Coming home: "Dahomey"

Mati Diop's Dahomey, the ruminative and searching documentary that won the Berlin Golden Bear back in February, forms an attempt to set the past and present in constructive conversation for a little over an hour. Cinematographer Joséphine Drouin-Viallard's crystalline images put us down in the Paris of November 2021, and more specifically yet in the backrooms of the Musée du quai Branly, where statues and other artefacts looted by French colonial forces during the 1892 invasion of what was then Dahomey and is now Benin are being readied for repatriation. There's something academic, even Frederick Wiseman-like about the way Diop films men in gloves dutifully boxing up and cataloguing these fragile, sometimes shopworn, hand-crafted tchotchkes. Yet she adds to the mix one giant imaginative leap. She hands the voiceover to the statues themselves, who duly report back to us as if they were hostages or soldiers captured in battle. They speak of the darkness of their confinement; of the dehumanising effects of being assigned numbers rather than names; of their anxiety over what awaits them on the other side of this handover process. Anyone who caught 2019's Atlantics on its pre-Netflix lap of the festival circuit will know Diop appears to have made it her personal mission to restore an element of mystery to the movies, even if it leads an audience to the brink of bewilderment; here, in what may well end up as 2024's foremost illustration of the magic of a fully functioning cinema, she pulls off a rare form of sorcery, transforming previously mute, inanimate objects into living, moving, politicised beings.

There's precedent in French cinema in the shape of Statues Also Die, the 1953 short by which Alain Resnais and Chris Marker initiated their respective projects on memory and cultural heritage. But Diop treads her own, more expansive path, and in so doing connects that earlier endeavour to a postcolonial, 21st century present. Her statues are watched over by state-of-the-art cooling and surveillance systems; she also carries them (and us) beyond the museum walls, to show where they came from and hear out what they might mean. In truth, this camera's rapt fascination with the processes in play - documentation, transportation, reinstallation, all hands to the pumps - would be enough to hook us even before anybody starts to consider the sociopolitical implications of this journey. Yet we arrive at the latter, too, via a further process of transference. The statues of kings and warriors become less important over the hour than the actual Beninese people who come to crowd the frame; from wondering what the statues are feeling, the film sets us to wondering what the workmen carting these items off planes and forklifts and up the gallery steps are thinking. Are they happy? Baffled? Resentful that this world wouldn't allow them the same privileges were they likewise to migrate? What good does it do a country to possess treasure if its people have no access to it? It's one of several points in Dahomey where we sense not just a shift in place but perspective, where both the eye and mind are similarly set to roam. In the final reel, Diop drops us into a debate between Beninese students, a sequence that recalls the institutional tos-and-fros of Laurent Cantet's The Class, only now with an even greater air of self-determination. Some of the speakers are impassioned, others indifferent, while others still note this offering forms part of a wider denial of their country's status ("Out of seven thousand items, they return 26"). Everything's shifting, and there's no set way of looking at (nor filming) these statues: it's good that they're back, but it's also not enough; what they are may be of less significance than what they represent; they've touched down on Beninese soil, but their ultimate fate and meaning is still very much in the air. The film is but 68 minutes, you realise, because there is no conclusion; the conversation - about our shared past, about the future - has to be ongoing. In Dahomey's closing moments, the lights go out on the artefacts, standing proud in their newly named home, but the substantial achievement of this resonant and captivating film is that the dust is never once permitted to settle.

Dahomey is now showing in selected cinemas.

On demand: "Sector 36"

You may well require a constitution of steel for this queasily compelling true crime riff from writer Bodhayan Roychaudhury and director Aditya Nimbalkar, but it's as far as the Indian cinema has yet travelled in the direction of Peak Fincher - further even than that noted cinephile-provocateur Anurag Kashyap has yet gone. As Sector 36 opens with antagonist Prem (Vikrant Massey), a child killer plaguing the Delhi backstreets in 2005, watching a variant of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, you wonder whether the intention was to overwrite any fond viewer memories of Slumdog Millionaire: here, by stark contrast, is a decidedly feelbad work, a test of mettle and nerve rather than arbitrarily assigned life experience. Perhaps our only hope is that the authorities have assigned their best man to Prem's case, and it's quickly scuppered with the arrival of the faintly complacent Sub-Inspector Pandey: the prefix seems relevant, somehow. As embodied by Deepak Dobriyal, Pandey is introduced turning a blind eye to lesser criminal transgressions than child murder, and initially seems far less perturbed by Prem's butchery - which extends to spiriting away victims under cover of night to sell their organs on the black market - than by the fact worry-wracked and grief-stricken parents are troubling him when he's off-duty. The screen soon clogs with dirty business, ugly emotions and wrong conclusions, like the sewer in which a severed hand is found at an early stage. The cop pursues a missing woman who's been pimped out by her own father. Prem, we learn, is in the employ of a businessman with links to the powers-that-be, which explains why the Sub-Inspector is given the runaround both by the killer and his superiors. Sector 36 was produced for Netflix by horror specialists Maddock Films (who did Stree and its sequel), and you can see exactly why it bypassed cinemas for streaming: it's a tough sell, offering little chance of a happy ending, and unusually critical of and unsparing towards the actions of those in charge, particularly when filming a copshop overrun with cockroaches big and small.

It is also exceptionally committed to telling this story honestly and well. Streaming - home to a thousand and one lurid true crime entertainments, but also more relaxed artistic constraints - has freed Nimbalkar to push his camera into the darker corners of this world, not that we always like what we see there. Control manifests elsewhere, most notably in writing that's generally sharp-eyed around systemic failure; instead of procedural-straight lines, we get blurrier activity, characters running in rings that start to resemble cycles of hell. Your primary takehome - it's not a consolation, exactly - is that the structures of law and order in place at this time weren't especially effective for catching a killer such as this; you see it in the way Pandey is routinely undermined by his superiors, and hear it in a nicely double-jointed line assigned to one of the latter ("if the system approves it, it's right"). Not even Prem, driven by a long-standing grievance against society, a feeling his skills have been overlooked while others have been handed million-crore paydays, cares to remember how many lives he's taken: at the end of the day, these stolen organs are all just money in the bank. The leads work wonders with two varyingly compromised and indifferent characters, raising the possibility the cop will be shocked into some sort of decency (we'd take functionality), and that the taunting killer will face justice. (Massey, who has previously presented on screen as such a nice boy, is worryingly committed to fleshing out someone who confesses to being an enthusiastic cannibal and rapist - the kind of part an actor surely has to wash off every night.) Yet the real backbone here is Nimbalkar's direction, which refuses to look away, self-censor, make pretty or otherwise tidy up the grim detail of this case, as an Indian theatrical release probably would in order to get passed. You may grimace and feel your stomach churn; you may decide Sector 36 isn't the right movie for the mood you're in, tonight or forever. But I'd defy anyone who dares look this way to take their eyes off it beyond a certain point.

Sector 36 is now streaming via Netflix.

Imitations of life: "The Room Next Door"

The transition is complete. After forty-plus years of working in his native tongue, Pedro Almodóvar is the latest arthouse luminary to become an English-language filmmaker, chasing his striking lockdown short The Human Voice with a full-length feature, The Room Next Door, which won the director his first major festival prize at Venice last month. You do wonder who's going to be left making movies in their own, non-English languages in ten years, and whether arthouse as a concept is doomed to extinction as our underfunded culture bends back towards the middle, but the new film, an adaptation of Sigrid Nunez's 2020 novel What Are You Going Through, initially suggests a promising continuity with the filmmaker's earlier works. It's there in the very Almodóvarian delight in stories and stories-within-stories, the effort to layer something up; the thematic interest in fate, motherhood, sex and death; and in the desirable living spaces, here sourced in central and upstate New York rather than the usual Madrid. The enduring commitment to shades of scarlet, meanwhile, is such that Almodóvar casts as his leads two of the contemporary cinema's most celebrated redheads in Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore. At first glance, Room seems to offer practically everything we've come to think of as Almodóvar, save only the subtitles. Is that, one wonders, why this is also the first of this director's films to feel so wordy, even windy in places? Some protective barrier seems to have been removed, leaving us to stare down a tsunami of thoughts, feelings and emotions - which is not to say that you won't still find yourself being swept away by it.

Some of the issue can be traced back to Nunez's original set-up: two writers trying to get everything out before their bodies give up on them, one (Swinton) a war reporter whose cancer has taken a turn for the terminal, the other (Moore) a novelist and art historian whose need to hear out her old friend's confessions extends to cohabitation in the latter's final days before playing a role of some kind in a proposed euthanasia plot. As the pair reconnect, bond and prepare to say a last goodbye, it gradually becomes apparent why Almodóvar cast two performers it has been a proven pleasure to see talk; it may be that this is the only chance Room has of working. Between them, Moore and Swinton lend the script a fighting chance, and in return - whether gabbing or listening - they find their faces caressed in the tenderest of close-ups. Swinton makes for one of the movies' few credible cancer patients, styling revealing a mole under her right eyebrow that somehow corresponds to the black spots accessorising her organs, the drawling or slurring of words speaking to heavy medication or a tiredness of jaw that could possibly be the actor's own. Moore has the more reactive role, but she's typically no-nonsense with it, describing instead a mounting inner conflict over the degree to which this bond is being tested almost as soon as it's been renewed. Yet often those adoring close-ups seem like a defensive strategy, and a giveaway of the film's one great narrative limitation. We get a lot of what's inside these two women - concerns, dreams, fears, regrets, all poured out in torrents of verbosity - but only ever a sketchy feel for the world around them. Almodóvar hasn't quite got his feet under this particular designer coffee table just yet, and that's odd to witness in someone who's spent the past quarter-century appearing generally sure-footed.

Flashbacks reveal Swinton's reporting on a naggingly unspecified conflict; the exteriors are so visually generic, in the main, that they may as well be Vancouver passing for New York. There's the odd foray into Edward Hopper pastiche, one of a series of nods to American artists (Faulkner, Hemingway, Buster Keaton, John Huston) which indicate the director is being canny indeed about currying the favour of new executives, audiences and awards voters, but it's a curious thing to see Almodóvar aspiring to the art of others, rather than finding (and then redecorating) a room of his own. The best Almodóvars (you'll have your own favourites; this filmography is now rich enough to allow everyone else theirs) expand in every direction as far as the eye can see; every character gets instilled with complex, turbulent life, and every line assumes two or more meanings. Room can seem poky and tinny by comparison: two women operating in a self-engineered bubble, corresponding to two actors working their butts off on a tightly guarded set. The Human Voice felt more expansive in its gestures and repercussions, and that was shot when social distancing was a thing. The new film retains lovely, absorbing, properly Almodóvarian scenes and spells: the deployment of birdsong, for one, the understanding art may be both a solace and finally not enough for another. It is also self-evidently the work of an artist thinking seriously about serious matters (mortality, euthanasia, war, climate change). Yet he's doing so at one crucial remove, in a second language, which partially explains why certain elements don't come together or seem irresolvably detached from the core: a fumbled scene between Moore and her personal trainer (Alvise Rigo) that has the shape of comedy but not the laughs Pedro massages into his Spanish films, John Turturro as a horny afterthought, a police investigation halted after five minutes. "Think of this as a rehearsal," Swinton tells Moore in the wake of one false alarm, and Room, strained and self-conscious, does have the feel of a runthrough for one of those illustrious theatrical engagements where star names alone ensure the tickets sell out in ten minutes or less. The best Almodóvars have always had a little of that theatre about them, but they've also been so much more besides - cinema, in fewer words.

The Room Next Door is now playing in selected cinemas.

Back in B&W: "Godzilla Minus One/Minus Colour"

It was around this time last year that Takashi Yamazaki's creature-prequel Godzilla Minus One came from nowhere to make several critics' year-end lists, including my own. Now it receives the decolorised treatment previously afforded modern classics Mad Max: Fury Road and Parasite, both to keep the revenue stream flowing and to better fit with the 1954 original into and off which it fed. Godzilla Minus One/Minus Colour, which has its UK theatrical debut this weekend after premiering on Netflix earlier this year, is primarily a matter of contrasts. The rubble to which the Japan of December 1945 had been reduced - and reduced by man, not monster - appears doubly bleak in stark black-and-white, which makes it all the more buoying when our guilt-wracked, grief-stricken hero (Kamiki Ryunosuke) sets sail on the high seas; the latter now represents light and space, and aboard the rickety, vulnerable wooden boat with the lopsided supporting characters, we again witness humanity knitting itself together, after years of being torn and blown apart. Among the things we can do that buildings can't: adapt, rebuild, maybe even learn from past mistakes.

Blowing up mines from a safe distance generates spectacle without suffering, and a pleasing sense of tidying up after a man-made mess. As I said at the time, Minus One is a movie whose presiding spirits are Ishiro Honda and Marie Kondo, being both grand in its gestures and repercussions, yet delicate and even restorative in its handling. We might well see the film's pacifism, signalled by the decision to make the hero a kamikaze pilot who bailed out of a wartime deathdive, in a whole new light after a further twelve months of atrocities across the Middle East; as one of Yamazaki's sage elders notes, in a line that really does jump out at you this time round, "not being part of a war is something to be grateful for". Otherwise, as much reflection on the past 75 years of Japanese life as it is 70th anniversary renewal of Godzilla, streaking its elaborate design with raw stabs of emotion, it remains a good, stirring, crowdpleasing movie, however you shade it. Nearing the end of a year in which the American studios have continued to step away from comparable mythmaking - the honourable prequel Furiosa aside - this Godzilla roars back among us as a lesson: in IP and VFX management, yes, but also civics, leadership, solidarity and basic human decency.

Godzilla Minus One/Minus Colour opens in selected cinemas from Friday, and is also available to stream via Netflix.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of October 18-20, 2024):

1 (new) The Wild Robot (U) **

2 (new) Smile 2 (18)

3 (new) The Apprentice (15) ***

4 (1) Transformers One (PG)

5 (3) Terrifier 3 (18)

6 (2) Joker: Folie à Deux (15) **

7 (4) Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (12A)

8 (8) The Substance (18) **

9 (new) My Hero Academia: You're Next (12A)

10 (new) Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - ROH London 2024 (uncertificated)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Dahomey

2. A Nightmare on Elm Street [above]

3. Halloween

4. Carrie

5. Back to the Future Part II

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Deadpool & Wolverine (15) *

2 (new) Alien: Romulus (15) ***

3 (8) Twisters (12) ***

4 (5) Despicable Me 4 (U)

5 (9) Bad Boys: Ride or Die (15)

6 (re) The Last Voyage of the Demeter (15)

7 (re) A Nightmare on Elm Street (18) ****

8 (re) A Quiet Place: Day One (15) ***

9 (re) Twister (PG) ***

10 (re) Longlegs (15) **

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Inside Out 2

2. Late Night with the Devil

3. Twisters

4. A Quiet Place: Day One

5. Blur: To the End

 

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Memoria (Sunday, Channel 4, 12.30am)

2. The Third Man (Sunday, BBC2, 12.15pm)

3. Malcolm X (Sunday, BBC2, 10pm)

4. Monster House (Sunday, Channel 4, 2pm)

5. Testament of Youth (Friday, BBC2, 11.05pm)

Warren, no peace: "Watership Down"

The British Bambi? Either way, 1978's Watership Down, perennial traumatiser of the very young, remains the pre-eminent Seventies example of the tendency to broach tough, grown-up themes within a form more commonly appropriated for kids' stuff: not an ignoble ambition, by any means, but one that - as with 1954's Animal Farm before it, and 1986's When the Wind Blows after it - resulted in an often uncomfortable sit. It's not inappropriate that this latest reissue should coincide with the week of Hallowe'en, but children raised on the Kung Fu Panda and Minions movies really won't know what's hit 'em: there's but one song here - Art Garfunkel's "Bright Eyes" - which may as well be about mxyomatosis for all the merriment it generates. Ripped by writer-directors Martin Rosen and John Hubley from Richard Adams' bestseller, the movie's warped twist was to take as heroes a selection of ragtag, bobtailed bunny rabbits - an entire warren's worth of Thumpers - only to demonstrate the perpetual state of fear in which they exist, either for the purposes of political metaphor or to reconnect the animist spirit with jaded metropolitan spectators hellbent on turning the world entire into roadkill. You can still admire the scrappy Seventies sincerity, certainly: at times, it comes on like a tie-dye Ten Commandments, with John Hurt voicing a floppy-eared, twitchy-nosed Moses leading his charges to the promised land set out in the truly trippy prologue. Yet the casualties incurred en route by these creatures leave the whole looking more odd than welcoming nowadays. Watership Down could perhaps be claimed by the school that insists kids need pets to learn about the grieving process, but - with its lingering close-ups of blood dripping from whiskers - it's also indistinguishable from the average PETA scare tactic.

Watership Down returns to selected cinemas from Friday.

Back in time: "Back to the Future Part II"

There's a glitch in the reissue continuum. Rather than 1985's hardy perennial Back to the Future, this year we're getting its 1989 sequel, Back to the Future Part II, to mark what has been claimed as Back to the Future Day. (October 21, if you're being scientific, though the celebrations apparently continue in cinemas throughout this week.) Robert Zemeckis's first movie was the enduring what-if about a boy going back in time to encounter his own parents when they were his age, working from one of the most satisfying screenplays of its decade. Film two, the one with a Sharper Image catalogue where a finished script probably should have been, has hoverboards, power laces and a still remarkable amount of product-placement in its opening half-hour; it does that recognisably Hollywood thing of assuming, not entirely without logic or reason, that the future would have a lot more heavily branded stuff going on everywhere you look, some of which now strikes the eye as surprisingly far out for a mainstream studio endeavour of the late 1980s. A computerised Ronnie Reagan duelling with the Ayatollah Khomeini as greeters in an Eighties-themed restaurant; a big billboard inviting consumers to Surf Vietnam; a future-world Crispin Glover (Jeffrey Weissman) aged up and hanging from the ceiling. The first movie was identifiably Spielbergian in its emphasis on light, magic and the family unit. The second, for at least its opening half, owes a greater debt to the Tim Burton of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure and Beetlejuice, its narrative seemingly secondary to or a pretext for offbeam spectacle. You have to dig some way beneath all the noodling and doodling to get to the piffling plot, which nobody remembers, about Marty McFly trying to save his deadbeat kids; the first film piloted in reverse, in other words, such that it eventually begins to cover the same ground from a marginally different angle. Part II ultimately proves to be less about the future than it is about the past, as flagged early on when the elder Biff (Thomas F. Wilson) notes "there's something very familiar about this". Postmodernism means never apologising for repeating yourself.

Still, lightning rarely strikes twice in the same place, especially in Tinseltown. The sequel has one major saving grace, the Michael J. Fox-Christopher Lloyd partnership, caught working overtime to sell us on the exposition required to get this machine up in the air again, and then keep it running. It also has a surfeit of ideas, some of which are worked through altogether better than others. These include the vaguely Voltairean notion of a growing philosophical split between our heroes, Fox's Marty wanting to use the time machine to get rich, Lloyd's Doc proposing a more comprehensive study of humanity, "perhaps even an answer to that universal question 'why?'" (What is a DeLorean for? What are sequels for?) There's a clear element of It's a Wonderful Life, that all-American touchstone, obliging Marty to negotiate multiple realities to get where he's headed; there's also far more evidence to support the argument that Biff is Trump, the bully who just won't go away, opening a casino on Hill Valley's main street and letting everywhere else go to hell. If nothing else, it's of historical note as one of the first studio movies to realise the development of string theory partly excuses any script or movie that takes the form of a big old jumble: Zemeckis throws in clips from Clint Eastwood films, a Michael Jackson cameo, flying cars, Hawaiian shirts, six different plots, five different delineations of each of the main characters, Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, a shaggy dog who represents the whole tale, and really just the thinnest connecting material. At 104 minutes, it certainly moves, even if it never fully coheres into anything as substantial as its predecessor, and amid all its chicanery, it may be damning that the best stuff here is the simplest: Biff throwing the kids' ball onto the roof, George throwing his punch (again), any time Alan Silvestri's score strikes up. The third film, heavily trailed in Part II's closing moments, would offer more consistent pleasures - being a better standalone film, and a better Back to the Future sequel - but this one's far weirder and livelier than this viewer recalled.

Back to the Future Part II is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

iMovie: "The Wild Robot"

DreamWorks Animation's The Wild Robot, released as the studio marks its thirtieth anniversary, has been conceived as a throwback to animated fantasias of yore. No egregious celebrity voice artist showboating; no revivals of half-forgotten Nineties Eurodance hits; not a single squeaking Minion to behold. Writer-director Chris Sanders goes back as far as 2002's Lilo & Stitch, and gave DreamWorks an enduring hit with the tangible old-school craft of 2010's How to Train Your Dragon: the look he oversees for this new film meshes digital innovation with the painterly, hand-rendered backdrops of golden-era Disney, and the messaging on parenting dates from around the same era. (The film is nominally set around 2050, but its roots and underlying belief systems predate the Eisenhower era.) In its story - reshaped from Peter Brown's 2016 book - Sanders' film recalls a more recent era, those digimation space-race days when DreamWorks and Pixar were scrapping over the same promising ideas. The pitch here must have been something like "What if WALL-E fell back to Earth?": instead of a boxy droid, we have a spherical helpmate, Roz (voiced by Lupita Nyong'o), introduced crashlanding on a planet with a familiarly leafy look and abundant flora and fauna, but also elevated water levels that have left the Golden Gate Bridge semi-submerged. In her first days on the planet, Roz befriends an egg, after which the plot starts writing itself: the egg hatches, a gosling named Brightbill (Kit Connor) emerges, robot comes to care for bird, and eventually learns some creatures are destined to fly away. There is, however, something missing: any real sense of where you and I are in this picture, and with that, any reason to be especially moved or stirred.

In WALL-E, you'll recall, the human beings were slovenly creatures slumming in hyperspace, their planet done for by decades of mindless over-consumption. (Fifteen years on, you have to admit this was fair representation.) For all its pretty artistry, Sanders' film may rank among the bleakest movie visions of 2024: effectively it's describing what happens once Mother Nature finally turfs humanity out, leaving her to duel with the new pollution of AI for planetary supremacy. (It's Silent Running without Bruce Dern, just the droids and the plants.) Now: clearly Brown and Sanders intended for us to find ourselves anew in the nurturing relationship between protective robot and helpless chick, or perhaps in the sly fox (Pedro Pascal), wisecracking possum (Catherine O'Hara) or grumpy beaver (Matt Berry, on disappointingly well-behaved form). But as rendered here, they're merely agglomerations of chips and wires on one hand, and anthropomorphised pixels on the other. The animators can thus mirror certain impulses and instincts, emotions and processes - their most extensive art is reserved for rendering the changing of very extreme seasons - but they make only fleeting contact with anything that might resemble human truth, a failing underlined by the absence of a single distinctive authorial fingerprint. For that idiosyncrasy, you'd need the dirt and dust of WALL-E, the Hughesian rust with which Brad Bird speckled his adaptation of The Iron Giant or just the salty trash of a second-string DreamWorks endeavour like 2006's Over the Hedge - artefacts that weren't so relentlessly damp-eyed and pious, so determined to do all our sobbing for us. Overlook the conservatism of its message, and The Wild Robot plays harmlessly enough; there's nothing on screen you might object to, as parents did to the bit with the tumble dryer in Lilo & Stitch. That strikes me as the reason for the movie's box-office success - it's a safe bet - but it also feels like an artistic limitation: I rapidly developed a craving for the raw meat Jan Švankmajer jolts into life in his animated bedtime stories. By contrast, Sanders' film, forever sterile in its prettiness, presents as so much wipeclean product: another assembly-line pacifier turned out by button-pushing automatons. Is this the future?

The Wild Robot is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

Couplings: "Mittran Da Challeya Truck Ni"

Bickering has become a central component of the Punjabi cinema: men bickering with men, women bickering with men and one another, bickering between families, bickering within families. Where the Tamil and Telugu cinemas have typically brawled out their differences, the characters in Punjabi films - and Punjabi comedies in particular - delight in squabbling and sniping, convinced there's nothing that can be done with fists that can't be more wittily expressed with crossed words. The squabbles writer-director Rakesh Dhawan initiates in Mittran Da Challeya Truck Ni begin with those between a divorced dad (Hardip Gill) and his unmarried adult son (singer-turned-actor Amrinder Gill) who collectively run a trucking firm, which permits them to take their domestic disagreements out on the road every now and again. Sometimes they team up to lambast their lumbering vehicle, which spills almost as much grain as it delivers; the "All Over India" legend adorning its front becomes ever more ironic, as the truck barely seems capable of going a mile or so without stalling or otherwise breaking down. In such moments, deprived of a mutual enemy, the pair invariably default to longer-running arguments, centred on dad's slovenliness and uselessness around the house, and the son's inability to find the bride he's so desperate to marry. A little further up this road, however, two eminent contenders await: Jindi (Sunanda Sharma), herself living in a one-parent household on the truckers' route, and Moumita (Sayani Gupta), a waitress at a truck stop being pressured into marriage with her landlord's brother. The questions that hone into view are twofold: one, which of these dames will best hold their own in the inevitable marital disputes, and two, whether the boys' truck will hold out long enough to carry everybody in the right direction.

At this junction, I should insert a caveat, which is that the English subtitles only sporadically match the speed of these back-and-forths: they catch and convey an essence of each conflict, but - like that cargo - some of the spark goes missing in transit, and the subs vanished entirely five minutes before the conclusion of the public screening I attended. Still, the film's virtues are self-evident, and require only sporadic mitigation. The first half is sincerely engaged with grain truck driving as a world with its own routes and pressures, ups and downs, and Dhawan cares enough to feel out what it is to drive long hours through the night with only your belching father sat alongside you for company. (In doing so, he explains the son's yearning to settle down even before the ladies pass into view.) It's not The Wages of Fear exactly, puttering modestly around the same handful of rural backroads, and then, after a pump blows, parking up on one street in particular; a shrugging intermission block promises similarly gentle fun to come after the break. What it has is a credible understanding of transient blue-collar life, turning a sympathetic eye on folks with limited prospects trying to improve their lot, on their routines and rituals, and on what happens whenever these are disrupted. Conflict is so hardwired into this cinema's syntax that character has to be revealed though complication, wrinkles in destiny: sudden deaths and hastily engineered couplings, a woman appearing in the middle of a long-male household. Personality is revealed, too, although the film has plenty of this from point of departure: the larger-than-life Gill Sr. chuckling fondly at his son's romantic failings, Gill Jr. demonstrating some of that everyman charm Chris Pratt had before Marvel sucked the life out of him. Sharma is good casting in the girl-next-door role, with the kind of goofy laugh that can only ever endear us to a performer, and Gupta combines a touching wide-eyed vulnerability with an inner fierceness that suggests she'd have the upper hand in any subsequent argument. They're the polestars of an unusually unpredictable love triangle, obliging our hero to commute between a woman who's an obvious match and one who's arguably the more interesting character, and a challenge besides. You'd ride along with any of them, in any combination - Dhawan conjures visual pleasure from the recurring two-shot framing driver and passenger, separated by a novelty wooden moustache glued to the windshield - and the film proves more reliable than the truck in one respect: it's consistently transporting.

Mittran Da Challeya Truck Ni is now showing in selected cinemas.

Monsters inc.: "The Apprentice"

Everybody gets an origin story, even the foremost monsters of the moment. So it is, with less than a month to go before a defining election for American democracy, that we end up sat before a film that seeks to explain where exactly Donald J. Trump came from. Written by Gabriel Sherman and directed by Ali Abbasi, The Apprentice shapes up as a Batman Begins with real-world repercussions, or a latter-day variant of 2002's Young Adolf biopic Max, which memorably found John Cusack as a Jewish art dealer appraising the protagonist's early work and life: "You're a terribly hard man to like, Hitler." Sherman and Abbasi posit that amid the dereliction and attendant social tensions of post-Nixon New York, slum landlord's son Trump (Sebastian Stan) found a mentor of sorts in the notorious lawyer and right-wing bigot Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) who proceeded to school our protagonist in the ways of the strongman. This feels like a relatively new angle: Trump as callow, suggestible kid, already moneyed but still in awe of others, possessed of some idea of legality, and having to do actual work for a living rather than merely making deals, or making shit up. This Trump hasn't yet fully metabolised his privilege, and hasn't yet learnt how to hide his insecurities and weak spots, drilled into him by his bluffly indifferent father Fred (Martin Donovan): a signature image, early on, has Young Don checking his (still fulsome) hair in a cab's smeary window. He's in construction, yet under construction, the guard still sometimes down, the golden facade of faux-success yet to go up. Cohn, for his part in this process, sees in this Trump a way of securing his legacy - and ensuring we're all still arguing about matters you'd hoped had been settled for good in the mid-20th century. He plies the kid with bonhomie and flattery, then alcohol, then ideology. When Strong, commitedly dead behind the eyes, spits out an aphorism like "none of it matters except winning" or "everybody wants to suck a winner's cock", it's Cohn, but it's also almost audibly Trump and Tate and every other chump on the Internet. The Apprentice is pretty sharp on how this poison, this ideological Drano, has to be forced down the gullet, whereupon it hollows you and any residual humanity out. You need a more resilient constitution than that of the ever-consuming Trump to resist.

As this suggests, The Apprentice is above all else an exercise in channelling, even ventriloquism, founded on the shoulders of skilful actors who've given themselves a lot to live up to. Strong, going toe-to-toe with the memories of Pacino's blowhard Cohn in HBO's Angels in America and the cadaverous James Woods in 1992's Citizen Cohn, recedes even further inside the character: no showboating, spittle-flecked ham here, just pure, unapologetic malevolence, tempered but slightly by a late-breaking battle with AIDS. (One peculiar yet effective physical tic, symptomatic of the consumption the movie describes: a gulping motion of the head and neck, that of a python swallowing in his latest victim, or a lifelong dyspeptic trying to keep down some of his bile. This stuff eats you up.) After his hilarious work in A Different Man, Stan sets himself the tougher challenge of accurately embodying arguably the most mediated figure of the century and getting us to listen to someone we might mute whenever he appears on the nightly news. Broken down, the performance is roughly 80% lips and hands (with a further 10% of superbly applied hairspray): the overemphatic gestures, forever promising more than can be delivered; the considered oral moues, threatening to do inappropriate things to every word, with or without their consent. If it's arguably more 21st century than 20th century Don, it's assuredly Trumpian in spirit, meshing who this guy was with who he was to become. (One reason Stan has skyrocketed over and above his leading-man contemporaries these past twelve months: a willingness to appear in less than heroic guises, to trade off his chiselled looks.) Around these two, we get Maria Bakalova, stalked by Baccara as Ivana, and lookalikes for Rupert Murdoch, Roger Stone and Andy Warhol: this New York, for all its disrepair, is also a petridish (or cesspool), a breeding ground for germs of ideas both good and bad. You need shit of some kind for these ideas to take root and flourish; and if all else fails, of course, you can always flood the zone with man-made BS. Is that why we emerge from The Apprentice feeling so unclean, in need of a long, hot shower? 

The main thrust of Abbasi's film - and it often does feel as brusque, possibly unwanted as a thrust - is an ugly business: at times, it plays like a buddy comedy between two men with no discernible sense of humour, and who thus have no idea how funny (most often: funny-strange) they are. One is a soulless husk as we find him; the other about to become far, far worse, perhaps the most insufferable man who's ever lived. (I mean, at least Hitler had his paintings to humanise him.) The Apprentice inarguably finds ways to immerse us in this world as it was at these times. Abbasi sticks his camera directly beneath his actors' chins, not so that we look up at them, rather to accentuate the dark hollows under Cohn's eyes and the soft, swelling paunch of the Trump jawline; he adopts a flat 1980s video look as we leave the disco era's shabby glamour behind, and tacks on slasher-movie synths. But the film is immersive in the same way slurry can be immersive, and not above the odd dirty trick of its own. We know this fumbling, bumbling Trump has reached the nadir he's heading towards when he subjects Ivana to sexual assault - here is the dominance Cohn has spent the movie drilling into him - so you can only grimace when Abbasi cuts away from the attack to the protagonist's latest erection, a phallic casino jutting out of the Nevada desert. Here, an otherwise shrewdly skeezy project succumbs to the Ryan Murphification of popular culture, in which even the most heinous behaviour is reframed as a sniggering joke, and our films and shows appear as shameless and sensation-hungry as the people they're documenting. There is, granted, both electoral and comic value in showing us Trump before he rebranded as The Don, when he was closer to Donald the Dork: socially awkward, mollycoddled, more than slightly weird. (One takehome: how those most hung up on winning are often sorely maladjusted losers.) Yet The Apprentice also feels like an origin story for the mire in which we're currently wallowing; a lot of the laughs here die on the lips, pursed or otherwise puckered, because we're all too aware what lies in wait for us in the real world once the house lights come up. Lots to admire, not least those performances, and you can't help but wonder what difference a film like this will make at the ballot box - but it is, finally, a terribly hard film to like.

The Apprentice is now showing in selected cinemas.

Cop out: "Vettaiyan"

This year's vehicle for Tamil cinema's self-billed "Superstar" Rajnikanth, Vettaiyan, opens with a state-of-the-nation address - given to a coterie of trainee cops by Hindi superstar Amitabh Bachchan, in his role as a human-rights scholar - on the broad theme of "what's wrong with India?" The lecture, which sometimes sounds indistinguishable from an old man's list of gripes, covers a fair amount of ground: post-colonial hang-ups, hangovers from the pre-colonial caste system, corrupt cops and administrators, failed children running amok on Tik-Tok. Some valid points are landed, but the two-and-a-half hours that follow suggest writer-director T.J. Gnanavel is using these observations to lend depth, scope and a degree of sociopolitical heft to what chiefly plays like standard-issue police procedural with a dash of copaganda. Rajnikanth's supercop Athiyan will, you sense, clear up some or all of the above, by hook or by crook, over the course of this professionally mounted tranche of escapism; the kind of supercool movie creation who employs a Horlicks-huffing trickster (Aavesham's Fahadh Faasil, continuing his mission to have more fun on screen than anyone in South Indian cinema) as his right-hand man, Athiyan lets a druglord escape from custody - and even shoot a uniformed officer - so as to make for a more propulsive recapture. It's all fun and games until the rape-murder of a schoolteacher framed as the bedrock of any enlightened state ties the movie's initially straggly strands together. Our brash hero shoots an innocent suspect dead in the aftermath and finds himself dogged by Bachchan's judge, whereby Gnanavel momentarily begins to complicate what appears to be his premise: Rajnikanth putting the country to rights.

That we're swept up in this process is mainly down to an admirable sense of pace. Rattling along to a terrific Anirudh Ravichander score whenever evidence has to be compiled in montage, Vettaiyan boasts the ambient pleasures of some Chennai-set CSI spin-off. It never lacks for character, either, even if that manifests in the often ridiculous syntax of the mass movie: Athiyan has the David Caruso-like habit of flipping on his clip-on sunglasses, typically to a rousing song cue underlining his general fanciness. The issue, evident even from said cues, is that the social critique set up by that opening is allowed to go only so far; whenever Athiyan starts to look especially reckless, Gnanavel timidly pulls back and defaults to the sight of a superstar kicking ne'er-do-well ass. "It's not haste, it's speed," Faasil's hypeman notes of the cop's methodology: yes, a few more bodies might have to be dropped along the way, but - hey, rest assured - this guy gets results. The sense is of an at least slightly tougher and grittier film that got compromised the minute Rajnikanth signed on; Vettaiyan is so determined to deliver the requisite hero moments it loses sight of the many more interesting directions this scenario could have been pushed in. For a while, it looks as if the character will be properly haunted by or challenged for his actions - or that he might challenge viewer complicity, as Dirty Harry and the Bad Lieutenant did. But no: the second half is altogether easy on its protagonist and too easy for Rajnikanth, who gets to strike much the same poses he must have done in at least a dozen previous star vehicles. It's a pity, because a more energised Bachchan might have been exactly the co-star to do the challenging; as it is, the judge is sidelined upon the introduction of a third star (Rana Daggubati as a tech bro exploring murderous measures to get teaching done online) and then recalled to pat our wayward hero on the back. The writing goes in circles: a case gets closed every twenty minutes, only for a few pages to fall out and create an even bigger mess, and after three or four passes at this, it's all contrivance. Entertaining contrivance, granted, and staged with a basic competency that nowadays presents as a luxury in the multiplex: Gnanavel somehow even gets us to suspend our disbelief that the stout septuagenarian Rajni might best the hulking Daggubati in hand-to-hand combat. Yet Vettaiyan probably won't go down as a Superstar classic for one simple reason: having set up so many potentially fascinating lines of inquiry, it picks the most conventional of all. It hears out those mountainous gripes, then spends two-and-a-half hours energetically patting down a molehill.

Vettaiyan is now playing in selected cinemas.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of October 11-13, 2024):

1 (new) Transformers One (PG)

2 (1) Joker: Folie à Deux (15) **

3 (new) Terrifier 3 (18)

4 (2) Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (12A)

5 (new) Vettaiyan (15) ***

6 (new) Salem's Lot (15)

7 (new) Buffalo Kids (U)

8 (4) The Substance (18) **

9 (3) Speak No Evil (15) ****

10 (5) The Outrun (15)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Carrie

2. Young Frankenstein 

3. Back to the Future Part II

4. Gladiator

5. Paddington 2

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. Do the Right Thing [above] (Saturday, BBC2, 12.35am)

2. In Which We Serve (Saturday, BBC2, 9.40am)

3. The Blair Witch Project (Saturday, BBC1, 11.50pm)

4. C'mon C'mon (Thursday, Channel 4, 12.25am)

5. Logan (Tuesday, Channel 4, 2.05am)

A bucket of blood: "Carrie"

If last weekend's box-office figures are anything to go on, the latest Stephen King adaptation, a redo of Salem's Lot, will be gone from cinemas long before the 31st, so thank goodness 1976's Carrie is back to meet our collective Hallowe'en requirements. This was Brian De Palma, in the year of the Bicentennial, gleefully besmirching the all-American coming-of-age narrative - with audiences young and old lapping up the results. In part, that may have been down to a renewed appetite for new horror myths, already amply demonstrated by the success of 1973's The Exorcist; jolted out of their complacency by Vietnam and Watergate, the cinemagoers of the 1970s were ready for and receptive to more than the usual flags, banners, marching bands and the patriotic piety they represent. De Palma could thus dare to suggest high school as hellhole, site of teenage dreams and nightmares. The dream (fantasy, rather) is right there upfront, in the sneaky, steamed-up opening surveillance of shower-block nudity in the wake of volleyball practice: for some boys, the cinema is a train set, for others, the key to the girls' locker room. The nightmare soon follows in the form of other kids, locating a weak spot in Carrie White's ethereal otherness and going in for the kill. What's still really strange and striking about Carrie is that while the film acknowledges there are elements of tragedy in King's story, and occasionally gestures towards real tenderness, De Palma - a moviebrat then closer in age to the kids than the teachers - doesn't position himself much above the bad behaviour he seeks to describe. He goes visibly funny whenever he points his Arriflex in the direction of head mean girl (and future Mrs. De P) Nancy Allen, and generally devotes himself to watching the playing out of one practical joke we sense even he may find a wicked sort of fun - the sort of wicked fun that comes into its own as Hallowe'en nears. The film's emergence as a modern classic is in part due to how unabashedly down and dirty it remains: few American movies have brought us tangibly closer to both the horror and the horniness of adolescence. Honestly, it's a miracle any of us came through it alive.

Lawrence Cohen's brisk adaptation is ruthless in paring King down to 96 minutes, but also preserves some very unsettling undercurrents: gym teacher Betty Buckley's apparent jealousy of her charges' youth and beauty, say, and everything to do with John Travolta, soon to become America's favourite dimple-chinned strutter, but here cast as a charmless groper who thinks nothing of impersonating Stepin Fetchit while balancing the bucket of blood over the prom stage. Within a few years, the teenagers in American movies would be cleaned up, reduced to their essentials, put in clean-cut John Hughes boxes; De Palma regards them mostly as sociopaths-in-waiting, with one or two honourable exceptions. Crucially, however, they aren't just pieces of meat, no matter that they might treat one another like that. They all have something going on, whether plotting to get in somebody's pants or to humiliate Carrie at what should be the happiest moment of her entire youth. (A stray observation: that humiliation and its aftermath is only the second worst thing to happen at this prom, after the performance of the band: we're still some way off Cameron Crowe and the music supervisors teen movies hired in the 1980s.) The horror is as much psychological as visceral, in other words, and it reaches fever pitch in the film's domestic scenes, where Sissy Spacek's Carrie blossoms before our eyes from screecher to sweetheart and Piper Laurie's Margaret channels something of the intergenerational confusion and mistrust that characterised the 1970s. We know within minutes why Carrie's father has fled the scene, and why the neighbours' house is up for sale. In this context, De Palma's horniness starts to seem humanising, far healthier for us in the long run than taking up arms against "dirty pillows", or honour killing. It ends, as it always does, with a blaze of purely visual storytelling that confirms the film as De Palma's Carrie rather than King's Carrie. Yes, the split screen permits more carnage per square inch; De Palma frames the prom like an assassination attempt, nudging us to wonder why we don't protect our teenagers the way we do the President. But don't overlook the image of girl silhouetted against flames, so potent it's provided the poster and marketing material for decades. Question: has anyone watched the (respectable, if comparably tame) Julianne Moore/Chloë Grace Moretz remake since it opened in 2013?

Carrie returns to cinemas nationwide today.

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.