Samsara (2024)

Written for RAF News January 2024

Samsara is an experimental film about reincarnation that does away with conventional narrative to create a meditative experience.

Beginning in a Buddhist temple in Laos, the day to day routine of the monks is shown in long, slow takes. Watching them chant collectively or queue for food, there is a deliberate focus on the repetition in which you can feel the time pass.

Amid (Amid Keomany) is a young man who reads passages of the Tibetan Book of the Dead to Mon (Simone Milavanh) an elderly woman who is preparing for death, in this body at least. When she passes, the film breaks the fourth wall by inviting you inside: text on the screen informs that you will join Mon’s soul on its journey through the Bardo, the space between life and death. This requires closing your eyes and experiencing the soundscape along with a series of coloured flashes that have been designed to be sensed through your closed eyelids. It is novel idea that lasts for 15 minutes, and so depending on your disposition it can have a deeply profound or alienating effect.

Once back in the mortal realm, the story is now in Zanzibar, among a small beachside community of seaweed farmers. Here the women make a living by picking seaweed, which will be compacted into soap – reincarnated perhaps. This is not your typical film, it is artistic and experiential with pacing and editing that feels uninfluenced by contemporary cinema. There are moments of visual effects but they are incredibly simple and primal, which makes it all the more appropriate. Old art forms are combined with early film techniques, overlaying mosaic and cave paintings, and simply changing the hue of the image.

Samsara is a singular experience – a treat for the adventurous filmgoer, or avid meditator.

January 19, 2024 0

Liberation (2024)

Written for RAF News January 2024

April 1945, the war is almost over but Nazi rule perseveres in Denmark, where over 200,000 German refugees have arrived looking for shelter. Residential colleges are instructed to house these large groups of civilians, including many children, wrongly informed that the occupying forces will provide food and medicine, they are abandoned sick and hungry.

Ryslinge Folk High School is the setting of this story, where over 500 Germans have arrived. Head of the school Jacob (Pilou Asbæk)is commanded to make room for them by the Wehrmacht, whilst the board of directors insist that he must not share any resources. This becomes extremely challenging when the elderly and very young begin to die, diphtheria spreading through the numbers, made worse by the cramped living conditions of the gymnasium where they are being housed.

Liberation is about the extreme difficulties of a place in transition, the moral complexity of trying to help those in need without jeopardising the safety of others. Jacob along with his wife Lis (Katrine Greis-Rosenthal) can not sit idly by whilst people are dying but members of the resistance, who are readying themselves to revolt, do not take kindly to sympathisers. Any help offered to these refugees is seen as aiding the German war machine.

The film is largely told from the point of view of Jacob’s boy Søren (an impressive Lasse Peter Larsen). He, like many kids his age, resents the influx of the starved and destitute now in his home. There is a particular viscousness to the children, as they turn on Søren for his father’s perceived betrayal. This retribution is an echo of the ideas playing out among the resistance. Birk (a brilliantly conflicted Morten Hee Andersen) is a student at Ryslinge, vengeful after his father is killed by Nazi’s he becomes an impassioned member of the resistance, and seeing Jacob as a traitor, will try to convince young Søren to turn against him.

Liberation is an interesting and nuanced story well told with a brooding tension, upheld by great performances.

January 19, 2024 0

The Holdovers (2024)

Written for RAF News January 2024

A lonely and vindictive tutor at New England boarding school draws the short straw in looking after the students who will remain on campus over Christmas – as if this wasn’t punishment enough.

Set in 1970, Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers – the nickname for the children who will stay at school over the break – is a film from another time. The look, pace and even the trailer all lend itself to a cinematic feeling of the 70s. It is cosy filmmaking, that is warm and inviting but also very funny and with a lot of heart.

Paul Giamatti plays Mr Hunham, or ‘Wall-eye’ as he is nicknamed on account of his lazy eye. A disciplinarian who lives on campus by himself and delights in the torment of his students. The boys in his care are a rag tag bunch of kids left behind, if they didn’t have abandonment issues before, they will now as cantankerous Mr Hunham intends on keeping the regular school schedule throughout the holidays.

Angus (Dominic Sessa) is at the centre of the film, a bright but cocky young man who is shouldering a complex depression, and that’s before he lands in the crooked crosshair of Wall-eye. Offsetting the tension among this makeshift family, is Miss Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) the school’s cook who will make meals for everyone out of whatever ingredients have been leftover. Reeling from the loss of her son serving in Vietnam, she does not give much away, but provides a vital maternal balance.

Stuck together in the confines of an empty school, these warring personalities find their own harmony, not without great resistance, and make The Holdovers a delightfully enjoyable film, tinged with sadness, that should be played for many Christmases to come.

January 12, 2024 0

Poor Things (2024)

Written for RAF News January 2024

Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) is a young woman revived and reborn in Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest weird and wickedly funny flight of fancy. 5 years since their last collaboration on The Favourite, the darkly comic historical film that earned Olivia Coleman an Oscar, comes another plunge into black comedy, but this time in the suitably wonky realm of fantasy.

Willem Dafoe plays Dr Godwin Baxter, a monstrous genius both feared and admired by his peers. Godwin is guardian to Bella, a woman who has ostensibly become a child again and will have to relearn the ways of life. Desperately wanting to protect the product of his experimentation but knowing that she needs to explore for herself, ‘God’ (a playfully direct nickname) allows for her to be married away to a young assistant. Just as the arrangements are being made, Bella is swooped up and stolen away by lustful opportunist Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo).

Taken travelling around Europe, imagined here in a kaleidoscopic series of sets with gorgeous production design often captured with fish-eye distortion, this is a bizarre coming of age story that becomes a perverted reflection of recent blockbuster Barbie. Childlike at first, Bella moves with a toddlers gait and speaks in simple form, before learning of life’s pleasures and toddling headlong toward them. Delighted to be her hedonistic guide, Duncan is devious but never enough to quash Bella’s hunger to learn and experience more. Ruffalo is hilarious, his slightly off English accent only adding to his preposterousness, where Stone’s alien bluntness is able to cut through social niceties, right to the bone.

Left to play in a genre where surrealism can stretch out quite comfortably, Lanthimos creates a raucous fairytale filled with sex, violence and mad science.

Some additional notes…

Playthings

When I first saw Poor Things I had thought that it was an interesting inversion of Barbie. Have seen a lot of throwaway comparisons made since but feel there’s a bit more to it.

Both protags are reborn, given a new life, uncorrupt and naive. The darker forces of the world are imposed on them, which they resist along with dominating suitors, building resilience and strength of character until they confront their creator – Barbie with the maternal godlike figure of Ruth Handler, Poor Things presents two fathers in the end, one a parody of the mad scientist ‘God’ and the other a sadistic general.

The ending of both films hinges on their female lead gaining agency over their lives, symbolised by taking ownership of their genitalia – Bella Baxter defending against the threat of mutilation, and slightly more curious is Barbie’s installation of a vagina (is this what happened?? It seemed like it to me..)

Sexy Baby

Loved the reframing and examination of the infantilised romantic interest, like Leeloo from The Fifth Element (or any Besson girls really). Duncan Wedderbern has a notable disinterest when Bella begins to learn more and her language develops, saying out right that she’s losing the adorable way that she speaks. A paedophilic gesture that implies he misses his status and domain over her. Fucking brilliant.

January 5, 2024 0