Category: Film Festival

Categories
Film Festival film review

Bring Them Down (Dir. Christopher Andrews, 2024)

Christopher Andrews’ directorial debut begins in the confines of a car as it races down a country lane at breakneck speed, a young woman Caroline (Grace Daly) is in the back and an older woman Peggy O’Shea (Susan Lynch) sits in the passenger seat. She’s had enough has Peggy, determined to leave the man who “terrifies” her, imploring ‘Mikey’ to “slow down”. This just ensures that the young driver, Michael, puts his foot down even more forcing the car out of his control.

Flash-forward twenty years as daylight gives way to darkness. Storm Noah is on its way, and Michael (Christopher Abbott) returns from tending his sheep to find his gate destroyed. His hands are crimson, fingers tinged blue from the cold weather as he and his dog Mac make their way inside. A phone call from the man they share a hill with, Gary Keeley (Paul Ready), causes Michael’s Ray (Colm Meaney) to fume and spew vitriol, as we are swiftly realise he is wan to do. Two of the O’Shea’s rams are dead on Keeley land and have to be destroyed. Rustlers are maiming sheep across the county, cutting the legs off livestock, destroying livelihoods and outsiders like “Poles or one of that shower…” are blamed for it. Little does Michael know the culprits are far closer to home and two rams is nothing compared with what is to come.

Andrews uses the farming crisis, boundary disputes and tourism-led gentrification in Ireland as a backdrop for his film (he also wrote the screenplay). Gary is in huge financial debt due to an investment of holiday homes, the building of which has stalled due to a large piece of farmland in the vicinity; the owners of which refuse to be displaced. Characters are at emotional and economic odds, the animosity historical. It goes way beyond land borders and boundaries for these two particular families – Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone) permanently scarred from the car accident seen in the prologue is now married to Gary and mother of Jack (Barry Keoghan) – with the two main protagonist sons in the middle of a tense situation neither asked for.

Filmed in Wicklow (the gorgeous pastoral landscapes do for Ireland what God’s Own Country did for Yorkshire), Bring Them Down unfolds like a neo-western but is steeped in Irish tragedy, as two sons reconcile family loyalty with the men that rule their respective roosts destroying the other at whatever cost. There are two very different patriarchs in Gary and Ray. One is a couple of decades older than the other and yet similarly unwise – probably bearing the brunt of their own fathers before them – breathtakingly noxious and incapable of breaking the cycle of bruising generational trauma and misguided vengeance. The film straddles the notion of tradition and modernity which is most impactful in how the two families communicate. The O’Sheas largely speak Gaelic to one another, the Keeleys English, which is turn signifies a larger territorial implication.

The film is split into two acts and the shifting of perspectives works brilliantly adding some nuance to a provocative and compelling drama which is relentlessly grim. Erratic camerawork that can be often out-of-focus only adds to the brutality onscreen, at times nausea-inducing, backed musically by a bass heavy soundtrack and the semi-persistent pound of a Gaelic drum. The performances are, for the most part, excellent. Meaney is as his name suggests and in the short amount of time he is on camera manages to convey the fear Ray instilled in his wife and child once upon a time. Noone provides fine support as one more underestimated, if somewhat reductive, woman looking to flee a marriage.

I am still not overly fond of Keoghan and his acting style, the twitching oddity and/or sociopathic man-child feels overdone at this point. For me, it is Abbott and Ready who carry this film. Their performances are as multi-layered as their Arran jumpers, padded gilets and waxed jackets. Brit Ready (hapless Kevin in Motherland) is a revelation as unpredictable Keeley who can blow a gasket just as easily as he’s wracked with sobs. Which leaves American Abbott – one of the best actors of his generation (see James White or any number of his supporting roles if you don’t believe me) – his accent is flawless, dipping in and out of Gaelic with an ease which belies his Connecticut upbringing. His complicated and stoic Michael internalises everything portraying a multitude with a silent stare, slump of the shoulders or sniff of the nose. This is a man constantly battling to do the right thing grappling to remain composed.

Bring Them Down is a suffocating and stressful watch depicting internal strife and the harsh, brutal and violent realities of a small rural community within which toxic masculinity breeds in all its contemptible shame.

The film is released in UK cinemas on Friday 7th February courtesy of MUBI.

Categories
Film Festival film review

Housewife of the Year (Dir. Ciarán Cassidy, 2024)

This documentary opens with a citation of article 41.12 of the Irish Constitution in which it states that no mothers will be “obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.” The marriage bar would remain until 1973 three years after second-wave feminism hit Ireland. Preceding both, in 1968, was the launch of the annual contest Housewife of the Year.

Described as a “friendly competition”, women across Ireland would be judged on how effectively they budgeted and prepared meals. As well as their sense of humour, appearance, personality, sincerity, and civic mindedness – think Miss World sans swimwear segment. It would be televised from 1982 with beloved broadcaster Gay Byrne (1934-2019) as host with the winner getting £300 in cash along with £300 in white goods, usually a “beautiful cooker.”

Director Ciarán Cassidy uses the backdrop of this derisive, surreal and sexist competition to interrogate the role of women in Irish society over the years. There is mention of the Magdalene Laundries, the Catholic doctrine and rigidity surrounding contraception, poverty, the Ann Lovett tragedy of 1984, the Divorce Referendum of 1986 (which was eventually overturned in 1995). Yet, the real meat on the bones is the present day interviews with some of the contestants (and winners).

These extraordinary women – Margaret, Ena, Ann, Sally, Patricia, Miriam, Ellen, Bernie and Philomena – and their stories are fascinating and kind of shattering in equal measure. Their lack of choice and how they adhered to a life of wife and mother, their confinements lasting far beyond the forty weeks of pregnancy. Interned not only in the marriage itself but many quite literally pregnant for decades. Ann was married at 20 years old and by 31 had thirteen children (including four sets of twins). Patricia had to juggle her housework, child-rearing and fulfil her duties as a postal worker when her husband fell ill and unable to work. Miriam sacrificed her career as a Nurse in London just as soon as she uttered her vows, while Bernie was petrified that she’d be found out, her eldest child’s illegitimacy exposed, that her subsequent marriage and further five children would render her disqualified.

On the surface, Cassidy’s film questions the conformity perhaps just not quite as much as the women themselves. Many lament that the decisions made for them, this lack of choice was ridiculous but yet, somewhat paradoxically, credit the competition with giving them the confidence and self-esteem to speak up and question if there was more to life than what was expected of them. Or, in the case of Ellen, the impetus to survive when her husband walked out on her.

Housewife of the Year does not reinvent the wheel in terms of documentary style, combining a lot of talking head interviews with archival footage, however, it is beautifully edited by Cara Holmes and having the former contestants introduced via a spotlight on stage is a lovely touch. It leans heavily into nostalgia, is always sympathetic but never delves too deeply or rages quite hard enough, in the way that many an audience member will upon viewing. While it is pretty wonderful that these women are here to tell their tales, it is always at the forefront of your mind that many, many more are not. Women and girls abandoned by blatant misogyny and a deplorable system, which would have sooner seen them dead than accept a teenage pregnancy or fill a prescription for a diaphragm (without a court case). Not so far removed from where the USA is headed today.

During its run, the contest gave face to a generation of women who in spite of it all kept going and while the State endeavoured to make them second-class citizens, it was their resilience which ensured that, eventually, they would endeavour to make the State work for them. That they could achieve something, there was possibility in the future and change would come. Eventually.

Housewife of the Year plays this year’s Irish Film Festival, London which runs from 13-17 November.

Categories
Film Festival film review

Mother Vera (Dir. Cécile Embleton & Alys Tomlinson, 2024)

“I didn’t want to become a nun,” confesses Vera at one point during Cécile Embleton and Alys Tomlinson’s absorbing and beautifully structured Grierson Award-winning documentary, Mother Vera. The genesis of which was a black and white photograph (see above). The portrait was taken by Tomlinson, during one of her visits to Catholic pilgrimage sites and published in her book, Ex-Voto – so named for the devotional votive offerings often left at these sites of worship.

For some sisters (and Catholics), the calling can be romanticised, childhood piety guides the novitiate on their path and any struggles with faith rarely discussed out loud. For the titular figure at the centre of this film nothing could be further from the truth.

Born Olga, Vera’s road was one filled with nightclubs, perfume, motorbikes and heroin. Not to mention the imprisoned husband before she found recovery, and God. Even after twenty years, redemption is still on the table: “I broke the lives of many people. I must be from hell.” Her backstory is slowly drip fed to the audience, almost elliptically, and delivered in short, often blunt, sentences which while never really expanded upon are without self-pity or, refreshingly, true regret. She is the perfect conduit to help the ex-prisoners in the congregation, men cloistered under her care seeking to reconcile their own addictions and reclamation.

Diegetic sound reverberates in every striking frame and there are many, austere and stunningly rich. From the nun shot from behind ringing bells, each peal seemingly moving ropes at will making her look like a marionette to close-ups of women reading scripture and their hands clutching rosaries, forefingers and thumbs cradling each bead as they silently count the prayers. Religious iconography adorns most interior walls and then there is the neon lighted cross at the head of an outdoor baptismal pool which upon first glance resembles an open grave. Images which are fleeting, often in isolation but evocative enough to render to memory.

Daily life at the St. Elisabeth monastery is filmed in stark contrast, black and white only further enhances the grey. Lighting is reduced to flickering candlelight, low camera angles focus on the swishing of the cassock as feet climb stairs, shadows move en masse until focus eventually pulls upwards and the apostolniks and skufias of the sisters, old and young alike, come into view. This contrast is never more apparent than when those dark melancholic frames give way to the daylight and the deep snow Vera rides her steed through heading towards the ominous forest on the grounds periphery. It is outside with the horses where she finds peace, her pockets of joy reserved for when she visits her family.

This documentary sits very comfortably within the realm of ‘slow cinema’, thematically (and visually) similar to films like Ida (Pawlikowski, 2013) and The Innocents (Fontaine, 2016) but with a fundamental truth and reality at its core. It carries emotional heft as the search for liberation and personal freedom becomes ever more apparent. The shift in the journey of the enigmatic Olga/Vera – herself the personification of a votive offering – also occurs in the filmmaking too. The slow transition to colour in those last twenty minutes is glorious and perfectly judged, the first initial bleeding of which comes after the inky black apostolnik is seen burning into ash and dissolving into the cold night air.

Mother Vera defies expectation. It is a visually gorgeous meditation in (mostly) monochrome – filmed with creativity and originality through a non-judgemental lens about one resilient and courageous woman’s search for identity and self-acceptance. Embleton and Tomlinson took a still image and over 91 minutes made it come to life onscreen.

Categories
Film Festival film review

Motherboard (Dir. Victoria Mapplebeck, 2024)

Matrescence is a word that is slowly finding its way back into vernacular after decades without recognition in Western society. This transition goes further than the narrative surrounding pregnancy, birth and motherhood women have been fed for centuries. It goes far beyond the development of the foetus, how the baby turns out and looks instead at unexamined moral assumptions about motherhood – and explains the metamorphosis and how it ends. As a chimera with her child’s cells knitted to her body and bones and her brain colonised, forever connected.

Victoria Mapplebeck’s feature debut Motherboard, shot over two decades on a DVCAM and five generations of iPhone is a collaboration between a mother and her son but attempts to depict the multitude of changes a woman goes through above beyond the physical mutation of growing another human. At 38, pregnant and alone after being dumped by a man reportedly not for fatherhood she begins to document her journey of motherhood post-birth. A filmmaker-cum-academic, Victoria is no stranger to an absentee father, her own walked out on her mother when she was a toddler.

Her baby’s father, upon meeting his child on the first of less than a handful of times, demands a paternity test before announcing his move to Spain and over the years his apathy does not change. One feels nothing but shame for him. Jim grows into a seemingly great little human in spite of him – that thumbs-up during the scan in the first scene of the film telling us all we need to know – and because of his mother and grandmother, Betty. He is mature beyond his years, sensitive and pragmatic even before he reaches ten years old.

While absent fathers are nothing new in this family, Victoria does manage to repair some of the fractures in her relationship with her own father in a particularly moving moment, Jim’s interest at 13 in developing a relationship with his other parent coincides with Victoria’s cancer diagnosis and the rounds of chemotherapy she must face. There is no sugar-coating, no bemoaning of the selfish human she pro-created with (at least on camera) or any self-pity: “I don’t care if I die. I just want to get [Jim] to adulthood.”

This documentary uses live-action footage, voicemails, voiceovers and text messages to paint a fiercely unsentimental look at motherhood, and the frustrations that go along with it not to mention the guilt and unfiltered messiness of life with a child and the attempt to navigate a career alongside. It is really beautiful seeing Jim evolve – over 90 minutes – the small squeaky voice giving way to a deep resonant tone, the small day bed replaced with a double to house his growth spurt.

We bear witness to the teenager, moody, monosyllabic, fighting the onset of depression amid a pandemic-induced lockdown and drug experimentation. That these struggles occur during the time Victoria starts to take baby-steps back into the filmmaking world, pitching her film to the Venice film festival are merely coincidence or because of are never really explored. However, understandably, it leads to some really intense and terse moments between the two, and on the other end of the phone there’s a voice of reason in Betty.

Victoria. Betty. They are the constants. Two women who raise(d) their children (mostly) alone. The former never stops needing the latter, who is often on hand to offer sage advice, empathise with, offer thoughts on films, or bake a shepherd’s pie, and Jim has another mother to go to when things get a little too tough between him and his own mum.

Motherboard frames the joys and expectations of motherhood and to some degree womanhood as the woman of this piece attempts to carve a place for herself in the world, recouping earlier sacrifices after the maternal block (Jim refers to it as a mental one). It is humane, warm and candidly relatable.

At the heart of it, there is no denying the connection between this mother and her child.

Categories
Film Festival film review

Tarika (Dir. Milko Lazarov, 2024)

Widower Ali (Zachary Baharov) lives a peaceful life in a rural and isolated area, deep in the hills of Bulgaria close to the Greek border with his mother-in-law and teenage daughter, “wonderful” 14-year-old, Tarika (Vesela Valcheva).

The family produce milk and cheese from their one goat (delivered to both the Imam and local Priest), mill flour and Ali picks up the odd shift at the local mine to make ends meet. Tarika has recently been diagnosed with Butterfly Vertebra, the same bone disorder as her mother and grandmother before her. A genetic abnormality which can result in butterfly wings forming from the spine and scapula. It is up to Ali as to whether his daughter undergoes the surgery to prevent full metamorphosis, before his daughter experiences any real change in her body. Her grandmother still bearing the scars from her own medical intervention.

Foot and mouth is seemingly prevalent in the area as sheep are removed from farms and taken away by men in hazmat suits – as witnessed by father and daughter on their bus-ride home. It’s an overnight journey thus establishing just how far away their dwelling is from “civilisation”. They are without electricity and running water but are self-sufficient, existing in their own cosmos. An idyll only recently disturbed by a hovering helicopter while more animals are located and destroyed, and the army a little farther out building a fence between the border .

There is a timeless fairy tale quality to Tarika (thankfully renamed from The Herd), it even brought to mind loose aspects of Frankenstein. It is not initially clear when this story is set, costumes are old fashioned – especially the Mayor’s (Ivan Savov) Biggles-inspired get up he insists on wearing while riding his motorbike and sidecar. Then during the, frankly, fabulous traditional dance number at the village fair the flag of the European Union billows stage left to the wafting of the Bulgaria tricolour stage right. Bulgaria only entered the EU in January of 2007 and yes, it feels dated but the politics are current (albeit also antiquated).

At no point does Milko Lazarov’s film suffer from the quiet and lack of dialogue thanks largely to Kaloyan Bozhilov’s stunning cinematography which does most of the heavy lifting, shot on 35mm film, it evokes such feeling and established sense of place, power and joy. Shots are often in isolation, like the five coloured rugs recently washed and drying on rocks in the sunshine. Although, further reading suggests this may allude to Bulgarian riddles/folklore and the ancient pantheon of Gods.

Characters are not always immediately identifiable or even noticeable amid the backdrop. The vista shots are breathtaking, often filmed in extreme long-shot – indicating the vast world beyond the characters’ door and expressing just how isolated this child truly is. Each frame is a work of art, like a watercolour the palette of which communicates the natural world Tarika is at one with and finds peace in. The still-life image punctuated with birdsong, light and bright, bursting with greens, lemons, oranges and ochres. It brought to mind Hit the Road (2021) which similarly deals with a changing country, political climate, and a child’s point-of-view all sprinkled in a touch of magical realism.

The supernatural is alluded to with Tarika’s presence, her mother having manifested her daughter’s very existence. The myth surrounding the family’s matriarch, most specifically her death, looms throughout. The child is to be feared, thrown stones at and generally shunned. She is – “just like her mother” – blamed for the droughts and inexplicable accidents or deaths. When she feeds an immigrant and soothes the woman’s baby, the Mayor sheds his man of the people mask and shows his true vile nature. Like most men in power he is a hypocrite, a man whose main motivation is to divide and dominate.

Throughout Tarika, there are moments which require little explanation, however, any unanswered questions by the denouement only further enhances the beauty of the film. The socio-political commentary is clear, however. This is Bulgaria yet could be anywhere in this day and age, as the world edges towards open xenophobia and basic human rights violated in the wake of so-called wealth, prosperity and nationhood. The characters are not particularly overdrawn but do not lose their credibility. The village fair sequence results in a wonderful interaction between a performing clown – played beautifully by Christos Stergioglou (Dogtooth) – who sees something in the titular character. While the recounted love story of Ali and his wife is heart-swelling. His love for both his late bride and flaxen-haired daughter is palpable and the lengths he will go to protect her encapsulates what it is to be human.

Butterflies and birdsong are everywhere in this exquisite film about hope, love, freedom and the ephemerality of life. Lazarov combines Kaurismäki’s tragedy and minimalism with Kusturica’s naturalism and empathy to create a unique, beguiling and deeply moving film.