GFF Reviews

Author: gffreviews

  • The Man in the Basement

    Really well put-together drama.

    Simon lives in a nice middle-class block of flats, and to get some money to do up the kitchen, he sells the storage space he has in the building’s basement. It’s basically a swanky tenement with a sub-floor, that is divided into individual rooms for the tenants, each looking a lot like a coal hut. Simon finds a nice buyer, Mr Fonzic, who gives him a lovely sob story about his mother’s tragic passing and how he needs to clear out her place tout suite because he’s being victimised by her old landlord. Being a soft touch, Simon knocks a grand off the asking price and gives him his key early.

    Until . . . he finds out who Fonzic really is. This bumbling, soft-spoken, sloped-shouldered, elderly History teacher is in fact a Holocaust denier who spreads his godawful hateful messages online. Fuck.

    And here his problem begins. Because Fonzic moves into the basement room, using it as a base to tap out his cries of global conspiracy and fake news. The neighbours are disgusted and want to know what Simon plans to do about it. He starts down a litany of legal remedies but is stymied at every turn.

    Meanwhile Fonzic is on his charm offensive, his “what, little old me?” bit. He sighs at how he has become a persona non grata simply for asking questions. How he is living in a poor bare basement, getting his drinking water from the courtyard hose tap, washing at the local swimming baths, is alone, is friendless, all for the harmless crime of being a free-thinker. Aw diddums.

    The awful thing is this shit works. His assumption of victimhood is symbolically represented by the basement room itself. Simon’s great-uncle was killed in Auschwitz, and the last year he lived in the building was in hiding in that basement room. Fonzic’s physical occupation of it represents his appropriation of the story of Jewish persecution to manufacture a narrative of his own oppression. The room itself is at the very end of the lightless, windowless corridor beneath ground, its bare brick and wooden doors reminiscent of the entrance to the gas chamber.

    And it also represents the underbelly of society, the things we want to forget about and be gone. The other neighbours in the building, they are initially appalled and find Fonzic’s presence distasteful, but they very much see him as Simon’s responsibility to deal with. They ask him over and over what Simon is doing about him, but never suggest ways to deal with Fonzic nor take him on as a problem themselves.

    Indeed, as the film goes on, they grow warmer to him. Fonzic is, after all, just a bumbling, unshaven History teacher in an old coat. He’s so nice and polite. He waters the flowers. He’s already been through enough, living in the cold and dark down there, all alone, poor soul. All for holding an opinion! He’s not a monster, he’s not violent, he hasn’t done anything to Simon personally.

    It’s Simon who looks like the crazy one, coming undone over the course of the film, as he goes from being so sure his reasonable objections to Fonzic’s occupation will be taken seriously, to finding himself running out of options, humiliated, isolated and having to stand by and watch the impact on his loved ones. His wife, who until that point, has always been ‘the Catholic in the family’ begins researching the family history and grows intensely frightened for the safety of her Jewish husband and half-Jewish daughter. She sees the clear threat Fonzic represents and is frustrated by Simon’s attempts to downplay it to keep her calm and docile. His daughter slowly falls under Fonzic’s sway, not understanding how everyone around her is losing their mind about this little old man, who is so kind and polite.

    The film shows how tolerance for these thin-end-of-the-wedge types very quickly normalise a climate of fear and hatred, and have a devastating impact upon the people at whose expense they are tolerated. They don’t need to swing a punch or carry a gun to create a campaign of terror, and to swiftly change the perception of who belongs and who doesn’t belong.

    Fuck Nazis.

  • The Conference

    Excellent film.

    Based on the minutes of the actual meeting, The Conference shows the meeting where the Final Solution was proposed and planned. The film contrasts the high stakes and utter brutality of the subject matter discussed with the sedate and bureaucratic procedure of what takes place in the room.

    That is the twin achievement of this film, to make an entire film in one location, without action, mostly of seated discussion, absolutely riveting, while simultaneously making you understand how sitting through this meeting, like most work meetings, would be mundane, technical, and boring, without the film itself ever being boring. There is the petty posturing, the departmental territorialism, the microaggressions, and the impatience to just get to the fucking end. Questions of the eradication of millions of people become secondary to when the tea break is, what there is to eat, stepping out for a fag break. Eichmann flirts with his secretary and Meyer doesn’t like his seat and Heydrich asks Stuckart how his wife is doing and when’s she due.

    My worry at the start of the film was that it was gonna be difficult to follow who everyone was. There’s 16 characters around the table, they all arrive in quick succession and are introduced with their title and rank. The military are all in uniform and they all have the same haircut. I worried everyone would get lost in the shuffle. But with skillful performances and direction, each character emerges, their temperament, their priorities. The film draws out the small nuances of interactions to show relationship dynamics, these tiny powerplays for dominance. If you like something like the Mindhunter tv series, you’ll like this. All these horrendous actions discussed sedately while seated around a table, all this gripping tension driven from minute expressions and behaviour, how each person is seeking something they need and even in ordinary conversation are trying to establish the power to have that met.

    And another impressive feat is to make a film this engrossing while having absolutely no one to root for. Every character is a bastard, a mass murderer. No one here speaks up for the Jews, or looks like they have any hesitation or compunction about what they are doing. Your heart rises for a moment when it looks like Kritzinger is going to raise a moral objection to what they are doing, only for it to sink immediately when he asks the question of the burden this will put on the mental health of their soldiers. After carrying out the annihilation of millions of people, will they be able to come back and be productive members of society? We don’t want them shell-shocked or alcoholics or blunted with sadism. They should be able to come back and be bakers and bankers and schoolteachers and carpenters. How can we make mass murder easier on them?

    What I liked so much about this film is, by making it about the boring admin side of an atrocity, by making it so identifiably mundane as a work meeting, with its handouts and its cost projections, by making it about departmental targets to get their numbers down, it demythologises and de-exceptionalises it as an event. So much of media about the Nazis present them as evil incarnate, this time, this place, where Hell put a foot down on earth. The black-and-white film, the skull and crossbones insignia caps, a seeming caricature of malevolence in uniform, all marching lock-step like they are no longer human beings but mechanical, like many ants making up a great hive, no longer human at all. And instead of learning from them, they become iconic; instead of believing this is what people are capable of, we believe it is what we are incapable of, an evil beyond our comprehension. But it was mostly made up of things like this, just this. Boring meetings. Departmental targets. Discussion about transport and quotas and scheduling. When Kritzinger brings up how to make the eradication of other human beings easier on the troops I was reminded of the documentary Machine, where the Americans argue for using AI in military action so as to ensure soldiers are less likely to be traumatised from the effects of war. When the attendees bicker about how difficult it is to deport so many Jews from Germany only to have to find places for them in other occupied territories, whose officials are already trying to reduce their own Jewish populations, I am reminded of listening to the narrative of refugees in Europe, British politicians insisting they are France’s problem, France insisting they don’t want them, Greece insisting they can’t support new arrivals, and everyone complaining about the tightness of borders, and never the treatment of human beings. These were not exceptional arguments being made at Wannsee, they were the same arguments made many times before and after. The Conference rehumanises this story, and in doing so, shows it to be the work of ordinary people, accountable for the impact their decisions have on others.

    An excellent film, skillfully executed and beautifully performed.

  • Kompromat

    Kompromat is the name the KGB gave to the classic move of using damaging information, real or false, to destroy someone’s reputation. It has the desired effect of isolating them from any support, and ensuring no one will give a fuck about what happens to them after that point.

    This film is loosely based on the experience of Yoann Barbereau, who was the director of the French cultural exchange organisation Alliance Francaise in Siberia. He was labelled a pedophile and arrested by the FSB. That’s about as much as the film has in common with reality, which it uses that as the jumping off point for a tense if occasionally outlandish political thriller.

    The main character is the most frustratingly naive guy you ever met. He stands up at the opening of their first dance production and explicitly thanks by name a local bigwig for his support. Then proceeds to put on the queerest dance show you ever saw, with two nearly nude men rolling around on stage, making out. Now, that’d be a five star review from me, but I wouldn’t expect that to go over smoothly in the back arse of Siberia, especially when you just made it clear to everyone present that they had the local honcho to thank for making it happen. At the afterparty, he unknowingly dances with the daughter-in-law of the local FSB heidy. Every foot he puts down in cow shit.

    Anyway, in a very short space of time, he’s run out of goodwill, and the FSB storm his house, accusing him being a pedophile. As labels go, it is an excellent one for ensuring you will be murdered in prison, and no one will give a fuck. Also a classic one for anybody associated with queerness in any way. The rest of the film follows his attempts to escape back to France.

    The film’s biggest strength is how unbelievably tense some of the scenes are. There were times I heard myself gasp, and from behind me someone suck their teeth, and the whole audience was holding its breath. At one point I covered my eyes, because I just couldn’t bear to watch this idiot make another dumb mistake. That’s the thing, a lot of these incredibly tense scenes are driven by the main character underestimating what he’s up against. He thinks naively that his innocence will protect him. And he doesn’t have the requisite level of paranoia to keep him safe. He doesn’t have any experience of dealing with the law, and his idea of how arrest works for straight, white, middle-class men in France doesn’t equate to what happens to someone seen as queer-adjacent in Russia.

    As for weakness, the film’s inclusion of a romantic subplot was, in my opinion, unnecessary. It’s like it’s considered mandatory to have some romance in a French film, even if it simply distracts from the storyline and adds nothing. Also, the first half stays very tense and self-contained and close to reality, but as the film tries to ramp up towards the end, things get more and more unbelievable. I felt a trim to the runtime would have done Kompromat the world of good, and kept the focus on the plot tight.

    Overall though, good film, tense and gripping.

  • Feathers

    A spin on The Metamorphosis, Feathers tells the story of a family struggling to cope in the absence of a male head of household.

    A grim and gritty drama with a long streak of magical realism, the film’s main character is a silent and dutiful wife and mother, who tries to provide for her three children after an unfortunate turn of fate. The film opens with her unspeaking obedience while the father controls the money, gives her his orders for meals and housekeeping, and holds forth loudly and confidently while chatting shit. The man’s a clown, but she gives him no reproach and their little world inside this drab flat is entirely at his mercy.

    To impress his boss, he throws a showy birthday party for one of his kids, getting balloons, a cake and a magic show. The magician does old-timey tricks like pulling out a string of scarves, and turning his wand into a bunch of flowers. He invites the dad to climb into his box, hey presto! the box is empty forby a chicken. Now turn the box around again, and hey presto! Em. Uh. Huh.

    The permanent transformation of the patriarch into a chicken manages to simultaneously be hilarious and devastating. It’s a comical event but played completely straight. And as the days and weeks pass by, the mother must find a way to bring money in, keep her family afloat.

    They live onsite at a factory, and owe money to the company store for appliances, rent, everything they own. They have to keep working to keep the roof over their heads. But the factory doesn’t hire women, so there is a continual shuffle of tenuous and temporary solutions. The mother spends the whole film juggling and you as the audience are just waiting for it all to fall.

    I found it a little overlong, given the dreary subject, but otherwise excellently put together. Moments of comedy stand out against the otherwise bleak landscape of the story, and with very little spoken dialogue, both the characters, the tale and the themes are made crystal clear. This is a dark fable, criticising the default dominance of men in both public and private life.

  • The Green Perfume

    Tonally disjointed murder-mystery comedy.

    It starts with an actor keeling over on stage, whispering into the ear of his friend, “I’ve been murdered . . . the green perfume”. Classic Agatha Christie shit. Good setup, I was eager to see where it went.

    But it then becomes overly complicated when the main character is then bundled off by a mysterious figure and given a long speech about political consciousness in the younger generation, a scene which plays as irritating and tedious for the audience as for the story’s hero. And this kinda kicks off the film’s problems. Because the mystery part of the plot is needlessly overly-complicated, bringing in espionage and corruption and ludicrous cybersecurity McGuffins. So much so my attention just dropped off it entirely. It’s not hard to follow, just boring and irrelevant, needlessly wordy for something that doesn’t touch on any of the characters beyond a reason for them to get to a place or grab a thing.

    With the mystery part being such a bloated drag on the film, the light-hearted comedic scenes are thrown off-kilter. There should be a bit of silliness and laughs to balance out the drama, and you can see what they were going for, but with the dramatic exposition so stodgy, the comedy feels out of place, too whimsical after you’ve been flattened by an anvil-drop of infodump.

    Weirdly the thing that works the best is the chemistry between the two main characters. It really is the movie’s saving grace. Vincent Lacoste plays the normally cool and collected, charming young 20-something actor. Sandrine Kiberlain plays the drama junkie cartoonist that he stumbles across, who helps him solve the first piece of the puzzle, only to become addicted to seeing how it all plays out. She is a woman who has red flags written all over her, first seen arguing on the phone about a decade-long family feud she is insistent on prolonging, and then becoming entranced when a stranger tells her he is being framed for murder. The actor falls for her, both as the saviour who comes to his rescue, and because her constant exuberance seems totally at odds with his muted and a touch melancholy character. It’s an unlikely pairing, and yet is the most believable thing about the film. The best scene in the whole movie is the one where the two of them are alone, making pasta for dinner together.

    And that’s my whole thing about the film, that scene, the pasta scene, isn’t like a murder-mystery comedy at all. It’s like a character-centred drama, something small-scale and domestic. And it’s wedged into the rest of this film, like pushing a fine brooch onto a lopsided jean jacket. The shifts in tone from scene to scene are all over the place.

    I have to say, I did find myself liking the film more as it went on, with the developing on-screen chemistry compensating for the frankly boring plot. But it is too much of a mess to really recommend seeing.

  • Birthday Wonderland

    Just stuff happening.

    Not to be cheeky, but this is just a series of loosely connected events, with very one dimensional characters, very little emotional journey and nothing much to look at beyond the standard.

    Akane bunks off school on her birthday. Although she’s not bullied, she doesn’t stand up when she sees bullying, despite knowing it’s wrong. Rather than another day of being a coward, she sulks at home. Her mum lets her stay so long as she runs a bouquet of flowers down the road to Chii, a young woman who runs the local bric-a-brac store and gives off heavy New Age lesbian vibes. For no fucking reason whatsoever, a magician appears in the store’s basement and takes Akane and Chii down to Wonderland, a magical land facing a new peril. Luckily Akane is destined to stop it.

    I feel even this short description fleshes out the characters more than the film. Akane is always nervous and scared, Chii loves travelling and doing new things. That’s it. That’s their whole characters. And they meet the standard wizards and princes that are yawningly generic and instantly forgettable. The first I checked the time was 20 minutes in, which isn’t a good sign.

    Even visually it’s nothing special. There’s 6-foot sheep, and fields of flowers, and massive fish, and tiny thumb-sized imps, but nothing that ever makes you say, “Wow!” In fact, I wanted to check when it was made, because although it was only 2019, it looks older.

    Dunno. Will likely not remember anything about it in a week’s time.

  • The Banshees of Inisherin

    I missed this when the BFI LFF came to the GFT, so I snapped up the first chance I got to see it. Beautiful! Just beautiful. Loved it.

    As the Civil War rages on the mainland, life on the tiny island of Inisherin goes on as it always has, much to the delight of Padraic Suilleabhain (Colin Farrell). He has his home, his devoted sister, and his friend Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson). Or does he? He stops in on Colm for their daily 2 o’clock pint, only to find himself ignored. This trifling interaction sets off a series of events that are by turns darkly comic and deeply melancholy.

    What at first seems to be a humorous yarn about the tiny concerns in a tiny place spins out seamlessly into a metaphor for the Civil War in microcosm. The astounding performances at the centre of the film makes the whole thing feel vital and gripping despite the small scale of the drama. From such triflingly little interactions we build our human bonds, and in their breaking comes the breaking of hearts and of worlds.

    Farrell plays Padraic with such a deep heart ache, such an open, good and simple nature, that when pain darkens him it feels truly tragic. The score is flecked with this operatic music which at first seems to jokingly contrast with the mundanity of the tale, but grows to become the heart-sore inner voice of the unspoken emotions of the piece.

    Brendan Gleeson for his part manages to make identifiable and understandable a character whose actions are antagonistic and almost incomprehensible to Padraic. It’s a harder job to hold the empathy of the audience while not being particularly likeable and when your first act on screen is the withdrawal of human warmth. Yet his sense of his own mortality, his striving for greater fulfillment, to go beyond the confines of their small world in some way, resonates so clearly.

    Tying into the allegory for the Civil War, is this theme of what is worth living for, a higher ideal or human bonds. Colm commits to his music as a thing which will outlive him, that will be a measure of a life well spent. For Padraic there is nothing higher than kindness to one another, and that in the loss of that, comes falling down all else.

    Truly beautiful film, in the writing, the acting, the cinematography, the score, everything!

  • The Island and The Signs

    Really fascinating documentary on the life and work of Cuban writer and artist Samuel Feijoo.

    The film tries to tell Feijoo’s life story in the style of his work, combining live footage interviews with animation in the style of Feijoo’s lively, frenetic, tangled illustrations. It allows the surreal to play with the everyday, with two interviews of sedate conversations in chairs being combined with animation of a turtle crawling its way through a disassembled and nonsensical stone structure. It is narrated by a mechanical pufferfish.

    I have to say I knew nothing about Samuel Feijoo before seeing this, but now I think it’d be really interesting to read his stuff. He loved nature and folk culture, passions which stayed with him all his life. He saw the centres of culture not as the big cities or institutions, but in the countryside, among communities. There ideas intermingle with history, with mythology, with religion, with knowledge of the natural world, and stories and songs are invented and reinvented continually.

    His written and artistic talent brought him to work at the University of Las Villas, and to become surrounded by the important creatives of his time. There he influenced and was influenced by the movements of his day, surrealism, plastic arts, and concrete poetry. He published magazines, first The Island and then The Signs, collecting the myriad artistic, critical and contemplative pieces being created. Essays, poems, illustrations and artwork all cohabited on the pages.

    I loved how the film ended, choosing to portray Feijoo’s death as simply a passing into folktale, becoming part of the legends of the island. A really unique portrait of a distinctive artist.

  • No Country For Old Squares

    Anti-authoritarian animation from Cuba.

    Over a cracked and bleak landscape, a city is cut into crust of the earth. From above, rows upon rows of flat, interlocked square rooftops show the rigid and confining nature of life here. The people shuffle out, silent, uniformed, faceless as thumbs.

    The only voice is that of their ruler, a figure in military greens, a red square on his cap, his shoulders. His confident, rageful voice bellows over the tannoys across the city, spewing his ideas as the only reality.

    The people of the city spend their days at rows of desks, repeatedly stamping documents, punching them with a red square stamp. They trudge home past the block red posters. But one figure hovers by one whose corner is starting to come away from its wall, and there, a little white triangle cuts into the colour. And an idea forms.

    The title riffs off the Cormac McCarthy classic No Country For Old Men, which in a very different way, also speaks to a sense of futility in a world filled with incomprehensible human violence. The animation uses Soviet iconography in a clear critique of Soviet authoritarianism, but its dystopian depiction of oppression of governance and labour is universally recognisable.

  • Fly

    Beautiful, colourful, sensual, animated music video. Cool and slick, it contrasts music’s ability to ground us bodily while also being transformative and magical. So pretty.