Vengeance

This film reminded me of Calvary, in its strange indecision about whether it was satire or horror. Overall I am glad that I saw it - the first scene a5 a party on a New York rooftop is one of the funniest send-ups of self-obsessed ambitious bubble dwelling urban youth that I've ever seen. Hundred per cent as the characters in it would say.

The Texan characters meanwhile recalled the family in the Australian film The Castle. The New Yorkers' attitude to them is that of 19th century travellers to exotic locations on encountering strange local fauna. There is a lot of comedy wrought from the contrast between cityfolk and countryfolk.

And then kerboom, just like Calvary, the film turns unimaginably dark.

And then it ends.

Hmm. Something of a jolt of discontinuity there - possibly intended, but it seemed clumsy to me.

Never mind - in addition to the funny opening scene, the film is worth seeing for Ashton Kuchner's performance. I've never seen him before but in this movie he is wonderful.

Last Looks

This film is a highly enjoyable caper movie. It has no agenda other than to entertain, and I found it very entertaining. A rare thing these days. I recommend it, if you want to have a little fun.

Sunset (Napszállta)

Having seen Laszlo Nemes's first feature film, Son of Saul, which was superb, I was excited to see Sunset, his new release. Unfortunately, my excitement was misplaced.

Sunset is set in 1913 in Budapest. A young woman, Irisz, turns up at a prosperous hat emporium to ask for a job, revealing that she trained in hat making in Trieste and is the daughter of the original owners of the Budapest hat business, who, we eventually discover, died in a fire.

The new owner first tells her she cannot have a job, then puts her up in the business's hostel for milliners, where she is disturbed in the night, not by bed bugs as the man who runs the place warns her she will be, but by a maniac called Gaspar, who then leaps out the window, setting the curtains on fire as he goes.

Irisz then discovers that she has a brother who is some kind of brigand. She sets off to find out more, after an encounter with a drug-addled countess, whose husband was murdered by said brother.

Irisz witnesses the countess's rape by a dastardly Austrian, and then is almost raped herself by her brother's colleagues. There is a great deal of rattling about in carriages drawn by wild horses and hordes of people running through streets carrying flaming torches. There is frantic rowing across rivers and general mayhem, all intercut with the contrasting calm of the hat salon itself - although it is actually the centre of corruption, where young milliners are sold off each year to barefooted and depraved Austrian princelings.

In Son of Saul, Nemes filmed with an intensely close focus on the protagonist, leaving everything not actually immediately around that character a dreadful blur. This made sense in a death camp and seemed to me to be a way of expressing the impossibility of surviving such a hell without screening out as much as possible from your mind. However, it turns out that this is just how Nemes films, regardless of whether his subject is the greatest crime ever committed by humanity or just a melodrama about a hat business. In Sunset, the cameraman runs after Irisz, keeping her - or the back of her neck - almost constantly in tight focus, while turn of the century Budapest rushes by in a blur. To discover that the blurring in Son of Saul was not a deliberate choice, intended to indicate horror, but just a stylistic tick rather undermines my admiration for that film.

Nemes attempts to link his ridiculous story to the decline - or "sunset" - of the Habsburg empire and turn of the century European civilisation. In the final scene, we see Irisz, now a boy (??!?), alone in the trenches of World War One. She stares at the camera with exactly the same expression she has worn throughout the film. I stared back, furious at being tricked into watching such a piece of twaddle.

As a positive, the hats are nice - but so are the hats in My Fair Lady, and that film is much more fun. And if you want to see a really enjoyable Hungarian melodrama, I would suggest Kincsem, rather than Sunset. The great joy of Kincsem, is that it has absolutely no pretensions. It is entertaining rubbish, whereas Sunset thinks it is significant and ends up being unentertaining and total rubbish to boot.

Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri

There are some very good things about this film. One is that someone pedantic was in charge of the titles and as a result the rule that prepositions are not capitalised is observed in the film's name onscreen. Another - the one that carries the film almost entirely - is Frances McDormand's performance. She excels as a tough woman who has had enough and takes on authority and anyone else who stands in her way.

What I didn't like about the film though was its uneven tone. Was it a black comedy? Was it a whodunnit? Was it a tearjerker? In the end, it was more of a cartoon, with the characters all drawn very, very broad.

There was Woody Harrelson, the good father and family man, with the emetically honey-lit wife and two ickle-pickle daughters - there was nothing believable about anything in this peculiarly luxurious - given the guy was on a policeman's salary - set-up, including the fact that Harrelson looked fatter and more glowing than I've ever seen him before, yet was supposed to be wasting very swiftly away. There was the idiot police officer who we were supposed to believe had a heart of gold, despite being a very violent thug. There was the dwarf who definitely had a heart of gold,  and the attractive black woman and attractive black man, who,  as soon as they saw each other ,understood that unwritten segregation laws meant that they must end up together and never consider the possibility of any kind of mixed race relationship.

Worst of all, from my point of view as a female, while there was a strong lead female character - McDormand - the rest of the female characters were excruciating. The writer of this film appears to think that the majority of womankind are laughable air heads - viz the girl at the agency that rents out billboards,  McDormand's ex-husband's new girlfriend, and Woody Harrelson's wife, who, while not totally ditzy is essentially a cypher, (and also played pretty embarrassingly badly by Abby Cornish, but what could she do with that part, to be fair?) - or alcoholic son-castrators. Even the main character rather loses the moral high ground, when she decides to throw half a dozen Molotov cocktails at the town's police station without making absolutely sure that no one is still inside.

But it may be that the world of the film is one that has no morality. This would certainly help explain the ending, when Frances McDormand sets off with the idiot police officer, (who we are also encouraged to see as not that bad, even though we have been told he beats up black people and we have watched him kick and punch one character, throw him out of a second storey window and then dash downstairs, socking a receptionist in the jaw on the way, and continue kicking his victim in the middle of the town's main street) on what may or may not be a journey of possibly misplaced vengeance.  

I suspect the film's mingling of jocularity and violence may be something that has been borrowed from Tarantino. I've never been able to bring myself to watch one of Tarantino's films, because I can't look at violence. Therefore, I'm totally unqualified to comment on their virtues or the lack of them. I can only say that, while I never got bored during Three Billboards, I did have to look away a lot.  Afterwards I found it hard to work out how its mix of violence and grief and cartoon narrative, (with a tiny dose of possibly tongue-in -cheek schmaltz in the scenes involving Harrelson's family) really ended up knitting into a coherent whole. But, as someone who could never watch Tom and Jerry, because those awful moments when something heavy got smashed down on a cartoon creature's head made me wince too much, I think I may be way out of step with the great majority of cinemagoers. Despite being riveted by Frances McDormand's astonishing tour de force,  I actually think this film is a load of old rubbish that doesn't amount to a hill of beans.

On Body and Soul

As I do not want to give away the truly original plot element that is at the centre of On Body and Soul, I cannot go into a huge amount of detail about this engaging film. The main thing is that I would not hesitate in recommending it, although, as a lifelong shudderer at the sight of blood, I should point out that there are a couple of blood replete scenes - forewarned, however, one can always look away.

The action of the film is split mainly between an abattoir in Hungary, the apartments of two of its employees - the finance manager and the maternity-leave-replacement hygiene inspector - and a quiet forest snowscape. Believe it or not, it is a romantic comedy, admittedly of a most unusual kind. There are many moments of humour, not least the attempt at a lunch date in a restaurant where a waiter feels his mobile telephone takes priority over his customers and the scene in the CD-shop.

I should point out that the setting and dullness of the main actors' professional lives are not the only unusual rom-com elements. Among others, the way that the film suggests that affection and love are the ideal precursors for sex, that drunkenness, intense sociability and being a laugh and a good sport are not compulsory human attributes - indeed might even be signs of vulgarity - strikes me as not exactly run of the mill.

The two main actors are very good - the female of the pair, I read, just won a prize in Berlin for her performance, deservedly so, I think. Actually, the whole cast are good, with perhaps a special nod to the psychiatrist and to Sandor, whose facial expressions in his interview on his first day at work were wonderfully nuanced.

While an abattoir seems a truly unlikely setting for any kind of story, let alone a romance, the scenes showing cattle waiting meekly, or plodding obligingly toward their deaths provide a poignant and oddly comforting counterpoint to those in which the film's human characters stumble as blindly through their own brief lives. It may be worth noting that it is a full three minutes into the film before we even see a human face.

On Body and Soul creates a resonant quietness that I found lingered with me after it had finished, lending a pleasant strangeness to everything around me. The film conveys wonderfully the mystery of reality, showing how that mystery exists in every part of the living world, if we care to notice. You could also argue that it is a simple story about meeting the man or woman of your dreams. Whatever else it may be - and I think it has many subtle layers of allusion - it is above all a very beautiful film.

Murder on the Orient Express

The latest iteration of Agatha Christie's Poirot story seemed a good idea after we had visited Bohinj, where Agatha Christie spent at least one holiday. In this new film, Kenneth Branagh does justice to Christie's description of Poirot's moustache (enormous), but for reasons best known to himself also decides to add a tear drop shaped bit of hair below his lower lip, which so distracted one member of our party that she was quite unable to concentrate on the film itself.

I didn't mind that, nor the fact that the Orient Express appears to take a detour through the Himalayas in order to reach Slavonsky Brod, which so far as I know lies in a fairly flat bit of Croatia. I quite liked the hint of deep melancholy with which Kenneth Branagh endows Poirot, although his repeated mooning over the framed photograph of some lost love seemed to me to be a bit clumsy. I would have preferred things less well spelt out, the possibility that it was more a general existential despair that Poirot suffered from, rather than just the memory of some ditzy young woman. I also loved the scenery, especially at the beginning.

However, what I did object to was the propaganda aspect of the film, plus the lack of morality. By propaganda, I mean the little story tacked on at the beginning, in which a Muslim priest, a Rabbi and a Christian priest fall under suspicion of having pinched something in Jerusalem. Of course, it turns out that the white figure of authority, the British policeman, is the culprit. I had the suspicion that, if they could have pinned it on both the policeman and the Christian, the makers of the movie would have been truly content, and I couldn't help wondering if this kind of anti-ourselves, anti-authority, anti-our-own-culture, self-hatred won't strike people in fifty years time as being just as heavy handed and unsophisticated as wartime films featuring clipped voices talking about 'the plucky British' et cetera et cetera do today. I suppose it is okay to add in a story strand about racism and the difficulty a black Englishman faced in advancing through society and becoming a doctor in the 1930s, as Branagh does, but the decision to cast as a member of the Croatian police force in Slavonsky Brod a person of African origin did seem absurd. But I acknowledge that this is probably a sign of my racism, because I ought not to have noticed at all.

As to morality, the wild violent viciousness of the murder as portrayed in the film was disturbing and the idea that the culprits could be exonerated for taking justice into their own hands bothered me quite a lot. To be honest, the whole film descends into melodrama once Poirot has resolved the mystery, with Branagh flouncing about far more than seemed characteristic of the Poirot imagined by Christie.

But never mind, if you can cope with the hair below the lip and the increasingly histrionic air of the whole thing, it is sumptuous to look at and the time passes quickly. Branagh has his own private joke, by the way, which is to have Poirot reading A Tale of Two Cities at regular intervals, each time overcome by laughter at what he presumably sees as the comic aspects of the novel. Hilarious or just weird? Anyway, overall an enjoyable hour or two at the cinema, despite my quibbles.

Dunkirk

Dunkirk is a film that tries to depict the events leading up to the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk in 1940. It is told from the perspective of the soldiers, the seamen and the airmen who were involved.

I enjoyed it very much, despite three main criticisms:

1. A great deal of the time the film's colour has the vivid look of an over enthusiastically edited Instagram photograph. The blues in particular are strangely bright. The effect is very pretty but gives the slight impression of a fairy tale rather than a fairly desperate, grimy actual event.

2. The crowd scenes - soldiers getting up after a bombing raid on the beach, soldiers moving en masse towards trains - seemed to me to be inauthentic. How the hell I would know I cannot say - all I can say is that in these moments I abruptly was reminded that I was watching a film, I had a sudden awareness that there was a film crew just out of view, recording a large number of would-be actors, all of whom had been told to get up shakily or to trudge wearily or whatever and were obeying - or trying to do so.

3. The opening frames, in which a sentence is put up on a blank screen and then the same sentence is joined by a second and then those two by a third and then all three by a fourth was, I thought, an uninspired solution to the problem of getting some information across to the audience. Worse still was the dedication written across the screen after the movie was over - it announced that Dunkirk was dedicated to the people whose lives were "impacted by" the events of Dunkirk. What the hell is wrong with "affected by"?

But the film has many qualities. It is, first and foremost, well-cast and acted. It has Kenneth Branagh in it, which is always a big plus for me. Harry Styles, a young pop star, is in there too, and this is quite clever, because, if you know who he is, the knowledge provides a sort of counterpoint between the life of the young man he is playing - and the lives of young men in general at that time - and the life of a young man today.

Apart from a troubling thread involving a young French soldier, the film's story is told entirely from the British point of view. What results is very entertaining. Whether one should be entertained by the depiction of an event that left Europe in the control of the Nazis and resulted in many deaths is debatable, but Dunkirk is less historical examination and more celebration of a moment in which ordinary people rose to a challenge. As such, it does give the slight impression that it could have been put together by a propaganda unit during the Second World War, (although technically, of course, it is immensely more sophisticated than anything from that time).  Were one so inclined, it also might be interpreted as a bit of a Brexit supporting work of art.

One element of the film that did make me wonder about its propaganda-esque tendencies is its surprising cleanliness - or at least its lack of torn limbs and spilt guts. Although bombs go off right beside soldiers, the only casualties we see are completely intact - as the woman I overheard talking to her friends about the film after the screening said, it wasn't bloody. I'm not complaining, as I hate gore, but it was an interesting decision, which led me to wonder what exactly the director's intention was in choosing this subject to make a feature film.

But if it's a question of whether going to the film will provide a good night out, then I suppose the answer to my speculations is: Who cares, (and yes, it will provide a good night out)? What the film does manage to do is to convey the astonishing bravery of so many men, especially the airmen, and to deliver some sense of how truly terrifying being bombarded is. It also reminds you what a superb moment for Britain the evacuation was, in spite of its being a defeat. I would also add, if I weren't afraid of being shouted at for racism, that it raised the question in my mind of whether such an effort would succeed today - whether there is still enough cohesion in British society now, enough of a sense of belonging to one family of people in a nation, to allow an almost spontaneous mobilisation by a huge number of people, who risked their own lives to rescue their fellow countrymen. I won't mention that though, as I hate being shouted at - and anyway similar circumstances are, I hope, very unlikely to arise.