I went to a decent selection of films at this year’s London Film Festival, and overall was very impressed by the range and quality. There are obviously a stupidly large number of films that you can see, and while seeing some big hitters early is always nice, there’s also the opportunity to see films that might never get released in the UK at all.
One overall takeaway I had from this year’s festival is that film makers should be very careful in using non-English speaking actors to speak and converse in English. If an actor can’t really speak the language then it suddenly becomes very stilted and their acting qualities go out the window. Suddenly it’s enormously distracting.
Of course two characters may converse in English because that’s the only language that both speak. But a lot of the time you feel that it’s about producers hoping for better box offices down the line. And that’s a shame.
Anyway, with that little aside, and because I’ll forget what I saw unless I record my thoughts here, here are [relatively] brief reviews of the nine films I saw at the festival.
Ghost Stories ran on the London stage for years, although somehow I never quite got around to seeing it. Written and directed by Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson, this adaption changes some things but brings others into play.
While I didn’t see the stage version, I do know that it was presented in terms of a lecture to the audience. In this version, the construct is a character who has made his name in unveiling fakes on TV, investigating three inexplicable stories that he’s presented with by a mysterious character who disappeared from public view many years ago.
This framing narrative allows for a portmanteau structure of three different, yet linked, stories. Each of them is well constructed. We get Paul Whitehouse’s security guard, Martin Freeman’s obnoxious banker, and Alex Lawther’s teenager. All tell their tales, bringing with them plenty of shocks and frights that I won’t spoil here.
And of course, there is more to everything than there might at first seem to be. Great performances all around.
Rift is a nasty little Icelandic horror film, all shot in a remote region of the country. Gunnar heads off to a remote house, where his ex-partner has left a worrying phone message. Is he going to do something stupid.
It’s the lead-up to Christmas, and the two haven’t really been talking since the break-up. The message suggested that someone was trying to get in. Once in the house, there are strange and disturbing sounds from nearby. What’s real and what’s not?
The film is bleak, and told with a modern horror sensibility. That does mean that sounds are used a little too much to make you jump. But there’s plenty here that’s creepy enough. Figures appearing and disappearing. Knocks on the door in the middle of the night. Where is it going to end?
Set during the war in occupied Hong Kong, Our Time Will Come is the story of a group of resistance fighters, trying to smuggle out those the Japanese are trying to intern or imprison, and disrupting the war effort.
It’s based on a true story, although with a good deal of added melodrama.
Zhou Xun plays Fang Lan, a teacher living with her mother, who also houses some academics. She gets involved with a resistance group led by Eddie Peng Yuyan’s “Blackie” Lau, who swashes more buckles than anyone in cinema since Errol Flynn. Sadly, this also means takes away from the film’s verisimilitude. Fang becomes ever more involved as the stakes get higher.
In the meantime, her boyfriend (Wallace Huo Chienhwa) has started working for the Japanese. Slowly, everyone gets deeper in their involvement, and the danger increases.
I really enjoyed the film, although I couldn’t quite get a handle on the pitch of it. At times it feels all too real, while at other times, it really doesn’t.
The parts of the film that really didn’t work are the faux documentary scenes surrounding the main film. Filmed in contemporary Hong Kong, but in black and white, we are to believe that some of these people were the protagonists of the action during WWII. While one child is explicitly said to be one of the adults, the rest too would have been children, or much older than they would appear here. I’m not sure the scenes add much.
That all said, this is a part of history I really know nothing about – maybe with the exception of wartime Shanghai as depicted in Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution. And the performances are excellent.
Just released properly last weekend, and like many other films getting a release over the next couple of months, attracting some Oscar “buzz”, this film from Luca Guadagnino is based on a novel of the same name. Set in the 80s, Elio (Timothée Chalamet) is the son of liberal academic parents, and is largely bored throughout the long summer holidays in the beautiful part of Lombardy that he lives in.
He is sort of having a relationship with a French girl, but then the household is disrupted when a visiting academic, Oliver (Armie Hammer) arrives for the summer. He’s literally freewheeling (borrowing a bike to get around), and instantly attracts the ladies – especially in a great scene in the local nightclub.
But the young Elio takes an especial interest in Oliver, and soon they are hanging around together a great deal. Elio is 17 and Oliver is older, but their relationship blossoms.
In some curious way, this reminds me a little of a TV series from the late eighties that I loved – Summer’s Lease (from a John Mortimer novel). And you could say too that it shares DNA with Stealing Beauty. All of those feature very middle class families, Italian idylls and coming of age stories.
There are heartbreaking moments in this, and some very funny moments as well. Not a film I think I’d have rushed to see, but one I’m glad I did see.
This is curious Icelandic film, although shot in Danish. The film opens in near darkness down a mine, men hard at work in light. Finally they emerge into the light, reaching the minehead. Then we’re introduced to the two brothers, Emil and Johan, and we begin to learn more about their lives.
They live in poor accommodation – perhaps some kind of camp associated with the mine – and there is clearly not much to do. But Emil has a sideline in producing some kind of homebrew spirit which he sells to colleagues. He’s also flirting with a girl in a nearby house. He’s also slightly obsessed with an VHS tape that teaches soldiers how to use their guns.
But one day someone who’s bought Emil’s homebrew collapses and is taken to hospital very ill. Suddenly, Emil’s life collapses around him.
This film is peculiar because it’s an experience as much as a story being told. The 16mm film it was shot on, the stark desaturated landscape, and the nothingness of the place. This might be set in Iceland, but it could be anywhere. At times this could be an experimental art film as much as film in the conventional sense. Yet it remains powerful.
Grain is something of an epic from Semih Kaplanoglu, set in a dystopian future in which crops no longer grow properly, and people live either within the confines of society, or outside it on the margins.
Jean-Marc Barr plays Erol, a scientist trying to find answers. He decides to go in search of Cemil (Ermin Bravo) who may have the secrets that can help.
The film is visually stunning, filmed in widescreen black and white in locales as distant as Detroit, Germany and Turkey. This is an allegorical film about a quest. Based in part on a chapter of the Koran, it has a philosophical tone throughout, and you are never quite sure where it is heading.
My only problem, as alluded to at the start of this piece, is that English is neither of the two leads’ native language, and it really shows. Perhaps the problem in part is that they’re being asked to speak using words with which they wouldn’t be comfortable in real life. Either way, it distracts from the film despite there being relatively little dialogue overall.
Ana Asensio has writes, directs and stars in this tale about life in the margins as an immigrant in New York. Luciana is from a non-specific Latin American country having to get by without having a social security number. She picks up various jobs when she can get them, but she’s about to be kicked out of her apartment by her roommate for unpaid rent, and her phone has no credit left. She meets up with a friend one day between babysitting gigs. Her friend Olga tells her that there’s a job on offer which will pay good money if she shows up in a smart dress.
Luciana is rightly reluctant, but in need of the cash to finagles a dress from a shop, and then has to follow a complicated series of instructions to be on time for the party she has to look pretty at.
We the audience are also beginning to get a little on edge. What kind of party is this? It can’t be good, with assignations below restaurants in Chinatown and back alley addresses. And I’m not about to tell you here either. But it’s clear that Olga has not been altogether honest about what’s required.
What this film does show, is perhaps a truer reflection of the diversity of life in New York City, and one that the TV cop shows set there tend to avoid. There are a lot of people in this film who don’t speak English natively, and as viewers, those conversations are not translated for us.
I really liked this film. It’s definitely uncomfortable, because you simply don’t know where it’s going to go. And while I’m not sure elements are a completely accurate reflection on life in the city, you can see how people desperate for money will do things that they mightn’t otherwise choose to do. Furthermore, others will prey on those people.
This is the new Guillermo del Toro film, and it’s a delight. We’re in fifties America, and Sally Hawkins is the mute Elisa, living above a cinema in an apartment that reminds me a little of Amelie. This may be the fifties, but Elisa is thoroughly modern even if her job is as a cleaner in a strange military site where strange undersea things are examined. She and her co-worker Zelda diligently go about mopping up the labs even as some kind of amphibious humanoid creature has been captured Michael Shannon’s evil Strickland.
Elisa begins to make friends with the creature, and she becomes more and more uncomfortable with how it’s being treated. The relationship is handled tremendously, Doug Jones playing the creature under layers of makeup. The relationship between them always feels real, even though the story runs perilously close to being silly. Yes – you have to buy into a world where this is possible. But it’s such a beautifully structured and believable world, that isn’t a simple one and has a seamier and nastier underside.
This is a lovely piece of work, and will be well worth watching when it gets a fuller release in a month or so.
This is the return of John Woo, the action director fondly remembered by many for films like A Better Tomorrow and Hard Boiled, before he went to the US for films like Face/Off and Mission Impossible 2. Of late he seems to have been making Chinese language potboilers, and this is his return to the action genre. Hanyu Zhang plays a Chinese lawyer working for a big pharmaceutical company in Osaka, Japan. He’s somehow embroiled in a plot from three years earlier in which he successfully covered something up. But now he’s wanted for a murder that he probably didn’t commit. The ingredients also include an evil boss and his son, two female assassins, a Japanese police inspector and his doting new assistant.
To be honest, this film doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it took me a while to understand that. Yes, Woo’s big action set pieces have always been overly elaborate, but there was a certain serious world view in those earlier films. In this case, you hope, Woo has his tongue firmly in his cheek. But even then, the dialogue is as corny as hell, and it falls again into the trap of having people speak English when they really shouldn’t (the reasoning is communication between a Chinese and Japanese national). The plot is not even worth explaining, since it’s so corny.
There are a few good set pieces, with bad guys being killed in a range of inventive ways. And in one sequence where our two protagonists are handcuffed together (which goes right back to Hitchcock’s The Thirty Nine Steps), we are teased with a dovecote that we know will see the release of dozens of white doves.
The bigger issue for me was probably the video effects that make it feel at times it was a Chinese language soap opera. Freeze frames, and strange wipes, as well as corny video effects that we didn’t need to see. One shot appears to be been made with a consumer drone, and really looked bad on the big screen.
Action films have moved on since 1992, with Bourne and even Bond adapting. Sadly, it doesn’t feel as though Woo, now 71, has stayed up with it.