GFF Reviews

Author: gffreviews

  • Anais In Love

    Manic pixie dream girl Anais careens carelessly into everyone’s life searching for herself and passion and love. Because she is young, and thin, and white, and pretty, everyone finds this adorably charming, and she faces no consequences and is never held accountable for her impact on others.

    I know it’s a tradition to romanticise carefree young women in summer dresses for their light-hearted and uncomplicated ways. So let me just make this plain, this is not a complaint about Anais trying to find herself, or shagging about, or wanting to stay single and child-free with her options open. This is about Anais being The Worst.

    She literally gives not one fuck about anyone else in this movie. The closest we come is when she finds out her mum’s cancer has come back and is sad. This lasts all of a scene, and even though the doctor tells her her mother is scared and will need her by her side when she goes through the chemo, Anais quickly boosts out of there, on to stalking her next shag. Later, she writes her mother a draft of a letter saying she thinks if her mother was really passionate about something in life, then her cancer wouldn’t have come back, or maybe if she loved her husband more. The Absolute Fucking Worst.

    Her brother Balthazar feeds Xanax to their pal’s pet lemur and it overdoses, and she stands over it as he tries to figure out how to stop it from dying and is like, “Do you think I know how to love?” Another belter is when she tells her thesis supervisor she’ll organise an academic symposium with him, then ditches that to pursue the latest object of her obsession, and when he calls literally the day before it starts to say, ‘where the fuck are you? You have all the documents for the presentations’, she’s like, ‘Aw, family emergency, my mum has cancer’, then phones her cancer-ridden mother to back up her lie, while she swans about on a beach. It begs the question, what exactly does someone young, thin, white, and pretty have to do to be considered an insufferable cunt?

    All that doesn’t even touch on the core plot. She leaves her current boyfriend, who tells her he loves her, because he’s upset that she is never on time to see him, acts like he is an afterthought, and casually drops into conversation that she’s having an abortion. Having the abortion is not the problem, it’s the mentioning it in passing while deciding where to go now you’re too late for the pictures. His hurt is such a downer, so she starts shagging her father’s publisher, a man her father’s age who is in a long term relationship. When she shows up on his doorstep with all her stuff looking to move in on, like, their third date or whatever, and he doesn’t handle in exactly the way she hoped, she ditches him and contemplates going back to the first guy. Then she reads the publisher’s partner’s books and become obsessed with her. Seeing in her writing a kindred soul, she pursues and seduces her.

    “I think the same way she does. We share a vision, personality, tastes,” she says before she’s even met the woman. “He [the publisher] picked the same woman 20 years younger.” It’s not so much Emilie, the publisher’s wife, that Anais falls in love with, but herself that she sees in the other woman. Emilie astutely catches just that. “What you feel for me, sorry, isn’t love, it’s an illusion. Of course it is. You projected a lot onto me.” Right on the money, Emilie.

    Anais isn’t charming, she’s a narcissist. And the total lack of consequences for her perpetual self-centredness is frustrating and depressing.

    It’s hard to comment on the film as separate from the character of Anais, as she is the film’s entire focus. The movie literally is about Anais In Love, just in love with herself. Even with the strong performances and the film’s technical accomplishments, it’s difficult to frame its merits and demerits independent from its central point.

    P.S. Anais also doesn’t pay her rent, so sublets to a Korean couple for Airbnb, tells them the gas cooker’s dangerous, but doesn’t tell them she smashed up the fire alarm, or replace it, and they almost die in a fire while cooking a meal, and nearly burn down the landlord’s apartment. Just The Worst.

  • Julia

    Eat something before going to see this! Thank god I did, because you’d be ravenous within the first 5 minutes.

    Julia is a documentary on the life and legacy of Julia Child, America’s first TV chef. And it’s actually a pretty interesting life. Although cooking on television was what she was famous for, she didn’t start that until she was in her 50s.

    She was born in 1912 to a wealthy family of Republican wasps. She was expected to do nothing more than marry well, her father had picked out a suitor who was the son of a lucrative business contact. But Julia rejected the proposal and rejected the life, and when the war began, she signed up.

    She was put to work in the Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to the CIA, typing up spy reports. She got posted to Sri Lanka, where she met Paul Child, a polymath and self-made man. At first meeting, he found her irritating and she disdained his “unbecoming moustache”, but slowly and surely they fell in love. Paul was a self-taught artist, he could speak multiple languages, he was a photographer. It was Paul who introduced her to really good food and enjoyed discussing his love for it. And it was here Julia found her passion.

    After the war, Paul was stationed in France, and Julia fell in love with French cuisine. She enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu school for chefs, and was the only woman on the course. She did meet a like-minded female chef, Simca, and together they came up with the idea of writing a book to introduce French cooking to America.

    Julia decided to try to promote the book on American public TV as the publishers had little faith in it selling well. To jazz up the segment, she decided to cook an omelette while discussing the book to demonstrate how easy the recipes were to follow. This little segment became the birth of the TV cooking show industry.

    It’s easy to forget just how dreich American food was in the 50s. Everything was marketed as convenience food, tv dinners and frozen meals. There was the weird obsession with jell-o or aspic, where you would put salad, or cut meat, or veg in a mould of jelly, and serve your dinner like something suspended in formaldehyde. Spam was considered a versatile main stay. Tinned soup doubled as a cooking sauce. Julia wanted to show that food was not a chore that should be done with as little time and strain as possible, but something you should put love into, and get love out of.

    Her popularity on screen came in defiance of all the rules about women on television at the time. They were meant to be petite, slender, delicate, soft-spoken, demure, pristinely put-together, young and beautiful. They were not meant to be 6ft 2″, square-shouldered, with a plain face, and a commanding authorative voice, fearlessly confident, with her hair falling loose, sweating in the heat, at the age of 50. And yet she carved out a career that was unlike anything that had come before. She was constantly asked when she was going to retire, because she already “too old” for television when she started, so she kept going for as long as she liked, until she was almost 90.

    In 2022, where everyone is obsessed with food, and food porn is its own genre, and celebrity chefs are so ubiquitous as to be interchangeable, it’s hard to imagine just how much Julia changed things. It was really fun to watch what an interesting life she had.

  • Sambizanga

    Sambizanga is the story of Domingos and Maria, a young couple in 1960s Portuguese colonial Angola.

    Domingos is a good man, a dedicated father and husband, and is secretly an activist for Angolan independence. One day the police kick in his door and drag him out his house, beat hell out him and fling him in the back of a van. We follow three stories – the activists watching the prison in Sambizanga who see him arrive, and need to figure out who he is and where he’s come from to alert his loved ones and contacts; Maria as she goes from government office to police station to jail trying to find him; and Domingos, for whom time is running out, as he is beaten and tortured under interrogation.

    What I liked about it was, that although this is a story about this young couple caught up in the horror of their times, the thread following the activists shows it’s not just the story of one misfortune or one man’s struggle. Many people co-ordinate to try to find out who this arrested man is, with nothing more than a brief glance when he is dragged from the car to the jail door. Lots of people are looking out for how they can identify him, so he is not alone and forgotten in there.

    Made in the 1970s, this is the 4K restoration release. I can only imagine how powerful this would have been at the time it was made, while the Angolan war for independence was still going. Really pleased I got the chance to see it.

  • Where Is Anne Frank

    Where Is Anne Frank examines the legacy of Anne Frank. Through the publication of her diary, Anne’s writings about being a normal child experiencing persecution has been read by and impacted millions. But its message fights to be seen, not a snapshot of the past, but as relevant as ever in the present.

    The film is set one year from now, when a girl appears in the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam. She is Kitty, Anne’s imaginary friend who she addressed her diary entries to. Kitty looks for Anne but can’t find her, and takes the diary to read it for clues.

    She finds the world outside the museum filled with dedications to Anne – Anne Frank Bridge, Anne Frank School, Anne Frank Theatre. The veneration of the diary is everywhere, with a €100,000 reward for its return.

    But it’s message is another matter. People queue up to get into the Anne Frank Museum, while pretending not to see refugees struggling to stay sheltered and warm on the other side of the street. In supposedly empty buildings, hiding in secret are people effected by war, people effected by persecution, people frightened they will be deported to their death. The authorities try to put them on transports, send them to the thing they fear most, at danger to their lives.

    Throughout the film, we see scenes from Anne’s life alongside Kitty’s journey to find its conclusion. The animation works really well, giving me goosebumps. Primarily traditional animation, there is also photography and almost like a CGI walk-through of the Anne Frank House. The music is really great, and the plot has enough energy and action to keep younger viewers grabbed.

    Timely and touching film.

  • Zalava

    Bloody great movie!

    Zalava is about a small village in Iran in 1978 which everyone is convinced is under attack by demons. Set before the Revolution, the village of Zalava is in Kurdistan, and home to a community of settled gypsies. There superstition and belief in demons rules.

    Massoud, a sergeant in the local gendarme, decides to confiscate the villagers weapons, as the trusted method for checking if someone is possessed is shooting them in the leg. This is his first mistake, and it kicks off the plot of the whole film. Demons are supposedly afraid or put off by metal, so a bullet in the leg will send them packing. But with the guns taken by the sergeant, the villagers have to corner the possessed girl armed with sickles, and in her fear, she backs away over a ledge, and falls to her death.

    The death of the girl enflames the villagers even more, and gives Massoud a sense of responsibility for setting the situation right. When he discovers a charismatic exorcist called Amardan is in the village, he becomes convinced the man is a charlatan, stoking the hysteria for profit. He promptly arrests him and takes him, and the jar he claims contains a trapped demon into custody.

    First things first, this film is gorgeous. Like, guh-hor-geous! The colour, the use of the light, everything just makes it beautiful to watch. Loved it!

    Zalava is about the power of belief. Massoud underestimates this power, believing that logic and reason will eventually bring people to their senses. How often have you seen that working?

    There are plenty of hints at a reasonable explanation for what is happening in Zalava. There is a doctor in town who is investigating a condition that is causing the villagers to develop white patches on their skin and hair. She is struggling to complete her research and discover the cause because of the commotion caused by the hysteria. So far, all she knows is the villagers’ test results show unusually high adrenaline levels. So maybe their condition or disease is causing an excessive production of panic hormones, which is causing their behaviour to become irrational.

    Another possibility is the land Zalava sits on is coveted by a dam construction company, and it just so happens Amardan used to work for that company. Now here he is, scaring the shit out of people, til they’re so terrified they’re willing to leave or shoot each other.

    But equally the villagers have their own interpretation, seeing their white patches as signs of affliction from a source of evil. They consider the fact that Amardan left a well-paying job at a dam company for a life protecting poor people from demons as a sign that he is on their side. Besides, the dam construction has been plagued with problems, which the villagers attribute to Amardan directing the cast-out demons towards the dam.

    Zalava is a horror film. Folk won’t say that coz it’s so gorgeous, they’ll want to call it a human drama, but that’s what it is. It is a film about the dark and destructive nature of man, and whether the demon is real or not, the damage its idea evokes is.

    As I say, Zalava is about the power of belief, but not just for the villagers. Massoud believes too much in nothing, he is too sure that the invisible can’t hurt him, and too unrelenting in his insistence on it. For those who think what you can’t see can’t hurt you, watching Zalava you will find out different.

  • Vortex

    I once asked my gran, “Gran, what’s good about getting old?” and she looked me dead in the eye and said, “Fuck all”.

    That’s what Vortex brought to mind. It’s basically about the nightmare of old age. Elle, beautifully played by Francoise Lebrun, is a retired psychiatrist and writer who is now losing her mind to dementia. Her husband Lui, portrayed so vulnerably by Dario Argento, struggles to care for her, given that he is also elderly and has heart problems.

    The film uses split screen to depict Elle and Lui’s lives, showing them at first together, happy and in sync, then diverging more and more dangerously. It also shows how Elle experiences the same events totally differently from Lui. He will be relaxed and chatting on the phone in the next room, and Elle will have done several circuits of their small flat, with an anxious but aimless pacing of someone lost and trying to make sense of where they are. Therefore any loud noise might barely register with him, while Elle will react as if she is in immediate life-threatening danger.

    The film is actually shot in Cinemascope, then split in half, so each screen has that square appearance of old photos. And since their small, booklined flat is full of muted hues, they look like old pictures that the colour has ran out of, and are slowly dulling to sepia. Just as Elle is slowly dulling.

    Elle and Lui are such a loving couple, and they care for each other with such tenderness, you are really invested in their wellbeing. They are alone together a lot of the time, apart from occasional visits from their son, and they rely on each other for everything. The opening scene is of them getting out of bed and starting their morning, and you can almost see a rhythm to it, something practiced over decades.

    Elle, though, is beginning to lose her place in this dance. With the film following her while she’s on her own, you realise how much of the time she is looking for clues, clues to where she is, what she’s supposed to be doing, and where she’s supposed to be going. She takes the bins out, and as soon as the bag leaves her hand, she has no idea where she is or meant to be going. Someone has left the outer door to the close open, so she goes out onto the city street, because an open door suggests you go through it. Pacing around in a shirt pulled over her goonie, she stares fretfully in windows, trying to remember what she is out shopping for. When she sees toys in a shop sign, it seems to spark some memory of her son, so she goes in and is directed to the back. But she gets lost in the stacks, totally at a loss for where she is or how she got there or how to get out. Every small thing is terrifying, like at any moment she might fall off the edge of the world.

    The split screen also emphasises how Lui can’t leave her alone for a second. If he takes a nap, she might leave the gas on. If he takes a shower, she might destroy stuff on a tidying rampage. And that’s just the stuff he catches her at. You as the audience have an even heightened sense of dread because you can see how many near misses she’s had that he’s not picked up on.

    This is a horror movie. But without any metaphor to shield you, and no comfort of it being unreal. Lui and Elle, both once incredible writers, voracious readers, and partners in intellectual discourse, are now essentially trapped in frail and betraying bodies, watching as the very things that made them them are slowly stripped away.

    The director prefaces the film with a dedication, “To all those whose brains will decompose before their hearts”. And that is what they are both going through, living decay. And the only endpoint for it will be certain death.

    This is a film for the dark watches of the night. It is a 3am kind of film. When you lie awake and worry about how all you are and all you love will be wiped out forever, and all your worry will not change one thing nor stop it by a single second.

    Goodnight kids.

  • Love, Life and Goldfish

    So much fun, full of silliness and whimsy!

    Love, Life and Goldfish is a musical about an uptight banker who is sent to work in a small town in the middle of nowhere where everyone is obsessed with goldfish. Scooping goldfish is a Japanese children’s game, something like hooking ducks at the shows is here. In this carefree little town, it’s the number one pastime, with grown men playing it on work’s nights out, and competing against one another.

    Makoto is this buttoned-down bank clerk who is dedicated to his work, suppressing all his emotions. That hasn’t been working out too well for him lately, as he’s started to mumble his thoughts aloud, his feelings spilling out him when he least expects it. He messes up when he does this in front of his boss, and for his rudeness is exiled from Tokyo and its world of high-powered banking, to this small town in the sticks. His only goal is to rededicate himself to his work and redeem himself. That is until he sets eyes on Yoshino.

    The beautiful proprietor of the local goldfish scooping establishment, Yoshino is a shy and innocent soul. She plays piano beautifully, but only when no one is around. Makoto falls head over heels for her, but is at a loss as to what to do with his feelings.

    Luckily he is helped along by townsfolk who befriend him, almost against his will. First is a dreamy wanderer who drives a truck with a tank of live goldfish in it. Second is the lassie who returned home to run the family pub after failing to make it as an actress in Tokyo. Together they teach him a little about opening up and letting go.

    The music is great, the singing is ace, and the whole thing is just so much fun. Really cheerful, upbeat, whimsical musical, a remedy for our times. Will definitely put a smile on your face.

  • Lost Illusions

    Lost Illusions is Mean Girls set in Restoration France.

    It’s the early half of the 19th century, after the Royalists retake France from Bonaparte, but Napoleon proved that you don’t need the right blood to wield power, and you can’t unring that bell. While the aristocracy go back to playing their games, beneath them, every man is out to see how far he can get. The scramble to acquire money and status has reduced every social interaction to a system of bribery and corruption.

    We meet Lucien, the main character, before he steps into this cesspool. Out in the provinces, this doe-eyed country bumpkin is in love with two things, art and a highborn lady. The lady in question is Louise de (my brain just mumbles at this point). Anyway, she has a January-May marriage with no real affection, and she falls head over heals for Lucien, despite him being a commoner, working on a printing press. Lucien is a poet and his writings steal her heart. Lucien is incredibly happy being with Louise, and wants for nothing. His soul is untainted by avarice, envy or regret.

    And then her husband decides to put an end to things. Louise is sent to Paris. In secret she makes a plan for Lucien to join her, where he might be published and rise to a high enough rank that her affair with him would be acceptable, but that falls to shit, and Louise feels she has no option but to end their relationship, as otherwise she will be shunned from society.

    In order to feed himself, Lucien takes up work as a journalist. He makes one friend and one enemy, Lousteau played by Vincent Lacoste, and Nathan played by Xavier Dolan (the gorgeous wee cupcake he is). Together they teach him the rules of the game, how the money goes round. Bribes for applause, bribes for reviews, bribes for newspaper stories. It’s a racket, and everybody must pay for protection. The ability to make or break people with the stroke of a pen increases the power of the company owner, who can leverage it for acquisition of more media outlets. A capitalist publishing oligarchy who can influence politicians, bankers, sway the masses. Sound familiar?

    Although this is a period drama, this is not a ballgowns and wistful sighs churn-out. This is a very relevant film about fake news, distrust of the media, and loss of faith in traditional institutions and sources of authority. Lost Illusions brings the timeless nature of Balzac’s novel to the fore.

    As Lucien gets pulled down into the corruption, debauchery, and the moral vacuum of the media industry, we see its powerfully destructive nature at work. He is not simply a man, but the embodiment of all the values we claim to hold as a society. His degradation is our degradation.

    Thoroughly enjoyable watch, even before you get to Xavier Dolan in his sexy high collar shirts.

  • Asteroid

    Just like The Quiet Girl, this is a wholesome film that goes straight for the heart.

    Ebrahim is good boy who lives with his mother and 5 siblings. Since the disappearance of his father, he must earn money to keep the family going.

    The film shows Ebrahim’s story from his perspective. To someone on the outside, this might be a tragic story, of a boy burdened with too much responsibility, pulled out of school and forced into child labour, poverty constantly snapping at his heels. But that’s not how Ebrahim sees it. Yes, everyone agrees he should be in school, the film, his mum, and him all would ideally like that. But just because his circumstances have fallen short of that, doesn’t mean his story is tragic or he should be viewed with pity.

    This is a great story for showing people, even children, with agency, and having their own viewpoint on their own lives. Ebrahim is a happy kid. You would expect him to miss playing with classmates at school, but he plays with his brothers and sisters all the time. In them, he has plenty of friends. And you might expect work to be a grind that wears him down. But for Ebrahim, it is getting to meet new people and do interesting things.

    Watching this in Glasgow, the concept of work and play are diametrically opposite, but in some cultures there is the same word for both. You can see that mingling when Ebrahim is climbing up trees to shake down dates. Or taking tourists out to see beauty spots in the local area. Ebrahim has a clean heart that is happy to help. He is kind to everyone he meets. He sees work as an opportunity, not as a burden.

    Another example of what I absolutely loved about this film is that one of Ebrahim’s siblings has no hands. It’s never mentioned. Not once. He is never excluded nor presumed incapable, just treated identically to the rest of the children. With the innocence of childhood, his difference is immaterial.

    I also love that the film also doesn’t pretend that Ebrahim is anything other than a kid. Even though he has such a good nature, he buys shopping on the way home from work, and his mum just stands over the bags, going, “What junk have you bought?” while pulling out 2-litre bottles of blue fizz. One day, for a treat, Ebrahim asks his mum if he can make pizza, and makes the most loaded cheesy pepperoni pizza you ever saw.

    This film is just full of the warm joy of being around family. Of eating with, playing with, and providing for family. Staying together, with a light heart. Ebrahim is such a good soul.

    Loved it.

  • The Girl and the Spider

    What the fuck was that?

    I mean, I don’t know what they were even going for here. The plot is vaguely this: Lisa is moving out the flat she shares with her pals. A couple of other things are going on, Lisa’s maw has the hots for one of the movers, there’s a lot of shagging going on, their neighbours run in and out. But nothing is really happening here. Which would be fine if there was something else to hold your interest. But it’s just folk shuffling about, punctuated by these long, boring, pointless monologues, which if you were to do in real life would get you chased for kak patter. I mean, the synopsis describes it as “tragicomic” and an “emotional roller-coaster”, and it’s like, what film were you watching? Maybe there is something lost in translation, but that was as boring as actually moving flat.