24FPS @ LFF: Playground

Dir: Laura Wandel

For seven and nine-year-old siblings Nora (Maya Vanderbeque) and Abel (Günter Duret), the school playground isn’t the friendliest place. Bigger boys pick on Abel, and the association, as well as their closeness, blows back on both him and Nora, making things worse for both of them.

Playground is perhaps better served by its original title: Une Monde (A World). A child’s world is, in many ways, fundamentally different to that of an adult, and Laura Wandel goes out of her way to create that world and to bring us into it. The camera is always placed at Nora’s height. Adults are often seen as legs and have to bend down into the frame to interact with the children. This immediately places us with the children, having to remember what our perspective was like. 

Visually, Wandel also uses close-ups a lot, making the backgrounds of shots blurry. This, I think, is a neat and effective way to suggest Nora’s development. At seven, she’s just arriving at the stage where she can see beyond herself, but the blurriness suggests there’s still a shallow focus there; she can empathise with her brother, but her reasoning (“You won’t stand up for yourself, so I told Dad”) is still simplistic, and initially, she can’t see how that might have unintended consequences. It’s telling that the adults we see in focus are the ones Nora feels closest to; her Dad, a stay at home parent, and her favourite teacher, through whom the script hits its only bump, perhaps leaning a little too hard on the saintly teacher trope à la Miss Honey.

These interactions with the film’s few adults aside, Playground stays resolutely among its young cast, observing the day-to-day of primary school politics and interaction. The bullying we see doesn’t seem motivated by anything particular, just that the bigger boys sense some kind of weakness they can pick at in Abel, especially when his younger sister—again too naive to read the situation the way her brother can—tries to defend him. It’s even more affecting when, having gone to a teacher, we see Nora sitting in on a meeting as the boys are made to apologise to Abel. The whole scene plays on Maya Vanderbeque’s face, and we can see that Nora now understands that this is only going to make things worse.

The way this all affects Nora and Abel’s relationships with each other and with their own friends is incredibly realistically written, seldom more so than in a heartbreaking series of scenes as Nora tries to get invited to the birthday party of a girl who, until a few weeks ago, was her closest friend at school. This and the way Abel tries to get back in the good graces of the bigger kids by turning into one of them are so well observed by Wandel and her young stars that were it not for the purposeful stylisation of her camerawork you could confuse moments of the film for documentary.

For me, the filmmaker Wandel most recalls here is Nils Malmros, whose brilliant coming of age films are some of the best the genre has ever produced. In particular, this one seems to look to his debut, the autobiographical Lars Ole, 5C, for inspiration. There is little higher praise I can offer than to say that Playground can stand alongside that film and other classics about childhood and growing up. 

This is an outstanding debut. It's structurally excellent, with a beautiful rhyme to its opening and closing shots. More than that, it's also an incredibly articulate film that has a lot to say about children’s experiences at school and, through some of the things we hear them say that must be parroted or misinterpreted from their parents, at home as well. It's too unblinking and too serious to speak to the children it's about, but it feels like it comes from a place of deep understanding for and of them. It's one of the best films of 2021, and marks Wandel out as a huge talent to watch.

★★★★½

24FPS @ LFF 2017: Mini-Reviews 1

So Help Me God

Dir: Jean Libon, Yves Hinant

The true crime documentary is going through a particularly interesting period right now, with series like Making A Murderer and The Keepers and films as straightforward as Amanda Knox or as formally interesting as Casting JonBenet. So Help Me God doesn't break any new ground in the way it's made, but it does show most of us a job within the justice system we're not familiar with, through a highly engaging and interesting woman.

Anne Gurwez is a Belgian investigating magistrate, a job that seems to be somewhere between detective and prosecutor and carries a great deal of influence on how people are dealt with within the Belgian system. The film follows her over the course of several months, as her day to day work on current cases coincides with the reinvestigation of a 20 year old double murder.

Gurwez herself is the best reason to give So Help Me God a look. She seems like she takes a nuanced approach to her work; tough but good humoured, able to be talked round to giving someone a chance if she likes them, but sharp tongued if she detects any hint of bullshit and deadly serious when the situation demands it. This mix often provokes some amusing juxtapositions of the gruesomeness of some of her work and the matter of fact and generally good humoured way she approaches it (see the scene where a body is exhumed in the cold case).

There are many memorable moments here, some are quite light, like the scene in which a dominatrix accused of theft amuses Gurwez by discussing some of the strangest requests her clients have made, but others are much darker and heavier. The film hits hardest in the investigation of a horrifying infanticide, which is immediately followed by a coldly matter of fact confession by the child's mother, who tells a story that suggests insanity in the calmest and most measured tones. It's a truly disturbing scene that nothing else in the film comes close to matching.

Overall, this is a pretty conventional film made engaging by an unconventional personality at its centre and some compelling stories, it's perhaps more suited to the BBC's Storyville than a cinema, but it's well worth a watch if you're interested in true crime.
★★★

Pickups
Dir: Jamie Thraves

Aiden Gillen is one of those actors who can make everything he's in a little bit better. Especially as he's got into middle age, he's become one of those actors who always disappears into a character, and that is the jumping off point for Pickups, which Gillen co-wrote with director Jamie Thraves.

Gillen plays Aiden, an Irish actor who is well known enough to get recognised regularly, but not George Clooney famous. He's recently divorced and preparing to make a new film, in which he's going deep into preparation to play a serial killer. It seems, however, that he may have got a bit too far into this character.

The premise of Pickups (the title referring both to casual sex and to additional shooting after a film's main production) isn't wildly original; a mid-life crisis coinciding with an actor going too deep into a role, but it should provide ample room for an actor like Gillen to get his teeth into a starring role (he's in practically every frame of the film). Unfortunately, I found the film meandering and lacking much insight. Narration frequently tells us what Aiden is thinking at any given moment, which it doesn't need to do, Gillen is a good enough actor to show us without our needing to be told most of what the voiceover says. Even with this though, everything is on the surface. The disconnect between Aiden's real life – the daughter he hasn't seen for some time back in Ireland – and his work on this character is interesting in concept, but the screenplay doesn't say much that's especially new or insightful about either side of that divide. 

The overarching story never coheres into anything terribly interesting, so what we end up with is more a series of vignettes. Some are interesting enough, interactions with fans often throw up an amusing moment, but even when we're supposed to be unnerved because he's too deep in the character, this doesn't feel like it bleeds over into these interactions. Only one vignette stuck in my mind, a brief moment with Antonia Campbell Hughes as an actress friend of Aiden's, who he suggests should have a part in the film. It's the one moment that chills the blood.

It's interesting to see Gillen play a character whose experiences seem so close to his own, but because of that it disappointing that Pickups doesn't feel more insightful. Ultimately if you want to see a version of an actor blurring the line between life and acting I'd suggest seeking out the underseen I Love A Man In Uniform rather than this.
★★

24FPS @ LFF 2014: Screeners

Thou Wast Mild And Lovely

Dir: Josephine Decker

I didn't get in to the mumblecore movement to begin with, but I've found myself warming up to it more and more recently, especially when it inches closer to genre.  Josephine Decker's second film (her debut, Butter On The Latch, is also playing at LFF) is hardly a mainstream effort, but it has an atmosphere that sets things on edge from the off, making you feel as though at any moment it could head off and become something more generically typical.  The fact it (mostly) doesn't is what helps it keep gripping you.

The film is set on a farm, run by Jeremiah (Robert Longstreet) and his innocent looking 20 something daughter Sarah (Sophie Traub).  They have hired help for the summer in the form of Akin (Joe Swanberg).  The atmosphere between the three is odd, and becomes more so as Akin seems to develop a fixation on Sarah, an attraction which may or may not be reciprocated.

I don't want to give too much away about how Thou Wast Mild And Lovely develops, because one of the film's great pleasures is seeing how its constantly uneasy tone evolves and pays off.  That unease is immediately striking in the way that all of the character relationships seem a little off... does Jeremiah look at his daughter, or indeed his new farmhand (who he calls 'Shoulders') a little too intently?  Is Akin's increasingly sexual gaze towards Sarah returned?  These things are open to interpretation, but it's clear when, in one of the film's most memorable and quietly chilling moments, Sarah says that she would have a baby "if Daddy would let me" that all is not well, and perhaps not quite what it seems, on this farm.

Sometimes the film's ambiguity is frustrating.  In one sequence we see Sarah lying on the grass, seemingly in some sort of (pleasurable) trance.  Then we see what she appears to be hallucinating; tools and hands floating in front of her eyes.  Is this the film's most obvious symbolism?  I suspect there's more to it than that, but unpicking what it means will probably take more viewings.  In this sequence and throughout, Decker and DP Ashley Connor's images are well chosen and beautiful.  At times the film's fixation with nature and people working and living in it feels Malickian, but Decker takes this to near parodic lengths mid-film, with a flashback sequence from a cow's POV, and the tone always sets the film apart from this influence.  In conjunction with the images, again setting the whole film on edge, is an often discordant soundtrack that suggests something underneath even the film's calmest and loveliest shots.

Largely a three hander, Thou Wast Mild And Lovely stands or falls on the strength of its cast.  Mumblecore auteur Joe Swanberg continues to prove that he's as effective a collaborator as he is a filmmaker in his own right, with a quiet and sometimes disquieting performance as Akin.  One of the things that is most notable is how his reactions, as much as those of Jeremiah and Sarah, become stranger as the film goes on.  It's particularly notable when Jeremiah makes disturbing reference to a 'roommate' and Akin almost completely ignores it.  Sophie Traub is a real find; you can see how her serene beauty would draw Akin in, and she manages to suggest both naiveté and calculation, often in the same moment, making us question whether Akin is simply drawn to her or being reeled in.  Jeremiah is a slightly broader character, but Robert Longstreet makes him someone to be wary of in many ways, without undermining the film's carefully maintained ambiguity of genre.

Josephine Decker only really stumbles in the last ten minutes, when the film makes a more distinct shift into genre territory.  It's not badly done, but the turn is more obvious than you'd like and the gear change, though slight, clunks a little.  Still, for the bulk of the film Decker's direction is superbly controlled.  She uses handheld camera well, the frequent fast motion forcing our eye when frames come to rest.  In this way she finds as much implied menace in stillness as she does in more hallucinatory moments.  Thou Wast Mild And Lovely is a confident work, slow paced but still lean at just 77 minutes, it's an uneasy and gripping piece that suggests an interesting new talent behind the camera.

★★★★

Waiting For August

Dir: Teodora Ann Mihai

I'm stuck.  I don't know what to write.  I think this is my fault rather than that of Teodora Ann Mihai.  You see, I loved Waiting For August, but I completely misread it.  Apparently this is a fly on the wall documentary, and I took it for minimalist, heavily improvised, fictional cinema.  I don't quite know what this means.  Does it mean there is a flaw in the documentary technique in that it fails to communicate the film's events as purely factual?  Perhaps, but it's not trying to fool us, nor is it American Teen, a 'documentary' so contrived that it not only feels dishonest but like a bad genre film.

Either way, the events are the same.  15 year old Georgiana lives in Romania, she has six siblings (all but one of them younger) and has been left in charge while their Mother, who can't make ends meet at home, works in Italy as a maid.  She cooks, cleans and tends to the younger children, all while juggling school and being a teenager.  Mihai's camera observes Georgiana and her family with an honest, but sympathetic and ultimately optimistic, eye.  She often lets scenes play out at length, displaying the family dynamics and the individual personalities of the kids.  It is Georgiana who makes the strongest impression.  The film paints her as a smart, responsible girl who absolutely loves her brothers and sisters, even when she gets frustrated caring for them (she is often seen asking her six year old brother, who cries a lot, to give her a kiss).  Without seeming to show off or pretend to be something she's not for the camera, Geo (as her family calls her) demonstrates a natural presence that I took as that of an exceptional young actress, but which, it seems is that of a young woman who is, the film makes clear at one point, is less of an exception than we'd like to think.

Ironically it is perhaps the lack of an overarching 'plot' that led me to misread this film as fiction.  Lately we have become so used to documentaries using fictional tropes and imposing a narrative that the purely observed nature of Waiting For August made it feel more akin to a fictional piece, especially one from the Romanian New Wave.  There are events - there is talk of the possibility that the children will be taken into care, considered abandoned by their mother and Georgiana clearly puts a lot of import on her exams as she tries to get into the high school of her choice - but none of the threads develops into a full narrative, they are, like everything, snapshots of days.  The closest thing to a narrative throughline comes in the conversations by phone and by Skype between the children and their Mother, which are delightfully human moments of connection.  The kids are largely preoccupied with what Mum will be sending them, while she says how much she loves and misses them.

What I appreciated most about Waiting For August in my misreading of it, beyond the skill with which it is shot and assembled, I still appreciate about it as documentary.  It would be very easy to focus on how desperately hard life is for this family.  After all, they are living for about nine months without their Mother because that's the only way they can afford to eat, but the film focuses less on their problems than on the way they deal with them.  Yes the kids argue, but you can feel and see the love they have for each other and how hard Georgiana in particular works to be a good surrogate parent.  This isn't a film about problems, it's not a sad or a depressing film.  This is a film about solutions, about how people deal with difficult circumstances and keep a smile on their face.

I don't think it is a problem that I misread the film (certainly the LFF programme doesn't make it clear that it's a documentary), it remains an absorbing portrait of a family and their situation, the fact it's a true portrait only makes it more intimate and immediate. Given that this is a documentary I hope that Mihai will return to the story in due course.  I was so engaged by Georgiana and her family and I hope that a few years from now cameras will find them doing well, but whether they do or not, Waiting For August is an excellent film in its own right and one I would recommend you check out at LFF.
★★★★