GFF Reviews

Author: gffreviews

  • The Other Lamb

    The Other Lamb is about a religious cult, a society of women gathered around the worship of their Shepherd. It has the veneer of idyllic fulfillment until Shepherd, trying to keep their commune one step ahead of outside interference, takes them all to find a new settlement site. This is effectively a forced march, where all the sheen comes off the apple, and the main character, Selah, is forced to see Shepherd and her life for what it is.

    Okay, so the first thing you gotta accept about this film if you are to enjoy it is the pacing. This is a slow nightmare. So there’s lots of shots staring intently into the woods, or gazing longingly at Shepherd. Once you get into its rhythm, the film is this slow burn of tension, as you wait for the other shoe to drop. Will Selah submit to a life she is increasingly aware masks dark truths because it is what she has always wanted up until this point? Or will she leave, turn towards the complete unknown?

    The film deals heavily with Christian symbolism, the sheep, the sacrifice of the lamb, menstrual blood as the physical manifestation of Eve’s sin and the weakness of women towards corruption. You can see echoes of things like The Handmaid’s Tale, with the ‘wives’ all in red, and the ‘daughters’ all in blue. Shepherd tells them he has given them sisterhood, reminiscent of how Gilead is described as a society of women. Their status and power struggles take up most of the focus of their society, disguising the lie at the heart of things, that everything they do is for the attention, approval and comfort of a man.

    Saleh has only ever known life in commune, being brought there as a young child, and now as she reaches sexual maturity, she aches with longing to become Shepherd’s wife. His gaze is seen as profoundly erotic, his touch seems to cause physical ecstasy. Saleh is devout, like a sunflower turned towards him as the sun. She sees being with him as complete religious, emotional and sexual fulfillment.

    Then she gets her period on the same day a lamb is stillborn while she tends the flock. And the experience is so traumatic for her, she begins to question everything, herself and Shepherd included. And as the forced march to a new settlement site brings all of Shepherd’s worst character out into the open, the question of what will she do with this new-found knowledge and experience begins to burn.

    Many films will try to make cult life weird enough that the actual religions they are based on get off scott free, so divergent are they from the ‘true’ religion. The Other Lamb is not life that. This is Christianity in microcosm. Shepherd might not be THE Jesus, but he certainly acts like it and desires the same worship. All the regnant hardships the women face are in the Bible, the shunning of menstruating women, the notion of their inferiority, their submission to their husbands, their lack of protection from marital rape and domestic abuse. Christianity is not let off the hook in this story.

    Another thing I like about this movie was the use of visual themes. Obviously there is repeated use of the image of the sheep and the ram, the blood of sacrifice and menstruation. But also just stuff like the church being a cordoned-off section of the forest, shaped with string wrapped around the trees. From a distance it is almost transparent, and gives the illusion of freedom, but up close there is no possibility of going in any direction other than that established by Shepherd.

    Kudos to Michiel Huisman (of Treme, Orphan Black, and Game of Thrones fame) on making a profoundly erotic and subtlety malevolent Shepherd. And Raffey Cassidy, who makes Selah’s inner journey vividly apparent with sparse dialogue.

  • Leitis In Waiting

    So interesting.

    Leitis in Waiting is a documentary about leitis, a gender minority in Tonga, and their changing status in Tongan society.

    Tonga is one of the few Polynesian island nations that were able to successfully resist colonisation. They had an accord with Britain beginning at the start of the 20th century but always remained an independent country, and never faced the processes of deculturation that affected other countries in the colonial era. This preserved the place of leitis in Tongan society. But as American evangelical queerphobia is exported internationally, leitis face increasing levels of violence.

    The other problematic element is leitis traditional place within Tongan society, which has been associated closely with domestic work, and hospitality work. This has been viewed positively by leitis, as it at least gives them a place in Tongan society, shelter from abuse and discrimination, and the work gives them a sense of self-respect. But it means that leitis are rarely in positions of power or decision-making roles. Another aspect of the export of American culture wars globally is that leitis are having to fight under the umbrella of LGBTQ, and although welcome as an ally, they don’t want to see their identity as Tongan leitis subsumed in this foreign concept.

    Christianity arrived in Tonga in 1826 in the form of Catholicism. And of course, the attitude varies from church to church, but generally, there was no virulent anti-leiti movement. That might be partly because leitis did a lot of work for the church, organising and serving events, and facilitating churches as community hubs. There also was a general attitude in the church of tolerance, if not acceptance. “Crossdressing” may have been viewed as a sin, but we are all sinners, that’s what church is for. This attitude among the religious has changed in recent years, and queerphobic people in Tongan society have been financed and advanced wide-reaching platforms to espouse the American evangelical brand of Christianity, which is lobbying for the imprisonment of leitis, and even threatening violence against them.

    Interestingly, leitis have chosen to handle this their own way, rather than model their approach on the combative fashion we see in Europe and America. They didn’t stand outside these evangelic churches with provocative or antagonist messages. They didn’t boycott businesses held by queerphobic owners. They instead invited the religious leaders to meetings, to speak their own truth and hear the leaders’ concerns. I think the character of island life lends itself well to reconciliation. These are their neighbours, and no matter how hurtful their actions, they are going to have to live with them. So there is more of an open-handed approach to finding a way to live peacefully, even if it is in disagreement.

    Really interesting film.

  • Breaking Fast

    Breaking Fast is about Mo, a gay Muslim doctor in West Hollywood as he has this sort of chaste romance with Kal, this white actor, across Ramadan.

    Okay, so this is a mixed bag.

    Points for positive representation of gay Muslims, when positive representation of Muslims at all is scarce in American media. And a lot of the acting is pretty good and the whole tone of the movie is sweet.

    The dialogue is awful. Just a rolling stomach churn of cringe from one moment to the next. Like, haven’t you ever heard how people talk? A total show, don’t tell lesson unlearned. People are constantly saying “I’m kidding!” instead of looking like they’re kidding. To be fair, it was the writer/director’s first feature, so a lot of this can just be chalked up to it being his first go.

    Also this one of those “problem” movies, where you can’t just be gay and Muslim, you have to explain being gay and Muslim. You can’t just introduce a gay Muslim character and then the story begins, it constantly comes up and needs to have discussion. Mo’s conversations with his white, non-Muslim love interest Kal feels like a proxy for the director’s conversation with the presumably white, non-Muslim audience. Which is not great. But you know, there are not exactly a plethora of movies about gay Muslim men, maybe the director felt his film needed to lay that groundwork for anything else to go after.

    Kal, the love interest, is the cringiest white guy showing that he’s down. He tries to show he can cook Arab dishes better than Arab folk. He compares the prejudice against Muslims to his inability to be taken seriously while being a good-looking hunk. Ugh.

    Special props go to Amin El Gamal, who manages to take the camp best friend stereotype and clunky dialogue, and really make it feel natural.

  • Time

    I didn’t like this.

    I expected I would. It’s a documentary about Fox Rich, a prison abolitionist and activist, mother of 6, who raised her kids on her own while her husband served a 20 year jail sentence. I expected it to be a take down of the racism and injustice of the prison system, and a portrait of how a family serves a sentence alongside the convicted, how the harm ripples out.

    But it wasn’t. Maybe I was expecting the wrong thing or maybe the filmmaker didn’t achieve their goals, who knows. But it just rubbed me entirely the wrong way.

    Firstly there’s the way the filmmaker chose to portray Fox. A lot of the footage is of her at speaking engagements, which makes her seem like you’re watching staged performances, not really getting to know a person intimately. Fox is shown practicing her spiel for selling used cars, and talking shit about people she’s on the phone to, making her seem two-faced. And because the way Fox speaks is very reminiscent of the emotive religious preaching that is part of her background, it just put me on the back foot and instantly sceptical, because you feel like you are be proselytised to, and manipulated, and talked at, not to. And maybe that impression could have been countered and balanced if the film had been cut together differently, but it actually lost me sympathy for the film’s subject, rather than gaining it.

    Then there is the absolute lack of surrounding context. There’s a lot of context that could have been put into a story like this. You could talk about the disproportionately high rate of incarceration among African-Americans compared to white Americans convicted of similar crimes, of the disproportionately longer sentences, and less likelihood for parole. I’m not really sure why the filmmaker decided to leave that out, whether because they assumed you already knew that, or that it doesn’t matter, or that providing such information catered to an outside perspective looking in on Fox and her family, rather than portraying Fox’s truth without feeling the need to validate it with statistics.

    But there’s even a lack of context in Fox’s specific situation. It’s quite aways into the film before you even find out why her husband is in jail, and that she was part of that crime. And then you find out she was sent to jail at the same time, but got out earlier, how long you’re not sure, someone mentions that the sentence was for 12 years, but she’s been around for almost all of her kids’ lives so that can’t be right. You are just left constantly wondering. And that’s not a good thing, because it causes the viewer to speculate, and wonder if you’re not being told something for a reason. The truth is her husband tried to rob a bank, no one was injured, and the police arrived almost immediately. But the fact that it feels hidden, makes you wonder, “Was someone hurt? Did they harm somebody?” Which again, damages the sympathy you would get from the audience if you’d just been up-front.

    Not a great movie.

  • Queering The Script

    So after watching Scream, Queen! about the really heartfelt queer fandom around the totally ridiculous Nightmare on Elm Street 2, I decided to watch another film showing as part of SQIFF, Queering The Script, all about queer fandom. This focuses on representation of gay and bisexual women and their relationships in tv.

    For me, this is kinda a reminder, it really brought me back to what it was like to grow up in the 90s, knowing you were gay, and not knowing another out gay person, and not seeing yourself or any role models for future relationships anywhere. Back then, there was no internet, no social media. You couldn’t jump on the computer and see loads of women out there telling their story and living their truth. So if anyone showed up on tv that was even slightly gay, it was the only pinhole through which you could see yourself represented. I had kinda forgotten what that was like, because now I have queer friends, queer community, both online and offline. I’m also older and more settled in myself, so I don’t look for role models as much. Watching this really brought that back.

    Love that a chunk of this is devoted to Xena: Warrior Princess because YES, and Willow gets a look-in on Buffy, but there were so many fandoms and shows I wasn’t aware of because I clearly stopped watching stuff around the time I went to uni, and was like, “I don’t have time for tv, I’m having a 4-year-long nervous breakdown!” I changed and drifted off into music, and comic books, and eventually films. But there were whole generations of queer women coming up who were looking to tv for those role models, and it was quite varied in terms of the quality of representation they got.

    Kind of a central point of the documentary is the killing of Lexa in The 100, which sparked a massive fan-led backlash, which was not confined to The 100 but began a real movement to hold the industry as a whole to account for the way they represented queer women. The shocking statistic they quote is that between 2015 and 2017, queer women made up 2.5% of character on tv, but made up a third of character deaths. The ‘Bury Your Gays’ trope seemed to be a regressive echo of the Hays Code, where you could only represent queers if they were tragic or punished. Fans organised to see that this harmful message was not the standard going forward, and that shows respect queer stories and queer fans.

    Today we see a push for more representation, but also diverse and responsible representation. Shows like Orange Is The New Black have a real range in body type, butchness, and race. A push for more representation can’t only be for thin, femme, white women.

    Trans women get name checked in the last 5 minutes of the movie with Pose, but are largely absent from the story, as though there aren’t trans lesbians and bisexual women too? But to be fair to the documentary makers, there really hasn’t been almost any representation of gay and bisexual trans women on tv, so it’s hard to talk about something that isn’t there, except to say “Hey, Pose! Maybe this is the beginning of something, huh?”

    All in all, a really interesting documentary. Shows how, no matter how silly your art may be to other people, to someone it might be a lifeline.

  • Mogul Mowgli

    So. I’ll have to watch that again. It had so much in it and went by too fast.

    On paper, the plot to Mogul Mowgli is about a rapper who is incapacitated by a neurological auto-immune disease, just as he’s about to get a big break in his career. In practice though, the majority of the meaning of this film is told in the visions the main character has while collapsing unconscious, or being sedated for surgery, or drugged up on treatment. In this liminal space, he has a dialogue with his history, from his father’s escape during Partition, to his childhood rejecting of his Pakistani identity.

    The main character Zaheer, whose rap name is Zed, makes music that is culturally-conscious, exploring ideas of identity, colonialism, and internalised racism. On stage, he is so articulate about the myriad threads that weave together in him. But outside the gig, his ex-girlfriend calls bullshit on him. He lives in America, and rarely goes home to Britain and his family. She sees him as dislocated, not facing who he really is, and espousing a harmonious version of himself that is largely a myth he tells himself.

    The physical condition that takes him down is a bodily manifestation of this, and in the fog of pain it causes him, he revisits the moments that have contributed to who he is. A repeated image and sound is that of his father as a child, escaping the violence of Partition by train, under a heap of coats, surrounded either physically or psychically by the dead, as he desperately prays under his breath. The rhythm of the prayer, the rhythm of the train, and the rhythm of Zaheer’s rap resound together, in a way that belies the truth – his relationship with his father is strained, and his father has never spoken about his experience except to describe this single image, that he travelled by train under coats. And this whole melodic and visual motif speaks to the notion of what has been inherited and what has been lost, that this unspoken part of Zaheer’s history has left him without an important understanding of who his father is, and by extension who he is. This generational trauma is being passed in silence, until it shuts down his nervous system so as to no longer be ignored.

    The biological is cultural. This is a truth that goes ignored and unstated by those that don’t need to hear it, because the culture is based around them as central and default, and serves their needs and wants, while denying the rest of us our existence. The biological is cultural, the way your body is shaped, your clay, is a manifestation of your culture’s values, and how your culture values you. Where does culture exist but in the body? How you transmit knowledge, agency, and creation is a physical act.

    And cultural violence is biological violence. Look to the blood pressure and hypertension levels among people who deal with systematic racism. Look at the rates of heart disease and diabetes. Hell, look at the survival rates in the current Covid pandemic.

    This film reminds me of Billy-Ray Belcourt, the essayist and poet, who talks about the gaslighting that goes on around health issue rates among indigenous Canadians. It reminds me of In My Blood It Runs, where a denial of Aboriginal Australian traditional healing practices is simultaneously a denial of Aboriginal Australian pain. And it reminds me of the novel, Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, which talks about how what was taken cannot be passed on, but its absence can.

    In trying to heal, the main character has to look at who Zaheer is, rather than Zed. The alchemy he has used to fuse African-American rap to South Asian music traditions while he rhymes in his English accent has given him a future where he can see himself as an uncontradicted whole, but the past unacknowledged is turning it all to lead.

    Mogul Mowgli is a work of sound and movement, a film that is a dance, or an absence of dance, in which stillness is the necessary accompaniment if you are to listen.

  • Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street

    So, after watching Nightmare on Elm Street 2 last night, I went rummaging around the internet with questions like, “How? . . . Why? . . .”

    The answer is Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street, Mark Patton’s account of what it was like to play Jesse, the sensitive male lead in the camp sequel full of barely concealed homoerotic subtext, at a time when he was young, new to Hollywood, and in the closet.

    My worry with the film was, quite frankly, that it was gonna be a downer. Nightmare 2 effectively ended Mark’s career, because, despite being commercially successful, it was panned by critics and fans, and the queerness of the movie and Mark’s performance brought down the shutters on him in the homophobic Hollywood of 1985. I wanted to enjoy Nightmare 2, and enjoy laughing at it, and not have that compromised by finding out it ruined the lead actor’s life, or that its making had left life-long bitterness.

    But it wasn’t anything like that. This is Mark’s story, and Mark’s story is one of the resilience of gay people and gay culture. Mark sees his life as being extremely lucky in an unfortunate time. He went to New York at 17 with $100 in his pocket and in 5 years was on stage with Cher. He met and fell in love with the handsome actor in the hit tv show Dallas, Tim Patrick Murphy, and moved into his home in the Hollywood hills right across from Madonna. While he was blossoming, so was gay culture, and it was slowly but surely making inroads into the mainstream, if only by nods and winks.

    Then Rock Hudson died in October 1985, bringing the AIDS epidemic to national attention, and setting off a reversal of everything that had been won since Stonewall. And in November 1985, the camp sequel to Nightmare on Elm Street was released, with its queer subtext now being far too much in an increasingly homophobic climate. Mark’s agents struggled to find him work, with tv contracts now stipulating blood tests before they hired actors.

    And as the career he made collapsed in around him, as the thriving community that had been his home and family became decimated, his lover Tim was dying of AIDS. Tim was publicly outed in the National Enquirer, they broke into his hospital room and took photos of him as he lay suffering on his deathbed, and splashed them across the front page of their magazines. And Mark was reconciling himself to the fact that he was HIV positive.

    After Tim died, Mark fled Hollywood, and set up in a small town in Mexico, bascially looking for a quiet place to die. He got tuberculosis, cancer, and his HIV went into full blown AIDS.

    All that would be enough to end anybody. But this is Mark’s story. And it’s one of resilience.

    After the launch of an effective drug cocktail that halted the progression of AIDS, Mark was able to recover, and he rebuilt a quiet life, with a new partner, in a little shop in Mexico, selling knickknacks and kitsch. And there he blossomed again. Until one day, decades later, when his acting days were just a memory, he gets a phone call from a private detective, who’s been hired to find him for a documentary on the legacy of the Nightmare franchise.

    And when he comes back for that, he realises there is this whole renewal of interest in this film, as the generation who watched this movie as kids are now coming out, and many of the fans are saying, “I would never have been allowed to watch a gay movie, but I was allowed to watch Nightmare on Elm Street, and you were the first gay character I ever saw”. Queer theory analysis of film is finding things to talk about in Nightmare 2, rather than just seeing it as a failed schlock sequel. And its cult following of queer fans are putting on their own showings. Mark can now embrace his past in Nightmare in a way that is far more meaningful to him, than if it had simply made it as a big, successful horror film.

    Mark now tours and uses his cult celebrity to talk about bullying, and about homophobia, and about destroying stigma around HIV. He uses whatever platform he has for good. And it’s like he and the culture are rediscovering each other, and saying to each other, “So you survived?” and “Yeah, I thrived”.

    For a documentary about an incredibly silly film, it is really rather touching. Where healing from insurmountable odds is not just a possibility, but a reality.

  • The Wolf of Snow Hollow

    Jim Cummings is back with his second film after the success of Thunder Road. The Wolf of Snow Hollow is an odd film, parked squarely across a couple of genres. It’s definitely a horror – a werewolf movie – but also a crime procedural, with lashings of humour, while having a strong dramatic storyline about struggling with addiction.

    Like Thunder Road, Cummings stars as a small town cop hanging by a thread, but unlike his previous character who was worn out with grief and regret, in Snow Hollow he plays John, a recovering alcoholic who medicates himself with drink to deal with his anger. I know, angry cop on the edge, it’s a trope, but the writing and the performance just fleshes it all out into a three-dimensional person, someone you sympathise with even though they’re not very likeable. He’s struggling to follow in the footsteps of his father, the ailing sheriff, and balance his duties as a father whose relationship with his ex-wife has all but broken down. He wants to be a leader and someone to be respected, but he gets in his own way all the time, his anger is ever-present and his undoing. The writing balances the humour that comes out this ridiculous human condition with the genuine frustration and sorrow at being stuck as your own worst enemy.

    Meanwhile, back to the werewolf, the gore and horror is beautifully done, with classic horror shots of the full moon reflected in a bloody paw print. Great watch for Halloween.

  • Herself

    Right, I gret through almost all of that.

    The film follows Sandra as she leaves an abusive marriage, only to end up living in a limbo of temporary accommodation, but determined to give her children the life they deserve, builds a house from scratch.

    And you’d think in a film about domestic abuse and homelessness, I’d be crying because it was tragic. But it’s not. It reduced me to tears because it’s about surprising, unexpected kindness. The extraordinary ordinary, the miracle we’ve become so familiar with we fail to see it. That people will do for each other, sacrifice for each other, help and care for each other, with no expectation of their cut, or their angle.

    The director introduced the film, and explained that, in this time when so many movies are being pulled from cinemas, this movie could not have a more timely release than now. Written years ago, it’s message has only become more potent in the time of Covid. As billionaires increase their wealth and multimillion pound companies lay off workers in their tens of thousands, neighbours and community volunteers have rallied together to provide the bare essentials of life to the people who need it most. Have given their time, their energy, without payment, without fanfare, to help their fellow man. Because it was the right thing to do. Because of decency. And it is an extraordinary miracle, in this world where all our life is counted in hourly pay, when there is a pound sign on every moment, and anything expended not on our own gain is seen as wasted or lost, that people will help one another, to no benefit of themselves, other than it reminds us of our common humanity. And it’s so everyday, we’ve gone blind from seeing it.

    Herself reminds you just how extraordinary kindness is. From the kindness of those that help her build a new home for her family, to the kindness she shows to her girls by making every end meet, going above and beyond, to move heaven and earth, to give them a safe place to enjoy their childhood. The other everyday miracle is the strength and resilience of women. In a world where all the cards are against them, where patriarchal structures, and poverty, and violence continue to grind them down, they rise, they rise, they rise!

    Just a quietly extraordinary film, incredibly moving, and full of the absurd optimism of survivors. Go see.

  • Monsoon

    Monsoon is about Kit, who left Vietnam as a child with his parents as refugees, returning home after a life in England, to scatter his parents’ ashes. The sense of dislocation he feels in the economically booming and modernising Saigon is tempered somewhat by the company of Louis, an African-American entrepreneur, who he meets for a hook-up, but which deepens into something more.

    The film starts with this real feeling of alienation, as Kit tries to retrace his steps through barely recalled memories to sites important to him and his parents, only to discover they are unrecognisable. He visits a cousin and is unable to speak any Vietnamese to his aunt. Instead of a homecoming, he feels just like any other tourist.

    And that playing with in/out idententies is a theme throughout the film. He brings his cousin shortbread in royal wedding biscuit tin, and then cringes at himself for being such a Westerner. He gets clocked as Vietnamese by a white French guy, who speaks in slow and clear English to him, despite English being his one and only language. And he feels like the war is almost irrelevant to who he is now, but rankles when Louis makes a typically American remark about how hard it was on American soldiers.

    As the movie progresses however, that sense of dislocation from the past is replaced more and more with connection in the present. Vietnam is a place with a future, as is possibly his relationship with Louis.