Future generation: "The Orphanage"

Not to be confused with its namesake, Juan Antonio Bayona's breakthrough film of 2007, the week's big MUBI premiere The Orphanage is instead the third full-length feature by the Afghan writer-director Shahrbanoo Sadat, whose Wolf and Sheep caught eyes on the festival and arthouse circuit in 2016. Her latest, set in the Kabul of 1989, introduces us to Qodrat (Quodratollah Qadiri), a redheaded, freckle-faced teen in a never-washed Amitabh Bachchan T-shirt who makes a living - in as much as anyone who lives out of an abandoned, bashed-up car can be said to make a living - hiking up the prices to new Bollywood releases as a ticket scalper. (Sadat inserts some fun clips from 1982's megahit Namak Halaal, featuring Bachchan kicking spectacular butt and a close-to-classic Asha Bhosle song.) Soon after this introduction, however, our boy will be carted off to the institution of the title, which presents as equal parts safety net and melting pot, a place of Sikh classmates, Argentinian football shirts, and - because of the country's historical and political legacy - compulsory Russian lessons. Qodrat emerges as a mixed-up kinda kid, one whose idle fantasies express as Bollywood song sequences, and a possible stand-in for a country that hadn't figured itself out yet, that - due to its unique position on the map, and the influences exerted over it by forces East and West - may to this day be considered a work in progress.

Aptly, The Orphanage itself feels open to suggestion. Much of it has been shot in the established arthouse-naturalism style, quietly tailing Qodrat and his fellow orphans as they go about their daily routine or sit around chatting shit: the performances appear at least semi-improvised, but Sadat gently nudges them towards what struck this viewer as an accurate representation of teenage-boy chatter (chiefly football and crushes, with a localised sidebar of chess). Yet she's equally unafraid to throw in, almost out of nowhere, the odd crowdpleasing flourish, like those musical daydreams, which peak with a minipop recreation of Sholay's deathless motorcycle-and-sidecar number "Yeh Dosti Hum Nahi Todenge" (more Amitabh, this time in companionable mode). What's especially engaging about The Orphanage is its sense that Sadat, too, is still working out what kind of filmmaker she wants to be - a purveyor of heavyweight statements, light diversions or something in between. It's possible, of course, to take the latter route, and what The Orphanage resembles more than anything is one of those much-laurelled Nineties movies (like Kolya from the Czech Republic, and The Thief from the former USSR) in which youngsters stand as the widest-eyed onlookers to formative events in national histories. Qodrat and co. witness a Russian tank crashing in the rocky terrain beyond the orphanage's walls; later, they will be called upon to burn potentially damning papers before the mujahideen reach those walls.

Here, then, is the Afghan Generation X, where X represents an unknown; those who occupy positions of influence within the country today, and who have to make their decisions based on everything they've seen and experienced. As rediscovered over the course of Sadat's film, they're youngsters who've lost their parents in the endless combat, or simply been abandoned, and left to organise themselves. (We're offered glimpses of passing supervisors - one of whom is played by Anwar Hashimi, the real-life orphan on whose diaries the film is based - but mostly the focus is on what these boys to do fill their days.) That arguably justifies a certain aimlessness built into this Orphanage's structure, which may require viewer adjustment. For about 80 of these 90 minutes, Sadat is simply offering us an unhurried, detailed tour of a place as it was at a specific time, without undue sign of any pressing narrative agenda: these kids' development is about all the development we get. (For onlooking child psychologists, extrapolating possible career paths for every last one of these tykes, it may be all that's really required.) That may be a consequence of basing your film on diaries: it yields a personal, chronological summary, not necessarily a story with all its hooks, whistles and bells. And I did feel the ending was a youthful misstep, in that Sadat chooses fantasy over reality - no matter that it's a fantasy that doubtless provided Hashimi and his contemporaries with a great deal of comfort amid a highly uncertain moment. Still, the extra observational time serves to confirm exactly what Wolf and Sheep proposed: that Sadat is among the most skilled directors of child performers working anywhere in the world right now. The future - or at least this small corner of it - is bright.

The Orphanage streams on MUBI from tomorrow.

On demand: "C/o Kancharapalem"

Believe it or not, there are places in this world where a version of trickledown economics still applies. We apparently have the vast global success of the Telugu blockbuster Baahubali to thank for the existence and prominence of the charming relationship drama C/o Kancharapalem, written and directed by the emergent Maha Venkatesh, with creative and promotional assistance from the earlier behemoth's visionary director SS Rajamouli and his villain-in-chief Rana Daggubati. In form, it'll initially present to Western eyes as something like a South Indian Short Cuts, fashioning varied yet interconnected stories out of modest slices of life that illustrate what the residents of the titular town talk about when they talk about love. We're introduced to a schoolkid with a crush on a classmate, a tough gal who finds a potential match among a pack of goons, and a liquor store clerk who tumbles hard for a masked sex worker; best of all - because it showcases two terrific performances, and a sure feel for the practicalities of love in later life - is a strand involving irascible middle-aged bachelor Raju (Subba Rao) and Radha (Radha Bessy), a widowed new colleague who arrives in his office speaking not a word of Telugu. Despite the considerable obstacles standing between them, it's this pair who appear likeliest to stay the course and provide both town and film with the desired happy ending, though there will be surprises - both nice and nasty - as we head in that direction.

Unlike the Altman movie, beset as it was with all manner of post-Rodney King, pre-millennial jitters, Venkatesh's film proves a relaxed and relaxing experience for the most part: it draws us slowly into this place through long afternoon walks and late-night drinking sessions on unswept front stoops. (Once again, I was struck by a key difference between Hindi and regional Indian cinema: unlike the flighty, globetrotting former, the latter is unabashed about putting down roots.) It maybe needs us to be relaxed about its early tonal shifts. I'm not quite sure what the strand involving the goons has to say about violence, or how seriously it's saying it, though several of the most vicious slaps seen, heard and felt this side of a Jimmy Cagney movie would suggest that this aggression is very much part and parcel of this culture, a counterpoint to any tenderness, and the risk you take for putting yourself out there. Credit Venkatesh with a willingness to add grit to his sugar, at any rate: darker material includes the streetwalker's admission that she watched her mother succumb to AIDS, and that isn't even the half of the hardships this lowly figure undergoes here. It requires some adjustment - not least as, as revealed on screen, it feels like a confounding, Shyamalan-like gotcha - but what we're watching is one big love story that contains a multitude of others, some happy, some undeniably sad.

What keeps us watching is that no matter which backroad the film finds itself on - and C/o Kancharapalem keeps opening up these new horizons - Venkatesh absolutely aces those moments of connection that get the characters (and get us) through life, and the elation that follows from those connections: you're buoyed by the lyrical sequence in which the junior schooler finally engages the object of his affection in conversation, and you take home the smile on the ever-radiant Bessy's face as an astrologer informs Radha this one looks to be a good match. What was great about the Baahubali movies, one remembers, was their total absence and rejection of cynicism - rare enough nowadays in most commercial filmmaking, all but unheard of within the carefully calculated domain of the multiplex-bound, effects-heavy blockbuster. A good deal of that open-mindedness and open-heartedness does look to have trickled down to this more humble and grounded endeavour. Venkatesh is acutely alert to the pain and hurt that can follow from falling hard for a fellow human, but he also takes - yes - a care to see the promise and the possibility, the prospect of happiness, within the everyday. The film he's fashioned on this theme proves a little rough around the edges here and there, but worth embracing all the same: the cinema surely needs directors who approach the world this way just as much as it does its visionaries and sceptics.

C/o Kancharapalem is now streaming on Netflix.

On demand: "The Ambulance"

A rental shop mainstay that never made the great technological leap to DVD (and thus dropped out of circulation in the UK for some while), Larry Cohen's deranged 1990 thriller The Ambulance has popped up in a workable print on YouTube. It's the one with a luxuriantly bemulleted Eric Roberts, in the final seconds of his leading-man career, as an illustrator for a down-at-heel Manhattan incarnation of Marvel Comics - there's an early Stan Lee cameo - who helps diabetic Janine Turner into the back of an ambulance after she collapses outside his office, only to then learn she never arrived at any of New York's legitimate hospitals. What follows is a dottily plotted cherchez la femme runaround in which our hero is assisted in his quest by a real ragbag of co-stars: James Earl Jones as a complacent, cantankerous detective ("One thing about women - they always show up!"), veteran Red Buttons the wardmate who helps Roberts flee the hospital he gets himself admitted to, TVM regular Megan Gallagher the plucky cop who may be a better match for old mullethead than the gal he starts the movie aggressively hitting on. Everyone's dialled up to eleven or twelve, either to compete with Jay Chattaway's none-more-1990 synth score, or because they realise Cohen's armed them with lines worth shouting to the heavens. Instructed by a nurse that it's time for him to go pass water, Buttons retorts: "I'm 73. I've peed enough."

We are some distance from the aspirational New York of countless canonical Eighties/Nineties titles: while fleeing his pursuers, Roberts stumbles into an entirely unrelated murder scene. Matters proceed instead with a wild-eyed conspiracy nut's sense for what might be going on beneath the noses of the city's ivory towers, in this case a softly spoken doctor (German-born Eric Braeden, found shortly before taking up residency on TV's The Young and the Restless) carting innocents off to "private research" centres. Cohen fosters a gaudy bad-dream aesthetic (not too far removed from the default aesthetic of the late Eighties DTV thriller), but auteurists will have to wrestle with a feeling the movie barely seems to be under anybody's control. The quality fluctuates wildly from scene to scene - Roberts, in particular, illustrates just why his career went so badly off the rails - though it still somehow generates moments that might legitimately seem like great cinema even if you weren't approaching the the bottom of your fourth can of lager: the hero escaping the ambulance while strapped down to a gurney, or that ambulance smashing into a nightclub mere minutes before a much-trumpeted bikini contest is set to begin. The kind of lively, chancy pulp our minor studios once ran a surplus of, back when directors were being hired to take risks - and its genuinely spooky shots of the glowing ambo tearing off into the night appear to have registered with Lars von Trier in the run-up to making The Kingdom.

The Ambulance is now streaming on YouTube.

On demand: "Calibre"

From a distance, Matt Palmer's feature debut Calibre might look like yet another of the very many "if you go down to the woods today" horror-thrillers produced each year by the British film industry, yet it's been fitted with some wicked twists, and staged with an assurance that hasn't been seen in this corner of the world since Danny Boyle made his film debut with Shallow Grave a quarter-century ago. Two old schoolfriends - one Irish and reckless (Martin McCann), the other Scottish, weaker-willed and about to become a father (Jack Lowden) - are reunited for a hunting weekend in the Highlands, or as the movies have traditionally framed it: A Very Bad Idea. Within ten minutes, they've pissed off some of the burlier locals; within twenty, they've been involved in an accident that leaves them with blood on their hands. They will spend the rest of the film attempting to escape the scene of their very considerable crime before what we're told is an annual festival ("a few drinks and a bonfire"). As anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Celtic horror will be gulping at this point: uh-oh.

On this one front, at least, you can rest easy. If Palmer is keen to revive anything, it's not the pagan horror of The Wicker Man - already fanboyed around by Neil LaBute and Ari Aster, with suboptimal results - but those clever neo-noirs of the 1990s: coal-black get-the-hell-out-of-Dodge narratives along the lines of Red Rock West and Oliver Stone's U-Turn. One novel twist is that, even as our heroes sign up to join the search party for the bodies they themselves have buried, Palmer plays their predicament dead straight, without the winking postmodern irony of the film's predecessors. That seriousness allows him to work in some cutting editorial on the wider state of play in Scotland: the tension between the city slickers and their hosts is to some degree reflective of a growing real-world schism between urban and rural communities. Commendably, Palmer takes both sides' arguments on board. What's especially excruciating about the situation that develops is that the locals aren't inbred monsters, rather concerned citizens, while our heroes are convincingly chastened and haunted by their actions even as they scrabble around looking to cover their tracks, eventually scurrying into a terrible cul-de-sac in the search for an exit. Throughout, Palmer's screenplay develops organically, guided not by the pursuit of cheap, forgettable thrills, but more lingering, unnerving questions. What would happen if this particular chain of unfortunate events unfolded in reality, and not the heightened horror universe to which we've grown accustomed? At what point would you personally ditch the pretence of politesse and make a dash for it? And what then? And what then? 

Calibre is now streaming on Netflix.

On demand: "Mr. Klein"

Mr. Klein finds Joseph Losey playing a cool, cruel game with doubles and otherness. Alain Delon is the refined, complacent Gentile trading off his name in Nazi-occupied Paris by purchasing those artworks the city's Jewish residents have started selling off in an attempt to save themselves. This comfortable existence is rudely interrupted one afternoon when he learns he's been subscribed to a Jewish newspaper, a mix-up that may have something to do his Jewish namesake (and, it turns out, doppelganger), who's living on the other side of town in a rat-infested apartment. It's not that this high-flier collapses entirely: as a performer, Delon was made of sterner granite, as Losey well knew, and to some degree the party goes on. (We watch him clinking champagne flutes with a redhead even as the police arrive in his apartment; with twenty minutes to go, we find him chatting up a fellow train passenger.) Yet there's little doubt that his foundations are shaken: we're watching a wobble, with a prospect of a fall as terrible as the one we bear witness to on the streets outside Klein's door.

The most terrifying aspect of this downfall is that it's almost entirely self-induced, born of this Klein's morbid curiosity regarding his shadow self's whereabouts, and how the other half live. Evidently, the class system Losey dissected so acutely in The Servant and Accident dated back some while, and the film puts a degree of privilege up on screen that threatens to become oppressive in its own way - a deliberate choice that flags what's truly important in this tale, which is everything that this privilege blocks out. Losey ensures there's barely a trace of actual Jewish Paris in the picture for most of Mr. Klein's running time; from Delon's fetish-item green-and-gold smoking jacket to the network of well-connected nobs he turns his back on, the focus falls instead on those layers of insulation and protection the protagonist insists on scratching away at, eventually tearing a hole in. The moral, stark as you may or may not like, is that there are points in history where granite crumbles, privilege wears thin. As with most Losey - a cinematic mortician, wheeling out the bodies of the damned and the dead - it arrives fully refrigerated, but you may well find its grey, wintry Paris getting into your bones; there's no denying the film fosters a troubling mood, even as its infernal logic carries the protagonist on train tracks to the one place you expect him to go.

Mr. Klein is now streaming via MUBI UK.

For what it's worth...

My top ten streaming picks (for the week beginning May 8, 2020):

1. Ema (15) **** (MUBI)
2. The Assistant (15) **** (Curzon, BFI)
3 (new) The Orphanage (15) *** (MUBI)
4 (new) Infinite Football (uncertificated) *** (Curzon)
5 (new) The Whistlers (15) *** (Curzon)
6 (new) Romantic Comedy (15) *** (MUBI)
7. A Russian Youth (uncertificated) *** (MUBI)
8. Moffie (18) *** (Curzon)
9. Why Don't You Just Die! (18) *** (Arrow TV, via Amazon Prime)
10. Ghost Town Anthology (uncertificated) *** (MUBI UK)


DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (12)
2 (new) Jojo Rabbit (12) **
3 (3) Birds of Prey, or... (15)
4 (new) The Gentlemen (18) **
5 (2) Jumanji: The Next Level (12)
6 (4) Spies in Disguise (PG)
7 (5) Frozen II (U) **
8 (6) Sonic the Hedgehog (PG)
9 (9) Knives Out (12) ***
10 (13) Rocketman (15) ***

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. And Then We Danced
2. Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché
3. A Paris Education
4. 1917
5. Talking About Trees


Top five films on terrestrial television:
1. King Kong [above] (Sunday, five, 12.25pm)
2. Brief Encounter (Friday, BBC2, 3pm)
3. Election (Friday, BBC1, 11.15pm)
4. Hellboy (Sunday, five, 4pm)
5. Air Force One (Thursday, five, 11.05pm)

Let it all blow: "The Whistlers"

Corneliu Porumboiu's second film of the week - emerging in parallel with the documentary Infinite Football, reviewed here - finds a filmmaker who's hitherto pottered exclusively around his own backyard enjoying something of an awayday. (Someone might as well, given that everybody else has cancelled theirs.) The newfound sunniness of The Whistlers - set on the Canary Island of the original title La Gomera - reflects what initially seems a forward step into commercial genre territory. Though twists and tweaks become apparent, what we're presented with is a film noir played out in broad daylight, following the machinations of a crooked copper and a good-time gal named Gilda. The former, Cristi (Vlad Ivanov, seared onto cinephile imaginations as the abortionist in 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days), is a Romanian police inspector with a foot apiece in the camps of law and disorder; the latter (Catrinel Marlon) an escort with criminal connections who invites Cristi to the Canaries to participate in a heist. That this will not be a straightforward affair is signalled by an extended flashback, carefully threaded through the main activity, which reveals Cristi is being surveilled by internal affairs over a bribe allegation, and that Gilda has links to someone the inspector previously set up. As if all this weren't tangled enough, the heist will involve nothing so cutting-edge as a two-way radio, but a form of whistling that appears to have originated with the island's shepherds and gone on to become a language all its own. Twists, tweaks and tweets, then.

That bizarre form of communication, detailed at length where some viewers are going to be expecting shootouts and car chases, chimes with that fascination with language Porumboiu foregrounded in the title of 2009's Police, Adjective. (Arguably, it was no less central to 2006's 12:08 East of Bucharest, set during the recording of a TV talk show.) This most curious of cases will involve not just the negotiation of international language barriers, but encrypted text messages and coded knocks on a hotel room door, and that's before Cristi hooks an index finger in his mouth and starts to blow. (Somewhere in the film's genesis, there slinks the elegant spectre of Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not.) Porumboiu goes about this study in linguistics with a sense of humour that feels like a deeply eccentric film's saving grace: no matter how many times his characters purse their lips, we always sense his tongue is pretty firmly in cheek. A conventional heist thriller would trouble to work in a scene where the protagonists work out what they're doing and where they're going using a table-sized map and various household objects - for the viewer's benefit, as well as their own. Porumboiu resists that to instead show us Gilda teaching Cristi where to put his fingers to yield the desired vowel sound, and the copper being manhandled into a warehouse and ordered to whistle at gunpoint. Close your eyes, and what you're listening to isn't the week's uppermost arthouse release, but an episode of The Clangers. By the closing credits, we really do seem to be on another planet.

All that risks the accusation that Porumboiu isn't taking this assignment especially seriously, that he's blowing off some of the responsibilities we associate with the festival-lauded auteur. (And a corollary question: if he's so interested in genre, why doesn't he make a straightforward genre film?) Certainly, The Whistlers starts out larky - muscling into similar territory to, say, Nick Love's Costa del Crime opus The Business, the effing and jeffing replaced by huffing and puffing - but it soon becomes insanely complicated, shuttling between characters and timelines; it forces us to piece it together as we would a charity shop jigsaw, hoping against hope that all the bits will be there. That parallel plotting is as artful and inveigling as the best noirs have been, allowing us to discover the trouble Cristi is in as he's getting in further trouble still. Yet Porumboiu increasingly seems less interested in tying together all these loose ends than playing with our understanding of the noir form, making a film about cinematic language. Is that why he has his characters walk into a screening of The Searchers, and throws in an obvious Hitchcock homage? In this return to basics, to cinema square one, we might perceive something not just self-reflexive but personal: Porumboiu is married to the local production designer Arantxa Etcheverria, and he surely knows what it is to have to learn a language and local customs, to start again from scratch. As with the whistling, as with the heavily enunciated Ute Lemper cover of "Mack the Knife" Porumboiu slaps on the soundtrack at one point, it may all be a matter of inflection and interpretation. That lesson is bound to induce headscratching in certain quarters, and may well require a little of the indulgence that is almost always required when filmmakers jet off to warmer climes. As Infinite Football underlines, Porumboiu is one of the few working directors uninterested in serving up meaning on a plate. If you're willing to play along - to parse and decode the film's multitudinous signifiers - there's a wonky sort of fun to be had here. If not, well: go whistle.

The Whistlers will be available to stream via Curzon from tomorrow.