Crazy in tents: "Koko-Di Koko-Da"

Denmark summons up Antichrist, Sweden hits back with Koko-Di Koko-Da, another if-you-go-down-to-the-woods nightmare apparently conceived to mess with viewers' heads. The startpoint is virtually identical - couple have their ad-ready parenting model destroyed by the sudden death of their child - but writer-director Johannes Nyholm flags his willingness to play around with form (and venture strikingly off-piste) by staging the immediate aftermath as part of a magic lantern show. What happens next, as the joyless couple (Ylva Gallon and Leif Edlund) set out on an especially fraught camping expedition, clearly bears some correlation to this tragedy, and the mocking loss, painful self-recrimination and crushing guilt that would follow from it. The thing is: what happens next is pretty damn weird. It involves, for one, a cat who seemingly serves the same semiotic purpose as Lewis Carroll's White Rabbit and, for another, a rogue patrol of carnival entertainers, including a monobrowed giant (Morad Khatchadorian) and a straw boater-clad barker (Peter Belli) who resembles a demonic cross between Twin Peaks's Leland Palmer and Eurotrash stalwart Eddy Wally. Von Trier's genital-slashing carnage in Antichrist was the logical endpoint of an ever-escalating battle-of-the-sexes, but there's no immediate or obvious connection between this couple's past and the perilous situation they find themselves in: the film's a freakout that requires some measure of figuring out.

It might help to know going in that the overall design isn't linear but circular, like the remote glade Nyholm's camera returns to time and again. Lynch seems to have been one influence (there's a rabbit motif, and a strong hint that some of what we witness is but a dream inside a dream), but older-school viewers may also be reminded of those Choose Your Own Adventure books that invited the reader to follow different routes into, through and out of various narrative woods. (Nyholm's title, borrowed from a nursery rhyme that crops up at crucial intervals, itself seems to describe forking paths.) Sometimes this couple fail to see the forest for the trees; some turns are just a write-off, a dead loss; yet there are equally one or two where they just about struggle through and emerge on the other side. Nyholm has chosen a poppy delivery system for it - reviews have also cited Groundhog Day and Run Lola Run as reference points - but it's just possible he intends this tale to be a lesson in grief, and how it can hit you on certain days. Initially surrounded, outnumbered and sundered by their demons, the couple begin to anticipate their pursuers' movements, work together and eventually achieve some mastery over the carny folk; an unexpectedly moving return to that magic lantern show in the final third gestures towards the place art might have in this process of healing. It will entail some built-in repetition, and I can't promise you a happy ending (although Nyholm leaves his lovers in better shape than the pessimist von Trier did): the takehome, I think, is that this work is typically harder than movies allow for, and that it has to be ongoing. Yet Koko-Di Koko-Da is never quite as bleak or despairing as that reading maybe sounds. On the contrary, this is as playful an illustration of the you-can't-outrun-your-past trope as we've seen in recent times, and - for all its mindfuckery - oddly therapeutic, in that very Scandinavian way.

Koko-Di Koko-Da is now streaming via the BFI Player, and available on Blu-Ray via Picturehouse Entertainment.

Something new: "Real"

For a while, Real plays like a throwback to those lowish-budget, slightly shuffling relationship dramas that were a Britfilm commonplace in the years immediately following Notting Hill. On a drizzly afternoon somewhere on the fringes of Havant, writer-director Aki Omoshaybi nudges together a couple of characters in the nondescript surrounds of a convenience store. Jamie (Pippa Bennett-Warner) is a single mother struggling to keep the lights on and food in the fridge for the young son she plainly adores. Kyle (played by Omoshaybi himself) is introduced cockily propositioning Jamie in the street after paying for her groceries, then retreats so as to move back into his devout mother's house. There would be next to nothing out of the ordinary about the pair's interactions were it not for the fact that Kyle and Jamie are black Britons, which is to say they wouldn't traditionally be front-and-centre in a theatrically released romance. (The closest we've had to Real was 2018's Michaela Coel vehicle Been So Long, but that was snapped up by Netflix for home viewing.)

What Omoshaybi has overseen is a slight but notable generic shift, noted in passing by that title. These lovers are less leisured than their Caucasian predecessors (and substantially less so than their upwardly mobile equivalents in those buppie romcoms that travelled this way from America in the early Noughties). Their first date comes to an abrupt end when Kyle is called away on a cash-in-hand gig; their second, in a restaurant, is paused so he can step outside to collect the money to allow him to pay for dinner. Here is a romance between two characters who no longer know how to relax - who are always, for reasons that go beyond mere matters of the heart, on their guard. Careful sound design suggests possible explanations for this: even that apparently successful second date ends with the noise of sirens and rowing couples, while a later TV news report offers the latest on a stabbing victim.

Visually, the film's a mixed bag: emergent cinematographer Michael Edo Keane (Around the Sun) squeezes out some pretty shots of Kyle cycling through sundappled streets, but the budgetary limitations become clear whenever we head indoors. (A hand-drawn picture of Ian Wright is as extravagant as things get.) Yet there's a richness to Omoshaybi's writing and characterisation that keeps us interested. This relationship is genuinely complicated; it's not the usual boy-meets-girl, boy-does-dumb-stuff-and-loses-girl pablum, and it stems from other, less immediately presentable areas of Kyle and Jamie's lives. That makes for some good, involved and involving playing. Bennett-Warner wins us over simply by being so great around Taye Matthew as her son, making us understand why she's so wary of the gadabout who comes galumphing into their lives in his Primarni suit; yet Omoshaybi works hard in the second half to contextualise Kyle's childishness. Third-act problems await them both, and here Real strays into contrivance: more screentime might have finessed it, although I'm aware that would have called for more money. (As it is, the coda feels like a plaster stuck over an open wound.) Still, like his characters, Omoshaybi is at the beginning of something, so the odd wrong turn is forgivable. There's enough promise on show to hope everything works out for those before and behind the camera.

Real opens in selected cinemas from today.

"Lady in the Portrait" (Guardian 11/09/20)

Lady in the Portrait **

Dir: Charles de Meaux. With: Fan Bingbing, Melvil Poupaud, Wu Yue, Chin Shih-Chieh. 108 mins. Cert: 15

This French-Chinese coproduction about an earlier French-Chinese collaboration offers handsome pageantry amid its lavish recreation of 18th century imperial court life, but it isn’t quite enough to compensate for a puttering narrative motor. Longtime Apichatpong Weerasethakul producer Charles de Meaux has turned director with a Far Eastern equivalent of Girl with a Pearl Earring – another decorous, ever so slightly sleepy matinee sit. The film’s subject is Jean-Denis Attiret (played by Melvil Poupaud), a real-life French Jesuit missionary who spent half of his 60-odd years employed as the Chinese court painter. His trickiest commission, recalled here, came from the Emperor’s bored wife (local megastar Fan Bingbing), thirsting to preserve an image that might turn her indifferent husband’s head.

The painting’s the thing: most of the action, such as it is, takes place in Attiret’s makeshift studio, where the central relationship progresses as the painter shifts from tentative charcoal sketches to making marks with ink and acrylic, and various hangers-on debate the differences between Chinese and European art. Yet de Meaux also permits himself the odd expressionistic flourish. A prologue superimposes one of Attiret’s canvasses on an empty battlefield, doubtless saving the director money on armour-clad extras, while his model drifts away to have conversations with the spectres of previous Empresses – a very Weerasethakul-like touch, intended to draw out the inner life of a generally quiet, demure figure.

Elsewhere, de Meaux holds dear to the virtues of classical painting. Serving as his own cinematographer, he dabs thoughtful widescreen compositions with appealing pastel hues, aware that – in the drama’s quieter moments – he can always fall back on the ever-absorbing sight of an artist’s hands at work. There are a lot of those moments, though, part of a curious void at the heart of the film, as if the characters were the last elements sketched in, and then in haste. I wondered whether de Meaux’s art-history nous might be better turned to production design or even curation: as it is, the vases adorning the sets demonstrate more character and depth than his pretty yet passive leads. Undeniably artful – but a lot of that beauty falls on the inert side. 

Lady in the Portrait screens from Monday at the Glasgow Film Theatre and from Tuesday at HOME in Manchester.

"Hard Kill" (Guardian 11/09/20)

Hard Kill *

Dir: Matt Eskandari. With: Jesse Metcalfe, Bruce Willis, Lala Kent, Natalie Eva Marie. 98 mins. Cert: 15

Anyone hoping Bruce Willis might enjoy a career renaissance after his recent rediscovery in M. Night Shyamalan’s Split and Glass: lower those expectations now. Here’s Bruce back in his now-familiar 21st century guise of cheque-cashing frontman for tuppenny-ha’penny VOD fare, drafted in to deliver terse, pursed-lipped exposition before ceding the screen to no-names with slightly more give in their knees. All evidence would suggest he spent greater time than usual on this set, albeit much of that lassoed to a chair with an extravagant snood to keep him cosy. As ex-Marine turned embattled CEO Donovan Chalmers, the star is operating in that grey area between zero fuss and not much effort; it’s another of those “thanks Bruce, drop by payroll on your way out” contributions.

The main event is a nondescript shuffle around some hoary old clichés, strewn with abysmal dialogue and shot by someone who’s played a lot of first-person shoot-‘em-ups. It transpires Bruce’s technowhizz daughter (Lala Kent) has been kidnapped by international scourge The Pardoner (Sergio Rizzuto) – not the scariest nom de guerre, but like much else here, it’ll have to do – whose smash-the-system rhetoric, expressed in very boring, sub-Dr. Evil monologues, needs stomping out with privately sourced paramilitary force. The film’s stompers-in-chief are a buff platoon of kick-ass boys and girls led by erstwhile Desperate Housewives gardener Jesse Metcalfe, shrugging blandly through the kind of role (alcoholic combat veteran with a bad back) Willis himself might have enlivened in happier times.

This is almost certainly ascribing too much profundity to bashed-out, bare-bones, mind-numbingly basic content, but the whole does retain an oddly rueful, haunted quality: it’s there in everything from the makeshift, wintry light to the supporting cast’s eerie resemblance to more established, sadly unavailable faces. (Rizzuto looks like a market stall’s Bradley Cooper knock-off.) Most of all it’s present in the primary location, a hollowed-out factory somewhere in the wilds of Cincinnati. Look beyond the lifelessly choreographed shootouts and you keep catching glimpses of ghosts: those of American industry, yes, but also those of the American action movie, once manufactured with a skill, verve and wit wholly absent from these painfully long, finally deathly 98 minutes. 

Hard Kill is available to stream from today.

China girl: "Mulan"

Our bigger movies have never seemed more like dinosaurs, lumbering noisily about on the verge of extinction, oblivious to changing world and shifting context alike. Back in January, Mulan held the mixed promise of being the latest off the conveyor belt of Disney's live-action remakes, albeit one with intriguing elements: the animation being anthropomorphised wasn't an unimprovable classic, rather one of the studio's solid second-rank items, and the director was Niki Caro, the Kiwi who did such acute, culturally sensitive work in the Maori heartlands of 2002's Whale Rider and the rural America of 2015's McFarlane, USA. As recently as two weeks ago, the studio appeared to be doing something like the responsible thing by making Mulan available for home viewing (admittedly for a hefty premium) via its Disney+ platform, where Tory superspreader Christopher Nolan was forcing everyone back into the recirculated air of the Odeon to witness the dubious virtuosity of his Tenet while being coughed at by maskless teenagers. Then came the meteor strike: a journalist sat at home with time on their hands to follow up on leads in the end credits revealed that Mulan had been filmed in Xinjiang province, with the permission of the same Chinese authorities who, in camps not a hundred miles away from Caro's sets, were carrying out forced sterilisation on the country's Uighur residents. I don't know about you, but I'm getting the distinct impression capitalism gives not a fig for the sanctity of human life.

Like Tenet, with which Caro's film was expected to duel at the global box-office in the non-bizarro version of Summer 2020, the Mulan that lands among us needs filing away under "dangerously seductive spectacle": Caro made many of the right decisions in production and post-production in a bid to compensate for the one very bad decision taken by the Disney higher-ups during pre-production. However much the screenwriters have tinkered with the blueprint (subtracting the wisecracking dragon, because these projects are now taken very seriously; adding Gong Li's shapeshifting sorceress to punch up the action quotient), the story still works: for newcomers, it's the one about the aspirant warrior princess (Liu Yifei) who spares her aging father (Tzi Ma) by riding into battle in his place, and winds up saving Imperial China from invaders, all while disguised as a boy. (Watching this naif blushing before the sight of her shirtless brothers-in-arms, you realise the extent to which the material plays like a bellicose Yentl: it's a legend to be passed down from one generation of oppressors to the next.) Caro peoples it with more or less every name Asian actor currently working (Donnie Yen and Jet Li upfront in the action, Rosalind Chao and Ming-Na Wen in domestic walk-ons), and dresses it up with the best cinematography, art design and costumes a Disney budget (now roughly comparable to a NASA budget) can buy. She shoots in big, striking, widescreen compositions - not entirely reduced on Disney+ - and fills her frames not with the ugly CGI that cluttered up the new Jungle Book, but organic sights, free-flowing textiles and handfinished props. Mulan's monogrammed blade has more weight and beauty than a thousand plasticky lightsabers.

The tension lurking beneath this ravishing surface concerns what all this weight and beauty is ultimately servicing. You can see exactly why the Chinese authorities signed off on this retelling: it's a practically unqualified hymn to imperial might, centred on a heroine whose skillset gets finetuned towards the creation of carnage and the suppression of others. That makes it a very different coming-of-age narrative to Whale Rider, where a girl broke free from hidebound patriarchal tradition to go her own way; Caro here establishes her alpha-female credentials by inviting us to cheer a young woman taking her place in the very frontlines of Chinese ethno-nationalism. (The leading lady's comments on the Hong Kong independence movement would suggest she was made for the role.) Try to separate the art from the artists, by all means - argue that undertaking an international coproduction isn't the same as enabling a major human rights violation, however closely the two might sit together - but the two beneficiaries of us handing over our £19.99 to Disney+ are China, who can show us the most carefully colour-graded recruitment video in military history, and Disney, who get to expand their empire even further into China. We get to swoon at the artistry, granted, but it's gone where a lot of corporate artistry now goes: into covering things up, like the delicate lotus blossom that perfectly occludes the heroine's derriere as she strips down for a moonlit swim. Caro is too gifted an imagemaker not to impose some of this on our eyeballs and sporadically dazzle us into submission - but as in Zhang Yimou's oddly similar Hero, it's the imposition, that underlying need for dominance, that's the issue here. Mulan's opulence is nothing if not supremely well-marshalled - but then it had to be. If Caro had stilled the thunderous horsehooves and quieted her rousing score, might we have heard the Uighurs' screams and cries for help?

Mulan is currently streaming via Disney+.

Street life: "Sócrates"

MUBI have set so much new Brazilian cinema streaming before us over the past few months that this week's theatrical release Sócrates would appear to have slipped someone's net. Still, if you were hunting fresh Brazilian talent, there'd scarcely be any fresher than this. An opening credit establishes that Alex Moratto's film was the end result of a social project conceived to foster a sense of inclusion in 16-20 year olds from low-income households; one of those overseeing this program was the eminent US indie director Ramin Bahrani, who's retained a producer credit. There are traces of Bahrani's quiet, unfussy, observational realism in the story these kids are telling, but equally something of his European equivalents, the Dardennes brothers: the film sets its camera, and the weight of the world, on its protagonist's shoulders, then watches as he tries to walk it off. That protagonist is a 15-year-old (Christian Malheiros) who finds his mother dead in the opening scene, and is then informed he has a week to find either a legal guardian or pass into the care system. With his father off living elsewhere (for the best, it turns out, when we finally catch up with this overbearing, deeply conservative scold), it also falls to Sócrates to pay the rent on his mother's property. Very quickly, Moratto and co-writer Thayná Mantesso set up that we will be watching a hustle in the heat, with nerves and tempers fraying. What we notice first of all is that Sócrates doesn't have time to mourn, and has to try and tamp down his emotions. Yet they keep coming out: rage at the clerk who refuses to hand over his mother's ashes, lust in a clumsy kiss with an older male colleague, the latter the surest sign this boy desperately needs someone to hold him. He finds a kind of peace sipping from a hipflask as the sun goes down on a long, hard day - but even this prompts him to vomit on a neighbour's steps, sparking another brouhaha. In some lives, it just never stops.

That opening credit initially seems a touch defensive, like a pre-emptive apology for any rough edges: hey look, kids made this, so cut it some slack. Fifteen minutes in, it's clear they needn't have worried: both as a piece of storytelling and an extended character study, Sócrates is more assured than many studio movies with bigger budgets. Its quiet strength is that it feels uncommonly close to its title character: you sense that if Moratto hasn't personally been through these situations, he sure as hell knows someone who has. Those situations feel perilously real. There's a lot of ambling round city streets in search of love, money or just a friendly face, punctuated by isolated moments of crisis, like a confrontation on a beach with a pair of homophobic shitkickers. (Just one of Moratto's small achievements: to film a Brazilian beach and make it look no more sunkissed or glamorous than Southsea in September. It's grey and misty, no-one's got time to get a tan, and there are people around determined to make it no fun.) What becomes clear from these perambulations and punch-ups is the extent to which the boy's late mother was a safety net or a bulwark, as single parents often are. Sócrates isn't long for the streets, it's just a matter of how far he'll fall. An encounter with a not-so-friendly neighbourhood pornographer feels like a particular low; still, even here, he bounces, battles and barrels through. Malheiros is very convincing as a resourceful, resilient kid, possessed of a weaponised glare, who exercises enough choice at every turn not to become a patsy or a martyr. As a result, those Dardennes parallels only strengthen: every moment appears dramatically alive, and the protagonist's willingness to fight against his circumstances inspires us, in turn, to care. It's one of those films that could only have been made this well by these people in this place: anyone else would be too detached from Sócrates' plight, and prone to either sentimentalise or overdo the hardship. Moratto, to his credit, knows that this is something thousands experience every day, and nobody ever really stops to notice.

Socrates is now playing in selected cinemas, and is available to stream via Curzon Home Cinema and the BFI Player.

Me myself and I: "Matthias & Maxime"

When British cinemagoers last encountered the Quebecois enfant terrible Xavier Dolan, back in 2016, he seemed to be doing okay for himself: the film was It's Only the End of the World, a starry, well-turned ensemble drama that earned its maker the Cannes Grand Prix gong. That success, however, was followed by the spectacular crash-and-burn of 2018's The Death and Life of John F. Donovan, conceived as prime awards bait, what with its red carpet-ready cast (Natalie Portman! The Room kid! That guy from Game of Thrones!), yet a film that stalled in post-production, met with disastrous reviews on its festival debut, and did next to nothing commercially. (It limped straight-to-satellite in the UK.) After that bruising lesson, Matthias & Maxime finds this always dangerously overhyped, more often than not wayward talent returning to first principles: it's the kind of film where a jaded slacker, played by the director himself, rediscovers something essential by looking at a child's drawing. We open, however, in Big Chill territory, as a group of friends reunite at a lakeside cabin ahead of an imminent departure for pastures new, and Dolan's rootless Maxime is recruited to appear in a documentary describing the experiences of his generation. "Are you ready for your close-up?," joshes his upwardly mobile, straight-edged pal Matthias (Gabriel d'Almeida Freitas). Dolan the director answers that question almost immediately by giving himself the first of several especially adoring close-ups. A chastened Dolan, it turns out, looks much the same as a Dolan in full pomp.

For those of us who aren't fully paid-up members of the Xavier Dolan Fan Club (subscriber perks: monthly newsletter penned by Dolan himself, T-shirt with Xav's face on the front), the hope has always been that maturity might yet encourage this creative to move beyond some of his flashier and more enervating tics and tricks. Small flickers of growth were apparent within the wildly overlong Laurence Anyways and Mommy, and more than that visible in It's Only the End of the World, where the actors added dashes of life experience that weren't all present in the script. Dolan has a workable idea here: to contrast the Matthias-and-Maxime group's worldview with those of others (teens, women, older women), and to observe where and how these subsets intersect. What he's gesturing towards, I think, is the widespread atomisation that has contributed to the decline of Western civilisation (Denys Arcand, an earlier Quebecois specialist in this field, gets a shoutout), but it's an idea explored in no particular depth, a title without a thesis. For a while, Dolan seems to fall back into his own worst habits: insane, alienating camera movements (all sudden jerks and push-ins, suggesting this reunion is being observed by a caffeinated chaffinch), self-consciously cool dialogue. You know those security devices that emit a high-pitched shriek so as to prevent kids (whose ears are still young and fresh enough to hear it) from loitering? Dolan has constructed the movie equivalent of one of those - except it's old folks (anyone upwards of, ugh, thirty) Matthias & Maxime will send packing.

That pretty much does for the show of crossgenerational empathy - revealed as superficial at best - though the film calms down and gets a little better as it goes on. Dolan wades so far into his scene that he sometimes brushes up against the satire of scenesterism a Gregg Araki would make: at the premiere of that documentary (by a Mademoiselle Rivette, no less), someone is prompted by a shot of a children's playground to ask whether the swings are non-binary. And I can't take too strongly against any film that slaps the Pet Shop Boys' "Always On My Mind" on its soundtrack, even if it seems typical of Dolan's tendency to deploy high-impact musical cues to mitigate against deficiencies elsewhere. Dramatically, for one, he's repeating and recycling himself. Maxime's fractious relationship with his shut-in mother (Micheline Bernard) replays any number of notes from Dolan's earliest work; a dress-up montage takes him back to 2010's Heartbeats; and the parallel being drawn between the two named protagonists, set on very different paths yet equally lost, tails off after Dolan has got his hand down his co-star's pants. (Straight male directors have been cancelled for less.) What's exasperating about the Dolan oeuvre is the sense that he's spent a lot of other people's time and money working through his own issues; in doing so, he's made himself the poster boy for the New Narcissism oozing out from social media to infect our politics and culture, but you can't help but feel the course of recent cinema history might have been altered if he'd just got more hugs from his mum. Once it stops waving hands and camera around for our attention, Matthias & Maxime proves a quietly handsome watch: everyone takes a flattering close-up, and the director knows how to frame an attractive image. Dolan has an eye; his most fervent admirers and haters would agree on that. It's just a pity it should so often be turned on himself.

Matthias & Maxime is now streaming via MUBI UK.