Dark Pleasures

The London Film Festival is basically my Christmas: as soon as the programme comes out everything stops until I’ve read the blurb and worked out my schedule, building anticipation about what I’m to see and then hoping to forget it all again, so I’m surprised on the day.

And there are the films that I get just as excited about but miss here because they are actually coming out.

So I’m going to open with three that you can go straight out and watch tonight, and far and away the best of the those, the whole bunch and maybe even the year, is The Killing of a Sacred Deer.

For those familiar with the work of Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth, Alps, The Lobster) this continues the vague trajectory towards accessibility and convention that marked his switch to the English language, definitely the least oddball and quirky of the films I’ve seen.

For the rest of you: Welcome to the other side. His is a world that in many ways resembles ours but yet remains distinctively other. There’s something very surreal about the flatness of his characters, drained of emotion and expression. They keep you guessing through distance, it’s hard to connect but you care, have to for the tension to work, and here it’s immense.
Ominous strings foretell the tragedy, reverberating through the theatre to tremendous effect (surely Hitchcock would be proud). And a masterclass in tracking. Whatever the angle, high, low, fore or aft: thoroughly menacing.
Performances spot on too: Kidman cold, Farrell deadpan and Barry Keogham stealing the show with his nervous, fidgety energy.

It might be bold to claim this, and maybe I’m still blown away by the experience, but this feels like a cult classic.

The Party, on the other hand, was a mixed bag: billed as a comedy without being particularly funny and over-acted in that style. The (at times melo-)dramaticly diverse set up reminded me of an Agatha Christie ensemble. Tensions rise as the dinner party crumbles, but with performances at odds with each other, as if they weren’t all in the same play.
Gantz’s new-ager made me cringe and Spall and Murphy seemed to be playing at a slightly different timbre to the rest of the terribly earnest cast. Emily Mortimer had the only sympathetic role and some exchanges worked better than others, it wasn’t badly acted, individually. Great black and white photography too - interesting camera angles used sparingly - but for my money did not really come off, despite many moments when I was totally absorbed in its brilliance.

A minority opinion, I suspect from the post-screening chatter, and more on subjectivity later, but another film I brought too much to was I am not a Witch, about a young girl forced to choose between admitting to the dark forces and being transformed into a goat. More awkward than awful I did not feel at all comfortable with what seemed to me (despite the director, Rungano Nyoni, being Zambian) a very colonial ‘look at the primitives’ gaze. I couldn’t quite work out whether the witches were hamming it up in the film or for it and the absurdity of the court scene lost its comic effect to my sense of discomfort in mocking their beliefs.

Still, the central performance was perfectly played; at once scared, bewildered and rebellious, commanding a naturalism very much at odds with the adults around her.

So on to those I actually saw at the festival, starting at the top with my must see pick: Mutafukaz. If Carlsberg did French Anime doing Lego doing Men in Black, it might look like this. Pure fun, referential parody and totally inspired delivery, surprises and laughs galore. Keep your eyes peeled because someone is sure to get this out there and you should definitely see it.

Another example of brilliantly original yet derivative French animation was the short film Martin Cries, which used scenes from Grand Theft Auto, mostly acts of random violence, against the mournful voice-over of a man who wakes to find all his friends gone.

I found the juxtaposition of the ponderings on loss, appeals to let him know why, against the aggression on screen really poetic.

[Other great shorts included Joy in People, not all crowds are created equal — a recluse encouraged to get out more can’t get enough of bonding with the masses; Great Choice, a shrimp advert on murderous loop; Turbo Killer, basically an 80’s rock video; Lucky, a crazy animation about horses; Wren Boys, about a gay wedding in an Irish jail; Fysh, fish start falling from the sky; and a Lebanese short (of which I can’t find the name) about a man who’s tasked with guarding a bridge, only for it to disappear on him.]

Shot in 3 days but work-shopped over a year of regular drinking sessions, Tides is a beautifully naturalistic monochrome gem about a group of friends hiring a barge, getting drunk on the canal and spouting exactly the kind of nonsense we would in their situation. The plot here is minimal, we’re just enjoying the warmth of friendship and typical British 40-something banter. Amusing, tender, perfect for a night on the sofa with a bottle of red.

There was a script, but they abandoned it apparently, and improvisation also scored strongly in Casting, probably the best of what I’ll loosely refer to as the conventional films, exploring the egos and power struggles of a crew attempting a remake of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. Brilliant character play and what I assumed to be the best script I’ve heard in a long time, contrasting, apparently, with the very stylised and formal dialogue Fassbinder favoured. It turns out that the crew for this film was lifted from another, failed production, so, as with Tides, there was a heavy real-life influence on the situation being played out.

More German improv in Tiger Girl, again surprisingly but this time abandoning naturalism for high paced action in a stylishly cut, energetic tale of rebellion and the difference between understanding the cause and blind mimicry. Ultimately it didn’t have much to say or anywhere to go but after a few beers it entertained nicely.

More sober and well worth a look, Ravens revisits the ‘new generation not wanting to inherit the family business’ (in this case a Swedish cattle farm) trope. Nothing really new here but exquisitely executed in long, static shots, sparse dialogue and distant stares, understated is an understatement, but not quite taking us into the Bella Tarr territory evoked by the closing strings.

And I was thinking of the Hungarian master again the following day, but from a very different angle following the screening of Hagazussa. For me, The Turin Horse is a kind of perfection rarely seen in cinema, sometimes narration has to be discarded to cut to the emotional core, to resonate the way only music usually can. Heavy strings used here, with elliptical repetitions and long shots of people staring into nothingness, I have to admit that it is not to everyone’s taste. Hagazussa put me on the other side of that line. If it hadn’t been for the Q&A I would have written it off as a complete misfire: people staring off camera to heavy strings just isn’t enough.

Another accused witch here, terrorised by her community with possible allegories to modern day displacement and persecution, I can’t exactly put my finger on what was wrong, but I guess the key being that films that resonate need a particular wavelength, and we’re all on slightly different ones. Two in the audience proclaimed it their film of the festival, one of whom was on his second viewing, and the lead actress had clearly found a strong connection with her character. But I was just bored, disappointed to find out she wasn’t actually dead and to see a new chapter title announcing more to come. Thankfully the director, who started the film sat next to me, disappeared about ten minutes in.

But he was back at the end and one of the highlights of the festival is having the chance to hear about the conception and making of the films, along with the various thoughts of the audience. Learning of the director’s nightmares in this case, discovering the best of scripts were improvised and being overwhelmed at the intellectual ambitions in what you’ve just seen. Or just being thoroughly entertained by the larger than life Andrew Kotting.

If I couldn’t nail down what was wrong with Hagazussa, the appeal of Kotting’s Lek and the Dogs is equally elusive. Based on Hattie Naylor’s Ivan and the Dogs and transposing it to his own creation, Lek, this abstract, incohesive musing on the nature of time and free will had an appeal that far outweighed the lack of any conventional draw. Definitely one of my films of the festival.

And while we’re on enigmatic charm, Ouboros added up to more than the sum of its disparate parts. Ignoring the director’s question on whether, in a place like Palestine, history needs to be forgotten to survive or remembered to advance and instead following a bunch of anonymous young adults as they hang out. Often reversing the direction of the film, sometimes just having them walk backwards, with occasional voiced-over political musings that got lost in the ethereal rest.

A more direct avant-garde approach to political engagement was Dead the Ends, named after a quote from a text of one of the 2011 London rioters.

Using gifs, playing off Maker’s La Jetee format (apparently) and featuring strongly its progeny, 12 Monkeys, plus many familiar dystopian sci-fi films from Alphaville to Minority Report and The Matrix, here we’re taken from Tottenham through Bretton Woods to Globalisation and back, to critique the world in which we live and how capitalism gets to define the context in which it exists. From the talk afterwards it was clear that I had missed a lot, and there was more the director said on top. Maybe too much for a film that scored heavier on its form of delivery than content, but engaged nonetheless.

Not all talks are so enlightening and sadly the director of the very ordinary Looking for Uom Kulthum led us to expectations the film simply failed to deliver. This was, for some reason, the Experimenta gala and far and away the most conventional, least original film I have seen anywhere for some time, simply following the Egyptian superstar singer as she grew in fame and stature. Not someone I’d ever heard of but Mark Cousins recently described her as

“something like Elvis meets Aretha meets Eleanor Roosevelt meets Madonna: an icon in dark glasses and a chronicler of personal and national wounds”.

It’d be no hardship to sit through on Sunday night television but you’d have forgotten it by the morning.

Better to aim high, even if you miss and 9 Fingers very nearly hit. Perhaps again confounded by the expectations it set with an opening sequence of a trenchcoated man on the run, smoky rail tracks and a shoot out, only to then go all surreally minimalist on us.

Not something I generally object to, and by the time they got on the boat I was with the programme and starting to enjoy it… but by the time they got off again I was willing on the credits. Still, that kind of film is a difficult one to pull off and I think I loved what it was trying to be.

24 Frames, being as many 4½ minute shorts by the late, great Abbas Kiarostami (finished posthumously by his son) was the only film from a known director I saw this year but it didn’t follow any expectations I may have had, owing more to his poetry and photography. The basic premise is that, when one sees a photo or painting, there is only that instant, so this is speculation on what happened immediately before and after. Mostly based on his own pictures although it opened with Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow and I would have been interested to see a few more of the classic paintings he worked on.

Meditative, with running themes of crows, cows, snow and rain, the sea, not all hits and sometimes a little computer-gamey but it finished well, and that always helps.

There were a lot of films this year, 20 in 11 days, and these were those that made an impression. Some will, sadly, inevitably, be lost in the haze, such as Pop Eye, a heart-warming tale of a man bringing an elephant home to the rural Thai village he so eagerly left in his youth, and One Thousand Ropes, of ghosts and pent up Samoan machismo. The Journey almost worked, about a suicide bomber intending to blow up Baghdad central station, and there was the less successful The White Girl, a tropical noir about the disappearance of traditional life in Hong Kong, but more charming than suspenseful.

But overall a success, and still Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water to look forward to in the new year.

Roll on 2018.