On demand: "Transit"

Transit, the latest from the noted German thinker Christian Petzold, parachutes us into a city under siege. The city is 21st century Paris, replete with graffiti on the walls and a branch of Hippopotamus on every street corner. Yet the details of who exactly the occupying forces are fall somewhere between sketchy and vague: we hear muttered talk of camp-building, and rumours of American Jews racing to catch the last flight to Washington, but nobody on screen seems to have time to connect these paranoid dots, or fill in the worrying gaps for us. All you and I can gather, from the wails of police sirens and the fingerpointing of passers-by, is that this is far from a relaxing or stable environment to inhabit; that, after a decent run, the city of love and revolution and resistance may finally have fallen for good. Our hero Georg (Franz Rogowski), a German TV repairman who's found himself at the very eye of this storm, quickly picks up the signals: "They've set up a camp at the velodrome. They're scouring the district. They call it spring cleaning." Not for the first time, a creative positions himself as a canary in the cultural coalmine, sniffing for gas and hearing the deathly rattle of trains; perhaps only a German filmmaker could claim such a heightened sense for what's in the air, and what might be coming down the tracks. Either way, the relocation of what we may have thought was 20th century history to our plugged-in present lends Transit's location work a vivid eeriness. Everything Petzold puts on screen in these 100 minutes - the cosy bars serving up pizza du jour, the familiar tourist attractions, the bright blue skies - suggests it shouldn't happen here. But, of course, it could.

Even before the voice of an unseen narrator kicks in, Transit might strike the casual viewer as a literary or intellectual exercise: what if you took this historical situation and transposed it on the present day? Yet Petzold enriches his conceit with a sure feel for how even in the midst of crisis, life goes on, and for people doing their best in newly reduced circumstances. (How fortunate for the film's UK distributors Curzon that it should have been releasable in the summer of 2019.) Fleeing to Marseilles on an overnight train with a dead writer's passport in his pocket and an ailing companion in a comrade with a gangrenous leg, Georg stops to kick a football around with a youngster; in a later setpiece, he'll resolder that lad's fritzing radio with the assistance of a candle's flame. Transit is a thriller about individuals making do as the walls close in. Yet there are also, as there were in this director's previous Barbara and Phoenix, flickers of a bruised romantic sensibility: the movie's hopeful in its heart around the idea of a better world, but it also knows deep down how hard it is to get there whenever things start to head south. That's why Petzold casts Rogowski, whose boyish handsomeness looks to have been hammered out of him by circumstance. Elsewhere, the proprietress of a Parisian hotel confesses how, even with all that's been going on, she remains a sucker for love; the fugitive Georg catches a couple canoodling in the shadows; and he will be accosted in the street, several times over, by a mysterious, frazzled brunette (Paula Beer), at which point this most classical of pictures gains a femme fatale, as if the threat of danger and risk of death weren't elevated enough.

The enduring tension in Petzold's work has been that between theory and practice, or theory and the viewer's lived experience: he's such a big ideas man you wonder whether he feels he doesn't have to sweat the small stuff, that a grand gesture or two will be enough to sweep any onlookers past the connecting tissue and corroborating detail any truly satisfying genre film requires. That approach can work, but Phoenix offered up several places where the discerning viewer might have raised an eyebrow and said "hang on a minute", and Transit, too, relies on what we might describe as extended use of artistic licence. Anyone who's ever spent time in a city the size of Paris or Marseilles will recognise the implausibility in Georg's bumping into the same people time and again; in a perverse twist, when Petzold tries to ground this flighty narrative in the second half - explaining why his hero keeps bumping into these folks - the film becomes slightly less compelling than the man-on-the-run thriller that preceded it. Nevertheless, even these developments are appreciably adult and complicated, and it permits Transit to arrive at much bigger, more profound truths in passing: the heartbreak of that football-crazy kid when Georg announces his plans to move on, crystallising all that loss suffered by real-world migrants and their loved ones; or the fate of the musician finally undone by stress over the twelve passport photos he needs to secure safe passage. In a functioning democratic society, Petzold knows, this shouldn't happen. This nagging, haunting, quietly chilling work, made by a European who's spent the past few years reading and looking around rather than arguing on Twitter, never lets you forget for one moment: it still could.

Transit is still playing in selected cinemas, and available to stream via Curzon.

On demand: "Holiday"

With her directorial debut Holiday, the Swedish writer-director Isabella Eklöf marches confidently into territory that would once have been considered exclusively male; she emerges from it with a powerful rebuke to all those lairy-leery crime movies circling the bargain bin down at your nearest 24-hour garage. At the film's centre is the toxic relationship between a gangster and the moll he's imported to look good on his arm, and Eklöf stays closest to the moll, a peroxide blonde status symbol, Sascha (Victoria Carmen Sonne), who's arrived in the Turkish port of Bodrom with expectations of cash sweeteners and a shot at the good life. Even there, the filmmaker's gaze never softens. Like the daughter of extreme cinema veterans Catherine Breillat and Ulrich Seidl (whose À ma sœur! and Paradise: Love Holiday often resembles), Eklöf confronts the fallout from this grim coupling head-on in ominously fixed camera set-ups that seem to be waiting for the worst to happen. Anybody drawn here anticipating the buoying highs of the Cukor screwball bearing the same title - an altogether more comforting vision of gender relations - would realise very quickly that they'd made a wrong turn. Would that our heroine - a naive, ice cream-licking kid playing at being a woman of the world - had the wherewithal to do likewise.

There are no two ways around it: Holiday is a difficult watch even before the going gets properly bad. Blue-eyed silver fox Michael (Lai Yde) takes delivery of our girl as if she were a new convertible, running a fortysomething finger across her bodywork before offering to rent her out to close associates. Amid that entourage of ne'er-do-wells and nogoodniks muttering shadily about the drug deals that allow them to spend their days in clifftop retreats and restaurants, Sascha cuts a perilously lonely figure. (The character has been conceived as a migrant labourer of sorts, sent to a place where she doesn't speak the language to carry out a combination of housekeeping and sex work.) Eklöf has had the wisdom to relocate what has, in the main, been an urban, inner-city narrative to far sunnier climes, meaning the viewer at least has pretty sunsets and scenery to look at, no matter how ugly the behaviour in the foreground gets; it's a film that might have seemed resistibly chilly were it not playing out in thirty-degree heat. That alone serves as some indication of the control Eklöf exerts, not just over the temperature of these frames, but the content of her images; in this, she is very much the equal of the film's gangster-in-chief. (More of a match, you'd say, than the initially cowering Sascha.) She knows to elide some of the worst, to give us just a sense of the roughhousing and recklessness going on here without dwelling on it: a scooter accident is briskly set up and dealt with, further underlining our heroine's vulnerability, and she confines one horrific beating to a room adjacent to that in which we're left to observe the gathered molls and their poor offspring watching TV. 

Yet the violence within the film emerges in unexpected ways; it gets sublimated and rerouted. Eklöf certainly doesn't spare us during her icky centrepiece, a far from entirely consensual sex scene that, while establishing Michael's dominance, goes further in its imagery than the rape in Irreversible (which it looks to be styled after, right down to the mid-grope arrival of an interloper who elects to back away). It's a scene bound to provoke questions: do we need it? And even if the storytelling justifies it, does anyone really need to see it? Narrow down that "anyone" to you, me and your Auntie Doris, and the answer would probably be "no". If, however, we're talking about the denizens of latter-day yachting culture - that commingling of cash and flesh indulged in by several high-profile A-listers, producers and hangers-on - the answer might be an urgent yes. (Swap Bodrom for Cannes, and you get a feel for how close this Holiday falls to home - it's unarguably an interesting film to have circulating as Harvey Weinstein nears trial and the contents of Jeffrey Epstein's black book are being made public.) In years gone by - back when crime narratives were an exclusively male preserve - the movies would have dressed up and romanticised the relationship between an older, powerful man and a younger woman, in part because it reflected well on those in the know or in the club behind the camera. Eklöf, to her credit, simply isn't interested in making life easier for herself, nor indeed for anybody else.

Holiday is now playing in selected cinemas, and available to stream via the BFI.

Fisherman's blues: "Bait"

One of the reasons British critics have traditionally looked down on British films is that so many have been so much of a muchness: hours of safe-bet country house cosiness, flimsy romcoms sticking to the Four Weddings template long after Richard Curtis has tumbled from his pedestal, hard yards of fallout from the Rettendon Range Rover murders, innumerable crowdpleasers featuring indomitable proles overcoming obstacles you could see coming from considerable distance. Bait, the breakthrough feature of the writer-director-editor Mark Jenkin, is something else entirely: a film that veers conspicuously away from these formulas, and rejects comforting complacency from the word go. For starters, it's defiantly regional cinema, unfolding around a Cornish fishing village being overrun with upper-middle class types who've arrived in Chelsea tractors loaded with Waitrose shopping bags to colonise a territory already beset with tensions. Secondly, Jenkin insistently fragments these tensions, refusing to let the film fall into recognisable schematics: he shoots an insane amount of coverage, seeking out close-ups of almost every detail in every scene for what they might offer (or break) up, then doubles down on the insanity in post by inserting brief flickers of scenes to come, a tactic that felt like a major commercial risk back in the heyday of Nic Roeg. Shot in the tight Academy ratio, with overdubbed sound, on jerky, scratchy black-and-white stock that jitters and flares and steadfastly refuses to yield the conventionally pretty images on which the British film industry was founded, Bait immediately gives the impression of a rough-hewn relic from the Twenties, or the Forties, or the Sixties. Which vault did they dig this one up from?

The glowing reviews the film has so far occasioned - born of sincere delight at discovering a genuine mutation or deviation from the norm - haven't quite noted that it takes some time, perhaps a third of Bait's running time, to get your head around its otherness. This is not an easy film to settle into; Jenkin throws the viewer into it as real-world trawlermen toss fish guts over the sides of their vessel. (Its particular shock-of-the-new is exactly that of icy, salty water: the film slaps your face, wakes you up, obliges you to paddle around in it for a bit, getting your bearings.) One vague reassurance is that the characters themselves seem all at sea, bobbing around and sometimes up against one another: the beardy fisherman hero (Edward Rowe), who seems to have enough on his plate even before he initiates a minor-league class war; the whey-faced, thin-lipped poshos, alternating between condescension and withering passive-aggression; the gobby innkeeper's daughter (Chloe Endean), whose cheek keeps cutting through any art-movie feyness Bait threatens to exhibit. The details, too, wash up on screen with the vivid physicality of seashells: we pick up a faded biscuit tin full of pound notes, a garage door daubed with an artless NO PARKING notification, a 50-pence piece set down firmly on a pooltable. The intense attention to everything could have proven overwhelming, wearing, but everything registers, and those edits that initially cause such tension in the viewer eventually explain themselves as descriptions of tension: clock the rhyme Jenkin fashions between a knuckle clenching on a wooden gate and a buoy being squeezed against the harbour wall, and shudder. If the film appears on the point of rupture, it's as nothing compared to the fragile community it depicts - or, one might add, the fractious country it's been released into.

Crucially, Jenkin isn't just passing through: you catch him looking around these shores for distress signals or signs of hope, and giving serious thought to how he might stitch these together into something that might be described as authentically cinematic. If Bait strikes the eye and ear as a throwback, that's partly down to the heightened levels of craft worked into it: after years of underwritten, sketchily shot, themeless Britpics rushed together before the money runs out, that might well seem unfamiliar, if not outright alien. It remains the most artful British film of late to feature both a character dressed in an inflatable stag-night penis costume, and a taproom confrontation that concludes with one character calling another a "prancing Lycra cunt" - some of that saltiness persists, helping to stave off any suspicion Bait might just be an academic exercise in reviving artisanal methods of filmmaking. Yet you cannot fail to spot the skill in Jenkin's shotmaking, and his prodigious gifts for montage: one sequence, paralleling the fisherman retying his lobster pots with the landowners teasing the meat from the cooked lobsters' shells, forms a demonstration of not only first-rate cutting but trenchant editorial, nimbly differentiating between those who still have to work in this country and those now enjoying the benefits of that labour. What's around it comprises a masterclass in taking a small, self-contained story - a tale ripped from the headlines of the surviving free papers - and getting it to resonate beyond its square, monochrome frames via an extraordinary alertness to image and sound. A film about nothing so much as a parking dispute thus develops, via a radio report on chlorinated chicken and a mounting dispute between haves and have-nots, into the first fully notable British movie of the Brexit era - though Jenkin's central accomplishment there has been to assemble a movie, rather than reels of celluloid that more closely resemble television. The Downton Abbey film opens in T minus three days.

Bait is now playing in selected cinemas.

The devil's own: "Hail Satan?"

We might consider it a sign of just how far we've travelled through the looking glass in the first years of the 21st century that a small group who self-identify as Satanists have become something like the voice of reason in latter-day America. Earlier this decade, the documentarist Penny Lane fell in step with the New York-based Satanic Temple as it relocated to the heartlands of Salem, Massachusetts (yes, site of the notorious historical witch trials) after a high-profile series of standoffs with the blowhards at Fox News and the hardliners of the Westboro Baptist Church. There was a vaguely archaic, Middle Ages feel about these heated conflicts of dogma - unlike their forcefully evangelical opponents, the Temple insist on a clear separation between church and state - but as one observer in Lane's film Hail Satan? observes, the Temple's wall-eyed founder Lucien Greaves has done much in recent years to refine Satanism as "a new tool in the culture wars", his every public utterance and appearance intended to test how far tolerance and free speech will stretch in a notionally Christian country. The funny thing, as Lane spots from the off, is that these Satanists are all so nice. "We're here to spread a message of good will and benevolence," one tells the press at a protest, and yes, internationalist in their outlook, sex-positive and pro-choice, with policy proposals inspired by It's a Wonderful Life that generate afterschool care for underprivileged students and sock drives for the homeless, these are every bit the Satanists you could take home to meet your parents.

Of course, they're not really Satanists in the Hammer House of Horror sense; there's not a blood sacrifice in sight. (You suspect actual Satanists would be reluctant to let a camera crew in on their daily activity, defending their darkness against the lights.) In spirit and deeds, Greaves's lot are closer to media-savvy performance artists like the Yippies, seizing on Satanic imagery and rhetoric to juice up what used to be called actions or happenings. Lane films a number of these: there is nudity, as there always was, and pigs' heads, and a sense of ritual being done on an art student's budget. What's new is the theme: that it is as absurd to align yourself uncritically with the Devil in 2019 as it would be to align yourself with God. Here, Lane floats the idea there might be successive waves of Satanists, much as there have been successive waves of feminism, each involved in knotty discussion with their predecessors. The Temple has clearly learnt a lot from the moral panic that surrounded Satanism as it was in the 1980s, and resolved not to be backwards about coming forwards. Nowadays, as Greaves proposes, Satanism is largely performative: Lane duly catches this troupe shopping for robes, rehearsing their gestures, sweeping up after themselves. Though some hide behind pixellation or horned masks, the talking heads have the well-drilled air of spokespeople for Internet start-ups. (These are the first Satanists with a social-media presence: on Twitter alone, Greaves can claim 24K followers, more than Anton LaVey or Aleister Crowley had in their lifetimes.) Their rituals are a strange mix of social activism - confronting the Catholic Church over allegations of historical sex abuse one day, outshouting anti-abortionists the next - and constitutional cosplay.

To some extent, Lane is preaching to the converted: she knows full well that Hail Satan? isn't ever going to play on the Fox network. That much is evident from the film's wry tone, reminiscent of early Louis Theroux/Michael Moore ventures, which knocks a snort or a chuckle out of you simply by confirming your biases. Asked about the Black Mass, one devotee shrugs "it's kinda vulgar... but then an actual mass is kinda vulgar, if you think about it"; the dramatic throughline concerns the Temple's efforts to crowdfund a statue of the bat-demon Baphomet to cancel out a stone scroll of the Ten Commandments being erected outside a state building in Arkansas. Lane can't resist approaching much of this as an eyerolling, only-in-America joke, artlessly tossing some of her material up in the air like a documentary equivalent of the shrug-with-raised-hands emoji. Yet when she looks beyond the stunts to hone in on the personalities involved, Hail Satan? takes on a more touching aspect. Although they tend to dress in one shade exclusively - black, pitch black - those who take up the Satanist garb arrive in many colours: brown, tattooed, trans, nerdy. One acolyte, sporting an unlikely brushcut and bow tie combo, appears to have transferred in on a Bosman from the Jehovah's Witnesses. What Lane shows us is a truly multicultural band of outsiders, made up of those who would have most to lose in any sustained push towards a white Christian monoculture. If you can get past the forked tongue-in-cheek business, Hail Satan? holds some value as a resistance story, illustrating the devilish organisation that may now be crucial to any serious bid to overturn the status quo. Deplorable as it might sound, perhaps we are all Satanists now.

Hail Satan? is now playing in selected cinemas, and streaming via Curzon Home Cinema and the BFI.

1,001 Films: "A Chinese Ghost Story" (1987)

Produced by Tsui Hark for director Ching Siu Tung, A Chinese Ghost Story might more accurately be titled A Chinese Love Story or A Chinese Shaggy-Dog Tale, although there are elements of all three titles in there: it's the highest-profile Hong Kong martial-arts movie to bear comparison to those Bollywood masalas throwing everything at the screen save the kitchen sink. A klutzy, unworldly debt collector (played by Leslie Cheung, later the star of Farewell My Concubine) elects to spend a night in a temple even the locals describe as "creepy and old". With good reason, it turns out: his fellow guests include duelling Taoist monks, Harryhausen-esque hordes of the undead, and an otherworldly female spirit (Joey Wang) with an unfortunate knack of killing her lovers. Supporting characters include a man in drag known as the Old Dame, an effete homosexual who gets pushed off his horse, while one of the monks performs his own synth-based musical number before blowing up a vampire. (This, admittedly, is awesome.) Though it's never remotely scary - surely a prerequisite of a proper ghost story? - it manages to be oddly sexy (our boyish hero becomes a man after a close encounter with the heroine in a bathtub), pacy, supremely playful and inventive (characters are repeatedly attacked by a giant tongue), baffling in the best way (governed as it is by an arcane set of rules regarding the relationships between ghosts and mortals; "this case is too complicated," a magistrate can be heard complaining at one point, and in many ways he's right) and above all else very funny, even if you're never quite sure whether you're laughing at or alongside the film. A free-for-all, in other words, but never less than entertaining.

A Chinese Ghost Story is not currently commercially available in the UK, though a Blu-Ray rip with English subtitles can be found on YouTube.

For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office 
for the weekend of August 30-September 1, 2019:

1 (2) Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (18) ***
2 (3) The Lion King (PG)
3 (1) Angel Has Fallen (15) **
4 (6) Dora and the Lost City of Gold (PG) ***
5 (4) Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw (12A) **
6 (8) Toy Story 4 (U) ***
7 (5) Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (15) ***
8 (10) Casino Royale - Secret Cinema (12A)
9 (9) Good Boys (15)
10 (new) The Informer (15)

(source: BFI)

My top five: 
1. Bait
2. Inna de Yard: The Soul of Jamaica
3. Pain & Glory
4. Hail Satan?
5. It: Chapter 1


Home entertainment Top Ten (DVD/Blu-Ray/Download): 

1 (1) Avengers: Endgame (12) **
2 (2) Hellboy (15)
3 (3) Shazam! (12) **
4 (6) Captain Marvel (12) ***
5 (4) Dumbo (PG) **
6 (24) It: Chapter One (15) ***
7 (re) The Mule (15)
8 (20) Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (PG)
9 (11) Bohemian Rhapsody (15)
10 (new) Escape Plan 3 (15)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Only You
2. Wild Rose
3. The Sisters Brothers
4. Benjamin
5. Long Shot


Top five films on terrestrial TV:
1. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp [above] (Monday, BBC2, 2.05pm)
2. A Late Quartet (Friday, BBC2, 11.45pm)
3. In the Loop (Saturday, BBC2, 11.30pm)
4. Split (Saturday, C4, 9pm)
5. Maleficent (Saturday, BBC1, 3.45pm)

On demand: "Leto"

The Russian film Leto has nothing to do with 30 Seconds from Mars, thankfully, but it is about rock music, and the possibilities it can open up. The writer-director Kirill Serebrennikov introduces us to the longhairs of Leningrad as that city was in the early 1980s at a concert where groupies are smuggled in through bathroom windows (no change there then) while, up on stage, intense young boys make derivative assaults on the look and sound of the rock gods they've taped to their bedroom walls (again, this may be universal). More striking - more region-specific - is how the enthusiastic, fresh-faced audience is obliged to sit in polite rows, as if attending a Mussorgsky recital; black-clad security agents can be seen stepping in to confiscate anything so disruptive as a I-Heart-The-Band sign. From a later scene, riffing on the absurdity of committee- and state-sanctioned rock, we gather that all the songs we hear have been pre-approved for performance. Here, then, is a previously unseen image of the Soviet Union as it was under Brezhnev. Yet despite its chalkily artful monochrome images, Leto is no quaint period piece, rather an act of rebellion: you'll get a greater sense of where the film is coming from if I tell you that Serebrennikov, a noted director of confrontational theatre in his homeland, was only recently sprung from house arrest after speaking up in favour of gay rights and against the annexation of Crimea.

Granted, for a film centred on a vodka-swilling band of rockers, Leto might initially seem a rather quiet and mellow rebellion. The title, for one, translates as "Summer", and early stretches are characterised by a certain languor. Serebrennikov wants to immerse the viewer in a scene (in both the cinematic and musical senses) and a moment, tossing us into the deep end of backstage manoeuvres and beachside jams, and leaving us to figure out who the prime movers and shakers are in the New Wave-influenced combo calling themselves (ahem) the Aluminium Cucumbers. Twenty minutes in, however, just as we're starting to get our bearings, something happens - or, rather, something erupts: the band run amok on a humdrum commuter train to the sound of their own rough-edged cover of Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer", at which point Leto reveals itself as a thrashy, scratchy, postmodern musical. (The "Psycho Killer" sequence ends with a character holding up a sign that reads "This did not happen", recalling Michael Winterbottom's playfully unreliable Madchester story 24 Hour Party People.) What Serebrennikov is getting at here, you sense, is a certain attitude, a certain defiance - he's filming that much-sung phrase whatever people say I am, that's what I'm not. Confronted aboard the train by a Communist Party hardliner who claims he "screams like an arsehole", Cucumbers frontman Mayk (Roman Bilyk) retorts "the Sex Pistols scream. I howl"; in doing so, he's aligning himself not only with the Beat poets of yore, but also with the Beatles outsmarting the oldtimers on the express train to superstardom at the opening of A Hard Day's Night.

For Serebrennikov, rock - perhaps performance in any form - is inherently disruptive and oppositional: a means, however temporary, of overturning the status quo, interjecting a new idea, or simply letting rip with screams or, yes, howls that might otherwise be suppressed. (We know our heroes are on the right side of history when one strops out of a creative difference with the priceless "Do what you want. Play Duran Duran, even.") As a consequence, Leto keeps erupting - literally so, the screen suddenly bombarded with CG lightning bolts and comet trails that serve as analogues for the flashes of inspiration occurring before and behind the camera. Iggy Pop's "The Passenger" breaks out on a tram navigating the city streets; a rainstorm prompts a singalong to "Perfect Day". When one energetic act brings stagediving to the proletariat - a tricky business, when your audience is sat a full two feet from the stage - this monochrome movie briefly bursts into full colour, marking a great evolutionary leap comparable to the first glam rockers appearing on Top of the Pops. (Here, finally, are the 20th century boys our T Rex-hymning protagonists have been waiting for.) Coming from a director who's been on lockdown, Leto is unexpectedly expansive; you can't spy a trace of fear in the exteriors. Maybe that's what the music gives us, the film suggests: a fearlessness, the ability to front any challenge out and go forth into the world with the solidity of a battle tank. Even so, Leto struck me as delicately poised between the romantic and the realistic, the work of a creative who's spent ample time looking on from the wings, and thus developed a more rounded perspective on the creative life than the young bucks he thrusts centre stage.

For one thing, Serebrennikov sets the Aluminium Cucumbers (nope: still doesn't get any better) in a not dissimilar context to all those refuseniks in American movies set during Vietnam: the looming spectre here is the Afghanistan conflict, evoked in a recruiting hall tableau where the boys spread their buttocks for hard-faced nurses. And for all the raucous revelry that provides his leads with an escape of sorts, Serebrennikov never loses sight of the idea rock may be an inherently childish pursuit, getting some kind of a fix on the women left holding the babies while the men strum among themselves. (One doe-eyed beauty occupies more or less the same space in the film's affections as Liv Tyler in That Thing You Do! or Kate Hudson in Almost Famous, gazing up adoringly at the men she flits between and circles around.) There's a poignancy about this activity, borne out in a late, elegiac rendition of "All the Young Dudes" where the Cucumbers recreate the album art of more successful and enduring acts: here, Serebrennikov concedes that the Russian rock scene hasn't generated a whole lot of noise (Pussy Riot aside), but - hey - at least somebody tried. (In the closing moments, an Eastern slant on the payoff to American Graffiti, we see how many of these artists survived to see the new freedoms of glasnost.) That trying, the speaking up and out, is important to Serebrennikov, because he knows art has the power to be revolutionary - that the right band or song might just alter the way we dress, conduct ourselves, think, even vote. (Such uncontrollable conviction worries our leaders.) More so than any of the recent Western jukebox musicals, all of which felt too cosy and streamlined in their desire to repackage the canon while turning a quick buck, Leto throws a comradely arm around the viewer's shoulders and steers us towards the heart of rock 'n' roll - a place where young dreamers can sometimes change the world.

Leto is currently streaming on MUBI UK.