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Film Festival film review

My Wonderful Wanda (Dir. Bettina Oberli, 2020)

East and West Europe clash in Bettina Oberli’s sly satire My Wonderful Wanda which was included in Glasgow Film Festival’s stellar line-up, and given special mention in the Nora Ephron Award category at Tribeca.

Wanda (Agnieszka Grochowska) arrives by coach from Poland – and does so at the start of each chapter of the film’s structure – clutching as much of her life as she can pack into two pieces of luggage. The most important parts, her two sons, are left behind and cared for by her parents while she earns a wage. She is employed by the Wegmeister-Gloor family (yes, really – translate it) and cares for patriarch Josef (André Jung) who has been left debilitated by a stroke.

His wife Elsa (Marthe Heller) and adult children Sophie (Birgit Minichmayr) and Gregi (Jacob Matschenz) are unwilling to lift him, place him on the commode chair or shower him, their lives either too full or too empty to truly care one way or another. Wanda does it all. Even when Manuela goes back to Portugal, Wanda is asked to take on extra cooking and cleaning. The Wegmeister-Gloors are far from poor with their stunning lakeside home that it makes the fact that she must barter for her wages all the more galling to watch.

Josef starts paying Wanda for sex as another way to supplement her income. Their business transaction satisfying both as his needs are met and she is able to send more money home. Almost predictably, she is then accused of stealing the money and her passport threatened with confiscation. Make no mistake, these are not likeable people but you will have to wait until the final few moments as to whether any of them are redeemable.

When Wanda falls pregnant by the ‘infertile’ Josef that’s when the fun really starts as panic and horror sets in and the realisation of what this may cost the family, both in monetary terms and to their prided reputation. There’s an element of schadenfreude as one watches white privilege implode in a drunken haze and Nancy Sinatra, a protection of assets and a taxidermy funeral (an art installation in the snow), while Wanda remains the taciturn and rational one. Choices are made but not by her – the poor tend not to have those – and Gregi, the youngest Wegmeister-Gloor, finally takes his creepy bird noises with him and flies the nest.

Oberli’s film is nuanced and empathetically shot – the family as microcosm – with its greens and blues symbolising all that is in nature, the façade beneath the picturesque, as well as the cash and the bloodline. Its tone is perfectly measured as it deftly comments on class, the immigrant experience, motherhood, family dynamics (including the multitude of human neuroses that comes with it) and legacy, however, does it with a sense of self-awareness and humour. The inclusion of the cow is genius – both as cast member and visual metaphor – and provides ever more light relief.

My Wonderful Wanda’s strength lies in its direction, screenplay, biting satire, and ensemble cast, with standout performances from Grochowska and Heller. Perhaps, we are all just prisoners of circumstance whether rich or poor.

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film review

The Father (Dir. Florian Zeller, 2020)

Over the last 20 years or so there has been an increase in films which have attempted to depict the cruelty of dementia and/or Alzheimer’s detailing aspects of the progressive and often fatal brain disease; from diagnosis to decline. Narratives told from the (adult) children’s perspective (The Savages, 2007), husbands trying to coming to terms with their wives’ diagnoses (Away from Her, 2006), (Iris, 2001) and Amour (2012) and the, then, inevitable gender-switch in A Song for Martin (2001) Robot and Frank (2001) and The Leisure Seeker (2018).

There have been grandfathers in Nebraska (2013) and, Head Full of Honey (2018), grandmothers in Poetry (2010) and women-of-a-certain-age-in-dementia-framed-as-horror (The Taking of Deborah Logan and Relic). Then, Still Alice depicted a young(er) patient in linguistics Professor Alice Howland before French ‘tragi-comedy’ Floride (2015) – the first film to adapt Florian Zeller’s 2012 play Le Père – in which Jean Rochefort and Sandrine Kiberlain embraced the darker comic moments. While films such as A Moment to Remember (2004) and Black (2005), A Separation (2011) and Wrinkles (2011) sought different ways to frame the narrative which can often feel a little derivative.

They have all had their charms, however, few have managed to convey the illness in quite the same way as Zeller’s BAFTA-winning The Father. Adapted from Le Père (screenplay co-authored with Christopher Hampton) which has been staged for theatre the world over, Zeller directs Hopkins in an arguably career-best performance. He’s brilliant in it, certainly on par with Glenda Jackson’s BAFTA and Emmy-Award winning role as Maud in Aisling Walsh’s Elizbeth is Missing.

In the film, he plays Anthony (no longer the André of the stage play), a charismatic octogenarian, living alone but fighting his daughter Anne (Olivia Colman) tooth and nail over the prospect of a live-in nurse. He’s independent and more than capable of caring for himself in his Maida Vale flat, thank you very much. Now if only he could remember where his watch was… The next time we see Anne she is played by Olivia Williams and it takes a beat to realise how and why. We are in Anthony’s world view and it is confusing, utterly disconcerting and often overwhelming. Every time he misplaces his possessions, every moment he shares with people we are unsure are really there and those heart-aching minutes when he can’t even remember that his other daughter Lucy is dead, there we are too.

There’s repetition to each scene made all the more apparent with the one setting – the flat evolves with the subtle movement of some props yet every door leads to somewhere just not always where Anthony expects. We see him as a curmudgeonly old sod determined to assert his patriarchal authority with intense conviction, as a young man attempting to impress Imogen Poots’ care nurse Laura by imbibing scotch and dancing around the room with almost teenage glee and then a little boy as the film edges to its denouement. It’s an astonishing performance by the 83-year-old Welshman.

Yet to only talk of Hopkins could be construed as a disservice to the rest of the cast all of whom are equally wonderful especially Colman (who only has to exhale amid a lip tremble and I well up). However, it is all about the eponymous father. He is our unreliable narrator as he comes to terms with the world around him, as he remembers his children, the location of his watch or not as the case may be. Enveloped by time which idles by or fails to pass at all in his mind. The more agitated Anthony gets the more fragmented his memory becomes yet all these narrative irregularities and incoherencies are beautifully immersive so the audience is never alienated.

The labyrinthian location – regardless of the chasms of Anthony’s mind – means that hallways and doors seem endless, colours muted and interchangeable. This use of the ‘unheimlich’ is often limited to the horror genre but here, is played with astutely. Walls change colour, costumes change at a rapid pace (or remain the same) and space is atmospherically lit. When Anthony is ‘sundowning’, greys and blues make up the palette, medium and long shots position the lead character in the centre of frame, small, lost with items within the mise-en-scène indecipherable in the darkening natural light. At other times, rooms are flooded with sunlight and Anthony is in medium close-up filling the frame, upbeat and somewhat in control.

While purple may be the official colour of the Alzheimer’s movement, blue tends to be the primary colour here, especially costume-wise which could symbolise reliability and trust, even stability and health – all of which are in flux for Anthony or perhaps, the colour of blooming forget-me-nots and melancholia. It may not even be that deep and meaningful, as dementia patients tend to favour blue, red and green and often find blue the most calming.

The Father is a sobering, unsentimental and poignant film offering a brief window into how one man lives with dementia – which is often tragic, often ugly – and the rippling repercussions for his family and care workers. It will strike close to home for many and few will wish to revisit but it is well worth preparing yourself for a one-time watch, if only to see a masterclass in acting.

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Film Festival film review

Apples (Dir. Christos Nikou, 2020)

We are introduced to the nameless protagonist of Apples [Mila], played by Aris Servetalis, in his apartment, through a series of cuts (or polaroid snapshots) restlessly listening to the radio…staring impassively into space… banging his head against the doorframe before venturing out to buy the flowers himself much like the eponymous Mrs. Dalloway. Though there is no party in sight for Aris as he wanders aimlessly through the city and eventually falls fast asleep on a bus taking him from A to B. When the driver awakens him, Aris doesn’t recall where he should have alighted, his name or where he lives – his lack of identification only confirms it and he is packed off in an ambulance to the Disturbed Memory Department of the Neurological Hospital for evaluation.

From there, he is assigned a number (14842) and afforded a new life as an amnesiac. Sudden onset amnesia is not seen as unusual as the seemingly irreversible epidemic sweeps across a modern, yet strangely analogue Athens, with neither sight nor sound of a mobile device. All amnesiacs (at least those not claimed by family members) are given tape recorders and polaroid cameras. The cassette tapes containing prompts of how to manage their “new beginnings” and the cameras are to snap proof of how they spent their days; photos stored in albums for posterity.

Christos Nikou served as Yorgos Lanthimos’ AD on Dogtooth and it initially shows. His film – based on a screenplay he co-wrote with Stavros Raptis – does fit within the so-called Greek Weird Wave in which filmmakers and writers such as the likes of Panos H. Kontras, Lanthimos, Athina Rachel Angari, and Efthymis Filippou have given us some brilliantly strange pieces of work that have painted a unique, often ideological, versions of Greek society. Yet, while his predecessors liked the darker, mordant aspects of life, Nikou’s film is far more heartfelt and poignant.

Aris throughout plays it deadpan even when he meets fellow new beginner Anna (Sofia Georgovassili) and as he chomps his way through, roughly, an orchard. Servetalis is a combination of Daniel Day-Lewis and Buster Keaton, the line between bizarre and funny grows increasingly blurry as the film progresses, as to the linearity of the whole thing is anybody’s guess. The 4:3 aspect ratio harks back to the silent era and helps to further detach from reality – although the whole Athens-epidemic-as-narrative-device strikes close to home as we, like Aris, find a new weird normal – in our case remembering to smile with our eyes beneath the material which covers the rest of our face.

The film is a very quiet and wry allegory with several laugh-out-loud moments involving a Batman, and even a nod to an Outcast lyric. Its use of colour is gorgeous, the daylight palette tends to be muddy blues, greys and muted greens while the nights tend to be oranges and ochres much like the innards of a mouldy apple. The use of music is astute with all feeding into the theme of memory and remembrance: “Scarborough Fair”, “Seal It With A Kiss”, and “Let’s Twist Again” (although, this arguably has a dual meaning) – tenuous it may be but even “Ave Maria” mentions fruit!

Apples is a brilliant and absurdist rumination on loss, memory, identity and human connection. It ponders selective memory – the want to forget what’s in the memory bank, the fight to remember by heart and if there’s a difference, and what the hell did we do before the smart phone and documenting our days.

Apples will be available exclusively on Curzon Home Cinema from Friday 7th May.

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Film Festival film review

Truman + Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation (Dir. Lisa Immordino Vreeland, 2021)

“Life is partly what we make it, and partly what is made by the friends we choose” – Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote were two of the greatest writers of American Literature during the Twentieth Century – Pulitzer Prize-winning even in Williams’ case. They were also friends for over 40 years until their respective deaths in 1983 and 1984. Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s documentary gives an 86 minute window into this relationship, promising an intimate conversation and doesn’t waste a second.

Utilising archival footage, stills and photographs – beautiful ones courtesy of the Cecil Beaton and Richard Avedon collections amongst others – the film establishes the two men as singular subjects as well as through a dual portrait. The split screen of both being interviewed by David Frost (or Dick Cavett) albeit on separate shows is a brilliant touch especially given both are faced with a similar line of questioning in spite of their very apparent (or so this reviewer thought) differences. That’s the beauty of this film, it never presupposes the viewer’s prior knowledge – there is more than enough here to keep ardent fans happy while schooling those less-than-familiar minds. Unless mistaken, it does feel like there is slightly more meat on the bones in relation to Williams’ personal history, career, subsequent film adaptations, etcetera. however, this is not a complaint, he was the older of the two and seemed the more prolific.

The ‘conversation’ begins in 1940 when both men first meet and extends decades until their deaths in the 1980s, it is rendered here and stitched together between their respective correspondence, snippets of interviews as well as passages of seminal works, their great love stories, battles with addiction and personal tragedies. Jim Parsons and Zachary Quinto’s voiceovers ‘as’ Truman and Tennessee respectively serve a purpose, however, can be at odds with the archival footage and detracts from an otherwise immersive experience. Neither quite nails the pitch and cadence of the eloquent Southern gents who had such distinctive timbre and speaking voices. That said, it is a brilliant piece of casting.

There is no denying that both TC and TW were supremely gifted, often troubled, men who helped shape the Southern Gothic literary genre and their work, in turn, gave some of the most memorable adaptations committed to film. Although to listen to them neither were all too keen. Capote felt betrayed after Marilyn Monroe – who he had always envisioned as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s – was replaced by Audrey Hepburn, and Williams loathed what film censors would do to his plays. He hated that everything had to be intimated and could never be shown, only for the last ten minutes of the film would it become apparent, that, for example, Stanley had raped Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire. It was the reason he fought so hard for artistic control of his work.

Their friendship was a complex one, lives often paralleling beyond the 13-year age gap or sheer coincidence – both had non-existent relationships with their fathers who they would compartmentalise, write out of their lives as well as their names – Truman at aged 9 and Tennessee at 18. They both struggled to accept their sexuality believing, somewhat devastatingly, that life would have served them better, or at the very least during childhood, had they been born girls. There were of course a multitude of differences, not least in relation to fame; one sought it unabashed and relentlessly while the other found it a “tedious bore”. One believed his most successful novel (In Cold Blood) was due to the fact that he didn’t appear anywhere in it while the other claimed to have only written the one autobiographical play (The Glass Menagerie).

Yet for all their unfaltering support of each other there were the petty jealousies, churlish goading and combative comments. Certainly, the description of Williams in Capote’s unfinished novel is less than kind but Immordino Vreeland steers her film in a more positive direction. There is enough pathos and poignancy in these frames which gives, not only a nostalgia hit, and a push to revisit their works but a real insight into their frank worldview, compulsions (of which writing was top of the list) and moments of real empathy. Although not new information, to actually hear Williams talk of his own self-loathing, and sister Rose’s ECT treatment is utterly heart-breaking.

Truman + Tennessee is an intimate and fascinating portrait of two behemoths of the written word; a dramatist and a writer (though neither descriptor is mutually exclusive) and definitely one for fans of Stevan Riley’s Listen to Me Marlon (2015) in which there is some attempt to demythologise a persona, or in this case two. These men – one a lover of Chekov the other of Moby Dick – butted heads, belittled and bitched about each other, often competitors as well as confidants, and if we’re to believe Truman Capote when he stated: “Friendship and love are the same thing,” then it’s safe to surmise from this documentary that they also loved each other madly.

Truman + Tennessee had its UK Premiere thanks to Dogwoof at the Glasgow Film Festival and is released on VoD on April 30th.

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Film Festival film review

The Old Ways (Dir. Christopher Alender, 2021)

GFF 2021 – FrightFest

After taking an assignment in Veracruz, Mexico Cristina (Brigitte Kali Canales) finds herself hooded and imprisoned in small cell. Despite begging to see her cousin Miranda (Andrea Cortés) and general protestations: “I’m an American… and a reporter” there she remains, shackled to the beautifully rendered and chalked wall, forced to ingest goat’s milk and pee in a bucket.

Keeping her ‘prisoner’ is local witch Luz (Julia Vera) and son Javi (Sal Lopez). Both are convinced that Cristina has picked up a demon that has hitched a ride on her soul following an illicit trip to the ruins of La Boca. As the days turn to night, Cristina tries to find ways to escape, however, soon she starts to feel that maybe she does ‘have it’ or something which is holding her hostage.

Exorcism films as a sub-genre are ten-a-penny and usually contain some white child/young woman losing the battle to find the devil within. Or there’s a haunting with a vengeful spirit/lost soul possessing a house or member of a family. Sometimes there are rites, rituals, a cassocked Priest, or perhaps a Rabbi, prayers, chants and holy water. It is refreshing therefore when a film tries to do something that little bit different with the well-worn tropes – Christopher Alender’s – making the leap from shorts and TV to his first feature – The Old Ways does just that (albeit with some old faithful). 

This is exorcism as repatriation. Cristina’s soul was up for grabs because she wasn’t quite fulfilled, living with trauma in a country she never quite belonged to, even if she didn’t realise it until now, drug addled and empty. She needs to commune with her forgotten heritage – one she was ripped from as a child – in order to heal and rid herself of the demon ‘Postekhi’. Her childhood trauma is never far from her mind revisiting her in flashbacks and nightly visits of a small boy.

The beauty of this film is its subtlety, it takes its time and doesn’t outstay its welcome which make the last fifteen/twenty minutes all the more forgiveable. There’s still fun to be had but it loses the nuance it worked so hard to build on and it is those moments which feel somewhat unnecessary. Joy-of-joys, however, the practical effects are great with the odd stomach churning moment, hair regurgitation is never pretty, and special mention goes to Luz’s make-up (courtesy of Josh and Sierra Russell); the cracking white face paint, the blood-red cross across the eyes and cataract lens is striking.

The cast of four play off each other brilliantly but it is Canales’ Cristina who is the standout. She doesn’t play her as a victim but survivor, fighting tooth and nail against what is or isn’t missing inside of her. This is less about restoration of a possessed soul – the snakes and milk symbols of renewal and rebirth – but more about reclamation of a heritage as a way of life and forging ahead. Forget the passive female protagonist bed-bound and helpless to prevent what’s happening, this one schools herself with a red leather bound book of demons (Jung’s manifesto of the same hue also detailed the recovery of a soul). There’s even humour with some amusing play-acting, bribery attempts, and the cell may be dotted in candles but there’s still an electric fan to help with the heat and humidity.

All-in-all The Old Ways is a smart and surprisingly subtle horror film. A really attractive looking feature which deftly goes beyond the expelling of demons, speaks to the migrant experience and embraces cultural significance (the Mariachi-instrumental of “La Bamba” is a nice touch). If you can take one thing from it it’s to never forget who you are or where you come from… and always invest in practical effects.

The Old Ways screens at GFF FrightFest from 5-8 March