On demand: "Emily the Criminal"

Aubrey Plaza has been so good in the background of so many things in the years since Parks & Recreation that she deserves a film that repositions her front and centre. Even so, the straight-to-streaming Emily the Criminal presents as an interesting career choice: an unpredictable, faintly Soderberghian run around the lower rungs of L.A.'s gig economy, written and directed by John Patton Ford, in which Plaza plays a caterer and aspirant illustrator drawn into credit-card fraud as a means of paying off her student debts. In the pre-streaming era, Ford's film might have been miscategorised as an action-thriller in your local videostore, but it's something different, underpinned at every turn by a surprisingly deep understanding of capital, labour and business practice. Emily shifts sideways, from an economy in which she has no rights to one in which she still has no rights but a far greater chance of making big money for her troubles. It's all just moving stuff around; it's just that certain products pay better than slinging salads, that's all. We can see her logic, which is why we're willing to go along with her as she transitions from legit business to the criminal underworld, yet we also spot the risks that follow from ripping folks off for a living. These, finally, may be all that stands between us and following Emily down much the same career path.

Ford has a great sense of character, and a quiet, assured way of ramping up tensions. Everything here is headed towards one last job - genre business as usual - but we're not following the straight line of most actioners so much as a steep learning curve; we're left to walk in the footsteps of a heroine who visibly toughens up, trading in the pepper spray she nervily fingers upon first crossing the criminal threshold for a taser and some of Plaza's old April Ludgate attitude. Her progress is laid out, coolly but not dispassionately, as a balance sheet of gains and losses. Gains include a handsome, attentive suitor who also happens to be Scammer #1 (nice work from Theo Rossi, fleshing out the thumbnail Ford hands him with hopes and dreams of his own). They also include a newfound self-confidence: indeed, a big part of the quiet thrill of Emily the Criminal is watching Aubrey Plaza stand up for herself - going toe-to-toe with Gina Gershon, to cite one example - rather than slumping listlessly behind a desk. One more thing the movie understands: how capitalism makes more folks angry than it does rich. Losses include any residual taste for the conventional nine-to-five, be that am or pm, and some form of personal security, although - again - Ford's plotting is smart indeed in its suggestion that a gig worker like Emily may actually have very little in the way of personal security to lose. As a director, Ford is big on atmosphere, the ambient wash of Nathan Halpern's score recalling Elliot Goldenthal's hall-of-fame work on 1995's Heat in places - but unlike Michael Mann, whose work has always tended towards the grandiose, Ford gets us and his characters in and out within a tight ninety minutes. A stealthy, insinuating debut - distinctive in its adherence to a recognisably classical Hollywood style - from a filmmaker we should keep an eye on going forwards.

Emily the Criminal is available to rent via Prime Video and YouTube.

In memoriam: Michel Blanc (Telegraph 14/10/24)

Michel Blanc, who has died aged 72, was a jovial, much-loved lynchpin of French stage and screen who numbers among a select group of creatives, having won prizes at the Cannes film festival for work both before and behind the camera. 

Blanc shared the festival’s Best Actor laurels for his hilarious turn as a mild-mannered husband nudged towards criminality and transvestism by a hulking Gérard Depardieu in Bertrand Blier’s brusque comedy Tenue de soirée/Evening Dress (1986). This was a banner year for short, balding performers proposing alternative models of masculinity: Blanc’s fellow honouree was Bob Hoskins, playing the lovelorn gangland chauffeur in Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa. 

Later, Blanc and Blier collected the Best Screenplay gong for the in-jokey Grosse fatigue/Dead Tired (1994), which saw Blanc both directing and playing (a version of) himself: a successful actor called Michel Blanc whose life unravels upon learning a doppelganger has been abusing his celebrity perks. Roger Ebert opened his review with an elevated form of praise: “Whenever I see Michel Blanc in a movie, I rejoice that he exists. He seems such an unlikely candidate for movie stardom.” 

If Blanc remained a French phenomenon – never breaking through internationally as Depardieu did – his films sporadically crossed the Channel to general acclaim, most memorably Monsieur Hire (1989), Patrice Leconte’s adaptation of the Georges Simenon novel. Here, Blanc excelled in a dramatic role as a lonely oddball accused of murder; Ebert noted the character “seems to have been sprouted in a basement”.

In actuality, Michel Jean François Blanc was born in Courbevoie in the Hauts-de-Seine region of France on April 16, 1952, the only child of removals man Marcel Blanc and his typist wife Jeanine (née Billon). His was, however, a sheltered childhood, a consequence of being diagnosed with a heart murmur: “I was constantly told that I was fragile, which is not reassuring.”

Blanc studied at the Lycée Pasteur in Neuilly-sur-Seine, where he and his friends made a quiet form of mischief: “I was shy and discreet, so I often slipped through the cracks. But it’s true that we liked to make fun of the teachers, especially the one who had stuck us in the front row and who, as a result, couldn't see our faces anymore, since his desk was on the stage. So we did stupid things to make the class laugh.”

Blanc made his screen debut in the fantasy Les filles de Malemort (1974) and his distinctive looks soon attracted notable directors: he was Louis XV’s valet in Bertrand Tavernier’s Que la fête commence/Let Joy Reign Supreme (1975) and one of the neighbours in Polanski’s The Tenant (1976). Yet his biggest success followed with his old school pals, with whom Blanc formed the theatrical collective Splendid. 

The group, which included fellow actor-directors Josiane Balasko and Gérard Jugnot, exploded onto the 1970s Parisian café-theatre scene, eventually taking up permanent residence at Le Splendid on the Rue du Faubourg. Their first film Les Bronzés (1978), set around a Club Med resort on the Ivory Coast, became a major local hit, fixing Blanc in the French imagination as the fumbling bachelor Jean-Claude Dusse (“I was afraid I would be associated with him for the rest of my life”).

Sequels followed in 1979 and 2006, but Blanc resisted typecasting. In the 1990s, he gravitated towards name directors: after reuniting with Blier for Merci la vie (1991), he played Alonso in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991), and the ineffectual Inspector Forget in Robert Altman’s fashion-world flop Prêt-à-Porter (1994).

In the new century, he worked with André Téchiné on The Witnesses (2008) and The Girl on the Train (2009), lent César-winning support as a ministerial aide in the procedural L’Exercice de l’État (2011), and was appreciably sly as the mayor moderating the gastronomic turf war between Michelin-starred Helen Mirren and Indian arrivistes in Lasse Hallström’s TheHundred-Foot Journey (2014).

The Splendid troupers reunited to receive an honorary César in 2021, after which Blanc returned to leavening popular comedy, playing a bluff sixtysomething belatedly registering for school in Les petites victoires (2023). His final screen appearance will be as the grandfather in an adaptation of Christophe Boltanski’s novel La cache (2025 tbc).

After striking box-office gold with his directorial debut, the buddy comedy Marche à l'ombre (1984), Blanc occasionally returned behind the camera: he cast Daniel Auteuil as a befuddled gigolo in the London-set The Escort (1999) and adapted the British novelist Joseph Connolly for Embrassez qui vous voudrez/Summer Things (2002) and Voyez comme on danse/Kiss & Tell (2018).

“I’m not a sad clown,” Blanc once joked, “I’m a worried clown.” In 2015, he told Paris-Match just what his worries were: “I am afraid of death. I do as many things as possible so as not to have time to think about it. And yet I think about it. When I get to the end of a shoot, I often say to myself: ‘Well, if I disappeared now, they could still edit the film.’ As if the idea of ​​a duty accomplished reassured me.”

He is survived by a long-term partner, the designer Ramatoulaye Diop.

Michel Blanc, born April 16, 1952, died October 4, 2024.

On demand: "Attica"

You'll remember the title from the chant Al Pacino launches into outside the bank in 1975's Dog Day Afternoon. Stanley Nelson and Traci A. Curry's quietly furious doc Attica revisits the reasons that name held such potency in the first place. In September 1971, inmates took over the correctional facility at Attica in New York in what was the largest prison uprising in American history. It was a stand against conditions within the jail, and a not unprincipled stand at that, steered by the prison's significant roster of Black Panthers. The Muslim brotherhood, for their part, intervened to ensure those guards taken hostage on site would be safe from harm; a white inmate with medical training attended to those injured in the course of taking control of the prison; those with prior legal experience advised the democratically elected committee leading the revolt on how to proceed from there. The uprising, which lasted four days, the span of one weekend, was an attempt to remodel a community towards some form of self-governance; as one ex-con recalls of the initial gatherings in the rec yard referred to as Times Square, it was like "a big picnic", at least three days of peace, love and time out. As reframed by Nelson and Curry, it was also a vision of how a prison - and the wider justice system beyond that - might be improved for everyone: among the prisoners' demands were the provision of basics like toothpaste and toilet paper, and access to education. But it couldn't last, or rather it wasn't permitted to last. Sold out by the political aspirations of New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, with his joltingly symbolic family name, the men's quest for a fairer world ran up, as such quests often do, against an unyielding (and heavily armed) wall of authority. The prisoners were fish in a barrel when push came to shove on day four; among the many aspects explained by Nelson and Curry's film, you can see exactly why a bank robber trying to raise funds for his transgender lover might have reached for a reference like Attica once placed under his own form of duress.

As a film, Attica hews to a tried-and-tested documentary framework, cutting between talking-head testimony and corroborating archive footage, yet it demonstrates the old ways can still generate power when that testimony and footage is this compelling. The former prisoners Nelson and Curry interviews speak on two levels simultaneously, recounting their own experiences of the uprising while also apparently speaking to the present moment. (A striking rhetorical quirk: how comfortable these seasoned-to-grizzled ex-cons are with such 21st century terminology as "privilege" and "safe space".) As Nelson and Curry see it, Attica was just one of several forks in the road where the American dream of justice for all was up for review and renewal, only for the initially promising conversations to break down with bloody consequences. The film benefits from the fact most of this particular stand-off was mediated extensively as part of US TV's live and uninterrupted coverage of the turmoil of the 1970s. We see with our own eyes the processes of negotiation by which the prisoners reaffirmed their status as individuals and citizens, rather than the cattle they'd been treated as; we hear the blatantly prejudiced rhetoric of the cops sat like hawks or vultures on the rooftops overlooking Times Square; and, finally, we witness the compromise of the prisoners' demands and the violent crushing of their hopes. The final reel is a real gutpunch: we seem to be walking further and further away from anything like an ideal, and more than one of Nelson and Curry's subjects notes how the violence visited upon them as the status quo was reasserted was far worse than anything they'd seen and experienced behind bars or in their previous life on the streets. Every now and again, our collective attention is drawn to an institution that stands for wider society, and how we treat one another in this world. (For Attica, British viewers could swap in The Maze, Grenfell or the Bibby Stockholm.) The filmmakers succeed in setting us down in the middle of that rec yard as the gas descends and the bullets pop off, and there set us to considering just how much society has learnt from Attica in the intervening half-century - particularly with regard to the boundless, disproportionate and demonstrably indiscriminate violence of the state, being both better funded and more scarring than anything individual convicts could achieve with a makeshift shiv. As one of these convicts puts it in Attica's closing moments: "It didn't have to be this way."

Attica is now streaming via the BBC iPlayer.

On demand: "Tangerine"

2015's Tangerine was one of the writer-director Sean Baker's first studies of figures on the fringes of contemporary American life, in this case two transgender sex workers dealing with a spiralling situation. It's Christmas Eve in North Hollywood, and for Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor), there's none of the usual pre-festive winding down. Instead, we bear witness to a sudden and dramatic winding-up: Sin-Dee learns her beloved has been cheating on her while she's been serving a 30-day sentence for soliciting, and - adding insult to injury - cheating on her with a cisgender white girl. Off she tears to extract confessions from (and possibly exact revenge on) all parties, her pal in tow whenever Alexandra can keep up, pursued by the ingenious and resourceful Baker, shooting the action on an iPhone (with certain image-correcting lenses) so as to keep costs down and generate greater immediacy. (Some scenes accordingly resemble those shopfront confrontations that occasionally go viral on social media.) What follows proceeds not along the straight lines of the Hollywood mainstream - ain't nothin' straight here, hun - but in a frenetic zigzag under an unseasonal sun, heading late into the night. Along the way, we're even offered something of a narrative puzzle, invited to consider what our heroines' haphazard progress has to do with an Armenian cab driver (Karren Karagulian) - a more conventional portrait of an L.A. working stiff - to whom Baker sporadically cuts.

The thrill of Tangerine is tied up with that iPhone, and how it seems to liberate the action: you feel Baker and his excellently named cinematographer Radium Cheung could go anywhere and shoot anything, could veer off down any one of the side streets they pass and alight upon a comparable brouhaha. (As for the taxi driver business: well, why not? Easier to sit in the backseat for a few blocks than hare after the female leads on foot - and such mobile focus worked for Jafar Panahi in his time, though Panahi never went as far, and was never allowed to go as far, as Baker does here. One quietly funny running gag: how delighted all the working girls are to see the cabbie. You'll see why.) This does seem a production governed by the girls' mantra-like cry of "fuck it": it does what it does for the story, or for shits and giggles, and that spontaneity is a large part of its charm. Tangerine has a freshness beyond bigger American movies, busy tying themselves in knots to no good end. With no budget for effects or chases, Baker is obliged to fall back on that old favourite human interest, and both Rodriguez and Taylor light up the screen, trash-talking whirlwinds who were never going to hit their marks and often seem more inclined to hit one another, thereby laying waste to several city blocks. Baker has proven especially adept at sourcing such personalities and then allowing them to be, flourish, shine, but here he also demonstrates a marked sympathy for those around them, most notably the Chinese woman stuck doing a solo shift at the donut shop where the film's primary troublemakers gather to thrash out their differences. The subsequent The Florida Project would refine the technique and massage in a little more of the emotional subtlety that arrives late here, but Tangerine retains the forceful impact of citrus to the face: it's a movie that grabs you by the weave, whether you like it rough or not.

Tangerine is available to stream via Prime Video and MUBI, and to rent via the BFI Player and YouTube.

Back in the ring: "Gladiator"

At the turn of the millennium, Gladiator was a seductive conjunction of the old and the new, of craft and flash. The fledgling DreamWorks studio had witnessed Hollywood raise the Titanic with dazzling visual effects, and now wondered whether it couldn't resurrect the Roman epics of fifty years before with a comparable creative guile and muscle. Ridley Scott was duly appointed to return us to and around the Colosseum, the backdrop of an earlier era's multiplex cinema, here reframed as the multiplex of an earlier era. And we were returned there in the company of the kind of heavyweight cast it was still possible to gather in the year 2000 A.D. The newly crowned Russell Crowe, the erstwhile soap star who'd just outpunched the A-listers in 1997's L.A. Confidential, made for a convincing bruiser in a way you worry even a gym-honed Paul Mescal, himself altogether rapidly promoted to serve as the star of this autumn's belated sequel, may not be. The then-emergent talent Joaquin Phoenix, scion of an acting dynasty, was pitted against him as Commodus, the louche, lisping Emperor we all love to hate. And they would be surrounded and supported by veterans who seemed almost to date from that earlier era, now taking the applause of the crowd for one last time: Oliver Reed (d. 1999, prompting some post-production jiggery-pokery), Richard Harris (d. 2002), David Hemmings (d. 2003), his eyebrows pointing towards the infinite as a ring announcer whose unmiked voice surely couldn't have carried to all corners of this especially colossal Colosseum. It would be one of those logistically grand and tricky projects you still thrill to see Hollywood make, and make this well, studio money spent wisely: Scott could show the carnage Cecil B. DeMille couldn't, fully stir our bloodlust and satiate our desire for catharsis, and there was human and historical interest to ground the technological wizardry. Audiences, and the Academy, could hardly resist. Are you not entertained?, as the cry went up.

In retrospect, we might in fact have Gladiator's success to blame for one or two things - Mel Gibson's subsequent The Passion of the Christ and the Star Wars prequels' over-reliance on CGI, to cite the most immediate and dire consequences. Yet in and of itself it continues to work handsomely: you will see no more thumping entertainment in the Odeon or Cineworld this week. What I hadn't grasped at the time, yet what's become more apparent with the years, is the extent to which the movie also functions as a golden-glowing self-portrait of Scott himself - or at least a portrait of someone you sense Scott would easily identify with: the self-made proletarian scrapper, adrift in a world of nepo babies and scheming, snivelling functionaries deemed unworthy of a man's time, handshake and mercy. (Beyond historical verisimilitude, there has to be a reason for naming your antagonist after a toilet.) Maximus Decimus Meridius is from the off an obvious commander of men - someone you'd follow into the breach, if called upon - but Scott and Crowe equally conspire to make him a details guy, smiling ruefully at a robin who drifts into the opening battle, rubbing dirt onto his hands to get a better feel for the terrain that lies ahead of him, only then leading a vast army into battle. "At my command, unleash hell" is just a long-winded way of shouting "action"; Maximus's vow "I will win the crowd... I will give them something they have never seen before" is straight from a pitch meeting, no translation from the Latin required. Yet this storied commander is caught at a transitional moment, forever yearning for the tranquillity of home, even as circumstances conspire to loose him from the safety of empire (for which we might read the perks, privileges and protections of the studio system) and force him to fight his own battles, huffily, grumpily, dourly.

Certain elements here date very much from the late 20th century, which is where Scott seems to have got stuck creatively: there are naggingly negligible roles for Djimon Hounsou as the slave who nurses our white hero back to health and Omid Djalili as the trader who sold Reed his "queer giraffes". (Hounsou, at least, recurs amid the stirring coda, involving one of many small details this script troubles to pay off.) As a filmmaker, Scott remains a singular mix of insensitivity and insecurity: a born entertainer - Robbie Williams, say - doesn't need to ask whether we're entertained or not, nor so bluntly state their methods. Commodus's observation of his sister's dozing child ("He sleeps so well because he's loved") meshes intriguingly here with Maximus's battle to earn the crowd's respect. (That he does is down to a mix of potent backstory, resilience, skill and flair, all transferrable skills for the modern creative.) Were Scott's battles to come worth fighting? In the new century, the veteran would get increasingly prolific and increasingly unreliable; he's that rare director who's made more films the older he's got, proof of his ability to talk a good game in the boardroom. Gladiator found the director, aged 63, turning his thoughts towards legacy and how a man is remembered - it was the beginning of late-period Scott - but were A Good Year (again: Crowe as Scott surrogate, this time furrowing his brow over bottles of wine), the various Alien footnotes and last year's Napoleon (with Phoenix as the anti-Scott) worth remembering? Wouldn't Scott have been better staying at home with the missus and kids, touching grass? At what point does the fight become a wearying compulsion? Born of Hollywood's ongoing inability to imagine a viable future - the auguries are not good - Gladiator II is almost upon us: the fear, shared by Crowe himself, is that Scott will overwrite this Champions League entertainment with something more akin to the Nations League, falling somewhere on a scale between timekilling and timewasting. Maybe there's some fight in the old dog yet. But the Elysian fields are calling.

Gladiator is now showing in cinemas nationwide, and available to stream via ITVX; Gladiator 2 opens November 15.

On demand: "Meantime"

From the early days of the Mike Leigh Film Project, an often riotous comedy about deeply dissatisfied people. Fashioned (believe it or not) for Central Television, home of darts-based Sunday teatime favourite Bullseye, 1983's Meantime feels like Leigh's update of the old Tolstoy dictum that insisted each family is unhappy in their own way. It opens with a directorial feint: a check-in with upwardly mobile suburban couple Alfred Molina and Marion Bailey, caught doing up their two-bed semi as a means of filling what otherwise seems a terribly empty petit-bourgeois existence. Yet for the most part, we're embedded - bogged down may be the better phrase - with the couple's pungently named relatives the Pollocks: unemployed dad Jeff Robert, mum Pam Ferris trying to keep the household afloat on bingo winnings, and two late-teenage sons (perma-aggro Steve Wright-alike Phil Daniels and gormless mouthbreather Tim Roth), neither of whom forms the greatest argument for procreation. Even if you disagree vehemently, you can see how the argument Leigh doesn't much care for his characters came about. (One early exchange between Daniels and skinhead mate Gary Oldman goes as follows: "You're really thick, you are." "I ain't as thick as you." "No-one's as thick as me.") Yet as embodied by a forceful new generation and style of actors, these characters remain enormously fun to watch and listen to, drilled into sulky, sarky, slangy rhythms that suggested Leigh had kept his ears open during his years of apprenticeship, and was now attempting something as revolutionary in film acting as the Method had been thirty years before. You can still feel how thrilling Meantime must have been in 1983: no Merchant-Ivory, this, no Chariots of Fire. Adios stuffed shirts and stiff upper lips, hello thick ears and lashings of tongue and cheek.

If Leigh really loathed the Pollocks, he a) wouldn't have turned these 100 minutes over to them in the way he does, b) wouldn't so closely hang on their every spit and cough, and c) wouldn't so clearly be making a case that their wayward meanderings - linked in passing to the inertia then being fostered within the working classes by Thatcherism - merited the most attentive study. Meantime remains political only in passing: though Roth's Colin is unexpectedly, nay miraculously offered a chance to improve his lot (and blows it), practically everyone else on screen has nothing to do and little to hope for. So they bicker with and snipe at one another, the rumbling getting nasty whenever a character of colour walks on, though arguably no nastier than it would have been on the streets of the real Britain circa 1983. Leigh isn't interested in pointmaking or point-scoring, however, instead diligently observing who these people are and why they've turned out like this: petty, sad, bored, depressive or passive-aggressive. Rather than dismissing these grumps and muppets out of hand, the director demonstrates a commendable generosity of spirit in centralising small lives and spotting within them the potential for at least a narrow form of growth. It's loudly, even rudely British, bristling with familiar faces, locations (pissy towerblock lifts, concrete precincts overrun with plastic bags, Chigwell Tube station), insults ("he's a jammy bastard", "Kojak", "nosy bloody Parker", "oi, prat!"), ad jingles, and lines that come out of nowhere to summarise the British experience ("I just had a really horrible hamburger", "Of course I'm not sure"). Better still, Leigh was starting to develop a sly visual sense: the whole movie seems to exist just to showcase the image of an anoraked Roth shambling past a statue of Churchill, but also don't overlook the (frankly hilarious) late revelation that Oldman's prize dunderhead Coxy has somehow started a fight with himself in an overturned bin. The core of the Leigh filmography - dating back to 1971's Bleak Moments and passing through High Hopes and Life is Sweet to Naked, Happy-Go-Lucky and points beyond - would be variations on the theme of daily drudgery. Some would be more engaging and successful than others, but Meantime now looks like the first time Leigh realised this technique could not only sustain a feature but prove wholly enveloping in its description of phrases, routines and textures. We ought to quote it just as often as people quote from Abigail's Party and Nuts in May.

Meantime is available on a Special Edition DVD through ITV Studios Home Entertainment, to stream via YouTube, and to rent via the BFI Player.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of October 4-6, 2024):

1 (new) Joker: Folie à Deux (15) **

2 (1) Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (12A)

3 (2) Speak No Evil (15) ****

4 (5) The Substance (18) **

5 (3) The Outrun (15)

6 (8) Despicable Me 4 (U)

7 (6) Lee (15)

8 (11) 200% Wolf (U)

9 (re) Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (PG) ***

10 (new) A Different Man (15) ****

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Gladiator

2. Young Frankenstein 

3. Paddington 2

4. Paddington 

5. A Different Man

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) Deadpool & Wolverine (15) *

2 (re) Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (12)

3 (4) Inside Out 2 (U) ****

4 (14) Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (12)

5 (2) Despicable Me 4 (U)

6 (12) Joker (15) **

7 (new) The Hitcher (15) 

8 (5) Twisters (12) ***

9 (7) Bad Boys: Ride or Die (15)

10 (1) The Bikeriders (15)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Inside Out 2

2. Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga

3. Hundreds of Beavers

4. Twisters

5. A Quiet Place: Day One

 

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. The Wicker Man [above] (Sunday, BBC2, 11.55pm)

2. Us (Saturday, BBC1, 10.30pm)

3. Hope (Sunday, Channel 4, 1.45am)

4. Zootropolis (Sunday, BBC1, 2.15pm)

5. The Square (Tuesday, Channel 4, 1.45am)