Another video essay – this one on identity in Sean Durkin’s brilliant debut: Martha Marcy May Marlene.
sax & violins
Rewatched, reanalysed and cut together a video
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.
Pinocchio A True Story (2023)
Written for RAF News July 2023
Pinocchio A Tue Story is a confused adaptation of the popular fairytale, a janky Russian animation that makes little sense, but has gained online notoriety for its particular American dubbing.
Evidently the story of Geppetto and his living doll have become public domain, and so we have had a number of versions released in the past couple of years. From Disney’s updated live-action with CGI, to Guillermo De Toro’s comic but darkly twisted stop-motion, and now this: a much smaller scale, no-thrills animation, that appears to be geared toward a much younger audience, and apparently those watching ironically for the memes.
The plot is much like the others, or at least it uses some of the same ideas (though notably excluding Jiminy Cricket or his growing nose). Pinocchio (Pauly Shore) is a wooden boy who comes to life and longs to see the world, along with his trusty talking horse Tybalt (Jon Heder) he joins a travelling circus and falls in love with the shifty proprietor’s daughter Bella (Liza Klimova). Now he wishes to become human so that they may share a love together, but her father’s schemes, and the thieving animals under his employ, threaten to interfere.
Despite being cemented into public consciousness through its many retellings, this instalment is pretty non-sensical, with drama arising out of nowhere and then being resolved just as casually. The score is generic whilst the animation is ropey and unexciting. The American dub is where the film has garnered much attention, largely due to Pauly Shore’s flamboyant delivery, causing a wave of TikToks celebrating the perceived sexuality of Pinocchio.
A suitably bizarre fate for this strange film, that isn’t nearly as funny as the reactions it has provoked.
The Ones Below
Written for Film and TV Now Nov 2015 (Available here)
From the haunting lullaby that accompanies the opening image of a sonogram, there is an immediate sense of foreboding horror in The Ones Below, of something about to go wrong.
The expecting couple are young professionals Kate (Clémence Poésy) and Justin (Stephen Campbell Moore), who up until now lived comfortably in the upper half of their London flat. Downstairs a new couple have moved in, a bubbly Finnish woman (Laura Birn) and her older, much less congenial husband Jon (David Morrissey). As luck would have it they have a child on the way too.
The soon-to-be mothers are drawn together initially but their differences soon come to light. Kate has doubts about motherhood that are not even comprehended by her desperately maternal neighbour. Theresa (her name even reminds of the renowned ‘Mother’) and Jon have always wanted to have children but it hasn’t been so easy for them. This is in stark contrast to Kate who wasn’t sure that she even wanted to have children, perhaps seeded in the frigid and distant relationship she has with her own mother. The ease with which she has fallen pregnant becomes a matter of discord as a sudden and dramatic turn of events sends the couples’ relationship spiralling into paranoid contempt.
When Kate eventually gives birth, her reluctance is challenged by the relentless demands of her young baby. She soon finds herself sleep-deprived and strung out, suspicious that the couple downstairs are interfering, but how much of this is in her head? While the more villainous qualities of certain characters is shown as schlocky and over-the-top, even for this style of film, it is the more subtle performance of Posey that grounds the horror and creates something interesting.
The Ones Below cleverly uses the divisive attitudes towards pregnancy as a means of finding tension and dividing lines. This is brought out in the way each character dresses, and the ways in which they decorate their apartments even. Where the more laid back and career focussed young couple wear mostly monochrome, smart-casual attire, the ones below are splattered with bright garish colours, a quality which is unsettling, almost laughably so in the case of Jon, whose tall and imposing demeanour is undercut by his pink socks.
The on-the-nose title of David Farr’s directorial debut sounds like A Twilight Zone episode, which is rather fitting for this film which owes a debt to the twisty revenge thrillers of decades past, and not to mention Roman Polanski. Not simply Rosemary’s Baby, which is an undoubted influence, but the others in the Polish director’s Apartment trilogy, and his more recent adaptation Carnage, which examines the volatile dynamic of two middle-class couples as they fight over their children.
Although there are glimpses of these other films, The Ones Below lacks the potency to rival them and instead offers a cheap thriller that descends into pure absurdity. The final act is actually quite fun in the end but it comes at the expense of all seriousness up until this point.
samcooney 