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Author: gffreviews
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GFF25 is over!
Well, I fell ill for pretty much half the festival, so only 16 films this year. It is what it is.
Favourite film of the festival – Four Mothers
Least favourite film of the festival – Mr K
It was a big ole milestone with Allison retiring. It won’t be the same without her.
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Make it to Munich
Genuinely really lovely, warm, uplifting film.
I’m not a sports fan, a football fan, a cycling fan. So you might not expect me to go in for a film about football fans cycling to Germany to see Scotland play in the Euros. I wouldn’t expect it from myself, but this film just transcends all of that, because it is about the warmth and positivity of this young boy, the friends that go with him on this journey, and the people from all over who give him their support. If you just want a feel-good movie, this is for you.
The film follows Ethan Walker, an eighteen year old, who had trained his whole life to be a footballer. Just as things seemed to start taking off for him, and he’s playing in the States, he’s hit by a car, sustaining life threatening injuries. Now if you read the synopsis, it just says serious injury, but when you see the state of him, it’s a wonder he’s alive. He was a hair’s breadth from death. He had two brain bleeds, he couldn’t swallow on his own, he couldn’t talk, his wrist was broken, his pelvis fractured, his knee was wrecked. Like, the collision shattered the bones you need to stand, and he had a very serious brain injury.
That was September. In June he decided to cycle to Germany.
I was a bit worried going into it, that the film would be a bit smaltzy. I don’t think anybody was more worried about that than Ethan, because the film shows him as a real down-to-earth guy, who, to be honest, is a bit uncomfortable getting attention, even if he appreciates the support. Whenever he gets congratulated on his remarkable recovery, or even just the literal fact he’s cycling 1200km, he defaults to that Scottish man mumbling self-deprecation. He doesn’t think it’s a big deal. He’s be mortified by smaltz.
Lucky then that the movie is just bang-on, a road trip with plenty of humour and camaraderie. Not a smidge of smaltz in sight.
Give this film a try, even if you think it’s not your thing, because it really is just a lovely watch.
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The Return
Excellent movie. From the sprawling epic The Odyssey, Uberto Passolini chooses to focus on the final challenge of King Odysseus, when he returns home to find both his home and himself changed. Instead of the spectacle of battle, we get a tense, introspective meditation on the inability to ever really go home again.
Which is not to say that it lacks for drama. King Odysseus arrives on the island of Ithaca as an anonymous shipwreck survivor. The Queen holds out hope that her husband is still alive, and stalls the suitors who vie for her hand. They are a swarm of locusts, arriving with their entourages, nothing but bands of thugs. They want the crown, the island, the wealth of Ithaca, but they pillage the land of food, attack and rape the people, and threaten the lives of the Queen and her son. The Queen is using every tool of diplomacy and custom to put off acquiescing to their demands, but time is running out. And Odysseus seems to have been spared in battle only to see the death knell of his home. He has no men, no weapons, no money, is sick in spirit and weak in body. Does he even want to claim this ruin of a home and does this home want this ruin of a king?
Ralph Fiennes gives a powerful and resonant performance as a man absolutely haunted. He has not simply been lost, he is lost. He has journeyed into war, and brought it with him when he left. It is inside him all the time, and he is terrified it will spill out of him, here on the land he sought to protect.
Juliette Binoche also gives a great performance as Queen Penelope, who as a woman has very few options open to her, and is working with the limited means that are available to her to preserve what is left of peace in the land she is responsible for. She is also trying to keep control over the very personal decision to stay loyal to the memory of her husband, be he dead or alive, be he faithful or wayward. For her, she swore her love and fidelity to him, and she has no wish to do that with any other man. Juliette does a great job of showing her as a woman under the strain of duty, shrewd in playing politics while confined within the feminine sphere, but deeply wounded from a very personal loss.
While the setting and story are ancient, The Return speaks to the timeless and universal experience of the veteran’s return, of the incommunicability of the experience of war to those who have not seen it, of the distance which grows within families as a natural consequence of separation, of how unrecognisable you may become to others and even yourself.
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Two to One
Comedy crime caper set during the reunification of Germany.
It’s the last week before the East German currency becomes obsolete. Everybody’s been laid off, and are considering how to start all over again now their way of life is ending. A trio of old friends persuade a security worker to let them into the local military bunker, and swipe a fortune from the stockpile of withdrawn currency. They are millionaires for the next three days, but how to spend it?
Two to One is about the tussle in the East German cultural psyche as capitalism meets communism. “Greed eats brains” a character says at one point, and god that’s right. It’s not simply about money, taking and spending it – it’s about how it changes how you think, who you consider, what is the unit of ‘you’. Family, friends, community, what price to protect them?
A lovely warm film that invokes hope is the aftermath of a world washing away.
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Andrea Gets A Divorce
I really liked this! I really love the dry Austrian humour, beautifully underplayed to maximum effect.
Andrea is a cop in a sleepy little town in the Austrian countryside where nothing ever happens, but things are looking up! She just got a big promotion to detective, which will involve moving to a more lively city, and she’s finally getting a divorce from her good-for-nothing husband. She goes to a colleague’s birthday party, only for her husband to turn up, be an obnoxious messy drunk, cause a scene, and have to have his car keys confiscated so he doesn’t get behind the wheel. She tries to salvage her evening, but it’s pretty much ruined, so after a while she goes home. The momentary distraction of a phone call makes her hit something out on the dark country roads. It is, you guessed it, the worthless ex.
What follows is Andrea trying to hold down her guilt and keep her world together, as she flees the scene and tries to carry on like it never happened. Her stoic and pragmatic nature make this seem achievable, and it might be, had not the blame for the accident come to fall on the shoulders of Franz Leitner, the local R.E. teacher, whose moral handwringing becomes the bain of Andrea’s existence. It’s so funny, just watching how quietly irritated she is at this man being so apologetic, kind, and remorseful.
I think that’s what I really loved about this movie, it’s almost entirely about good people. For all the situation has put them into conflict, and the choices they make are not great, everyone in it is fundamentally good. And I love Andrea carrying on with relentless practicality with an ‘only sane one in the asylum’ attitude while everyone around her has their own brand of being slightly ridiculous.
Just really well done and really enjoyable.
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Restless
Restless is about Nicky, a kind, considerate, decent, hard-working carer, who is kept awake by her new noisy neighbour until she eventually starts to lose her shit.
Loved this movie. Loved how it manages to trace all the ripple effects of this mundane and downplayed problem without ever being heavy-handed about it. It explores how it affects Nicky physically, psychologically, how it drains her of patience, leaves her with nothing of herself to give to others, makes her resentful, spiteful, darkens her spirit. How it makes her feel like people see her as doormat to walk over, and her kindness and politeness as an invitation to exploitation and mockery.
And if all that sounds miserable, I should also say, it’s very funny. The drama walks hand-in-hand with dark humour, as she tries to cop-off with a boring traffic warden just to use him for a bed to sleep in for the night. Desperately trying to listen to the soothing tones of a directed sleep meditation podcast while dance music thrums incessantly in the background.
Lyndsay Marshall is excellent in this, and keeps believable the extremes of Nicky’s reactions. Aston McAuley is also to be commended as the noisy neighbour, Deano, a role which has the difficult job of not simply descending into stereotype, but is kept still feeling fully human.
Deano is also an interesting character, despite being the out-and-out villain of the piece. He moves in and immediately starts up with all-night ragers. He’s not a considerate man, but when Nicky first comes over to ask him to turn the noise down, he is initially friendly. He’s been “away” and is celebrating being back with friends. He has that just-out-the-jail excess, which combined with the cocaine he’s on, makes him not the most thoughtful person. The real problem comes when the next night she threatens to phone the police. BIG MISTAKE. It’s the one thing you never do, mark yourself out as a grass.
I really like this film because it isn’t often you see movies with ordinary working class people as leads, unless it’s in the regulation mold of British class struggle period pieces. Restless is a nice change of pace, balancing drama and humour, that will leave you cheering at the end. Go Nicky!
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Ebony and Ivory
This film is doing a thing, the thing is just not for me.
Richard Herring once did an hour-long set just stretching out one joke about yoghurt. This is like that, only it’s about Linda McCartney vegetarian ready meals, in film form. This feels like an Edinburgh Fringe show that ran on a bare stage at midnight and absolutely killed it, but does not work when taken out of that environment and put into a movie.
The blurb for this film is that this about when Stevie Wonder went to Paul McCartney’s home on the Mull of Kintyre where they wrote Ebony and Ivory back in 1981. It’s not. Literally nothing in the film is about that. Again, the comedy in the film feels like a £4 Tuesday night Raw Improv at the Stand, where someone’s gotta pretend to be obsessed with hot cocoa, can’t say a word containing the letter e, and also you’re Stevie Wonder talking to Paul McCartney – go!
There are 5 jokes in this film. They are:
- Vegetarian ready meals by the wife (breaded nuggets)
- Wee Billy’s Big Wee Fizzy Beer
- Doobie woobie
- Wearing a merkin with a long willy
- Bah
Each joke is given about 20 minutes of monotonous repetition before moving on, occasionally to only to come back to it again for another round later. It’s the kind of endurance comedy of Stewart Lee’s Shilbottle bit, only it just doesn’t land.
Again, it’s a context thing. I think I might have enjoyed this with the two of them standing motionless on stage with a live audience feeling the collective tension of “when will it end and will there be a punchline?” but I just watched a man bahing for the better part of half an hour, and thought in exhaustion, “cinema can do almost anything…”
To be honest, I didn’t like it, but I did respect it. I could see what it was trying to do, even if it failed. I just feel like it was in the wrong medium.
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Mistress Dispeller
This is one of those documentaries where you are surprised folk agreed to be in it at all, given how intimate and sensitive the subject is.
Mistress Dispeller follows a wife discovering her husband of many years has begun having an affair with a much younger woman. Mrs Li chooses to deal with the situation by hiring a mistress dispeller. This is a service in China, kinda like a reverse honey trap – instead of hiring someone to prove your man’s a cheater, you are hiring someone to stop your man cheating. In steps Miss Wang.
Miss Wang is introduced by Mrs Li to her husband, who coaxes the story out of him, and through him makes contact with the woman he is having an affair with, Fei Fei. She always comes across as non-judgemental, empathetic, offering to help, and protect their confidence and their reputation. And she uses her influence to slowly dislodge Fei Fei from the Lis’ lives.
The documentary also takes the same tack, showing each person without judgement, with sympathy and sensitivity. It is up to you as the audience to form your own opinion, both about the people involved, their choices, and how the mistress dispeller service works.
I think the film did very well in this regard. The film initially focuses on Mrs Li, your sympathy is naturally with her as the injured party, but when the focus moves to her husband, it also treats him with the same humanising lens, showing his shame, his unhappiness at knowing that no matter what he chooses to do now, it will hurt someone he cares about. And finally Fei Fei is also shown with tenderness, as someone who is young and lonely, who has kind of lost hope, and has sought comfort in a romance with a much older married man.
The tactics of the mistress dispeller service are equally shown without judgement, as a hired service to untangle a knot in people’s lives. All three people involved do not want exposure of their issue, and all want it resolved, and in some ways, the service can be said to be simply coming in and forcing people to deal with the reality of the situation. It could be argued that yes, there is an element of deception, but no more than any private detective would use, and an element of manipulation, but no more than is already going on as part and parcel of the existing affair.
This is the part where I have to say, the film might be able to take that step back, but I in the audience could not. The mistress dispeller service is very manipulative, and were it not for the documentary, only the person who hired them would even know who Miss Wang truly was. Obviously it was necessary for the filmmakers to gain access to the mistress dispeller service for them to be open and non-judgemental in how they portrayed them, and I think it’s great because otherwise we would never get to see this really interesting look at what actually goes on. But wow, befriending people so you can end their relationships, orchestrating arguments between couples, sabotaging people’s dates, it is all very unsettling to watch.
The other thing this film shows very well, even if it doesn’t comment on it, is the absolutely rigidity and uniformity of society’s expectations of romantic relationships. There is only one type of romantic relationship that should take place, it is compulsory heterosexual lifelong married monogamy. And when presented with the fact that people actually have all sorts of experiences, all that happens is to double-down on enforcement.
Fascinating documentary handled with superb sensitivity which will leave you unpacking the ethical and moral dimensions long after it’s over.
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Four Mothers
My favourite film of the festival so far!
So funny. Just great. Stellar cast. So identifiable.
Edward is caring for his elderly mother Alma, who is paralysed down one side and has lost the ability to speak, save for using the text-to-speech app on her ipad. She doesn’t let that stop her though, making her will known. She can boss him about just as easily with a computer-generated voice, and anyone else for that matter.
He and his three pals are all middle-aged, gay and single, and quietly panicking about it. In an attempt to recapture their care-free 20s, his pals jet off to Maspalomas Pride for the weekend, leaving their wee mammies with Edward.
Edward spends the weekend trying to manage four intractable, strong-minded elderly women, and moving to the backburner some big upcoming decisions about his career. I love that Alma isn’t happy about the situation either, not enjoying her home being taken over by strangers one jot.
And this review can’t go on any further without me saying it, how amazing Irish national treasure Fionnula Flanagan is as Alma. Fionnula doesn’t ever physically speak a line in this movie, and yet she manages to have brilliant comedy timing. What she manages to convey with absolute clarity, by turns scathing, by turns hilarious, using just her face is something that is only possible when you have spent 60 years honing your craft as a highly regarded actor. An absolute gem!
Edward is facing renewed interest in his debut novel, which was about young gay love and coming-of-age in Dublin. This kinda underlines that the usual gay story you see in media is always the coming out story, always young people struggling with the expectations of heteronormativity from family, always defying their parents to break free. Four Mothers in contrast is about the return. What happens after? When, after the tumult of rejection or acceptance, your parents get old like everybody else.
What I love about seeing more films like this, is that there are films like this. The absence of these kinda stories is because most people faced complete rejection and an end to the relationships with their parents, and because the media was only interested in portraying homosexuals who died tragically young. Out queer people having stories about caring for their elderly parents in their middle-age is something I am so glad to be seeing on screen.
This film is so good. If any of you have a mother over in Ireland, you will recognise so much in this film. Crashing the wakes of total strangers, avidly following the funeral announcements, being taken in by any old shite on Facebook, commanding immediate and complete compliance with the drawing of a stern look. I loved it all so much!
Please go see it, it’s exactly the kind of good laugh you need.