Change Your Image
dguest-57663
Reviews
Á Ferð með Mömmu (2022)
Black and white and very colourful
Don't be put off by the title, which is bland and unintentionally deceitful. Pay no attention, either, to over-simplified summaries: road movie, black comedy, that sort of thing. Driving Mum is a clever, imaginative film that flickers in the light of various genres but develops its own distinctive character.
The leading man, hirsute, taciturn and unworldly, is heroic. His dog, Brezhnev, easily justifies third place on the credits, after Mum, the stiffness of whose performance makes her a candidate for Best Supporting Actress.
The film successfully negotiates the line between eccentricity and silliness. Characters, scenes and events teeter at the far edge of implausibility but never topple over. Shot in monochrome - perhaps to establish dreary Icelandic credentials - it is often starkly beautiful, and the supporting cast adds colour.
Towards the end the sequence of events turns into a plot with a dramatic twist, but it's barely necessary. The film is so well put together that it might end satisfactorily at any one of three or four points. Driving Mum is a rare treat, reminiscent at times of Peter Greenaway.
Triangle of Sadness (2022)
Interesting, lively but too long
Triangle of Sadness is not quite as good as you have been led to expect. There are enough 'best bits' to produce an enticing trailer, but the film itself is composed largely of each of those bits stretched out and stitched together to fill 140mins.
In other words it is long and, in places, rather laboured. Its main point - to demonstrate how dreadful the rich are - is firmly established quite early on and reinforced at length and with caricatures throughout. The subsidiary themes that emerged - how vindictive the oppressed can be, for example - may have been a product of my weary imagination.
Would I recommend it? Yes, it's an interesting and lively film. Would I go again? Perhaps, as long as I can retreat to the bar for the Captain's Dinner scene, which seemed to go on for ever.
Aftersun (2022)
Understellar overdrive
Everybody seems to love 'Aftersun'. I found it dreary and formulaic. It must be me. I should get out less.
Dreary? Nothing much happens. Troubled part-time dad takes precocious daughter on holiday. Events before and after are hinted at. As for events during... those exchanges we are shown suggest that the rest of the holiday must have been very dull.
Formulaic? With little happening, there's heavy-lifting to be done elsewhere in the production. The recourse to home-movie footage, enigmatic mumbling, dipping into the future and, repeatedly, dark, unfathomable disco scenes aren't really up to the job. The film is pretty, but when nothing Instagrammable has appeared on the screen for a while, back we go to those old reliable Turkish rugs.
Paul Mescal is nominated for the Best Actor Oscar, but even Best Supporting Actor would be a stretch. The film belongs to Frankie Corio as his infinitely patient daughter. Perhaps Mescal is not best served by some quirky direction. On a couple of occasions when he is called on to actually do something - shuffle cards, sob inconsolably - the camera looks somewhere else or films him from behind.
Neil Young: Harvest Time (2022)
AutoBarn
The running time of Neil Young's 1972 album 'Harvest' is less than 40mins. 'Harvest Time', his documentary about the bringing in of 'Harvest', runs to a little over 2hrs despite overlooking a couple of songs. Admirers of Young will know exactly how that can happen and they will love it.
The film has an Arts & Crafts feel, rough-hewn and quirky. It skips between playing and recording, interviews and landscapes. It is consistently fascinating on the process of recording music, where Young's painstaking approach doesn't exclude mystical possibilities - a ghost in the studio, an echo from the rolling hills. Directing himself, he comes across as an agreeable, thoughtful young man (he was in his mid-20s), but he is disappointingly opaque on the subject of his own creativity. 'Harvest Time' is intriguing and frustrating.
Neither the title track nor 'The Needle and the Damage Done' makes it into the film, and 'Old Man' and 'Heart of Gold' are shoe-horned into the final reel. 'Alabama', by contrast, features at length, twice.
Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris (2022)
Diamon dogs
It's hard not to admire a reviewer who headlines his piece '5 reasons why this just isn't that good a film:' and goes on to list 10, all valid. There may well be more.
But surely no-one will go to 'Mrs Harris Goes to Paris' expecting gritty realism. It's a fairy-tale. A bookie with a heart of gold? Helpful anglophone Parisian winos? A goth in 1957? Really?
One outstanding positive trumps all of the folderol. Isabelle Huppert as the flinty Dior directrice Mme Colbert is the last to succumb to Lesley Manville's unrelenting cheeriness. Mme Colbert too is eventually diagnosed with a heart of gold, but until then her face - and, to a certain extent her hair - take the film into a different dimension.
Cicha ziemia (2021)
Silent night
If anyone in this film was at all likeable; if it was less laboured in its making of points; if the central characters could talk to each other or were capable of recognisably human feelings; if, in short, it was possible to believe in or care about anything happening on the screen, 'Silent Land' might not seem so long. Unfortunately, none of these conditions is met. Worse, for extended periods nothing is happening on the screen - in the case of the weather, the same nothing, repeatedly. Almost all the surfaces the inept Polish holidaymakers lie on are hard; even the bed looks uncomfortable. Not an easy watch.