Category: GFF strand – Gala

Genuinely really lovely, warm, uplifting film.

I’m not a sports fan, a football fan, a cycling fan. So you might not expect me to go in for a film about football fans cycling to Germany to see Scotland play in the Euros. I wouldn’t expect it from myself, but this film just transcends all of that, because it is about the warmth and positivity of this young boy, the friends that go with him on this journey, and the people from all over who give him their support. If you just want a feel-good movie, this is for you.

The film follows Ethan Walker, an eighteen year old, who had trained his whole life to be a footballer. Just as things seemed to start taking off for him, and he’s playing in the States, he’s hit by a car, sustaining life threatening injuries. Now if you read the synopsis, it just says serious injury, but when you see the state of him, it’s a wonder he’s alive. He was a hair’s breadth from death. He had two brain bleeds, he couldn’t swallow on his own, he couldn’t talk, his wrist was broken, his pelvis fractured, his knee was wrecked. Like, the collision shattered the bones you need to stand, and he had a very serious brain injury.

That was September. In June he decided to cycle to Germany.

I was a bit worried going into it, that the film would be a bit smaltzy. I don’t think anybody was more worried about that than Ethan, because the film shows him as a real down-to-earth guy, who, to be honest, is a bit uncomfortable getting attention, even if he appreciates the support. Whenever he gets congratulated on his remarkable recovery, or even just the literal fact he’s cycling 1200km, he defaults to that Scottish man mumbling self-deprecation. He doesn’t think it’s a big deal. He’s be mortified by smaltz.

Lucky then that the movie is just bang-on, a road trip with plenty of humour and camaraderie. Not a smidge of smaltz in sight.

Give this film a try, even if you think it’s not your thing, because it really is just a lovely watch.

This is a horror movie.

Long Day’s Journey Into Night is based on the Eugene O’Neill play, and it very much feels like a filmed play, with everything taking place in one location, the family home, over the course of a day.

The film begins cheerily enough, with a mother, father and their two sons gathered around the table for breakfast. A well-to-do middle class family in a fine house with servants and a beautiful sea view high on a hill. But the undercurrent of tension, recrimination, and fear isn’t long in making itself felt.

Jessica Lange is stunning and heart-breaking as Mary, the matriarch, a woman who has been destroyed by morphine, loneliness, and the steady accumulation of woes that comes with living long enough. It’s not an easy role, Mary is not a sighing, helpless victim, the writing doesn’t cheat at making her likeable by making her an object of pity. Mary is ugly, mean-spirited, her whole character swallowed by the morphine, sporting the profound selfishness of the addict. She meditates on her wrongs and resentments while high, growing so full of poison, she bursts, filling her family’s life with constant tirades about how they have ruined her happiness, how they have failed her, how blighted she is by them.

And it’s despite this, you still come to break your heart for her. Beautiful writing and an excruciatingly sensitive performance by Jessica show Mary hopelessly lost and desperately trying to hold onto her sense of self. A frantic scratching and scraping through her memories to recover how she came to be this way, when it all went wrong, and who is to blame. And with each horrific stinging spiteful thing she barks at those around her is a splinter of love she went looking for in her ruins.

And that is what makes the hurt all the sharper. Because they do love each other, all. The sons support and care for one another as they both endure their home-life. The father James (played by Ed Harris giving arguably the performance of his career) loves his wife, and desperately wishes he could save her from this sickness, living with the aching loss of her while she is still in front of him, touching her and being unable to reach her. And all have this shared sense of camaraderie, all isolated in this house on the hill, their shame known only to each other, all drowning together. Even Mary, at times will awake to see the man she fell in love with, the children she cradled with tenderness, and then the moment will pass, like the clouds over the sun, and she will once again be fighting the battles of the past, all gone now and beyond remedy.

Mary is haunted, by loneliness, by loss, by mortality and the spectre of death. Her helplessness in the face of her addiction, her spiralling tirades back and back and back again to the old resentments, the behaviour she swears off then repeats, she is a woman trapped by her past, doomed to constantly relive it, to the destruction of the present. But, as she says, “The past is the present, isn’t it? And the future too”.

And that’s what makes this a horror movie. An exquisitely written family drama, but a horror story none the less. This is a haunted house, filled with ghosts, and they are all the breathing people who live there. What is Mary’s existence but a living nightmare? What is that of the others, driven to drink to stay sane in the face of her madness? Each of them assigned their roles long, long ago, from birth even, and never allowed to move on from their assigned parts. Never permitted to have any other character than what everyone has decided for them, never know themself in any other way than through the fractured lens of a fractured woman.

The fact this gruelling autopsy of a family is but a day’s work in the long line of days stretching out before them, it’s enough to instill a terror of life as strong as that of death. Excellent film.

This is just a bad day for everyone across the board.

Tornado is set almost entirely over one day in which things go wrong very fast, then just keep getting worse. At one point a character slips, goes down and breaks their arm, and instead of it seeming contrived, you just think, “Yup. It’s that kinda day.”

A combination of bad luck and bad choices leads to disaster for the titular character Tornado. It’s Scotland in 1790 and Tornado and her father set up their travelling puppet show on the side of a road. Folk stop to watch the show, including some bandits on their way back from a job with a huge stolen fortune. All it takes is a little boy pickpocketing the crowd to turn it into everyone’s worst day.

Tim Roth plays Sugarman, the leader of the gang of bandits, comfortable in a familiar role as the hardened criminal dispensing casual brutality, and very fun to watch. Jack Lowden plays Little Sugar, son of Sugarman and possibly the only person who hates Sugarman as much as his victims. Rory McCann plays the muscle of the outfit as Kitten, while Dennis Okwera plays Pyscho, the deadly blade of the group. Okwera looks so cool this whole movie, in a badass outfit, being really intimidating, and I was disappointed when he didn’t get a single line or even seem lit properly in a lot of his shots. Felt he was underused.

Koki plays Tornado, a petulant teenager who has to do all her growing up in one day. Tornado has learnt from her father the fighting style of the samurai, and when it seems darkest before the dawn, she must turn to this training to seek her revenge. It’s great to see a samurai movie set in Scotland, but I always forget that every samurai movie is 10% samurai-ing and 90% waiting to samurai.

Nonetheless, the film is good fun.

That was so much fun.

Set in 1989, Kristen Stewart plays Lou, a mean butch who runs a gym and chain-smokes constantly. Into her life comes Jackie, a muscle babe bodybuilder disaster bi. True to form, they move in together after their first night in bed, and love is in air. Things would be great were it not for Lou’s brother-in-law, a wife-beating scumbag, played to creeshie, skeevy perfection by Dave Franco. Cue crime noir thriller with romantic angst and more than a hint of humour.

Now, I’ve heard this film get compared to Thelma and Louise. I cannot state how much I disagree with that. Thelma and Louise is almost a fable, the noble heroines are beset on all sides by shitty men, and their struggle illustrates the impossible and unfair life for women in our world.

This is not that.

This is a deliciously fucked-up dark romance with complex, flawed, and extremely morally dubious characters, in which no one’s hands are clean, and you just pick your favourite bastard to win. Finally, some representation for the queer hot mess!

Beautifully shot, cinematic looking as fuck, with a lens for the queer gaze, and sizzlingly hot. *bangs pans* Get your murder wives here!

Closing Gala this year is Polite Society, a film about sisterhood and flying kicks.

Ria is a young lassie who dreams of growing up to be a stuntwoman. The only person who encourages her in this is her big sister, Lena. Lena is an artist but has recently dropped out of art school to lie around the house depressed. The only thing that gets her out her bed is Ria dragging her to film her stunts in the back garden. They adore each other, and Ria is convinced they both will ascend to unparalleled success in their fields.

But her world is turned upside when a rich, charming, handsome doctor swoops in to make Lena his wife. Desperate to stop this marriage, which looks to put an end to Lena’s life as an artist, and take her away from the home she shares with Ria, Ria puts her stuntwoman skills to good use and fights for her sister.

Feel good fun film, with plenty of jokes and martial arts, cool set pieces, and everything bright, loud, colourful, ridiculous and joyous!

From the director of powerful and nuanced short film Expensive Shit, comes Adura Onashile’s first feature film, Girl. An emotional portrait of a young girl and her mother, living in a Glasgow high-rise.

Firstly, beautiful. Stunning cinematography, you know when a shot can only be described as delicious?

Secondly, powerful performances. This isn’t a film driven by events, but one that asks you to sit in the characters’ emotional state. It has a more meditative pacing and tone. The journey of the film isn’t one you can chart from plot point to plot point, but one that invites you into the interiority of the characters, where so much is expressed even without dialogue.

Grace is Ama’s mother. She’s a young woman, only 25, and raising Ama alone. Fiercely protective of her 11-year old daughter, Grace has come to the attention of social work as she has been keeping Ama out if school. The trauma that caused her to fall pregnant at 14, that has left its mark on her in panic attacks and periods of dissociation, is never explicitly stated, but is conveyed through its impact on her relationship with her daughter.

They have a tight-knit bond, deeply loving, but blighted by the burden of Grace’s trauma being handed onto her daughter. Grace is trying to be invisible, doesn’t trust anyone, and it’s this that causes her to isolate herself as well as Ama. Ama is confined to their flat much of the time, and her tentative friendship with another girl at school is seen as a potential vector for the ingress of danger into their lives. Without intention, Grace’s protection of Ama veers into controlling and abusive.

What marks this film is the profound empathy it has for its characters. Despite highlighting the damaging impact of generational trauma, no judgement is placed on Grace. She is a very young woman who has survived god knows what, and is coping as best she can. And it’s not as if her fears are unfounded. Everything she’s worried about could happen. She plucks Ama’s underarm hair and refuses to let her wear deodorant, and while it seems extreme, you understand what she is doing, don’t let them smell it on you, don’t let them believe you are now fair game. It’s infantilising but the threat she’s trying to protect Ama from is one she herself has experienced first hand.

What’s great about Girl is there is no need to underline things. Without having to state anything explicitly, you can see the dangers of being a young, Black girl on the cusp of puberty, from an immigrant background and living in a high poverty neighbourhood. Girl doesn’t try to explain gender, class and race to you, like you’ve never heard of it before. It allows the characters to just be, without needing to explain themselves to the audience as an observer.

I also loved that Girl explores generational trauma without having to make anyone the villain. The damage this is doing to Ama is mirrored in the damage it has done and is still doing to Grace. Grace is equally the Girl of the film’s title as much as Ama. And because there is such genuine love between the mother and daughter, there is hope this can be overcome. That it is possible to heal.

Just a thoroughly moving film, deftly using the visual language of filmmaking and superb performances to take us on a journey of the invisible, the unspoken.

Murina is the story of Julia, a teenage girl under the thumb of her controlling, abusive father. They live on this idyllic Croatian island, across the sea from Italy. Everything looks like paradise, but for Julia, it’s a gilded cage.

At the start of the movie, Julia goes along with her father’s commands, but her compliance is more the weary exhaustion of an unpleasant status quo. Inside her spirit is unbroken. She knows her father is wrong, she believes her and her mother deserve better.

Then better seems to arrive in the form of Javi. He is her father’s old friend, from their days as young men. He seems to have been a rival for her mother’s affections back in the day. He is a billionaire now, and her father has brought him to the island to bilk him for money with a phoney investment.

When Javi shows up, Julia looks at her mother like, “You had a chance to marry him, and you chose Dad?!” Javi is everything her father is not, kind, considerate, romantic, charming, proficient and wealthy. He is encouraging of Julia and praises her qualities. Julia’s clearly not had this much positivity in her life for a long time, and despite her initial hesitancy, begins to think he is her way out.

Her mother’s a bit more of a dark horse. She and Javi have history, and although she flirts with him and remembers their time together, she is not serious about running away with him. Unlike Julia, she doesn’t have an idealised version of who he might be, she knows who he is. And for whatever reason, has chosen her husband over him. At first she and Julia are on the same page, being charmed by Javi, but they start to diverge as she realises Julia is serious about getting away. She tries to warn Julia that Javi is full of pretty words, but he won’t be there for them, unlike her father. For her, she would rather stay with an abusive man who is determined to keep her, than a kinder man who might let her down and leave her.

Leon Lucev expertly plays the repugnant father. He is narcissistic, petulant, bragging, spiteful, and domineering. He has the mood swings and temper of a child. He sees his wife and daughter merely as extensions of his will whose purpose is to meet his wants and wishes. Despite his rigid control over his wife, he allows her to flirt with Javi as an ends to luring the money from him.

The opening scene of the film is Julia and her father spearfishing murina, the moray eel. While it hides in rocks and crevices, it is a violent prey, and if trapped, will bite at its own flesh to free itself. Julia is the murina of the film’s title. This story is how she bites at her confines, and the lengths she is willing to go to to be free.

A stylish noir locked room drama. Taking place entirely inside a tailor shop in 1950s Chicago, it follows Leonard, played by the excellent Mark Rylance, as he tries to survive the night.

The Boyle Crew are at war with the La Fontaines, and are paranoid about a rat in their midst. Leonard and his receptionist and pseudo daughter, Mable, live a relatively quiet life plying their trade, despite more than a few of their customers being the city’s gangsters. But that boundary is crossed one night when the son of the head of the Boyle crime family bursts through the door with a gun shot wound. Aided by his lieutenant Francis, played to perfection by Johnny Flynn, the bleeding Richie demands to be sheltered and helped by Leonard. Added to the ticking clock of Richie’s wounds, is the valuable cassette in Francis’s suitcase, which will supposedly reveal the identity of the rat.

The twists and turns of the night keeps Leonard on his toes. While the mobsters are tooled to the teeth, he must survive using nothing but his wits.

I liked watching this, I liked its look and the tension in the scenes. I liked Rylance and Flynn’s performances as well as that of Simon Russell Beale as the Boyle mob boss. It’s a really enjoyable watch and it keeps you going through the 2 hours easy.

But. It actually doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. The twists go back and forth long after it stops making sense. Like, if you were actually to sit down and say what happens, it just sounds like a series of highly unlikely coincidences and illogical decisions. Now that’s fine, coz it’s fun. But it takes a lot of cloth wholesale from Rope and Bound and others of that ilk. And unlike those films, where the villain essentially undoes themselves through their own character flaws, their arrogance, their pride, The Outfit’s villains don’t really have characters, they’re just tropes of the gangster genre. They’re undone by being outsmarted by Leonard, rather than their own faults, which I think gives Leonard too much power and downplays the peril.

All in all, a really enjoyable and slick watch. Just don’t think about it too much.

Spring Blossom is a film about a 16-year-old schoolgirl’s first love. It’s written, directed and starred in by Suzanne Lindon, so this is obviously her vision of a youthful romantic fantasy. Trouble is, the object of her affection is a much older man.

I guess in France there are different sensibilities about these things. Young love and age gaps are maybe not inherently viewed with suspicion the way they are here. But her love interest, Raphael, is never mentioned to be a specific age, which kind of strikes a note of wariness. I mean, he looks like he’s in his mid-30s. I wondered if they were trying to pass him off as 25, just as Suzanne’s character is obviously younger than she is. He certainly isn’t 20 or something approaching excusable. Certainly Raphael seems to be going through some kind of mid-life crisis, or lull, so you would expect him to be in his 30s at least. Looking up the actor who plays him on IMDB, I see he’s 36. So, yeah, over twice the age of this love interest.

While Lindon is obviously writing a romantic fantasy from the perspective of a naïve girl who finds the experience mesmerising and positive, I can only write from my own perspective, and it gave me the ick. The idea a man this age would take an interest in a schoolgirl, the fact he would pursue her even after he finds out how young she is, the fact he’s an actor and she’s his teenage fan, just yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck. Also at one point she buys a 10-pence mix-up, and he says she looks cute eating sweeties. Boke. He at no point addresses the age difference or has any reservation or thoughts about entering a sexual relationship with a school-aged teenager. There is a scene where they dance together which is clearly meant to be a metaphor for her first time, and at one point she drops to her knees and he guides her head with his hands in visual metaphor for fellatio, and everything about the scene, the music, the way it’s filmed, the graceful, half-sleepy dance of the actors, is supposed to tell you this is beautiful, but it just made my skin crawl.

Spring Blossom is a film very much in the French tradition, it’s romantic, it’s carefree, it revels in discovery and coming-of-age, it’s more fantasy than reality. If that’s your thing, wire in.

Pleasant story of friendship on the frontier. Cookie teams up with King-Lu and they try to make a living out in Oregon in the 1820s. King-Lu is an ideas man and an entrepreneur, and Cookie is, well, a cook and a baker. When the rich English dandy in charge of the territory brings the first cow into the region in order to have cream in his tea, Cookie and Lu take to milking it at night in order to sell cakes at market.

First Cow is really a folk hero tale. It’s the little guy sticking it to the big guy. But anyone familiar with folk hero legends know they only end one of two ways.

When Lu is introduced, you really find out everything you need to know about this story, about who Lu is, about what kinda place this is. Also the movie overtly starts with the end, so there’s no surprises. Still a nice yarn. Got a warm and kindly feel to it.

Also, for Rene Auberjonois fans, he has a very small part in this, but it is lovely to see him in his last role.