On demand: "Is That Black Enough for You?!?"

Subtitled How One Decade Forever Changed the Movies (and Me), Is That Black Enough for You?!? is the eminent US film critic Elvis Mitchell's cine-memoir of growing up in parallel with the blaxsploitation movies of the 1970s. The films under observation were cheap, trashy, often nasty - they weren't always there to make nice, and some even divided Black audiences - but as Mitchell drily observes, they were also energised, far more in touch with wider social trends and shifts than much of the era's studio product, a liberation of some haphazard kind from what had come before. An early montage deals briskly with that backstory: decades of flatly racist stereotypes, white writer-director-producer-stars (of whom Olivier and Orson Welles were merely the most prominent) who thought it perfectly natural to don blackface, Black careers that went mishandled, obscured, obliterated. In its place, Mitchell offers a vibrant parade of Black faces and bodies, seen in everything from glitzy, hyper-expensive mainstream musicals to obscure, quasi-experimental, YouTube-sourced curios. To bolster his thesis, he adds interviews with contemporary Black talent - from the overlooked Charles Burnett to the never more visible Zendaya - who benefitted from these sudden eruptions or redirections of creative energy; these esteemed and illustrious talking heads chattily and candidly address what they themselves have been looking for on screen all these years, and some explain why they haven't quite found it yet. The title, which comes from the theme song to 1970's prime blaxsploitationer Cotton Comes to Harlem, becomes the mantra Mitchell applies to the hundred or so titles that fall under his gaze and ours, another way of asking "does it do us justice?" (In a way the old studio takes on Black life more often than not didn't.)

The editorial approach isn't dissimilar to Mark Cousins' recent compendium films: first person, close-to-the-mic narration, with idiosyncratic turns of phrase that reveal the author's own interests and biases. (My impression was that Mitchell is more of a Sweet Sweetback than a Shaft guy, possibly as the former demands careful critical handling - but he also sees how both films were instrumental in the repositioning and reshaping of the Black screen protagonist.) The clips, which speak to a lifetime of wide-ranging viewing, run the gamut and should in themselves be enough to pull any cinephile in: 1940s zombie movies, where the role of the Black comic support was to roll their eyes and run screaming offscreen; recently rediscovered countercultural artefacts (1968's Uptight and Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One); even Robert Downey Jr.'s ironised blackface in 2008's Tropic Thunder. It is, granted, somewhat ironic in itself to be watching Mitchell's film on Netflix, whose library of pre-2000 titles is patchy at best. Wouldn't it be great to double-bill Is That Black Enough for You?!? with 1973's Cleopatra Jones, or 1974's Uptown Saturday Night? Still, the arguments being made hold: the leads in 1964's Nothing But a Man should have enjoyed longer and vastly more successful careers, and something was very definitely going on in the Black cinema of the 1970s, even if it had to creep into view from the movies' indier fringes (1968's Night of the Living Dead) and got sent back there once Rocky Balboa replaced Muhammad Ali as America's favourite fighter and the Bee Gees repurposed the essentially Black sound of disco. After the Seventies, American movies got whiter again, and it took several more decades to course-correct.

Formally, Mitchell's film is rather foursquare, almost exactly how you'd convert a textbook or reference guide into images: it proceeds year by year, almost month by month, highlighting notable titles with a few minutes of commentary from either the director or his guest stars. If it's sometimes a little clipped in itself, that's surely because its maker was hustling to get in as much as he possibly could, but generally there's a nice, jazzy flow to these 135 minutes, and those films that did make the final cut are grabby, diverting and largely unfamiliar because undercirculated: the legacy problems of 1974 are also those of 2024. The aim appears no greater and no lesser than assembling a canon, but it's a far more extensive canon than you might have guessed from the handful of scratchy Super Fly knock-offs, and Mitchell addends those useful sidebars and footnotes that are the mark of the best critical endeavours. (Call them areas for further research.) I had no idea that The Wire's Glynn Turman, a graduate of blaxsploitation (via 1975's Cooley High) showed up in a Bergman movie around the same time (1977's The Serpent's Egg), and whatever your shade, it's hard not to be stirred by the sight of Harry Belafonte, in one of his final screen appearances before his death last year, recalling his defiant response to one of the corporate film business's drearier ultimatums: "Fuck it, I'm going to Paris." That's the spirit.

Is That Black Enough for You?!? is currently streaming on Netflix.

Mollywood nights: "Varshangalkku Shesham"

The Malayalam cinema has been enjoying substantial success not just this year but this past month, so perhaps we should permit it some measure of self-congratulation. Vineeth Sreenivasan's Varshangalkku Shesham has been composed as a would-be rousing hymn to the industry's creativity and durability, its ability to work cinematic miracles with often only limited resources; the drumbeats of its rich, keening songs become indistinguishable at times from the resounding thump of a hearty slap on the back. At the film's centre are two lifelong friends who first meet in the backwaters of late 20th century Keralan theatre and are then reunited, in something close to the present day, as showbusiness survivors, older and wiser, but also greyer, sadder and wearier. Murali (Pranav Mohanlal) is a prodigal musician and songwriter who succumbs to solitude and drink; Venu (Dhyan Sreenivasan, the director's brother) a runner turned writer-director who enjoys a decade of solid hits before losing his way. While shifting us between past and present - the title, translated into English as "Years Later", also serves as an onscreen graphic - writer-director Sreenivasan begins to riff on the way careers are made and destroyed, reputations gained and lost, and how lives switch track, sometimes gathering momentum, sometimes tailing off. Doubtless inspired by several decades' worth of real-world industry legends, it's an innately literary construction - a sort of South Indian Last Orders, with movie love swapped in for military service - announced by early scenes of courtship conducted via notes in the fly pages of college set texts. It helps that the younger versions of these characters are still of an age to dream and woo, but the first hour or so forms the strongest stretch of Malayalam filmmaking I've seen so far this year: proof you can make popular cinema without jettisoning any and every trace of poetry. In movies as in life, however, the problems come later - foremost among them how to keep it up.

For once our heroes pass into the Madras film business - versatile Venu seeing his enthusiasms embraced, Murali watching as his are subsumed and turned against themselves - VS gets both broader and more familiar. On a scene-by-scene basis: Sreenivasan has modest fun recreating the kind of movies that were made in a certain place at a particular time, as per everything from Singin' in the Rain to last year's Hindi TV standout Jubilee. In terms of characterisation, where Murali has been drawn along time-honoured, rather careworn lines as the self-loathing virtuoso who duly pisses his talent away. And in terms of overall shape, too: we pass through break-up, reunion and eventual comeback, each encountered more or less where you'd expect them to be in a film of this type. Sreenivasan pulls off individual coups here and there, such as the creation of a signature song (the movie's equivalent of "Shallow" or "That Thing You Do!") which flows through the drama, becoming the making of one creative and the undoing of another. There's still poetry present, in other words, but its lines and cadences become far less distinct, the script struggling to distinguish its behind-the-scenes war stories from the many others we've seen and heard. Late on, that poetry is replaced by Reels: local favourite Nivin Pauly injects some welcome energy as "Nivin Molly", the social media-addicted megastar headlining Murali and Venu's belated comeback vehicle. Even here, though, VS presents as inflexibly male: it could badly do with a Debbie Reynolds to set alongside its Kelly and O'Connor, the better to stop it hammering insistently away at the same nostalgic notes. For while the film remains genial in its backslapping, it's also two hours and forty-five minutes of men paying tribute to themselves, their genius, their hurt and resilience; while that's no doubt true to the structure and composition of the Malayalam film industry as it was at the millennium, in 2024 it also comes with a real air of locker-room fustiness. The great South Indian films of the past few years have demonstrated a heightened, bustling sense of community, both before and behind the camera. Sreenivasan gets some of that collective magic up on screen, but he's rather keener than you might like to frame it within the context of what is almost exclusively a boys' club.

Varshangalkku Shesham is now playing in selected cinemas.

On demand: "Drift"

Anthony Chen's contribution to the huddled masses of 21st century cinema's migrant movies is a smaller, more intimate affair than most of its predecessors. Drift's heroine, Liberian girl Jacqueline (Cynthia Erivo), has already got where she's going: a sunkissed Greek isle where others travel for leisure and pleasure, while she beds down in a cave, a shaven-headed citizen of nowhere, with only the clothes on her back and scraps of official documentation to show for herself. The issue facing Jacqueline is what's next; it's a migrant movie that dramatises a different kind of transitional period, more psychological than geographical. Chen joins her as she begins to address and process the tumult she's already endured: helpful flashbacks describe her life in Liberia and London, where Erivo sports longer locks, a Stockwell accent, and signs of prior privilege. Back in the present, there's a relationship of some kind with an American tour guide, who represents an easy-breezy freedom and is embodied by Alia Shawkat at her most relaxed. (Practically her first onscreen act is to offer Jacqueline a stick of chewing gum, a gesture that assumes a greater poignancy once we realise it's the closest the latter has received to a free meal for some while.) Amid the rubble and ruins of various fallen civilisations - first ancient bathhouses, then what's been left of an abandoned apartment complex - Drift begins to show us gradual and often haphazard rebuilding, first of a life, then of a trust in our fellow man.

For a while, I wondered whether the film was in fact being too easy-breezy to do full justice to its protagonist's experiences. With good reason, we are suckered by the idyllic scenery - but then you wouldn't have to look too far along the horizon, most immediately to the Lampedusa to which the migrants clung in 2016's documentary Fire at Sea, to see such narratives playing out on golden shores such as this. Within the context of this film, it allows Chen to play with notions of tension and release. The flashbacks capture a slow creep into bloody civil war, the walls closing in on Jacqueline's well-to-do, once-untouchable family, where the present-day action permits the camera (like the heroine, like us) to pause, breathe, relax, take stock. Drift is at its most effective in these quieter, more reflective moments: scenes involving Jacqueline's English contacts (including Honor Swinton Byrne as an upwardly mobile pal who won't for a moment have to worry about armed men invading her back garden) land somewhere between sketchy and soapy - Chen hasn't the budget to fully flesh these characters out - while the dialogue that washes in like the tide in the second half is a touch plain and utilitarian, a means of closing any remaining gaps. Yet the film remains persuasive - and quietly moving - so long as it stays close to two performers you'd probably follow to the ends of the earth, and simply lets them be. With her Tim Roth-like internality, Erivo is particularly adept at suggesting degrees of hurt and pain without saying a word; yet handed a restaurant's complementary bread basket, she turns visibly childlike, and her rare smiles feel like hard-earned rewards. Shawkat, meanwhile, infuses a slightly underwritten part with a spirit - a liberated, adventurous warmth - you might well want to find waiting for you at the end of a long, winding and dangerous road. Drift's essential modesty appears to have counted against it - it lands on streaming off the back of a surprisingly cursory theatrical release - but in the company of its two fine leads, it nudges towards an understanding of what and who we need to heal and move on, and how, in even the clearest of conditions, that progress isn't always as easy as it might first look.

Drift is currently available to rent via the BFI Player.

On demand: "Laapataa Ladies"

Given the ideological violence, codified or otherwise, which has set audiences running from the cinema in their droves over recent months, it's a relief to be confronted with a Hindi film that still feels capable of gentility, that isn't merely thumping us around the head with a recruiting manual for the better part of three hours. Kiran Rao's Laapataa Ladies is a deft and endearing fable, set in a 2001 that seems like tangible ancient history, and founded on an amusingly simple muddle involving nervy newlyweds who've barely tied the knot when they unknowingly stumble towards partner-swapping. Bumfluffed groom Deepak (Sparsh Shrivastava) gets the shock of his young life when the bride he's dragged off the midnight train to meet his parents lifts her veil to reveal a face he's never seen before; the mix-up, it transpires, was the result of a surfeit of veiled brides travelling on the same cross-country service, and some decidedly suboptimal seating arrangements. Such a breach of nuptial decorum would probably in itself be enough to sustain a feature-length comedy-drama, but screenwriter Sneha Desai, working from a story by Biplab Goswani, also explores complications involving the other corners of this accidental love quadrangle. The other woman, the progressively minded Jaya (Pratibha Ranta, who presents with something of Sonam Kapoor's poise), realises this snafu might actually work in her favour, swiftly torching the SIM card connecting her to her betrothed as if she were Jason Bourne; it's thus no real shock when we discover said betrothed, the brooding Pradeep (Bhaskar Jha), is a possessive drunk who's been accused of burning his first wife. And then there is the hardly small matter of Deepak's abandoned beloved, the spooked, unworldly, doe-like Phool (Nitanshi Goel), who descends from the fateful train in an unfamiliar part of the countryside, and finds herself at the mercy of complete strangers.

The opening hour suggests farce slowed down to the pace of an Ealing comedy, the better for us to savour this script's generous story and character beats, and the jokes that bubble up organically from its premise. Phool sees her name inscribed in an exasperated stationmaster's lost-property ledger, alongside the umbrellas and spectacles; an openly corrupt police chief (the terrific Ravi Kishan), who accepts bribes in the form of banknotes or songs, commends Deepak on managing to throw off his other half mere days into wedlock ("I've been trying for years"). In the span of attitudes and personalities it describes, Laapataa Ladies qualifies as a triumph of casting: even the walk-on roles are filled perfectly, and some cosmic matchmaking is evident between the leads. We're never allowed to believe Shrivastava's shy, sleepy Deepak stands a chance with Jaya - not when he's so felicitously paired with Goel's Phool. If the film eventually shades into seriousness - towards notably higher stakes - it's led there by the women. Not just the brides, forced to make their own ways in a society offering them scant encouragement, but those around them, like Manju Maai (Chhaya Kadam), the lived-in chaiwalli who takes the hapless Phool under her wing, telling her the greatest con ever pulled on the fairer sex - limiting their potential in one fell rhetorical swoop - was the notion of "the honourable woman". In a better world, one so wise and so pragmatic with it would be running her own country; here, she's frying bread pakora and hoping things work out for the best. Rao and Desai wear their feminism lightly, setting out characters rather than statements, but those characters' interactions do serve as a rallying call for women to be more forceful about who they are and what they want to be, where they're going and what they say and do there. (The better not to be so interchangeable - or, worse still, dispensable.) The point gets underlined by the elegant, outgoing Ranta and the adorable, homely Goel, giving the most skilfully differentiated and affecting performances in the entire film. "Learn to keep your eyes down," Phool is instructed by her family early on, the kind of dyed-in-the-wool, long-in-the-tooth non-wisdom that proliferates in stagnating societies. Rao's eyes remain open, alert to change and forever forward-facing, which is why Laapataa Ladies works so well as entertainment, but also - particularly in its home stretch, which gifts us the gleeful, Shakespearian spectacle of justice being properly served - as a vision of how India might well better itself, far away from all the flags and guns.

Laapataa Ladies is now streaming on Netflix.

In memoriam: Vincent Friell (Telegraph 27/04/24)

Vincent Friell, who has died aged 64, was an actor whose career describes an entire history of Scottish film and television, beginning with the cult indie comedy Restless Natives (1985) and proceeding to appearances in Danny Boyle’s era-defining Trainspotting (1996) and Ken Loach’s The Angels’ Share (2012) via episodes of Taggart, Rab C. Nesbitt and Still Game.

In Restless Natives, directed by the American import Michael Hoffman from a script by Ninian Dunnett, the dark-browed, 6’3” Friell – a gangly, shrugging presence in the John Gordon Sinclair mould – starred as the lovelorn Will, one of two underemployed chancers who become unlikely, Dick Turpin-like folk heroes upon holding up tour buses with toy guns. Set to a stirring score by Big Country’s Stuart Adamson, it echoed Bill Forsyth’s beguiling, better known efforts at modern Scottish mythmaking; much like Gregory’s Girl (1982), it lingered long in the imagination. 

As with most myths, the film required some degree of legerdemain, particularly in the scenes that required Will and sidekick Ronnie (Joe Mullaney) to make a high-speed Highland getaway on a motorbike. “I don’t drive, and I have an aversion to any form of speed,” Friell later admitted. “The first time we were on the bike, Joe revved the engine. He went one way, I went the other, and we were never let on the bike again. In the film, it’s not Joe and me on the bike.” 

Friell was born in Glasgow on January 17, 1960, one of five children for the actor and Labour activist Charlie Friell and his wife Mary. He made his screen debut among the suspects in Killer (1983), the ITV miniseries that first introduced audiences to the character of DCI Jim Taggart, played by Mark McManus. Such was Friell’s dependability and versatility that, after spin-off Taggart (1985-2010) became a ratings juggernaut, he returned to the show, playing three further, entirely new roles. 

The close-knit nature of the Scottish industry meant Friell repeatedly worked with the same performers in different contexts. He appeared with Gregor Fisher on the period miniseries Blood Red Roses (1986), before taking two separate roles on Fisher’s breakout vehicle Rab C. Nesbitt (1988-2014) and playing a landlord in the BBC’s fondly remembered, Fisher-led revival of The Tales of Para Handy (1994-95), based on Neil Munro’s books. He appeared alongside stage colleague Robert Carlyle in prison drama Silent Scream (1990), and then watched Carlyle become a star as Begbie in Trainspotting, where Friell played Kelly Macdonald’s baffled father.

More TV work followed, in Jack Docherty’s adworld sitcom The Creatives (1998), as a detective alongside Adrian Dunbar and Ray Winstone in ITV’s Tough Love (2002), and as a developer trying to take over the Clansman pub in Still Game (2002-2019). Friell belatedly returned to film in the indie Fast Romance (2011), which won BAFTA Scotland’s public vote for Favourite Scottish Film; in a marker of how far he’d come since his Restless Natives days, he played the Procurator Fiscal sentencing the wayward young hero of The Angels’ Share to community service.

Friell’s final screen credit came with the comedy short Jim the Fish (2015), although he remained a bedrock of regional theatre. In 2013, he toured Scotland in Paul Coulter’s one-man play Linwood No More, playing a worker laid off from the factory that produced the Hillman Imp and the Talbot Sunbeam; in 2017, he played a crime novelist confronted by harsh reality on the London-to-Glasgow train in Simon Macallum’s Late Sleeper.

Restless Natives – which remained a mainstay of the BBC Scotland schedules, lent its name to a popular podcast presented by the actor Martin Compston, and even spawned a stage musical, currently touring the UK – achieved a newfound prominence in the 21st century after being reissued on DVD. Among the bonus material was an interview with the now middle-aged Friell himself: “It’s a lovely feeling to think […] there’s going to be a whole new generation who are going to see it. I hope it stays around for years, so that it can become a nice novelty factor, that there was this wacky little Scottish film made in 1984 that’s going to stay the course.”

He is survived by his wife Alana Brady and two children, Connie and Jude.

Vincent Friell, born January 17, 1960, died April 14, 2024.

Bad babysitters: "Abigail"

With original ideas apparently at a premium, the movies have taken to smashing pre-loved concepts together, much as prehistoric Man did flints, in the hope of creating sparks. The process is being prominently demonstrated by Adam Wingard in Screen Three's Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire; over in Screen Five, however, we find arguably the process's nimblest practitioners, Wingard's V/H/S shooting buddies Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, collectively known as Radio Silence. This pair previously gave us 2019's Ready or Not, which had a lot of fun mashing up the meet-the-parents comedy with the slasher-splatter movie; their latest Abigail sees them and writers Stephen Shields and Guy Busick splicing the heist movie with an altogether different horror genus. It's the old story of criminals who get more than they initially bargained for, in this case a ragbag of muttering oddbods first seen in balaclavas - the best medium-budget Universal money can buy: Melissa Barrera (survivor of the directors' iffy Scream reboot), Dan Stevens, Kevin Durant, Will Catlett, Kathryn Newton and the late Angus Cloud - who've been contracted by third-party Giancarlo Esposito to kidnap a pre-teen ballerina (Alisha Weir) with the aim of squeezing a ransom out of the girl's millionaire father. If you've seen the trailer, an example of producers spoiling their own movie, you'll already know young Abigail is plenty capable of defending herself, which means the film's opening half-hour plays as slick preamble with a side order of set-up. Yet smart playing ushers us past the clanking of plot mechanics, while also fanning out - like cards on a table - a set of personalities you're almost sad to see getting torn up. Torn up they must be, though - that 18 certificate's not for nothing - because Bertinelli-Olpin and Gillett rightly understand their best chance of striking sparks is to give these elements a resounding ketchup-bottle thump: the red stuff goes everywhere, with one particular effect that bears repetition and never gets old or tiresome or any less marvellous to behold.

Actually, Abigail is relatively sparing with the grue up until the point all hell breaks out - it gets stored up, for a more spectacular splurge - and that time allows us to see just how attentive these filmmakers have been in matters of construction: they both need and want their bricolage of old-movie odds and sods to withstand even the fiercest of hammer blows. There are precedents here. Abigail shares something of From Dusk Till Dawn's wriggly, borderline serpentine shape, but crucially not its winkingly ironic tone, allowing it to land some emotional beats involving the Barrera character's relationship for her son; for a while, I also wondered whether we were watching Home Alone re-envisioned from the perspective of the Pesci-Stern characters. Yet its most apparent virtues are those of the stronger Saw films: inescapably tight plotting that gets only tighter still upon the revelation of who exactly all these strangers are, and some quietly excellent and unnerving production design (by the versatile Susie Cullen). The so-called safe house to which our anti-heroes escort the girl turns out to be deceptively cushioned, with a whole host of dark spots, secrets and shadows lurking behind the artefacts. (Trust me, you don't want to see what's in the basement.) In confining itself to the one big house, Abigail is visibly operating within the same parameters Ready or Not did - not necessarily a limitation, given how enjoyable the latter film was - but it also holes up with an even better ensemble, who quickly win us over in the guise of weary capitalist footsoldiers, screwed over by management and eviscerated by the job in hand. It's a rare horror movie where you sort of want everybody to survive for potential sequels, notably the spacey, suggestible Newton, the dimly uncomprehending Durant - Elon Musk x Hulk - who gets major laughs just from being more outwardly terrified of his pipsqueak charge than anyone, and the cherishably sarcastic Stevens, who in a parallel universe would be enjoying Bradley Cooper's career, but in this one appears ecstatically happy to have become the thinking person's Jeff Fahey. If the Screen Actors Guild had an award for Best Doomed Souls, this shower would win at a canter.

Abigail is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of April 19-21, 2024):

1 (1) Back to Black (15)

2 (2) Civil War (15) ***

3 (3) Kung Fu Panda 4 (PG)

4 (4) Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (12A)

5 (new) Abigail (18) ****

6 (5) Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (12A)

7 (6) Dune: Part Two (12A) **

8 (7) Monkey Man (18) ****

9 (27) Varshangalkku Shesham (12A) ***

10 (8) The First Omen (15)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Abigail

2. Close Your Eyes

3. Varshangalkku Shesham

4. Aavesham

5. Civil War

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) Dune: Part Two (12) **

2 (28) Dune: Part One (12) **

3 (4) Oppenheimer (15) ****

4 (3) Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (12)

5 (13) Argylle (12)

6 (2) Wonka (PG) ***

7 (6) The Holdovers (15) ***

8 (new) Dune: Double Pack (12) **

9 (5) Barbie (12) ***

10 (1) One Life (12)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Fallen Leaves

2. The Holdovers

3. The Three Musketeers: Part II - Milady

4. The Taste of Things

5. Priscilla

 

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Trading Places (Friday, Channel 4, 1.25am)

2. Cape Fear (Wednesday, BBC1, 11.40pm)

3. The Shop Around the Corner (Saturday, BBC2, 2pm)

4. Step Brothers [above] (Friday, Channel 4, 11.05pm)

5. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Saturday, Channel 4, 11.35am)