Automaton and on: "Robot Dreams"

Easy to understand why The Boy and the Heron swept this year's major animation prizes: venerated artist, emotive backstory, penhand flourishes vivid enough to overwrite an increasingly tangled and fraying narrative line. Given that it must in each case have been a close-run race, with no one outstanding title for voters to get behind, it's a shame there wasn't more love along the way for the Spanish filmmaker Pablo Berger's hand-animated take on Sara Varon's graphic novel Robot Dreams, charting the waxing and waning friendship of a dog and a robot in a New York populated exclusively by animals of one description or another. What awaits you here are far simpler pleasures than the Miyazaki film permitted. Berger recreates Manhattan as it once was, or a Manhattan of the mind, where the Twin Towers never fell and Woody Allen wasn't around to woo his teenage date on a bench beneath the Brooklyn Bridge; an early bonding sequence plays out to Earth Wind and Fire's deathless "September", practically the one song guaranteed to turn even the most stubborn frown upside down. (They could - and should - prescribe the brass section free on the NHS.) Relative simplicity - clear, unfussy lines, familiar brandnames, Bob's Burgers colour - allows the film to find its own semi-distinct identity: that of a Zootropolis with much of the clutter and all of the chatter cleared out, leaving more room for socially awkward Dog and his lovelorn Robot to register and grow on you.

They do, even amid a necessarily static centre stretch in which, with its main characters separated by circumstance, this relationship literally cannot go anywhere. (And actually begins to dwindle.) It's the movie that shifts, unpredictably and charmingly, with the help of fourth-wall breaks, sunflower Busby Berkeley numbers, snowmen who come to life (but not in the Aled Jones way), and a chorus of birds tweeting "Danny Boy". The pacing gets a bit deliberate hereabouts; Berger is having to work overtime padding out to feature status a wispy narrative that might have felt happier still as a short or mid-length proposition. (I fear very young children, otherwise well-placed to embrace these characters, are going to get restless.) Yet there are plenty of deft, funny touches - I liked the way the snowman takes on the colours of the slushie he gulps down at a bowling alley - and by the conclusion you realise what a range of emotions Berger has expressed without recourse to gabbling celebrity voices, or indeed any of those voice cameos from YouTube luminaries you're supposed to know and love. It's the work of an animator (or animators) going their own way and amusing themselves: in forsaking the usual prods and demands of frenetic digimated content, Robot Dreams allows itself time to slap a big, dumb smile on your face, and then sets you to wondering just what else its makers might be getting at here.

Robot Dreams opens in selected cinemas from today.

Hide and seek: "Monster"

Following excursions to France (for 2019's The Truth) and Korea (2022's Broker), Hirokazu Kore-eda has returned to Japan for a story that really needs to be told in a native tongue. Monster is an exceptionally nuanced and layered drama, written in a way that demands both precision and delicacy, rooted as it is in subtly divergent perspectives on the same series of events. It opens with a fire in an apartment block, as observed from a safe distance by a single mother (Sakura Ando) and the secretive pre-teen she's struggling to raise (Soya Kurokawa): an early illustration of this narrative's guiding principle, which is that it all depends where you stand. Yet even as a fire crew puts the conflagration out, other mysteries blaze on. Why is the building on fire? Why does the boy later throw himself out of his mother's car? And what does it have to do with the young teacher (Eita Nagayama) rumoured to be spending his nights with a hostess at the bar that was ground zero for the towering inferno we witness in reel one? That fire provides something of a smokescreen we will spend the next two hours peering through, yet as the smog lifts and clears, we start to notice a shift in this filmmaker's own perspective. In earlier Kore-eda films, children were typically regarded as angelic joy bringers. Some of those cherubs can still be spotted on the margins here, but Monster is the first Kore-eda to centre a youngster who appears as complicated, difficult, sometimes as outright cruel as the rest of us are capable of being. The M-word shifts around - it's heard in a song, and later used in a card game - but there are reasons for that title, expertly revealed as the film goes on.

Rarely can a title and a camera have felt more like an accusatory finger, hopping from subject to subject. Yet in many ways both have to hop around, simply to get a clearer bead on everything these characters seek to withhold from public view. Writer Yūji Sakamoto won the Best Screenplay prize at last year's Cannes for one of the strongest pieces of writing yet attached to a Kore-eda project, a script constantly attempting to pin down people prone to games of hide and seek. It also factors into Kore-eda's most Renoir-like undertaking, ascribing to everyone their reasons, and then doing its level best to dramatise them fairly and unsentimentally; this it does via three successive passes of the same points of conflict, gradually revealing the full extent of this story - and of its makers' concerns. The most readily apparent truth here is that all these characters become more complex as the film proceeds; the loss of innocence it describes in passing is really the gaining of an awareness that there are other points of view, that not everybody sees things the same way. Take the teacher who occupies the film's centre stretch, for one: initially presented as a strong candidate for monster status, shielded by stonewalling staff-room superiors, he comes slowly into focus as an impulsive young man - barely older than his charges - who gets pressurised into making a regrettable mistake, and then sees his life starting to fall apart. Kore-eda hopped around geographically for his last two films, possibly to capitalise on growing international recognition, possibly to prevent from repeating himself. (As ever, multiple truths are in play.) Yet it turns out all he really needed for a fresh start was an internal shift, a change in the way he thinks through his narratives. Monster isn't just a film about children (thus "in the Kore-eda style"), but a film about the rather more fraught and dramatically loaded subject of child protection; if it feels like an advance, that's partly because it's tied thematically to the often haphazard ways we develop.

At any rate, Kore-eda attains this narrative fullness and richness of characterisation with no visible strain whatsoever; the clunkiness of The Truth suddenly seems a very long time ago. He's always been a skilled director of children, able to reveal personality as well as nascent understanding, and it's highlighted again here in the script's third pass at these events - a more conventionally Kore-edan movement observing the growing friendship between two very different kids, one (Kurokawa) sullen and closed-off, the other (Hinata Hiiragi) more open to the elements. Each of these characters is linked to the others by subtly recurring motifs: fire, lost shoes, the threat of plunges from great heights. (Everyone seems to be headed for a fall at some point.) And the quietude that in earlier Kore-eda endeavours felt like the signature of a dreamer with a boner for Ozu and only so much to say for himself now seems very specifically directed in to help us reflect on the events we're seeing and revisiting, and connect one set of life experiences to another. We're helped by energised sound work: noises off - a clatter here, a French horn's parp there - which eventually marry up. Yet even when the narrative logistics - who's doing what to whom where - are hazy, the film's emotional throughline remains wholly graspable, clarified yet further by Ryuichi Sakamoto's final score. The whole is not unlike 2022's much-loved Belgian fable Close, as remade by a 60-year-old rather than a callow film student: we get three passes, yes, but we also sense we could review this story from the perspective of just about anyone on screen, even the day players, and uncover something revelatory about the human condition. Kore-eda has worked so consistently for so long that he can seem a relatively minor figure himself, part of the festival-circuit furniture: a workmanlike director whose cosily middlebrow crowdpleasers facilitate easy consensus and thus win prizes when more ambitious titles have proven divisive. But Monster is major: much as his young leads construct a new universe for themselves in the shell of a rusting schoolbus, Kore-eda finds the whole world, and its unceasing potential for both heartbreak and good, in the course of parsing a sad and sombre little anecdote.

Monster is now playing in selected cinemas. 

O brother, where art thou?: "Drive-Away Dolls"

Drive-Away Dolls is simply trying too hard. For his first film since a (reportedly amicable) parting of the creative ways from brother Joel, Ethan Coen has paired up with writer-editor-spouse Tricia Cooke, and contrived a would-be romp about odd-couple young lesbians (uptight Geraldine Viswanathan and DTF Margaret Qualley) making their way across pre-millennial America in a hire car that - unbeknownst to them - contains sensitive equipment: a case full of dildos modelled on the members of the country's most powerful men. If you think that sounds forced, you ain't seen nothing yet. The girls' haphazard progress, pursued by goons, is set out in wonky camera angles and crash zooms even a first-year film student might find gauche; these are linked by clangingly wacky or pointlessly trippy scene transitions. Plentiful girl-on-girl activity, meanwhile, indicates this is the work of middle-aged creatives who've watched queer-themed material break out at the box office in recent times and hoped they, too, might get in on the action. One oddity - one area where Coen and Cooke really weren't trying hard enough - is that no attempt is made to situate the heroines' sapphism in the context of post-kd lang, pre-Peaches America; it's all tongues, no trousers, and given how cheap and naff much of the film looks, it forms the basis of a movie that often resembles the American equivalent of a British sex comedy made with National Lottery funding in 1999. Was it that the Coens operated their own, sibling-exclusive system of checks and balances? (The goofball Ethan grounding the higher-brow Joel, whose solo debut was that chiaroscuro redo of Macbeth; Joel conjuring memorable images from his brother's yaks and yuks.) Either way, there are no memorable images in Drive-Away Dolls, and the actors seem to have been left to themselves for the most part: Qualley affects a bouncy Southern twang that only ever strikes the ear as rehearsal-room put-on, while the supporting cast contains a one-for-the-ages rarity in a bad Beanie Feldstein performance. Tricked out to a flimsy 80 minutes, it isn't long enough to irk and irritate as it might, and I quite liked the flickers we hear of Carter Burwell's score, though I suspect these were sparingly applied, lest they remind us of all the worthwhile Coen endeavours we could be watching instead. It's bad enough that Hall and Oates have undergone a separation, but these guys too?

Drive-Away Dolls is now showing in selected cinemas. 

Devil's advocate: "Shaitaan"

Shaitaan finds the Hindi mainstream cribbing ideas from elsewhere again. In this case, it's from last year's Vash, a well-received Gujarati horror flick seized upon by producer-star Ajay Devgn as an opportunity to once more inhabit the role of hypervigilant patriarch with which he's enjoyed some success over recent years. In 2015's clever thriller Drishyam, itself a remake of a noted regional title, Devgn took extreme measures to protect his offspring's virtue; now he's a bejumpered paterfamilias trying to halt the malevolent force that gains entry to his household via a suggestible teenage daughter. (If any of this sounds overbearing, we should give Devgn credit for being one of the few Indian stars of a certain age who appears genuinely comfortable playing dad roles, rather than initiating onscreen romances with actresses young enough to be his granddaughter.) The set-up here is basically Pasolini's Theorem, with a dash of The Vanishing at the start, and a fiery Padmaavat flourish towards the end. Pausing at a roadside eaterie en route to a family break, Devgn's four-strong party - made up by wife Jyoti (Jyothika), daughter Janhvi (Janki Bodiwala, a holdover from Vash) and son Dhruv (Anngad Raaj) - is approached by one Vanraj Kashyap (R. Madhavan), a fellow traveller who appears personable enough until he slips Janhvi a sweet that is clearly some kind of gateway drug; soon, she's eating uncontrollably, letting this charmer into the family's well-furnished holiday home (uh-oh), and making novel use of a swing set to terrorise her sibling. At first glance, it's a standard-issue good-versus-evil fable with a moral as simple as never take sweets from a stranger or - for any onlooking dads - keep a close eye on those with designs on your daughters. Gradually, however, Shaitaan reveals itself as altogether more complicated, not least because this isn't just an Ajay Devgn star vehicle.

In 2018, Shaitaan's director Vikas Bahl was accused of sexual assault by a former employee of his production company Phantom Films; this allegation was followed by further accusations of sexual harassment by actresses Kangana Ranaut and Nayani Dixit, who'd appeared in Bahl's putatively feminist 2014 travelogue Queen. No charges were brought, but the ensuing furore resulted in Phantom Films' dissolution. (This process in itself proved messy: after Bahl's partners in the company, Anurag Kashyap and Vikramaditya Motwane, provided formal statements on the matter, Bahl threatened to sue for defamation.) The director has worked steadily post-lockdown - signing off on three films in three years - but Shaitaan is Bahl's first big hit since his return to action. You can see why: this is a proper horror movie, as opposed to the militaristic flagwavers currently being shoved down the mass audience's neck, and one with both a well-rehearsed premise and a sly, insinuating performance from Madhavan to recommend it. (The latter really is good, feigning sincere hurt whenever anyone accuses him of being the Devil incarnate. Compared to Madhavan, the other performers strike the eye as a little bland, mere puppets.) Without the backstory, Shaitaan might have stood as the kind of modest, manageable genre proposition by which a troubled creative might well rehabilitate himself within a forgiving industry.

Except something genuinely malevolent seems to be lurking beneath the film's inch-thick surface: it shows through not just in the name attached to the villain (no coincidence, surely), but in the numerous scenes in which Madhavan's seducer persuades the entranced Janhvi to slap herself, or dance for him, or cry harder and louder - giving this captive soul direction, as in an audition that's got completely out of hand. Here, Shaitaan appears to be openly mocking anyone who's been tracking its maker's progress. You want to see what an abuse of power looks like?, these scenes cackle, I'll show you what an abuse of power looks like. This is a reach, granted, but Bahl's film kept reminding me of those Bergman movies that centred conjurors and hypnotists because its maker realised they were an allegory for the control we can wield over our fellow man. Shaitaan isn't The Magician; at best, it's unusually potent hackwork, a B-movie that benefits from an A-movie budget and a metatext that pulses like a migraine. Yet it falls closer to the dark side than one might prefer from a Friday or Saturday night entertainment, leaving us with much the same queasy feeling we'd get from sitting through another Woody Allen comedy about a middle-aged man mooning over a teenager. It's certainly committed to what it's doing and showing - hellbent would be another word, its maker palpably more defiant than contrite - but if you come this way hoping to separate the art from the artist, or the undeniable force of a movie from its unseemly context, forget it: a director accused of sexual impropriety really has made a big hit movie that is unmistakably premised on the pliability and susceptibility of young women. Don't bring popcorn; take all available precautions.

Shaitaan is now playing in selected cinemas.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of March 8-10, 2024):

1 (1) Dune: Part Two (12A) **

2 (3) Wicked Little Letters (15)

3 (2) Bob Marley: One Love (12A)

4 (4) Migration (U)

5 (new) Imaginary (15)

6 (new) Shaitaan (15) **

7 (new) Titanic: The Musical (PG)

8 (6) Wonka (PG) ***

9 (10) Sami Swoi. Początek (12A)

10 (5) Madame Web (12A)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Our Body

2. Monster

3. Fight Club

4. Origin

5. City of God

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (4) Wonka (PG) ***

2 (new) Migration (U)

3 (5) Dune: Part One (12) **

4 (1) Anyone But You (15)

5 (3) Poor Things (18) **

6 (2) The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (12)

7 (6) Oppenheimer (15) ****

8 (13) Barbie (12) ***

9 (new) Napoleon (15) **

10 (16) Elvis (12) **

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Anatomy of a Fall

2. The Royal Hotel

3. How to Have Sex

4. Wonka

5. Dream Scenario

 

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (Friday, Channel 4, 11.05pm)

2. Out of Sight [above] (Saturday, BBC1, 11.35pm)

3. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (Saturday, Channel 4, 11.10pm)

4. Phantom Thread (Sunday, BBC2, 11.40pm)

5. Can You Ever Forgive Me? (Sunday, Channel 4, 12.50am)

Punchdrunk love: "Fight Club" at 25

I saw Fight Club for the first time on the morning it opened in Paris in late 1999. Queuing up for a 9.30am screening in Pigalle: my fresher-faced self, a clutch of burly bruisers in leather jackets set to be palpably disappointed by the film before them, and an elegant, Deneuve-like older woman in furs who wafted down to the front row and spent the entire movie laughing like Juliette Binoche. It was a screening that more or less crystallised early responses to David Fincher's film, not least because the six of us were just about the only folks in the world paying to see it that weekend. After taking a notable box-office dive on first release, Fight Club would eventually be reclaimed, first by film buffs waving the DVD as proof as Fincher's emergent virtuosity, then by online edgelords, trolls and incels, reframing a black comedy as the bloodiest of red flags. The question of who should really be laughing at Fight Club abides. As Mme Deneuve doubtless understood, the varyingly grim jokes of the film, ripped from Chuck Palahniuk's cult novel, come at the expense of men; it's alpha lone wolf Fincher, a director who'd likely refuse to join any club that would have him as a member, seeking to skewer masculinity much as he'd done in 1997's underrated The Game and would do in 2010's The Social Network and the shortlived Netflix series Mindhunter. 

For any newcomers, this is the story of a perilously lonely boy (with "a house full of condiments, but no food", as Jim Uhls' script has it) who starts listening to an inner voice urging him to give into his worst instincts. (Fortuitously, this reissue lands between two high-profile films centred on protagonists with imaginary friends: we've been primed.) Beating himself and others up in underground gladiatorial arenas hardly improves his condition: he's soon homeless, bleeding, being cuckolded by his own subconscious and well on his way to becoming public enemy number one. His downward spiral allows Fincher to flag just how easily certain men are misled towards violent, (self-)destructive activity. Yet one reason this late 20th century endeavour has endured so is that it feels very much of the 21st century: simultaneously doomy and snarky while ambiguous and slippery, bound up with cults of personality (for Brad Pitt's Tyler Durden, the film's strutting imp of the perverse, read Tate or Trump), a broadly despairing view of the state of play between the sexes, and the misplaced anger that follows from our understanding that we need to shake off capitalism but haven't quite figured out how best to achieve that aim. And that's before the collapsing buildings the movie arrives at, a trailer for non-movie spectacles to come.

I think we might still concede Fight Club is less forcefully of a piece than it seemed a quarter-century ago, when the critic Alexander Walker was driven to declare its nihilism a danger to civilised society. Time and a clearer eye reveal the film to be composed of showoffy segments, overlaid with Ed Norton's droning voiceover and a pounding Dust Brothers score, which highlight Fincher's unarguable camera and editing prowess: the plane crash, the sex scene, the soap making, the fights. Nothing really connects; only in its final act does the film gather real momentum, rather than circling a drain while gurgling loudly. At this point, Fincher was still thinking in grabby setpieces, trying to make a name and a career for himself; we may all of us prefer the subtler, sublimated craft and guile of The Social Network and Mindhunter over these barely controlled explosions. Fincher's business here was provocation: though the twist ending loosely ties Fight Club to late 1999's runaway hit The Sixth Sense, for most of its running time, it feels closer to an American translation of Lars von Trier's The Idiots, another study of a fraying collective conducted with cackling intelligence. (Either that, or it's Drop Dead Fred rewritten by the Unabomber.)

All that said, it is often wildly funny, or howlingly inappropriate, its tossed-off wisecracks pushing some way beyond those of, say, South Park or Family Guy; you can see why the edgelords seized upon it, but also why Fincher wound up making the comparably distasteful Gone Girl, which I half-suspect may be Fight Club for women. And Fincher was always good with actors, driving them to commit and subvert as befits. Incels seem to miss this, but wiggly Norton - one of the great worms of 1990s film - only becomes heroic late on after trying to take responsibility for his crimes; Pitt remains a pretty terrific articulation of a pose most men will have wanted to throw at some point, even if it stands for nothing and might get you killed. The bonus is Helena Bonham Carter at her most withering; you have to overlook her Marla if you want to appropriate Fight Club as an unapologetic push for men's rights. (Further down the callsheet, two from the funny-how-things-turn-out file: a TV news reporter is played by Lauren Sánchez, newly prominent as the main squeeze of Amazon boss Jeff Bezos; and it still strikes me as faintly ironic that our hero should be seen to bottom out upon beating Jared Leto to a pulp, "I felt like destroying something beautiful" et al.)

Even after 25 years, we haven't yet fully metabolised Fight Club - what it means, what it represents, where it ranks - which probably accounts for the ongoing arguments. Fincher pushed on regardless, but Uhls has had only one more script produced in the years since, 2008's bland Hayden Christensen vehicle Jumper. Like an off-colour joke, it might just be unrepeatable, although elements of the film seemed to factor into the following year's American Psycho (another droll rendering of a notionally unfilmable novel) and the Jackass series (first transmission: October 2000), which was - which remains, somewhat implausibly - Fight Club reenacted by clowns for shits and giggles. But extinction was where everything was heading: within ten years, and after a decade characterised by insecurity on various fronts, American movies had been reduced to childproofed superheroics and digimated cutesiness, with barely a single Tyler Durden around to splice a welcome transgression or two into the mix. Raw meat stuffed with gelignite, Fincher's film still requires marking as dangerous - I wouldn't take a date to it - but we'd do well to reclaim some of its swagger from the nuts on the Internet. Peer beyond its sloganeering and sixpacks, and you can spy a moment when our movies still took risks, and revolution of multiple kinds remained some sort of possibility.

Fight Club returns to cinemas nationwide from today. 

Anatomy of a fall: "Manjummel Boys"

Though the Malayalam word-of-mouth hit Manjummel Boys tells a tale of fortitude, resilience and heroism, it distinguishes itself by putting precisely zero of its leading men in military khaki. (One obvious reason for its success: it's offering moviegoers a break from the grunting norms of the current Hindi mainstream.) Recent films and events to commemorate 2018's Tham Luang cave rescue may well have inspired the writer-director Chidambaram to dramatise a local variant - another nervy true-life descent, dating back to 2006. The most immediate difference is that those at the centre of this rescue weren't lithe, slender kids, rather ten headstrong, fully-grown men: balding, paunchy loafers, tailchasers, drunks and other troublemakers who, as we join them crashing a wedding, have seen their Keralan workers' collective split into two factions, a source of ongoing conflict seemingly only exacerbated by regular tug-of-war contests. Already, you can spot how some facility with a rope - a capacity for taking the strain and working as a team - might be of benefit when, during a seat-of-the-pants lads' trip to Kodaikanal, the ground opens up beneath one of their party, sending him tumbling down an especially deep and dark abyss. In the rescue effort that follows, we possibly find another reason for Manjummel Boys' success: almost shruggingly, with the insouciance of any other genre film, it presents a vision of unity that may be difficult to see anywhere else in the India of 2024, a narrative about disparate folks putting grudges aside and pulling together in a common cause.

While this narrative throws up idiosyncratic regional variations - the Boys come this way to pay homage to a musical number in a Kamal Haasan movie - it's an example of a film where both the trajectory and structure are, from an early stage, reassuringly predictable. Simply put, the Boys spend the first half getting into a tight spot; they spend the second trying to get out of it. For a while, Chidambaram treats this story as the basis for a hangout movie, observing his leads chatting shit and roughhousing one another. (The stag-party abrasiveness is smoothed by a soundtrack that forsakes bangers for jams: ambient beats you might stumble onto on pirate radio at three in the morning.) So relaxed is the opening movement it comes as some surprise when the film suddenly snaps to and gets serious. Asked whether their pal could conceivably have survived his drop, a passing guide peers into the void and mutters "It's Satan's decision". (This particular crevice, we learn, is known locally as "the Devil's Kitchen".) We don't have to be told the significance when the heavens open and the cave begins to flood with sheet rain. Having handed these characters a dire problem, Chidambaram nimbly, briskly sets about solving it, and there is undeniable interest and pleasure to be derived from watching that, as the long tradition of disaster movies would indicate. Yet Manjummel Boys isn't just nuts, bolts and winches; there are appreciable character beats, too. It's a smart move on Chidambaram's part to withhold the fate of the fallen, adding one genuine note of uncertainty that is sustained with tremendous skill through the second half, an agonising descent into a suffocatingly serpentine sinkhole that either represents inspired location work, superlative production design, or a bit of both. This, finally, is what audiences have been talking excitedly about: as taut and fraught a suspense sequence as you'll witness in the months between now and Furiosa, nailing us to our seat with the sight of lives and bonds hanging in the balance. Through to the deft coda - a signature dash of edit-suite craftsmanship after all the heavy lifting - Chidambaram gets the best out of his terrific ensemble, set to convey a steadfastness in the face of adversity that shows up the haphazard, frankly half-arsed response of the authorities and might just serve as a lesson to others besides. At the very least, there is more sincere and stirring brotherhood on display throughout Manjummel Boys than one could discern in the last half-dozen Salman Khan pictures.

Manjummel Boys is now playing in selected cinemas.