Category: GFF strand – Official Selection

Excellent movie. From the sprawling epic The Odyssey, Uberto Passolini chooses to focus on the final challenge of King Odysseus, when he returns home to find both his home and himself changed. Instead of the spectacle of battle, we get a tense, introspective meditation on the inability to ever really go home again.

Which is not to say that it lacks for drama. King Odysseus arrives on the island of Ithaca as an anonymous shipwreck survivor. The Queen holds out hope that her husband is still alive, and stalls the suitors who vie for her hand. They are a swarm of locusts, arriving with their entourages, nothing but bands of thugs. They want the crown, the island, the wealth of Ithaca, but they pillage the land of food, attack and rape the people, and threaten the lives of the Queen and her son. The Queen is using every tool of diplomacy and custom to put off acquiescing to their demands, but time is running out. And Odysseus seems to have been spared in battle only to see the death knell of his home. He has no men, no weapons, no money, is sick in spirit and weak in body. Does he even want to claim this ruin of a home and does this home want this ruin of a king?

Ralph Fiennes gives a powerful and resonant performance as a man absolutely haunted. He has not simply been lost, he is lost. He has journeyed into war, and brought it with him when he left. It is inside him all the time, and he is terrified it will spill out of him, here on the land he sought to protect.

Juliette Binoche also gives a great performance as Queen Penelope, who as a woman has very few options open to her, and is working with the limited means that are available to her to preserve what is left of peace in the land she is responsible for. She is also trying to keep control over the very personal decision to stay loyal to the memory of her husband, be he dead or alive, be he faithful or wayward. For her, she swore her love and fidelity to him, and she has no wish to do that with any other man. Juliette does a great job of showing her as a woman under the strain of duty, shrewd in playing politics while confined within the feminine sphere, but deeply wounded from a very personal loss.

While the setting and story are ancient, The Return speaks to the timeless and universal experience of the veteran’s return, of the incommunicability of the experience of war to those who have not seen it, of the distance which grows within families as a natural consequence of separation, of how unrecognisable you may become to others and even yourself.

This film is doing a thing, the thing is just not for me.

Richard Herring once did an hour-long set just stretching out one joke about yoghurt. This is like that, only it’s about Linda McCartney vegetarian ready meals, in film form. This feels like an Edinburgh Fringe show that ran on a bare stage at midnight and absolutely killed it, but does not work when taken out of that environment and put into a movie.

The blurb for this film is that this about when Stevie Wonder went to Paul McCartney’s home on the Mull of Kintyre where they wrote Ebony and Ivory back in 1981. It’s not. Literally nothing in the film is about that. Again, the comedy in the film feels like a £4 Tuesday night Raw Improv at the Stand, where someone’s gotta pretend to be obsessed with hot cocoa, can’t say a word containing the letter e, and also you’re Stevie Wonder talking to Paul McCartney – go!

There are 5 jokes in this film. They are:

• Vegetarian ready meals by the wife (breaded nuggets)
• Wee Billy’s Big Wee Fizzy Beer
• Doobie woobie
• Wearing a merkin with a long willy
• Bah

Each joke is given about 20 minutes of monotonous repetition before moving on, occasionally to only to come back to it again for another round later. It’s the kind of endurance comedy of Stewart Lee’s Shilbottle bit, only it just doesn’t land.

Again, it’s a context thing. I think I might have enjoyed this with the two of them standing motionless on stage with a live audience feeling the collective tension of “when will it end and will there be a punchline?” but I just watched a man bahing for the better part of half an hour, and thought in exhaustion, “cinema can do almost anything…”

To be honest, I didn’t like it, but I did respect it. I could see what it was trying to do, even if it failed. I just feel like it was in the wrong medium.

My favourite film of the festival so far!

So funny. Just great. Stellar cast. So identifiable.

Edward is caring for his elderly mother Alma, who is paralysed down one side and has lost the ability to speak, save for using the text-to-speech app on her ipad. She doesn’t let that stop her though, making her will known. She can boss him about just as easily with a computer-generated voice, and anyone else for that matter.

He and his three pals are all middle-aged, gay and single, and quietly panicking about it. In an attempt to recapture their care-free 20s, his pals jet off to Maspalomas Pride for the weekend, leaving their wee mammies with Edward.

Edward spends the weekend trying to manage four intractable, strong-minded elderly women, and moving to the backburner some big upcoming decisions about his career. I love that Alma isn’t happy about the situation either, not enjoying her home being taken over by strangers one jot.

And this review can’t go on any further without me saying it, how amazing Irish national treasure Fionnula Flanagan is as Alma. Fionnula doesn’t ever physically speak a line in this movie, and yet she manages to have brilliant comedy timing. What she manages to convey with absolute clarity, by turns scathing, by turns hilarious, using just her face is something that is only possible when you have spent 60 years honing your craft as a highly regarded actor. An absolute gem!

Edward is facing renewed interest in his debut novel, which was about young gay love and coming-of-age in Dublin. This kinda underlines that the usual gay story you see in media is always the coming out story, always young people struggling with the expectations of heteronormativity from family, always defying their parents to break free. Four Mothers in contrast is about the return. What happens after? When, after the tumult of rejection or acceptance, your parents get old like everybody else.

What I love about seeing more films like this, is that there are films like this. The absence of these kinda stories is because most people faced complete rejection and an end to the relationships with their parents, and because the media was only interested in portraying homosexuals who died tragically young. Out queer people having stories about caring for their elderly parents in their middle-age is something I am so glad to be seeing on screen.

This film is so good. If any of you have a mother over in Ireland, you will recognise so much in this film. Crashing the wakes of total strangers, avidly following the funeral announcements, being taken in by any old shite on Facebook, commanding immediate and complete compliance with the drawing of a stern look. I loved it all so much!

Please go see it, it’s exactly the kind of good laugh you need.

Hold onto your seat because this is the film you’ve all been waiting for, a movie about an English DJ in Spain who falls for his manic pixie dream girl. She dies, so he takes an experimental drug to allow him to have lucid dreams where he can be with her. It’s an after-life rom-com.

This movie is like Jessica Jones season 1, but if Kilgrave was the main character and didn’t realise he was a villain. It’s like no one making the film understood that a guy who has god-like powers to shape reality, whose continued interest in you is literally the only thing keeping you from oblivion, and who, if you start to show your own sentience, will literally delete emotions and memories from you, is the stuff of women’s nightmares. This guy is a monster.

It is really hard to talk about the characters in this movie, because there is really only one character in this movie, the main guy, Nicolas. You never actually meet Daniela. She is only shown as a smiling, glowing memory that makes him feel good about himself, and then as his projection of something to fulfil his desires in his dreams. Who she actually is without him is something we never see, and the writer doesn’t think is important to show.

There are secondary characters who pop in and out to help Nicolas with his problems, but like Daniela, they are just there to serve his drives. This is true across everyone and everything, both in his waking and dream worlds, until even his wildest dreams of constant and immediate wish-fulfillment start to dissatisfy him. What I took away from the film was how profoundly lonely and empty it is to see yourself as the only real person, and other people as only existing as tools for you to use to fulfil your wants and needs.

Nicolas doesn’t use the drug as directed, instead spending longer and longer in the dreamworld with Daniela, until Daniela eventually gains true sentience. Whereupon she starts to annoy, bore or defy him, so he just speeds up, skips or deletes her inconvenient self-expressions. And the film conveys none of the horror of that, or suggests that there might be anything morally questionable about Nicolas’s actions. At one point, Daniela tries to leave him for her ex, and he fully deletes the memory of her ex from her, and commands her to love only him.

Having said my piece about all that, what else is there to say about this film? The writing is bad, the dialogue is constantly stating the obvious, and then repeating it several times, as though it thinks the audience is too stupid to keep up. The main character takes so fucking long to work out what is happening with the lucid dreaming stuff, I mean it’s the premise of the movie and it takes ages to get going. There are parts that are supposed to funny and just aren’t.

I think the main lead doesn’t help. I spent the first half-hour wondering if the writing was bad or he was just bad, but the answer is both. He is hair-pullingly melodramatic, daytime soap opera levels of reactions. When he’s not doing that, if the scene doesn’t have a dramatic incident, he is flat, looking like he’s lost interest in what’s going on as much as I have.

If you are looking for a film at the festival that shows people dealing with grief and retreating into their own psyche, watch My Dead Friend Zoe. If you wanna see a movie about how to process trauma, move on and change and grow, don’t watch this film, because the main character doesn’t really do any of that.

I am aware this has been a particularly bitchy review on my part, but if I have an excuse, it’s the narcissism that runs through this movie like a stick of rock.

What a rollercoaster!

The Luckiest Man in America is about a guy who goes on a morning game show and becomes the record-breaking biggest winner in the show’s history. Going into the film, I was like, sounds interesting, but I’m not sure if it’s enough drama for a full movie. Oh, it’s plenty of drama, enough and more.

Michael Larson shows up for auditions to his favourite morning quiz show. My sympathy was with him instantly, because on sight I was like, oh, this guy’s autistic af. My wee heart went out to him, standing in a tshirt and shorts looking as uncomfortable as all get-out, and all these slick casting executives laughing up their sleeves at his honest sincerity and over-eager enthusiasm for the show. It was the 80s too, so all anybody understands him as is ‘off’.

They tell him to come back the next day in a smart jacket with a trimmed beard and combed hair. So he does come back the next day with a trimmed beard, combed hair and smart jacket . . . and the same shorts. My auty from another hotty, I see you.

What the film does really well is keep you off-balance with Michael himself. The executives start scrambling as the numbers he’s winning just keep racking up, and they start digging into who exactly this guy is. He says he’s a down-on-his-luck middle-aged ice cream truck driver with a wife and kids at home, but is everything as above-board as he’s painting it? Is he cheating somehow? Is he a scammer?

The film does an excellent of job of keeping you guessing through the twists and turns of the story, as those who hold the purse strings scramble to manage the unstoppable train of Michael’s wins. Just a really well-told little tale.

This film starts with the burning of a barn and ends with the burning of a world.

This is being billed as a folk horror and it’s not. It’s a kitchen sink drama. At the end of harvest, a fire burns down the barn of the benevolent landowner. Master Kent, played by Harry Melling, has gone half-native in this idyllic Scottish village. Even his own manservant, Walt, played by the redoubtable Caleb Landry Jones, has married a local woman and now tills the soil. The breaking apart of their little haven takes place over the course of a week.

The morning after the burning, they come across 3 strangers of their land, darker-skinned and foreign. The villagers fall upon them and put the two men in the stocks and shear the woman’s hair. But is the enemy these outsiders? Or is the enemy among them?

Spoilers! *drumroll* The enemy is the class system.

Caleb Landry Jones gives, as always, a really solid performance, but this film is too long, and feels full of stuffing. There is a lot of dancing around the point, in a way that just felt totally unnecessary and added nothing.

Okay, some ground rules for going into this movie. It is about a U.S. veteran, so it is set firmly in the American unquestioned, unchallenged veneration of the military. So no asking obvious questions beyond the frame in which this story is told. Once you accept those ground rules, this is actually a solidly good movie about trauma and grief.

Sonequa Martin-Green and Natalie Morales make this movie by building a truly believable friendship at its heart. Sonequa plays Merit, middle-class and hoping to go to college after serving. Natalie plays Zoe, someone with no money, prospects, or support system on the outside. The friendship they form while deployed in Afghanistan together is one of the best things in each other’s lives. The two leads instantly gel on screen, they bicker and banter and get in one another’s space, they are so comfortable together. The writing and their performances leave you with a clear impression of the depth of care, trust and love they have.

But the movie’s not called My Friend Zoe, it’s called My Dead Friend Zoe. The film begins with Merit struggling with life after the military, doing court-appointed group therapy for PTSD, which she is not engaging with at all. She is haunted by Zoe, who is her constant companion, making wise cracks, and taking the piss out the therapy group. The film shows beautifully the retreat into grief, the self-isolation and unwillingness to move on, because while you don’t, you get to hold them close a little longer.

Merit’s guilt at surviving is palpable, and that’s why I think this film is so easily identifiable, all the military stuff aside. Because once they are dead, everybody acts like it was inevitable, unavoidable, and they will tell you it wasn’t your fault. But they weren’t there and they don’t know, and in the time before, there were lots of ways it could have gone and lots of things you could have done, and you know that if you had done things differently, things would be different. Merit’s reaction to well-worn advice is so recognisable, we are all so used to the same handful of platitudes, and you can hear how it wasn’t your fault a hundred times, but it means nothing until you actually believe it.

I’m making this film sound like a dirge of misery and it’s actually not. The journey Merit goes on is one of reconnecting with her family and becoming open to the possibility of making new relationships, but it is kept in constant flux with the urge to hold onto this beautiful thing from the past and live there instead of the present. And Zoe is fun, you get why you would try to keep her ghost for as long as possible.

It’s because Zoe and Merit’s friendship is so warm and fun that the ending hits so hard. Zoe’s death is an established fact, and Merit’s trauma over it has been explored, that by the end you think everything has been telegraphed so completely, it couldn’t possibly be the gut punch that it in fact delivers. I was crying. It’s very moving, and very identifiable. Genuinely a very good movie about grief.

I think Four Little Adults is meant to be a comedy but it’s Finnish so I can’t be sure.

Polyamory explored through the lens of the most boring, middle-class, middle-aged white couple you ever met. And by explore, I mean, kinda just point to the fact it exists, and use all the characters and plot as vehicles to do that. Like with The Teacher, the film is so much about what the filmmaker wants to say that the characters are barely sketches, don’t feel remotely like real people, and it instead just feels like sock puppets talking at you.

The plot is this: uncomplicatedly good Equality Party politician, Juulia catches her husband Matias, the local vicar, having an affair with a single mother in his parish. In the space of a fortnight she goes from utterly heartbroken about this to deciding they should all now have a polyamorous relationship. Cue literally sitting about the kitchen table.

For her part, Juulia goes out and picks up genderqueer Miska who is half her age. I’ll pause here to say Miska’s lip sync to Lost on You is the highlight of this entire movie, and the only moment in the whole film that ripples with actual desire, despite the multiple fully nude sex scenes it has. So kudos to Pietu Wikstrom who plays Miska for that.

One of the comedy features of this film is how the adults begin to act as children as the film progress, dealing with complicated feelings by hiding under their bedcovers, climbing on each other’s lap for hugs, and sitting down in the street, back straight and kegs akimbo like a toddler. I suppose its meant to indicate this idea that we never really grow up, that our emotions are still as fragile, and that these new experiences their polyamorous relationship has brought up means they are feeling everything new, raw and intense the way little kids do as they come to terms with the world. In reality, I just saw it as saying the polyamorous relationship was infantilising, unwittingly underscoring the points made by outside characters opposed to it, who were telling them to grow up, to realise adulthood means making sacrifices and not getting everything you want. So whatever the filmmaker was trying to do with this as a metaphor, it was counterproductive.

I guess this film wants points for painting polyamory in a good light and having a happy ending. God knows there are few enough of those around. But it still uses the trope that polyamory is a response to men’s infidelity, even if the primary drive for it comes from Juulia. And it is just all round patronising and has nothing intelligent to say on the subject. It’s also just not a good movie. It’s like the filmmaker said, “I wanna make a film that shows polyamory positively” and they did that and only that.

This film isn’t really worth your time, in my opinion, other films have done what this does before and better.

Have you heard the one about Louis C.K.?

Sorry/Not Sorry traces the fall and rise of Louis C.K. following the exposure of his history sexually harassing women. It talks to the women who spoke out, and subsequently received a slew of hate, and juxtaposes this against Louis selling out Madison Square Gardens, winning a Grammy, and releasing popular comedy specials where he walks on to standing ovations.

The documentary is very matter-of-fact. It just lays out the events, lets victims speak for themselves, and shows the media shitstorm around it. There’s no narration, you are left to form your own thoughts, ask your own questions.

For me, the big takeaway was our culture’s response to sexual violence only builds on and makes worse the harm done to victims.

Jen Kirkman talks about Louis’s interaction with her as being mostly weird and gross, but when she spoke out about it, suddenly she was inundated with hate, and every piece of press she did for her own career became sucked into a vortex of answering questions about Louis. She took down the episode of her podcast where she talked about it, stopped doing press for her shows, and eventually tried to back track on what she’d said so it would stop.

Men’s violence comes to be the defining story of women’s lives. No matter what you do, what you achieve, your story will always be That One Woman Who This Happened To. Like, when you die, the obituary headline will be ‘Famous Guy Accuser passes away’. Perpetrators come to completely eclipse their victims.

Sorry/Not Sorry is like a bingo card of the standard responses for insulating perpetrators from any repercussions of their actions. I have here “It’s just rumours, random tweets on the internet, so I don’t need to take it seriously”. And next out we have “If this was real why haven’t women spoken out?” Here comes “These women who speak out just want attention and publicity.” Bingo!

In Louis C.K.’s case, that whole process got short circuited when he issued a formal statement admitting all the accusations were true. You’d think that would stop it, right? If even the dude comes out and says all these women are telling the truth and I did exactly what they say.

WRONG.

When Louis C.K. went on tour with his show Sorry, he talked up how the women had consented to these interactions, something that was categorically false, he didn’t get a yes from anyone. And other comedians piled on, with Dave Chapelle talking about Abby Schachner, who spoke out about Louis masturbating while on a phone call with her, as “a brittle ass spirit” and said, “Bitch, you don’t know how to hang up the phone?” The victims became the punchline.

The bottom line is, Louis C.K. did what he did because he knew he had nothing to fear from doing so. And the victims were afraid to speak out because they knew they had plenty to fear from doing so.

Sorry/Not Sorry illustrates perfectly how the chat about how we are living in a new era for victim is bullshit. The dial didn’t move in their favour one iota.

A dark fairytale from France.

19th century gothic novella The Family of the Vourdalak gets a Hammer Horror-esque adaptation in this satisfying vampire yarn. Simpering fop Marquis de blah de blah is mugged while being sent as a French court envoy across Eastern Europe. He is told he can get himself a new horse at the home of a peasant named Gorcha. But when he finds it, Gorcha is missing, and his family are weird, unwelcoming and afraid of something. And when Gorcha returns we realise why.

An old school horror with practical effects and a skeletal puppeteered monster as Gorcha. The whole film is confined to the old farmhouse that serves as Gorcha’s home, and the surrounding woods. A simple story, so traditional the tension comes from the inevitable sense of doom rather than twists and jump scares.

Kacey Mottet Klein plays the Marquis beautifully, moving fluidly from his comical buffoonery to his genuine terror. The costume as well is just great, from the Marquis’s silk jacket and knee-high stockings, to his love interest’s green gown with its embroidered flowers seeming to grow up from the ground. A film that hits the bullseye of what it’s trying to be.