Author: gffreviews

My Wonderful Wanda is a family drama, taking place almost entirely in one house. The titular Wanda is the Polish carer for elderly German patriarch Josef, as he recovers from a stroke. With shades of The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, a bond develops between the two in this intimate setting that has far reaching consequences for the family as a whole.

Upon watching the trailer, I thought Josef was just a dirty auld man, pawing at the nearest young thing now his wife was older. And he is kind of that, but he’s also at his most vulnerable he’s been in his entire life. Paralysed over most of his body, struggling to regain any mobility, he has returned to the helplessness of a child. And the person caring for him, spending time with him, doing the most intimate of acts, cleaning and caring for his naked and defenceless body, is Wanda. Not his family, not his children, not his wife. All of whom have the time and money to care for him themselves, but have elected to hire someone else to do it. And it makes you wonder about how you could ever hand over such intimacies to a stranger without expecting relationships to form and change.

Josef pays Wanda for an ‘extra service’. Again, at first you can only recoil in judgement, but you can also see a man who, having been near to death and chilled by his sense of his own mortality, is willing to pay any price to feel alive. So much has been taken from him, his independence, his control over his body and his life, and his identity as he saw it. He needs something, something that that screams I’m not dead yet!

Needless to say, this sets in motion a chain of events that challenges Josef’s family to their limits. But ironically, this crisis forces them to confront whether they really are a family or just a group of people who share a name and wealth. In defiance of expectations, this somewhat cold and aloof family warms and strengthens in the heat of conflict. Actually a surprisingly touching film.

Spring Tide is a portrait of the quiet psychological war of one family. Three generations of women live in one flat. The grandmother is a relentless hammer on the mother, irritated by her mere presence, emotionally abusive and spiteful for any perceived slight. The mother has grown silent through years of experience, knowing that engaging with the grandmother’s rants will have no benefit. The daughter is confused and disorientated, constantly being manipulated as a pawn by the grandmother against the mother, and so by turns spoiled and scolded, held up as an achievement of the grandmother’s guidance or denigrated as the culmination of all the mother’s shame.

This is a triptych of character studies, rather than a story with a plot. The tension in the household pushes the characters forward, rather than any quest or instigated drama. Without a direct throughline of the story, that only increases the suspense of the film, because you are constantly waiting for I-know-not-what, some form of emotional explosion or implosion or catharsis, and there is no indication of what form it will come in. You are gripped by the prospect of the tension swelling into a tide of change or collapsing back into a withdrawal and defeat.

The mother is largely silent in the film, except in her final scene where she says everything that needs said. Outside of the home, she has a career and respect, and inwardly she has a strong sense of herself, unbroken by her mother. Yet inside the house, she is like a dog too used to being beaten. She weathers the grandmother’s rages like a storm, still as a sturdy tree beneath lightning and thunder. She gives no reaction, denies any satisfaction at the constant torrent of abuse poured on her. It looks exhausting.

The grandmother is greedily eager for others’ good opinion of her. She takes part in community events, takes interest in her neighbours, keeps in touch with old classmates, and generally garners the liking and praise of all. She projects an image of an ideal citizen, conscientious and caring, responsible and generous with her time. No one would believe the mother were she to actually tell what it was like living with her. At home she is vicious, unyielding, manipulative, and spiteful. She seems to find provocation in the very sight of the mother, who scurries to her room like a shadow so as to minimise the grandmother’s opportunities to explode.

The daughter is only 9-years-old and confused by the ever-changing atmosphere around her. The grandmother constantly pitches her against her mother, and misrepresents her. In addition to the constant gaslighting, there are also unspoken secrets, like who her father was, how he died, where her mother was for the first few years of her life, and why she was not around so much. This digging for the genuine facts of her life is further muddied by her grandmother’s continually changing family narrative based on her moods and rages.

One of the repeated battles between the grandmother and mother is that of the memory of the grandfather. The grandmother claims he was a terrible husband, a sex offender, and the source of all her woes. The daughter appears to have a kind memory of him. And you’re not sure if that is just the innocence of the eyes of a child, or if this, like so much of what the grandmother says, is just another story to gain her sympathy and allow her to frame herself as the victim of abuse, rather than the perpetrator. The grandmother is excellent at pressing true facts into telling false stories. But to the mother, the grandfather was just another member of the family the grandmother defeated, and now in his absence, she destroys any trace of him, down to even his good memory.

To some degree, these generations are the generations of China. The grandmother is fiercely patriotic, forgiving of past hardships under Mao, and happy to constantly change the story of her life to suit the needs of the moment. The mother is a journalist, interested only in the truth, exposing shortcomings and corruption, and wanting to hold people to account. The daughter is the trying to sift through what she’s being told for what to actually believe, trying to get her personality out from under the baggage of the older generations, and find the truth about her identity.

A really compelling film.

In The Shadows is an old-school dystopia, like, 19th century dystopia. The central character is one of a community of miners, who live and work in the ravine of this quarry where the mine and its processing plant stands. Their entire life is focused on toil in this difficult and back-breaking work, for which they receive no apparent recompense other than food and lodging.

The visual style of this film is its main star, the set design, the props, the costume. It is beautifully ugly. Everything is mocket, decayed, rusted, or lichened. People sleep on top of old boilers or water tanks. Loose and snaking wires curl everywhere, powering the coal machines and the omnipresent surveillance equipment. Everything is pipes, or pistons, or cogs. Visually it reminds me of things like the geometry in Katsuhiro Otomo’s Domu, and the panopticon, and stuff like 1984.

There is an unseen management, who gaze on every aspect of their lives through cameras, and who are feared like the wrath of God. In their faceless omniscience, their random health inspections can lead to the termination of contract, or transfer, to a fate unknown. You daren’t get sick, daren’t get injured, daren’t slow your work.

The main character, the miner, is able to successfully pass off an injury at the beginning of the film, allowing him to question for the first time the powers that be. If they are not all-knowing, then they may not be all-powerful.

Tugging at that thread leads him to the possibility that the greatest tool oppression has is our willingness to comply with it.