The vistas in this are stunning. You forget just how vast China is, seeing a big ole country on a map doesn’t properly convey that this stretches from mountains to rainforest to desert. One Second is set on an immense desert steppe, and the panoramas are just spectacular.
Set in the 60s under Mao’s rule, the film follows Zhang Jiusheng, an escapee from a labour camp. He has travelled across the desert to see a film, one which is prefaced with a newsreel showing his daughter, who he has not seen in 8 years. Unfortunately for him, a young dishevelled girl, Orphan Liu swipes a film cannister and makes off. Zhang has to track her down and retrieve the cannister.
The centre of One Second is the cinema experience in the 60s. Because of government control, there would only be about one movie a month, and it would be a propaganda film, and it would tour from town to town. So when a new film arrived, it was a big deal. One Second shows practically the whole town stopping to pour into the town hall, bringing their own chairs, sitting or standing in every available space. They put up a projector screen, and the projectionist is god as he loads the film ready to show.
One Second is embedded with a love of this experience, even as it is aware of the darkness of these times. Zhang’s story is tragic, losing years of his life seperated from his family. Liu’s life is blighted with the kind of stone-hard poverty the revolution was meant to erase. Both represent the failing and crimes of the Mao era.
Yet when that film comes on, and lights up all those faces, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that the film is propaganda, it doesn’t matter that it’s one of only a handful they get to see, it doesn’t matter that they’re crowded in with hardly anywhere to sit. They light up with delight, are transported, are given respite from their daily woes, given an escape. They cheer at the high points and weep at the lows, and sing along with the songs, and leave feeling lifted. Whatever the darkness that surrounds it, their love of cinema is real.
One Second is a moving, beautiful, and at times funny film.
P.S. This film clearly has an ending, then another ending that the Chinese government has made them tack on, basically saying things are fine now. A bit like how the bleak crime noir Back to the Wharf has a blank end screen with text on it saying the government eventually brought everyone to justice. Just ignore that.
Ruth Wilson stars as Kate, a middle-aged single woman suffocating in her rundown seaside town and her tedious as fuck office job. She works for the brew, where she meets Blonde, recently released from jail and looking to sign on. An affair with him looks sure to blow the dust off her life.
Firstly, obviously, Ruth Wilson is brilliant in this. Really layered performance, able to make every hesitation or glance communicate such vulnerability. Tom Burke plays Blonde, a rough around the edges guy, whose intentions always seem ambiguous.
From the outset Kate sees Blonde as someone who can make her feel alive. She wants what everybody wants, passion, excitement, connection. But beneath that, Kate hates her life, and is looking for someone to help her burn it all down.
Blonde is a very ambiguous character, because this film is Katie’s story, and he just happened to wander into it. It’s hard to tell who he is from who Kate needs him to be, and if he is deliberately and consciously playing into that difference or if, still further, he has his own objectives in mind. My first thought when they met was, “He’s gonna turn you out”. He definitely has the gaslighter’s guidebook to hand. The way he treats her comes off as a play to keep her off balance and doubting herself, usually prep for an abusive relationship.
Yet as time goes on, I began to wonder if that was just what Kate was seeing in him. While she’s not exactly middle class, he jokes that she’s ‘well brought up’ and ‘proper’. It’s obvious she looks at him as her piece of rough. When she asks him about his criminal history, she obviously wants to be thrilled by scary stories, but he snorts and tells her he was only inside 4 months. You wonder if she is trying to exploit this guy, who comes from a chaotic and broke background, where there’s some petty crime to survive, into fulfilling her bad boy fantasy. And maybe he’s playing into it, being the big man who treats the mean and keeps them keen, more to fulfil her expectations than as any reflection of his reality. Maybe there’s no intention of turning her out, maybe he’s just a broke guy who met her at the dole office, and whose changeability is less a play and more standard behaviour for his fragmented homelife.
So is this prep for something darker, something dangerous, something life-changing? Is it just the scattered and scadging ways of a man who grew up in a less than reliable and plentiful environment? And either way, is his affection for her actually real?
For that matter, is hers? She thinks she’s falling in love with him, but as I say, you see very little of him beyond her enthrallment with his rough and tumble ways. What she loves is the way he makes her feel. That he gives her an excuse to bunk off from the work she hates, to ditch the nights out with the friends she doesn’t like, and potentially provide her with a new and more exciting life.
Kate . . . isn’t actually that nice a person. She’s very sympathetic because she’s lonely and stultified, but she doesn’t really care about anybody else. Now, the people around her don’t seem very nice either, but that’s a little beside the point. Blonde tells her they’re not her “tribe”, which might be the case, they’re all heavily invested in their 2.4 kids and 9 to 5 lifestyles. Kate is viewed with pity and dismay to still be single and not committed to work. They all have a narrative of Kate The Failure, Kate The Fuckup, and whatever she tells them about herself, or her relationship with Blonde, is made to fit into it.
But, like, there might be good reason for that. We’re joining very late in the story, and maybe all these people are arseholes, or maybe Kate does have a long history of making incredibly bad choices. Maybe this isn’t the first disreputable guy she’s used as an excuse to go into a self-centred spiral. Maybe this is a familiar stop on the cycle for these people. Plus, she doesn’t seem to give a shit about any of them, she never has any concern about what might be going on in their lives. For example, the friend she ditched, the one who is super judgemental about Blonde, she got Kate the office job she is now skiving off from and taking the piss at. It never occurs to Kate to figure that in to her considerations. Maybe her pal has good reason to be pissed off.
True Things could be billed as a love story, but it’s more a complex character study of someone searching for something she needs. Love, sex, passion seem to be currency for some unsated yearning. And the players who pass it back and forth seem to be as much a mystery to themselves as to each other.
Her Way is a film about a mother trying to do the best for her son. Marie is a single mother, raising her son Adrien alone. He is 17 and going through a difficult time. He is sullen, lazy, stoned and feckless. Marie is at her wit’s end trying to get through to him. The only thing he has ever shown any interest in is cooking. When he is expelled from school, the public school system is a bit like, ‘Eh, maybe your fuckup son would be better off in P.E. You could be a security guard!’
Determined her son won’t set his sights any lower, Marie decides to try and get him into one of the most prestigious private schools for training chefs. He gets in, but she has to raise the tuition fees. Marie works as a prostitute but struggles to earn enough cash from her regular clients. The film follows her as she turns to more and more desperate measures to get the money.
Her son Adrien is a frustrating character. It’s hard to watch Marie go to such lengths, calling in favours, suffering indignities, and working flat out, only to come home to a pig sty, sticking of weed, with her red-eyed, jobless son still in bed at midday. You want to slap him.
But I can also see myself as a teenager in him. He has sunk down inside himself and is already certain of the outcome of any of his efforts. It’s so frustrating to watch Marie fight so hard, when her son doesn’t fight at all. But he’s convinced it will all end in failure, so he thinks she is a fool to try. And like, he’s not wrong, raising this money is a huge feat, and the odds are stacked against them succeeding. But that’s what his mother has that he hasn’t – hope. And self-belief. And that is what she is trying to teach him.
I also like that they didn’t simply make Marie a stereotype of ‘the whore with a heart of gold’. You root for her, you admire her, but she does some well dodgy stuff over the course of this. For one, she’s a racist. She’s an activist for sex workers’ rights, advocating at rallies for total legalisation. But she refuses to give flyers to black women who are selling sex, for the most traditional of racist reasons, the standard ‘coming over here, taking our jobs’ bullshit. Despite holding signs at the rally saying “Not guilty, Not a victim, Proud to be a whore”, she describes the black workers as “slaves”. It’s the dumbest, most self-defeating thing in the world, but Marie is not simply a cipher of what the audience want to cheer on, she’s complicated, messy, and sometimes shit.
Her Way is a great film, about what we pass down to our kids, how we give them what they need. All the way through the film you hope Adrien will break out of his defeatism, that he will see the lengths his mother is going to for him, to realise that his future must be something worthwhile if she will put in this much effort. Honestly had a tear in my een by the end. Brilliant.
A Banquet is a horror film in the vein of mental illness or possession? Focusing on a family of a mother and her daughters, anorexia is transformed into preparation for sainthood or the affliction of the demon-possessed.
Dunno what it is but I feel like recently I’ve just seen a bunch of stuff that was like an eating disorder in a can. This has everything you’d expect, from the loud chewing and squelching, to the scrape of cutlery on plates, to the images of rotting food.
The family consists of the mother, Holly, the eldest daughter, Betsey, and her wee sister, Isabelle. The film starts with the dad at home in the livingroom in a hospital bed. He is gagging and wrenching, tortuously and terminally ill. The mum is bleaching down the chair next to the bed, presumably where he’s just puked. She goes to the kitchen to puree something she hopes he might keep down, and returns to find he’s swiped the bleach she left by his bed, drank it, and is now vomiting blood all over the floor. She screams for help, as upstairs Betsey looks on in horror.
Enough to give anyone a complex.
I have to say, I fucking hated the mother in this. She gets more sympathetic as the film goes on, but by god it’s a low bar to clear. Firstly, their house is like a sterile showroom. It’s like no one lives there. They have this wank design of a sunken livingroom with a glass wall, all painted black with white PVC flooring. There’s not a mark on the floor or white countertops, and it’s like, don’t you have two kids living here? Literally any sign of their presence in this pristine tableau of monied taste is met with immediate exclamation and haranguing. Even her husband, when he went as far as to sully the place with all-too-human infirmity, only became another thing she had to scrub all evidence of from the furnishings.
Secondly, it’s clear that she relates to her oldest as a co-parent. And not in a ‘thanks for helping out now your dad’s dead’ type way, but an entitlement of constant support for her ridiculous bullshit. In one of the first scenes, the mum and the wee sister arrive home, and Isabelle kicks off her shoes in the hall. Not willing to tolerate this for even a second, the mum starts barraging her to pick them up and set them neatly to the side, then throws a look to Betsey in her room as if to say, “See what I have to put up with?” It’s like Betsey’s a teenager, she’s got her friends in, she’s actually meant to be socialising with them and not having to monitor her little sister’s shoe placement, or your insane neat freak obsession. Like, it’s not Betsey’s job to be on your side on this, she’s not your co-parent, she’s a teenager with as much interest in casual shoe removal as you’d expect a teenager to have. I know that seems like a massive rant about a tiny interaction in an early scene, but it just set up the dynamic perfectly, and made me absolutely hate Holly throughout.
Betsey on the other hand seems to have no sense of herself. She is reactive to her mother’s needs but has no sense of her own. When the careers counsellor asks her what she wants to apply for at uni, she can’t pick a subject. When he tells her to make a list of things she’s interested in, it stays blank. She’s so out of touch with her own wants and needs, because she’s clearly never had them prioritised. Isabelle dances and ice skates, but Betsey has nothing. She struggles even to assert herself among her peers, so used as she is to being rolled over.
Into this dynamic comes a blood red moon. Betsey sees it while at a party, and entranced, follows it into the woods. When she comes back she no longer eats.
The mother distinguishes herself once more, by reacting to this with all the calm and tact you’d expect. She tries to force her to eat at the family dinner table, by turns patronisingly wheedling, then rageful. When Isabelle tries to stick up for her big sister, suggesting they respect her boundaries and not put pressure on her, the mother turns on her too. And I know you’re reading this, thinking, ‘That’s what any good mother would do, try to get their kid to eat’. But it doesn’t feel like this is out of any concern for Betsey’s wellbeing. It feels like this is irk at her defiance. That her refusal to eat is willful, rather than viewing it with any empathy.
That sense of her daughter’s abstinence as a personal insult to her dominance of the household becomes clear when the doctor refers Betsey for psychiatric help. “You’re not crazy!” she insists, more concerned with distancing herself from the label than dealing with her daughter’s mental health problem.
At the dinner table, she brings up the starving children in Africa to manipulate Betsey with guilt. On the one and only occasion Isabelle decides to leave the table without finishing off her plate, primarily so she doesn’t have to listen to her mum’s constant criticism, the mother tells Betsey, “I will not let you infect this family”. She says, “Anorexia. You know who gets it? Entitled middle-class white girls.” WRONG! Shaming her own daughter for having a mental illness, this, bear in mind, after she recently saw her father die. Holly then forcibly weighs her, all the while screaming at her, then makes her keep a diary of her weight, to be taken twice a day. I think that’s how you give someone an eating disorder. Also, weight changes naturally over the course of a week, just with fluid intake and things like that, literally nothing can be learned by weighing someone twice a day. Anyway, let’s all agree, what a cunt.
Betsey meanwhile goes from someone who could barely assert herself, to someone who is rigid in the face of any pressure. She slowly shifts the power balance between her and her mother. Her mum goes from screaming commands to eventually begging. Then Betsey announces that she’s had a religious awakening upon seeing that red moon, she is some kind of prophet who has seen the end times.
Now’s really the time for mental health intervention, but despite the physical trial being Betsey’s, it’s her mother who’s undergoing the real gauntlet. As things get worse and worse, further and further away from the perfect image she is trying to project, her mother finds a kind of liberation. When everything is such a disaster, she has to decide what really matters. And her initial selfishness gives way to real empathy and a genuine attempt to relate to what her daughter is going through.
The whole time the question is open to whether this is anorexia and psychosis, or if Betsey really has become the prophet of some god, foretelling end times. Whatever the answer, the horror is how it swallows this family.
There is always a sensitivity when films are made about true life crimes. You don’t want to aggrandise the killer nor exploit the acts gratuitously. Yet it is also undeniably true that people are fascinated by destructive events and the motives for unusual crimes. Can you present that in a way that walks that fine line?
Nitram tells the story of the man who committed the Port Arthur massacre, and what played into his mindset as he planned the crime. It basically asks the question, why?
There are two parts of me watching this. There is the part of me who was a kid who read everything I could about serial killers and poured through the internet for gruesome photos, fascinated by the extremes of it all. And there’s the adult I’ve become, who doesn’t find it extreme at all, just finds it wearily, exhaustingly familiar, the violence of men, their sense that they have the right to make their points on the bodies of others. The first part wants to know what the killer was like, what drove him, how he was able to arm himself like he did. And the second part doesn’t give a shit what this bastard was like, and knows that what drove him was quite simply that he wanted to and was too selfish to give a fuck who got hurt, and that he was able to arm himself like he did because as a white man he belonged to a privileged social group whose actions are not given the same scrutiny as the rest. Part of me really wanted to see this movie, and part of me worried that just by doing so I was contributing to the notoriety he so desired.
The filmmakers obviously felt that same worry, as he is not mentioned by name throughout the film. Nitram was a nickname he disliked, so that is the film title, as a big fuck you. Yet there is no getting around that the film is about him, and the title refers to him. They do make the right call by not actually showing the massacre.
However you might feel, Nitram is a good film. It is a profile of a man who is clearly not right in the head. Multiple diagnoses have been applied to the guy he’s based on, from a learning disability, to neurodivergence, to mental illness, to personality disorder. All anyone can agree on is he’s emotionally unstable and performs poorly academically and socially.
Caleb Landry Jones gives the performance of his career. Just superb. Portraying the main character with nuance and vulnerability without ever compromising on his violent and unempathic nature. This depiction doesn’t try to excuse or apologise for him – he has a supportive family, he doesn’t grow up in poverty or abuse, he is actually incredibly fortunate and lucky. Caleb’s portrayal is of someone who is aware that they are different on some fundamental level, that it is not simply that others think something is wrong with him, but he himself knows that there is, he just doesn’t know what it is and can’t fix it. He has the constant demanding nature of a narcissist, and the deep depressions that follow their frustration at their inability to have their every need met.
Essie Davis, that chameleon of the screen, shows up as Helen, the killer’s sole friend and benefactor. She’s a lonely older woman who has gone full Grey Gardens. Her large house is falling into ruin, while populated with the dozen dogs and cats she keeps as pets. She swans around in old costumes from her career on the stage, singing to old records. By accident of fate, she meets the main character, and his acceptance of her eccentricity is reciprocated by her acceptance of his oddness.
The other stellar performance in this is Judy Davis. She plays the mum of the main character. She is sharp, cold, and criticising, and at first I was worried the film was gonna use the tired old trope of “Mummy made me do it”. For decades it became behavioural science gospel that mass murderers all had domineering mothers, with implied cause and effect. In fact, killers were likely to the blame their mothers for their crime for a more obvious reason, that violent men usually blame women for the violence they perpetrate. And I didn’t want to see Judy’s character set up like that in the film.
I’m glad to say that wasn’t the case. Yes, she is short, sharp and relentless, but she is also clearly exhausted, weary to the bones, and ground down by years of grief from her son. She also seems to have her suspicions, which his father doesn’t, that her son is dangerous. She tells a story a little way into the film of when her son was 5, and he turned a game they were playing nasty, and just when she was in the most fear and anguish she could imagine, he began to laugh. And since then, she has never trusted him. There is more wrong with him than simple oddness or slowness that a mother could easily accept. She is relentless because she is frightened of what he will do if he doesn’t stick rigidly to her instructions, she is domineering because she is scared of what choices he might make on his own, and she is sharp and cold because she is impatient from years and years of toil, managing his destructive behaviour.
This is a hard subject to treat sensitively, but Nitram handles it with care, nuance, and honesty.
Once Upon A Time In Uganda is a documentary about Wakaliwood, where Isaac Nabwana makes low-budget, high-octane action flicks. Isaac is based in Wakaliga, a ghetto in the capital city of Uganda, Kampala. There he makes movies for as little as £200, and puts them out to his neighbours. When Alan, a superfan from America shows up, determined to make sure Isaac gets the recognition he deserves, will it translate into material benefit for Isaac and his crew?
Isaac is so impressive. Like, seriously. He’s put together a whole team of people, each as passionate and resourceful as each other. They need a lighting rig, they weld it; they need a camera jib, they weld it; they need a helicopter, THEY FUCKING WELD IT! It is unreal how they can build all their equipment, all their scenery, all their props from scrap metal, and whatever else is to hand.
I really wanna show this film to my stepdad. He has a deeply instilled drive to make-do wherever possible, and appreciates nothing more than someone who can make stuff out of anything.
Isaac’s films are inspired by the action movies of the 80s, Chuck Norris and Rambo. But he does them in a distinctly Ugandan way, with his own particular style. And they’re funny, and don’t take themselves seriously, and have a VJ – a video joker who narrates over the film with quips and exclamations.
However, money and recognition don’t come easily. There are big establishments in Uganda, tv and media outlets, but they have no interest in action movies, especially those made in the ghetto. As Isaac explains, nobody rates anything in Uganda unless it makes it big overseas. The racism pervasive in society says, for something to be good, white people have to want to buy it. And I’m sorry to say, the film doesn’t really dig into that any, just accepts it as a fact of life.
The film begins with Alan Hofmanis flying out to Uganda to be part of Isaac’s film crew, which to be honest I didn’t like. I don’t think the story should start with when the first white guy got involved. And I don’t need him taking me to Uganda like a tourist visiting and having the place explained to me. And I don’t need to see a white face endorsing the subject to think it’s worthwhile.
At the Q&A, this choice is kinda explained, as the director got involved in Isaac’s story through Alan, so that was their beginning to the story. But that just shows all the more why it’s problematic telling these stories going from the outside in. Fundamentally you’re telling a white America’s experience of this African story.
It actually does get better as the film goes on, as the documentary makers go to Uganda and continue filming even though Alan goes elsewhere. So at that point Isaac gets to take more centre stage without Alan.
Although, starting with Alan’s arrival does underscore the central relationship as their friendship. It’s their highs and lows which punctuate the film’s acts. You do root for this unlikely pair.
So Alan’s story pretty much starts with him having a mid-life crisis. He’s worked all his life in films, but has kinda lost the passion he started out with. He buys a ring to propose to his girlfriend and she dumps him. Then he sees Isaac’s films. And his mind is just blown, it’s like all the passion he once had, all the love for films, it’s right there on the screen. He pretty much sells everything, buys a plane ticket, and moves to Uganda. Which is a bold move.
He turns up on Isaac’s door and asks to be part of his film crew. They actually were looking for a white man to play the baddie in an upcoming film, so Alan was a wish granted. And because he was a white Westerner, he could be an advocate for Wakaliwood overseas.
And he was quite successful in this. Wakaliwood’s story went viral, appearing on the BBC, Al Jazeera and the Wall Street Journal among many, many others. But making that visibility turn into dollars proves more difficult than you’d think.
Once Upon A Time In Uganda is a movie which will remind you of why you love film. It’s about how people come together to make, to watch, to share films. Film is a global uniter.
A simple and straightforward story. Guled is a gravedigger, his wife Nasra needs an operation to remove her kidney or she’ll die, he tries to raise the money for the operation. Beautifully shot, eschewing artifice for directness.
Other people might have made this film as a tragic story, about poverty and preventable illness in the oft-repeated depictions of Africa. But this isn’t that. Yes there is hardship and difficulties to overcome, but fundamentally this is a love story. It is about having someone who you would do anything for, and who would do anything for you.
Guled fell in love with Nasra at first sight, but she was from another village and her father had promised her to another man. They eloped, and to save face both their families disowned them. Now Guled must face his family’s wrath to plead for money.
Beautifully made, and by sticking to the essentials, keeps the focus on the the relationship between the two main characters, with you hoping against hope that love conquers all.
What’s that in my eye? Nothing! I’m no greeting, you’re greeting! It you want to see a purely wholesome film, go see The Quiet Girl. It’s about how children blossom when given love.
Cait is the 4th of 5 kids, and her mother has another on the way. Worn out from her feckless bastard of a husband, they agree to send her to her mother’s cousin for the summer. That way she will be out from underfoot when the new baby comes.
Cait is neglected. There is simply no time for her in a house so full of kids, and her penniless mother can only do so much when her drunken, cheating, gambling husband keeps the place in a state of filth and disrepair. She wets the bed, for which her exhausted mum can only scold her. Her sisters tease and humiliate her. She has no friends. She has retreated into herself, and frequently absconds from school and home. Out in the countryside, she wanders under trees and among the long grass, finding a beauty and solitude that is like a sanctuary.
Her father drops her off at her mother’s cousin’s in just the clothes she’s standing up in, an old, faded, and dirty sundress and a pair of sandals. Eibhlin takes her in, delighted to have a child in the house, and showers her with affection. She lets Cait be her quiet self, but gently encourages her to come out her shell. When Cait wets the bed, she is anxious what reaction she’ll get, but Eibhlin exclaims, ‘oh I forgot these are weeping mattresses, what am I thinking putting you on one of them?’ and I fell in love with her for it.
Sean, her husband, is less enthused. Not hostile, simply uninterested. But as time goes on, he sort of takes her in out the side of his eye, sees her good and steady temperament, and with apparent indifference, makes more and more overtures towards her friendship. He is a solid farmer, and he appreciates her quiet, watchful, and helpful nature.
As I say, this film is so wholesome, watching all three characters blossom into a family. It is a film about how you fall in live with your real family. So touching.
Don Letts narrates the story of his life in Rebel Dread. It’s a pretty amazing life, being at the nexus of iconic cultural moments in music.
Growing up in Brixton in London, when it was a Little Jamaica, it was a community of first generation Black Britons, Jamaican immigrant families, and working class white folks. Letts remembers it fondly. As a kid, he was aware that racism existed, but in his community there seemed to be a commonality among folk, even when they hung out in their own crowds, they coexisted together without issue. It wasn’t until he got to secondary school that racism was brought to the forefront.
Enoch Powell, that old bastard, did his infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech, and Don went from being Lettsy in the playground to a spat upon outsider. Racist epithets were hurled at him, National Front slogans went up, all the bullshit began. The most consistently racist interaction he had was with the polis. The sus law was used to stop and search any black person coming and going at any time. It was basically a blank cheque for perpetual harassment.
At the same time the social situation was heating up, Letts saw The Who perform, and his head burst wide open to rock and roll. He decided to become a rebel, reject this assimilation, good school, model citizen path his parents had chosen for him, and decided to make rock music his life, with all the style and attitude that went along with it.
Whenever the police pulled him over, he’d jump up on his car bonnet, attract a crowd, and start stripping, since he was such a ‘suspicious character’ after all. He put the police to shame for their attempts to denigrate him, making their racist tactics visible to the whole street. Taking back a bit of power by making it a stage.
On the music and politics front, Letts became unique for touching on a lot of different scenes. He was a great lover of the rasta music played throughout his neighbourhood, he hung out in the queer scenes that worshipped Bowie, and he ran with the white punk rockers, as that genre began to emerge. Constantly at every gig at The Roxy, he’d invite folk back to hang at his, and there’d be Bob Marley hanging with Souixie Sioux and John Lydon and whoever else. Countless bands and artists credit him with introducing them to new music and helping influence their work.
He began filming what was happening, without a plan beyond that he wanted to capture this really creative time. Someone eventually suggested a movie, and he ran with the idea, making The Punk Rock Movie, a documentary of the early years of punk. He was getting film developed and then editing that shit by holding it up to the light, cutting, and sellotaping bits together. Fucking madness.
From this he became the videographer for his mates in The Clash, directing their music videos, including London Calling. This launched him into the world of filmmaking. He directed numerous music videos, documentaries and films. He toured with his own band, Big Audio Dynamite, seeing the world.
While Letts provides the main narration, the talking heads that chime in with their piece of the story reads like a list of headliner bands, The Sex Pistols, The Clash and so on. There’s so many people you just swipe past, like Elvis Costello, The Beastie Boys, Ice-T. His life really is a mad ride.
Really interesting film, and really satisfying to hear it told first hand by the man himself.
This film is absolutely gorgeous. But we’ll get to that in a minute.
I was so angry watching this film. Yuni is about a schoolgirl who has to decide between pursuing her education and getting married. Literally 3 adult men want to marry this 16-year-old schoolgirl. Like, what the fuck?! She’s a wean! But it would be wrong to put this all on the individual guys, because the whole school system is rigged against girls continuing their education. A nice teacher, Mrs Lis, tries to encourage Yuni to go to uni, since she excels at maths and science. But even the brochures for scholarships have the proviso that she will be ineligible if she marries.
On the other hand, it seems like the clock’s ticking on marriage as soon as a girl hits puberty. And not like, from other boys her age who fancy her, but from adult men, who for some reason see a wee lassie in her school uniform and think, she’s clearly ready for a lifelong commitment to a vastly older man. Gross, and shame on you, and also fuck you!
Anyway, putting a pin in the rage-inducing aspects of the story, Yuni is actually a really well-balanced, nuanced story about growing up. For all the struggle and strife, so much of it is joyful, full of the bonds of friendship, and the fun of being 16. Yuni and her pals go swimming, paint their nails, do their makeup and pose for selfies. They gossip about boys they like, which teachers they might have a crush on, and what they’ve heard about S-E-X. All the usual, normal, adorable things about being a young teenager.
And Yuni kinda blasts apart the silence of propriety that kinda hangs over these subjects in her community. It shows the girls whispering about sex, a subject they know almost nothing about, except as something with the potential to destroy their life, educationally, socially, familially. The scene is so universal, with them asking, does it hurt? Do you bleed? Do you have an orgasm, and how? All the while, half-scandalised themselves at the topic.
And in 2020, there is this weird disconnect from the irl life of modesty and unspoken-of subjects, and the online life where you can just google “female masturbation” and get thousands of explicit answers. Like, if someone was to find Yuni’s phone, they would have a totally different idea of who she was as a person, than the naive virgin she actually is.
To go back a bit to anger-inducing aspects, it is infuriating how much it seems to be everybody’s business whether you choose to fuck or not, or even if you’re thinking about it. The school proposes at one point introducing mandatory virginity tests for the girls, a bullshit impossibility that just seems like a scam to look up young girls’ knickers. This is so the school can ‘protect’ its reputation from pregnant unwed mothers and lassies who try to get an abortion. Like, what fucking business is it of any of yours?!
Anyway, as much as I was seething at each guy who brought her a marriage proposal, they are not portrayed as some awful creeps, they’re just ordinary, possibly even in another context, nice men, who are being told by society that there is nothing wrong with what they are doing. The fact they are completely derailing her education and putting pressure on a young girl to make life-changing decisions probably doesn’t even occur to them.
To me, Yuni really just spoke about how people are the same all over the world. Yuni and my teenagehood could not look more different from the outside. I was an irreligious queer lass studying to get into uni and helping my mate raise her kid alone. And yet the same things come up in Yuni’s life, folk experiencing unsupported pregnancy, rape, abortion, domestic abuse, being queer and in the closet.
Finally I’m gonna just say about the visuals, this film is unearthly beautiful. Like, stunning. It feels so colourful and vivid, it’s worth watching just on that merit alone. So, so gorgeous.
Yuni is just a film filled with human drama. Visually outstanding, it also tells a story at once identifiably Indonesian, but also universal, about how, so early in life, girls are forced to grow up.
