24FPS @ LFF: Petite Maman

Dir: Celine Sciamma

“I came from the path behind you”, says 8-year-old Nelly (Josephine Sanz), just after telling her friend Marion (Gabrielle Sanz) that, in the future, Marion will be her mother. Like many of the lines in Celine Sciamma’s exquisite screenplay for her fifth film, it’s layered with meaning; Nelly literally comes from the path behind Marion, from her Grandmother’s house, which she and her parents are clearing out after her death. It’s also a line about how Nelly, and all children to some degree, follows a path cut for her by her mother.

Four of Sciamma’s five directorial films, and the two features she’s written for other directors, fall broadly into coming of age cinema. I’m not sure any modern filmmaker has managed such a consistent, varied and nuanced exploration of the genre. While it hasn’t got the spectacular effects and the high sci-fi concept, the film Petite Maman most recalls for me in spirit is, perhaps surprisingly, Back to the Future. That film, ultimately, is about meeting your own parents and realising that if you had just been a couple of guys at school, you probably wouldn’t have got on with your Dad. Petite Maman takes the same basic concept of meeting your parent at your own age, but in this case, Nelly and Marion become fast friends. While the film doesn’t have her state it in the moment, it’s clear from one subtle shot of a particular, almost talismanic, prop that Nelly figures out quickly what is going on. 

Initially, Nelly and Young Marion are on totally equal footing, there’s an innocence and purity to their play together, spending much of their time in the woods, building a hut that Nelly had asked about earlier in the film. Later, when the relationship is clear, Sciamma uses the carefree feeling of these scenes to contrast with the older, clearly more fragile, Marion (Nina Meurisse), for instance, it doesn’t seem like the silly, playful, way that the girls make pancakes for Marion’s eighth birthday party is something Nelly will have done with the older version of her mother. 

In the present day scenes, there are some beautiful observations of how much Nelly cares for her mother; feeding her crisps and hugging her from the back seat as they drive away from the home where Marion’s mother passed away. It’s something that, while present day Marion clearly loves her daughter, the younger version seems more able to express. There is so much to be said about how delicately and how beautifully Sciamma and her young stars paint this relationship, but perhaps the simplest moments are the most moving, like the image of 8-year-old Marion, blowing out her birthday candles as she looks between her mother and her future daughter. It’s a gorgeous, truly magical, family portrait that sums up the film's magical realism perfectly.

Celine Sciamma is one of the truly great filmmakers working today, and Petite Maman is another gem. Thanks to cinematographer Claire Mathon, who also shot Portrait of a Lady on Fire for Sciamma, this is a beautiful film. The scenes between the young Marion and Nelly have a golden autumn feel, while the scenes back at the present day house emphasise the emptiness, especially after present day Marion takes off, leaving Nelly with her Dad. The dialogue doesn’t always sound like 8-year-olds talking, but some of the most childlike moments are the film’s most indelible, like Nelly wanting to go to sleep “to get to tomorrow”, which leads immediately to one of my favourite cuts in any recent film, carrying that idea through directly.  In 72 minutes, Sciamma manages to convey great depth and nuance, to fully explore this mother/daughter relationship, but do so with disarming simplicity. 

I think I need to see it again (and again) to appreciate all of its layers properly, but this is clearly one of the very best films of 2021 and yet another landmark in Sciamma’s thus far flawless career.

★★★★★

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: All About My Sisters

Dir: Wang Qiong

Starting in 2015, 22-year-old Wang Qiong picked up her camera and began filming her family, focusing on her younger sister Jin. The story she tells across this nearly three hour canvas is about a family that, with two daughters and despite China’s one child policy desperate for a son, first tried to abort and then gave away Jin to one of her uncles, who raised her as his own. Just over 20 years later, Jin is a young mother herself and has an understandably difficult relationship with her parents (who she calls Auntie and Uncle). Qiong’s camera documents their relationship, as well as digging into a family history of abortion and abandonment.

All About My Sisters is, from the start and frequently throughout, an uncomfortable watch. It begins with Jin asking her sister what the point of telling her story is, but as that story unfolds, whether Jin knows it or not, it becomes clear that the point is not only that it is fascinating a devastatingly emotional from a singular point of view, but that Qiong uses it to unfold a critique of how the one child policy drove many people to act. Perhaps the toughest scene to watch is an interview with Jin and Qiong’s uncle, who was one of the local administrators of the policy, and recalls leaving two babies that he and his wife attempted to abort at 8 months out to die. His regret and remorse are clear, as is the implication that this was a routine part of life at the time, but it remains an horrific moment.

The film hammers home the results of the policy not just in moments like Qiong and her other sister Li’s memory of walking over a bridge to school and seeing the bodies of babies, all female, that had been abandoned to die but in a larger, and still prevalent, preference for male children, both at pregnancy and throughout their lives. What emerges is a picture of a society—or at least a section of society—that views women’s lives as almost purely transactional. There are discussions of how much the groom’s family should pay when Jin gets married, of how much families should gift when a woman gives birth to a male child rather than a female, and more besides. 

Watching Jin’s personal story is no easier. It seems clear that her abandonment has affected her both as a person generally and as a parent specifically (some of the scenes of her scolding her two-year-old son are very difficult to watch). Unsparing as Qiong’s camera is of her sister, it’s also sympathetic. She is consistently the family member noting, especially in a late conversation with their 13-year-old brother Sifan, that the situation isn’t Jin’s fault. Many of the questions she asks their brother seem a bit challenging for someone of his age to process, especially when she asks if he thinks Jin was abandoned so that he could be born; that’s a lot to put on him, but it’s a question that hangs heavy on the film and over that relationship, which despite that seems, for much of the film, the closest Jin has with any of her biological family.

For all the moments that Jin is unsympathetic, the film strives to understand the impact of how she grew up on her. She talks about the time she did spend living with her parents and her sisters as feeling “like I was a cleaner in your home”, and the way she is treated by her parents now seems defined more by financial support (an investment in a shop, which then ties her to them) than by anything emotional. Judgments and words are harsh, though to be fair this is not just towards her, at one point her father tells Sifan “you shouldn’t have been born” after he gets in trouble at school. Again though, everything that Jin’s parents are really invested in about her seems driven by money, little emotion comes through, even on her wedding day. The ending is tinged with both sadness at the fact Jin doesn’t seem to be able to find a way forward with her parents and at least a little hope at where it finds her going, and it would be nice to have an update on how she and her family are doing now.

All of Wang Qiong’s points are worthy and often devastatingly made, but it’s fair to say that all of them are made many, many times over and that by the third hour of the film it’s hard to see that she’s adding much new to the argument she’s making. This is an insightful film, and a promising debut for the young director / producer / cinematographer / editor. Next time, it might benefit her to take on fewer jobs herself, as another voice might have focused the film down a bit more, making its points land all the harder by concentrating them. There is much here that could be tightened, from reducing some of the repetitious nature of the sequences to simply trimming back some incidental shots that don’t add a lot to the narrative or the argument. I can see that there is a point to making this an exhausting watch, but after a while, it does dull the emotional punch. 

★★★

24FPS @ LFF: Les Enfants Terribles

Dir: Ahmet Necdet Cupur

Back in 2015, Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Mustang dramatised life inside a Turkish family where the wishes of the parents for their daughters overrode (or at least attempted to override) just about any agency the girls could have had for themselves. Ahmet Necdet Cupur’s documentary has more than a few things in common with Mustang, with its director going home to capture family life with his parents and younger siblings, chiefly twenty-something Mahmut and teenager Zeynep.

Mahmut and Zeynep are each constantly at odds with their parents for different reasons. Mahmut wants to leave his arranged marriage to 17-year-old Nezahat, not because of any fault on either of their parts, he simply doesn’t love her. Zeynep, on the other hand, just wants to further her education, to go to university in the nearest city and to live life on her terms rather than be bound by her parents’ traditions. All this makes for a volatile atmosphere in the house, something we see from the very start when an innocuous joke sends the siblings father into a violent rage. Throughout the film, Ahmet observes in close-up detail, but without seeming to impose himself on what he’s filming. Given that this is his family, that balance must have been challenging to find, but it means that the end result feels fair, if never dispassionate, in how it depicts everyone.

Later sequences demonstrate just how ingrained tradition is in Mahmut and Zeynep’s parents, especially when it comes to seeing women as inferior. In one of the film’s most quietly shocking sequences, Zeynep first debates then more stridently argues with her mother about why she so desperately wants to be educated, trying to get through to her that women have just as much value and should have as much choice of what they do, as men. Frustrated, she finally says “Studies or death, I’ll die if I don’t”, only for her mother to come back with “Death then”. It’s so haunting, so sad, summing up in two words the seeming impossibility of squaring their points of view. The image that closes this scene; Zeynep resting her chin in her hands, looking away as her mother prays, strikes me as the defining one of the film.

Mahumut’s problems have more ramifications for others, chiefly Nezahat, divorced at barely 18. We do see that Mahmut cares about her to some degree, at least expressing concern about her family “giving her to an old man” because she has lost her value. This, as it was in another film at the festival, is a running theme; women being valued as commodities, and there is much discussion of what will have to be paid for Mahmut to go through with the divorce.

As dark as the film can be, chinks of hope come through by the end. “I think a person is like a tree, says Zeynep, so intelligent and expressive throughout the film. You can only hope that she and Mahmut both get to put their roots down where they want to, and grow from there.

★★★★

24FPS @ LFF: See For Me

Dir: Randall Okita

Having recently gone blind, former Olympic skier Sophie (visually impaired actor Skyler Davenport) has found herself taking jobs cat-sitting for wealthy homeowners. On the first night at her latest job, the house is broken in to and Sophie has to make it through the night, with the help of Kelly (Jessica Parker Kennedy), a desk-bound army veteran who sidelines as a helper on an app called See For Me.

To begin with, See For Me plays like a pretty typical home invasion thriller, riffing on the likes of Wait Until Dark and Panic Room. The opening act capably sets out the space, even more vital here because, with Sophie unable to see, we need to understand the geography to appreciate the difficulties she’s going to face because of it. The first half-hour or so also deals with the character introductions, and in that respect, at least with Sophie herself, Adam Yorke, and Tommy Gushue’s screenplay (their first feature) distinguishes itself a little. Sophie is a more complex character than you might first expect, especially in her moral dimensions, and this leads to some pretty surprising twists, and one scene, involving a cop played by Emily Piggford, takes on much greater tension because of it. 

The mix of characters among the three criminals in is pretty typical: the tech guy who doesn’t like violence, the controlled pro, and the loose cannon, and Kelly is also quite loosely established, though her sense of responsibility to Sophie comes through strongly and at least initially there’s some spark in the relationship between her and Sophie, though that is reduced as the film goes on, and she becomes a lot more purely functional as a character. Director Randall Okita does a decent job establishing and exploiting the geography of the location. Best in this respect is a series of shots early in the break-in that use first a wide exterior and then a more claustrophobic interior to show, in single frames, where Sophie and the robbers are in relation to each other.

Unfortunately, the whole film begins to lose its way in the third act. Up until this point, Davenport has given a performance that plays interestingly with our sympathies and challenges us on whether to root for her. The last half-hour, however, ends up letting in the only truly bad performance in the movie. The script piles on too many twists, and eventually loses credibility in story terms and, more damagingly, in terms of what we believe Sophie would be able to do with the level of visual impairment the film says she has. A tacked-on coda suggests something I simply don’t believe, before wrapping up on a twee note that doesn’t really fit the film, dragging it further down just before the credits roll. It’s a pity because there are things to enjoy here, but a solidly tense first hour ends up deflating by the end.

★★½

24FPS @ LFF: Cop Secret

Dir: Hannes Thór Halldórsson

Not all filmmakers have always been in cinema. Some come from visual art, others from criticism, still others from completely different areas, but I have to say, a film directed by the goalkeeper for the Icelandic national football team isn’t something I saw coming. Nor, if I’d thought about it, would I necessarily have expected that film to be a spoof of 80s and 90s buddy cop actioners.

Cop Secret is, in the tradition of the best spoofs, a loving homage to the genre it’s riffing on. You’ve got the rival cops who have to become partners. In this case that’s loose canon Bussi (Auðunn Blöndal) and wealthy former model Hörður (Egill Einarsson). You’ve got the flamboyant villain with the diabolical plan; Björn Hlynur Haraldsson as Rikki and you’ve got supporting players like the boss who communicates almost entirely by shouting. The plot is drawn together from bits and pieces of earlier films, notably Die Hard With a Vengeance and Lethal Weapon, among others. The twist here, aside from the general absurdity, is that Bussi and Hörður are not just partners as cops, drawn together, they end up in a relationship. It’s important to note that, while Bussi has to come to terms with his sexuality, the fact of this relationship is never played for laughs. The film is absolutely sex-positive, embracing the sexuality of its characters without question. This isn’t to say that there isn’t fun to be had with their attraction, especially at the moment in the middle of a gunfight when the two brush hands; the first moment of electricity between them.

The performances are all entertaining, the whole cast going for the tone, but Björn Hlynur Haraldsson has a wonderful time as Rikki. He speaks almost entirely in English, which gives his performance the feel of a slightly low rent direct to video bad guy, offset by the fact his attempts at menacing dialogue become ever more convoluted, to the point that even his henchmen barely know what he’s saying. He also plays on villain clichés. When he threatens one henchman another reminds him that he can’t just start killing people “oh, just this one?”, comes the reply.

The action scenes, despite some terrible CGI, are a lot of fun, especially the kinetic car chase that opens the film (and which has a great gag midway through) and the aforementioned bank shootout. Unfortunately, that comes midway through, and the third act doesn’t quite have anything to match it. The parody may keep the bad guy’s plot from mattering too much, but given that this isn’t quite pitched at Naked Gun levels of silliness, it’s a shame it doesn’t engage a bit more on that level. Still, Cop Secret is a knowingly and mostly winningly ridiculous good time.

★★★½

24FPS @ LFF: Martin and the Magical Forest

Dir: Petr Oukropec

10-year-old Martin (Sebastian Pöthe) is a town kid who is packed off to a forest-based summer camp that he’s less than excited to be going to. Uninterested in joining in with the team games, and constantly complaining, he soon alienates most of the other kids. However, the sprites that live in the forest need some of the items he’s brought with him to cast a spell that might save them from a drilling crew looking for minerals. Martin’s price is their help so his team can win the camp’s series of challenges.

I sometimes worry that we’re not doing enough to grow the next generation of cinephiles, raising them on a limited diet when there is a world of kid’s cinema out there, and the LFF’s family strand is always a good way to throw the net a little wider. This Czech film is squarely pitched at an audience of its main character’s age, but it doesn’t talk down to them in terms of the environmental issues, nor by assuming that it needs fart jokes to keep a young crowd engaged. 

The magical world of the forest is something the film highlights from the very start. We see it in the beauty of the setting, but more to the point in the creatures that appear from the very first time Martin steps foot in the forest. Initially the sprites like him about as much as he does them; pine cones throw themselves onto his head and vines trip him up, but we also see that they have a side that can come to people’s aid, flying Martin back to the campsite when he’s tried to leave or helping him win the various challenges.

 

The methods used to realise the creatures are a little tough to discern. There may be animatronics in use because the sprites are very present within the frame and have a slight staccato effect to their movement, but if they are CGI then it is exemplary work. The creatures are expressive and fun to look at, with several developing personalities. One moment, when a stick Martin has been trying to get an arrow back from gets run over and ‘bleeds’ sap is surprisingly affecting as an image, even though we’ve never seen that creature before. It’s an effective way to teach kids a healthy respect for nature, but it’s never cloying or overly preachy.

Most of the kids other than Martin and Foxie (a winning Josefína Krycnerová), a fairy-tale loving 8-year-old who believes in the sprites but has never seen one, aren’t especially well-defined. The adults fall into two categories: the counselors, only one of whom, who measures chemicals in the local water and talks about being ready for a catastrophic event, is particularly notable and the drillers, personified by a couple in their 30s. On the one hand, it’s refreshing that the drillers aren’t simply shown as monsters who can’t wait to destroy the forest (remember Ferngully’s smoke-belching bulldozers), but on the other hand, they don’t otherwise have a great deal of personality.

The stakes and morals are pretty simple, as is the solution of the ending, but Martin and the Magical Forest should be a fun time for its intended audience, and it’s hard to argue with any of what it's trying to teach them about respect for nature and finding common ground with other kids. For adults, there’s some lovely imagery and the chance to watch something a little different from the usual kids movie fare. It’s slight, but a charming and fun time.

★★★

24FPS @ LFF 2021: Inexorable

Dir: Fabrice Du Welz

Adoration, Fabrice Du Welz’ last film, which played at LFF in 2019, was basically Junior Badlands, with two twelve-year-olds on the run from a mental hospital. It’s still only had a digital release in the UK, and remains something of an underseen gem. If that film had a single obvious influence, then Inexorable is much more of a patchwork, drawing plot points and images from a lot of entries in the yuppies in peril subgenre, among others.

Marcel (Benoît Poelvoorde), his wife Jeanne (Mélanie Doutey), and their young daughter Lucie (Janaina Halloy) have just moved back into the massive estate owned by Jeanne’s family. When a young woman named Gloria (Alba Gaïa Bellugi) brings their daughter’s new dog back after he has run off, and offers to show Lucie how to train him, the family soon offers her a job as a nanny/maid. However, it quickly becomes clear that Gloria is not just a fan of Marcel’s successful novel, Inexorable, but that she may have a fixation on it and him, which begins to manifest in manipulative ways.

Like many of the films it draws on, much of Inexorable unfolds like a home invasion thriller in slow motion. Gloria’s assault on the family is not one of sudden violence, but of nurtured obsession and festering resentment. It’s a mix that Alba Gaïa Bellugi plays effectively. The first moment there is a flicker of a crack in her mask is especially good; it’s a tiny bit of nervousness that passes across her face when she’s asked about a bit of her background, visible enough for it to register for us, but fleeting enough that we buy Marcel and Jeanne failing to recognise it. The performance, driven by the necessity of the screenplay, gets broader throughout, but Bellugi comes up to meet the tone rather than overplaying.

Poelvoorde, Doutey and Halloy are all good too, and a believably imperfect family unit. Poelvoorde’s blocked author (an early drone shot has shades of The Shining as it tracks the car on the way to the dusty stately home they are moving into) is obviously at first intrigued by and perhaps too easy-going with the attractive young woman who is now in his home, but from his lies to cover an indiscretion to his hiding of parts of his life, it becomes clear that he’s largely driven by self-preservation. Doutey has perhaps the least rounded character here, too often she’s written a little overly spiky, and early on there’s a naïveté in the way she takes Gloria in (and especially her reaction to Gloria’s first real manipulation) that never seems especially credible from the rest of her performance, but these too are largely script issues.

Du Welz doesn’t just wear his influences out in the open, from Chabrol to Barbet Schroder and from Hitchcock to (if I didn’t misread a certain point) Park Chan-wook, he displays them proudly. Sometimes, as in a stylish shot of Marcel throwing Gloria out of his (stationary) car, one side bathed in blood-red light, the other in vivid blue, in what one could take for a fleeting giallo homage, it works in his favour. When his plot points bear if not direct then certainly considerable comparison to the likes of La Ceremonie and the criminally underrated The Page Turner, those influences hang heavy on the film. That said, Du Welz and the cast successfully draw out the tension. The single location where the bulk of the film takes place may be expansive, but the lighting and the blocking, particularly as Gloria begins to draw Marcel in, help to shrink that space and eventually make the dynamic between the three adult characters fairly claustrophobic.

Inexorable isn’t a bad film. The issue is more that it’s never as good as the sum of its influences promises. The performances are capable, it’s got some thrills and some tension, but you’ll always know where it's going, and you’ll know because you’ve seen its moves done better before. An engaging homage, then, but not one that can sit alongside the best of its predecessors.

★★★

24FPS @ LFF 2021: Preview Part 2

 

Belle [Official Competition]

For the second part of our preview of the 2021 London Film Festival I'm (still) joined by Liam McLeod (still of HeyUGuys and others), this time to discuss some of the bigger hitters of the programme, as we delve into the Competition and Gala strands. 

A Cop Movie [Documentary Competition]

24FPS @ LFF 2021: Preview Part 1

Dashcam [Cult]

The London Film Festival is back at full strength, and as a full scale physical event, for 2021. In the first part of our preview of the festival, I'm joined by Liam McLeod (of HeyUGuys and others) to break down the festival's themed strands. For each, we each choose one film that we're excited about to recommend and discuss.

The Crossing [Journey]