"Merry Men: The Real Yoruba Demons" (Guardian 07/12/18)

Merry Men: The Real Yoruba Demons **

Dir: Toka McBaror. With: Ramsey Nouah, Jim Iyke, Falz the Bad Guy, AY Makun. 106 mins. Cert: 15

Compared to our French friends, we see nothing like enough African cinema on our screens, and certainly very little African popular cinema – so the arrival of this cheerfully duff caper, newly minted as Nigeria’s biggest box-office hit of 2018, might seem a forward step. In and of itself, however, it’s not a vast improvement on those Nollywood timekillers one chances across on satellite TV’s outer reaches, serving up 100 minutes of slapdash plotting, variable acting, mid-scene lighting shifts and consistently muffed jokes. Some of Merry Men has evidently been lost in translation, hence the businessman cursed for having “chewed every piece of sliced national cake”. Professionalism was shrugged away long before that, as in the dialogue scene that proceeds with a car alarm going off down the street.

Ironically, its emergence here may be down to perceived slickness: there’s visible money behind it. Our heroes – four bantering Abujans styled after The Hangover’s Wolfpack (or possibly Leo DiCaprio’s erstwhile Pussy Posse) – pull up in sports cars and set about manhandling the local women on gleaming, well-dressed sets; their sole redeeming feature is that they use their access and smooth tongues to rob the rich and give back to slum-bound relatives. Yet as one merry man is an industrialist, and another a gigolo, you can’t help wondering why they don’t just write nearest and dearest a cheque, rather than put themselves through this torturous non-plot, muddling its way around hacked sex tapes with scant trace of narrative connecting tissue.

Well, perhaps the home crowd wasn’t going for watertight storytelling. Some of the supporting performances are so broad they can only raise chuckles; and it belatedly earns the novelty of being the first Nigerian film opening in the UK to cite Kurt Vonnegut among its reference points. Yet throughout director Toka McBaror appears far less interested in organising these disparate elements into anything coherent than ensuring the various hotel chains and hire-car providers who put up some of the collateral get the desired placement. We’re left with glimpses and glimmers of a cinema growing in confidence – one that’s learning how to put its resources up on screen in ways that might appeal to audiences at home and abroad. But it’s still very early days. 

Merry Men: The Real Yoruba Demons is now playing in selected cinemas.

Our house: "Roma"

Whatever it does and doesn't win in the months ahead, Roma will surely be taught in future years as a textbook example of how camera choices can lend amplitude and resonance to a small, in-every-sense familiar story. That story is autobiographical, by all accounts, comprising writer-director Alfonso Cuarón's reminiscences of growing up in the early Seventies in a Mexico City household with the resources to employ its own live-in domestic staff. The camera, however, is much the same as that Cuarón brought to 2013's Gravity. True, it's been slowed a little, the better to observe earthly drama rather than out-of-this-world spectacle, but still it roves, rotates, roams, pushing deep into cluttered rooms and backstreets that present as overflowing repositories of social history to note the television shows and tunes played out at this time in this place, the fashions of the clothes the maids are obliged to pick up from the youngsters' bedroom floors. Once more, the cinema of Cuarón is a matter of space, and a demonstration that the best cinema is most often a matter of who fills and films that space best.

For some while, we gaze upon this household frontally, as if it were a cutaway of a doll's house, not unlike the boarding house in Jerry Lewis's The Ladies Man or one of those vast Jacques Tati constructions. The framing can yield very funny episodes: the ongoing struggle to dock the family's wide-winged Galaxy in the house's narrow garage (and to do so while avoiding the turds parked thereabouts by the family's troublesome dog), a would-be martial artist attempting to impress maid Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) by demonstrating his stick-fighting skills while naked. (Unexpectedly, he completes this posturing foreplay without smashing everything in sight.) Yet Cuarón, serving as his own cinematographer, is more often to be found operating in a broadly realist mode: the film's first act is at pains to impress upon us how the upstairs and downstairs areas of this home are linked, and how the house in total connects to a shared courtyard, the garage, and the streets beyond the family's front door, on which we see the city's residents beginning to stir, mass and protest. (Later on, we will even gain a sense of the tectonic plates shifting beneath everybody's feet: the focus goes that deep.)

What's immediately striking is the uncommon precision of the approach. A opening title card flags a distinction between subtitles for dialogue in Spanish and those for dialogue in the Mixtec dialect spoken by the maids; subsequent sounds and images appear to snap together - assembling memories like Meccano - into a bigger picture besides. (For starters, we're given the info to know exactly how much the steering wheel of that Galaxy needs to be turned to get car into garage without incurring lasting structural damage.) Roma shapes up as one of those very rare films where every corner of every frame - the clutter in the youngsters' bedrooms, the fraying posters tacked to the walls of the neighbourhood cinema, both the turds on the garage floor and the stuffed dogs' heads on the walls of a family friend's holiday home - has apparently been made subject to a remarkable level of directorial oversight. We keep catching stuff out of the corner of the eye - the incidental details of childhood that stay with us, as they surely have with Cuarón: Cleo wiping down the receiver before replacing the handset on the family's phone, the kids sliding down the banisters on the way out of the house. It's the kind of filigreed worldbuilding traditionally associated with fantastical genres and filmmakers (del Toro, Peter Jackson, the Harry Potter movies to which this director contributed); Cuarón shows us it is possible to construct (or reconstruct) such a world realistically, and in doing so, leaves us wondering why more films don't make this much effort, or take this much care.

What makes Roma more than just a logistical-technical marvel is a quality that was evident in Gravity, and as far back as Cuarón's 2001 success Y Tu Mamá También, which quietly noted the gap between Mexico's rich and poor: this filmmaker's acute awareness of the space between people. This is a matter of perspective, and it's crucial to Roma's emotional effects that the film approaches this generally happy household from the POV of the overburdened maid, which makes us instantly aware of the split-level privileges at work - who has someone to look after their children and who doesn't; what a holiday means to some, and what it means to others - and ensures there are secrets and mysteries (and just general family knowledge) to which we're not immediately privy. It will take that roving camera time to alight on these, but there's always plenty to take in. For forty minutes, the film concentrates on outlining this household's standard operating procedure, its daily rhythms and rituals: packing the kids off to school and picking them up; the opening shot is of a floor being mopped. (The movie puts up on screen more of the menial and emotional labour that keeps households running than just about any film this side of Jeanne Dielman...) Only gradually do we get a feel for the faultlines threatening to break up this merry picture: the maid's unhappy lovelife, the father's lengthy absences. What starts as a portrait of a particular moment in time develops into a more specific picture yet: one of women left in the lurch. The significance of this house, the reason Cuarón dwells on it from roof to floor, is that its low-level hurly-burly is all the shelter these women have.

That we come to feel this so profoundly is due to the fact these people - Aparicio's mutely accepting Cleo, the warring young brothers, the professor of martial arts who shows up for training in superhero latex - are as vividly etched as the places the camera locates them in: they're worlds within worlds, pools of mystery that deserve exploration and explanation - and in the case of the fellow who shows up in costume at a forest fire and breaks into keening lament, who maybe can't be fully explained. (By keeping him in shot, Cuarón insists he was there, all the same.) The main narrative business, it transpires, is the revelation and foregrounding of a quiet, everyday tragedy the young Alfonso couldn't have known about, but which Cuarón the elder, drawing on much the same empathy Greta Gerwig tapped for her cine-memoir Lady Bird, now sees full well and knows how to give dramatic weight to. Roma takes in more life than the average movie, moving us from the relative plenitude of the suburbs the director was raised in to the poverty of the slums from which Cleo emerged. Yet it also gets in closer to it, finding moments to treasure forever in the reflections of a polished table or scrubbed floor, while seeing both the unpredictable chaos of the universe and those flickers of human kindness and generosity that carry us through it. It remains paramount among 2018's many absurdities that the year's most comprehensive and arguably complete work of cinema will likely end up - thanks to its imminent Netflix appearance - being watched by more people at home on TV than it will be in theatres. But there's no dwarfing Roma's many extraordinary achievements.

Roma is now showing in selected cinemas, and streams on Netflix from Friday 14.

1,001 Films: "Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters" (1985)

After a run of negligible releases (Touch, The Walker, the ones that went straight-to-DVD, if they were released at all), we may have lost sight of just what a vivid and rigorous filmmaker Paul Schrader can be. Which makes the reissue of Mishima, his singular 1985 biopic of the Japanese writer, poet and provocateur Yukio Mishima even timelier. From the off, this is a film governed by a profound understanding of ritual: Mishima dressing for breakfast, his collection of countless awards, his final act of despair. Its four chapters are structured around the writer's 1970 attempt to take over an army base with a squadron of loyal followers - an action it's hard to imagine, say, Sebastian Faulks taking today, and which at the time only added to Mishima's growing sense of impotency - but rarely can the boundaries between art and life have been so fluidly rendered. Monochrome flashbacks cluing us in to the writer's early years benefit from Schrader's evident knowledge and love of the Japanese cinema, featuring performers who wouldn't have looked out of place in the Ozu movies of the Fifties and Sixties; these are interleaved with full-colour dramatisations of Mishima's compellingly weird prose - nihilist, nakedly autobiographical, defiantly modern, and tantalising enough to make one want to go and raid Foyles for the books.

Driven forward by Philip Glass's insistent, unifying and itself no less ritualised score - where even the cues that haven't subsequently been pilfered for car adverts strike the ear as perfectly uncanny configurations of notes, sending shivers down the spine - what these memories and fantasias suggest is that Mishima was set on the path of self-destruction all along (consider the prevalence of sharp blades in his work). You see it in the virginal stutterer who burns down the titular edifice in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion; the bodybuilder who enters into a sadomasochistic pact with his landlady in Kyoto's House, and suffers death by a thousand cuts; and the assassins in Runaway Horses, prepared to sacrifice their lives in an act that may ultimately mean nothing, and who become so hooked on the idea of purity they're prepared to turn their lives into "a line of poetry written with a splash of blood". Schrader manages a tremendous joke here - a belly laugh, you might say - switching from one of the assassins' attempts at seppuku (ritual disembowelment) to Mishima shouting "cut!" (boom boom) on the set of one of the films he came to be involved with.

This is a study of a man who, despite the trappings of celebrity he took on, came to see writing as a doomed enterprise, an attempt to ascribe order and beauty to a world that simply wasn't set up for it; who, at some point, came to the conclusion that to be a poet, you have to be prepared to die. Don't go expecting a happy ending: despite the neatness of that chaptering - Schrader's effort to ascribe order and beauty to this life - the film's main business is the messy, internal wrestling match this Mishima conducts between words and deeds, the word and the world, the Left and Right, masculine and feminine. His eventual suicide looks like an attempt to merge art with action, an author with his characters, even as the contradictions pile up around this illustrious corpse: a plea for peace that terminated in bloody violence, the Mishima coup was both the writer's most public statement, and a desperately solitary act. (Schrader concludes that his subject could only attain peace by slicing himself in two.) Formally adventurous, delving headfirst into the neuroses of both a truly complex figure and a society caught between ancient traditions and the modern desires documented in Mishima's work, this remains one of the boldest American films of the 1980s.

(July 2009)

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters is available on Blu-Ray via Criterion.

2018: The Poll of Polls

Top 10 (as of December 31, 2018):

1. Roma [above], 59pts
2. Phantom Thread, 44
3. First Reformed, 29
4. Leave No Trace, 28
5. You Were Never Really Here, 27
6. Burning, 26
7= Widows, 22
7= Zama, 22
9. Black Panther, 17
10. Cold War, 15


Empire: 1. Avengers: Infinity War 2. Mission Impossible: Fallout 3. A Quiet Place 4. Three Billboards... 5. Black Panther 6. First Man 7. Lady Bird 8. A Star is Born 9. Phantom Thread 10. BlacKkKlansman

John Waters (Artforum): 1. Jeannette 2. American Animals 3. Nico 1988 4. Mom and Dad 5. Blindspotting 6. The Green Fog 7. Custody 8. Sollers Point 9. Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992 10. Permanent Green Light

Cahiers du Cinéma: 1. The Wild Boys 2. Coincoin and the Extra-Humans 3. Phantom Thread 4. Burning 5. Paul Sanchez est revenu! 6. The Post 7. On the Beach at Night Alone 8. The House That Jack Built 9. Leto 10. Treasure Island

Sight & Sound: 1. Roma 2. Phantom Thread 3. Burning 4. Cold War 5. First Reformed 6. Leave No Trace 7= The Favourite 7=You Were Never Really Here 9= Happy as Lazzaro 9= Zama 

Time Out: 1. You Were Never Really Here 2. Widows 3. Phantom Thread 4. Hereditary 5. Roma 6. Mission Impossible: Fallout 7. Cold War 8. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri 9. Loveless 10. Lady Bird

Film Comment: 1. Zama 2. Burning 3. First Reformed 4. Roma 5. Western 6. Shoplifters 7. Let the Sunshine In 8. The Other Side of the Wind 9. Happy as Lazzaro 10. Hale County This Morning, This Evening

Little White Lies: 1. Zama 2. Roma 3. The House That Jack Built 4. First Reformed 5. Leave No Trace 6. If Beale Street Could Talk 7. The Wild Pear Tree 8. You Were Never Really Here 9. Burning 10. The Miseducation of Cameron Post

Bechdel Test Fest: 1. You Were Never Really Here 2. Widows 3. Phantom Thread 4. Roma 5. Black Panther 6. A Star is Born 7. Lady Bird 8. The Miseducation of Cameron Post 9. BlacKkKlansman 10. Shoplifters

The Guardian: 1. Roma 2. Phantom Thread 3. Leave No Trace 4. Loveless 5. Private Life 6. Black Panther 7. Cold War 8. Widows 9. Coco 10. Hereditary

Me (here): 1. Roma 2. Leave No Trace 3. First Reformed 4. A Cambodian Spring 5. The Wild Pear Tree 6. Custody 7. 120 BPM (Beats Per Minute) 8. Lady Bird 9. Summer 1993 10. Widows

From the archive: "Twilight"

Twilight forms a two-hour advert for all things pale and interesting. Pale, interesting teenager Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) moves to the small town of Forks, Washington to live with her father. She's looking for stability; instead, she catches the eye of the tall, pale and awkward Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) across the school canteen. He's a strange one, this lad, coming across as badly constipated when they're paired up in a biology lesson, and unable to get his words out when he attempts to apologise for his erratic behaviour shortly thereafter. Yet when he saves Bella from being crushed by an out-of-control vehicle in the school car park, she too becomes convinced he's a special one, or at least one with special powers. For Edward Cullen derives from a family of vampires; and while some part of Bella wants to give herself to him, he loves her for what she is, not what's running through her veins, leading him to keep his distance. Boys, eh? Pain in the neck.

Twilight has been ushered forward to fill the hole in the Christmas release schedules left by the delayed Harry Potter, but the first thing that strikes you is that this is a more immediately sophisticated proposition than any of the previous Potters. As directed by Catherine Hardwicke, of the teens-gone-wild drama Thirteen, the setting is a leafy, rainy Washington ("the wettest place in America", hence the ideal spot for creatures afraid of the sun) that takes us back in the direction of Twin Peaks. Twilight is only a 12A in comparison, but it doesn't talk down to its core audience, and allows its on-screen teenagers to be gangly, pallid and uncoordinated, recognising how their emotions (and hormones) are liable to be unruly at best. "Your mood swings are kind of giving me whiplash," Bella tells Edward, and there's something so perfect in the interjection of that "kind of" there: it could be a beautiful line, but the character's instincts won't let it be so. 

The effects are TV level, the stuff of Smallville and Supernatural - in this respect, the Potter producers have nothing much to fear - and the script could do with a meatier second act: once Edward's secret is out, we get somewhat too much of his and Bella's drippy mooning (sitting up treetops, or at the piano), not enough of their potentially deadly spooning (Edward pulls away from one encounter, insisting "I can't ever lose control with you"; once more, vampirism becomes a metaphor for sex). Pattinson, a future cover star of Unthreatening Boys Weekly, is clearly going to stir up all sorts of previously unknown passions in the breast of the average 13-year-old girl, and there's a lovely, career-making performance from Stewart as a girl unsure of herself, her feelings, her own feet, even. (Jena Malone must be kicking herself that no-one got round to filming these books five years ago.) The beginnings of a fresh, likable franchise, then, with a distinctive, light-gloomy mood (these vampires hold a baseball game during a thunder storm) and pleasing traces of Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark in its vampire family mythology. Short of selling snakebite at the concession stand, Hollywood has come up with no better way of getting Goths into the multiplex.

(December 2008)

Twilight returns to cinemas nationwide tonight.

Under the eyes of God: "Disobedience"

First Reformed, Apostasy, now Disobedience: we really did figure out what to do with religion at the movies this year. The improbable financial success of the first God's Not Dead suggested there was an audience who'd been praying for a faith-movie revival, but maybe we needed to get past this born-again genre's fundamentalist true-believer stage - the unimpeachable protagonists, the divine narrative intervention - to re-engage with properly conflicted, flesh-and-blood human beings, circling one another beneath the eye of their particular, not-always-kindly Gods. Sebastián Lelio's adaptation of Naomi Alderman's book offers three eminent examples of the form. Ronit (Rachel Weisz) is a photographer recalled from boho New York to her devoutly Jewish North London home turf after news breaks of her rabbi father's death; offering to put her up for the duration of the commemorations are Dovid (Alessandro Nivola), the rabbi's protégé, and his meek-seeming schoolmarm wife Esti (Rachel McAdams). Alderman's novel unfolded as a book of revelations, and so it goes here: Ronit makes an early faux pas in failing to spot which of the female mourners her old pal Dovid has married, but there's an even bigger revelation ahead, born of the relationship between the two women, which likely explains why we first found Ronit in exile.

In the meantime, the viewer bears witness to the detailed reconstruction of a world with its own customs, secrets and boundaries. It quickly becomes apparent that an unorthodox free-thinker like Roni - with her cigarettes and foul mouth, her untroubled womb - has no truck with these restrictions, and that this world has no obvious place for her in turn: it's hurtful enough that she should be glossed over in the rabbi's obit, let alone to learn she's been cut out of dad's will. (So much for forgiveness and charity.) Geographically, we're not far from the stomping ground of TV comedy hit Friday Night Dinner - the supporting cast is well-stocked with performers who might well cameo chez Goodman - but this suburb appears a newly sombre and serious place, occupied from its very first scene (the rabbi collapsing mid-sermon while on the brink of some revelation of his own regarding free will) with matters of life and death. Nevertheless, Lelio - a surprisingly effective choice, arriving off the back of March's rainbow-hued Oscar-winner A Fantastic Woman - works small miracles of variation within the film's carefully limited visual styling. The wigs that lent razzle-dazzle to the earlier film's Marina in her guise as a nightclub chanteuse are here just another way for the characters to conceal their true selves, and - working capably with local cinematographer Danny Cohen (This is England, Room) - Lelio displays a sure feel for cold, damp commuter-belt exteriors: we possibly needed a Latin American filmmaker to highlight just how central layering up is to English emotional repression.

The intelligently structured script, credited to Lelio and Rebecca Lenkiewicz (Ida), sets us waiting for these coats, mantles and other fronts to be cast off - as they are in a mid-film hotel hook-up infused with such wild melodrama as to seem a real liberation. Yet we're also left fearing what will become of these three once certain truths are made public, and they risk incurring the wrath of - if not God - then of the thunderously controlling men of this parish. Throughout, these characters seem fascinatingly vulnerable, mortal. Nivola's Dovid appears lost in his faith, muttering his daily prayers like a man whose existence is unravelling; as Roni, Weisz - quietly becoming one of our most interesting actresses - has a wounded quality that undercuts the character's fierceness, continually putting up brittle defences against a community that hurt her badly in the past. Both find a notable foil in McAdams' alertness: those ocular flickers that mark Esti as very much open to the possibilities Roni has brought back from the New World, but also reveal the conscience of someone harbouring secrets she desperately wants to guard. For something shot on the drizzly outskirts of Hendon, it's an unexpectedly sexy watch - perhaps the closest the British film industry has come to a movie like Witness, populated by people who would be totally DTF were it not for the all-seeing eyes around and about them - but it's quietly stirring in other grown-up ways, too, not least in the final reel, as these wanderers reorient themselves towards truth and love, in ways that feel less sappy than genuinely hard-earned.

Disobedience is now playing in selected cinemas, and streaming via Curzon.

1,001 Films: "Brazil" (1985)

It's not hard to see why the executives hated Terry Gilliam's futureshock opus Brazil. Populated by grey suits on concrete sets, the film devotes at least its first hour not to the flamboyant freehand fantasy of which the director is so clearly capable, but to the business of scrupulous office drone Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) as he goes about trying to rectify the bureaucratic error that saw one Archibald Buttle, rather than his namesake Tuttle, rounded up and carted off by totalitarian troops. Lowry's dreams of flights and freedom fighters suggest a Billy Liar-like desire to escape his humdrum reality, but he's ground down by the bastards around him - Ian Holm as a needy middle manager; Robert de Niro and Bob Hoskins as varyingly threatening rival contractors; Michael Palin as a company man with a dark side - as well as by random terrorist atrocities that play as merrily in the post-9/11 era as they must have done upon first release at the time of the IRA. His colleagues' surprising choice of desktop viewing - taken with that title - hints that what we're watching is meant as Casablanca via the gloominess of Orwell's (or Michael Radford's) Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Yet if Brazil was always going to be too deadpan to satisfy mass audiences (its idea of a romantic come-on is "care for a little necrophilia?", which is inspired in the context), the completeness of its vision really does creep up on you, given patience and close attention. It's an oddly realistic-seeming sci-fi movie that manages to see several things to come, not least the corporate absurdity of Office Space and the many versions of The Office, but which remains cherishably perverse at heart. You suspect the studio wanted science fiction of scale, to sit alongside The Terminator and Back to the Future; what Gilliam actually delivered was a dystopian fable about the petty frustrations and irritations of modern life. Brazil is second only to Blade Runner, amongst 1980s films, in putting up on screen a world where nothing - not the screwy plumbing, nor the malfunctioning electrics - really functions as it should. This equally applies to the ending, which remains a mess, but amongst the otherwise supremely organised disorganised clutter, there's a wealth of left-of-centre detail that demands multiple viewings to fully absorb: to take but one fifteen-minute segment, you get fresh-air dispensers, men in chemical suits playing volleyball, and kids receiving credit cards as Christmas gifts from shopping-mall Santas. Gilliam junks the utopian ideals of so much sci-fi in favour of a good-humoured pessimism about the direction society was headed in: as time goes by, he reckons here, things don't seem to get any better.

Brazil is available on DVD through Fox, and to stream via Amazon Prime.