During a traumatic event, your body switches into fight or flight mode, adrenaline and cortisol coursing. Higher brain functions shut down, including the processing of long-term memory. Which is why people who’ve been through terrible events can sometimes have no memory of it, or only fragments, or can’t remember things until long after. This part of recovery, dealing with remembering or not remembering, is what the film Paris Memories is about.
Mia is sitting in a restaurant when there is a terrorist attack. In the aftermath, everyone wants her to talk about it, to support her with what she’s been through. It seems impossible to communicate to them that she doesn’t know what she’s been through. She doesn’t remember any of it.
At first there are just ghosts, folk she passed in the hall, faces of people she saw, appearing like afterimages in her daily life. When she starts to meet other survivors, she gets snatches of sensations, sounds, glimpses, the feeling of someone holding her hand.
Paris Memories is about the long shadow cast by trauma, how its impact is not simply in its immediate effect, but in how it disrupts people’s very sense of self. Virginie Efira is amazing as ever, but it suffers from the French need to crowbar l’amour into every story.
Daniel is a film about a heavy subject but it handles with sensitivity, thought and empathy. After the suicide of a young lesbian in his religious rural community, local gay artist Daniel tries to organise a tribute to her life, but meets with resistance and prejudice. It is based on a true story.
The titular character is one of the few out gay men in his farming community in Poland. He is so unapologetically himself that he seems have been allowed a place as an exception. Like how a guy I knew once said to me, “All gays are sick in the head, but you’re alright.” It helps that Daniel is a devout Catholic and he makes art which venerates his faith. Cutting about on his motorbike, never out his Adidas rainbow stripe trackies, he has no conflict in his identity as rural and religious, and gay and artistic. He protests for the rights of his rural community just as he protests for the rights of his queer community.
That effortless synthesis of identity begins to fracture after a young girl kills herself. Daniel, perhaps without intention, just through the sheer force of his character, is seen as a mother for local queer youth, he is someone they can go to who will be accepting. When she dies, he feels the weight of the failure to see how much she was struggling, how much pain she was in, how great was her need. He tries to organise for her a religious act called The Ways of the Cross.
Now, maybe like me, you have no idea what The Ways of the Cross is, but the film is able to give enough context that you can see it is an act recognising suffering. How she suffered, how we suffer, how Christ suffers, and how that suffering is not meaningless or in vain and we are not alone in it. Daniel builds a cross that he intends for the whole community to carry and walk with through the village. It is an act which will openly acknowledge the pain she was in, that they caused by their hatred or indifference to it, their collective contrition, and speak to a will to do better. It is intended as an act of healing.
It doesn’t go over like that. The priest explains how he can’t support this for a suicide. Some are appalled at this religious rite being used to promote ‘the gay agenda’ (of you know, living safely with dignity and respect). Others accuse Daniel of capitalising on this tragedy to make it about his art, his opinions, a spectacle. Instead of binding the community together, it only shows up how deep the divides, and the veneer of tolerance is tremulously thin.
The urban, secular queer community take up Daniel’s cross as a piece of art, try to frame it in a city exhibition space, to gawk at and intellectualise. Here Daniel is also alienated, he tries to make them understand that this is not a sculpture using religious iconography to provoke, it is an act of sincere faith.
The film handles the matter so well, giving enormous space to the full gamut of grief, and treating this community as a place with as much nuance, politics, art, culture and social dynamism as the city. A hard but worthwhile watch.
The opening scene of this film tells you everything you need to know about the main character, Howard, and his relationship with his daughter, Grace. She drives out to his house in the arse-end of nowhere, bringing with her a cake for his birthday. He sits in the musty dark of his livingroom, doing the crossword, surrounded by stacks of old newspaper and general detritus and clutter. He doesn’t look when she calls his name, barely glances at the birthday cake she’s brought him. When she goes into the kitchen, it’s full of dirty dishes, rotting food, and a sink full of old drawers for the wash. She’s bought him a washing machine, but he refuses to use it. He gives not a fuck about her, expects her to pick up after him, and won’t even meet her halfway, because why would he? Why would he care how much work he makes for her or how exhausted she is?
He brightens when his sons show up for their annual drop-by, there to enjoy the party after Grace has tidied and cleaned and prepared food for them. They brag about their latest holidays and bring their dad expensive gifts. Then fuck off never to be seen for the rest of the movie, leaving Grace with the day-to-day drudgery of looking after their father.
And I just looked at Howard and thought, “Ye auld bastard”. Auld, dirty, bastard. Probably stinks of piss coz he never bothers to air the house or change his trousers and leaves his washing to pile up for someone else to do. Fucking picked up after all his life, by his mother, then his wife, and now his daughter’s to do it, because of course she is, that’s what she’s for.
Grace is a nurse who works long hours, her marriage is crumbling because, by putting herself last in everything, she’s left her partner alone in their relationship. Every spare minute she has is spent worrying about her father, because he takes no responsibility for looking after himself.
When she hires Annie as a home help, against Howard’s wishes, it’s in the hope it might give her just a fraction of relief. But unexpectedly a romance blooms between Annie and Howard.
This is a love story, but it’s also a lack of love story. Howard spends Christmas with Annie and her family, doesn’t even bother to invite Grace or mention his plans with his new circle, leaving her to turn up as an unwanted guest in own childhood home. At dinner he gives a toast, thanking for all she’s done, all the help she’s been, all the light and love she’s brought into his life, Annie. Grace, invisible at the other end of the table, is the ghost at the feast. Later, when Grace asks what it is about Annie that has turned him around so radically, made him this laughing, joking, story-telling life of the party, he tells Grace that he loves Annie. The implication being that he never made any effort to laugh or joke or be his best self with Grace because he doesn’t love her. It’s so brutal and cold and callous.
The main plot is the love story between Howard and Annie, and Grace’s objections are the hurdle they have to clear. But Grace warns Annie that her father is so enamoured with her now, after she’s come to him as a paid servant, after she’s cooked and cleaned and made him comfortable in all his wants and needs. And while she’s shiny and new, he will be jovial, but Annie should be warned that it will not last. Because he’s a selfish auld bastard and he loves her only in so far as it costs him nothing and serves him. And quite frankly Grace is right on the money.
Annie is a domestic abuse survivor, and Grace’s warning shakes her, because going through something like that makes you constantly question yourself, question your judgement, look with suspicion upon people who profess their love for you. And it would be easier for their romance if Grace was wrong, but she’s not. To the last in this film, Howard puts himself first, his ego, his enjoyment. He is exactly who Grace tells her he is.
In some ways I resented that Howard gets this beautiful romance, because he doesn’t deserve it. But love doesn’t come because we deserve it. This will be the last love of Howard and Annie’s lives. It’s up to them whether to embrace it.
Beautifully shot, beautifully acted, very emotive.
The blurb for this movie describes it as nerve-shredding, and boy does it deliver. So tense. Not been on the edge of my seat like that since watching Land of Mine.
How To Blow Up A Pipeline is about, funnily enough, people blowing up a pipeline. A group of young people from disparate backgrounds come together to take direct action against the oil industry. The film follows the execution of their carefully prepared plan, while showing what led them to this moment in flashbacks.
My worry with the film was that it was going to do the predictable thing, show young people taking direct political action and portray their naivety, their short-sightedness, their ego and lust for a rush. That their valid concerns would be given ‘balance’ with the unthinkable possibility that one person on the other side have a single hair on their head harmed. That this would be an exploration of how people could be lead on such an extreme and misguided path.
That is not this film. How To Blow Up A Pipeline explores the multiple ways this industry is killing people here and now, even as it drives towards our collective annihilation through climate change. It shows indigenous kids trying to prevent the destruction of the last of their land, of folk losing people they love in the heat waves that are already taking hold, of the hopelessness of young people being robbed of their future. This film is not about to balance that by cutting to – what exactly? Some billionaire having his portfolio returns disrupted by fluctuating oil prices? What are you going to balance that with?
I love that the cast reflected the reality that the people doing most of the heavy lifting in the fight against climate change are the people most directly effected and least likely to be in positions of power. Young people of colour, especially women. All the young actors are just great, and make their character clear and distinct, even in a large ensemble cast.
Thoroughly recommend How To Blow Up A Pipeline. Tight, tense and as urgent as its message.
How to sell this film… It has Colin Mochrie in a leather chest harness.
The End of Sex is about Josh and Emma, a middle-aged middle-class couple, who after 10 years of marriage, are experiencing bed death. A week away from their kids for the first time makes them realise that it’s been a long time since they had genuinely satisfying sex together, and increasingly adventurous attempts to spice things up only lead them to dread whether the sexual element of their relationship is even recoverable.
That sounds grim, it’s actually hilarious. Like they decide to have chem sex on MDMA, and then just sit there, staring, wondering where the hell they are gonna find MDMA. They decide to go to an orgy, then just sit there, staring, wondering where the hell they are gonna find an orgy. What I love about it is this juxtaposition of attempting to have care-free sex, while being chronically self-conscious of how awkward it is. Like trying to mingle at a sex club, or approach equally middle-aged, middle-class people in their social circle for a threesome.
Always this is balanced against the safety and understanding of a long relationship where they know each other really well. The familiarity that is really neutering is also incredibly comforting.
I loved the character of Marlon. They’re like, “Wow, you have no filter!” and it’s yeah, he’s clearly autistic as fuck. His flirting reminded me of myself so vividly it was almost too hard to watch.
The End of Sex is a good fun rom-com about long-term relationships, about the ups and downs that beset you after you’ve thought you’ve won and got your happy-ever-after.
Cards on the table, I’m maybe not the best person to review this film. Back in my 20s all my pals got into reading Haruki Murakami, and were like, “You have to read him, you’ll love it!” And I read some, and was like, “Eh… I don’t like this guy.” They were appalled, like I had just said The Godfather was shit or slagged off early Black Sabbath.
Murakami has a very clear literary voice, something which Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman does a very good job of carrying into the film. I just… don’t like that voice. And his depiction of women always makes my skin crawl, attempting to elevate to poetry this sexualisation of sad women, a fetishisation of the noble struggle to negotiate pussy out of these unknowable, mysterious creatures. All of which is to say, I hold opinions which do not make me the most objective judge of this film.
That being said, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is pretty much what I’d expect. It’s masculinity in crisis in a meandering set of virtual non-events.
In the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, two men in Tokyo experience a crisis. Komura’s wife leaves him suddenly, and Katagiri takes a nervous breakdown and starts hallucinating a talking man-sized frog. Komura’s wife briefly has a short vignette telling a story about her 20th birthday, but the majority of the film follows Komura stumbling through the shellshock of his marriage ending. Both Katagiri and Komura’s wanderings are less about events and more a vehicle for introspection as they question the choices they’ve made up until this point.
The film is a mixed bag. Some of the animation is beautiful and to be commended, some of it I could take or leave. It was weird to watch the English dub of what is originally French, because it’s set in Tokyo, and you just feel like they should be speaking Japanese. The drifting, dislocated nature of Komura’s emotional state is communicated effectively, but it doesn’t exactly make for riveting engagement with this character who is insular and numb. Katagiri is more sympathetic because he is so profoundly lonely, but it’s not as if that resolves itself in any satisfying way. So there’s no real emotional pay off for investing in these characters.
I think if you like Murakami, this will be your bag. If you don’t, it won’t. And if you’re coming to this cold with no expectations, it’s going to seem like a lot of nothing happening, which you may or may not enjoy.
