Sight & Sound - April 2024

Feature films are nearly always fated to be behind their times. Given how long it takes to write a script, to finance it, to shoot and release a new work, even those titles that aspire to be urgently about their immediate moment risk looking like last year’s news – especially now that social media has accelerated our sense of what the current actually means. We are a long way from the age when the latest films by Godard or Fassbinder, say, could seem like hot-off-the-press bulletins on a changing world. An exception is the current work of Romanian director Radu Jude, one of the few contemporary directors whose films genuinely have that breaking-news vividness. His latest film Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World – its title from an aphorism by Polish writer Stanisław Jerzy Lec – analyses the malaises of the working life in digital-era Romania. Its heroine, Angela (Ilinca Manolache), is a struggling production assistant employed by a company that is about to shoot a work safety video for an Austrian multinational. The film follows Angela driving round Bucharest to audition people who have suffered industrial accidents; we eventually see the video being shot in the excruciatingly comic 35-minute sequence that closes the film. Angela’s frenzied working day (shot in black and white) is punctuated by her pauses (in colour) to record Instagram clips in which she plays the part of a boorish male named Bobita, using filters to superimpose a bald head and stubble on herself. In this guise she spews out virulently offensive sexist and racist rants. “I satirise by way of caricature – I’m like Charlie Hebdo,” Angela insists, referring to the French satirical magazine, although we also sense that she is hooked on her troll identity and the thrill of ‘saying the unsayable’ – to use a culture-war motto that has been comprehensively pilloried by comedian Stewart Lee. While engaging with our digital decade – Instagram, TikTok, a hallucinatory use of Zoom conferences – Jude also makes connections with Romania’s past. The film’s first section, a title card tells us, is a ‘conversation’ with a 1981 feature by Lucian Bratu: Angela Moves On, a Ceaușescu-era drama about a Bucharest taxi driver played by Dorina Lazar, who also appears in Jude’s present-day drama. Threaded throughout Do Not Expect… extracts from Bratu’s film establish Romanian director Radu Jude’s viciously barbed latest work Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World offers a piercing satire for our times, one that takes aim at work alienation, the toxic world of social media, the state of the image economy and the normalisation of hate culture BY JONATHAN ROMNEY LEFT Radu Jude BELOW Ilinca Manolache as Angela in Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World parallels and differences between two Angelas, two Romanias. Add to this Jude’s first use of an international name – German star Nina Hoss, playing an Austrian executive called Doris Goethe – and a cameo by notorious pulp auteur Uwe Boll as himself. The result is a vertiginously provocative satire of our times – of work alienation, the state of the image economy and the normalisation of hate culture. The film is very much of a piece with Jude’s last film, the 2021 Golden Bear winner in Berlin – the scabrous Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn. Revolving around a hapless teacher’s leaked sex tape, it was 100 per cent of its moment: with its characters wearing protective masks, it was shot during the lockdown of 2020 and premiered during that of early 2021. These films consolidate Jude’s status as the most innovative and shapeshifting of contemporary directors, and a consistent outlier in Romanian cinema. His early films, such as 2009 debut The Happiest Girl in the World, were in the realist mode he shared with Romanian New Wave contemporaries like Cristian Mungiu, Cristi Puiu and Corneliu Porumboiu. But he headed in radically different directions with aesthetically polished period dramas Aferim! (2015) and Scarred Hearts (2016), then investigated Romanian history in archive films including documentary The Dead Nation (2017), and in metafictional drama I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018). Talking with me from Bucharest, Jude discussed Do Not Expect… and its place in his work. 51 RADU JUDE PORTRAIT: VLAD VDK/CONTOUR BY GETTY IMAGES

Jonathan Romney: Both in Bad Luck Banging and in Do Not Expect…, you’re practising a certain kind of provocation. Angela says some horrifying things in her guise as ‘Bobita’, but we feel that she’s not just satirising – it’s as if she’s become addicted to the role. Radu Jude: It’s absolutely true. The actress, Ilinca Manolache, created this crazy dirty avatar during the lockdown. She was heavily criticised by some people, saying, “You’re an actress, you shouldn’t do such a vulgar thing,” and she said, “But I’m doing it to caricature toxic masculinity.” This is the thing with caricature, it’s always on the edge. The art of caricature means to exaggerate something in order to demolish it, but, of course, it’s not a direct critique, it’s kind of oblique. I said to her, “But Ilinca, it’s obvious you love to do it!” Bobita presents himself at one point as a pal of Andrew Tate. Tate has set up camp in Romania – how do people feel about him there? When Ilinca created this character, she didn’t know about Andrew Tate – me neither. I found out about him because three or four years ago, my older son, who’s now 18 and a half, became very interested in him. I got a bit scared for him; thank God, he now seems to be over it. When we shot the film, it was not a big thing – Tate became a topic a little bit later, when he was arrested in Romania. So it was just a coincidence – I even like to tell Ilinca that she invented Andrew Tate, he’s her creation. In this film, you use social media – Tik Tok, Instagram, et cetera – as well as lots of adverts, as you did in Bad Luck Banging. These are films very much about now, in a very immediate, Godardian way. I made a few films about history. I always thought that those are not about the past but about the connection between the past and the present. Thinking about the past paradoxically made me more aware of the feeling of history in the present time. I feel that my recent films are like historical films of the present. We know from Walter Benjamin that sometimes it’s not the big events that capture a moment, sometimes it’s the garbage of a culture. So I’m trying to capture the flux of the times through these smaller things. I noticed that sometimes when filmmakers make contemporary films, they don’t want to let the specifics of that time or place in the film. Many Romanian films made during the pandemic made big efforts to get rid of the masks that were mandatory – to place the story in a kind of eternal present. But I’m interested in capturing what is specific. For Bad Luck Banging, everyone said, “You cannot make a film with masks.” I said, “But this is how we’re living, I want to capture that.” When Angela talks about working 16-hour days, it seems clear that people really are routinely doing that in her business. Not only in her business, and this is a problem that is not being addressed. Our law is exactly like in EU countries – a certain number of working hours and then you should be paid overtime. But in cinema, television, advertising, this is not at all my experience. Some time ago, a camera assistant died after 48 hours of continuous work because he had two contracts to work on commercials – each of them was 24 hours, so he did one after another and died of a heart attack. There is a myth of work in cinema. You can read the memoirs of people like Werner Herzog, or read how Apocalypse Now [1979] was shot, or D.W. Griffith’s Way Down East [1920]. This gives a feeling of heroism around cinema. I’m not totally against it – it makes cinema exciting because it’s organised in a different way. But then you realise that actually this is because the only ones who get to speak are the actors or the directors or the producers – nobody asks the prop man or the electrician, the garbage man or the cleaning lady. The people that Angela auditions – are they non-professionals, and have they actually suffered industrial accidents? Absolutely. The main guy, Ovidiu [Pîrșan], had a car crash while he was working in Greece. And one was a construction worker and fell. He didn’t wear any helmet or equipment. This is something that you see very often on Romanian construction sites, workers without equipment. Tell me about the 1981 film Angela Moves On. Why did you choose it? Lucian Bratu was an interesting director, who was Godardian in a way, ‘Sometimes it’s not the big events that capture a moment, sometimes it’s the garbage of a culture. So I’m trying to capture the flux of the times through these smaller things’ ABOVE Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World

in the 60s and 70s. He made some modernist films at the time and, in some cases, he paid for that. But in his last years, he was more and more lazy. When I saw this film a few years ago, it felt like a lazy film to do for a salary, with a progressive theme of a woman driving, a love story, et cetera. Then, when I decided to make this film, I saw it again for research and discovered that actually the film is quite subversive for the era, it’s full of details that were not supposed to be there: people waiting in line for food, poor clothes, these kinds of things, which he captured by shooting cinéma vérité. Your film features a sort of human objet trouvé, German filmmaker Uwe Boll. It’s a bit like those Godard films where characters interact with real people, like Samuel Fuller or Jean-Pierre Melville. In this case, it’s Doctor Uwe Boll. That’s how he signs his emails. I’ve never seen any of his films but they’re supposed to be very bad. But from what I’ve read, it seems you rather admire him. Well, we can consider his films bad or we can like them or we can be indifferent to them, this is up to each of us. I was impressed in a certain way. There was this petition against him, signed by many critics, that he should stop making films. He challenged some of them to a boxing match and some of them went and he smashed them. I thought, someone who has such a resilience to go on after so many people tell him to stop is a model for me. And by making many films, it becomes a bigger work, an oeuvre – in itself it becomes interesting, it becomes a corpus of documents in a certain way. Because my film is about the construction of images, I thought about these foreign films shot in Romania. I used to work as assistant for many of them – some good European interesting ones, like Amen [2022] by Costa-Gavras, some complete Z-movies. Uwe Boll’s name popped up. I wrote him an email and in five minutes he answered: yes, he would be interested. He came and we improvised the scene. I don’t know how he is as a filmmaker, but as an actor, he’s really gifted. Your end credits list quotes that you have used from the likes of Don DeLillo and Slavoj Žižek – but you also list TikTok, Instagram et cetera, as if they’re equally important. You’ve said that TikTok is something we should take seriously as cinema. Yes. I know all the pitfalls and all the dangers of these platforms, I know that they are tools for spying on us, tools for disseminating toxic ideologies, they are very dangerous in many ways. But they exist, and if you pay attention to them, then you see that there is some energy, there are possibilities of representation, and cinema is not at this level. The platform [TikTok] gathers things from all over the world. I don’t only see Romania, but China and other places – it’s a way of representing the world which is not accessible to cinema. Do Not Expect… harks back to your first film The Happiest Girl in the World, about a Romanian family’s experience of a television shoot, because it’s similarly about ordinary people being screwed over by the media. ‘I know all the pitfalls and all the dangers of social media platforms like TikTok. But if you pay attention to them, then you see that there is some energy, there are possibilities of representation, and cinema is not at this level’ BELOW Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021) RADU JUDE 53

Absolutely, and I tried to emphasise that connection by casting some of the people who were in that film. My focus there was more on family issues, and the way that they are affected by this media of new capitalism. Romania was a Communist dictatorship, it was a terrible dictatorship and a very poor country. By embracing free market capitalism, a certain prosperity was created, for sure. At the same time, I think that Romania is the most neoliberal country in the European Union. A capitalism with more social protection, more social care or whatever, would have been much more beneficial. You and your contemporaries in the Romanian New Wave started out with a similar aesthetic of unvarnished realism, but then went in different directions. You were probably the first to go somewhere completely different when you made your 19thcentury rural drama Aferim!. This brutal realism was a common thing because, first of all, it was cheaper. Then I had to invent a little bit, to explore other directions, and I discovered I very much like to do that. I’m less and less interested in quality. [The way] cinema is organised in schools, or as an industry, there’s an obsession with quality – to do things you have to learn how to do quality things. In other arts, it’s more about other things like novelty, and I think this is more or less lacking in cinema. Cinema can learn from musicians or from painting. I’m much more interested in trying to find something new, at least new for me or for Romania. Both in fiction and in documentaries like The Dead Nation, you have addressed Romania’s past and a national history of antisemitism – but also a denial of the past. In Do Not Expect… we hear people expressing hatred towards Roma people, and the production company says, “Don’t put them in the video, it turns viewers off.” So you’re suggesting that on one hand, bigotry is everywhere, but on the other, you’re not supposed to say it exists. I made a string of films about these dark parts of the Romanian past, including the participation in the Holocaust and the rise of antisemitism and racism. Back then, I didn’t even realise that I was on to something. Now, looking back, it was like I was fishing in a lake. I am from a generation that discovered these things, the first generation that came to maturity after the Revolution – I was 13 in 1989. You can see the connection to some of the problems of today – they’re still there, still lurking. For instance, during the pandemic and a few years before, the same rhetoric was used – antisemitic rhetoric towards George Soros, or [prejudice] against LGBT people in the shameful referendum [on the definition of the family] we had in 2018. There’s a line, a joke about Romania being “screwed in the ass”. You seem to suggest that Romania’s national self-image is not very healthy at the moment. It’s true that it’s one of the traits of Romanians – during Ceaușescu’s time and even before, in the 19th century, you can find traces of that laughing about our miseries. This sharp humour has a name, bășcălie, a deprecating humour about everything. On one hand, I think it’s healthy, it shows a kind of collective spirit that you can laugh about everything, and I’d like to explore this dimension. On the other hand, I can understand that a lot of serious people say that the disaster of Romania is this stupid sense of humour that makes us not develop, and makes us able to destroy each other with this thing. You’ve got a number of new projects in the works. I’m finishing two montage films – one is called Eight Postcards from Utopia, about [1990s and early 2000s] advertisements as documents. Then I made a homage to Andy Warhol, called Sleep Number Two, but I won’t tell you what it’s about. And I’m preparing two films. One is a Dracula film – it’s about trying to make a Dracula film, with a lot of digressions. And I want to do a moral or ‘issue’ film about the relation between individuals and the big property developers. You have the feeling these people are running Romania, destroying parks and green space and building in terrible ways – against the law, actually. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is released in UK cinemas on 8 March and is reviewed on page 72 ‘I made a string of films about these dark parts of the Romanian past, including the Holocaust and the rise of antisemitism and racism. Back then, I didn’t even realise I was on to something. Now, looking back, it was like I was fishing in a lake’ BELOW Radu Jude’s Aferim! (2015) 54 RADU JUDE

shooting inspirations How the untapped ingenuity of silent cinema, the bold simplicity of Andy Warhol’s technique and Steven Soderbergh’s neat editing trick helped bring Radu Jude’s latest film to life TOP Terence Stamp in Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey (1999) ABOVE Louis Lumière’s Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895) RIGHT Andy Warhol SILENT CINEMA “I am very much interested in the Lumières’ and Edison’s films, early cinema and what is called ‘primitive cinema’, because there you discover some potentialities which were never realised. This is why my film has only fixed shots, with one exception. And, of course, the final scene is a kind of quotation of the Lumière brothers.” ANDY WARHOL “Warhol became more and more important for me as a filmmaker because of his acceptance of accidents. A film like Vinyl [1965], which is a kind of adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, was very important for me. And also his attitude. Cinema is plagued by people who either complain all the time, or try to make things difficult for themselves. Warhol always said [words to the effect of ], “Cinema is so easy. You just have a camera, you push the button, the camera rolls by itself and then there’s the film.” I tried to see the reality of cinema like that, in this lighter way.” ANGELA MOVES ON & THE LIMEY “I had Lucian Bratu’s Angela Moves On in mind for a possible remake at some point. Then little by little I realised I was doing this remake already. I wanted to pay homage to this film by putting Dorina Lazar and László Miske, the main actors, in a scene where Angela meets them, and that was supposed to be it. Then I remembered Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey [1999], where he uses flashbacks to Terence Stamp’s character in Poor Cow [1967] by Ken Loach. I thought maybe I could do something like Soderbergh and incorporate a flashback at one moment. Then I thought, ‘But why only that?’” ‘Cinema is plagued by people who either complain all the time, or try to make things difficult for themselves’ IMAGES: SHUTTERSTOCK (2); BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE (1)

Maestro, Bradley Cooper’s film about composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein, is a bold and beautiful biopic that has been highly praised but also pelted with its share of criticism. Of course, that’s true of almost every film daring to deal with the most abstract of the arts, ‘classical’ music. From the beginning, cinema has explored the stories of musicians – real and fictional – struggling to balance their troubled lives with the demands of composition as well as performance. At the same time, the classical repertoire has been constantly exploited to underscore emotion and provide atmosphere in films. But the questions persist, how far does one artform successfully enhance another, and how accurately is the world of classical musicians portrayed? For the sake of argument, let’s say ‘classical’ refers broadly to rigorously composed pieces from the last four centuries that are mainly performed in the concert hall – except as we now live firmly in the age of mechanical reproduction, such music is more often heard through ever-changing recorded formats, radio and television broadcasts, the internet… and film soundtracks. Maestro deploys Bernstein’s compositions throughout with considerable finesse, including his one movie score, and a brilliant one at that, for Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954). It swings in early in the film, bursting with the youthful energy of one of the 20th century’s most significant musical figures. The title Maestro undeniably evokes the antiquated aura of an egomaniacal figure on the podium holding power over a cowering orchestra. Cooper’s film, however, is more engaged with Bernstein’s conflict between devotion to his wife – the Chilean-born actor Felicia Montealegre, exceptionally played by Carey Mulligan – and his homosexual desires (a better title might be ‘When Lenny Met Felicia’ or even – as a nod to Cooper’s first film as an actor-director – ‘A Star Is Torn’). Some have bewailed the exclusion of significant aspects of Bernstein’s multifaceted life, how he educated a generation of Americans in the ‘classics’ and played a part in radical politics, all while generating Broadway musicals and reaching the heights with his fabulous score for West Side Story. Cooper and Mulligan brilliantly embody the charisma of a golden couple in harmony and discord through a scary fug of cigarette smoke. (While many conductors are still active into their 80s and even 90s, Bernstein died comparatively young, aged 72, in 1990.) But, as director and co-writer, Cooper opts to avoid most of the usual stuff of biopics, such as childhood trauma or the birth pangs of masterpieces. And as he’s said in his defence, there is so much of ‘Lenny’ already recorded on film and tape, from his lectures to his major symphony cycles – what would be the point of emulating that? If Bernstein had a rival in the field of filmed performances, it would have to be the Austrian-born conductor Herbert von Karajan, who also made countless recordings of the core orchestral repertoire and sought ways to have his ‘maestro’ persona immortalised on celluloid. He initiated this project by collaborating with director Henri-Georges Clouzot, making films of both rehearsals and performances. But if the overtly emotional Bernstein sought to entice and seduce his audiences like an exuberant schoolteacher, Karajan preferred to play god in his aloofness and majestic talent. Surprisingly, they were reasonably amicable, even if they seem so opposed – Bernstein, Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, which explores the life and loves of Leonard Bernstein, joins a rich tradition of cinematic portraits of composers. David Thompson picks up the baton to examine how convincingly the world of classical music has been portrayed on the big screen ORCHESTRAL MANOEUVRES IN THE DARK 59

never shy to proclaim his Jewish heritage, liked to refer in private to his counterpart as “my first Nazi”. So far, it seems unlikely a biopic of Karajan will appear, but then a life of manic perfectionism is not so well suited – notwithstanding his penchant for driving fast cars and flying jets – to a genre that prefers to wallow in personal defect. On that subject, there’s a cute piece of archive of Karajan relaxing during a recording session and cracking a rare joke. He recalls a conversation with conductor Karl Böhm, whose actor son Karlheinz (the protagonist of Michael Powell’s 1960 film Peeping Tom) was about to take on the role of Beethoven. “He has an empathy that’s simply enormous,” bragged the proud father. “He’s been busy with Beethoven for three weeks and he’s becoming hard of hearing.” The composer’s deafness is poignantly covered in Bernard Rose’s Immortal Beloved (1994), which starred Gary Oldman as Beethoven and dared to suggest a solution to the mystery of his devotion to a woman known only as his ‘immortal beloved’. Oldman’s evident skill as a pianist helps create a fair impression of a social outsider whose only real happiness is when poised over a keyboard. Rose’s script deploys the structure of a Citizen Kane-like investigation, and while it almost certainly overplays Beethoven’s sex life, it makes good use of the music (most of it his ‘greatest hits’) and – via shots of the composer as a boy running through the woods and floating in a lake at night reflecting a starry sky – dares to imagine a persuasively pantheistic response to the glories of the Choral Symphony. By his own admission, Rose was following the path of self-styled supremo of the composer biopic, Ken Russell. When Russell joined BBC television in the early 1960s to make arts documentaries, the rule was never to represent a composer with an actor. It’s one he cleverly broke in stages. First, Prokofiev’s hands; then, Elgar observed from a distance; and finally his crowning achievement, Song of Summer (1968), on the syphilis-ridden Delius, which was entirely scripted drama. On the big screen, Russell’s inventions became far more extravagant: in Mahler (1974), he shifted gears between a basic reality and overt fantasy sequences, but in Lisztomania (1975) he went full throttle with the concept of the 19th-century piano virtuoso as a very 20th-century rock star (a parallel that’s rarely convincing, the 2022 portrait of composer Joseph Bologne Chevalier being a painful example). Russell wasn’t interested in showing the hard slog of scribbling scores and repeating phrases ad nauseam on the piano, but preferred to explore his own imaginary take on what was going on inside creative minds. This raises the question of whether a director’s visual vocabulary can possibly match the heights of abstraction to be found in pure music. I’d suggest that the beloved Elgar and Delius films apart, the most successful of Russell’s portraits were two collaborations with Melvyn Bragg: The Debussy Film (made for the BBC in 1965), which indulged the device of a film within a film as actors assemble on location, and The Music Lovers (1971), a fairly riotous collection of scenes from the troubled life of Tchaikovsky. In the latter, Richard Chamberlain played the composer, and fortunately (like Oldman) was a keen pianist who could look convincing pounding the keys, while the conflict between his secret homosexuality and a disastrous marriage to a starstruck young woman (played by a fearless Glenda Jackson) allowed for a fair quota of outrageous, highly speculative scenes. While in the 60s a Soviet super-production on Tchaikovsky’s life studiously avoided any suggestion of the composer being gay, the most recent film on this subject, Kirill Serebrennikov’s Tchaikovsky’s Wife (2022), showed no such reticence, exploring similar territory to Russell’s film but with nothing like the flair or even joy. Little is really known about the sad figure of Antonina Miliukova, but Serebrennikov offers no insight into why she thought she might change the composer’s ways other than sheer delusion. Furthermore, he hardly allows us to hear any of the music, making nothing of the obvious parallel with Tchaikovsky’s opera about a thwarted love, Eugene Onegin, which he was composing at this time. Such direct connections between life and art were always part of Russell’s scheme, even if at times he seems not to take that much pleasure in the music itself. In The Music Lovers, the sweet lyricism of the First Piano Concerto’s slow movement is matched to over-the-top slowmotion images of blissful feelings; perhaps Russell was taking a pot shot at Bo Widerberg’s once-famous Elvira Madigan (1967), with its pastoral romps accompanied by limpid Mozart. Ken Russell wasn’t interested in showing the hard slog of scribbling scores and repeating phrases ad nauseam on the piano, but preferred to explore his own take on what was going on inside creative minds PREVIOUS PAGE Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein in Maestro BELOW Richard Chamberlain as Tchaikovsky in Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers (1971) OPPOSITE Roger Daltrey as Franz Liszt in Russell’s Lisztomania (1975) 60 CLASSICAL MUSIC ON SCREEN

I f biopics of composers mostly deal with those who led dramatically charged lives, then it’s hardly surprising that clocking in with over 30 screen appearances is Frédéric Chopin. Since he poured out memorable melodies, was devoted to the piano and generally composed in short-form, he is obviously ideal for a winning soundtrack, but what of his life? In sum, Chopin was a Polish exile who made Paris his main home, had a long relationship with the novelist Georges Sand (infamous for her penchant for smoking and wearing men’s clothes) and coughed his way to an early grave. In Charles Vidor’s A Song to Remember (1945), the Hollywood machine took a handful of real characters and events, threw them up in the air and simply reinvented everything, including giving Chopin a deep commitment to Polish nationalism (well, this was the end of World War II). The film’s chief merit was employing José Iturbi to play the music while Cornel Wilde (physically quite unlike the composer himself) made a brave effort to look like a keyboard virtuoso (this presumably impressed enough people to win him an Oscar nomination). A by-product of the film’s extravagance was that a scene in which Chopin is revealed to be playing by the light of candelabra inspired Liberace to make it his trademark. Subsequently, the consumptive composer turned up in the guise of floppy-haired Hugh Grant in James Lapine’s Impromptu (1991), in which Judy Davis as Sand has a ball attempting to seduce him at a country house party – again, all pure fiction – before whipping him off to Majorca. At least this time we are spared blood on the piano keys. Andrzej Żuławski’s The Blue Note (1991) is also set mainly at a country house gathering, but this one did actually happen, with Sand, the author Turgenev and singer Pauline Viardot all present. Żuławski’s high-voltage direction will not be for all tastes, but he clearly felt his way into the story as a Pole abroad himself, and boldly cast a real Polish pianist as Chopin playing live on an instrument true to the composer’s time. Looking back, we should be grateful to the Golden Age of Hollywood for at least introducing classical composers to a greater public. By comparison, though, Maestro is a rare instance of a film that largely sticks to the facts (having living relations around no doubt helps). After souping up Chopin, Vidor applied the same treatment to Liszt in Song Without End (1960), casting an unenthusiastic Dirk Bogarde. At least William Dieterle tried to be more accurate in his biopic of Wagner, Magic Fire (1955), and Alan Badel as the composer gives some suggestion of high intelligence. But Brahms and the Schumanns received the sudsy treatment in Song of Love (1947), which concludes with Brahms (Robert Walker) and Clara Schumann (Katharine Hepburn) attending the premiere of his First Symphony, but deciding they should walk out after a few minutes to discuss their deep if unrealisable love. Only in the movies. Not that anything much has been done to protect the private lives of composers from a good story. Miloš Forman’s Oscargarlanded Amadeus (1984), based on Peter Shaffer’s hit play, is stirringly directed and acted, but its premise (courtesy of Pushkin, so around for at least two centuries) that Salieri’s envy of the young genius Mozart would lead to murder is far removed from the history of their rather respectful relationship. Even Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s austere The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968), which includes extended scenes of performances of J.S. Bach by notable musicians in period costume, uses a fictional diary to bind the elements together. When it comes to outstanding players, those subject to cruel issues of health still dominate as movie characters, the most obvious examples being Shine (1996) and Hilary and Jackie (1998). Both films exploit the delirious nature of the music we hear – Rachmaninov and Elgar – to underscore mental and physical torment. With greater freedom to invent, Todd Field’s Tár (2022) plunged into the rarefied world of classical musicians and asked some complex questions about reputation in the age of toxic social media. Dazzlingly incarnated by Cate Blanchett, Lydia Tár is a fictional conductor-composer figure along the lines of Bernstein, but in this case a woman whose seductive self-assurance leads to her downfall. She exists alongside genuine artists, present and past; the chief setting is Berlin and the renowned conductors Wilhelm Furtwängler, Karajan and Claudio Abbado are constantly evoked, even if their orchestra is never spoken of as the real ‘Philharmoniker’. Tár name-checks other women in a field for centuries totally dominated by men, including Marin Alsop – who happens to be a lesbian like Tár and a genuine protégé of Bernstein’s. Responding to the film, Alsop fairly pointed out that it was a shame that just as the gender imbalance is slowly being corrected, a female conductor is shown as a sexual predator along the lines of recent cases involving men (James Levine and Charles Dutoit are cited). The film never reveals the full extent of Tár’s misdeeds, if in fact they happened as charged, while its exposure of abuse in the hierarchical world of musicians is no special revelation on the big screen; Deception (1946), starring Paul Henreid and Bette Davis, also covered dark territory in the persona of a cruel conductor. But is the musical side of these films convincing? Frankly, any suggestion that GOING FOR BAROQUE Jean-Pierre Melville began a trend when he employed Bach and Vivaldi on his soundtrack in Les Enfants terribles (1950). The clear harmonies and strict rhythms of music from the 17th and early 18th centuries make a direct and uncomplicated impact on the ear, and are less likely than the works of romantic and modernist composers to conflict with what is on the screen. But key baroque hits have too often been chosen to add ‘instant spirituality’ to movies (the obvious equivalent in contemporary music being used this way is the holy minimalism of Arvo Pärt). Time for a rest? 1. BACH: CHORALE PRELUDE, ‘ICH RUF ZU DIR, HERR JESU CHRIST’ Tarkovsky placed this haunting refrain throughout Solaris (1972), then it was heard in the final scene of Ida (2013) and – rather bizarrely – badly played on a piano at the close of Return to Seoul (2022). 2. PURCELL: KING ARTHUR – ‘THE COLD SONG’ Movingly but sparingly used by Pialat – in a version by ‘art rock’ countertenor Klaus Nomi – for À nos amours (1983), the aria also popped up in Ridley Scott’s Napoleon (2023), but strangely in a scene depicting springtime. 3. VIVALDI: NISI DOMINUS – CUM DEDERIT A beautiful vocal piece that unexpectedly lifted the Bond film Spectre (2015). Vivaldi wrote around 500 concertos, but only a handful turn up in films, most commonly ‘The Four Seasons’. But why was it featured in performance in Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)? By the end of the 18th century, when that film was set, Vivaldi was hardly played – his big revival began well into the 20th century. 4. ALBINONI: ADAGIO IN G MINOR Probably not by Albinoni at all, but the melody has proved indelible – it felt wonderfully plangent in Welles’s The Trial (1962), but when it was larded over the crucial scene of the fire in Manchester by the Sea (2016), it almost ruined a film until then devoid of false rhetoric. 5. PACHELBEL: CANON IN D MAJOR So memorable in its simplicity, this ‘baroque pop’ was quietly effective in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), rather less so in Clouds of Sils Maria (2014). 61 IMAGES: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE

Blanchett – or Cooper – would be up to conducting a professional concert should be taken with a very large dose of salt. Both have been well coached, but watch carefully and all too often their vague gestures show them following the orchestra, not leading them forward. Much has been made of the long section in Maestro when Cooper as Bernstein conducts the finale of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony in Ely Cathedral, a real event that was filmed (I recall watching with awe the original transmission on television) and so is available for comparison. Yes, Cooper conveys Lenny’s emotional commitment when it comes to facial contortions and the occasional leap. But there are often too many beats in the bar, and unlike with Bernstein – who, for all his exhibitionist tendencies, had a very clear baton technique – I believe most performers would be lost as to when to play or sing if they tried to follow Cooper. At least in Tár and Maestro the conductor is shown to have an individuality and personal style, a long cry from the cliché of a stiff-backed martinet in tails. In those terms, Yul Brynner is suitably commanding in Once More, with Feeling (1960), even if he’s mostly required just to beat a firm two in the bar. Very impressive is Rex Harrison in Preston Sturges’ Unfaithfully Yours (1948), in which an eminent maestro (supposedly inspired by Sir Thomas Beecham) imagines ways to murder his wife, whom he believes to be adulterous. Nul points definitely go to John Gielgud as an old master in Andrzej Wajda’s The Conductor (1980). Gielgud was famously not that attuned to the joys of the classics (the story goes that once, while directing Mozart’s Don Giovanni and trying to correct the movements of the chorus, he became annoyed when the orchestra played on, shouting, “Oh, do stop that dreadful music!”). Here his gestures supposedly driving his players along in Beethoven’s Fifth are so limp and out of time as to make one wonder how he became at all eminent. Pity then the director faced with an actor unsuitably cast in such a role. Douglas Sirk had no choice with a very stiff Rossano Brazzi in Interlude (1957), later commenting: “Brazzi was not exactly a born conductor… I had to spend more time cutting on that picture than any other that I made.” Happily when the same story (roughly) was remade by Kevin Billington, again as Interlude (1968), Oskar Werner as the conductor showed himself to be an actor who was genuinely musical (the film itself is a lost gem, a romantic drama with a smart script and subtle performances). But having a real musician act in a film is not always a solution. The flamboyant conductor Leopold Stokowski introduced vast numbers of people to classical works through Disney’s animation spectacular Fantasia (1940); today it’s mostly remembered for Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, though personally I always cherish the balletic hippo soaring through the air in ‘Dance of the Hours’. Alas, when Stokowski was cast as himself with Deanna Durbin in One Hundred Men and a Girl (1937), he proved to be an uncomfortable screen presence. More recently, Teodor Currentzis acted the lead in Dau (2019), a mysterious over-reaching film ‘event’ that appears to have vanished from sight. Tár solved the other major problem – making non-musicians look like convincing players of their instruments – by casting a talented performer and actor as the young cellist who draws Blanchett’s eye. Playing a stringed instrument is a particular challenge to fake, the usual giveaway being the absence of any gesture suggesting vibrato on the fingerboard (Rudolf Nureyev was a particular offender as a ‘virtuoso’ in Exposed, 1983). Hollywood usually solved this problem by employing alternative arms and hands to play the instrument while the star looked deeply moved. This worked well for John Garfield in Humoresque (1946); his bow was actually controlled by the brilliant violinist Isaac Stern. In Tár and Maestro the conductor is shown to have an individuality and personal style, a long cry from the cliché of a stiff-backed martinet in tails BELOW Cate Blanchett in Todd Field’s Tár 62

B razenly melodramatic, Humoresque included the iconic screen image of Joan Crawford wandering to her watery death in the sea to the ‘Liebestod ’ from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. Through the history of cinema, this piece has been used – frankly, over-used – to signify overwhelming passion and erotic submission. In the beginning, it was a perfect match: think of how Luis Buñuel exploited this in both Un chien andalou (1929) and L’Âge d’or (1930), with the latter featuring a live performance which moves its conductor so much he is compelled to stop and stagger away. Buñuel couldn’t resist returning to the piece in later films, and it’s also proved popular with a vast range of directors. The first time I ever heard the ‘Liebestod ’ was when I saw a clip – a scene of mutual suicide – from Patriotism (1966), the only film to be directed by the controversial Japanese author Mishima Yukio, which was included in a television news report the night of his death. Often the irrefutable potency of classical music has threatened to make a film more memorable than the rest of its parts. As used in Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971), the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony became the sound of tragic mortality (both Tár and Maestro use it to emphasise passionate love, which was arguably its original message). The wistfulness of Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto cannot now be separated from the impossible romance of Brief Encounter (1946), even though it was subsequently used in a more ironic way in Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch (1955). Personally, I am always grateful when an unexpected music choice makes a perfect fit, and there are directors who have excelled in this respect: Stanley Kubrick, Terrence Malick, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Walerian Borowczyk, Robert Bresson and Ingmar Bergman. Others, alas, only seem to hear music when it is used in films and therefore just repeat the same pieces over and over. I’ll refrain from making direct accusations. One special pleasure came from hearing the Czech composer Leoš Janáček used throughout Philip Kaufman’s 1988 adaptation of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (the author actually suggested which works and in which recordings). That film was edited by Walter Murch, who commented recently With the coming of sound, the ‘film composer’ was born, and they are still very much with us – is there any silence on the soundtracks of superhero movies? (on BBC Radio 3’s Private Passions) how music and film form the perfect marriage, and that to him, “Beethoven was one of the fathers of cinema” because he broke away from music as architecture and choreography “to be inspired by nature, which is very changeable and conflicted”. Back in 1908, the highly esteemed SaintSaëns (of Carnival of the Animals fame) was one of the first established composers to be commissioned to write a score for the cinema. With the coming of sound, the ‘film composer’ was born, and they are still very much with us (is there any silence on the soundtracks of superhero movies?). Nevertheless, and not just for financial reasons, classical pieces constantly recur on soundtracks, and the lives of creators and performers will continue to provide subject matter for the screen. On the horizon is a biopic of the controversial Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache, to be played by John Malkovich. Celibidache loved to spout abstruse theories of sound, held endless rehearsals to achieve perfect balance, refused to make recordings and favoured very slow tempi. I’m not sure there was so much drama in his private life. Now there’s a challenge. Maestro is on Netflix now and was reviewed in our Winter issue CLASSICAL MUSIC ON SCREEN 63

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) Such a range of styles and periods – the weightlessness of The Blue Danube waltz for spinning space stations, the seeming cacophony of voices in Ligeti’s Requiem for deep mystery – but the opening sunrise from Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra takes the prize (and became synonymous with space travel). KUBRICK’S classical odyssey It all began with a ‘temporary’ soundtrack that Stanley Kubrick assembled for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Although film composer Alex North was brought in to provide new music to match the classical old, the director made the right choice to stick with the unexpected. The rest, of course, is history. A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971) Anthony Burgess’s novel cried out for Beethoven – his hero Alex’s favourite composer, whose music at first inspires him to acts of violence but after his rehabilitation makes him feel sick. Kubrick added Rossini overtures for spice, though best of all was the Moog synthesiser rendering Purcell’s Funeral Music weirdly sinister. BARRY LYNDON (1975) A Handel sarabande was cleverly adapted throughout, as a stately march and then resounding throughout an agonising duel. But although strictly speaking music out of period, it was the pathos of Schubert’s Second Piano Trio that we all remember. THE SHINING (1980) If Penderecki, with his measured blasts of orchestral frenzy, provided the obvious horror, Bartók’s eerie Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta was truly unsettling. Behind-the-scenes footage shows that Kubrick liked to play his chosen tracks on set to establish the atmosphere. EYES WIDE SHUT (1999) A delicious ironic waltz from Shostakovich set the tone, but Ligeti’s nagging Musica ricercata – hard repeated notes on the piano – hit the spot when it came to invoking the impossible terror of a dream state. 2001 has such a range of styles and periods – from The Blue Danube waltz for spinning space stations to Ligeti’s Requiem for deep mystery 64 IMAGES: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE CLASSICAL MUSIC ON SCREEN

ADVERTISING FEATURE Screenwriters Advice By Andrew Zinnes and Genevieve Jolliffe, Bloomsbury Academic, 376pp, paperback, £24.99, 9781501363276 This book looks at the most important part of the fi lmmaking process from the point of view of those who grind away at a keyboard or notepad trying to bring new ideas and perspectives to an increasingly diversifi ed world. Using The Guerilla Film Makers Handbook's tried and true Q&A style, with selected screenwriters, creating an engaging and easily digestible conversational feel, this book chronicles story theory, formatting, business issues and the creative process itself. Whether you're a seasoned scribe or an inexperienced writer, this book will give you perspectives and tips to get your creative juices fl owing and make your story happen. www.bloomsbury.com A Guide to Postclassical Narration The Future of Film Storytelling By Eleftheria Thanouli, Bloomsbury Academic, 288pp, paperback, £28.99, 9781501393075 A concise and comprehensive overview of the creative norms of the post-classical mode of narration. With dozens of cases studies and hundreds of colour stills from fi lms across the globe, this book provides the defi nitive account of post-classical storytelling and its techniques. After surfacing in auteur fi lms in varied production milieus in the 1990s, the post-classical options continued to gain ground throughout the 2000s and 2010s, gradually fertilizing several mainstream productions in Hollywood. From Lars von Trier's Europa (1991) to Zack Snyder's Army of the Dead (2021) and Baz Luhrmann's Elvis (2022), the post-classical narration has shown not only impressive resilience but also tremendous creativity in transforming its key formal principles, such as fragmented and multi-thread plotlines, hypermediated realism, parody, graphic frame construction, complex chronology, and intense selfconsciousness. www.bloomsbury.com Multi-Camera Cinematography and Production Camera, Lighting, and Other Production Aspects for Multiple Camera Image Capture By David Landau and Bruce Finn, Bloomsbury Academic, 248pp, paperback, £24.99, 9781501374647 This book is written for anyone wanting to fi lm, direct or produce multiple camera productions. Lighting Directors, Directors of Photography, Camera Operators as well as Directors, Producers and Production Managers will all fi nd valuable information that will help them do their job and accomplish their goals of effectively fi lming with more than one camera at the same time. It is also meant to give insight and inspiration to those starting out their professional careers in multi-camera productions. The book covers advice for producing and fi lming content using two or more cameras in many genres including Sitcom, Stand-up, News, Talk Show, Interview, Reality, Corporate Video and Indie Movies, with budgets both big and small, by two award winning professional industry professionals. www.bloomsbury.com World Cinema On Demand Global Film Cultures in the Era of Online Distribution Edited by Stefano Baschiera and Alexander Fisher, Bloomsbury Academic, 232pp, paperback, £28.99, 9781501392399 World Cinema on Demand brings together diverse contributions by leading fi lm and media scholars to examine world cinema's dialogue with the transformations that took place during 2010-2014, engaging directly with ongoing debates surrounding national cinema, transnational identity, and cultural globalisation, as well as ideas about genre, fandom and cinephilia. Chapters look at individual national patterns of online distribution, engaging with archives, SVODS and torrent communities, and investigate the cross-cultural presence of world cinema in non-domestic online markets. The collection maps the impact of different online formats of distribution in the understanding of world cinema, underlining the links between distribution and media provisions as well as engaging with new forms of intermediation. www.bloomsbury.com

98 BOOKS Action heroes of the 70s and 80s, from Sylvester Stallone to Steven Seagal, and the raptures of Todd Haynes 96 WIDER SCREEN London’s Polish film festival, Kinoteka, comes of age; and Andrew Kötting and his daughter Eden, one-time star of his films, take their art on the road R V W S E I E 88 DVD & BLU-RAY Showing Up, Goodbye & Amen, The Man Who Had Power over Women, Roobarb, Dazed and Confused, Jinnah, Impossible Object, The Roaring Twenties, Black Tight Killers, Canadian label Black Zero and more 68 FILMS The Delinquents, The Teachers’ Lounge, Robot Dreams, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Monster, Disco Boy, Copa 71, Drive-Away Dolls, The New Boy, Silver Haze, The Origin of Evil, The Settlers, Memory and more

BANK IMBALANCE Franco de la Puente as Toni, Laura Paredes as Laura, Germán De Silva as Del Toro, Lalo Rotavería as Isnardi, Iair Said as Barrientos, Mariana Chaud as Marianela, Esteban Bigliardi as Román No matter how clever the movie gets, it never feels like the work of a calculating mastermind. Rather, Moreno’s gestures towards the uncanny feel more like an olive branch extended on behalf of a more open kind of cinema The Delinquents ARGENTINA/LUXEMBOURG/BRAZIL/GERMANY/ MEXICO/ITALY/CHILE/USA 2023 CERTIFICATE 12A  189M 31S DIRECTOR RODRIGO MORENO PRODUCER EZEQUIEL BOROVINSKY WRITTEN BY RODRIGO MORENO CINEMATOGRAPHY ALEJO MAGLIO INÉS DUACASTELLA EDITING MANUEL FERRARI NICOLÁS GOLDBART RODRIGO MORENO ART DIRECTION GONZALO DELGADO LAURA CALIGIURI COSTUME DESIGN FLORA CALIGIURI CAST DANIEL ELÍAS ESTEBAN BIGLIARDI MARGARITA MOLFINO GERMÁN DE SILVA SYNOPSIS Buenos Aires. Bank teller Morán steals $650,000 from his workplace and invites his co-worker Román to hold the money while he serves out his sentence. But things don’t go according to plan, and Román falls in with a crowd of strangers who reroute his future trajectory even as they intersect with Morán’s past. REVIEWED BY ADAM NAYMAN Some criminals act on impulse, but Morán (Daniel Elías), the protagonist (or is he?) of Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents, is playing the long game. Comfortably ensconced in a job as a bank teller in Buenos Aires, Morán does his job with a quiet efficiency that belies ulterior motives. One day, behind his co-workers’ backs – but in full view of the branch’s surveillance camera – our mild-mannered hero stuffs approximately half a million dollars into a duffel bag and ducks out. Morán’s impending arrest is a fait accompli: getting caught red-handed is part of the plan. His scheme is to face the music while secretly stashing the money with a trustworthy – but superficially unconnected – co-worker, who’ll promise to keep shtum about the loot in the meantime. Factoring in good behaviour, Morán is looking at three years and change behind bars, which isn’t much when measured against the score of a lifetime; once he’s out, he’ll split the loot with his accomplice, effectively liberating both men from a system that would otherwise keep them on the clock through the best years of their lives. As a shortcut to an early retirement, Morán’s scheme is ingenious, but its daring is tinged with a desultory sense of realism, as if explicitly acknowledging the impossibility – so familiar from the movies – of a clean getaway. He’s leaving a lot to chance and the fact that his chosen confederate is named Román (Esteban Bigliardi), who is introduced wearing a neck brace that draws attention to his fragility, hints at some kind of fateful symmetry beyond his control. The name game registers immediately as a bit of absurdist embroidery à la Nabokov, or, given the Argentinian setting, Borges; an alternative title for Moreno’s film could be The Garden of Forking Paths. Or maybe The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths. Certainly, The Delinquents means to be more than a heist picture: running a deliberately distended three hours – with plenty of screen time given over to delays, detours, and drawn-out dissolves – Moreno’s first dramatic feature since Mysterious World in 2011 is structured and paced like an existential epic, complete with a superlatively curated soundtrack of blues, jazz and tango numbers that deepen the sense 68FILMS

Q&A Rodrigo Moreno DIRECTOR BY KATIE MCCABE Q Many of your characters’ names are anagrams of one another: Morán, Román, Norma. What was the thinking behind that? A It started as a game, you know, a playful thing, because the film has a strong link with an old film from the 1940s [Hardly a Criminal, by Hugo Fregonese]. In that film, the protagonist is called Moran. It’s not a remake, but I wanted to [highlight] that source so I kept the name… Later I decided to go far from that source. So I split the character in two. After that, everything became a fable. Q In one scene Morán quotes the poem ‘The Great Salt Flats’ by Ricardo Zelarayán while in prison. Was that something you had to fight to keep in? A It was easy for me to defend that decision because from the very beginning, I explained that this film has to confront the idea of ‘useful’ time against ‘useless’ time… Poetry is totally useless for capitalism. So it’s kind of a provocation… I think [the producers] understood it was the essence of the film… Maybe they hate that scene! I don’t know. Q Do you feel your film taps into an unhappiness that a lot of Argentinians may be feeling now? A Yeah… I’ve been making this film since 2018. So when I started… I never ever imagined that this guy [Javier] Milei was going to be elected as president… The curious thing is that my film talks about freedom, and the main word in Milei’s speech [at World Economic Forum] is freedom. But of course, he speaks about the freedom of companies, which has nothing to do with the freedom of people… So, it was unexpected, the way the film began to have this dialogue with this new electoral reality… A film can take on new meanings when it’s ready. of drift. The deepest cut, which keeps popping up at crucial moments, has the title ‘Adonde está la libertad ’ – “Where is the freedom?” – a question that the film poses on a level of form as well as theme. Although it’s divided into two parts, The Delinquents has a shape-shifting structure which doesn’t so much delineate between the characters and their respective narratives as map them along a similar (and uncanny) continuum. So even though Part One is focused primarily on Morán – whose incarceration is harsher than he expected – it’s also partially preoccupied with Román’s status as an accomplice; and while the second part follows Román on a journey out of the city, it doesn’t exactly leave Morán behind. In interviews, Moreno, who at 51 is a generational peer of both Lisandro Alonso and Lucrecia Martel but with a more tenuous sense of festival-circuit traction, has cited the 1949 Argentinian film Hardly a Criminal, directed by Hugo Fregonese en route to Hollywood, as a narrative and conceptual influence. In that film, the gambler hiding his ill- gotten gains is shocked to find the money gone after he’s been granted parole; supposedly James Mason was so impressed by the film’s hardbitten fatalism that he recruited Fregonese to direct the Mexico-set One Way Street (1950). In adapting the material, Moreno has left behind only the faintest tint of noir; the tone is closer to the magic-realist drift of his countryman Mariano Llinás, but instead of trying to cram in as many storylines as possible, The Delinquents exults in the spaces between plot points. In lieu of narrative incidents, the film offers a dizzying pile-up of visual and verbal cues and clues, including a deadpan doubling of supporting roles in which Morán’s prison-yard rival is played by the same actor as his bank supervisor (Germán de Silva), drawing a parallel between very different kinds of authoritarian nastiness. Such two-for-one gambits are all but begging to be decoded along symbolic or sociological lines: ditto the film’s centrepiece sequence, which technically belongs in the second part but functions more as a self-contained idyll. Or maybe a daydream: stumbling through the hills of Córdoba, Román encounters two young women and a male documentary filmmaker whose names are, respectively, Norma (Margarita Molfino), Morna (Cecilia Rainero) and Ramón (Javier Zoro). These anagrammatic doppelgangers are welcoming and seductive; as it turns out, they’re also acquainted with Morán. The significance of this coincidence is never underlined, which of course makes it all the more beguiling. If co-conspirators and ostensible ‘delinquents’ Morán and Román represent two sides of the same tarnished coin, are the additional characters meant to further complicate the question of identity? Is their featured film shoot a meta-commentary on Moreno’s own cinematic practice? Or does their languid, sun-dappled group-hang, rendered by cinematographers Inés Duacastella and Alejo Maglio as a series of fleshy, paradisiacal tableaux, merely oblige us to abandon rational inquiry all together? For many directors, questions like these might be gauntlets to be dropped in front – or on top – of the audience. Moreno has a gentler sensibility, however: no matter how clever the movie gets, it never feels like the work of a calculating mastermind. Rather, his gestures towards the uncanny feel more like an olive branch extended, freely and sincerely, on behalf of a more open kind of cinema, one that prizes freedom above all else. (It also helps that certain passages are extremely funny: there’s a deadpan quality to some of the dialogue that suggests a rarefied form of sketch comedy). If you’re able to make peace with The Delinquents’ wry, slow-moving inscrutability – and the possibility that its loose ends will be left dangling in the breeze – the reward is considerable. It gives us the rare experience of watching a movie where it truly feels like anything is possible. In UK cinemas from 22 March 69 FILMS

The Teachers’ Lounge GERMANY 2002 CERTIFICATE 12A 98M 35S DIRECTOR ILKER ÇATAK PRODUCER INGO FLIESS SCREENPLAY JOHANNES DUNCKER ILKER ÇATAK CINEMATOGRAPHY JUDITH KAUFMANN EDITOR GESA JÄGER PRODUCTION DESIGN ZAZIE KNEPPER MUSIC MARVIN MILLER COSTUME DESIGN CHRISTIAN RÖHRS CAST LEONIE BENESCH LEONARD STETTNISCH EVA LÖBAU SYNOPSIS A spate of thefts at a secondary school has led to suspicion and accusations among staff and students. When teacher Carla Nowak captures the culprit on video, the tension escalates. As a mutiny builds in her class, her colleagues turn on her and parents accuse her of losing control, Carla fights to re-establish a balance. REVIEWED BY CATHERINE WHEATLEY Ilker Çatak’s The Teachers’ Lounge falls into a category of films best described as ‘everyday thrillers’. Recently we’ve had Boiling Point (2021) and Full Time (2022), but the tradition stretches back at least as far as Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948). These are films in which characters fight not for their lives but for their livelihoods: desperately working to keep their jobs, their families and their integrity intact. Leonie Benesch is terrific here as Carla Nowak, an idealistic young teacher frightened of her own courage and overwhelmed by the snowballing events that a moment of exasperation has set in motion. Frustrated by her colleagues’ ham-fisted handling of a spate of petty thefts, Carla takes matters into her own hands by setting a trap and secretly filming the culprit in the act. But the thief turns out to be a much-loved member of the school community, and Carla’s video is a possible act of entrapment, violating human rights policy. The headteacher involves the police, and the unfortunate situation metastasises horribly. Soon Carla is contending with a backlash from students, staff and parents, and every time she opens her mouth she seems to make things worse. Russet-haired and pale-lashed, with dark, darting eyes, Benesch bears a resemblance to the young Isabelle Huppert, and shares her ability to walk a line between imperiousness and anxiety. There are shades here, too, of Cate Blanchett’s Lydia Tár: a rather on-the-nose early scene with an orchestral warm-up as soundtrack sees Carla quietening her chattering class with a regal sweep of her arms. A maths teacher, Carla likes to make the unpredictable predictable, insisting time and again on the mathematical principles of algorithm, evidence, proof. She should be in her element amid the geometrical architecture and arrangements of the school: the cuboid filing cabinets, parallel rows of desks and the lacquered floor of the sports hall, on which a perfect painted circle intersects with the lines of a grid. But her rigid shoulders and brusque, overly professional demeanour suggest she is ill at ease even before the environment becomes openly hostile. Certainly, something seems rotten about the institution from the outset. One teacher reports large quantities of pencils are missing from the stock room. Another covertly pockets change from the staffroom honesty box. A pair of children slip out of class for what might be a sneaky cigarette – or perhaps something more sinister. The school’s zero-tolerance policy is enforced by a good cop/bad cop duo of male teachers who look like something out of a 70s detective film, complete with aviator spectacles and grubby-looking stubble. It hardly seems a coincidence that their suspicions first alight on a child of immigrant parents (“You know the father’s a taxi driver?”, one sagely nods, as if that were incontrovertible proof of criminality). Carla herself was born in Poland and is understandably keen to avoid the topic of her heritage. The atmosphere is jittery, paranoid, an effect heightened by Çatak’s choice to set the entire film – with one brief exception – within the school grounds. The film is very good at evoking the glittering malevolence of children: it calls to mind Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (2009) and Laura Wandel’s Playground (2022), films that, like Çatak’s, cast the classroom as a place in which adults are outnumbered and ultimately ineffective. Perhaps the closest comparison, though, is with Maren Ade’s underseen debut The Forest for the Trees (2003), which shares a key cast member, Eva Löbau, with The Teachers’ Lounge, and paints a similarly brutal portrait of a female teacher trying and failing to assert authority at work. Where those films succeed, though, and Çatak’s does not, is in their setting out of the stakes. For Carla’s fate to matter to us, something must be in the balance, and here it’s not clear quite what that is. Since the school is understaffed as it stands, we know she’s not likely to lose her job; there’s no real threat of violence; her personal life is a closed book. There’s the suggestion that the corruption is systemic – the conspiracy goes right to the top – but the film is so busy skewering everything that it becomes unfocused, baggy. A misjudged surreal sequence undercuts an otherwise rigorous realist aesthetic, and the closing shot is a non sequitur. It’s just possible these elements are deliberately intended to undercut Carla’s own commitment to making order out of chaos, suggesting that humanity lies in the loose ends that can’t be neatly tied up. Unfortunately, it’s the audience who are left with a sense of unfinished business. In UK cinemas from 12 April CLASS WARFARE Leonie Benesch as Carla 70FILMS

Robot Dreams SPAIN/FRANCE 2023 CERTIFICATE PG 102M 29S DIRECTOR PABLO BERGER ANIMATION DIRECTOR BENOÎT FEROUMONT PRODUCERS IBON CORMENZANA IGNASI ESTAPÉ SANDA TAPIA DIAZ PABLO BERGER ÁNGEL DURÁNDEZ WRITTEN BY PABLO BERGER BASED ON THE NOVEL BY SARA VARON EDITOR FERNANDO FRANCO ART DIRECTOR JOSÉ LUIS ÁGREDA MUSIC ALFONSO DE VILALLONGA SYNOPSIS A lonely dog living in New York purchases a robot companion and they bond immediately. After an accident leaves the robot stranded out of reach on a beach, the pair must adjust to life apart. As the months pass, they find it hard to forget one another. REVIEWED BY ALEX DUDOK DE WIT Do androids dream of electric sheep? Not in this film. Here, the robot of the title dreams of New York sidewalks and other robots and sunflowers who tap-dance in a Busby Berkeley-style routine; but mostly it dreams of its companion, an anthropomorphic dog it has been separated from and yearns to see again. The film opens in an East Village apartment, where our melancholic pooch with a paunch is playing Pong by himself. Responding to an ad, Dog – the characters have no personal names – mail-orders a robot companion who, once assembled, brims with childlike naivety and goodnatured exuberance. Their first scenes together play out like a series of early dates: a trip on a row boat, a night in with The Wizard of Oz (1939), roller-skating in Central Park to Earth, Wind & Fire’s ‘September’ (a song that will resurface as a plot device). Whether this is a friendship or a romance isn’t the point; what matters is that they care for one another, and indeed that Robot is capable of caring like a living creature. This blossoming comes abruptly to a stop after a misadventure leaves Robot paralysed and stranded on a fenced-off beach. Powerless to rescue it, Dog returns to a life of solitude in the city. From here, the film takes on a more episodic rhythm, each season bringing new experiences to Dog and new visitors to Robot’s spot on the beach. But their bond endures in dreams, depicted in surreal sequences – electric sheep wouldn’t be entirely out of place – that reveal the characters’ attachment to one another and shared fear of abandonment. We see more of Robot’s dreams: poignantly, these are forever remixing the limited experiences it has had in its short life. The very fact that it can have dreams is perhaps the best proof that Robot is alive. Not a word is spoken in the f ilm. Writer-director Pablo Berger did something similar with Blancanieves (2012), his delightfully melodramatic live-action retelling of Snow White, but that was a pastiche of silent cinema, complete with intertitles. Here, he takes his cue from his source, Sara Varon’s graphic novel, also dialogue-free. The effect is to make the relationship between the protagonists, who already lack the particulars of human appearance, even more universal. Although this is Berger’s first foray into animation, he directs with confidence. Characters and backgrounds are all clean lines and simple colour fills, and the schematic designs allow for some nice visual puns: in one sweet scene, Robot helps teach a hatchling bird to fly by arching and flapping the line of its mouth in imitation of wings. Fast, snappy editing propels the narrative. Shots are framed dynamically, ranging from close-ups that convey thoughts in the absence of words to extreme high-angle long shots, which emphasise Dog’s and Robot’s solitude. New York teems with a menagerie of animals – a busking octopus, a sunbathing proboscis monkey – amid which, once again, Dog often appears isolated. We could read a bleaker story into the film’s premise, about a modern urban capitalist society atomised into lonely individuals who are then sold products to dull their anguish. But Robot Dreams doesn’t take a social perspective; almost no other character seems lonely like Dog is. In contrast to Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) or Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Klara and the Sun (2021), the film isn’t interested in Robot as an example of advanced artificial intelligence, nor in the implications its existence might have for society. It is set in the 1980s, when the fantasy of wholly unthreatening AI was perhaps still plausible. Ultimately, Robot Dreams is a story about how swiftly and lastingly a bond of affection can mark a life, in which the protagonists just happen not to look human. The film strikes a very particular tone. It is easy to follow and entertaining in a way that speaks to children, but the emotions it deals with are adult ones. It riffs on romcom, sci-fi and horror tropes, and even plays with the cinematic frame in a surprising meta moment, but wears its references lightly, and is free of the irony and wisecracking that saturate so many family-oriented (and indeed adult) films today. Wistfulness hangs in the air. The film is not effusive – nobody cries – but it is touching, especially as it approaches its unexpected ending. I loved it for that. In UK cinemas from 22 March HI, ROBOT Robot Dreams 7 1 FILMS

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World ROMANIA/LUXEMBOURG/FRANCE/ CROATIA/SWITZERLAND/UK 2023 CERTIFICATE 18 163M 30S DIRECTOR RADU JUDE PRODUCERS ADA SOLOMON ADRIAN SITARU WRITTEN BY RADU JUDE CINEMATOGRAPHY MARIUS PANDURU EDITOR CĂTĂLIN CRISTUȚIU PRODUCTION DESIGN CRISTIAN NICULESCU ANDREEA POPA MUSIC JURA FERINA PAVAO MIHOLJEVIĆ COSTUME DESIGN RADU JUDE CAST ILINCA MANOLACHE OVIDIU PÎRȘAN DORINA LAZĂR SYNOPSIS Angela, an overworked production assistant who makes toxic social media videos in her downtime, drives around Bucharest to audition accident victims for an Austrian corporation’s safety-at-work video. The firm selects wheelchair user Ovidiu, whose mother is real-life actor Dorina Lazar: she is seen in extracts playing the taxi driver protagonist of Angela Moves On (1981). REVIEWED BY SAM WIGLEY In simple terms, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is about the day-today graft of a video production runner in contemporary Bucharest. Angela (Ilinca Manolache) calls herself a PA, but – on a zero-hours contract – she’s really a kind of fixer or factotum or dogsbody, currently working with a corporation that’s making a safety-at-work video. For much of Radu Jude’s sprawling black comedy, the camera is placed in the front seat of her Fiat, shooting in high-contrast black and white as she negotiates choked-up traffic to run errands around the city. She’s ‘auditioning’ a succession of workplace accident victims to appear as the video’s main case study. Exhausted from working 16-hour days, continually on the move, she often struggles to stay awake at the wheel, but still has a barrelling, over-caffeinated energy for the tasks at hand. She finds a release valve for her pent-up bile and frustration making Instagram and TikTok videos in the hateful guise of her avatar Bobita, an Andrew Tate-style influencer. “It’s criticism by way of extreme caricature,” she claims, comparing her methods to Charlie Hebdo and using a glitchy social media filter to transform herself into a raging, monobrowed misogynist. There’s another Angela too – the namesake taxi driver protagonist (played by Dorina Lazar) of Lucian Bratu’s 1981 film Angela Moves On, colour footage of which Jude repeatedly intersperses with the modern-day action, often slowing the clips down to a crawl or zooming in to scrutinise the noticeably more filmic textures of the image. Shot in Communist-era Romania, these parallel episodes behind the wheel are drawn together with Jude’s own material when the ageing actor Lazar turns out to be the mother of a semiparalysed accident victim, Ovidiu (Ovidiu Pîrșan) – who eventually gets the part in the firm’s self-serving video. In this way, Jude suggestively layers identities, fact and fiction, past and present, celluloid and digital, communism and capitalism. Enlarging the fire-starting satirical scope of his recent films I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018) and Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021), his latest is a careering, curdling, misanthropic reckoning with the rubbishness of modern life – bracingly current in its references to the gig economy, the fuel crisis, Ukraine, Uber, Zoom calls, the death of Godard, the death of the Queen, and so on. Like Herman Melville cramming Moby-Dick with every conceivable thought, fact and myth about whales, Jude shows an encyclopaedic ambition in the way he pieces together his abrasive odyssey into post-pandemic existence. Perhaps that feels like a high-cultural reach, but Jude’s film is itself full of them: Angela’s nagging ‘Ode to Joy’ ringtone, the volume of Proust she keeps on her bedside table, the allusions to Ovid and Faulkner. Then there’s the fact that the head of marketing at the Austrian corporation commissioning the video (played with a clipped, lethal air by Nina Hoss) – who we first meet as a disembodied head gazing imperiously out of a fake background in what may be cinema’s most wince-making Zoom session to date – is the “grandgrand-granddaughter” of Goethe. Not just punchlines, these allusions are more of Jude’s layers – his archaeology of a society and the foundations on which our current mess has been jerry-built. In the soil under Bucharest are Angela’s own grandparents, but these graves are due to be dug up as part of a forced exhumation to make way for the expansion of a hotel complex – sacred ground no protection against the march of capital. But it will all be done “by the book”, Angela is assured. And there are more graves, dozens of them, in an interlude late in the film: after Angela tells Hoss’s character about an over-trafficked stretch of highway outside the city, Jude pauses the action for a mute, five-minute montage of the roadside grave markers – a documentary requiem for the collateral damage of a world in hyperdrive. The giving of ground. Forced compromises. These themes play out in real time in Jude’s bleakly hilarious closing sequence, a 35-minute fixed-frame tableau filmed in sharp, high-resolution colour in an industrial parking lot as the film crew attempts to finesse the messaging of Ovidiu’s testimony. The daylight dims, it starts to drizzle, and Jude drops in his most Godardian digression yet, explicitly connecting this scene of unreliable imagemaking and corporate exploitation with the Lumière brothers and the dawn of cinema itself. His film surveys our world of avatars and green screen and deepfakes and links it all back to the primal scene of workers leaving the factory. In UK cinemas from 22 March GOFER BROKE Ilinca Manolache as Angela, Dorina Lazar as herself 72FILMS

Monster CERTIFICATE 12A 126M 32S DIRECTOR HIROKAZU KOREEDA PRODUCED BY KAWAMURA GENKI YAMADA KENJI PRODUCERS BANSE MEGUMI ITO TAICHI TAGUCHI HIJIRI SCREENPLAY SAKAMOTO YūJI CINEMATOGRAPHY KONDO RYūTŌ EDITED BY HIROKAZU KOREEDA PRODUCTION DESIGN MITSUMATSU KEIKO MUSIC SAKAMOTO RYUICHI COSTUME DESIGN KUROSAWA KAZUKO CAST ANDŌ SAKURA NAGAYAMA EITA KUROKAWA SOYA SYNOPSIS When primary school pupil Minato claims his teacher Mr Hori was violent towards him in class, his single mother Saori goes to war with the school and its recently bereaved headmistress. But the full story, revolving around Minato’s intense friendship with victimised classmate Yori, is more complicated than it seems. REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE An incident of classroom misconduct – and its ramifications, both domestic and institutional – plays out from three different vantage points in Monster. ‘Perspectives’ wouldn’t quite be the right term: though each section of Koreeda Hirokazu’s elegantly folded new film leads with a different character, the action is never shown explicitly through anyone’s eyes. Reverse angles and newly adjacent, contextualising scenes shift our conception of blame and victimhood in a story that narrows from one of a hostile community to intimate, ecstatic isolation. Rashomon (1950) has been raised repeatedly by critics as a reference point since Monster premiered at Cannes last year, but it’s hardly the same. Koreeda’s film doesn’t pit contradicting stories against each other; rather, it layers accounts fraught with blind spots and psychological frailties – building a bigger picture while stressing everyone’s essential unknowability. At Cannes, Monster won the Queer Palme for the best LGBTQ+ story; it’s indicative of the film’s lithe, shimmying structure that viewers may spend the bulk of its running time mystified as to why. For Koreeda, the film marks both a homecoming – to Japanese cinema, after somewhat ungainly excursions to France (The Truth, 2019) and South Korea (Broker, 2022) – and a departure. It’s his first feature since his 1995 debut Maborosi that he hasn’t written, and while Sakamoto Yūji’s elaborately diagrammatic screenplay plays to Koreeda’s strengths with its fine-grained family drama and empathetic focus on children, its narrative switches and reversals require more opacity and emotional reticence than is customary from his filmmaking. It begins with a building ablaze on the squat skyline of a small, unspecified Japanese city; a freak rainstorm will bookend proceedings, the elements twice uncannily intervening in a story of human impulse and foible. On one floor of the burning block is a hostess bar supposedly frequented by mild-mannered primary school teacher Mr Hori (Nagayama Eita); some distance away, widowed single mother Saori (Andō Sakura, the marvellous star of Koreeda’s 2018 film Shoplifters) watches the inferno with morbid interest from her apartment balcony. Her pre-teen son Minato (Kurokawa Soya) is one of Hori’s students; his mother’s distaste for Hori’s rumoured extracurricular activities will soon factor into a tense bust-up with the school staff. The hitherto gentle Minato has become sullen and unreadable – cutting his own hair, going awol in a storm drain, jumping from his mother’s moving car. When he comes home from school with a facial injury, saying Hori is responsible, Saori reads the teacher and oddly impassive headmistress Fushimi (Tanaka Yūko) the riot act. She gets repeated deferential apologies, but no explanation; the script is sharp on how a culture of courtesy can impede candour. After 45 minutes, we rewind to the beginning, with Hori’s knowledge of classroom dynamics recalibrating our perception of Minato’s behaviour. But the teacher’s outburst that Minato is a bully – and his smaller, feyer classmate Yori (Hiiragi Hinata) his target – doesn’t ring true either: the boys are friends, perhaps chastely more, with an understanding of each other that increasingly excludes their minders. ‘Who is the monster?’ is a recurring question in Koreeda’s film, vocalised by the boys in a taunting, sing-song chant, but essentially paraphrased by adult characters keen to divide the world into villains and victims. Fushimi’s strange, affectless manner stems from the recent death of her grandchild, in which she may have been culpable; Yori’s alcoholic single father (Nakamura Shidō) may be his real abuser, implanting a ludicrous lie in the boy’s mind – that his brain was transplanted with a pig’s – which ripples maliciously through the action. Some may find this a lot of business to wade through to get to the film’s heart, crystallised in its final third: a naive, intensely pure romance of sorts between two grieving boys, exquisitely played by Hiiragi and Kurokawa. But the friction between adults’ rule-determined antagonism and the unbound emotional and imaginative expression of childhood is essential to the film’s payoff – ineffable tragedy rising into galloping, sunlit release. In UK cinemas from 15 March Q&A Koreeda Hirokazu DIRECTOR BY KATIE MCCABE Q The film has been compared to Rashomon [1950], but your approach is very different to Kurosawa’s. How do you feel about that? A I understand the comparison, but the name of the film was not often mentioned during the development of the film between screenwriter and producers, and I believe they have fundamentally different structures. Instead, Gus Van Sant’s Elephant [2003] has been brought up. But of course it is an honour to be compared to Kurosawa’s masterpiece. Q You spoke to an organisation that supports LGBTQ+ children about the relationship between the two boys in the film. What did you learn from that? A To what extent is the protagonist aware of his own sexuality? For example, does he self-identify by using the word ‘gay’, or is he at an earlier stage where he hasn’t reached that awareness? I was advised to make those points clearer, so I selected and deleted scenes and dialogues according to that advice. Q For a lot of parents, once their children are at school – a large part of their lives become unknowable. How do you feel the film explores this idea? Can cinema help us better understand the more mysterious parts of children’s worlds? A In a broad sense, I think it can help. However, before we can ‘understand’, we need to know how much we don’t know, and… we need to acknowledge that we are a threat, and sometimes a perpetrator, to the fragile and sensitive existence of children. PUPIL WILL TALK Kurokawa Soya as Minato, Andō Sakura as Saori 73 FILMS

Los Ingrávidos os Ingrávidos Tsai Ming-Liang saiMing-Liang After Hours: fterHours: Clubbing on Film lubbing on Film Jonathas de Andrade onathas deAndrade Batalha Film Centre Porto, Portugal Find out more about our programme batalhacentrodecinema.pt Collective ollective Retrospective etrospective Themed Programme hemed Programme Exhibition xhibition

Red Island FRANCE/BELGIUM/MADAGASCAR 2023 CERTIFICATE 12A 116M 32S DIRECTOR ROBIN CAMPILLO PRODUCER MARIE-ANGE LUCIANI WRITTEN BY ROBIN CAMPILLO IN COLLABORATION WITH GILLES MARCHAND SCRIPT CONSULTANT JEAN-LUC RAHARIMANANA CINEMATOGRAPHY JEANNE LAPOIRIE EDITORS ROBIN CAMPILLO STEPHANIE LEGER ANITA ROTH PRODUCTION DESIGN EMMANUELLE DUPLAY MUSIC ARNAUD REBOTINI COSTUME DESIGN ISABELLE PANNETIER CAST NADIA TERESZKIEWICZ QUIM GUTIÉRREZ CHARLIE VAUSELLE SYNOPSIS Madagascar 1971: eight-year-old Thomas Lopez lives with his family on a military base in the last years of France’s colonial presence. Shy and sensitive, Thomas watches his parent’s fraught dynamic from afar, as they confront the dissolution of their marriage and the inevitability of leaving Madagascar. REVIEWED BY GABRIELLE MARCEAU In a gorgeous sequence in Robin Campillo’s Red Island, we see a French military family settle in on the sand at the end of a beach day to watch a film. A sheet is tied to large stalks of bamboo, the projector lights up the palm trees above the screen. They are watching Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927), specifically a scene in which the conqueror is alone on a ship tossed violently in a storm; beyond the crashing waves on the screen is the pleasant stillness of the real ocean reflecting the moon. The Lopez family is watching the film in 1971, during the dying days of France’s colonial presence in Madagascar, as they all grapple with imminent return to France. It may be beautiful, but like many of the metaphors for colonialism in the film, the image is heavy-handed. Red Island is set over a decade after Madagascar became an independent state, but during this period, the French still held high-level offices and Malagasy students still learned French in schools instead of their native language. A low-ranking military man, patriarch Robert Lopez (Quim Gutiérrez) is volatile and chauvinistic, but as sensitive as his eight-year-old son Thomas (Charlie Vauselle), who he frequently calls a sissy. Most often we see the fraught dynamics of the Lopezes and their social circle from Thomas’s point of view, either through slats in a wooden box where he hides or abstracted into coloured shapes by the textured glass of the living-room door. Thomas is fascinated by his mother Colette (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) – who is afflicted with some unexplained malaise – and obsessed with the book series THE SON RIDING Charlie Vauselle as Thomas Fantômette, which chronicles the adventures of a child superheroine. Thomas’s internal world is rendered in whimsical retellings of Fantômette’s adventures, in which the heroine (Calissa Oskal-Ool) is the only real human, and the scheming adults wear inexpressive felt masks. These scenes are wonderfully executed: artificial but immersive, like you’ve just walked into the maquette of a stage production. Campillo (who directed the 2017 hit 120 BPM) spent his childhood in Madagascar, so making Thomas the focus of his portrait of the dying days of French colonialism is a natural choice. But the trope of the child escaping the turmoils of the adult world through make-believe – think The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) or Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) – is well-worn, and in the case of Red Island it becomes a way for the film to avoid adult complexity (it makes sense that Thomas doesn’t understand his mother’s dissatisfaction, but there’s no dramatic reason for the viewer not to.) Like Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, the film gestures at the chaos and violence outside the walls of the base, without ever showing it outright. But here the choice feels more perplexing than impactful – those not well-versed in French colonial history are left with too many blanks to fill. Meanwhile, intense music and menacing close-ups of the baby crocodiles the family keeps in their backyard (more metaphors!) evoke a sense of dread on which the film never quite delivers. The violence of colonialism creates more texture than tension. But right at the end, the film shifts to something more interesting by putting the focus on the Malagasy people. Thomas watches as the sad sack Bernard (Hugues Delamarlière) – whose homesick wife (Luna Carpiaux) left him to return to France – takes his Malagasy girlfriend Miangaly (Amely Rakotoarimalala) to the mess hall for an after-hours drink and dance. Bernard cries, dances with her awkwardly and passes out. While he’s asleep, Miangaly talks with one of the locals, Andry (Mitia Ralaivita), about their president’s suppression of protesters, and her distaste for her job, mildly amused and wholly unbothered by the Frenchman asleep on her lap. She describes a nightmare where parachutes cover the entire island, while sitting under a photograph of the same image, resulting in a wonderful moment where imagination and reality meet, done with a light touch and performed beautifully by Rakotoarimalala. It’s a testament to Campillo’s impressive skill as a director when he’s working in a more delicate register. Miangaly leaves the base and is swept up by some friends. They go to a demonstration, then drive through the night, singing along to a song by Mahaleo, a beloved 1970s Malagasy folk group – a lyrical portrait of life on the island persisting, all the more poignant for its normality. In UK cinemas now 75 FILMS

Disco Boy FRANCE/ITALY/BELGIUM/POLAND 2023 DIRECTOR GIACOMO ABBRUZZESE PRODUCERS LIONEL MASSOL PAULINE SEIGLAND SCREENPLAY GIACOMO ABBRUZZESE CINEMATOGRAPHY HÉLÈNE LOUVART EDITORS FABRIZIO FEDERICO ARIANE BOUKERCHE GIACOMO ABBRUZZESE PRODUCTION DESIGN ESTHER MYSIUS MUSIC VITALIC COSTUME DESIGN PAULINE JACQUARD MARINA MONGE CAST FRANZ ROGOWSKI MORR NDIAYE LAËTITIA KY SYNOPSIS Belarusian citizen Aleksei travels illegally to France where, desperate to obtain a French passport, he joins the Foreign Legion. After brutal training he is dispatched on a mission along the river Niger. A chance encounter with guerrilla Jomo binds the two men together. REVIEWED BY CARMEN GRAY Mercenaries are often considered the very embodiment of cynical unscrupulousness; but when a soldier of fortune stands to gain not just money but his freedom and a whole new identity, more complex motivations come into play – something Italian director Giacomo Abbruzzese explores in his bold, visceral, phantasmagorical feature Disco Boy. Heralding a new talent with a distinctive signature, the film brings a hellish, Faustian shimmer to its core themes of undocumented migration and exploited desperation. Franz Rogowski is haunted, intense and typically brilliant as Aleksei, a Belarusian from a small town near Vitebsk. With his friend Mikhail (Michal Balicki), he makes a break for the greater opportunities of the European Union after obtaining a three-day visa for Poland posing as a sports fan. Their goal is France, and a new life, by any means available. They dream of drinking Bordeaux together, all pleasures at their fingertips. Their journey, dodging border patrol, is treacherous, and goes drastically off plan, but they see extreme risk as the only option if they want to open doors in a world of unequal opportunity. Once in Paris, Aleksei signs up for the French Foreign Legion, which grants a residence permit and, after five years, a French passport to foreign recruits willing to follow orders and shed blood in military campaigns on behalf of the French state. But when he is one part of a troop sent to the Niger delta, the harrowing impact of his opportunism becomes ever clearer. His path crosses with that of Jomo (Morr Ndiaye), a militant in a guerrilla movement dedicated to emancipating the delta from neocolonial exploitation, as its resources are plundered with the complicity of corrupt government authorities, and locals struggle to live. This is a rain-streaked film of rich, burnished colours, psychedelic night-vision sequences and atmospheric power, which takes the unfamiliarity and fightor-flight danger of strange territory as a cue for heightened, sensorial surrealism, in the vein of Apocalypse Now (1979), as if soldiers’ minds can do little but become unhinged in the jungle. Villages blaze and oil refinery chimneys flare in a vision of multinational greed and environmental decimation. One inspired satirical scene has a news crew from Vice Media show up on the river, its young anchor exhilarated by the prospect of an edgy photo opportunity with state enemies as she tries to organise the militants for a soundbite. The men laugh with each other about playing up to the cameras as they fire their assault weapons skyward. It’s a damning vision of a neocolonialism that routinely uses such people for its own ends, even when ostensibly sympathetic to their situation. In the eyes of the French Foreign Legion – initially formed to assist France’s colonial project in Africa – Aleksei is another foreign body deemed expendable. He is known as Alex, the legion having erased his Slavic name and set about chipping away at his humanity, training him brutally to act without thinking, in order to survive. But Aleksei’s impulse to bury a violently dispatched body, from a desire to confer dignity upon the dead man, is one of several aching moments of conflicted humanity that show what is at stake in winning the right to leave the realm of illegal ghosts. Membership in the family of the legion is strictly conditional, and Aleksei increasingly questions the price. Jomo and a fellow guerrilla dream of being a croupier or a dancer in a nightclub – a disco boy. That life, a mere fantasy for most, is evoked by French music producer Vitalic’s pulsing electronic score, which infuses Disco Boy with the mood of hedonistic release that can be found on the nightclub floor for those who can afford a life of leisure. On one chaotic, hallucinatory and aggression-marred evening out on leave in Paris with a macho fellow recruit, Aleksei becomes obsessed with Manuela, a migrant dancer. She seems, to his anguished, guilt-ridden mind, to signal another chance at life – and a key to once again feeling like the dreamer he used to be. In UK cinemas from 29 March BEAU STRESSED Franz Rogowski as Aleksei 76FILMS

Football is never just football. Copa 71, an energising sports doc from James Erskine (The Battle of the Sexes, 2013) and Rachel Ramsay (and exec produced by Venus and Serena Williams), puts forward a case for the wider significance of the world’s most popular sport, using the fascinating story of the unofficial Women’s World Cup to tell a cautionary tale about the corrosive impact of institutional sexism on women’s hearts, minds and bodies. In 1971, six women’s football teams gathered in Mexico to compete for the title of world champions. The players – greeted as celebrities and stalked by paparazzi – competed in televised games in front of huge crowds. The final, which took place in front of 110,000 fans, remains the best attended women’s sports event in history. Yet this potential watershed moment has, until now, been largely forgotten. Copa 71 is Erskine and Ramsay’s attempt to correct this cultural amnesia. It takes a while to get going – framing interviews with a younger generation of footballers feel superfluous – but once the filmmakers allow the 1971 players to tell their own stories, narrating over slickly edited archive, Copa 71 becomes as gripping as any cup final. There’s plenty of inane misogyny on display in the vivid footage – the press are reassured that the player’s uniforms will be “as close as possible to hot pants” – but the astonishingly petty actions of Fifa, who objected to the tournament then used it as an excuse to systematically shut down women’s football around the world, are anything but laughable. Controversies aside, it’s the players who make it worth watching – like downto-earth Danish defender Ann Stengård, who calmly states, “I can knit and use a chainsaw… I don’t want to be put in a box.” Like 2021’s Summer of Soul, which also marshalled a rich trove of suppressed footage to reconstruct a forgotten episode from pop culture, Copa 71 is thrilling not just as a vivid work of montage, but also as an argument for reintegrating these lost chapters into our collective cultural memory. Its conclusion leaves us wondering what could have happened, in the world of sport and beyond, if women’s football had been allowed to keep growing instead of being crushed. Presumably, Copa 71 was finished before the end of the 2023 Fifa Women’s World Cup, a historic success story, but one in which the final was overshadowed by a high-ranking Spanish official’s public misconduct. Football is never just football, no matter how much women players – and their fans – wish they would just be allowed to play the bloody game. In UK cinemas from 8 March The terrific opening shot of Drift, the third feature and first English-language film from Singaporean director Anthony Chen, is an extended close-up of two footprints on a sandy beach. The waves lap inexorably closer, until the outlines disappear, washed clean by the tide. It’s an image of focused simplicity, understated ambiguity and resonance, which the rest of the film, despite its honest, compassionate intentions, struggles to match. Based on the 2013 novel A Marker to Measure Drift by Alexander Maksik, who co-wrote the screenplay with Susanne Farrell, the story rings some interesting changes on the typically assumed plight of modern refugees. Flashbacks show that Jacqueline (Cynthia Erivo) is from an affluent background, her family part of Liberia’s ruling class, and she has lived and studied in the UK. Here, too, she’s fallen in with a privileged class and has a wellto-do girlfriend, Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne); but back visiting her homeland she became embroiled in the outbreak of civil war. She uses her cut-glass English accent to deflect police suspicions on the Greek island where she has ended up. The film is at its best depicting Jacqueline’s navigation of these new surroundings. Chen keeps his camera at a slight remove, as if respecting her need for space, but close enough to show the disturbing details – stealing sugar sachets from restaurant tables for food, bedding down in coastal caves – of her life. Erivo’s near-silent performance in these scenes affectingly shows the physical toll such survival skills take, especially when inside she is stuck reliving recent horrors. And when she forms a wary connection with Alia Shawkat’s seemingly confident American tour guide Callie, it’s gratifying to watch two fine actors negotiate subtle shifts in a burgeoning, unconventional relationship. Outside these two central performances, though, Drift’s potency gradually ebbs away. The muted, repetitive present-day narrative leaves too much space to ponder frustratingly unanswered questions. Even if she’s suffering survivor guilt, why doesn’t Jacqueline use her connections to change her situation? Why is Callie’s own chequered past, undoubtedly less harrowing than Jacqueline’s, given such scant attention? At the same time, the eventual reveal of Jacqueline’s trauma, while sensitively handled, feels prosaic, almost schematic. The result is that the richer, more allusive sense that Chen, Erivo and Shawkat had evoked of existing in a state of limbo, haunted by the past, starts to fade, like footprints on a beach. In UK cinemas from 29 March It’s gratifying to watch two fine actors negotiate subtle shifts in a burgeoning, unconventional relationship DRIFT MOVING THE GOALPOSTS The England team with coach Harry Batt EXILES OF GREECE Alia Shawkat as Callie, Cynthia Erivo as Jacqueline Copa 71 UK/USA 2023 CERTIFICATE PG 89M 34S DIRECTORS RACHEL RAMSAY JAMES ERSKINE PRODUCED BY VICTORIA GREGORY JANNAT GARGI ANNA GODAS WRITTEN BY RACHEL RAMSAY JAMES ERSKINE VICTORIA GREGORY CINEMATOGRAPHY ANGELA NEIL FILM EDITORS ARTURO CALVETE MARK ROBERTS MUSIC ROB LORD SYNOPSIS In 1971, the Women’s World Cup was held in Mexico City, an unofficial football tournament which was attended by over 100,000 fans. This documentary uses archive footage and interviews with the women footballers who took part to tell the story of this forgotten chapter in sporting history. REVIEWED BY RACHEL PRONGER Drift UK/FRANCE/GREECE/USA/CHINA/SINGAPORE 2023 CERTIFICATE 15 93M 20S DIRECTOR ANTHONY CHEN PRODUCERS PETER SPEARS EMILIE GEORGES NAIMA ABED ANTHONY CHEN CYNTHIA ERIVO SOLOME WILLIAMS WRITTEN BY SUSANNE FARRELL ALEXANDER MAKSIK BASED ON THE NOVEL A MARKER TO MEASURE DRIFT BY ALEXANDER MAKSIK CINEMATOGRAPHY CRYSTEL FOURNIER EDITOR HOPING CHEN PRODUCTION DESIGN DANAI ELEFSINIOTI MUSIC RÉ OLUNUGA COSTUME DESIGN MATINA MAVRAGANNI MAYOU TRIKERIOTI CAST CYNTHIA ERIVO ALIA SHAWKAT IBRAHIMA BA SYNOPSIS Jacqueline, a young Liberian refugee, ekes out a threadbare existence on a Greek island, trying to avoid the authorities and deal with the traumatic events that landed her there. She meets Callie, an American tour guide, and they form a tentative friendship as both attempt to come to terms with their uncertain futures. REVIEWED BY LEIGH SINGER 7 7 FILMS

Elegantly staged and shot as a minimalist chamber piece, hybrid documentary Four Daughters is a Brechtian exercise, but not a merely formal one; it uses self-reflexive performance to unearth family history and exorcise shared pain. At the centre of Kaouther Ben Hania’s film is a middleaged Tunisian woman, Olfa Hamrouni, mother to four adult daughters – Eya, Tayssir, Rahma and Ghofrane. The latter two are played in their absence by actors: we hear at the start that they have disappeared. Four Daughter explores the causes of their disappearance, re-enacting the bitter history of these five women. Early on, Ben Hania foregrounds the nervous thrill of participating in the dramatisation of one’s own life. Olfa interacts with Hend Sabri, the well-known screen performer who will play her, but also ends up directing some scenes; she herself plays the older sister who intervened brutally in young Olfa’s wedding night. In a comically knowing moment, Olfa, played by Sabri, watches an old film with her husband, who denounces an actress on TV as “a total slut”; the actress is Sabri herself. There are even moments of joy, when Eya and Tayssir first meet the women playing their sisters, and when all four lounge around in relaxed intimacy, reliving a lost pre-crisis past. The sisters and their mother joke together, making light of her strictness, but we discover that Olfa, though loving and protective, has also been moralistic, repressive of her daughters’ individuality and sexuality, sometimes downright violent towards them. The girls eventually refuse to be the model daughters that Olfa expects: the older two experiment with traditional teen-rebellion styles, then opt for a more radical means of escape, embracing Islamic fundamentalism and eventually taking a decisive step that breaks up the family altogether. Though Four Daughters is itself nonjudgemental, Olfa is judged by her daughters; by Sabri, who occasionally offers stern criticisms (“You are obsessed with sin”); and above all, by herself. What emerges from this collective investigation is not only an understanding of the role of misogyny in North African culture (the subject of Ben Hania’s 2017 fiction feature Beauty and the Dogs) but, the way that women are taught to be complicit with it over generations: “I repeated everything that my mother did to me,” Olfa admits. The film ends with a freeze-frame of a fifth girl, representing the next generation – her challenging gaze leaving us to hope that Olfa is wrong when she ruefully predicts, “The curse will continue.” In UK cinemas now Ben Hania foregrounds the nervous thrill of participating in the dramatisation of one’s own life FOUR DAUGHTERS SISTER ACT Eya Chikhaoui, Nour Karoui, Ichrak Matar, Tayssir Chikhaoui Four Daughters FRANCE/TUNISIA/GERMANY/SAUDI ARABIA/CYPRUS/UK/EGYPT 2023 DIRECTOR KAOUTHER BEN HANIA PRODUCERS NADIM CHEIKHROUHA HABIB ATTIA THANASSIS KARATHANOS MARTIN HAMPEL WRITTEN BY KAOUTHER BEN HANIA CINEMATOGRAPHY FAROUK LAARIDH EDITING JEAN-CHRISTOPHE HYM KAOUTHER BEN HANIA QUTAIBA BARHAMJI ART DIRECTOR BASSEM MARZOUK MUSIC AMINE BOUHAFA COSTUMES SOUHAILA BEN MAHMOUD SYNOPSIS A docudrama that follows Olfa, a middle-aged Tunisian woman, and her younger daughters Eya and Tayssir, as they relive their troubled experience as a family. Together with Hend Sabri, playing Olfa, and three other actors, they re-enact events leading up to the departure of older daughters Rahma and Ghofane. REVIEWED BY JONATHAN ROMNEY The artistic and ethical boundaries of film production are pushed in this disconcerting docufiction by Manuel Abramovich, which follows an online porn influencer, Lalo Santos, as he ventures into pornographic acting. In a series of scenes that have the veneer of documentary – although there is in fact a script, attributed to Abramovich and two co-writers – Santos is depicted in his day job at a factory, then on set during the shooting of a porno, and finally making his own videos for OnlyFans. All the while he is seen in dismal communion with his phone, a source of misery on top of the depression he clearly suffers from, while filming pornographic material which, the film seems to suggest, may be detrimental to his sanity. Pornomelancholia actively seeks to create discomfort, by probing a series of disconnects: between sexual joy and mental anguish, public and private personas, performance and reality. A striking example of this comes when a fellow performer tells Lalo about his difficult upbringing, while blurred figures in the background have oral sex. On another occasion, Lalo is filmed thumbing through his many messages and listlessly replying to them with the horny devil emoji, his own face perfectly blank. Indeed, the film assays comedy in a few of these ironic juxtapositions, some of which feel a little preening, as when Lalo is jolted from a reverie by a porn star nakedly flopping past. The inadvertently humorous frankness of the industry is presented rather more pertly in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997), which like this film can switch suddenly into a disturbing register: in Pornomelancholia, this comes when Lalo seems to experience a mental breakdown mid-fuck, his strokes becoming ever more forceful, his expression more inscrutable. But Boogie Nights, a fiction, is vastly less compromised than Pornomelancholia, which was disavowed before its premiere by Santos, claiming in a long Twitter thread that the filmmakers took advantage of him. This outwardly alluring film – its lighting is exquisite, its handling of different media very nimble – displays an impressive command of form, and there is joy in the Mexican Revolution-queering porno at its heart (“You are annoyed, Zapata! You are furious!”). But the alleged ethical ambivalence of its production may alienate potential viewers. Now streaming on Apple TV/PeccadilloPOD PORN SACRIFICE Lalo Santos Pornomelancholia ARGENTINA/BRAZIL/FRANCE/MEXICO/THE NETHERLANDS/ GERMANY/SWITZERLAND 2022 DIRECTOR MANUEL ABRAMOVICH PRODUCER GEMA JUÁREZ ALLEN RACHEL DAISY ELLIS DAVID HURST SCREENPLAY MANUEL ABRAMOVICH FERNANDO KRAPP PÍO LONGO CINEMATOGRAPHY MANUEL ABRAMOVICH EDITING JUAN SOTO TABORDA ANA REMÓN ART DIRECTOR DUDU QUINTANILHA COSTUME DESIGN DUDU QUINTANILHA CAST LALO SANTOS DIABLO BRANDON LEY SYNOPSIS Lalo is a Mexican pornographic influencer attempting to become an actor in the world of professional porn. As he wins a role playing Emiliano Zapata in a gay take on the Mexican Revolution, Lalo sinks deeper into depression, seemingly prompted by the disjuncture between his private and public personas. REVIEWED BY CASPAR SALMON 78FILMS

in the Thatcher era (“He was into labels and stuff,” sniffs a tutor) and his creative coming out as a Central Saint Martins student, an ugly-duckling story of a repressed Gibraltar immigrant becoming, he says, a “peacock”. (You might see Galliano’s pride and fall as a parable of the New Labour years.) The gear shifts of his career are marked: his 1984 graduation show, ‘Les Incroyables’, inspired by post-revolutionary French youth (“in the top five fashion shows I’ve ever seen,” opines one critic); the 1994 shoestring ‘Black Show’ arranged by Vogue’s André Leon Talley and Anna Wintour to platform the bankrupt Galliano in Paris (“For the next ten years women went out in black slip dresses,” Wintour recalls); his hiring in 1995 by Givenchy, the first Englishman in a century to run a Parisian fashion house, and his move the next year to Dior. But it’s the inspiration the student Galliano found in Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927) that provides a visual through line and Macdonald’s main directorial flourish. High & Low continually raids Napoleon for clips, dropping them in to illustrate the beats of Galliano’s life with the satisfying neatness of puzzle pieces. What’s not spelled out is what Napoleon meant to Galliano: pure style? Self-belief? Supremacy? There’s also a cinephile wink in another borrowing, The Red Shoes (1948), co-directed by Macdonald’s grandfather Emeric Pressburger, whose infernal dance of creative devotion is used to suggest Galliano’s own blowout under the weight of success and its demons: overexposure and corporate exploitation, workaholism, drink, (prescription) drugs, isolation. The analogy captures the pathos in Galliano’s story – a man trapped by his talent for fantasy and escape. As for measuring Galliano by his offences, the film – a little like Citizen Kane (1941) – offers the audience depositions from past acquaintances. There are character clues throughout, notes of repression and recklessness and dependency, though no perfect keys. Most clearly, he had long been a nasty drunk; at his worst, he says, he was hallucinating, and he was banned from 20 London hotels. How to judge a drunk, and the hate he denies when sober? Interviewees speculate on received antisemitism, an urge to selfdestruct, the worth of his public penance. The film finds trails of damage, received and wrought. The Jewish head of Dior talks of waiting more than seven years for an apology. But before the incident, Galliano was allowed to fire his secretary for sounding the alarm about his mental health. Philippe Virgitti – whose verbal abuse by him in a cafe has been magnified while the world works through Galliano’s shame – volunteers his testimony again: his trauma shows. Marlene Dietrich’s summation in Touch of Evil (1958) seems applicable. “He was some kind of man. What does it matter what you say about people?” And when millions keep saying it? In UK cinemas from 8 March High & Low: John Galliano UK/USA/FRANCE 2023 CERTIFICATE 15 117M 5S DIRECTOR KEVIN MACDONALD PRODUCER KEVIN MACDONALD CHLOE MAMELOK CINEMATOGRAPHY DAVID HARRIMAN MAGDA KOWALCZYK PATRICK BLOSSIER NELSON HUME FILM EDITOR AVDHESH MOHLA MUSIC TOM HODGE SYNOPSIS A documentary about the fashion designer John Galliano, tracing his career from student promise to global fame at Dior, and infamy after recordings of his racist abuse of strangers were shared around the world. The film interviews Galliano himself and dozens of acquaintances and commentators, with archive film illustrations of his story, both literal and figurative. REVIEWED BY NICK BRADSHAW John Galliano is the fashion designer who should have earned a documentary for raising haute couture to a new level of daring, dazzle, refinement and esteem, but instead disgraced himself with antisemitic and other racist abuse of strangers in a Paris bar. Kevin Macdonald’s film seeks to weigh not just his lopsided life story but our value system: how do you judge someone’s accomplishments against their sins? Should we separate the art from the artist? How do we apportion power and opportunity – and responsibility and compassion? How do you atone, and who judges that? High & Low is built around an interview Galliano gave Macdonald in his Mediterranean retreat: he speaks direct to camera, eyes imploring, a deep cigarette drag following his vow of candour, though he will prove a better raconteur of his life than analyst. He doesn’t broach his motives for participation, which could be reputation or legacy management or perhaps a quest for understanding. Around that, dozens of talking heads bring testimony from across his 63 years: so many they sometimes become a cacophony, words detaching from speakers’ identities, though that gives a sense of the mass-observing lens Galliano found himself under. The film doesn’t hide the possibility that it could aid Galliano’s redemption – it’s co-produced by Vogue publisher Condé Nast, whose executives include Galliano supporters past and present, and his runway (and Brit jet-set) comrades Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell contribute. But Macdonald also consults family and former collaborators Galliano left behind, and a still-scarred victim of his abuse. And as we see, Galliano has already won a swift career reprieve – he was given the intriguing invitation to succeed the reticent founder of Maison Margiela, where he has now worked ten years. It’s a talky film, but rich in archive, too, reaching back to Galliano’s apolitical, suburban south London youth DESIGNER TROUBLE John Galliano 79 FILMS

Banel & Adama FRANCE/SENEGAL/MALI 2023 CERTIFICATE 12A 87M 6S DIRECTOR RAMATA-TOULAYE SY PRODUCERS ERIC NÉVÉ MARGAUX JUVÉNAL MAUD LECLAIR NÉVÉ SCREENPLAY RAMATA-TOULAYE SY CINEMATOGRAPHY AMINE BERRADA EDITOR VINCENT TRICON PRODUCTION DESIGN OUMAR SALL MUSIC BACHAR MAR-KHALIFÉ WARDROBE DESIGN MARIAM DIOP CAST KHADY MANE MAMADOU DIALLO BINTA RACINE SY SYNOPSIS In northern Senegal, the young couple Banel and Adama want to start a life together: Banel finds a house just outside their village, and Adama rejects the position of chief. But as the community questions the pair’s relationship and a drought suddenly strikes, Banel and Adama’s love for each other is tested. REVIEWED BY ANNABEL BAI JACKSON Banel & Adama is not just the title of this gorgeously directed film by Ramata-Toulaye Sy, but a kind of mantra, a fervent prayer. The names of two married young lovers in a remote Senegalese village, the phrase is repeatedly whispered and written by Banel, the wife – at first with the naive infatuation of adolescence, and later with the desperation of the damned. The way this desire for an absolute, elevated togetherness collides with the broader community is the substance of Sy’s wellexecuted – and Palme d’Or nominated – debut feature. The film is defined as much by visual lyricism as by the assertive performances of first-time actors Khady Mane and Mamadou Diallo, who play the couple trying to bring this faltering utterance into being. Banel (Mane) is ardent and defiant, Adama (Diallo) reticent and responsible. The pair married after the death in an accident of Banel’s first husband, Adama’s older brother Yero. Now they dig up houses at the edge of the village that have been buried right up to their roofs from a sandstorm, hoping to live together on this social margin in an ideal, curated unity. But when Adama refuses to inherit the role of chief, a fault line quietly rips through the community. It’s not melodramatic – the elders accept his decision, albeit with the forbidding warning, “Being chief is in your blood; you can’t change that” – but it’s tectonic nonetheless, causing subtle drifts and sparking latent misgivings. Fingers point more firmly at Adama when the village succumbs to a cataclysmic spell of drought, and the interrupted bloodline is blamed. Adama’s choice seems to come to bite him back on a nightmarish scale; he’s no longer burrowing into the sand to discover a new life, but to dig new graves. The film’s elemental storyline gives it the air of a parable, its dignity and authority bolstered by Sy’s epic images. When the dry spell hits, a wailing storm of birds, captured in an overhead shot, surges across the barren terrain like a rash erupting across the screen, while the excavated houses, flushed a deadly orange in a sandstorm, loom like temple gates. It’s as if the apocalypse has chosen this tiny village, otherwise tranquil and far-flung, to receive its first signs of the end. Even in her feature debut, Sy’s consummate eye for colour and composition is clear: the glowing horizon lines and sumptuous blue lakes of the first act give way to a stark, desaturated, drought-ridden palette, exquisitely rendered by Sy and her cinematographer Amine Berrada. But these formidable symbols lend themselves to a kind of monumental stasis: they unfold one by one for the viewer to be absorbed into them, to be beguiled by them, but they only haltingly come together in a proper narrative rhythm. Towards the end of the film, Sy’s stack of splendid images strains to satisfy the symbolic possibilities it set up to begin with. This narrative ambivalence is useful, however, in producing the film’s smart, inconclusive message. A simple reading would accept Banel and Adama as star-crossed lovers foiled by conservative convention. But there is no fetishising binary here between the ‘tradition’ of village customs and the ‘modernity’ of independence. The lovers do seek to escape their social constraints – Banel itches at her mother-in-law’s questions about children and domestic labour, just as Adama turns away from the prospect of becoming chief – but such is the force of Sy’s imagery that the viewer, like the villagers, falls under a superstitious spell. Maybe the drought is not a coincidence, but indeed a form of cosmic revenge; maybe this is the cost of change. It’s a brilliant example of seductive visuals complicating clean morals and narrative arcs. And the third act shrewdly diffuses the idea that we are witnessing trouble in paradise: the film discloses a violent streak in Banel, captured terrifically in Mane’s wide-eyed, roving gazes, that suggests there was perhaps no paradise in the first place. Sy has said that the film’s influences ranged from classical Greek myths, like the stories of Medea and Antigone, to the figure of the West African griot, a bardlike storyteller and singer. But if these oral traditions can sometimes flatten individual personalities into ciphers and allegories, the humane presence of Banel and Adama themselves is always powerful and apparent. Mane makes Banel’s strange descent into mania seem plausible, while Diallo vividly communicates Adama’s guilt. Their coupledom, fraught and fatalistic, is wonderfully irresistible to us, too. In UK cinemas from 15 March SHADOW OF A DROUGHT Kady Mane as Banel, Mamadou Diallo as Adama 80FILMS

THREE MORE LESBIAN ROADTRIP MOVIES BY CLARA BRADBURY-RANCE GIRLTRASH: ALL NIGHT LONG (2014) This musical comedy, directed by Alexandra Kondracke, is full of romantic quasi-criminal mini-dramas and has all the hallmarks of its writer Angela Robinson, who directed the 2004 action comedy D.E.B.S. and created the web series Girltrash!, to which this film is a prequel. Starring a line-up of supporting actors from The L Word (2004-09) and distributed by lesbian company POWER UP, it has the feel of a 90-minute lesbian in-joke. SUDDENLY (2002) Diego Lerman’s film transgresses the rules of both kidnap movie and lesbian love story. A young woman is so bored by the repetitive mundanity of her job that being seduced, and then kidnapped, by two lesbian punks, ‘Mao’ and ‘Lenin’, at least has a bit of excitement to it. A sex comedy, family drama and road movie delivered in high-contrast black and white. MOSQUITA Y MARI (2012) Aurora Guerrero creates an anti-road movie: a small, slow film about the heady, tactile but unspoken desire between two teenagers in the Latinx Los Angeles neighbourhood Huntington Park. Emotionally momentous scenes unfold in a broken-down car in a boarded-up garage. Sitting in the driver’s seat, the girls imagine what the world might look like for them if only they could reach it. Drive-away Dolls USA/UK 2023 CERTIFICATE 15 84M 1S DIRECTOR ETHAN COEN PRODUCERS ETHAN COEN TRICIA COOKE ROBERT GRAF TIM BEVAN ERIC FELLNER WRITTEN BY ETHAN COEN TRICIA COOKE CINEMATOGRAPHY ARI WEGNER EDITOR TRICIA COOKE PRODUCTION DESIGN YONG OK LEE MUSIC CARTER BURWELL COSTUME DESIGN PEGGY SCHNITZER CAST MARGARET QUALLEY GERALDINE VISWANATHAN BEANIE FELDSTEIN SYNOPSIS Philadelphia, 1999. Free-spirited Jamie accompanies best friend and fellow lesbian Marian on a road trip to Tallahassee, Florida, in the hope that at least one of them will get laid. But unbeknown to them, their car contains stolen cargo and they are being pursued by criminals. REVIEWED BY SIMRAN HANS “A story of two ladies going south” reads the tagline on the poster for Ethan Coen’s first narrative feature as sole director. In the film, which is set in 1999, best friends Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) do indeed travel from Philadelphia to Tallahassee, located in the southern state of Florida. But it’ll surprise no one that Coen and co-writer Tricia Cooke have their tongues firmly in cheek (and other parts). The free-spirited Jamie is introduced from between a woman’s quivering thighs. Unfortunately, the thighs in question do not belong to Jamie’s long-suffering girlfriend Sukie (Beanie Feldstein), who swiftly dumps her when she finds out. Meanwhile, it has been “three years, four months and fourteen days” since mopey, uptight Marian has had sex at all. Both decide they need a change of scene, and so they embark on a road trip to visit Marian’s aunt – with the plan of stopping off at every lesbian bar on the East Coast en route. What the women do not know is that the car they’ve hired contains a mysterious package, and its bumbling prior custodians (Joey Slotnick and C.J. Wilson) are in hot pursuit. A silly B-plot involving a suitcase of prosthetic penises is, admittedly, funny. More tiresome, however, is the film’s inevitable narrative trajectory, which follows Marian’s sexual awakening and Jamie’s settling down. Qualley is charming rather than convincing as the insatiable Jamie, going for screwball heroine, with her flailing limbs, motormouth delivery and cartoon Texas twang. Feldstein (one of the only openly gay cast members, with Colman Domingo) is funnier as a prickly butch cop, while the usually witty Viswanathan is forced to downplay her natural swagger, and strains to bring humour to a dour role. This is Coen’s second film as a solo director, following the documentary Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind, released in 2022. But though it shares DNA with some of the lighter films he has directed with his brother Joel (particularly Raising Arizona, 1987), the film’s overplayed silliness feels like an attempt to free Dolls from any expectations of prestige filmmaking. While Joel’s solo debut, The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021), was an exercise in classy, stripped-down minimalism, Ethan’s first solo fiction feature is the inverse, seeming to revel in its own studied ‘bad taste’. The film adopts a self-consciously trashy aesthetic. A violent prologue featuring Pedro Pascal in 1970s-style sunglasses uses shlocky canted angles: scenes transition like comic book panels, spinning 360 degrees before slotting into place, or sliding from right to left and slotting into place with a thud. Psychedelic B-roll footage is inserted of a witchy Miley Cyrus advocating pizza and free love. None of this is half as fun or wacky as it sounds. More unexpected is the film’s climactic sex scene. Champagne is poured; a woman lays down on a hotel bed; Viswanathan is framed like a Hollywood goddess, her modesty tastefully preserved. Afterwards, the two women cuddle. It’s an attempt to subvert the kind of seduction that might appear in an aggressively heteronormative romcom, but the scene is not played for laughs. The screenplay – originally titled Drive-Away Dykes – was co-written by Coen’s wife and long-time editor Tricia Cooke who identifies as queer. Though the couple have been married since 1993 and share two children, Cooke has said in interviews that theirs is a “non-traditional” arrangement, and that both she and Coen have other partners. The arc of the love story at the heart of the film isn’t as liberated, though the jokes are bawdy enough (“I don’t want it if we’re not both going to use it!” shrieks a tearful Sukie, removing a glittery dildo from its wall mount in her bedroom). One aspect of the film that does raise an eyebrow is its retro take on lesbian culture. Setting the film in the 1990s allows Coen and Cooke to swerve contemporary queer politics. It betrays a certain nostalgia for a simpler time, but one that’s less evolved too. The lesbian sex is oddly centred around male anatomy, and monogamy is presented as a happy ending. Elsewhere, a women’s soccer team is depicted as a dated and unfunny stereotype: horny, unspeaking and interchangeable. A song by folk rock singerturned-Broadway star Linda Ronstadt is an inside joke for an older crowd. It’s how the film feels: authentic to the late 90s, but stuck there, too. In UK cinemas from 15 March SOMETHING WICKED THAT WAY GOES Geraldine Viswanathan as Marian, Margaret Qualley as Jamie, Beanie Feldstein as Sukie 81 FILMS

The New Boy DIRECTOR WARWICK THORNTON PRODUCER KATH SHELPER ANDREW UPTON CATE BLANCHETT LORENZO DE MAIO WRITTEN BY WARWICK THORNTON CINEMATOGRAPHY WARWICK THORNTON EDITOR NICK MEYERS PRODUCTION DESIGN AMY BAKER MUSIC NICK CAVE WARREN ELLIS COSTUME DESIGN HEATHER WALLACE CAST ASWAN REID DEBORAH MAILMAN WAYNE BLAIR CATE BLANCHETT SYNOPSIS Australia, 1940s. A young Aboriginal boy is forcibly brought to a remote orphanage run by Sister Eileen, who is covering up the death of its former head. Known only as ‘the New Boy’, he is exposed to Christianity, while displaying strange powers that perplex his fellow pupils and the orphanage staff. REVIEWED BY JONATHAN ROMNEY Warwick Thornton’s The New Boy begins with a caption providing historical context: it explains Australia’s former official policy of ‘breeding out the black’ by separating Indigenous children from their families and culture. This might seem to promise a historically rooted realist drama – something like Phillip Noyce’s Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002), which addressed this theme. But The New Boy, informed by Thornton’s experience as an Indigenous child in a Catholic school, is a very different proposition. Despite references to war in Europe and to national specifics – like the ironically-named ‘Chief Protector of Aboriginals’ – The New Boy establishes a fictional world strangely disconnected from outside realities. The orphanage is set in a vast tract of rolling terrain, a self-enclosed cinematic space reminiscent of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978) (the closeups of waving corn could hardly be more Malickian). Notwithstanding the detail with which Thornton furnishes this microcosmic world, the film has a hermetic atmosphere and a compressed fable-like quality, all the more for its brevity (premiered in Cannes at 116 minutes, it is now released in a 96-minute cut). The realities of The New Boy seem as unanchored as its young nameless hero, said to be unrelated to any tribes of the region. Captured in the desert, he is brought to a spartan compound where nun Sister Eileen runs an orphanage on its last legs, with only seven boys in residence; she is hiding the recent death of its principal, a cue for spiky comedy as she fakes an offscreen argument with the late cantankerous abbot. The largely silent New Boy rejects the house rules, sleeping under his bed and wearing only shorts. Inddedde is allowed to, remaining an object of bemusement to the other boys and to the establishment’s skeleton staff. He is fascinated by the apparatus of his new world: notably a large wooden Jesus, sent from Europe. Just as he previously hugged a tree PAN AND GLORY Aswan Reid as the New Boy outside, he climbs and hugs the crucifix – the first time he really shocks the otherwise tenderly indulgent Sister Eileen. Thornton notably eschews the element of tyranny that tends to come as standard in tales of religious upbringing – making the sister all the juicier a role for Cate Blanchett, who plays her by turns as pugnacious, neurotic, rueful and vulnerable, her weathered, puffy face backing up the intimations of alcoholism. The realism is undercut by magic: notably a little floating ball of light, trailing sparks, that the Boy produces from his palm, hovering beside him like his personal Tinkerbell. This manifestation is linked with his apparent powers as a miracle worker; sucking venom from a snake-bitten schoolmate, he spits it out as copious dark fluid, an image echoing Sister Eileen’s red wine and the blood that drips from Jesus’s wounds (and from the stigmata that the Boy himself displays). The Boy, says George, is “a long way from home” – and indeed, he is not of this world. He seems a kind of angel, which the casting of newcomer Aswan Reid bears out, with his wide eyes, delighted alertness and unkempt halo of golden hair, highlighted in Thornton’s camerawork. As in Samson and Delilah (2009) and Sweet Country (2017), Thornton is his own cinematographer, creating moments of striking visual metaphor: notably, notably, there is a shot of the Boy through one door framed against another, highlighting his isolation. While Thornton largely avoids the familiar and the schematic, the f ilm ends up somewhat bluntly making its point about the baleful effects of severing people from their heritage. While the Boy is fascinated by contact with an alien belief system, it also becomes emphatically clear that Christianity must inevitably sap the life force that makes him uniquely himself – both Aboriginal and a child. The point is more subtly made through Sister Eileen’s helpers, ‘Sister Mum’ and George (economical, memorable characterisations by Deborah Mailman and a gruff Wayne Blair), themselves Aboriginal and long since distanced from their own origins. It is precisely because of his affinity with and understanding of the Boy that George views him all the more warily. Coherent and succinct as this release cut is, there remains a sketchy, fragmented quality: an episode involving a nearby fire feels unintegrated with the rest. And there is no avoiding a preciousness in the VFX magic, which fits awkwardly with the film’s harder edge and gently caustic humour. For all the imagination, mischief and nuance it displays, The New Boy finally boils down a little too neatly to the religious travails of an Outback Peter Pan. In UK cinemas from 15 March 82FILMS

Silver Haze THE NETHERLANDS/UK 2023 CERTIFICATE 15 102M 38S DIRECTOR SACHA POLAK PRODUCED BY MARLEEN SLOT MICHAEL ELLIOTT WRITTEN BY SACHA POLAK CINEMATOGRAPHY TIBOR DINGELSTAD EDITOR LOT ROSSMARK PRODUCTION DESIGN ELENA ISOLINI MUSIC ELLA VAN DER WOUDE JORIS OONK CAST VICKY KNIGHT ESMÉ CREED-MILES CHARLOTTE KNIGHT SYNOPSIS Franky, a 23-year-old nurse and burns victim living in east London, forms a relationship with Florence, a suicide survivor who arrives on Franky’s ward. Sharing anger about their circumstances, the pair offer each other a chance to move past their burdens, while Franky navigates the truth of what caused the house fire. REVIEWED BY JOHN BLEASDALE “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle,” runs the quote – usually misattributed to Plato – that pops up in email signatures, motivational posters and countless social media posts. It’s a sentiment that runs through Sacha Polak’s remarkable new film Silver Haze, her follow up to Dirty God (2019). Vicky Knight plays Franky, a young nurse from a rough working-class family; her mum’s an alcoholic and her sister Leah (played by Knight’s real-life sister Charlotte) is in a relationship with an abusive partner. Franky is consumed by her own demons. As a child she was badly burned in a fire in her father’s pub; she’s convinced the fire was caused by the woman her dad has since started a new family with, but there’s no evidence to prove it. It’s a trauma Franky handles by smoking weed and nurturing thoughts of revenge – that is, until Florence (Esmé Creed-Miles), a disturbed young woman who has just attempted suicide, turns up on Franky’s ward and the two find themselves drawn to each other. Polak, who also wrote the screenplay, which is partly based on Knight’s own experiences, captures the humour, tone and rhythms of working-class life without condescension or Dardennesque dourness. While never forsaking the grit, Tibor Dingelstad’s camerawork stays alert to the possibility of beauty and invests moments with a sensuous immediacy, whether it’s a rave in the park or a moment of kindness in a hospital ward – grace notes among the radio noise of mundane reality. No character seems like a cipher; if anything, Polak runs the risk of cramming in too many subplots in the attempt to ensure all her characters are fully fleshed out. (Leah’s conversion to Islam may be a plotline too far, though Charlotte Knight plays her role convincingly.) The lives of everyone in Silver Haze are fractured and stumbling, and if the film loses track of Franky and Flo’s relationship, it’s because it is busy taking in the world around them. The excellent supporting cast keep the overlapping stories vivid, with veteran television actor Angela Bruce deserving special mention as Flo’s wise but ailing grandmother. And Vicky Knight, following her breakout performance in Dirty God, once more impresses. It’s the kind of performance that often gets stamped with that backhanded adjective, ‘raw’. But it’s more than that: it’s complex and nuanced, and it gives the film its heart. At one point Franky asks a patient to rate their pain on a scale of one to ten. Polak’s film reminds us that even the person asking the question might be at the higher end of that spectrum. In UK cinemas from 29 March As films like Welcome to Sarajevo (1997), In This World (2002) and The Road to Guantanamo (2006) attest, Michael Winterbottom has never been afraid of taking his camera into the world’s most troubled regions and tackling contentious subjects. In Shoshana, a film the director spent 15 years trying to get made, he is exploring the seeds of the Israel-Palestine conflict, which by the time of the film’s release has deteriorated into overwhelming levels of tragedy and horror. This is sensitive, complex material which need careful handling, and Winterbottom (writing with regular collaborators Laurence Coriat and Paul Viragh) has rooted Shoshana largely in fact, telling the story through a handful of real-life figures. Shoshana Borochov (Irina Starshenbaum) was a journalist in the rapidly growing Jewish city of Tel Aviv, and her lover Tom Wilkin (Douglas Booth) was a British intelligence officer whose years in the city had given him a more nuanced understanding of the region than most of his colleagues. British colonial arrogance is personified by Geoffrey J. Morton (a coldeyed Harry Melling), who is determined to impose order by any means necessary, and with whom Wilkin is forced to align. The model appears to be Graham Greene, with Winterbottom aspiring to tell a story of complex interpersonal relationships against a backdrop of political turbulence, à la The Quiet American or The Comedians –he explicitly references The Third Man (1949). What defeats the picture is its lack of a clear perspective. It charts Shoshana’s path from idealism to radicalisation, but her role is often purely expository, filling in gaps with bursts of stodgy informational voiceover; as the narrative shifts to Wilkin and Morton’s hunt for terrorist leaders, she becomes a passive participant in her own story. Winterbottom’s attempt to build a doomed love affair at the heart of his film is stymied by the lack of heat between Starshenbaum and Booth, who shares a much more compelling dynamic with Melling. In some respects, Winterbottom’s direction is efficient and accomplished. The depiction of 1930s Tel Aviv as a thriving new city is vividly realised, and the numerous bombings and assassinations are staged with a startling and gruesome immediacy, but it’s too unfocused to work as either thriller or human drama. It’s also notable that while we spend plenty of time with Jewish and British characters as they put forth arguments about the future of this region, Winterbottom can’t find room in this sprawling film for any distinct Arab characters, which feels like a particularly regrettable oversight. In UK cinemas now Polak captures the tone and rhythms of working-class life without condescension or Dardennesque dourness SILVER HAZE SCAR QUALITY Vicky Knight as Franky, Esmé Creed-Miles as Florence MANDATE WITH DANGER Irina Starshenbaum as Shoshana, Douglas Booth as Tom Shoshana UK/ITALY 2023 CERTIFICATE 15 120M 46S DIRECTOR MICHAEL WINTERBOTTOM PRODUCERS JOSH HYAMS MELISSA PARMENTER LUIGI NAPOLEONE MASSIMO DI ROCCO WRITTEN BY LAURENCE CORIAT PAUL VIRAGH MICHAEL WINTERBOTTOM CINEMATOGRAPHY GILES NUTTGENS EDITOR MARC RICHARDSON PRODUCTION DESIGN SERGIO TRIBASTONE MUSIC DAVID HOLMES COSTUME DESIGN ANTHONY UNWIN CAST DOUGLAS BOOTH IRINA STARSHENBAUM HARRY MELLING SYNOPSIS British Mandatory Palestine, the 1930s. The influx of Jewish people fleeing Europe incites anger among Arabs in the region, leading to an escalating series of terror attacks on both sides. Journalist Shoshana Borochov dreams of the peaceful establishment of a Jewish homeland, but as the tension around her grows, her relationship with a British officer is tested. REVIEWED BY PHILIP CONCANNON 83 FILMS

The Origin of Evil FRANCE/CANADA 2022 CERTIFICATE 15 122M 57S DIRECTOR SÉBASTIEN MARNIER PRODUCER CAROLINE BONMARCHAND WRITTEN BY SÉBASTIEN MARNIER CINEMATOGRAPHY ROMAIN CARCANADE EDITORS VALENTIN FÉRON JEAN-BAPTISTE BEAUDOIN PRODUCTION DESIGN DAMIEN RONDEAU MUSIC PIERRE LAPOINTE PHILIPPE BRAULT COSTUME DESIGN MARITÉ COUTARD CAST LAURE CALAMY DORIA TILLIER JACQUES WEBER SYNOPSIS Factory worker Stéphane infiltrates an estate run by a group of women who live in the shadow of their domineering patriarch. Acts of greed and deception unfurl as she entangles herself in a web of lies – and Stéphane has her own agenda. REVIEWED BY CASPAR SALMON Sébastien Marnier’s The Origin of Evil is, by its delicious final reel, a movie all of its own. At times it feels like a queer(er) Rebecca (1940) made by Claude Chabrol had he lived to see The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (2010-). This high-flown tale of family, double-crossing, toxic patriarchy and murder gives a plum role to Laure Calamy as Stéphane, a working-class factory worker who sets out to finally meet Serge, her rich, previously unacknowledged father in the forbidding house he inhabits with his equally forbidding wife, daughter, granddaughter and maid. What does Stéphane seek from her father? Revenge? Money? Love? What does this ailing tyrant want from her? How will the seething womenfolk in the paternal household deal with this cuckoo in their midst? So many aspects of the film are expertly calibrated for tingling camp pleasure, from the arch performances (Dominique Blanc, as Serge’s wife Louise, is serving Phantom Thread to the power of Almodóvar) to the set decoration (stuffed animals galore, an entire wall of VHS tapes) right through to the very camerawork (witty split-screens; a crane shot used for nothing more than to film three people on a sofa). The fact that Stéphane’s job is in an anchovy-packing factory, the almost total lack of men, and two deeply enjoyable murder scenes are merely icing on the cake. Nothing is quite as it seems in The Origin of Evil; traditional elements of story seem at first to be withheld, only for Marnier to clunk the audience on the head by revealing them later on. This makes for an unsettling tone at the movie’s outset, which takes time to adjust to: are we in a social-realist comedy? Is this a blackhearted thriller? Who is this protagonist about whom we know so little, other than that she is played by the winsome Calamy, trying her best in this hostile environment? Stéphane’s identity and what is motivating her gradually turn this part into Calamy’s best role, delivering dark comedy and sadness in equal measure; over the film’s duration, the actor steadily dials up the fervour to 11. If The Origin of Evil were only lurid camp it would pall fairly quickly, but Marnier is careful to weave a fine vein of pathos through this narrative. The absence of Serge’s beloved son, a homosexual man, hangs over proceedings; so too does Stéphane’s need for love and belonging, which leads her to act so rashly. Serge’s terrible violence and megalomania, initially only hinted at, are ultimately brutal, more than counterbalancing the film’s tart comedy. The film’s wicked ways hit home with all the more jouissance for being deceptively anchored in the real. In UK cinemas from 29 March Nothing can compare to the way Ebrahimi embodies the hair-trigger state of being constantly on guard SHAYDA KIN HELL Dominique Blanc as Louise, Doria Tillier as George There is barely room to breathe in Noora Niasari’s taut family drama, Shayda. The film depicts a situation – a mother and daughter attempting to forge a new life in a women’s shelter – inherently constrained by anxieties. The location of the home that Shayda (Zar Amir Ebrahimi) and Mona (Selina Zahednia) share with other women is kept secret for their safety. They are all – including the home’s compassionate matron, Joyce (Leah Purcell) – hyper-vigilant of any conspicuous vehicle idling outside. A trip to a local Iranian supermarket is as tense as a spy thriller, with the possibility Shayda will be recognised and reported to her husband, Hossein (Osamah Sami), carrying stomachchurning peril. A boxy 4:3 aspect ratio emphasises this quality, literally reducing the space on screen to create a visual analogue to the stifling situation. It is especially potent when Ebrahimi is captured in close-up, a choice that director and cinematographer Sherwin Akbarzadeh regularly makes. That extends the compositional claustrophobia, but such proximity also embellishes and enriches the smallest details of a look or a breath. Niasari mines abundant meaning from quiet scenes that might have felt incidental – the affecting liberty of preparing sweets for Persian New Year, the weight of an innocuous comment during a phone call from Iran. These scenes rely heavily on the other benefit of this lavish use of close-up: allowing Ebrahimi’s performance to take centre stage. For all the ways the film expertly depicts the discomforting situation, nothing can compare to the way Ebrahimi herself embodies the hair-trigger state of being constantly on guard. It’s a performance brimming with vitality: from allconsuming panic at feeling exposed and vulnerable to Hossein’s retribution, to the raw emotion of having to recount her rape at his hands. There are also expressions of joy – dancing to Iranian music videos with Mona or experiencing the first flushes of romance with a kind man. Ebrahimi’s Shayda is a woman desperate for freedom and determined to provide it for her daughter. Their relationship is just as heartfelt in the other direction too. While Mona could have been written as blissfully unaware of her father’s violence, Niasari has opted for female solidarity. Since she is drawing upon her own childhood experiences in writing the screenplay, this may just be more authentic; but it also consolidates the audience’s compassion, rather than splitting it. We are placed squarely on the side of emancipation, and Shayda’s moments of release make it feel as though such a future is within reach. BOXED IN Zar Amir Ebrahimi as Shayda, Selina Zahednia as Mona In UK cinemas from 8 March Shayda AUSTRALIA 2023 CERTIFICATE 15 118M 7S DIRECTOR NOORA NIASARI PRODUCERS VINCENT SHEEHAN NOORA NIASARI WRITTEN BY NOORA NIASARI CINEMATOGRAPHY SHERWIN AKBARZADEH EDITOR ELIKA REZAEE PRODUCTION DESIGN JOSEPHINE WAGSTAFF COSTUME DESIGN ZOHIE CASTELLANO CAST ZAR AMIR EBRAHIMI OSAMAH SAMI MOJEAN ARIA SYNOPSIS Shayda, an Iranian immigrant, lives in a women’s shelter in an undisclosed Australian city with her young daughter, Mona. Terrified that her abusive husband will find them and spirit Mona back to Iran, Shayda must grapple with being a single mother, community pressures and the instigation of painful divorce proceedings. REVIEWED BY BEN NICHOLSON 84FILMS

The Settlers CHILE/ARGENTINA/UK/TAIWAN/FRANCE/DENMARK/ SWEDEN/GERMANY/USA/ITALY/PERU 2023 CERTIFICATE 15 100M 44S DIRECTOR FELIPE GÁLVEZ PRODUCED BY GIANCARLO NASI BENJAMÍN DOMENECH SANTIAGO GALLELLI MATÍAS ROVEDA THIERRY LENOUVEL EMILY MORGAN STEFANO CENTINI WRITTEN BY FELIPE GÁLVEZ ANTONIA GIRARDI SCREENPLAY COLLABORATION MARIANO LLINÁS CINEMATOGRAPHY SIMONE D’ARCANGELO EDITING MATTHIEU TAPONIER ART DIRECTION SEBASTIÁN ORGAMBIDE MUSIC HARRY ALLOUCHE COSTUME DESIGN MURIEL PARRA CAST MARK STANLEY CAMILO ARANCIBIA BENJAMÍN WESTFALL ALFREDO CASTRO SYNOPSIS Tierra del Fuego, 1901. Much of the Chilean western half of the archipelago has been seized by a landowner, who sends a team of men headed by Scots lieutenant Alexander MacLennan to clear a path to the sea for his grazing sheep. MacLennan, along with racist Texan mercenary Bill and mixed-race Segundo, sets out to dispose of all Indigenous peoples obstructing their path. REVIEWED BY PHILIP KEMP Mexican examples apart, Latin-American westerns are quite rare – and Chilean westerns, these days, all but unknown. Possibly the sole extant specimens till now may be the silent classic The Hussar of Death (El húsar de la muerte, 1924), directed by Pedro Sienna, one of very few surviving Chilean silents; Helvio Soto’s Bloody Nitrate (Caliche sangriento, 1969); and The Expropriation (La expropiación, Raul Rúiz, 1971). The prison-break movie In the Shadow of the Sun (A la sombra del sol, 1974), written and directed by Silvio Caiozzi and Pablo Perelman, might also marginally qualify as a ‘western’. But The Settlers (Los colonos), the first feature of Chilean director Felipe Gálvez (who co-wrote the script with Antonia Girardi), establishes itself as a prime example of the subgenre, with a style and mood all its own. Picking up the anti-colonialist theme of Soto’s and Rúiz’s films, it follows the real events of 1901, when the Indigenous Selk’nam tribe was ruthlessly displaced and slaughtered by European and American mercenaries hired by greedy landowners. The action’s no-holds-barred slant is established from the start. A group of men is seen digging earth and building a barbed-wire fence in a ferocious wind when we hear a mechanical snarl and a scream. The victim lies on the ground, his arm severed at the shoulder. As the gang-boss, Alexander MacLennan, approaches, the wounded man desperately pleads that he’ll still be able to work. MacLennan (Mark Stanley), formerly a lieutenant in the British army (or so he claims), unhesitatingly produces his pistol and shoots the man dead. “A man without an arm is one man less,” he comments dispassionately. No one dares protest. MacLennan is ordered by rich landowner and sheep magnate José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro) – an individual who did exist, and demanded just what follows – to take a few men and, by any means, clear a path to the sea for his herds. He chooses Texan cowboy Bill (Benjamin Westfall), a veteran of the Indian Wars and a man with even fewer scruples than himself, and the mestizo Segundo Molina (Camilo Arancibia). Segundo, being of mixed race, is mistrusted by both sides. “You never know who they’re going to shoot,” growls Bill. And while MacLennan recruited Segundo for his skill with guns, he hopes to avoid using them on the natives. After a massacre in the malevolently swirling mist, MacLennan demands that Segundo rape an Indigenous woman, Kiepja (Mishell Guaña), to prove his loyalty. The action is brutal and unforgiving, the tone of the production yet more so. The broad Patagonian landscape is awe-inspiring in its beauty but, as shown by Simone D’Arcangelo’s camera, devoid of any hint of prettiness. He uses slow zooms in and out to create a disorienting effect, framing the characters in extreme long shot to emphasise the emptiness that engulfs them. The sunshine is harsh, oppressive even, never in the least warm or benevolent; and Harry Allouche’s brooding score exudes menace. No one troubles to justify his acts of arbitrary violence, nor even thinks of doing so. An English colonel (Sam Spruell), who casually reveals that MacLennan never rose higher in the British army than private, abruptly shoots a fellow white man dead, seemingly from a sudden sense of repulsion. The violence continues, intensifies – until, some 20 minutes before the end of the film, the venue unexpectedly changes. We’re in a genteel sitting room in 1908 Punta Arenas, where Menéndez and his family are hosting a visit from a representative of the government in Santiago, the intellectual Marcial Vicuña (Marcelo Alonso). The guest is offered tea and cakes, while Menéndez’s granddaughters entertain him with a charming rendering of the traditional lullaby ‘All the Pretty Little Horses’. But when they learn why he’s come, the family is outraged. Undeterred, Vicuña proceeds to Segundo’s wooden hut out in the desert, accompanied by a priest and two mounted policemen. Once inside the hut, his tone remains as civil as ever; but the threat, even if now involving only a cup of tea, is still implicit. And just to make sure we don’t miss it, on the soundtrack we once again hear the lullaby, but this time sung by a choir of deep male voices – and far more slowly. On Mubi now TIERRA THREAT Camilo Arancibia as Segundo, Benjamin Westfall as Bill, Mark Stanley as MacLennan THREE MORE CHILEAN ‘WESTERNS’ BY PHILIP KEMP THE HUSSAR OF DEATH (EL HÚSAR DE LA MUERTE, 1925) One of a tiny number of surviving Chilean silent movies, The Hussar of Death was scripted and directed by Pedro Sienna (Pedro Pérez, 1893-1972), who also played the lead role: Manuel Rodríguez, a legendary guerilla who led Chilean revolutionary forces against Spain in the battles of 1810. At the time, it was reckoned by a critic the only film of the period “worthy of exhibition”. BLOODY NITRATE (CALICHE SANGRIENTO, 1969) Set during the War of the Pacific of 1879-83, Helvio Soto’s film features a young lieutenant leading a platoon of Chilean soldiers against the allied Peruvian/Bolivian forces. The film’s frankness about the economic motives behind the war meant that it only narrowly avoided being banned by the Chilean authorities. THE EXPROPRIATION (LA EXPROPIACIÓN, 1974) Raul Rúiz’s film, suggested Barthélemy Amengual in Positif, “is inspired by Eisenstein’s teachings, but filtered through Godard’s example. It sets out to expose a… legalistic ‘fair play’ moment in the politics of Chile’s Popular Unity Party.” An ‘Agronom’ (a group of agricultural officials) arrives at a farm to expropriate land. The landowner is willing to hand over his holding; but this sparks a revolt among the tenants, who demand true compensation for their loss of land. 85 FILMS

Memory MEXICO/USA/CHILE/UK 2023 CERTIFICATE 15 99M 1S DIRECTOR MICHEL FRANCO PRODUCED BY MICHEL FRANCO ERÉNDIRA NÚÑEZ LARIOS ALEX ORLOVSKY DUNCAN MONTGOMERY WRITTEN BY MICHEL FRANCO CINEMATOGRAPHY YVES CAPE EDITED BY ÓSCAR FIGUEROA JARA MICHEL FRANCO PRODUCTION DESIGN CLAUDIO RAMÍREZ CASTELLI COSTUME DESIGN GABRIELA FERNÁNDEZ CAST JESSICA CHASTAIN PETER SARSGAARD MERRITT WEVER BROOKE TIMBER SYNOPSIS Contemporary New York. Sylvia, a single mother who works at an adult daycare facility, attends a school reunion, where she encounters Saul, who has early-onset dementia. As the pair reckon with their challenges, which for Sylvia include memories of a traumatic past, they develop a tender bond that turns to love. REVIEWED BY ALEX RAMON Early on in Michel Franco’s new film Memory, Sylvia (Jessica Chastain) leaves a school reunion, at which she’s clearly felt uncomfortable and isolated, to return to the Brooklyn apartment that she shares with her teenage daughter Anna. As Sylvia undertakes her journey home she’s followed by a man we glimpsed in long shot at the party and whose actions – leaving the dance floor to sit next to her – clearly motivated her abrupt departure. By this point in the film, we know a few details about Sylvia’s life: that she works at an adult daycare centre, that her relationship with her daughter is close but perhaps overprotective, and that she’s a recovering alcoholic who’s been sober for over a decade. What we don’t know is the nature of her relationship with the man who’s following her, and who’s still outside her apartment the next morning. The sequence provides a good example of the way in which Franco’s film subverts a viewer’s expectations. What looks like the prelude to a drama about stalking becomes something else when Sylvia’s pursuer turns out to be Saul (Peter Sarsgaard), a gentle man who is suffering from early-onset dementia. Later, when Sylvia confronts Saul with an accusation about their shared past, Franco appears to be setting the scene for a morally complicated revenge thriller. But Memory morphs yet again when Sylvia’s recollection of this aspect of the past proves faulty, and her relationship with Saul develops into one of connection and love. From his first feature Daniel & Ana (2009) through 2012’s After Lucia to the controversial vision of Mexican class warfare in New Order (2020), Franco’s films have often explored trauma and family dysfunction. With a protagonist who has suffered serial sexual abuse, Memory is no exception in this regard. But what distinguishes it from Franco’s earlier work, which has sometimes seemed calculated in its pitilessness, is its more redemptive tone. Although it retains the austere formal features that have distinguished Franco’s filmmaking – static long shots, no non-diegetic music – Memory is by far the writer-director’s warmest work to date. Returning to a North American setting, this film also picks up the theme of care-giving from his 2015 film Chronic, but in the service of a love story between a woman still reckoning with her past and a man struggling to remember his. Much of the quiet power of Memory must be credited to Chastain and Sarsgaard. Since Franco’s script is frugal to a fault with character information (we learn nothing whatsoever about the identity of Anna’s father or Sylvia’s relationship with him, for instance), the actors must make every small detail count. Often placed at the centre of the frame, Chastain conveys Sylvia’s need for control and routine through tense, self-protective body language and sometimes clipped responses; her every gesture is expressive. Bearish here, and with his quiet voice full of feeling, Sarsgaard – who won the Volpi cup at Venice Film Festival in 2023 for his performance – brings a befuddled grace and almost uncanny sweetness to Saul, along with a palpable need to express and receive love. To some extent, the film sentimentalises dementia – Saul shows frustration only in interactions with his brother Isaac (Josh Charles), who the film depicts, uncharitably, as an oppressive force. But Saul and Sylvia’s growing affection is subtly charted through their daily interactions, with the moving use of Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ – a song connected to Saul’s past – as a leitmotif. The couple’s first kiss is one of the loveliest of recent screen kisses; a later love scene is also convincing in its mix of awkwardness and passion. Despite well-judged work from Brooke Timber and Merritt Wever as Sylvia’s daughter and sister respectively, the sketchiness of Franco’s script serves some characters poorly; Jessica Harper struggles to humanise her role as the estranged mother in denial about her daughter’s painful past and her own complicity in it. An inevitable scene of family confrontation gains impact from its tableau-like framing rather than its revelations. The question of Sylvia’s reliability – raised early on when she makes an incorrect accusation about Saul, but clearly meant to be dismissed later when her mother accuses her of habitual lying – is also a jarring aspect. Nonetheless, with its muted, autumnal palette and everyday New York locations, Memory achieves a high level of realism scene by scene. Refreshingly, there is little fashionable about the film, which suggests a throwback to the more sincere strands of 1990s US indie cinema, and to which Chastain and Sarsgaard bring a rare and bracing intimacy. In UK cinemas now FORGET ME NOT Peter Sarsgaard as Saul, Jessica Chastain as Sylvia 86FILMS

limited edition Sight and Sound framed cover prints Ready to hang on your wall sightandsoundprints.com

Showing Up British audiences may not have had the pleasure of seeing Kelly Reichardt’s smart, multi-layered portrait of an artist in cinemas, but now they can watch and rewatch it on disc – and a wonderfully understated Michelle Williams makes it well worth the effort REVIEWED BY KATE STABLES Consider this your ‘canary in the indie film coalmine’ warning. One of 2023’s screen disappointments was the failure of Showing Up to show up as a UK theatrical release, despite having been a Cannes 2022 Palme d’Or contender. When directors of Kelly Reichardt’s stature can no longer get well-received films into UK cinemas, something signif icant has shifted in film culture. So it’s a pleasure to find it released here on Blu-ray and DVD. It’s a barebones release – the only extra is the theatrical trailer – but still a delight. Showing Up marks Reichardt’s shift from big skies to small sculptures. It’s an intimate character study, a sly, gently funny and solitary ‘indoor’ film, in contrast with the towering landscapes, big themes and tender friendship of her last feature, First Cow (2019). Still portraying Oregon, but on a smaller, contemporary canvas, she creates a sharp-eyed observation of the buzzy, insular Portland art scene. An exquisite piece of slow cinema, this film traces the daily frustrations of Michelle Williams’s struggling thirtysomething sculptor Lizzy, butting up against her day job, family concerns (a careless father, played by Judd Hirsch; an unstable brother, played by John Magaro) and everyday obstacles (a busted water heater her landlady isn’t fixing) while rushing to finish her pieces in the week before a key show. As delicate and detailed as her heroine’s fluid ceramic figures, it’s a film that translates Reichardt’s trademark interests into new, intriguing shapes, rather as Lizzy’s hands transform her clay ‘girls’. Prickly Lizzy is a rare film subject, a small-time female artist (the opposite of a tempestuous Frida Kahlo or Camille Claudel), someone locally respected but not successful. Reichardt’s camera is fascinated by her consuming focus when crafting figures, lingering on the patient tactility of shaping, scoring, glazing. Another of Reichardt’s women-onthe-verge, she’s frazzled from cramming art-making around an admin job at the local art college (no film’s been this acute about the art-vs-rent juggle since Claudia Weill’s 1978 Girlfriends). Though her tired resentment harks back to the life-abraded heroines of Certain Women (2016), the film shows the director trying out a lighter tone, frank but flirting with comedy, winding in thoughtful points about the balancing act of art and everyday life. The grit that makes a pearl of Showing Up, however, is Lizzy’s creative rivalry (real or imagined) with her artist friend Kelly Reichardt; US 2022; Mediumrare; Region B Blu-ray or Region 2 DVD; English SDH; Certificate 12; 108 minutes; 1.78.1. Extras: trailer. 88DVD & BLU-RAY

WHERE THE ART IS Michelle Williams as Lizzy (opposite), Hong Chau as Jo (above) and landlady Jo, a friction that fuels her building resentment. Hong Chau’s Jo, full of breezy, rentier self-confidence in life and work (she’s prepping two shows, and still finds time to make a tyre swing) is the kind of woman benevolent enough to bandage a wounded pigeon, but shrewd enough to park it with timepressed Lizzy. Reichardt makes their polar-opposite art practice resonant with difference, as the film weaves between their work. Jo’s cheerful physicality wrestles foam, wire and yarn into big, abstract attention-grabbing pieces (giant primary coloured spider webs, created by New York artist Michelle Segre) that take up space unapologetically. Whereas Lizzy’s fragile, slubby ceramic figures (created by Portland sculptor Cynthia Lahti) barely fill a table. Caught in sudden acrobatic actions, they suggest a freedom Lizzy can’t access herself. Their expressive postures and enigmatic, finely moulded faces demand close attention to give up their secrets – another crossover with Reichardt’s work. Too discerning to set up these two art modes as ‘brash and flashy’ vs ‘delicate and unworthily overlooked’, the film’s interest is in diving deeper than artistic popularity. Because, watching Lizzy coax clay figures into fluid, dancing life, it’s clear that this is a process movie. It’s about art as labour, the hands-on effort of artmaking used to immerse characters in the setting, functioning as the rhythm of chores did in Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff (2010). Staying close, but comfortably so, the camera drinks in the slow progression of Lizzy’s ceramics, but quiet inserts also spy happily on students intently weaving, throwing pots or life-drawing, Ethan Rose’s soft, spare electronic score flowing around everyone. For both Lizzy and Jo are embedded in the community centred on a small art college, filmed in the now sadly defunct Oregon College of Arts and Craft. It’s the closest the film comes to a landscape setting, director of photography Christopher Blauvelt making a sunny cocoon of busy classrooms and sculptural outdoor pavilions, all shot in muted colours to which the Blu-ray transfer imparts a deliciously grainy 16mm look. Despite the Arcadian vibe of the college, the film isn’t starry-eyed about regional arts, preferring to nudge up against comedy here, though without fully committing. Murmurs of “That’s a spontaneous pot”, a review of glasswork as “a religious vessel for gnostic meditation” flit by, and twirling bodywork takes place in the meadow. Jon Raymond and Reichardt’s gentle script remains appreciative, however, of the college’s open, nurturing vibe, swerving away from artscene spoofing in the vein of the TV show Portlandia (2011-18), or the barbed rivalries of Martine Syms’s art-college satire The African Desperate (2022). Their plotting is so subtle that it can feel incidental, but the film still knows how to pierce you with quietly played family encounters, again often framed by art. A pitiful scene where Lizzy’s brother’s grandiose ramblings identify his maniafuelled digging of a backyard hole as “a major earthwork” makes you catch your breath. Even Lizzy’s growing obsession with the boxed pigeon (it joins the dog in Wendy and Lucy, 2008, and the eponymous First Cow as Reichardtian symbols of connection with nature) winds itself into a tense gallery-set eruption. Reichardt threads this all together in a narrative that’s sophisticated enough to suggest that obstacles, accidents and obligations can feed as well as impede art-making. What binds you to the film however, is Michelle Williams’s sheer excellence. In her fourth movie as Reichardt’s muse, her ability to find the many layers within the reserved, hard-to-like Lizzy without sanding off her crabby edges, is compelling. We read much of the movie’s emotional complexity through her intense stillness, that hunched posture and the gentle hum of resentment, since the film shoots her with the same rapt attention as the artworks. A consummate underplayer, she portrays interiority as dexterously here as she created her thwarted extrovert pianist in The Fabelmans (2022). Slicing a key clay fold to animate a figure, or levelling an appraising stare at a kiln-burnt piece, her Lizzy makes art with the dogged intensity of one prising something precious from a workaday life. Watching Lizzy coax clay figures into fluid, dancing life, it’s clear that this is a process movie. It’s about art as labour, the hands-on effort of artmaking used to immerse characters in the setting, functioning as the rhythm of chores did in Meek’s Cutoff 89 DVD & BLU-RAY

GOODBYE & AMEN Damiano Damiani; Italy 1977; Radiance Films; Region AB Blu-ray; in Italian with English subtitles/English with SDH; Certificate 15; 110 mins; 1.85:1. Extras: alternative English version; commentary by critics Nathaniel Thompson, Howard S. Berger; interviews with editor Antonio Siciliano, actor Wolfango Soldati; booklet. REVIEWED BY MICHAEL BROOKE The pleasures of Damiano Damiani’s hostage procedural lie primarily in its serpentine narrative: the opening scenes (in which CIA operatives plot an assassination) suggest a different type of film altogether, while the closing ones tie up loose ends in unexpected ways – not least a crucial revelation at almost the last minute. The action is largely set in a modern hotel complex, from the roof of which John Steiner’s character (naming him would be a spoiler) randomly kills two people with a sniper rifle before taking hostage vacuous himbo actor Jack (Gianrico Tondelli) and his adulterous squeeze (Claudia Cardinale). Damiani cheerfully undermines various Hollywood and Italian cinema clichés. Despite his name, Jack is struggling to learn dialogue in English, and we see a lot more of him – including a full-frontal shot of him in nothing but a cowboy hat – than of her. As often in Damiani’s work (A Bullet for the General, 1967; How to Kill a Judge, 1975), expertly staged genre set pieces are peppered with tart political insight, the latter embodied by Tony Musante’s amoral CIA man, for whom the hostage crisis is a potentially jobthreatening distraction from his core mission to destabilise an unnamed African country. Though the film was shot in English, it’s more familiar in the longer Italian cut – indeed, this is the English version’s home video debut. Severely damaged source materials (flagged up by the disc menu) make for a less satisfying viewing experience, but it’s worth a look, since several scenes play somewhat differently – for example, the incongruity between Jack’s carefully crafted all-American appearance and his strong Italian accent is more satirically loaded. DISC: Restored from the original camera negative, the Italian cut is immaculate. A lively commentary by film historians Nathaniel Thompson and Howard S. Berger provides ample context, as do interviews with editor Antonio Siciliano, tackling technical nuts and bolts, and actor Wolfango Soldati, who recalls the challenge of playing a weaselly character he strongly disliked. A 20-page booklet includes a hefty essay on the film by Lucia Rinaldi. THE MAN WHO HAD POWER OVER WOMEN John Krish; UK 1970; Powerhouse/Indicator; Region AB Blu-ray; English SDH; Certificate 15; 90 minutes; 1.66:1. Extras: long interview with Krish; new interview with screenwriter Allan Scott; Krish military police training Break-In (1956), with Jim Dale, anti-apartheid documentary Let My People Go! (1961); image gallery; booklet. REVIEWED BY SOPHIA SATCHELL-BAEZA The British filmmaker John Krish (1923-2016) seemed to try his hand at everything: public information fillers, social-issues documentaries, cult science-fiction cinema, episodes of with-it television series like The Avengers (1967)… The Man Who Had Power over Women was his stab at the Swinging London film, though by 1970 that short-lived cycle had all but run itself to the ground. The director of Georgy Girl (1966), Silvio Narizzano, was originally slated to make it, but dropped out before the shoot; I can’t help feeling that he would have been better suited. The film’s curious amalgam of marital drama and music-industry satire misfires, though intriguingly. In an interview included as an extra here, screenwriter Allan Scott suggests that was largely the result of studio meddling, but it’s also down to an incredibly dislikeable central character: Peter Reaney (Rod Taylor), an unhappy talent agent intent on combusting his marriage with alcohol and infidelity, something he achieves to the backdrop of a London that’s already swung. The tone is bleakly cynical. Krish looks at London’s youth culture from the POV of the ad men and music-industry nodes: everyone is completely old, totally pissed and doesn’t care about anything, least of all their wives. The throwaway, period-specific misogyny is unusually stinging, particularly in its treatment of unwanted pregnancy. Carol White elevates a rather two-dimensional role with dignity and warmth, and the space-age, marital bachelor pad interiors are a lot of fun. Although an odd entry in any director’s body of work, The Man Who Had Power over Women reveals a lot about the attitudes of the money men most responsible for making London swing. DISC: Indicator label has put out the film as a website exclusive. Accompanied by new restorations of two of Krish’s shorts, including the Bafta-winning anti-apartheid docu-drama Let My People Go (1961), a fascinating career overview conversation with Krish and excellent booklet essay by Vic Pratt, this makes for a full if tonally uneven package. THE VILLAGE DETECTIVE: A SONG CYCLE Bill Morrison; US 2021; Second Run; region-free Blu-ray; colour/ b&w; in English and Russian with English subtitles; Certificate 12; 81 minutes; 1.78:1. Extras: interview with Morrison; short films by Morrison – Beyond Zero: 1914-1918 (2014), The Unchanging Sea (2018), Sunken Films (2020), Let Me Come In (2021); trailer. REVIEWED BY HANNAH MCGILL Beginning as a painter, the American artist-filmmaker Bill Morrison began in the late 1980s to create moving image works that explored the relationships between music, image, narrative and the physical properties of film. Acclaim gathered as he began to coax new forms from old footage, in a process at once nostalgic and defiantly adaptive. His 2002 magnum opus Decasia, made in collaboration with the composer Michael Gordon, synthesised multiple segments from early films in a state of literal decay. Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016) used a cache of long-lost silent films to tell the story of one remote North American town. Accompanying as it has the almost total industrial replacement of physical film with pixels and digital files, Morrison’s work has provided both an elegy for our physical relationship with cinema and an irreverent celebration of the generative aspects of rot. So it is that when canisters of films are found rusted, drowned or otherwise brought low, Bill Morrison may be who you’re gonna call. In the case of The Village Detective – four reels of which found their way into an Icelandic fishing net in 2016 – the found film turned out not to be lost, forgotten or even all that old: a 1969 crime comedy, it is in fact quite familiar and celebrated in its native Russia. But the physical condition of the filmstock still fascinated the poet of decay – as did its leading man, Mihail Žarov, in whose substantial back catalogue and changeable relationships with Soviet fame and respectability Morrison found an allegory for Russia’s tumultuous recent history, and for cinema’s totemic role in that history. Around a film concerned with the search for a purloined accordion, Morrison has constructed a piece about the place of song and image in shared histories and the role of cinema in Russian and Soviet myth-building and cultural cohesion. DISC: The film has lots of holes in it, but that is of course the point, and it’s fascinating to watch it falter in and out of visual and narrative coherence, accompanied by Morrison’s notes on its history and that of Žarov. Extras comprise an interview with the personable Morrison, contextualising the work, and four recent shorts exhibiting different tendencies of his work. 90DVD & BLU-RAY

REDISCOVERY Home video labels help to map out new cinematic histories, making work accessible that would otherwise be lost to time. Championing work that is under-recognised, out of circulation or simply out of fashion, they give us the tools to start plotting new coordinates. We already know that digital streaming is coming up short when it comes to protecting films from disappearance. Physical media are another matter; though still a plastic product in an over-saturated market, DVDs and Blu-rays are a relatively reliable insurance against cultural amnesia as well as vessels of discovery in and of themselves – at least while we have the technology working to show them. Black Zero was born in just this spirit of enquiry and archival recovery. Focusing on Canadian underground and experimental cinema (much of it rarely screened even on home turf), Black Zero was set up by Stephen Broomer, a film historian, preservationist and experimental filmmaker. One of its first releases, Keith Lock’s Everything Everywhere Again Alive (1975), was reviewed in the June 2023 issue of Sight and Sound, and chosen as one of our Discs of the Year. Broomer began the label as a way of getting his film restorations into wider circulation. Back in 2008, while a student, he restored 20-odd films from the McMaster Film Board, a radical student-run film cooperative and cine-club at Ontario’s McMaster University, which he would later make the subject of a book, Hamilton Babylon (2016). Black Zero reflects what Broomer calls a “focused enthusiasm for local, regional, national subculture that has been critically under-served in recent decades”, one which he is diligently documenting in books, video essays, articles and speculative sequels to unfinished films; much of this work cohering around Black Zero releases. One of his McMaster restorations was Palace of Pleasure, a heady, unfinished dual-projection sexual odyssey from 1969, created by one of the founders of the Film Board, the avant-garde filmmaker and later right-to-die activist John Hofhess. The film splices erotic and creative encounters with anti-war missives to shimmering, tin-foil psychedelic effect. With a ‘cameo’ by a floppy-haired David Cronenberg (in bed for a threesome!) and Leonard Cohen reading his own poetry on the soundtrack, Palace of Pleasure seems very Canadian and yet it also undoes any pre-conceived notions one might have had about Canadian experimental film. It’s a far cry from, for example, the minimalism of filmmakers Michael Snow (La Région centrale, 1971) or Ellie Epp (Trapline, 1976). Broomer tells me in an email that Palace of Pleasure “changed my life and expanded my approach to cinema, inspiring me to keep going with making films”. The title of the second section of Palace of Pleasure also gave Broomer the name of his label, which has so far released six Blu-rays: a carefully curated mix of individual films and artist-focused collections which celebrates cinema’s liberatory and therapeutic potential as well as its sheer diversity of form. No grand claims are being made for re-evaluating unrecognised masters; several of the filmmakers are outsiders and misfits, artists whose work doesn’t conform to the neat categories of established film history. The films speak for themselves, and when the message is hard to hear, video essays, liner notes and commentary tracks help fill in the missing information. The first slate of releases focused on individual films – including Strange Codes (1975), an unclassifiable late-career work of ritual and dense word-spell by the legendary, troubled found-footage artist Arthur Lipsett (1936-86) – the second prioritises more contemporary, artistfocused collections, including films by the artists Richard Kerr (b. 1952) and Josephine Massarella (1957-2018). Josephine Massarella: Green Dreams is a comprehensive collection of Massarella’s vivid, often verdant feminist eco-cinema. The release takes us from her early student work to the oneiric, surrealist studies of figures in landscape for which she is best known, and her return to filmmaking in the 2010s. The film that gives the collection its title marries portraiture, landscape and poetry, rumbling between the industrial bleats of the motorway and the twittering of the natural world. The artist claims that Green Dream (1994) channels the spirit of Artemis – the goddess of nature, childbirth, the moon, and wilderness – and that’s evident in Massarella’s fragile, ravishing images. Black Zero’s catalogue includes singlefilm releases that are shorter than feature length, but they never feel sparsely populated. R. Bruce Elder’s extraordinary 1997 feature A Man Whose Life Was Full of Woe Has Been Surprised by Joy is an exception to the short form, clocking in at 96 minutes. A stained-glass window of a film, it is studded with clustered images, silent-movie gestures and sexually intimate diary footage, careering off into split screen and multiple projection, to the accompaniment of a hectic polyphony of spoken word and jazz. I found it a fight to keep up, but my eyes and ears eventually settled in, zeroing in on whatever caught my fancy: the shimmer of goldfish scales, strands of automatic writing that made my head spin, street footage shot in Italy, the art nouveau flourishes of handmade film masking. Surprised by Joy is a sensory barrage of colour, fleshiness and self-pleasure shaped into the squiggles of stream-of-consciousness. I was familiar with Elder’s scholarly film writing but had never had the change to watch any of his extensive body of films. So what next for Black Zero? “This year we’ll be putting out work by much more contemporary filmmakers, but I am devoted to presenting more rarities spanning the 1960s to the 1990s,” Broomer tells me. Right now, he’s looking into grouping work according to major themes in Canadian experimental film as well as by regional artist communities. Experimental film deserves a wider audience, even if at times it stubbornly resists that. Labels like Black Zero are here to make it happen. Black Zero A raw description of Stephen Broomer’s Blu-ray label – dedicated to giving wider circulation to Canadian avant-garde filmmaking – doesn’t do justice to the rich, strange worlds it opens up JOSEPHINE MASSARELLA: GREEN DREAMS Josephine Massarella; Canada 1984-2017; Black Zero; region-free Blu-ray; 100 minutes; 1.37:1. Extras: individual commentaries by various writers; four early films by Massarella; archival interview with Massarella; video essay by Stephen Broomer; booklet. A MAN WHOSE LIFE WAS FULL OF WOE HAS BEEN SURPRISED BY JOY R. Bruce Elder; Canada 1997; Black Zero; region-free Blu-ray; 96 minutes; 1.37:1. Extras: commentary by Elder and Stephen Broomer; interview with Elder; video essay by Broomer; booklet. BY SOPHIA SATCHELL-BAEZA SAND AND FREEDOM Josephine Massarella’s One Woman Waiting (1985) 91 DVD & BLU-RAY

ARCHIVE TV Writing about a programme like Roobarb (1974) risks wandering into spade/soufflé territory, in this instance a green soufflé that wobbles constantly. Bob Godfrey and Grange Calveley’s cartoons were too brief and silly to bear much analysis; still, they can stand a little celebrating. Roobarb is an eager, energetic dog with green fur and a rich fantasy life. Calveley’s scripts typically involve him coming up with some grand, fantastical scheme – building a flying-machine, setting out to discover pirate treasure, becoming a knight in shining armour or a hypnotist – and enlisting Custard, next-door’s bright pink cat, and the birds who inhabit the garden as assistants or audience; their reactions range from hostility to indifference to occasional enthusiasm. He assembles fantastical contraptions in the garden shed and dresses in elaborate costumes that imply a range of reference well beyond the programme’s original school-age audience: as a film director, he wears von Stroheim jodhpurs and shouts through a loudhailer; as a theatre director he wears a Victorian actor-manager’s floppy black hat, cape and cravat. Calveley was surely indebted at some level to Snoopy, another cartoon dog with a recherché fantasy life, but importantly, Roobarb’s fantasies spill over into the real world: when he becomes a pirate – a broad ‘Arr, Jim lad’ impression of Robert Newton – he really does cross the sea to a genuine treasure island; when he decides to mark Thursday by dressing as the god Thor and hurling thunderbolts, actual pagan deities, irritated by the noise, intervene to punish him. Each episode lasted five minutes, of which around 90 seconds is opening and closing titles: so a tremendous amount of plot has to be packed in, and the scripts’ nonsense logic unfolds at exhilarating speed. When the garden pond dries up, Roobarb goes in search of a water source, is conducted by a mole to the giant toad at the centre of the earth who is in charge of sources but out of everything but chocolate sauce; the episode ends with Roobarb, wearing an Edwardian one-piece swimming costume, encased in congealed chocolate. The animation bustles the viewer amiably past any gaps in the logic. Godfrey and his small team, working from Calveley’s drawings, churned out all 31 episodes at high speed, using marker pens – you can see the strokes – so that faintly mismatched frames constantly shimmer and wobble (the technique is called ‘boiling’). The artwork is literally vibrant, filled with energy and strangeness. Two other ingredients complete the recipe. One is Richard Briers’s narration, which gives Roobarb a boyish excitability and pleasure at his own cleverness not a million miles from Briers’s Tom Good in The Good Life (1975-78), and Custard a sneering nasal drawl. The other is Johnny Hawksworth’s music: maddeningly catchy theme tune, which then mutates within episodes – plucked out on a double bass with fidgety snare-drum backing to create a sense of motion, or wah-wahed on a muted trumpet to express languor. Roobarb was probably the commercial peak of Godfrey’s long and influential career – he died in 2013 at the age of 91 – but only one of a number of creative peaks. He was nominated four times for the Oscar for Best Short Film, Animated, winning in 1976 for his Isambard Kingdom Brunel biotoon Great. He made a lot of eccentric films in the 50s and 60s, sometimes in conjunction with the experimental filmmaker Bruce Lacey, mostly preoccupied with sex – several are free to view on BFI Player. His fingerprints are all over important parts of midcentury culture. He had tiny roles in both A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965) – you can spot him easily in the former, playing shove ha’penny in a pub and reacting with a stony stare when Ringo spills his change all over the game – and had his bottom filmed by Yoko Ono. His trick of inserting classic works of art into his cartoons surely had an effect on Terry Gilliam, who borrowed his studios to do some of the animation for early episodes of Monty Python. Stanley Kubrick personally asked for Godfrey’s Kama Sutra Rides Again (1971) – one of his funniest – to be released as an accompaniment to A Clockwork Orange. Calveley, by contrast, never found another vehicle that suited his talents half as well – the other cartoon series he wrote for Godfrey, Noah and Nelly in SkylArk (1976), a riff on the Bible story involving two-headed animals and perfectly fine weather, was fun but too puzzling to satisfy. That helps to explain why he created a Roobarb reboot in 2005, broadcast in the UK on Channel 5 as part of the children’s strand Milkshake. This second version apparently has its fans (the only user review on IMDb gives it 10/10 and says it’s an improvement on the original), but it doesn’t convince me. Oddly, the thing it reminded me of was Martin Amis’s 2012 novel Lionel Asbo, not that you’d be in any danger of confusing them: in both cases there’s a strong sense of a writer imitating himself, trying to get back to a tone, a voice that had worked decades earlier, and chucking in a few contemporary details to make it ‘relevant’. The updated Roobarb gets into all sorts of technology-related scrapes, often involving a wooden computer and a character called Mouse, who is described as a ‘Rodent Scholar’ from ‘Silly Cone Valley’. At times, the somewhat longer episodes veer into science fiction, discarding the nonsense logic of the originals in favour of a more familiar imported variety. The digital animation (directed by Jason Tammemagi, these days associated with the Irish studio Cartoon Saloon) struggles, too, to recapture the chaotic energy Godfrey’s team imparted to every frame: the boiling effect is recreated digitally, so that drearily straight, well-defined lines pulse in stiflingly regular rhythms; and the computer’s palette can’t quite match the joyous felt-tip shades of the original. Roobarb’s own shade of green struck my eye as mildly repellent – roobarbative, even. Neatness purposefully mussed up at the edges is no replacement for organic anarchy. Roobarb… and Custard: The Complete Collection Peer long enough into the abyss of mid-century British comic surrealism that spawned the Goons and Monty Python, and a hyperactive animated green dog will peer back ROOBARB Bob Godfrey; UK 1974 ROOBARB & CUSTARD TOO Jason Tammemägi; UK/Ireland 2005 Fabulous Films; Region B Blu-ray or Region 2 DVD; 2 discs; English SDH; Certificate U; 414 minutes; 1.33:1. BY ROBERT HANKS COLLIE WOBBLES Roobarb, a bird, Custard 92DVD & BLU-RAY

JINNAH Jamil Dehlavi; Pakistan/UK 1998; Powerhouse/ Indicator; region-free Blu-ray; in English with SD/Urdu with English subtitles; Certificate 15; 1.85:1. Extras: making-of documentary; trailer; image gallery; booklet. REVIEWED BY PHILIP KEMP You’re planning to make a serious, largely factual biographical picture about the real-life statesman Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who almost single-handedly succeeded in creating the Muslim state of Pakistan. So who should be cast in the title role? Well, how about – Christopher Lee? The role was originally offered to Jeremy Irons, who turned it down. But in the event Lee – as Pakistan’s English-language paper The News International commented – “plays Jinnah with conviction, and his performance is outstanding”. Lee himself, then nearly 80 years old, considered it “my most important role”; he gives Jinnah immense stature and dignity, though leavened here and there with touches of humour. Focused to the point of monomania, he is seen tussling with Gandhi (a mischievous performance by Sam Dastor), Nehru and the British viceroy Lord Mountbatten (a pompous James Fox). Even so, the film hit a wave of criticism, less from Hindus than from extremist Muslims. The casting was controversial (“Dracula cast as Father of the Realm!” read one headline), but the bigger problem was that it was insufficiently reverential towards Jinnah. Reporters crowded the set, and when told they couldn’t stay while a scene was being shot, demanded ‘Why the secrecy?’ The executive producer, Akbar Ahmed, tried to get himself credited as director and interfered with Jamil Dehlavi’s work, even persuaded the Islamabad government to withdraw £1 million of promised funding. The production became chaotic, distribution was badly mishandled and Jinnah never achieved the reputation it warranted. The fantasy-flashback sequences in which the young Jinnah (Richard Lintern) is visited and advised by his older self become a touch repetitious. Even so, the film deserves to stand with Richard Attenborough’s far more lavishly budgeted Gandhi (1982), portraying an equally key figure in the tragically botched 1947 Partition of India. DISC: Dehlavi Films’ HD remaster was created from the original negative, with additional grading corrections. A making-of documentary is useful, but Éric Peretti’s booklet essay has much more revealing detail. IMPOSSIBLE OBJECT John Frankenheimer; France/Italy 1973; Powerhouse/Indicator; Region AB Blu-ray; in French with English subtitles/English with SDH; Certificate 15; 113 minutes (French cut)/104 minutes (international cut). Extras: alternative English-language version; commentary by critic Tim Lucas; 1973 Frankenheimer interview; video essays; image gallery and script; booklet. REVIEWED BY HENRY K. MILLER Essentially unreleased in its day, and deservedly so, Impossible Object is John Frankenheimer’s sincere attempt at a European art movie à la Resnais or Fellini, made during the murky patch in his career between Grand Prix (1966) and The French Connection II (1975). Based on a Booker-nominated novel by Nicholas Mosley, it has much in common with Joseph Losey’s adaptation of Mosley’s Accident (1967), a nonlinear rendering of the evergreen middle-aged intellectual meets twentysomething bombshell tale; except that Accident was adapted by Harold Pinter and Impossible Object wasn’t. In this one, Alan Bates plays the married English expat novelist, and Dominique Sanda the somewhat younger wife of a businessman, whom Bates refuses to break up his marriage over, at least until she gets pregnant. It’s all there: maleauthored non-consensual sex fantasies voiced by women, naff ‘surrealist’ dream sequences (or are they?!), and a difficult-to-do-justice-to bit with Bates’s character’s teenage son’s girlfriend. None of this is helped by Bates, who plays his role as if he’s the romantic lead in a light comedy, making for a particularly confusing attempted suicide scene. On the other hand, Claude Renoir’s images are lustrous in the extreme, with Sanda’s hair achieving a hitherto undreamt of glow, faithfully restored in HD on this Indicator disc. DISC: Indicator has not held back, providing both French and English versions of the film (the latter was called Story of a Love Story, which sounds like a parody title from a sitcom), plus a video essay listing the differences between them, as well as a second video essay on ‘lost’ films by Frankenheimer and Lumet, a commentary, a digitised copy of the script, and a fat booklet. But at the same time, no one seems to be pretending that the film around which all this has been arranged is any better than it is – notably, commentator Tim Lucas says Frankenheimer was in over his head. DAZED AND CONFUSED Richard Linklater; US 1993; Criterion 4K UHD & Region B Blu-ray dual format, 2 discs; English SDH; Certificate 15; 102 minutes; 1.85:1. Extras: director’s commentary; making-of documentary; deleted scenes; outtakes; audition footage; booklet. REVIEWED BY HENRY K. MILLER It is tempting to write that Dazed and Confused ‘stays the same age’, but really we have grown old together, and it has taken on new dimensions without losing its youthful charm. Even apart from the foreshortening effect that the passage of three decades has wrought on the difference between 1976 (when the film is set) and 1992 (when it was made), the film’s own discourse on the passage of time looms larger than on first viewing, not least because time has been the theme of so many of Richard Linklater’s subsequent films. Nevertheless, the supposedly mature view that nothing of consequence happens in Dazed and Confused, or that it’s plotless, is not one I can adopt. It is the last day of school somewhere in Texas – Linklater has the audacity to soundtrack this moment with Alice Cooper’s ‘School’s Out’ – and the film follows about two dozen teenagers from early afternoon to dawn the next day. A lot happens, but the teenagers themselves, and not just the nerds, are aware that they themselves can’t grasp the moment’s full significance, that the moment is passing, and that nothing can quite satisfy their yearning for – something. Nothing especially bad happens, and nothing especially good, and it all happens to unexceptional people – aspiring filmmakers, even film fans, are notable by their absence in an avowedly autobiographical film. There are fights and beatings among the boys, there are couplings among the boys and girls, but no single parting, only the sense among the older teenagers that the group’s time together is coming to an end. What now seems remarkable is Linklater’s directorial poise, at some golden mean between identification and distance. This is an involving film, but not (as most films are) a melodramatic one. The bad things that do happen are given no more emphasis than they need. What does stay the same is the music, though it is far more familiar now than it was in the 1990s, at least in Britain, and the lines, though somehow Matthew McConaughey’s immortal “It’d be a lot cooler if you did” sounds even better than I’d remembered. DISC: Linklater’s commentary is fun and frank, but it was recorded in 2006, a mere 13 years after the film came out, and surely it would have been more Linklaterian to have included a new one alongside it. Kahane Cooperman’s making-of is a cut above, and comes with two hours of outtakes, a few of which are fascinating – namely, the very articulate 20-year-old Ben Affleck and the female leads discussing the film’s male bias, their attempts to push back against it, and Linklater’s mea culpa (reiterated in the commentary) to the effect that he is pushing against his limits in writing for women. 93 DVD & BLU-RAY

THE STING OF DEATH Oguri Kōhei; Japan 1990; Radiance; Region AB Blu-ray; in Japanese with English subtitles; Certificate 12; 115 minutes; 1.66:1. Extras: documentary on 1990s renaissance of Japanese cinema; interview with film scholar Maeda Hideki; booklet. REVIEWED BY HANNAH MCGILL A harrowing, bleakly beautiful chamber piece, Oguri Kōhei’s adaptation of an ‘I-novel’ (an emotional confessional that blurs protagonist, narrator and author) by Shimao Toshio allegorises the psychological fallout from Japan’s World War II experience through the close-up depiction of an unravelling marriage. Or is it vice versa – war trauma allegorised as hopeless domestic misalignment? The viewer certainly gets time to ponder the filmmakers’ intentions, as the unfaithful Toshio (Kishibe Ittoku) and his pained, rejected wife Miho (Matsuzaka Keiko) discuss and re-enact the failures of their relationship, in a home that appears to be literally collapsing around them. Meanwhile, their young children adapt to being neglected. Visual compositions, shot in a dusty, muted palette by Andō Shōhei, are unstintingly elegant and interesting, while the emotional tone is punishingly lugubrious. Whether one believes that Toshio has driven his wife insane by cheating on her, or that her coldness and neurosis forced him to seek comfort elsewhere, may depend upon what baggage the viewer brings along; but Oguri, in any case, appears less concerned with the origins of the couple’s despair than with their inability to assuage it. It’s as if a sentimental 1950s melodrama has had a nervous breakdown: love is a state of misery; erotic joy is absent even from illicit love affairs; children bring no fulfilment; domestic life is but a flimsy stage set and the world beyond it hazily irrelevant. In its depiction of a marriage as a war of attrition, Sting of Death calls to mind Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? (1966), Scenes from a Marriage (1973) and Antichrist (2009). Like those films, it tests how much of one couple’s mutual misery we can bear to witness. The limited reasons we’re given to care whether Miho and Toshio remain together render the test all the more gruelling. An enlightening interview with film scholar Maeda Hideki, included in the extras, expands possible responses: to him, the point isn’t marital discord at all, but rather the access to raw, primal energy that discord enables. The film’s ambiguities and challenges are beautifully assisted by Hosokawa Toshio’s score (his first film credit), which blurs the swooning strings of conventional melodrama into the knife-edge shrieks of horror. DISC: The film’s terrific visuals and score are both beautifully presented in this release. Maeda’s interview is a goodhumoured guide to an ill-humoured film, with particularly interesting investigation of the discombobulating effects of Oguri’s cuts and camera placement. A lengthier documentary, technically rough but packed with information and excellent interviews with a raft of important directors, contextualises the Japanese cinema of the 1990s, including the extreme horror trend and the pioneering animation work of Miyazaki Hayao. BLACK TIGHT KILLERS Hasebe Yasuharu; Japan 1966; Radiance; Region AB Blu-ray; in Japanese with English subtitles; Certificate 18; 87 minutes; 2.18:1. Extras: audio commentary by Jasper Sharp; archive interview with Hasebe; trailer; booklet. REVIEWED BY KAT ELLINGER After a lengthy stint as an assistant director at Nikkatsu, Hasebe Yasuharu’s feature debut for the studio as a director in his own right, Black Tight Killers (1966), isn’t afraid to wear its obvious debt to forerunner Suzuki Seijun on its candy-laden sleeve. But the film’s wonderfully excessive pulp comic-book approach to embodying what the director, in an archive interview among the disc’s extras, calls a “new type of action film” for Japanese cinema makes it anything but derivative. The film has a fairly simplistic action plot: handsome hero Honda (Kobayashi Akira), returned from Vietnam, quickly becomes embroiled in a search for his kidnapped girlfriend (Matsubara Chieko) and later, a hunt for missing gold. But Hasebe packs every frame with set piece after set piece of high-kitsch 60s pop-art soaked action; including firework displays, a cheeky nod to Goldfinger (1964) and several extraordinarily fun segments featuring a group of blacktight-wearing female ninjas. They also happen to be go-go dancers with a penchant for weaponising chewing gum. The film might not have quite reached the same cult classic heights as genre cousins Danger: Diabolik (1968), Modesty Blaise (1966) or The Tenth Victim (1965), but it’s every bit as good. DISC: Black Tight Killers really benefits from this Blu-ray restoration, given its gaudy colours, gorgeous sets and camera work. Although not loaded with extras, the disc comes with some quality material, including an audio commentary by Jasper Sharp, who digs deep into the cast and crew as well as the film’s place in Nikkatsu’s long history. There is a valuable archive interview with the director, shot on video, in which he explores his career and influences, and laments the state of funding in the contemporary industry. Also included is a Japanese trailer for the film. THE ROARING TWENTIES Raoul Walsh; US 1939; Criterion; 4K UHD & Region B Blu-ray dual format, 2 discs; b&w; English SDH; Certificate tbc; 106 minutes; 1.37:1. Extras: audio commentary by film historian Lincoln Hurst; new interview with critic Gary Giddins; excerpt from 1973 interview with Walsh; trailer; booklet. REVIEWED BY KAT ELLINGER James Cagney stars as Eddie Bartlett, an affable young man serving in the trenches during World War I where he strikes up a friendship with George – Humphrey Bogart in a solid supporting role – and Lloyd (Jeffrey Lynn). On his return home, Eddie’s dreams of owning his own taxi company through hard graft are soon shattered. Instead he finds himself dragged into an underworld packed with bathtub gin and speakeasies, setting him on a path to becoming a major bootlegger. The Roaring Twenties was Raoul Walsh’s first film for Warner Brothers; the Hollywood legend’s tight direction was grounded in a strong script by Mark Hellinger, reportedly based on real people he met during his time as a journalist in the 1920s. The film exploits recent American history to deliver both a character study in corruption and a morality fable. Exploring tensions between the three men and Eddie’s infatuation with singer Jean (Priscilla Lane) – who cannot love him back – it tracks the rise and fall of a man with deeply ambiguous ethics but a good heart. While performances across the board are compelling – especially Cagney’s, ranging from lovable to despicable; and Bogart’s slightly unhinged George – one of the real stars of the show for me is Gladys George in her supporting spot as Panama Smith: a world-weary woman, whose understated love for Eddie goes unnoticed by everyone until the tragic final frames. DISC: This new restoration by Criterion delivers the film in both 4K UHD and Blu-ray. It comes with a few extras, including a somewhat stop-start, read-the-screen archival audio commentary by Lincoln Hurst, which unfortunately lapses into long silences. Of more value is a new interview with critic Gary Giddens, who enthusiastically explores many aspects of the film, its place in the context of American crime cinema, its main themes and its strong ties to 1920s history. There is also an excerpt from a 1973 interview with director Walsh, and a trailer. 94DVD & BLU-RAY

LOST AND FOUND In a career that spanned more than seven decades, amassing over 240 acting credits, Michel Piccoli never phoned in a performance – even when he was just breezing on through in the tiniest of one-line cameos (see, for example, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s La Prisonnière, 1968). Unlike many of the contemporaries with whom the French actor shared screen time, he was never really a movie star; seemingly just as comfortable playing in the background as heading up front and centre. He was above all a character actor, one with a particular skill for playing absurdist or surreal satire with complete deadpan conviction. As such, he shines in the roles he played for subversive filmmakers like Marco Ferreri and Luis Buñuel. Which brings us to Luis García Berlanga (1921-2010) and his 1974 production Grandeur nature (also known as Love Doll; also known as Lifesize – which is a literal translation of the French title), which takes an approach to social satire similar to both Ferreri and Buñuel. Berlanga remains an obscure presence in cinephile circles and his work has rarely been restored for the home video market. He worked almost exclusively in Francoist Spain, though Grandeur nature – a FrenchItalian-Spanish production – is one of the exceptions. His domestic films were quietly subversive, but he’s a difficult sell in English-speaking territories: he didn’t dabble in genre like some of the more shocking anti-Franco filmmakers, such as Vicente Aranda or Eloy de la Iglesia; nor did he become an esteemed auteur like Carlos Saura. Nevertheless, Grandeur nature cries out to be embraced by contemporary arthouse audiences. The story begins with the midlife crisis to end all midlife crises – putting it in line with much of the comedy coming out of Italy at the time, which often used gratuitous sex to explore the deeper theme of male insecurity in a deeply Catholic landscape. Michel (Piccoli shares a first name with his character) is seen in the opening moments collecting a mysterious package. It’s soon revealed that it contains “the perfect woman” – an inanimate sex doll, which he promptly takes as his lover. Michel is a wealthy Parisian dentist, trapped in a loveless marriage of convenience; his wife (Rada Rassimov) doesn’t seem to mind him taking on extramarital affairs. But as the lines of fantasy and reality begin to break down, his relationship with the doll becomes increasingly disturbing and perverse, and his wife is sent packing. Like many films that followed in the wake of Buñuel’s Belle de jour (1967), Grandeur nature uses overt sexual imagery, social satire and the theme of kink to explore power relations. The film seems to imply the question, what would happen if you took away the lines of consent? Michel’s object-woman represents his dream: a woman who can never say no. When he is given this power over the doll, it ultimately corrupts him; shifting him from protector and doting lover to serial abuser, to violent misogynist. The film deals in explicit and perverse imagery, present even in the design of the mannequin itself, which is often shown exposed, with over-sized breasts and an ever-open pouting mouth. In early scenes, the film deliberately exploits conventions seen in the Emmanuelle-era sex film boom (the two films were released the same year), although the doll renders those scenes grotesquely comical. The establishing scenes focus on the erotic and sensual, as Michel showers with the doll. He talks constantly, as if the mannequin were real. Even weirder, his mother – who feels estranged from Michel’s real life – steals the doll while visiting, dresses it up in period clothes and takes it as a knitting partner. When Michel catches her, they act as if the doll were a real person and carry on in this fashion. Things get increasingly strange from here on, as others apparently feel compelled to project their desires on to the doll. In response to this loss of ownership or control, Michel becomes increasingly paranoid and possessive, accusing the doll of acting like a slut, taking numerous bizarre videos of the two of them together, spying, punishing the doll by repeatedly inserting a knife into its vaginal cavity, before he descends into total madness and depression. While the film resonates strongly with contemporary feminist themes – especially those concerning objectification and pornification, male fantasy, consent – one must never forget the particular resonance that ‘patriarchy’ had for Francoist Spain. Just as General Franco presented himself not as a dictator, but as the benevolent father, the ultimate patriarch, Michel is the husband, the father, the provider and he constantly makes reference to his role. Although the films are stylistically very different, Grandeur nature has much in common with Vicente Aranda’s The Blood Spattered Bride (1971), which comments on violent patriarchy through an adaptation of Sheridan le Fanu’s 1872 vampire novella Carmilla; or Carlos Saura’s equally disturbing arthouse/genre crossbreed, Ana and the Wolves (1973) – in which Geraldine Chaplin takes a job as nanny in a wealthy Spanish family’s isolated mansion, only to find herself under surveillance, subjected to coercion and, later, in danger of serious bodily harm by the male forces in the house. Even setting aside its particular political context, the film speaks to a wider theme of existential crisis. It is fitting that it takes place in Paris, the home of Charles Baudelaire, who saw the city shrouded in its own decay and decadence. And it is this decay, despite its more satirical elements, that makes this such a profoundly interesting film – and one that really would benefit from a restoration, so it can be seen by international audiences, who might respond with far more appreciation than it received on its original release. Grandeur nature An era that can put Barbie at the top of the box-office charts and the centre of the discourse is surely ready for a proper revival of Luis García Berlanga’s Franco-era comedy about a dentist’s obsessive relationship with his inflatable doll lover Luis García Berlanga; France/Italy/Spain 1974 BY KAT ELLINGER INFLATED AMBITIONS Michel Piccoli as Michel, with bride 95 DVD & BLU-RAY

Kinoteka Polish Film Festival The 22nd edition of the festival finds the Polish industry in rude health, with recent work by Agnieszka Holland and Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert alongside restorations of classic films by Walerian Borowczyk and Krzysztof Kieślowski BY MICHAEL BROOKE ABOVE The restoration of Walerian Borowczyk’s The Story of Sin (1975) will screen at the festival Kinoteka continues to play an essential role in bringing more critically acclaimed Polish titles to the UK, as many won’t get a subsequent theatrical release London’s first Kinoteka Polish Film Festival ran over four days in 2003, in less than propitious circumstances for its national cinema. Almost a full decade had passed since a Polish-language film had received a commercial release in the UK (Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours: White, in 1994), a time when the 1989 collapse of Communism had been accompanied by the related nearcollapse of Polish cinema. Films were still being made, but barely shown even in Poland, and the occasional big local hits like Andrzej Wajda’s Pan Tadeusz (1999), Jerzy Hoffman’s With Fire and Sword (1999) and Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Quo Vadis (2001) were considered to have strictly parochial appeal. Fast-forward 21 years and things have changed beyond all recognition. Thanks to a comprehensive mid-2000s industry restructuring, Polish cinema is now in robust health, and a substantial crosssection of its increasingly prolific output can now be accessed internationally via a wide range of platforms, including several streaming services (notably Netflix). The UK also has its own long-established Polish cinema circuit, largely sidestepping the English-speaking media, albeit one generally focused on mainstream commercial releases. So Kinoteka, overseen by longstanding artistic director Marlena Łukasiak, continues to play an essential role in bringing more critically acclaimed Polish titles to the UK – if precedent is a guide, many won’t get a subsequent theatrical release. This year’s opening film, Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border, is an exception (it’s out on 7 June), but the Kinoteka screening on 6 March features a director Q&A. Similarly, although the closing night film, DK and Hugh Welchman’s animated The Peasants, opened in December, the Kinoteka screening on 28 March is at the BFI Imax, with its acclaimed folk-inspired score being played live. Green Border caused considerable controversy back home, when it was vociferously condemned by the then ruling Law and Justice party over its impassioned attack on Polish refugee policies. However, the government was unable to prevent its release (and the row helped make it a substantial domestic hit), and its successors in the current Donald Tusk-led coalition subsequently discovered an internal blacklist at TVP, the main Polish state broadcaster, affecting not just other films by Holland but also those starring such outspoken Law and Justice critics as Krystyna Janda, Andrzej Seweryn and Jerzy and Maciej Stuhr. (The blacklist has since been annulled.) A similarly heartfelt study of those marginalised through no fault of their own, Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert’s Woman Of… (23 March), like Szumowska’s previous films (especially 2013’s In the Name Of… and 2017’s Mug) firmly grasps a tricky sociological nettle, in this case the experience of growing up with gender dysphoria against the uncomprehending, often hostile backdrop of small-town Poland. Szumowska’s husband Mateusz Kościukiewicz plays the lead in Saint (17 March), a newly qualified policeman charged with investigating the theft of a silver sculpture from a church, a narrative macguffin that ends up uncovering rather more pertinent things about the fraught relationship between church and state in mid-1980s Communist Poland. Jan Holoubek’s Doppelganger: The Double (9 March) is a bizarre true story set during the Cold War in which a Polish man gradually discovers that his identity has been stolen by a Soviet spy (Jakub Gierszał) operating in Western Europe. Gierszał is also the lead in Klaudiusz Chrostowski’s desolate Ultima Thule (7 March). It follows his relocation to the remote Scottish island of Foula, where Michael Powell filmed The Edge of the World (1937), which on this evidence hasn’t changed much over the intervening 96WIDER SCREEN

Rooms with a view ‘The Tell-Tale Rooms’, a touring exhibition of paintings, sculptures, animations and VR film by Eden Kötting, authored with her father Andrew, offers an entertaining and celebratory encounter with otherness BY JOHN BEAGLES ABOVE Eden Kötting in one of her ‘Tell-Tale Rooms’ decades. Jan Kidawa-Błoński’s The Secret of Little Rose (12 March; nominally a sequel to 2010’s Little Rose, although it’s not necessary to have seen it) is a contemporary thriller in which a politician (Magdalena Boczarska) finds herself compelled to dig deep into her complex family history after her husband is murdered by terrorists. Pre-20th century Polish history is represented by Paweł Maślona’s Scarborn, a rollicking Tarantinoesque reinvention of the true story of General Tadeusz Kościuszko (Jacek Braciak) that amply confirms the promise of Maślona’s gleefully dark debut Panic Attack (2018). That’s showing on 15 March with a director Q&A, and on 24 March with an accompanying talk (by yours truly) on the history of Polish black comedy. There’s more of the latter on display in Adrian Apanel’s aptly titled Horror Story (13 March), about the humiliating limbo period between qualification and relevant employment, exacerbated here by the hapless protagonist (Jakub Zając) being forced through financial circumstance to live in the boarding house from hell. Gentler experiences come via Magdalena Nieć’s delightful The Dog Who Travelled by Train (9 March), a huge domestic hit last year; and Kinga Dębska’s Feast of Fire (16 March), about two sisters pushing themselves beyond what their bodies are comfortable with – the twist being that Łucja (Joanna Drabik) is a professional ballerina, while Nastka (Paulina Pytlak) has cerebral palsy. As in previous films like These Daughters of Mine (2015), Dębska deftly sidesteps the kind of mawkishness that one might expect with this subject matter. Animation, a longstanding Polish strength, is covered in the programme ‘A Short Story of Women’ (8 March), comprising nine short films by female animators. And Polish cinema’s equally impressive documentary tradition is represented multiply by Maciek Hamela’s In the Rearview (10 March), about Ukrainian refugees traversing their newly war-ravaged country to safety in neighbouring Poland; Mela Hilleard’s Home (10 March), a journey through the memorabilia of people expelled from their countries and cultures; and Vita Maria Drygas’s Danger Zone (14 March), about the bizarre phenomenon of war-zone tourism. Kinoteka also showcases restorations of important Polish classics, such as Walerian Borowczyk’s only Polish feature The Story of Sin (1975, 17 March) and Krzsysztof Kieślowski’s international breakthrough Camera Buff (1979, 10 March). There’s also a rare opportunity to see Michał Waszyński’s The Great Way (1946, 27 March), the first post-World War II Polish feature film, a reminder both of a time when the industry was in an even worse state than was the case in 2003 and of Polish cinema’s long and distinguished record of triumphing over often considerable adversity. The 22nd Kinoteca Polish Film Festival takes place at venues across London from 6-28 March Eden Kötting, who self-identifies as a neurodiverse artist (she has the rare genetic disorder Joubert syndrome), has never suffered the indignity of being (mis)represented by the temporary institutional box-ticking exercises of someone else, as can happen in the art world. This is made explicit in ‘The Tell-Tale Rooms’, a touring exhibition of her paintings, sculptures, animations, drawings and VR film, all of which have been collaboratively authored with her father Andrew, the British artist and filmmaker. This is self-determined work by Eden and Andrew, not second-hand images about Eden. As such, it’s a timely reminder of the need for widespread, urgent, structural relocation of art world power, to avoid misrepresentations of anyone ‘other’ in danger of becoming fixed, in Eden’s words, as “diseased and deviant”. Technically, ‘The Tell-Tale Rooms’ rejuvenate yesterday’s piece of diminished tech futurism, the 360-degree virtual reality headset. Once inside the VR world, the disembodied viewer is free to embark on an unfolding phantasmagorical journey through the sunlit rooms of the Köttings’ dilapidated cottage in the Pyrenees. In a beautifully rendered 3D photogrammetry space, animations of Eden’s drawings of fish, her signature toothy TellTale Heads and a Lilliputian Eden and her zimmer frame magically materialise. Transposing images of Eden and her animated drawings into and over the prosaic ‘reality’ of the kitchen, the bedroom – reclassified as the “the room of memory, the room of nostalgia” – creates a dizzying spatial dislocation. By monkeying around with the “fusty rules of perception”, the cumulative effect is a giggle-inducing, playful reminder of the subjectivity of perception. One of the many ways the work achieves this is via artful oscillations in scale, which are subtle but telling in their ability to transport the viewer. It is uncannily disorienting suddenly to be a small, floating Alice in VR wonderland, looking up at a looming chair, gigantic bed or abruptly noticing that the floor has dissolved and you are hovering over a rocky abyss. As a defamiliarising strategy, these spatial reorientations are aesthetically and cognitively stimulating. They are also deeply poignant. Becoming a small person, gliding from room to room, accompanied by Eden, her zimmer frame and a shoal of animated fish, is a profoundly empathic experience, that reminds any viewer who navigates space with ease that it isn’t like this for everyone. This emotional experience of accompanying Eden around her ‘art-world’ is heightened by an omnipresent sound collage, which evocatively uses extracts from Andrew’s films, such as Gallivant (1996), to weave its own immersive sonic enchantment. The sound of spectral voices from Eden’s past, such as Andrew’s grandmother, repeating phrases – “your mouth is open very wide, you should always put your hand in front, lest people see inside” – adds another emotional register to Eden’s world. Andrew Kötting once urged “all filmmakers to have spent time with their arms or feet inside another sentient being”. I’d extend that to urge all viewers to do so too. The VR manifestation of another person’s cognitive, imaginative realm in ‘The Tell-Tale Rooms’ is a radically entertaining, ethical and political encounter with otherness. It’s also a thought-provoking celebration of the creativity of Eden, Andrew and their collaborators, such as Glenn Whiting and Isabel Skinner – a timely, uplifting 360-degree joy to behold, which is as far away as possible from being an exercise in institutional box-ticking and flat (mis)representation. ‘The Tell-Tale Rooms’ is at South Hill Park Gallery, Bracknell Forest, from March 7-20 and Home Manchester from 15-24 March 97 WIDER SCREEN IMAGE: ANDREW KÖTTING

The 80s called for kaiju-sized leading men who strode through the devastation while the accountants tallied up the costs and profits. The book gets the tone of this style of cinema perfectly BELOW Sylvester Stallone in Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) The Last Action Heroes AUTHOR NICK DE SEMLYEN PUBLISHER PICADOR PAGES 352 ISBN 9781529058505 REVIEWED BY KIM NEWMAN Subtitled ‘The Triumphs, Flops, and Feuds of Hollywood’s Kings of Carnage’, Empire magazine editor Nick De Semlyen’s The Last Action Heroes follows Wild and Crazy Guys, his 2019 study of the gross-out comedy star vehicles of the 1980s. One or two totemic careers (Eddie Murphy’s pivot from stand-up to crime/action and back) and even films (the teaming of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito in Twins, 1988) straddle the categories. De Semlyen’s focus in both books is what came next for the major studios after the experimental/ambitious movie brat-driven cinema of the 1970s. Usually, Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977) are tagged as the turning-point hits that ended an era typified by risktaking auteur ventures like The Godfather (1972) and Taxi Driver (1976) and inaugurated the blockbuster multiplex fillers of the 1980s – which happened to coincide with the rightwards shift of the US after the election of a Hollywood president, Ronald Reagan. De Semlyen, like Quentin Tarantino, pegs the bicentennial year hit Rocky (1976) as the significant moment. As originally written by its star, Rocky could have been a gritty loser-focused drama like John Huston’s typical-for-the1970s Fat City (1972), but the project was transformed in development into a feelgood fable that told American audiences they’d earned their shot after all. Like Wild and Crazy Guys, the new book focuses on careers and images rather than genre cycles – offering Sylvester Stallone as Rocky and Rambo, and Schwarzenegger as Conan and Terminator, as the battling brand leaders. Sly and Arnie oneupped each other’s box-office grosses throughout the 1980s and even seemed to compete when it came to costly flops. Their feud and eventual detente matches the big political story of the decade too: Austrian Schwarzenegger plays an East German in Commando (1985) and a Russian in Red Heat (1988), whereas Stallone’s archetypal American characters both start as anguished martyrs (taking a beating was his USP) but transform in progressively fantastical sequels into supermen (and, not incidentally, take the fight to the Soviets). These titans feel like the auteurs of their films – though only Stallone went so far as to script and direct his pictures, perhaps on the model of Clint Eastwood, an important progenitor – and wink at each other. In Last Action Hero (1993), an alternative universe finds Stallone on promo material in a video store playing the Terminator, while the future visited in Demolition Man (1993) follows a Schwarzenegger presidency. There was genuine ill will between the stars, as De Semlyen lists slights, scuffles and sulks – though they’d eventually end a cold war by partnering in a burger restaurant and teaming for the Escape Plan (2013-19) and Expendables (2010-23) franchises, which have become the hang-outs for a generation of now-ageing if still spry ass-kickers. In retrospect, it’s significant that both icons started out in bit roles towering over the kinds of performer (and director) they’d supplant – Stallone as goons bested by Woody Allen (in Bananas, 1971) and Jack Lemmon (in The Prisoner of Second Avenue, 1975); Schwarzenegger as ridiculous muscle set beside Elliott Gould (in The Long Goodbye, 1973) and Jeff Bridges (in Stay Hungry, 1976). Within a few years, gym-toned knuckleheads didn’t seem so funny and an age of big-screen heroism was defined by Conan, Rocky, the Terminator and Rambo – all of whom first appeared in auteur-led ambitious pictures that straddle the 1970s and the 80s in approach. First Blood (1982) could have starred, say, Bruce Dern – or Robert Blake, who more or less played a western version of Rambo in Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1968). The Terminator might have been Lance Henriksen. The action film of the 80s evolved away from those possibilities – this book doesn’t have much truck with the Simpson-BruckheimerScott-Cruise axis of Top Gun (1986), but the tone of many of the decade’s action star vehicles is set by that particular fusion of the aesthetics of MTV, US Navy recruiting films and gay porn. This is an American story, but besides homegrown action men like martial arts champion Chuck Norris, everyman wiseass Bruce Willis and ponytailed man of mystery Steven Seagal, the arena was open to all-comers. Even losing to one of the big two was a route to stardom for Swedish renaissance man Dolph Lundgren (KO’d in Rocky IV, 1985) and Belgian kickboxer Jean-Claude Van Damme (fired from a gig inside the alien suit of Predator, 1987). Hollywood stunt arrangers and fight choreographers looked to work being done with fewer safety restrictions in Asia (a major devastation scene in Commando is copied almost exactly from Police Story, 1985) and Jackie Chan spent the better part of 20 years alternating Hong Kong hits with attempts to muscle in on the American market, eventually breaking big with the Rush Hour franchise (1998-2006) – an essay in one of the defining 80s subgenres, the buddy cop picture. It could be argued that the tone of comicstrip policiers like Cobra (1986), Tango & Cash (1989) and Die Hard (1988) was set by Freebie and the Bean (1974), but James Caan and Alan Arkin were 70s stars, neurotic and grounded. The 80s called for kaijusized leading men who strode through the devastation they wrought and left nothing but flaming ruins and bruised stuntmen – while the accountants tallied up the costs and profits. The Last Action Heroes gets the tone of this style of cinema perfectly, with grit and good humour and even an elegiac streak as the age of heroes recedes into history – the death blow may have been landed by Batman (1989). Zombie versions of the Rocky and Terminator sagas continue, but what came next was an age of superheroes. 98BOOKS

Todd Haynes’s scrupulous research is apparent, as is a deep intellectual rigour… and the book is a reminder of how transgressive a figure he can be Todd Haynes: Rapturous Process EDITOR MICHAEL KORESKY PUBLISHER MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE PAGES 350 ISBN 9798218294465 REVIEWED BY JOHN BLEASDALE Julianne Moore met Todd Haynes at an audition for the film Safe (1995). In the room were Haynes, producer Christine Vachon, an assistant and a malfunctioning video camera. Moore, despite the doubts of her agent, had agreed to read scenes. “All of a sudden, with that voice and cadence and iridescent skin and coloring, the conceptual idea of the movie that was built around this void was filled in by what I heard and how uncannily she personified this vacant person,” Haynes recalls. He is speaking to Judith Revault d’Allonnes in a series of long interviews that take place over the space of four days and make up the majority of the text for Todd Haynes: Rapturous Process. In Moore, he had found “one of the great creative partners of my life”. Moore herself provides the foreword for the book and notes how – as part of his process – Haynes distributes playlists, mixtapes and image books to the cast and crew to give them a feel for the film and their particular roles and functions. Christian Bale, who worked with Haynes on Velvet Goldmine (1998) and I’m Not There (2007), referred to the material he received as “another of Todd’s scrapbooky things made special”. Published in conjunction with the 2023 exhibition of Haynes’s work by the Museum of Moving Image in New York (and adapted from a French edition that coincided with the Centre Pompidou’s retrospective of the director’s work), this book is exactly that: a scrapbooky thing made special. Evidence of Haynes’s scrupulous research is apparent, as is a deep intellectual rigour. A chart drafted during the making of Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987) aligns Karen’s eating habits with the music and what was happening in the world: Nixon and Vietnam mostly. The film ran into trouble on its release due to rights issues over the music and the use of Barbie dolls to tell the story. Mattel, the toy maker, sent the director a cease and desist notice with accompanying rights documents specific to Barbie’s parts: her forearm, her feet, her torso, etc. “Talk about cultural ownership of the female body,” Haynes remarks. The Polaroids of the dolls in their scale sets, with handmade costumes and tiny objects, are fascinating. For each film, there is inevitably a different emphasis. Safe includes floor plans for the treatment centre where Moore’s character goes to recuperate from her illness, and meticulous notes on style, giving a real insight into Haynes’s process. “SAFE is not a genre parody,” he notes in freehand and cites influences, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968 (“its immaculate framing”) and Raise the Red Lantern, 1991 (“it emphasizes the architectural space that its central female character inhabits without compromising our identification”). Felt drawings and schoolbook-style fantasy doodles give a sense of a teenage fan prepping Velvet Goldmine. A drawing of Moore in sunglasses in an autumnal coloured garden was the starting point for Far from Heaven (2002) and hung above Haynes’s desk as he wrote the script. From the visual inspiration of an image, there can also be the influence of a deeply intellectual resource. For his Patricia Highsmith adaptation Carol (2015), Haynes arranged pertinent extracts from Roland Barthes’s 1977 treatise on love A Lover’s Discourse in order of the film’s scenes. There’s such a wealth of material here and so much painstaking thought and preparation that it makes the reader want to revisit those Haynes pictures that didn’t quite land, such as Wonderstruck (2017) or Dark Waters (2019). The photo section is rounded off by some childhood drawings and portraits of friends and collaborators, as well as Haynes himself at various stages of his career. What is evident is the central role women have always played in his work, as both his creative partners – from Moore and Cate Blanchett to Vachon, his producing partner whom he met as a student at Brown – and his subjects: Karen Carpenter, the Carols of Safe and Carol, Mildred Pierce, Elizabeth and Gracie in last year’s May December. Moore notes that Mary Poppins provided a young Haynes with an initial fantasy figure of feminine power. And in an essay in the book, Michael Koresky writes: “An interest in the political contours of queerness is inseparable from a devotion to feminism.” The book is a reminder of how transgressive a figure Haynes can be. His first feature-length film, Poison (1991), became a target for the American right during the culture wars of the 1990s, provoked – they claimed – by its depiction of homosexuality. More recently, May December portrays the aftermath of a sexual relationship between a woman and a 13-year-old boy in a wry, non-judgemental way that has the potential to be ‘triggering’ in a modern landscape of heightened sensibilities about sexual power dynamics. In an interview that closes the book, Haynes talks to director Kelly Reichardt about May December, and like much of the material gathered here the discussion goes deep into the process of filmmaking. He neatly divides his oeuvre into “gay boy films and girly melodramas”, with Carol presumably being a crossover “gay girly melodrama”. But as this book underlines, Haynes is doing so much more than such offhand generic categories might suggest. His films tangle with Hollywood, subverting and transgressing as well as exciting and entertaining, and Rapturous Process reveals the underground maps on which Haynes has built his success. Visit toddhaynesrapturousprocess.com ABOVE Costume designer Sandy Powell with Todd Haynes on the set of Carol (2015) 99 BOOKS