Woman at war: "The County"

Grímur Hákonarson is the Icelandic writer-director whose Rams, that disarming tale of feuding fraternal sheep farmers, became an unexpected word-of-mouth hit at the UK box office back in 2016. His follow-up The County occupies markedly similar territory - if it hasn't been shot on the same stretch of farmland, it unfolds not too far from that frozen track - but adopts an altogether more shaded tone. From the struggles of his country's yeomen to survive, this filmmaker now fashions not another jolly, wild-and-woolly comedy, but something generically closer to Nordic noir - though even that label wouldn't quite be accurate in the end. For starters, though, it presents us with a bejumpered, redheaded heroine in Inga (Arndís Hrönn Egilsdóttir), a middle-aged dairy farmer who receives a dread midnight phone call to inform her that her truckdriver husband has perished in a road accident. What she doesn't know, but we do, is that the last trip hubby made before his rig leapt off the road and into the void was to the offices of the farmers' co-operative he'd intended to exit. Thereafter, we huddle up to watch Inga raising difficult questions - both about co-op practice and her husband's demise - via her Facebook page, waiting for secrets to be made public, the truth to out. Hákonarson has evidently retained some of Rams' heady regional quirk - it's as though someone had made their fraught dealings with John Lewis the basis of a Gordon Willis-hued mafia movie, or a range Western - but it's turned several degrees less comforting: a brief shot of a slurry pit into which a body could all too easily fall sends a chill down the spine that has nothing to do with the onscreen climate.

That shot serves as yet another indication of just what an assured and economical storyteller Hákonarson is, whatever genre he's working in. His latest clocks in at 92 minutes, and displays not much in the way of fuss or fat: we soon intuit he knows this land - its feeding rituals and power structures, how its residents come together for better and worse - and so he doesn't have to waste time with unnecessary exposition or scene-setting. He has the considerable advantage of a central performance that will likely get the viewer on side very quickly indeed. Egilsdóttir makes Inga a tenacious, practical woman - we first see her delivering a calf, apparently for real, amniotic sac fans - who's not sentimental or easily rattled. One of The County's bigger idiosyncrasies is that its heroine is forever on the offensive: she responds to a threat from one suit by shovelling manure over his Mercedes-Benz, and later stages a tremendous PR stunt involving a tanker full of milk outside the organisation's headquarters. Whatever they do to or with her livestock, here is a woman who simply will not be cowed, who insists on taking the fight to the opposition - one reason I suspect the film may well click with audiences as Rams did before it.

Rams, of course, had a familiar element of grumpy-old-man comedy to nudge it closer to the mainstream; about an hour into The County, I found myself pondering the small miracle that anybody had made a film quite this engrossing on a subject as apparently arcane as the finer points and politics of Icelandic dairy farming. One reason for that may be that it's not exclusively about Icelandic dairy farming - or, rather, that Hákonarson achieves the dramatist's holy grail of being both hyper-specific and yet somehow universal. The County meshes with all those recent news reports about fresh-faced, fresher-thinking women taking up positions in the Icelandic cabinet, yes, but it's also fascinated by something bigger still: the fraught processes by which societies of any kind reorder and reorganise themselves, and what happens when individuals resist the dominant faction and go looking for new models - so as not to finish up in the shit. Here is a story, in short, that could have been told just about anywhere in the Western world this century, with regional variations; it just so happens to have been told in this chilly neck of the woods, with considerable skill, by a filmmaker who really has come to feel like a blast of bracingly fresh Arctic air.

The County will be available to stream via Curzon Home Cinema from Friday.

Pertinent vacation: "Take Me Somewhere Nice"

If ever a title spoke to our present moment. Take Me Somewhere Nice, the debut feature from writer-director Ena Sendijarević, could at a push be claimed as a summer holiday movie, in that it describes a marked change of scenery, following Dutch teen Alma (the baleful Sara Luna Zoric) as she flies to Bosnia to visit her ailing father. Yet Sendijarević never lets us lose sight of the fact this is an obligation visit and a humdrum getaway. For starters, the only person she still knows in Bosnia is a blokey cousin, Emir (Ernad Prnjavorac), who claims to be too busy to show a girl around town, leaving Alma stuck indoors and having to entertain himself. (The title isn't the only element that will strike chords in early 2020.) There's a fumbly, sort-of holiday romance with one of Emir's pals, local playa Denis (Lazar Dragojevic), but for a long time this threatens to go no further than a bunk-up in a lift; and even when Alma finally sets out from base to visit her pa, things hardly go to what could only loosely be described as a plan. Sendijarević compounds this sense of underopened horizons by shooting in a tight Academy ratio that serves to tamp down any extravagance while giving rise to the drollest of sight gags: a reverse that reveals the head of a cat sat on the belly of Alma's sunbathing mother, a portrait of a fridge containing a pyramid of water bottles topped by one solitary orange. (It's been stocked by Emir, of course.)

Taking a bow on MUBI's UK platform this week after winning a jury prize at last year's Rotterdam festival, the film is essentially anecdotal, but it's the work of a director using her camera in such a way as to wring the most from these anecdotes, and to ensure her heroine would have a story of some kind to tell upon returning home. Sendijarević knows it's all a matter of perspective, and how one looks at the world. Consider the set-up that finds Alma suffering a violent bout of travel sickness, oblivious to the sweeping mountain range she's been deposited in front of: it'd be a hell of a view, if it weren't for all the throwing up. Accept that we're not going anywhere unduly scenic - that we're just passing through, and not in any immediate hurry - and the second half yields a run of quietly amusing mishaps and wrong turns, notably when a girl who can't even keep hold of her suitcase takes unexpected delivery of a coffin. My suspicion is that Sendijarević spent a good deal of her formative years watching Jim Jarmusch - chiefly the early, funny ones: the Alma-Emir-Denis triangle is very Stranger Than Paradise - and the results form the image of a festival-nurtured debut: small and self-contained, setting a tone early on, and then clinging to it for ninety minutes. Still, it's promising enough: a calling card where the signature is at least semi-distinctive, and the corners have been precisely and appreciably clipped.

Take Me Somewhere Nice streams on MUBI UK from Thursday.

Submission: "Cassandro the Exotico!"

By a happy coincidence, the first of this week's MUBI premieres Cassandro the Exotico! picks up where the TV we've been watching over the past few weeks has signed off (or logged out), with an introductory Skype conversation between the filmmaker Marie Losier and her subject. This is the well-kempt wrestler of the title, who looks as if Eddie Izzard had gone to Freddie Starr's hairdresser circa 1984 and bills himself, rather fabulously, as "the Liberace of lucha libre". It's an innately colourful world for any filmmaker to enter for any length of time - as Jared Hess's underseen comedy Nacho Libre knew - and doubly so when your fighter of choice is an openly gay Mexican who competes both solo and as part of a crossdressing tagteam. When Losier finally arrives in person at Cassandro's side, she finds him more than willing to put on a show, flexing in his shorts as a prelude to flaunting his war wounds, and entering gamely into staged dream sequences in which he stalks the streets of his hometown after dark in full ring regalia. The clips Losier provides of Cassandro's day job - replete with luchadors flinging themselves into the crowd and off lighting rigs - are tremendous, and further proof of the athleticism (and balls) such entertainments demand. Here, in short, is a man who was born to appear before a camera sooner or later. Is it a pity, then, that the camera that shows up in Cassandro's backyard is timid and oddly incurious, all too willing to take its subject at something like face value?

Losier gives the film an appealingly hazy, home-video look (rounded Kodachrome frames, washed-out textures that make footage shot in the mid-2010s look like offcuts from the opening credits of The Wonder Years) and from time to time she stumbles across an image that is both beautiful and bathetic. As we watch Cassandro pegging out the flowing cape and train he wears to enter the ring out to dry on a washing line, we start to get a feel for what this man brings to his arid and impoverished surrounds, the everyday heroism he's come to represent. Too often, however, we find Losier meekly following her subject into the world, falling in lockstep with the established cult of Cassandro. There's a weird moment during that Skype interview where the wrestler is clearly texting off-camera, the director's own questions requiring no more of him; and after the bombshell revelation that he was sexually abused as a child, you wait for a follow-up inquiry... but nope, nothing. It could be that Cassandro has shook this off as he has his other slights and injuries, but surely a man who's survived countless surgeries and been prepared to fling himself off a top rope night after night would be prepared to discuss this formative subject in a little more depth?

I wonder whether we're entering a dangerous period for the documentary form, in which subjects offhandedly lay claim to traumas filmmakers feel they can't broach or investigate, lest they come across as triggering, exploitative or in some other way insensitive. This is not the only recent non-fiction where personality has been allowed to trump journalism, where both filmmaker and viewer are supposed to feel grateful for the access - which is why Cassandro the Exotico! tails off so dramatically in its second half, even permitting the wrestler to stage his own funeral before the closing credits roll. As portraits go, it's one that's been heavily determined by its subject; he says time's up, and that's that. As he approaches his twilight years (and the spectre of one final leap into the unknown, so superbly chronicled by Darren Aronofsky and Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler), Cassandro is quite the personality, evidently a good deal of fun to be around, and it wouldn't surprise me if some still applauded Losier's approach, how it allows this old survivor to tell his own story, and accepts him for who he is. "I wish I could give you a kiss," the director sighs during a low spot in that Skype interview, in a flagrant breach of directorial objectivity. For better and worse, her film - less journalism than a form of devotional fan art - is that smacker.

Cassandro the Exotico! is now streaming via MUBI UK.

On demand: "Clash"

Here's something you really don't see all that often: a B-movie that never feels like one. For ninety-odd minutes, Clash corrals us inside a single setting (a police van parked up at the 2013 protests where representatives of Egypt's ruling Muslim Brotherhood clashed with members of the public), a framing typically deployed by inventive young tyros to disguise certain budgetary restrictions. Yet the glimpses we get out of the van's grilled windows - revealing hundreds of extras charging hither and thither, massed ranks of police wielding batons and water cannons, sudden eruptions of chaos and violence - suggest there's a much bigger picture going on out there. Staying inside the van, then, represents a choice on co-writer/director Mohamed Diab's part: he's determined to stake out this revealing corner of a far more expensive and expansive undertaking. The immediate effect is to focus the viewer's gaze. Rather than splash Egypt's social and political woes across an IMAX-sized screen, Diab slides them under a microscope, the better to see what might be understood about an especially fractious period in his homeland's history. It's synecdochic filmmaking: a handful of increasingly crowded square feet come to stand for an entire disputed territory.

The people who come into view present almost as molecules: charged up and restless, they bounce around, sometimes off one another. (If the film is anything to go by, the police strategy at these protests wasn't the most considered, tossing Brotherhood and non-Brotherhood Muslims, members of the wider public, and card-carrying journalists into the same van. The volatile atmosphere on the streets is hardly neutralised by the transfer to a greatly more confined space.) The situation is serious - deadly serious, in certain places - but Diab finds moments of levity and absurdity amid the general back-and-forth. One firebrand member of the Muslim Brotherhood somewhat undermines the ferocity and severity of his political pointmaking by insisting on wearing an upturned colander as protective headgear. The debate is further inflamed, at one point, by an accusation of farting. And after a sniper attack, the officer in the driver's seat slumps over the handbrake, causing the van to edge slowly forward into the brouhaha, as good an image as any for a country going out of control.

You could see this done as a stageplay, but the material develops cinematically, with especially smart use of interior/exterior space. If ever the tensions within the van start to simmer down, Diab can have them react to some new kerfuffle unfolding outside. Understandably, you might find the sustained tension exhausting, as does one of the van's junior occupants, who logs onto iTunes and throws his hands over his ears in a bid to drown all the shouting out. I'm also not so sure that Diab quite nails the ending as he might: we're provided with an asterisk rather than a full stop, possibly reflective of ongoing political struggles. Yet scuffle by scuffle, well-observed anecdote by well-observed anecdote, Clash succeeds in building up a far more rounded picture of a protest and a people than you might have taken away from the closing moments of 2017's The Nile Hilton Incident, which exploited the first wave of Egyptian protests as a backdrop. It has been a lot calmer in this territory since the events depicted, as if these characters came to realise that, for better or worse, they were all in the same boat (or van); or perhaps any residual unrest has been drowned out by the noise the rest of the world has been making. Some bright spark might like to film a variant describing just what happened to the formerly United Kingdom in the wake of May 2016.

Clash is streaming on All4, and available to rent via the BFI and Amazon Prime.  

For what it's worth...

My top ten streaming picks (for the week beginning May 15, 2020):

1 (new) The Atom: A Love Affair (uncertificated) **** (MUBI)
2. Ema (15) **** (MUBI)
3. The Assistant (15) **** (Curzon, BFI)
4 (new) Take Me Somewhere Nice (uncertificated) *** (MUBI)
5 (new) Heat and Dust (15) [above] *** (Curzon)
6 (new) The Orphanage (15) *** (MUBI)
7. Infinite Football (uncertificated) *** (Curzon)
8. The Whistlers (15) *** (Curzon)
9. Romantic Comedy (15) *** (MUBI)
10. A Russian Youth (uncertificated) *** (MUBI)


DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) 1917 (15) ***
2 (new) Onward (U) ***
3 (1) Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (12)
4 (2) Jojo Rabbit (12) **
5 (3) Birds of Prey, or... (15)
6 (7) Frozen II (U) **
7 (5) Jumanji: The Next Level (12)
8 (4) The Gentlemen (18) **
9 (6) Spies in Disguise (PG)
10 (8) Sonic the Hedgehog (PG)

(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. The Addams Family (Saturday, five, 4.30pm)
2. Paint Your Wagon (Sunday, BBC2, 2.50pm)
3. Frankenweenie (Saturday, BBC2, 11.30am)
4. Carefree (Friday, BBC2, 3.05pm)
5. Tropic Thunder (Friday, BBC1, 11.15pm)

Fission for compliments: "The Atom: A Love Affair"

Vicki Lesley's documentary The Atom: A Love Affair tells a story you might think you had some handle on in a way you probably wouldn't expect. Its subject is the development of atomic and nuclear power in the decades since World War II, deploying an impressive, pan-global roster of industry experts, scholars and politicos to talk us through the process whereby a force that resembled the end of the world circa Hiroshima came to be rebranded as an exciting, energy efficient new beginning. (The film opens with enthusiastic nuclear endorsements from David Cameron and Donald Trump; somewhere in the background of Lesley's mind is the promise right-wing governments have made to press ahead with a proposed nuclear revolution in the face of decades of protest.) Yet this account is presented in semi-satiric fashion, with knowing Lily Cole narration, and ironic inserts from trashy B-movies and public information films that suggest a romance between this form of power and the powers-that-be: how latter fell hard for the former, and how they ran a little scared after explosive bust-ups at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl; how, in the absence of any cheaper options, they came to embrace nuclear all over again, only for the giant F-U of Fukushima to give everyone but the UK's Conservatives - busy striking lucrative deals with the Chinese - renewed pause for thought about the relationship. That's the problem with hooking up for big bangs with an unstable ex: it can be electrifying, until someone winds up getting badly hurt. The framing allows Lesley to skewer certain romantic myths about nuclear. The dream of "total energy independence", blustered about by Trump in that prologue, is shown to date back at least as far as the (environmentally progressive) Nixon administration, and debunked as at best idle fantasy; similarly, the idea that building vast reactor sites and sourcing plutonium with which to run them might be cheaper, over the long haul, than putting in a call to the Russians or Saudis and asking them to pipe over some oil or gas. The Labour government's bailout of British Energy in 2002 demonstrates how nuclear has always been somewhat high-maintenance; still, as they say, love is often blind.

The slight flaw of Lesley's film is a consequence of its ambition and its strengths: it never feels less than densely packed, attempting to tell three stories at once - the development of nuclear in the UK, US and mainland Europe - and to get them all into 90 minutes. You admire the compression involved, and how much information it gets in, while wondering whether the film isn't on the verge of some meltdown of its own. Unlike at Chernobyl, however - a dark cloud Lesley very skilfully evokes through the jumpy, Geiger-counter fear her interviewees felt at ground level - there's a calm head and a safe pair of hands at the helm, and The Atom generally proves to make the right decisions. That three-track narrative, for one, allows Lesley to draw an instructive comparison between different approaches, pointing out how - unlike the UK, governed increasingly by money, short-termism and political expediency - Germany made several wise choices twenty years ago that have allowed it to lead the way today. And wherever her narrative is in time, Lesley has a knack for honing in on the most stimulating material available to her, be that the futuristic exhibits at a post-WW2 Atoms for Peace expo, German environmentalists facing off against massed ranks of police, or an anecdote Ralph Nader tells about being on the Saturday Night Live set as Three Mile Island went up in smoke. One health warning: you will be exposed to some carcinogenically dire anti-nuclear protest pop and cabaret from the mid-1980s. (I'm guessing Lesley had to handle this loudly humming footage at arm's length, through some kind of safety panel.) Yet even Cole's floaty, ethereal narration has the effect of opening up a window and letting some air and sunlight in on a subject that might initially strike you as technical or academic. This very smart, brisk briefing generates an energy all its own, before sending you out recalibrating your beliefs; it's both a lively watch and one of those rare docs you could usefully forward to an MP.

The Atom: A Love Affair is streaming via Curzon Home Cinema from tomorrow.

From the archive: "Brief Encounter"

Would it have worked anywhere else? A hypothetical French version of Brief Encounter – they’d call it Un Rendez-Vous Indiscret – would have found some way of nudging its lovers closer together, even if it resulted in no more than a memory of a few lusty moments in a sleeper carriage. An American version would have insisted the lovers got together, and – after their parting – retained an optimism that they might reconvene at some later date. (Put the two sensibilities together, and you arrive at Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy.)

Perhaps it always was a matter of climate and temperament: Celia Johnson’s Laura herself wonders whether, in a warmer country, “we shouldn’t be so withdrawn and shy and difficult”. Either way, within moments of David Lean’s film starting, it’s hooked you again: we sense that something significant, possibly life-changing is going on in the corner of that humdrum railway station café, and that, interrupted by that dreadful busy-body Dolly Messiter, its time is surely up.

In describing Laura’s predicament – torn between growing attraction to her handsome, attentive would-be lover Alec (Trevor Howard) and duty to her complacent dullard hubby (Cyril Raymond) – Lean and writer Noel Coward framed, without condescension, two ordinary middle-aged people allowing a late chance at love to slip through their fingers. They caught something more critical, though: how the English need for decorum, the insistence upon avoiding a scene, means they’re obliged to let it go. (That’s the crucial difference between these alternative Encounters: the French embrace pleasure, Americans fight for happiness. We’re meant to let such matters drop.)

The reissue later this month of Doctor Zhivago – chronicling a different, chocolate-boxy kind of love – will highlight the deleterious effect on Lean’s filmmaking when he began yoking his love stories to a bigger historical picture. The backdrop here is no more spectacular than any commuter belt, yet even that summons up a history of missed connections and longing glances with fellow travellers on the same clock. The modest scale raises the stakes: every word and gesture counts double. As Laura says, of an arm placed subtly around the back, “I didn’t notice it then; I remember it now.” And how.

It also allows viewers to spot the film’s influences, worn like the heart on its sleeve. There was the War, of course, with its repositioning of the cinema as both shelter and escape, a means of getting close to someone in the dark while retaining social respectability, and its imposition of sacrifice. (Laura and Alec’s rationed love – spooned out like sugar, or a hill of beans – is surely our equivalent of Casablanca’s Rick and Ilsa.) There’s the Rachmaninov, too, already reconfiguring itself into the strains of Eric Carmen’s scarcely less enduring “All By Myself”.

Most crucially, there was Coward, the man behind so many essential descriptions of the British character, from In Which We Serve to The Italian Job; a figure who understood how limiting, even stifling domesticity could be, and our need for romance and adventure, no matter that it might leave us with something in our eye. His brilliance is evidenced in how Laura’s narration makes a confidante of the viewer: through it, a woman suddenly consumed by high emotion attempts to justify everything she’s considering – from adultery to suicide – just as we all do whenever we change trains mid-journey.

Yet ultimately it all comes down, as all great romances do onscreen and off, to two people who share an uncommon chemistry – who really ought to be together. Here, Johnson and Howard are so much of their time, and of a type, that their predicament has never – over these seventy years – seemed less than a most urgent, ongoing concern; they could be our parents, grandparents or great-grandparents, making our very existence dependent upon their actions over this hour-and-a-half. Could it work nowadays? Could we be sure the lovers wouldn’t, at some stage, wind up on a rail replacement bus?

(MovieMail, November 2015)

Brief Encounter screens on BBC2 tomorrow at 3pm.