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

Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

Written for RAF News November 2023

A fraught and complex marriage is put on trial when a man is found dead in front of his chalet having fallen from the attic. Discovered with a fatal head injury, it may have resulted from a knock during the fall; or maybe just before.

Although we see the moments around his death, we do not yet have the context. This will be drawn out in the courtroom, where the film spends most of its runtime. Sandra (Sandra Hüller) is a successful German novelist living in France with her partially-blind son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), family dog Snoop, and until now, with her husband Samuel (Samuel Theis) – but the relationship certainly had issues, as the prosecution will make evident.

Sandra is suspected of killing Samuel for various reasons: the circumstances around the incident itself, their history of violent exchanges, and going as deep as the resentments that they harboured for one another. The courtroom scenes are less stagey than is common in films. By comparison this feels conversational, almost intimate, but nonetheless pointed and combative. Witnesses are brought to the stand and cross-examined, but when evidence is presented, or an anecdote described, we see the moments play out. One particular fight is viewed almost in its entirety, and it feels painfully lived in.

The performances of the central cast are phenomenal. Samuel is only seen briefly in flashbacks, as someone struggling severely with work-life demands, whether he is suicidal or not will be debated. Daniel is 10 years old and witnesses the entire trial, every revelation fracturing the idea of his family. Sandra is the one in the spotlight, under scrutiny, her resilience almost working against her. The centre of the film, she enriches the text deeply though we cannot be sure if she is telling the truth.

Anatomy of a Fall is a riveting courtroom drama, expertly played.

November 3, 2023 0

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

Written for RAF News October 2023

Martin Scorcese’s latest epic is a western about the exploitation and killing of Native Americans in early 20th century Oklahoma; a revisionist take on the Osage murders.

Based on the bestselling nonfiction book by David Grann, it follows dim-witted World War I vet Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) as he returns to his uncle’s cattle ranch looking for work, or more importantly, money. William ‘King’ Hale (Robert Deniro) has amassed his own wealth, but it is nothing in comparison to the First Nation locals who struck rich when they found that their land was sitting on an ocean of black gold.

Becoming the richest peoples per capita on Earth, it is not long before others start sniffing around and finding ways to part them from their riches – whether through robbery, insurance scams or marriage. The latter is suggested to Ernest by conniving Uncle Bill, matching him with Mollie (Lily Gladstone) as way to secure the inheritance of the ‘headrights’ to the oil money. Of course, there is Mollie’s mother and sisters to consider, but they are a minor inconvenience that can be fixed with a bullet or enough dynamite.

There is a great power in the storytelling, aided wondrously by the central performances, all presenting a deep contradiction or duplicitousness. Hale presents himself as a friend to the natives, speaking their language and established in the community, but underhandedly plotting their demise. Simpleton Ernest appears to genuinely love his wife and yet his loyalty to his uncle, or maybe his hunger for power, triumphs this bond repeatedly. Mollie, in a show-stopping turn from Gladstone, is aware of Ernest’s bad intention but allows him in anyway, her intentions cloaked behind an expression of constant restraint.

Killers of The Flower Moon presents a great American story of massacres and land snatching in the name of money and control – a saga that runs at just under 3 and a half hours, but somehow flies by – a true masterpiece.

October 13, 2023 0