quite the same way as Renton and his friends turn up outside Corrour station in front of a lifeless autumnal grey Highland vista. And reminisces of Renton and friends shine through again in the cocky Island youths as they have their first encounter with Omar, the lead character.
Limbo is memorable in many ways but particularly perceptive in its depiction of the context of ethnic minorities in Scotland. Scotland, and the Highlands and Islands region in particular, is ethnically highly homogenous. Less than 5% of the Scottish population describe themselves as non-white. In the Highlands and Islands, it is less than 2%, a bit more than 3000 residents. If you are brown, or black, or of African, or Asian, or Indian or Arab heritage you really stand out. This is tempered by the friendly welcome characteristic of Scottish culture, and by the open-door policy towards migrants, which seeks to counter balance the threat of depopulation that looms large across the Highaldns and Islands. Limbo gets the resulting tensions about right, adn that alone makes it worth watching.