Drive-Away Dolls is now showing in selected cinemas.
Cinésthesia
Feelings. On film.
Monday 18 March 2024
O brother, where art thou?: "Drive-Away Dolls"
Saturday 16 March 2024
Devil's advocate: "Shaitaan"
In 2018, Shaitaan's director Vikas Bahl was accused of sexual assault by a former employee of his production company Phantom Films; this allegation was followed by further accusations of sexual harassment by actresses Kangana Ranaut and Nayani Dixit, who'd appeared in Bahl's putatively feminist 2014 travelogue Queen. No charges were brought, but the ensuing furore resulted in Phantom Films' dissolution. (This process in itself proved messy: after Bahl's partners in the company, Anurag Kashyap and Vikramaditya Motwane, provided formal statements on the matter, Bahl threatened to sue for defamation.) The director has worked steadily post-lockdown - signing off on three films in three years - but Shaitaan is Bahl's first big hit since his return to action. You can see why: this is a proper horror movie, as opposed to the militaristic flagwavers currently being shoved down the mass audience's neck, and one with both a well-rehearsed premise and a sly, insinuating performance from Madhavan to recommend it. (The latter really is good, feigning sincere hurt whenever anyone accuses him of being the Devil incarnate. Compared to Madhavan, the other performers strike the eye as a little bland, mere puppets.) Without the backstory, Shaitaan might have stood as the kind of modest, manageable genre proposition by which a troubled creative might well rehabilitate himself within a forgiving industry.
Shaitaan is now playing in selected cinemas.
Friday 15 March 2024
For what it's worth...
UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of March 8-10, 2024):
1 (1) Dune: Part Two (12A) **
2 (3) Wicked Little Letters (15)
3 (2) Bob Marley: One Love (12A)
4 (4) Migration (U)
5 (new) Imaginary (15)
6 (new) Shaitaan (15) **
7 (new) Titanic: The Musical (PG)
9 (10) Sami Swoi. Początek (12A)
10 (5) Madame Web (12A)
(source: BFI)
My top five:
1. Our Body
2. Fight Club
3. Origin
4. City of God
DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten:
2 (new) Migration (U)
4 (1) Anyone But You (15)
6 (2) The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (12)
8 (13) Barbie (12) ***
9 (new) Napoleon (15) **
10 (16) Elvis (12) **
My top five:
1. Anatomy of a Fall
4. Wonka
Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (Friday, Channel 4, 11.05pm)
2. Out of Sight [above] (Saturday, BBC1, 11.35pm)
3. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (Saturday, Channel 4, 11.10pm)
4. Phantom Thread (Sunday, BBC2, 11.40pm)
5. Can You Ever Forgive Me? (Sunday, Channel 4, 12.50am)
Punchdrunk love: "Fight Club" at 25
For any newcomers, this is the story of a perilously lonely boy (with "a house full of condiments, but no food", as Jim Uhls' script has it) who starts listening to an inner voice urging him to give into his worst instincts. (Fortuitously, this reissue lands between two high-profile films centred on protagonists with imaginary friends: we've been primed.) Beating himself and others up in underground gladiatorial arenas hardly improves his condition: he's soon homeless, bleeding, being cuckolded by his own subconscious and well on his way to becoming public enemy number one. His downward spiral allows Fincher to flag just how easily certain men are misled towards violent, (self-)destructive activity. Yet one reason this late 20th century endeavour has endured so is that it feels very much of the 21st century: simultaneously doomy and snarky while ambiguous and slippery, bound up with cults of personality (for Brad Pitt's Tyler Durden, the film's strutting imp of the perverse, read Tate or Trump), a broadly despairing view of the state of play between the sexes, and the misplaced anger that follows from our understanding that we need to shake off capitalism but haven't quite figured out how best to achieve that aim. And that's before the collapsing buildings the movie arrives at, a trailer for non-movie spectacles to come.
All that said, it is often wildly funny, or howlingly inappropriate, its tossed-off wisecracks pushing some way beyond those of, say, South Park or Family Guy; you can see why the edgelords seized upon it, but also why Fincher wound up making the comparably distasteful Gone Girl, which I half-suspect may be Fight Club for girls. And Fincher was always good with actors, driving them to commit and subvert as befits. Incels seem to miss this, but wiggly Norton - one of the great worms of 1990s film - only becomes heroic late on after trying to take responsibility for his crimes; Pitt remains a pretty terrific articulation of a pose most men will have wanted to throw at some point, even if it stands for nothing and might get you killed. The bonus is Helena Bonham Carter at her most withering; you have to overlook her Marla if you want to appropriate Fight Club as an unapologetic push for men's rights. (Further down the callsheet, two from the funny-how-things-turn-out file: a TV news reporter is played by Lauren Sánchez, newly prominent as the main squeeze of Amazon boss Jeff Bezos; and it still strikes me as faintly ironic that our hero should be seen to bottom out upon beating Jared Leto to a pulp, "I felt like destroying something beautiful" et al.)
Even after 25 years, we haven't yet fully metabolised Fight Club - what it means, what it represents, where it ranks - which probably accounts for the ongoing arguments. Fincher pushed on regardless, but Uhls has had only one more script produced in the years since, 2008's bland Hayden Christensen vehicle Jumper. Like an off-colour joke, it might just be unrepeatable, although elements of the film seemed to factor into the following year's American Psycho (another droll rendering of a notionally unfilmable novel) and the Jackass series (first transmission: October 2000), which was - which remains, somewhat implausibly - Fight Club reenacted by clowns for shits and giggles. But extinction was where everything was heading: within ten years, and after a decade characterised by insecurity on various fronts, American movies had been reduced to childproofed superheroics and digimated cutesiness, with barely a single Tyler Durden around to splice a welcome transgression or two into the mix. Raw meat stuffed with gelignite, Fincher's film still requires marking as dangerous - I wouldn't take a date to it - but we'd do well to reclaim some of its swagger from the nuts on the Internet. Peer beyond its sloganeering and sixpacks, and you can spy a moment when our movies still took risks, and revolution of multiple kinds remained some sort of possibility.
Fight Club returns to cinemas nationwide from today.
Thursday 14 March 2024
Anatomy of a fall: "Manjummel Boys"
Manjummel Boys is now playing in selected cinemas.
Wednesday 13 March 2024
An education: "Origin"
The eminent film scholar David Bordwell may have passed last month, but pressing questions of film form linger on in his wake. Kaouther Ben Hania's recent Oscar nominee Four Daughters demonstrated - unintentionally, I suspect - how the hybrid commingling of drama and documentary can do as much to obscure as reveal the truth of any matter. Claire Simon's Our Body, by contrast, suggested old-school observational documentary craft remains as vital as ever to our understanding of ourselves and the world. Now we have Origin, in which Ava duVernay - a filmmaker with form in both drama (2014's Selma) and documentary (2016's 13TH) - sets out to film what she's described as "the biography of a book". The book is Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, a non-fiction bestseller of 2020 in which the Black academic and writer Isabel Wilkerson argued it was caste rather than race (and, a corollary, casteism rather than racism) that most closely governs how society operates.
Arguably, Wilkerson was splitting hairs - that most academic of pastimes - but her theory pushed beyond skin colour in search of something more deeply rooted yet: the discontent that would explain both the white-on-white hatred of the Holocaust and contemporary anti-Semitism, and the brown-on-brown atrocities of latter-day India. Her fieldwork now yields a drama describing the process whereby Wilkerson (played in duVernay's film by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) - an observer as we join her, "on hiatus" in her own words - was first persuaded to put pen to paper or fingers to the keyboard, a mixed bag of circumstances that include the Trayvon Martin shooting, much bathtub and bedtime reading, the loss of her partner and mother in quick succession, and subsequent research trips to Berlin and Delhi. It is an unconventional way of approaching the material, to say the least. Non-fiction books such as Wilkerson's, steeped in theory and historical analysis, tend to generate non-fiction films; it would be neither inaccurate nor strictly a diss to describe duVernay's film as soap-adjacent. With that comes an element of creative jeopardy, for Origin risks interpretation not as a text on how we might collectively negotiate and resolve the issues under discussion, but something far more niche, borderline narcissistic: how a tenured Black creative - be that Wilkerson or duVernay or anyone with money enough to travel and test a theory - negotiates such issues. Could it be that Origin is less interested in how society is reformed and redeemed than in how publishing advances are earned?
Well, nope - or not entirely, and therein lies Origin's odd sort of success. Granted, duVernay's film may still be primarily of interest to writers, historians and the chattering classes. What we're watching is, after all, the construction of a grand unifying theory, an idea that might connect the Berlin of 1939 to Charlottesville in 2017. (The movie is A Beautiful Mind with hate crimes in place of equations.) Yet the risk pays off in scenes you wouldn't normally see in this kind of prestige statement drama: Wilkerson calling in a plumber (Nick Offerman, glowering under a MAGA cap) to fix a blocked pump, or attending cookouts with best pal Niecy Nash-Betts, a surrogate for those of us without an MA. The scene where Wilkerson first arrives in India may be the most accurate filming yet of what it is to be a Westerner arriving in India for the first time, but then, at all points, duVernay is interested in the ways theory gets developed, tested and refined in conversation with the wider world. A lot, then, depends on the writing, which is passionate, if every so often on the nose: as the inspirational ballad poured over the closing credits like treacle underlines, Origin was conceived not as a rigorous Straub-Huillet interrogation of our shared past, but rousing awards-season product, no viewer left behind. Yet scene-by-scene, the actors sold me on it, particularly Ellis-Taylor, who's been quietly excellent for a while (Ray, If Beale Street Could Talk, King Richard), and here really does seem to be pulling something notable together: a theory, a life, a way forward for her fellow man.
If you find the film working for you in any way, it's almost certainly because duVernay prioritises human experience over the abstract and conceptual: what she's chosen to film is how the facts Wilkerson unearthed affect the characters, realising that that's what will most forcefully affect us in turn. This director holds to a sentimental view of history and class relations, but much as Wilkerson's theory can be boiled down to our old friends love and hate, concepts beyond colour, so too casteism invites description as irrational and emotive - an arbitrary imposition that arguably merits dramatising as much as it does documenting. In its second half, Origin alights upon a rather brilliant thesis: that just as hate spread across the world, from Jim Crow-era America to Nazi Germany and back to our Trump-haunted present, so too might love and resistance, much as the reformist Indian politician B.R. Ambedkar drew strength from the resilience of the African-Americans he observed on one U.S. trip. Within the narrow corridor of awards season 2023-24, this heartfelt, all-embracing film by a noted Black creative was clearly outmanoeuvred by a far cooler, more rigorous proposition by a middle-aged white bloke from North London, yet it struck me that both duVernay and Jonathan Glazer were working towards much the same goals of engagement and enlightenment. By going a funny way around, by refusing merely to stripmine its material for a rollcall of astonishing and/or alarming truths, Origin stands alone as a sort of prologue or prequel - its own origin story, directing us back towards the book and the possibility it holds of becoming better citizens in a kinder, more just society.
Origin is now playing in selected cinemas.
Tuesday 12 March 2024
Inside out: "Our Body"
What's extraordinary about Simon's film - and much of it does seem extraordinary - is that it shows us next to nothing that might be deemed extraordinary. Although this camera briefly notes the presence outside the hospital gates of women protesting against the more heavyhanded forms of gynaecology - establishing some boundaries, if you like - Simon doesn't come this way to expose any medical scandal or shortfall; instead, she films exactly that treatment we'd hope to receive in any enlightened healthcare system. A male physician speaks with admirable frankness and clarity to a 17-year-old transitioning from female to male about their options, should they want to have children in later life; a woman facing a mastectomy is guided through the finer points of reconstructive surgery. Set against this reassuringly ordinary chat, there is the grand science fiction of the Tenon's operating theatres, where lasers are steered and activated remotely by surgeons working beneath giant hoods to shut out any external distraction. Again, the sight is both ordinary (standard operating practice for any 21st century hospital) and extraordinary (a setpiece extracted from one patient's endometriosis). Yet even the film's quieter, more humdrum interactions set you to thinking about the nature of the institution, and our place within it. I spent some of the film wondering whether there would be time and space in our stressy, rickety, maxed-out NHS for any British filmmaker to attempt a comparable study, or whether the need to get one patient out the door and another one in would preclude it. Would the cracks immediately start to show, as they never seem to do here?
At every stage, the trust Simon established with subjects from evidently diverse backgrounds appears as great as that these patients place in their doctors. Maybe we're all just loosening up around cameras, but it still seems an uncommon feat on Simon's part to have gathered three hours of acutely, often uncomfortably personal testimony: words and emotions pulled from the very heart of fearful and/or exhausted human forms. You may not know what it is to endure fertility problems, hot flushes or skipped periods, but you'll remember what it is to feel unease in some core part of your being; and while you're unlikely to know how to carry out the radical vulvectomy one doc mentions in passing, you'll already sense the pain, both physical and psychic, lurking in such a phrase. Yet Our Body goes about its rounds with the calm bedside manner of a gifted med student, sitting just off-centre of the patient-doctor axis, watching and learning, and somehow even seeing past everybody's facemasks, because Simon was filming at the tailend of Covid, that moment when we all suddenly became ultra-aware of our own bodies, and the impact they can have on others. The result counts among the most profound examples of pandemic cinema, as the existential threat is front and centre - and never more so than when Simon herself receives a diagnosis of breast cancer. This really is an extraordinary development: it's as though the filmmaker was so in synch with her subjects that her body decided it was her turn. Yet Simon affords herself the same dignity as any other of the Tenon's patients, and presents her body as one among many, in much the same boat as the young Spanish woman informed she has ovarian cancer via a translation app, or - the real heartbreaker here - the bedbound greyhair whose chemo has failed to take. The singular and the collective; the miracles of life, and its myriad miseries. In such sequences as that in which a sperm is injected by hand into an unfertilised egg, and again as a new mother greets her mewling child with a line no scriptwriter could have landed on ("after nine months of complicity, we meet at last": our body, indeed), this generally unprepossessing-looking film starts to feel major indeed: a prequel to every documentary, every film ever pushed into the world. Art, cancer, conception, compassion: it starts with us and within us.
Our Body is currently streaming via MUBI.
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