"Kler/Clergy" (Guardian 12/10/18)

Kler/Clergy ***

Dir: Wojciech Smarzowski. With: Arkadiusz Jakubik, Robert Wieckiewicz, Jacek Braciak, Joanna Kulig. 133 mins. Cert: 18

Source of understandable huffing among Polish conservatives, this stark and steely-eyed drama sets out its anti-clerical stall when three Catholic priests’ marathon drinking session is interrupted by news one of their parishioners requires the last rites, duly slurred through. A few degrees lighter – visually, tonally – and it might have reached us under the title Bad Padres. The multitude of sins writer-director Wojciech Smarzowski enumerates spans confession-box dozing, illegal surveillance, and liberal borrowing from the collection plate – and that’s before he perhaps inevitably broaches some ambiguous business with altar boys in the sacristy. Suffice to say, Smarzowski isn’t exactly preaching to the converted, rather mobilising that audience who suspect organised religion may be as organised crime, a Cosa Nostra in cassocks.

Presumably one reason for the hubbub back home is that this line of attack is being pushed not in some scrappy indie, but a handsome, multiplex-bound production boasting local all-stars: the most hireable priest – chief weakness: booze – is embodied by the excellent Robert Wieckiewicz, who played national hero Lech Walesa in Andrzej Wajda’s 2013 biopic. (His pregnant wife is played by Joanna Kulig, removed of her Cold War glamour.) After that riproaring opening, Smarzowski begins to chart the priests’ daily transgressions with a seriousness that subtly, skilfully shifts our perceptions of his apparently damnable protagonists. After half an hour, they start to look less like blundering caricatures than individuals at the mercy of a system keener to cover up than prevent abuses that are in many ways cyclical.

At times, it can feel as if the writer-director has taken on more than one film can satisfactorily chew. The deviation and interweaving of the three priestly strands proves quietly inspired – the network of corruption sustaining 1997’s L.A. Confidential may have been an unlikely but valuable influence – but the film still clocks in at an ungainly two-plus hours, despite a ruthless editing strategy that pares scenes to the bone. Yet if Smarzowski can’t quite achieve the straightahead rhetorical force of Pablo Larrain’s The Club, he gets close – particularly in the closing stretch – while the haunting central performances provide their own, altogether grim survey of the Polish church: here are sad, lonely, damaged men, clinging to their dog collars even as circumstances transform them into vices around their necks. Say a prayer for the Vatican PRs having to spin this one. 

Kler/Clergy is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

"MFKZ" (Guardian 12/10/18)

MFKZ **

Dirs: Shojiro Nishimi, Guillaume Renard. Animation with the voices of: Kenn Michael, Michael Chiklis, Dascha Polanco, Giancarlo Esposito. 94 mins. Cert: 15

The title of this exhaustingly grimy and chaotic collaboration between French and Japanese animators is both a blunt contraction of the Oedipal expletive and a statement of attitudinal intent. No time for anything so wussy as vowels: writer/co-director Guillaume “Run” Renard instead whips his own graphic novel’s highlights into a frenetic postmodern melange that sends pizza delivery boy Angelino (voiced, in this English redub, by Kenn Michael) scooting through diversely appropriated cultures. Any film encompassing Nazi-punching lucha libre wrestlers and top-secret moonbases should by rights be huge fun, but even Renard finds himself conceding “What the F*** is Going On?” in a midfilm graphic; enjoyment will depend on a tolerance for that randomness teenagers apparently find hilarious.

By far the most impressive aspect is its density of vision: every corner of every frame has been worked over in some way. Renard’s Dark Meat City – a teeming reimagining of latter-day L.A., spawned of many hours sat before ‘hood movies, Grand Theft Auto and harder-core rap promos – is a mesh of interconnecting urban legends, overlaid with armies of human and insectoid cockroaches, then topped with ziggurats of trash and advertising space. If you’re looking for world building, you’re come to the right place. Yet its principal architects prove keener to flytip this secondhand imagery than they are to sort through it. There’s so much of everything – including a last-reel nuclear strike, intended to level matters up – that MFKZ threatens to mean nothing very much.

Pause to analyse the overload of visual information for even a moment, however, and some of what’s being dumped before us starts to look suspect indeed. At least one eyebrow might be raised at Renard’s effusively enthusiastic portrayal of a violent crime-ridden ghetto populated by gun-toting hulks and pneumatic babes; even Angelino’s bulbous, berry-round head appears dangerously close to the kind of racist caricature stamped on the front of 1930s boot blacks. (In this context, the city’s name sounds doubly icky.) It’s hitting cinemas for one night only, which may be all a splurge like this deserves – but don’t discount it from becoming a repository of retina-grabbing background visuals for questionably vogueish club nights.

MFKZ played in selected cinemas on Thursday night. 

The fame: "A Star is Born"

In times of trouble, turn to the tried and tested. Hollywood's glitziest fourth-quarter diversion A Star is Born has, yes, been filmed thrice before under the same title (in 1937, 1954 and 1976), but its underlying story template has also been channelled by Bollywood (the Aashiqui series), the Human League ("Don't You Want Me?") and, most recently, by La La Land, the Technicolor hit of two years ago that may have ensured this latest, long-gestating iteration finally saw the green light. (Among the stars most recently linked with this version: Clint Eastwood and Beyoncé, and there may not be enough string in the universe to string-theory that film into the imagination.) That very straightforward narrative, a matter of two intersecting arcs, sets out some arcane - and debatable - law of celebrity gravity, insisting that for one star to be born (here, Lady Gaga's waitress-turned-pop-sensation Ally), another (Bradley Cooper's grizzled alt-rocker Jackson "Jack" Maine) must either make room or fade away. There may be some significance in the fact this Star opens at a moment when the industry has haphazardly started to reorganise itself: one of Jack Maine's live favourites features the plaintive line "Maybe it's time we let the old ways die". Yet this is also the first Star to be directed by the actor playing the old white guy on the slide, which shifts other emphases - not least the character of Maine himself, presented here not as some unforgivably boorish lush, but a buff, brooding, attractively damaged addict. This text remains a looking glass in which Hollywood can take a long, soft look at itself and its processes, a glam session of stocktaking we're invited to sit in on.

So what's in it for us? A fair bit, as it turns out, and more than most were expecting when the project was first announced. For starters, it has a romance by which the film can override the self-regard in its premise. Cooper and Gaga are not an obvious pair, especially in these characterisations; one of the movie's background implausibilities is that it imagines a world where Eddie Vedder might hook up - musically, romantically - with Sia (or Gaga herself). Yet they have chemistry, and work very hard in the early scenes to persuade us Ally and Jackson might have a shot at something greater and more lasting than that. These two place a bet together, and find themselves on some winning streak before things go south; they're gamblers who cannot believe their luck, which may be as good a definition as any of those who work in the entertainment industry. As a director, Cooper has a sure feel for the live music scene that we're told has rejuvenated the once-dying music business. Time and again, his Steadicam peers over the shoulders of the actors as they walk out on an actual festival stage, registering the surprise and excited screams of unpaid extras who may have feared they were in for an unexpected guest slot from The Lumineers. In these scenes, the bass is mixed so loud you can feel it doing a number on your internal organs: it's as good as being there, as they say, but the effect also helps us make narrative sense of Jackson's hearing loss, and to spot his dwindling musical powers, his inability to rock a room as he once did. (Subtext of Star 2018: how the traditional, rootsy, white-collar rock long plied by men has of late been comprehensively eclipsed by more flexible young women.)

The film is generally sophisticated in its use of these songs to propel the narrative and generate emotion; even the arrangement and production of individual numbers - whether stripped down or Autotuned up - seem to speak to the characters' state-of-mind at any given moment. (Universal did well to get the Mamma Mia! sequel out before this, lest their film look any more like clunked-together panto.) Still, there are times when that music has to do a lot of heavy lifting. This is the shortest of the colour Stars - 134 minutes, so as to meet the demands of the modern multiplex - and certain prosaic details have had to be omitted or compressed so as to let the songs breathe. The precise location of Ally's crowded (halfway?) house has already become an Internet talking point, but her rise and Jackson's contingent fall feel unusually rapid (predetermined, maybe), and our heroine's make-or-break decision to shift from intimate, self-penned songs to the kind of slamming floorfillers that get to open Saturday Night Live isn't in any way explored: she sets out in this direction simply because that's what her arc demands. I've never been convinced that this narrative is particularly profound - or at least not as profound for us as it might seem to the people who keep revisiting this material: that underlying template strikes me as something like a Stanislavsky textbook, a relic of the Golden Age of cinema that movie people keep going back to because they believe it contains the secrets of the universe, rather than simply a fairly extreme summation (birth-fame-death) of their day job.

If handled correctly, however, it can yield a very absorbing entertainment. Any film that finds room for a line such as "You sold dad's ranch and turned it into a fucking windfarm!" is never going to lack for an element of melodramatic camp, but Cooper the director generally approaches those twin arcs with a no-nonsense, Eastwood-like sincerity (there's no further windfarm activity), while investing individual scenes with the on-the-hoof freshness and textures of his Silver Linings Playbook director David O. Russell. And none of the above reservations really seem to matter whenever Gaga steps back into the limelight Cooper casts to belt out one version or another of "Shallow", the knowingly titled belter by which Star 2018 hopes to convince us there is more to it than first meets the eye and ear. The irony is that, as a 32-year-old who's spent the best part of the last decade towards the top of her profession, Ms. Gaga may feel that her own musical star has been eclipsed in recent times by, let's say, Selena Gomez, Taylor Swift, Dua Lipa or anybody else who's collaborated with Marshmello (whoever he is). If so, then she's picked the right time and the right project to launch a crossover career as a movie star: she'll likely wind up the biggest benefactor from a film that - right through to Ally's closing rendition of a ballad that sounded, to these tired old Maine-ish ears, actionably close to R. Kelly's "I Believe I Can Fly" - forever prioritises the truth inherent in performance over and above all others. She will almost certainly appear on awards-ceremony stages over the long months ahead. Let's hope that, unlike poor Ally, she can get on and off without anybody showing her up.

A Star is Born is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

On DVD: "The Happy Prince"

If I remember correctly, Brian Gilbert's very handsome, BBC-backed 1997 biopic of Oscar Wilde - the one with Stephen Fry in the lead role - drew a discreet veil over the writer and wit's final years in exile, preferring instead to enshrine Wilde in his tragic, martyred prime. Twenty years on, and hopefully we're all a little more grown-up around the idea of how a gay man might choose to spend his days and nights: Wilde was one of 20,000 men granted a posthumous pardon by the British Government in 2017 for offences that no longer exist in law, and which should never have been offences in the first place. Rupert Everett, who writes, directs and stars in The Happy Prince, has no such qualms about diving into the gutter in which Oscar found himself in later life, perhaps because - at this stage of his zigzagging, pinballing acting career - he too has nothing much left to lose. The thesis of Everett's film - which joins Wilde in a state of impoverished dishevelment amid the cabarets of late 19th century Europe, where he sought sanctuary after serving his prison sentence - is that right until the last, there was life in this old dog, as well as a desire to make peace with his demons.

So: where Gilbert's Wilde took the classical, Great Man of History line, Everett's unruly younger sibling concerns itself with a notable storyteller in search of a worthy ending for his own tale. Yet while it honours Wilde's spell in exile, The Happy Prince is itself having to make peace with its subject's past, or at least with what the movies have already told us. Clearly, Everett doesn't want to retread that ground Gilbert and Fry so amply covered, but his film's unusual shape suggests he must have had to sit impatiently through a number of production meetings where executives urged him to get some of that history in nevertheless. Everett's solution involves adopting a more than faintly Proustian structure whereby a line of dialogue will cue a flashback or cutaway to action unfolding simultaneously elsewhere within Wilde's circumscribed universe. The result is a rogue's gallery of odd, sometimes free-floating scenes that, taken collectively, do somehow paint a picture of a life lived in limbo. Old friends - friends of Oscar, friends of Rupert - come and go: Anna Chancellor as a society matron, Colin Firth as Wilde's loyal confidant Reggie Turner, Béatrice Dalle in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo as a cafe proprietor. When Emily Watson pops up over the Channel in a couple of scenes as Wilde's wife Constance, the expectation is that there will eventually be some kind of reunion, but the film never heads in this direction.

There may, I think, be something truthful in this approach. We mean for our lives to have unity and purpose, but we drift out of others' lives as they drift out of ours; we strive for meaning, and often wind up with no more than handfuls of madeleines and missed opportunities. The trick to living - for Wilde, for Everett, perhaps for you and I - is how we come to terms with that fact. Holding it all together is Everett himself, sporting latex jowls that bring him physically closer to where Fry signed off. Impossible to imagine Everett the director considered any other performer for the part: he tears through each scene, scattering epithets in English and French, bellowing at the heavens, and seducing the serving staff; it's fun to behold, but not subtle, and you sense Wilde's humility and gentle grace getting rather crushed beneath the wheels of a galumphing star vehicle. As a film, The Happy Prince is as eccentric and cockeyed as every other credit on its prime mover's CV, but it grabs a certain poetry in passing, and - thanks to Irish cinematographer John Conroy - a muted, faded beauty commensurate with its subject and star. Does it finally come up with an epitaph worthy of Wilde? Not exactly: its incoherence is such that this is one of the rare recent British period dramas where you'd advise everyone to only drink more tea, rather than soaking up the fumes coming off the onset absinthe. But it sure is lively.

The Happy Prince is available on DVD through Lionsgate from Monday.

At the LFF: "Shock Waves: Diary of My Mind"

Shock Waves: Diary of My Mind is another artefact plucked from the ever-expanding borderland between TV and cinema. It was shot on digital for a Swiss true crime series by Ursula Meier, whose fine track record (2008's Home, 2012's Sister) and expert marshalling of a superior cast has landed it a surely unforeseen theatrical outing during this year's London Film Festival. This episode places the shock in the series' title upfront: it's the story of a disturbed teenager (played here by Meier's acteur fétiche Kacey Mottet-Klein) who, on a nondescript Friday in 2009, shot both his parents dead after posting a rambling text confessing his crime to a literature teacher (Fanny Ardant) who'd set her class a diary-writing assignment. The bulk of Meier's film unfolds after the boy has been taken into custody and the diary has landed on the desk of a woman already struggling to deal with both guilty thoughts that she may have in some way inspired this act, and the culpability the local authorities - led by short-fused prosecutor Jean-Philippe Écoffey - come to confer upon her.

What follows is a reconstruction in the conventional sense of the term, using lines from the killer's text to describe the run-up to the killings, and to try and comprehend why such a senseless crime took place; yet Meier's radical empathy - a compassion seemingly beyond the paygrade of those who investigated first time round - extends to an attempt to enter the boy's shattered headspace (laying his words over close-ups of uncomprehending faces) and understand the lonely teacher's need to stay close to someone most of us would possibly distance ourselves from after a certain point. It remains pretty exacting viewing - even at 70 minutes, you'd need a fair bit of Toblerone to get through it without ad breaks, and it winds towards an especially painful scene of self-harm - but the approach does get it under your skin, and the closing scenes are unnervingly strong. In its fierce terseness, this Diary cannot help but recall another: Meier's film has the look of a 21st century Bresson fable, and if that director would probably have forsworn Ardant's crumpled glamour (though she's not untouching in her solitude), you sense he'd be at least as fascinated as Meier with Mottet-Klein, roughly hewn yet ever-expressive, credibly dangerous to know.

Shock Waves: Diary of My Mind screens on Fri 12 (ICA, 6.15pm) and Sun 14 (Rich Mix, 1pm). 

At the LFF: "Evelyn"

Orlando von Einsiedel is the British filmmaker who was Oscar nominated for his 2014 documentary Virunga, on the ferocious battle raging between poachers and rangers within a Congolese national park; he went on to win last year's Best Documentary Short prize for The White Helmets, his study of the heroic Syrian medics. Von Einsiedel's new doc Evelyn marks both a homecoming, and perhaps an attempt to work out exactly why he's spent the last decade throwing himself, seemingly without a second thought, into the middle of vicious armed conflict. It is, in short, a personal film, one that frequently finds von Einsiedel front and centre, often in or close to tears, as he outlines the contours of a walking trip his family undertook through the Scottish Highlands and the Peak District with the aim of coming to terms with the suicide of his younger brother Evelyn, a name barely spoken within his clan in the years since the tragedy. Evelyn was himself a keen walker, we learn, but he was also a schizophrenic who, after several unsuccessful attempts, took his own life in 2005, aged 22: his teenage self can be glimpsed during the opening credits, compiling a video diary that doubles as a whirlwind tour of the von Einsiedels' boho household. Thereafter, he becomes an informing absence, as we sense this one trip becoming a means of having all those conversations the filmmaker, his parents, and his siblings ducked having at the time - a chance to get everything out in the open. By a miracle of Mother Nature, the landscape (the rocky, bumpy, uneven ground, the skies that fall somewhere between stormy and melancholy) soon comes to mirror the emotional landscape.

A few caveats, and possibly trigger warnings, may be in order. When I say Evelyn is personal, it is deeply personal from its very first scene, which finds the filmmaker taking delayed delivery of his brother's suicide note. Had he made it about any family other than his own, von Einsiedel would almost certainly have been accused of morbid prying. As a film about a British family (albeit a family with Germanic heritage, hence its preponderance of weird and wonderful names), Evelyn also brushes against issues of class and privilege: we are forever aware that not every bereaved family has the resources to exorcise their traumas on a walking trip, get it filmed and then exhibited in cinemas. Yet any sense that this awayday was of greater benefit for them than it will be for us is very quickly overcome by the realisation von Einsiedel is actively diagnosing that emotional aloofness commonly seen in the British upper classes, and which may not be entirely healthy for anybody, the vulnerable most of all. (It is a bad case of that stiff upper lip the class system has sought to frame as unconditionally heroic.) The director himself, who presents among the more approachable scions of this softly spoken tribe, is described as "emotionally stunted" by sister Gwendolyn, although this looks increasingly like a facade maintained by a big brother who felt pressured into leading the way out of the dark. Something more needling becomes apparent in a stretch that witnesses dad Andreas - who'd remarried several years before Evelyn's death - stomping brusquely over Gwen's thoughts and feelings during the yomp through the Peak District. (I hesitate to say it, but we've seen variations on this behaviour in other fields recently. Catastrophic referendum result? No point analysing it, just roll up your sleeves and crack on with pushing it through.)

The fascination exerted by the film lies in watching a family being drawn out of their usual bubble; it stands as poignant proof of the wisdom that simply getting out of the house can liberate us from our grief. The walk brings the von Einsiedels into contact with fellow travellers, from different backgrounds, many of whom are mourning losses of their own. A conversation with an ice cream man serves as evidence that the director's reserve is beginning, at last, to melt; falling into step with Evelyn's skater chums allows the film to build a community of the bereaved, capable of sharing the burden such a crushing loss must represent. Thoughtful image and sound choices tap the emotion sitting close to the film's surface. Though there is the occasional drone shot, equated to the walkers' belief that Evelyn is now watching over them, we're generally only a step or two ahead of this party at the roadside, looking back as they've previously refused to do, and the walks are very sensitively miked, so that we can hear every last snuffle, murmured regret or declaration of love. It's a film that stresses the importance of talking by trying very hard to hear every word of what's being said - however difficult these words may be to hear, or to say. We are brought unusually close to the film's subjects, then - and if ever their discussions get too much, too painful, too tragic to consider, there are always those rolling hills behind them to consider, a reminder of what will be there long after the rest of us have disappeared. That closeness makes this family's grief, and their eventual breakthroughs more tangible, while bringing a personality previously content to hide behind the camera into far sharper focus. Von Einsiedel, more German than perhaps he realises, here emerges as a capital-R Romantic, setting out into nature to confront death head-on.

Evelyn screens on Thu 11 (Curzon Mayfair, 6.15pm), Fri 12 (NFT3, 6.20pm) and Sun 14 (BFI Studio, 6.15pm).  

Great expectations: "Private Life"

It took seven years for Debra Granik to follow up Winter's Bone with this summer's exceptional Leave No Trace; it's been a full eleven since Tamara Jenkins made her terrific second film The Savages (with Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman as a matchless sibling combo), and twenty since her very smart and enjoyable debut Slums of Beverly Hills earned her the tag - wanted or otherwise - of a female Woody Allen. Competition for the Elaine May Prize for Unjustly Underemployed Female Creative has seldom seemed so fierce. (The question lingers: how many half-assed film-sketches about nothing very much has the actual Woody Allen churned out in that time?) The good news is that Jenkins has found sanctuary with Netflix, broad-minded, deep-pocketed new home of the kind of film the American mainstream, and to some degree the indie sector, has turned its back on: films made by grown-ups about grown-ups for grown-ups, more interested in matters human than superhuman. It's just that the gestational problems that form Private Life's chief concern seem to tally exactly with Jenkins' struggles to bring a project to full fruition over the past decade.

After introducing us to Richard and Rachel (Paul Giamatti and Kathryn Hahn), a couple of fortysomething New Yorkers exploring the diminishing options of having a child at this age, the film settles into a handily chaptered step-by-step guide to some of the procedures involved in both IVF treatment and adoption ("The Retrieval", "The Test"): how it works, where it goes awry (the scams, the failures, the continuous throwing of money at an itch that often can't be scratched), and how even the stuff that does work (the endless needles, the close gynaecological study) can seem invasive and painful. This, however, is but a route into Jenkins' eternal subject, namely intimacy, the inner workings of a relationship - always a fraught, potentially comical business, never more so than when biological desperation rears its head, as it does here. A wildcard presents itself in the form of the couple's niece Sadie (Kayli Carter, all but picking up where Natasha Lyonne left off in Slums), a would-be writer who's dropped out of college and has come to crash on Rich and Rach's floor. Might she, we wonder, provide the pair with a way forward from their conceptual cul-de-sac?

It is, then, another in that recent run of films and TV shows exploring unconventional models of parenting, picking up a conversation we haven't much had publicly. Jenkins' dialogue is, as ever, studded with sharp, harsh, amusing truths: upon noticing one potential donor has a BA in journalism and cinema studies, Rachel can be heard to murmur "No wonder she's selling her eggs: she can't get a job", while Sadie's response to her hosts' breakfast table is a youthful "How Instagrammable". Yet she also finds witty ways for her characters to channel their emotions: it's too good that the first action Richard's conservative sister-in-law Cynthia (Molly Shannon) has to perform upon learning of her daughter's surrogacy plans is carving the Thanksgiving turkey. She has, of course, called upon the services of performers unafraid to look silly yet capable of inspiring deep empathy. There may be no funnier image of male despair this year than the shot that finds Giamatti sitting glumly in a clinic's masturbatorium with his trousers round his ankles; Hahn, the fearless firecracker of modern American screen comedy (The Goods, TV's I Love Dick), goes further still in a scene that finds her cleaning the bathroom bottomless while waiting for an embryo to take hold - the cinema's most prominent instance of everyday nudity since Julianne Moore in Short Cuts - but she's also alert to every last delicate nuance in Jenkins' writing. (Spot the look Rachel gives Richard after he describes one potential surrogate as "cute".)

Some early responders have quibbled with the two-hour running time - a Netflixism born of the editorial freehand the platform affords its creatives - yet Private Life felt to me entirely right in this form: it reflects an arduous and haphazard process, and grants Jenkins extra time to chart those gradual hormonal shifts - within these bodies, and in the arrangement of these bodies - which distinguish this deeply human comedy from a frenetic baster-based farce such as, say, Ben Elton's Maybe Baby. On a basic level, it's no particular chore to spend more time around characters who strike the eye and ear as real and recognisable people with real and recognisable problems, and believe me, it's worth waiting for Jenkins' final image, which - though sourced from just about the most unpromising location imaginable (an Applebee's restaurant) - forms a perfect illustration of two concepts you may be forgiven for thinking were long dead in 2018: togetherness, and hope. At a moment when it sometimes seems as if the world could care less and less about lived experience - and especially lived experience as recounted by a woman - it is a too-rare pleasure to encounter a cinema that embraces it unconditionally. Let's not wait another decade for Jenkins' next dispatch.

Private Life is now showing in selected Curzon cinemas, and is available to stream via Netflix.