Movies

BELFAST: a child’s point of view is universal

by
Photo caption: Jude Hill in BELFAST. Courtesy of Focus Features.

In Belfast, Kenneth Branagh’s superb coming of age story, we see Northern Ireland’s Troubles through the eyes of eight-year-old Buddy (Jude Hill). His dad (Jamie Dornan) works for two weeks at a time in Britain, so his mom (Caitriona Balfe) is raising Buddy and his older brother by herself most of the time. The family is under severe financial pressure. They are a nominally Protestant family living in a working class Belfast neighborhood, integrated with Catholics.

The movie’s opening is set on August 15, 1969, the day the Troubles intrude on Buddy’s neighborhood. Branagh perfectly captures the moment – the very second – that external events upend Buddy’s life. Overnight, his block has barbed wire at one end and a barricade at the other. Catholics are pressured to move out in a measure of ethnic cleansing.

Things get real, and the dad has the chance to move the family to Britain. There are factors that make uprooting the family a complicated decision. The audience is thinking, get the HELL out of THERE. After all, the family doesn’t know what we know – that the Troubles will persist for 29 more years.

This is autobiographical, the story of Kenneth Branagh’s own family. They escaped the Troubles by moving to from Belfast to Britain in 1970 when Branagh was Buddy’s age.

Although this story is about a specific child, telling it from the child’s point of view makes it universal. Children need security, but adult grievances, however valid, are prioritized over the security of children. The sectarians may think that they are targeting Catholics or Protestants, but the impact of their violence is to destroy safety, civility and predictability for all.

Judi Dench, Jude Hill and Ciarán Hinds in BELFAST. Courtesy of Focus Features.

The performances are impeccable, especially those by Judi Dench and Ciarán Hinds as Buddy’s grandparents. (The grandfather has the best line in the film.)

And where did Branagh find this kid actor Jude Hill? He is completely believable in every scene – and he might just be the most adorable child on the planet.

Belfast is a family drama, but the family is Irish, so there’s plenty of humor.

Branagh has shot Belfast in a glorious black-and-white which amplifies both the historical period and the grittiness of the setting. The use of Belfast’s own Van Morrison on the soundtrack is perfect.

Belfast is justifiably one of the Oscar favorites. If you have heartstrings, they are gonna get pulled.

PASSING: navigating a racist society and the value of one’s identity

by
Photo caption: Negga and Tessa Thompson in PASSING. Courtesy of Netflix.

Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson star in Rebecca Hall’s thought-provoking drama Passing, about the value of one’s identity and navigating in a racist society. It’s 1920s New York City and two light-skinned black women, both prosperous wives and mothers, happen upon each other for the first time since childhood. Irene (Tessa Thompson) is married to a doctor and has become a figure in Harlem society. Irene is shocked to find Clare (Ruth Negga) with her hair died platinum blonde and passing as Caucasian – even married to a racist white man.

For Irene, the reunion is unsettling because, ever polite, she doesn’t want to express her own disapproval of “passing”. Things get nerve-wracking for Irene when Clare’s husband (Alexander Skarsgård) shows up; from his very first word (which is overtly racist), it’s clear that things will go badly for Clare if he discovers her actual race. Presumably, he knows that Clare is not a real blonde, but he is SO racist that he even assumes that Irene must be white.

Clare on other hand, is eager to rekindle their friendship, regardless of the risks that Irene calculates. Clare NEEDS to slip a toe back into African-American culture. She is oblivious to Irene’s disgust for “passing”, and, when they first encounter in an elegant hotel tea room, Clare even assumes at first that Irene is passing.

Despite Irene’s reluctance, Clare composes herself in Irene’s family and social circle. We watch Irene as she runs her staid household (with black servants). She puts on a swinging charity benefit, attended by her black upper crust peers and by hip white New Yorkers sampling Harlem culture. One of the latter is Irene’s friend Wentworth (Bill Camp), a literary figure of standing.

Despite her charity leadership (for the Negro Welfare League), she wants to “protect” her sons from the “race issue” by keeping them sheltered and ignorant.  Her husband Brian (André Holland) doesn’t agree – he has given up on improving race relations in America and wants to relocate the family in another country.

Is anyone here satisfied? Irene keeps saying she is satisfied, meaning personally, but she does her charity work for a reason. Brian is exhausted by his practice and wants to give up on the entire nation. Clare is comfortable having made a choice that she describes in the most materialistic terms, but is still yearning for what she misses in White society.

Referring to the 1929 novel, Mick LaSalle writes,

“…it’s a great advantage that the movie’s source is in the past. If this story were attempted today, it would be about a social issue. One woman would be presented as right, and the other would be wrong. There would be a crucial realization three-quarters in, and then a moral to the story spelled out before the closing credits.“

Passing is directed by British actress Rebecca Hall, whose own American mother is multiracial. As a director, Hall puts her actors in the forefront, framing them in static shots and with piano music just jazzy enough to suggest Harlem setting. Passing is photographed in black and white, with the backgrounds washed out to emphasize the characters in the foreground (and the colors of their skin).

The performances are excellent. Negga has the showier role as the charming, flamboyant and dangerously flighty Clare. Thompson’s Irene is really the more important character, and Thompson lets us see inside this woman who is so very proper that she should be boring; but Thompson’s Irene is ever thoughtful, introspective and contained – with all her turmoil roiling inside. 

Veteran character actor Camp is exceptional as Wentworth, the sardonic white novelist who enjoys his forays into Harlem and values his friendship with Irene. An actor who can make the smallest role memorable, Camp has recently played Mr. Shaibel, the chess-teaching school janitor in The Queen’s Gambit and The Beach Boys’ controlling father in Love & Mercy.

Passing is still in some theaters and is now streaming on Netflix.

SON OF MONARCHS: resolving his identity

by
Photo caption: Tenoch Huerta in SON OF MONARCHS. Courtesy of SFFILM.

In the contemplative indie Son of Monarchs, things seem to be going well for the young biologist Mendel (Tenoch Huerta). His career as a scientist at an elite NYC institution seems to be starting well, his mentor respects and encourages him, his peers invite him to socialize and he’s dating a woman with a very unusual hobby. But something is not right, and it’s that Mendel’s very identity is unresolved,.

Mendel comes from rural Michoacán, which Nature has blessed with Monarch butterflies and cursed with disasters that traumatized Mendel in his childhood. The same childhood experiences have built his passion to understand life and have estranged him from his brother and their homeland. When he has occasion to revisit Michoacán, he can no longer compartmentalize his inner conflict.

SON OF MONARCHS. Courtesy of SFFILM.

Son of Monarchs is the second feature for writer-director Alexis Gambis, who makes the most out of the visual contrast between chilly NYC and the vivid warm of Michoacán.

Tenoch Huerta is very good as the somber, restless Mendel. Gabino Rodriguez (recently in the deadpan Fauna and a very scary villain in Sin Nombre) brightens the Michoacán segment.

I first saw Son of Monarchs at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM). It’s now streaming on HBO Max.

FAUNA: how droll can you get?

by
Gabino Rodriguez and Luisa Pardo in Nicolás Pereda’s FAUNA. Photo courtesy of SFFILM.

In Fauna, Luisa (Luisa Pardo) and her boyfriend Paco (Francisco Barreiro), both actors, visit Luisa’s remote Mexican hometown and meet up with her brother (Gabino Rodriguez), stepping into humor even drier than the parched landscape. They intend to visit Luisa’s parents (Teresa Sanchez and José Rodríguez López).

Paco wanders into the town, looking for some smokes. He meets an older man, who makes the encounter unnecessarily awkward. It turns out that the man was his girlfriend’s father.

Luisa runs some lines with her mom, and it’s clear to the audience that the mom is much better than the “professional actress”.

In the highlight of Fauna, the three guys go out for a beer. The dad is fascinated by Paco’s tiny role in a big episodic TV series and has him “perform” in the cantina. It’s a masterpiece of cringe humor and comic timing.

José Rodríguez López, always deadpan, is hilarious as Luisa’s dad. Where has this actor been? Despite being nominated for a 1991 Ariel (Mexico’s Oscar) for his first movie performance, Fauna is only his seventh feature film.

More than halfway though, Fauna pivots. Luisa’s brother has been reading a mystery , and the film begins to mirror the book. The deadpan continues throughout all of Fauna’s 70 minutes.

Mexican-born writer-director Nicolás Pereda lives in Toronto, and Fauna competed as a Canadian film at the Toronto Film Festival.

I screened Fauna at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM). It’s been released into some theaters, but is hard to find.

ONE FALSE MOVE: the inevitable confrontation with America’s original sin

by
Cynda Williams and Billy Bob Thornton in ONE FALSE MOVE

The gripping contemporary neo-noir One False Move begins with a home invasion in Los Angeles. Two vicious professional robbers, with one’s beautiful girlfriend, steal money and cocaine, leaving a trail of corpses. The crime is solved right away – the cops know who did it and that the murderers are headed to a small town in Arkansas. The LA cops fly to Arkansas and lay in wait with the local constabulary. One False Move is a ticking time bomb as we wait for the criminals to drive across the Southwest to the inevitable confrontation.

This is a fundamentally noir story – there are guys overreaching for greed and ambition, a femme fatale, and a very dark secret. The screenplay was written by Billy Bob Thornton (before his breakthrough Sling Blade) and his writing partner Tom Epperson. One False Move was filmed in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, about two hours from where Thornton grew up, in and around Hot Springs.

The robbers are an odd couple that met in prison. Ray (Thornton) is white, an edgy, coke-fueled, brutal and not very smart gunsel, always on the verge of an epic misjudgement. Pluto (Michael Beach) is black, an ever-calculating crime machine – a cold, brilliant and bloodthirsty sociopath. They are accompanied by Ray’s beautiful black girlfriend Fantasia (Cynda Williams).

When the two seasoned LA homicide detectives (Jim Metzler and Earl Billings), arrive in Arkansas well ahead of the robbers, they encounter the local Sheriff, Dale “Hurricane” Dixon (Bill Paxton). Hurricane is overeager and over-enthusiastic, and his nickname obviously comes from his being an irrepressible force of nature. He’s comfortable as a big fish in a little pond, but now he fantasizes about being a big city cop. As he charges around thoughtlessly, he thinks that this is his big chance to be the kind of cop that he watches on TV.

This was Fantasia’s hometown, where she grew up with her given name of Lila. Dale and Lila share a significant past.

Cynda Williams in ONE FALSE MOVE

As a femme fatale, Fantasia/Lila can manipulate both Ray and Dale, although Pluto is immune to her charms. She is clearly a more decent person than Ray and Pluto, and she has one relatable vulnerability. but she does things and intends to do things that are very, very bad.

This was Cynda Williams’s second film role. She was married to Billy Bob Thornton for two years, including during the making of One False Move. She has worked consistently since (playing Halle Berry’s sister in two movies), but One False Move has certainly been her best-remembered performance.

Bill Paxton in ONE FALSE MOVE

Bill Paxton left a great body of work that included starring in the topflight episodic series Big Love and a key role in Apollo 13. Big Love and One False Move demonstrate that he should have gotten more leading roles. Paxton’s Hurricane is always bubbling over, whether it’s with ambition, naivete or good ol’ boy chumminess.

One False Move was directed by Carl Franklin. who also directed the period neo-noir Devil in a Blue Dress. Franklin has directed lots of TV, including episodes of House of Cards and Mindhunters).

America’s original sin – race – is at the core of One False Move. The entire plot is predicated on something that happened when Lila was 17 – and neither that occurrence nor any of the following events would have happened if Lila were white.

Ray and Fantasia/Lila are an interracial couple, the two LA cops are white and black, and Dale unwittingly leaks his casual racism.

One False Move is on my list of Overlooked Neo-noir and can be streamed from Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube.

LAST NIGHT IN SOHO: clever and entertaining horror

by
Photo caption: Matt Smith, Thomasin McKenzie and Ana Taylor Joy in LAST NIGHT IN SOHO. Courtesy of Focus Features.

In Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho, the contemporary fashion student Ellie (Thomasin McKenzie) moves from a sheltered upbringing in rural Cornwall to London, but finds herself ill-suited for a boisterous college dorm. She rents her own modest digs and seems magically transported to her fantasy Mod London of the 1960s, where she finds a would-be alter ego, the cool and confident Sandy (Ana Taylor Joy). But she also finds the dark side of the London scene and a fifty-year-old violent incident that haunts her very bedsit.

Through Ellie’s eyes, the story shifts between today’s London and that of 1965. Edgar Wright brilliantly weaves Ellie and Sandy into scenes and shots together. Wright also gets the period and place just right – you just expect Oliver Reed or David Hemmings to step into the picture at any moment (or Terence Stamp).

Is Ellie in an alternative reality – or fantasizing – or hallucinating? Ellie has a rich fantasy life, as well as a “gift of seeing things?”. Of course, she’s also the right age for a psychotic breakdown, and she has a disturbing family history of mental illness.

Last Night in Soho begins as the is she going crazy? subgenre of horror, and then morphs onto a straight horror movie. Wright shrewdly waits to the last minute before revealing who the evil force really is.

Thomasin McKenzie, now age 22 after juvenile roles in Leave No Trace and Jojo Rabbit, projects an other-worldliness – so, if anyone could happen upon a portal to another time and place, it’s McKenzie

It sure is fun to watch the charismatic Ana Taylor Joy (The Queen’s Gambit, Thoroughbreds). Taylor Joy seems like the quintessential Brit, but she is of Argentine-Spanish heritage, lived her first six years in Argentina and her first language was Spanish.

Matt Smith is good as a guy with both charm and cruel lethality. Smith was superb in a much different role – the young married Prince Philip in 20 episodes of The Crown., and also did 54 episodes of Dr. Who as The Doctor.

I love Terence Stamp. Stamp, of course was a Pretty Boy star during the actual 1960s (Billy Budd, The Collector, Far from the Madding Crowd). I’ve felt that his best work has been in his middle age and since (The Hit, The Limey, The Adjustment Bureau). Here in Last Night in Soho, still ith striking features and dead-cold eyes, he looks dangerous from our first glimpse of him.

Speaking of the Swinging London of the 1960s, no woman was more symbolic than Diana Rigg, famous for her role as Emma Peel in The Avengers. Last Night in Soho was Rigg’s final screen performance.

Another 60s stalwart, Rita Tushingham (A Taste of Honey and Doctor Zhivago), also appears.

Edgar Wright broke out with the delightful Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz (and the less funny The World’s End) before showing us all in Baby Driver that he was more than a low-brow funnyman.

Last Night in Soho is a clever, entertaining and sometimes artsy horror movie, but in the end, it’s just a horror movie.

DE GAULLE: a man and his moment

by
Photo caption: Lambert Wilson in DE GAULLE. Courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn Films.

De Gaulle takes us to a pivotal moment in French WW II history that is no longer well-understood by most Americans. The French Army has collapsed in the face of German invasion, and the fall of Paris is both inevitable and imminent. The French government is considering asking Hitler for an armistice, seeking to end the slaughter and to repatriate its 2 million POWs.  

Charles de Gaulle (Lambert Wilson) is also losing his battle to convince the government not to surrender, but to keep fighting the Nazis from outside France itself, based in France’s colonial possessions. In this moment of catastrophe, de Gaulle is virtually alone in imagining that Great Britain, joined by America’s industrial might, could someday liberate France. It doesn’t help that, for the authoritarian and anti-Semitic French military establishment, Hitler isn’t so abhorrent.

Writer-director Gabriel Le Bomin has focused De Gaulle on only two weeks of WW II history – between June 5 and June 19, 1940. Every minute counts – and the clock is ticking.

It’s a similar approach as in Darkest Hour, where all of the story takes place in May, 1940, as Churchill is facing England’s moment of existential peril. In fact, the Darkest Hour (Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and HBO Max) would complete an excellent double feature with De Gaulle.

The tension is enhanced with a parallel thread – the political crisis has isolated de Gaulle in London while his family, completely out of communication, is scrambling to escape the Nazis in France.

Aloof, shy and an egomaniac, de Gaulle was easily dislikeable. Le Bomin has humanized him by including his most relatable attributes – his relationship with his wife and kids, especially his daughter with Down’s Syndrome.

Le Bomin and Wilson had to meet high expectations on the portrayal of an icon. After all, De Gaulle’s appearance, speech and mannerisms are as familiar to a French audience as those of Elvis Presley, Richard Nixon, Jacqueline Kennedy and Muhammad Ali are to an American one.

I wouldn’t have immediately thought of Lambert Wilson for the role. Wilson, known for the Matrix franchise, is handsome and physically graceful. But, for starters, Wilson is tall enough, at 6-2, to play de Gaulle, just under 6-5. Prosthetics and makeup completed the physical transformation. Wilson’s acting craft took him the rest of the way – capturing de Gaulle’s stiffness and the physical awkwardness that some very tall people have.

I streamed De Gaulle on Virtual Cinema at Laemmle.

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND: immersing us in a cultural moment

by
Photo caption: Lou Reed in THE VELVET UNDERGROUND. Courtesy of AppleTV.

It’s rare for a documentary film to immerse the audience as deeply into a time and place as does Todd Haynes’ The Velvet Underground. Even if you’re not a fan of the band, you’ll appreciate this sensory dive into a cultural moment.

Haynes takes the time to bio the two artistic driving forces of the Velvet Underground, the avant-garde musicologist John Cale and the troubled song-writing prodigy Lou Reed. Equally essential is the world of Andy Warhol’s The Factory.

The Velvet Underground is exceptionally richly sourced, with load of file footage and photos and a host of eyewitnesses, especially the surviving band members John Cale and Maureen Tucker. and in this cultural moment.

But it’s the LOOK and FEEL and SOUND of the film which is so singular. That’s because Haynes, a filmmaker known for the lush and evocative Far from Heaven and Carol, has brought his sensibilities to bear on a documentary. And because the artists in Warhol’s circle left such a film record.

The Velvet Underground is in theaters and streaming on AppleTV.

BECOMING COUSTEAU: amazing guy, pedestrian biodoc

by
Photo caption: BECOMING COUSTEAU. Courtesy of National Geographic.

The educational if not scintillating biodoc Becoming Cousteau traces the world-changing career of Jacques-Yves Cousteau.

This was an important man. Before Cousteau, we looked at the oceans the way that humans had regarded them for centuries – based on what was on their surface and at their edges. The vastness of the oceans gave them a mask of invulnerability.

Becoming Cousteau tells how Cousteau, a pilot recovering from a motoring accident, became one of one three free divers in France before WWII, and how he was involved with or responsible himself for the invention of the aqualung, undersea stations, the underwater movie camera and his scientific ship Calypso.

Fortunately, Cousteau’s second passion was cinema, which allowed him to reveal the undersea world to the general public. He strongly preferred to call his work adventure film instead of documentary. (The cinematographer for Cousteau’s breakthrough 1956 film was Louis Malle, only two years before Malle’s own breakthrough masterpiece Elevator to the Gallows.)

That allowed Cousteau to become the great popularizer of ocean science through his ABC series The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.

Becoming Cousteau shows us how, at first, Cousteau had the explorer’s outlook of conquering the elements – but evolved into an ecologist. Cousteau canoodled with the oil industry in the 1950s, which he regretted in the 1970s. The preservation of Antarctica may be his enduring legacy.

Becoming Cousteau is dotted with some revealing tidbits such as how his first wife Simone was in love with Calypso and lived there, while Cousteau was on the road and their sons were in boarding school.

I am usually entranced by documentaries as superbly sourced and revelation-filled as Becoming Cousteau, but I found it a bit of a yawner. Twice Oscar-nominated director Liz Garbus packs a lot into 94 minutes, but it seems longer. Vincent Cassel voices Cousteau’s written words.

ONLY THE ANIMALS: surprise after surprise

by
Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Nadia Tereszkiewicz in ONLY THE ANIMALS. Courtesy of Cohen Media Group.

The ever-surprising Only the Animals is no ordinary mystery. After an opening sequence with a most unusual piggy-back ride, a wealthy woman (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) disappears among the wintry cattle farms in France’s mountainous and sparsely inhabited Lozere highlands. We meet a series of local characters, each of whom may hold the key to the puzzle, as may the young hustler Armand (Guy Roger ‘Bibisse’ N’Drin), a world away in Côte d’Ivoire.

The intricately constructed story reveals elements of the mystery, from each character’s perspective in sequence. The first French character we meet is Alice (Laure Calamy) – cheery, good-hearted and goofy, with atrocious taste in men; Alice’s neediness leads her to make a poor decision. Then the others, whose behavior is motivated variously by obsessive infatuation, misdirected passion and psychotic delusion, plunge completely off the rails. Their individually random acts collect into a pool of perversion.

By the time we reach the satisfying conclusion, the audience has learned the what and the why (which the investigating police will never uncover), and the most seemingly disparate story lines have intersected.

The story comes from a novel by Colin Niel, adapted by Only the Animals’ director Dominik Moll, with Gilles Marchand. Moll and Marchand were nominated for the César (France’s Oscar equivalent) for adapted screenplay. (Niel himself has a cameo at the agricultural coop’s store counter.)

Laure Calamy and Denis Ménochet in ONLY THE ANIMALS. Courtesy of Cohen Media Group.

The story is the real star of Only the Animals, but the cast is superb. Tedeschi is marvelous as the worldly woman with a private reason to get away to her husband’s rural getaway, especially when she flashes the briefest instant of anger. Calamy, recently in Sibyl and My Donkey My Lover and I, is one of my favorite international comic actresses. Denis Ménochet, César-nominated for Custody, perhaps the best ever domestic violence drama, plays Alice’s boorish and secretive husband Michel. Damien Bonnard plays Joseph, a damaged loner with an underestimated psychosis.

Nadia Tereszkiewicz plays the young waitress Marion, who turns a one night stand into a disturbing infatuation. This is only the fifth feature and third significant movie role for 25-year-old Tereszkiewicz. She now has four films in production or pre-production, including one directed by Tedeschi.

Guy Roger ‘Bibisse’N’Drin (left) in ONLY THE ANIMALS. Courtesy of Cohen Media Group.

N’Drin and the other key Ivorian players – Perline Eyombwan, and Christian Ezan – are also excellent.

The surprises keep popping up until the final shot. Only the Animals opens this weekend in a limited theatrical release, which will soon include the Bay Area’s Landmark Shattuck.