Viraldice

“Every day, on every street, in every city,” grimly intones the narrator, “women are insulted, abused, threatened.” The voice is Abel Ferrara’s, and this is the trailer for his sophomore feature, Ms 45. We see a striking young woman making her way down a bustling New York City street, while a succession of cat-callers leer and jeer at her. Her beauty is otherworldly and her expression is hard to place – somewhere between high anxiety and vacancy.

This is Zoë Lund as Thana, the titular Ms. “What’s her secret?”, Ferrara continues, audibly smirking. The trailer then goes on to outline, in a teasingly elliptical fashion, the film’s rape-revenge structure, giving a prospective grindhouse audience the rough idea. But it’s clear this is no ordinary exploitation quickie: the image of Lund dressed in a nun’s habit, lips painted blood red and wielding a pistol in slow-motion is more eerie than it is strictly sleazy. “What is she hiding?”, asks Ferrara. “Where is she going?”

Zoë Lund led a tragically short life and a consequently short career, both of which have become chiefly associated with Ferrara, though they only collaborated twice (she co-wrote and co-starred in his seminal Bad Lieutenant). A multifaceted and mercurial figure, Lund was an accomplished musician, a model, a novelist and a staunch advocate for the decriminalisation of Class A drugs. “She didn’t just love heroin,” punk rocker and NYC scenester Richard Hell said of Zoë, “she believed in it.” Lund was only 17 when Ms 45 began shooting (she turned 18 during the four weeks of principal photography), but she was given an enormous amount of freedom to shape her character and the film as a whole. “Every scene was more or a less a paragraph on a page” Lund herself would later recall, “and a lot of discussion went on.”

The film follows Thana, a mute garment worker scraping by in the big bad city. She’s alienated from her co-workers, patronised and pawed at by her lech of a boss, and subjected to a daily barrage of unwanted male attention on the mean streets of Manhattan. She appears to be totally helpless, as well as literally and figuratively voiceless. One day, returning home from a dispiriting day at work, Thana is raped twice – once in an alleyway by a mugger (Ferrara in a director’s cameo), and then again by a burglar in her apartment.

While Ferrara approaches these scenes with an exploitation filmmaker’s candour, he does so with no discernible eye towards titillation. This is supported by Lund’s performance, which heartbreakingly underlines the psychic damage of both events, and stresses dissociation over physical agony (atypical for the subgenre). Her approach is nuanced and considered, and Ferrara’s technique is blunt – a potent and disquieting mix.

During the second assault, Thana manages to bash the attacker over the head with a paperweight, then an iron, killing him. Over the next few days, she carves up the corpse, refrigerates the parts, and disposes of them piece-by-piece around the city. She keeps his gun. Her mania and paranoia begin to build – she’s tortured by visons of her landlady’s watchful eye and her bathtub drain bubbling with human innards. She is unable to look at her bare breasts in the mirror without seeing them groped by the hands of her rapist.

In one brilliantly conceived scene, Thana is comforted by her co-workers as she suffers something like a panic attack. As concerned faces loom over her, she silently grasps for words that simply are not there. Here Lund’s performance starkly evokes the alienation and terror of feeling oneself to be beyond help, and the ineffable fear that support might somehow come laced with malicious intent.

While out disposing of a bagged-up body part, Thana is hounded by a catcalling creep who inexplicably insists on returning said brown paper bag to her. He chases her down a dead-end alleyway, she turns to see him charging towards her and – without thinking – she blows him away with her newly acquired .45 calibre pistol. But this first murder offers no catharsis for Thana (and therefore relatively little for us). She returns to her apartment panicked and sickened. It’s not until her second murder that Thana discovers the restorative power of dealing death.

Her first pre-meditated target is a sleazy photographer who bothers her and her co-workers at lunch. Unlike Laurie (a particularly mouthy colleague), Thana isn’t able to tell the guy to “get bent” as he continues to pester her down the street. However, she is about to deliver a more permanent form of rebuttal. She shoots him dead in his own studio. She doesn’t even get out of the elevator.

Finally, Thana’s transformation into Ms 45 begins in earnest – a discrete new identity, that of an avenging angel, that she builds for herself. She discards her mousy attire and begins wearing heavy makeup. She spends her nights dispassionately offing men in the street: pimps, muggers, businessmen. Lund said that it was Thana’s muteness that allowed her to exercise a greater degree of control over the characterisation, and it’s at this point that she deftly modulates that silence from vulnerability to strength. We spend the film tethered to Thana, but once her reign of terror is in full-swing she starts to become obscure to us. Her painted face becomes a mask. She’s making herself into something inhuman.

It might be generous to describe Ms 45 as a feminist work, but it does upset the balance of the prototypical rape-revenge film in thoughtful and pointed ways. For instance, it explicitly places sexual assault on a continuum with catcalling and other more “innocent” forms of sexual pestering. In this way, the film does not position rape as an aberration, but as something endemic. Moreover, the protagonist’s revenge is not reserved for the men who wronged her (neither reappear). The vision that Thana brings to life through her violence is one wherein no man, under any circumstances, can ever hurt her again. But this anti-heroine persona does ultimately reveal itself as a deranged form of play.

Towards the end of the film, in a clear riff on Taxi Driver, Thana theatrically poses with her gun in front of the mirror. She playacts the massacre she’s about to visit upon her workplace’s Halloween party. She’s selected a nun costume for the occasion, a potent symbol of female purity – a woman without men. Lund’s performance in this moment is mesmerising. She’s at once childlike and monstrous, a self-made vision of twisted glamour.

The film up until this point has rested comfortably on her shoulders, but it’s during the climatic party sequence that her performance reaches an ecstatic peak. As she coldly picks off the male partygoers one-by-one, we see Thana totally subsumed by her fantasy. A lesser actor would let Thana become something purely symbolic at this point, but Lund’s performance keeps the tension between reality and fantasy ever present in our minds. Thana herself is not an abstraction, but rather she is a character who has found some measure of peace in embodying something abstract: vengeance.

Michael Powell strived throughout his career towards a concept he called “composed cinema”: the bringing together of performance, music, and image into film as a singular whole. Powell wanted to make a ‘ballet film’, as opposed to a ‘filmed ballet’, in which the cinematographic techniques of cinema do not simply record but are worked into the choreography of the dance.

Describing his new film Creature, Asif Kapadia calls it “pure cinema”: nothing more than performance, music and image. Powell often attempted to create a “composed” film, the best-known of which is 1948’s The Red Shoes, which features a 17-minute ballet sequence. The aim had originally been to make an entire film as a ballet, but it is near impossible to sell the idea to a producer that a cinema audience will embrace a total negation of dialogue.

Returning to the image-based storytelling of the silent era to some may feel like going backwards. But to Powell – and now to Kapadia – it is an enhancement of form.
In Creature, Kapadia has realised Powell’s dream of a feature-length ballet film. At 87 minutes it is still a palatable runtime for what is essentially an experiment. Complete ballets have long been recorded and exhibited in cinemas. There is demand for what is often a more accessible mode of performance. But the editing and cinematography of those streams is static and one-dimensional to mirror the eye of an objective observer.

By contrast, Creature is a collaboration between director and choreographer which unifies film and dance. The ballet itself is an original piece by Akram Khan created for English National Ballet, which has produced the film, who has choreographed some of the most radical and exciting productions in contemporary dance. It’s easy to see why the project has appealed to Kapadia, who has rarely seemed content with conventional, talking-head documentary in films such as Senna and Amy. Here he transforms the ballet live stream into a work of cinema.

Creature works so effectively because the story is a simple and ancient one of beauty falling in love with the beast. Combining Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck with Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’, Khan tells through movement a romance in a dilapidated Arctic research station between a test subject (Jeffrey Cirio) and a cleaner called Marie (Erina Takahashi) as the doctors and military at the station come between them. It’s similar to Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, which also attempted to express forbidden love and alienation through sheer bodily expression.

The creation is revolutionary. It is the work of a collective – of director Kapadia, choreographer Khan, cinematographer Daniel Landin, editor Sylvie Landra, sound designer Stephen Griffiths, and composer Vincenzo Lamagna existing as a single mass which ebbs and flows in the filmic space. It is therefore also a celebration of British diversity, of dancers and creatives with heritage from across the globe, brought together in a bold artistic front. Creature announces a new frontier for cinema.

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The fast paced world we live in today thrives on the constant movement of people. Our attention is relentlessly being fed into the stream of new information provided by digital and social media. Competitive job markets have transformed us from collective to individual beings, clawing our way through a career in the hopes of achieving a big dream, just to find ourselves clambering to stay alive. The transition between liberating youth and bustling adulthood has not always been kind to me. I find myself under stress and uncertainty of my own future – a moment spent resting or having fun is immediately followed by a feeling of unproductivity.

In the context of a world that is rushing you to get ahead in life, films like Hirokazu Koreeda’s After Life and kogonada’s After Yang become a great reminder to find intimacy in the short and fleeting seconds. In an attempt to remember (read: romanticize) the small moments in my life, I purchased a disposable film camera. Being a lover of movies, I thought perhaps freezing a moment in a single frame would remind me that joy, affection, sadness, and all the things that we are alive to feel happens to all of us and not just characters on screen.

A UNIVERSITY STAPLE: My university area is famous for its abura soba. I visited the school festival after graduating, experiencing the meal for the first time as a visitor instead of a student. Eating chewy oily noodles at a cramped seat takes me back to late-night soba runs after studying with friends.

Among the many similarities of After Life and After Yang is the languid pacing; a slow exploration of loss and humanity that contrast the rapidly changing world. Aspects of realism engulf the two films despite both stories existing in an alternate, other-worldly universe. Director Hirokazu Koreeda emulates documentary-style filming by introducing interview-formatted monologues and frequent uses of long-take handheld scenes. The audience acts as observers and conversation participants as well. Comparably, kogonada’s sci-fi film retains the familiar aspects of life through visuals and sound. Without overtly fancy set design or CGI, After Yang revels in nature imagery and the ambient sounds of domestic backyards.

THE LAST OF THE AUTUMN WARMTH: I met up with a long-distance friend who I only had one day to spend with. We desperately wanted to maximize our time with each other and met up early in the morning when nothing was yet open, so we found ourselves sitting under a pine tree watching groups of runners jog by to pass time.

The stylistic palette of the two films sets a tender and nostalgic tone for exploring themes of grief – not only for the living, but for moments passed. In After Life, a group of newly deceased are compelled to select a memory to carry with them throughout eternity; a memory that would sum up their time on earth. Meanwhile, the afterlife bureaucrats – who in their own way, are unable to move on from their deaths – are tasked with the duty of guiding the deceased with choosing and manifesting these memories into film.

In After Yang, the sudden passing of the android older brother Yang guides the family to his memories, which comes in the form of short videos taken each day of his life. Through Yang’s recordings, the family gets a glimpse into his past lives and in turn, discovers his inner thoughts and emotions – something they never thought would have been possible for a programmed robot to carry.

TOKYO STORY: In crosswalks in which souls are entangled, each unaware that every passing stranger carries a certain depth. It is strange how we stand on the same ground yet would never experience and understand the world the same way as another person would.

After Life and After Yang propose similar ideas about the moving image: a capsule of life. Memories – more specifically the fragmented, intentionally framed, deliberately nitpicked memories – gives the characters’ death sentimentality. Display of vulnerability and remorse comes forward, rendering whatever “purpose” or mark they may leave on earth insignificant.

Among the group of recently deceased in After Life is Mr. Watanabe, a widowed man who spent most of his life working until retirement. Only remembering the tedious corporate routine and a humdrum arranged marriage, the old man felt dissatisfied with his life and refused to choose a memory. In the end, it was a warm autumn afternoon of sharing a park bench with his late wife which Mr. Watanabe decided to bring with him forever. For Koreeda, memories shape identity, so when Mr. Watanabe is granted the opportunity to have his life be defined by a single moment of peace and affection, his soul is no longer bound by the shackles of work and a colorless existence.

Similarly Yang, whose purpose on earth was to fulfill a functional role, displays a sense of individuality through his recordings. Filling his memory bank are images of trees, a shared embrace between parents, the swirling dry leaves in a warm cup of tea, and other ordinary occurrences. Accompanied by the soft pianos of composer Aska Matsumiya and cinematography that echoes many of Koreeda’s dramas, koganada frames Yang’s individuality in such a humane way that contrasts the sci-fi convention of a rational and soulless robot.

LIKE THE DISAPPEARING CLOUDS: Growing older, I’ve learned to enjoy house chores as it gives me time to clear my head from the dreadful job-hunting hustle. On cloudless days, my balcony offers a view of Fuji mountain, which makes laundry day a little more pleasant.

In kogonada’s video essay about Hirokazu Koreeda for Sight & Sound, he mentions the way the Japanese filmmaker captures mundanity. Daily activities and routine are portrayed in a compassionate and romantic way, but in a familiarity that doesn’t stray too far from the everyday. In the grand scheme of things, when we take on a journey towards a big goal, achieve an impressive milestone, or get too caught up in the flurry of career or studies, what may go unnoticed is an appreciation for the uneventful and small moments of intimacy; In sharing meals, train rides, comfortable silences, or in the sunlight that sifts through trees. This value for the seemingly insignificant pauses can be found rooted in After Life and After Yang. It is mundanity that characters chose to return to during death.

A PARTING GIFT: I like to leave my kiwis out the fridge overnight so my teeth don’t hurt from the coldness of the fruit. When I woke up, I found a pair on the kitchen counter without remembering taking them out the night before. That same morning, my parents left quietly during my sleep to return back to our hometown.

Through the passage of time, nothing survives. Revisiting the past (perhaps through the opening of a photo book or a conversation with an old acquaintance) is often nostalgic and painful. What fills us is a yearning to go back in time, or a sense of regret for not cherishing something enough. Before we knew it, time has forced us to move on to other things, other people, and other dreams. But I believe that it is not because time is cruel that we have regrets, it is that we often let these things fleet away before we have the chance to fully embrace them for what they are.

Produced by A24, The Inspection is the fiction feature debut of writer-director Elegance Bratton, who previously earned acclaim for Pier Kids, a documentary on young queer and trans New Yorkers coping with homelessness. A fictionalised depiction of Bratton’s own experiences, The Inspection is set in 2005, and follows Ellis French (Jeremy Pope), a young Black man who’s been living on the streets for roughly a decade, after being kicked out of his New Jersey home in his teens for being gay. With few options for his future, and partly in an attempt to reconnect with his homophobic mother (played by Gabrielle Union), he decides to join the Marines amidst the peak of the US military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” era, which prohibited serving LGBTQ+ individuals from disclosing their sexuality from 1994 until 2011.

Bratton got his own pre-college filmmaking start in the marines, thanks to an eventual videographer role, though The Inspection – a recent Golden Globe and Independent Spirit Award nominee – largely sticks to his onscreen surrogate’s time navigating a tough South Carolina boot camp.

LWLies: How have you found the transition from documentaries and shorts to fiction features?

It’s been a real eye-opening experience. First of all, I don’t see a difference between documentary and fiction filmmaking. They’re two divergent processes to end up with the same goal, which is a movie. Particularly in my film, which is autobiographical yet at the same time fictionalised, right there I’m in this nebulous area between what’s real and what’s imagined. I think all of us deal in that area.

But then once you’re in the industry, it’s a huge difference. I think a lot of the time when we talk about questions of diversity, and people are like, “Well, why are movies like this? And why isn’t my filmmaker over there like that?” It’s because it’s an industry of precedent. I didn’t realise how different my work and image as a director would be received after a fiction film. I thought I knew what I was walking into after Pier Kids. I made that for duct tape and five bucks. So, this is really eye-opening. I go to the [Golden] Globes now, and Angela Bassett knows my name. It’s just very different.

Documentarians are like monks. You make movies for nothing; about things most people don’t really want to know about. You’re in this little collective of people who do things for no money. And then you get to the Hollywood side: everybody’s rich, impossibly beautiful, so poised. It’s very different, but very fun.

Was Angela Bassett your most exciting encounter at the Golden Globes?

I’m a weirdo. Certain people just do it for me. Like Jennifer Coolidge. I met her the week before actually, shopping in L.A. We were at the same store and she was giving Inspector Gadget realness: big fedora, huge mask, collared jacket. Of course, I saw her and was like, “That’s Jennifer Coolidge!” When I was at the Globes and I introduced myself again, she was like, “Oh, yeah, you’re the guy who bought the jewelry.” That was pretty starstruck. And later, I was talking to my agent and Rihanna walked up behind me to introduce herself to me and my husband. She was so sweet and A$AP [Rocky] looked so handsome. Tilda Swinton returns my texts. And Jamie Lee Curtis loved my outfit. She looked me up and down and she went, “Yes.”

Why this autobiographical story for your fiction debut?

The first draft was written in 2017, right after I sold my show, My House, to Viceland. I finally had a bit of money in the account and realised I would never not need a real job for six months ever again, so I’d better write a script. I wrote three and The Inspection was one. I then went to my husband, producer of this film, Chester Algernal Gordon. To him, my biggest strength as a storyteller is bringing the audience to places they could never go without me. I needed to do something personal that would really introduce who I am as an artist and human being, so that, hopefully, I can build an audience relationship.

I came to the Marine Corps at the lowest moment in my life, after being homeless for 10 years. I felt my life really had no meaning, value or purpose. And then I was fortunate enough to have a drill instructor remind me that my life was valuable because I had a responsibility to protect the person to my left and to my right. In these polarised times, I felt it was important to share that message that you don’t have to agree about everything. And that, honestly, it’s the dynamic interpersonal relationships between people that change things, not institutions. It’s grassroots up, not top down. That’s what I learned in the Marine Corps and I was hoping people could watch this movie and get a piece of that.

There are moments in the film where we take the view of other Marine recruits objecting to their own treatment. Were those additional perspectives based on people you knew directly?

The War on Terror era is essentially, for me, the [defining] moment of Islamophobia in my country. I’m from New Jersey, and the town I was staying in at the time is very much a Middle Eastern town. And after 9/11 happened, literally every storefront had an American flag on it, because they didn’t want non-Middle Eastern Americans to attack them. Fast forward: I’m in bootcamp, there’s Islamic recruits there and they’re being called the Taliban. They’re being called Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. They’re being abused in front of my face, ridiculed and broken down. And in bootcamp, you don’t really get a chance to speak up for yourself, let alone other people.

Those stories stayed with me. Each of these characters is a composite of people who made an impact on me; who I felt I had something in common with. When French goes to the Marine Corps, he goes in thinking he’s the weakest person because he’s gay, that his effeminacy is going to somehow render him useless to the mission. And then he discovers that every man in bootcamp is given an impossible proposition, which is to be the perfect marine, to be a real man. And then, he uses what I like to call strategic kindness: radical defiant empathy in order to find that common ground.

But mind you, that empathy is what he’s learned from his queer life. So, it’s really understanding that difference is [itself] different and maybe the way you get there, whether it’s through your race or sexuality, is specific to you. But at the end of the day, those of us who are different have more in common than those of us who are ‘normal’.

Why Jeremy Pope to play ‘you’?

For me, it was really important that the character that’s based on me be an out Black actor. I’m not one of those people who says you have to be the thing to play the thing all the time. But growing up, I never saw any Black queer heroes in movies. Most of the time, if they’re actually out and gay, they’re an accessory to the lead character and whatever they’re going through. And as a Black gay man, I needed that representation.

Jeremy and I would talk often about what it would’ve meant to us to have this film as teenagers. I wanted to shrink a bit of the work for future audiences. As a Black gay man, I’m a cobbled together identity of RuPaul-isms, voguing, Karl Lagerfeld and random bits of gay stuff that I see in the world that resonates with me. I take it on and it becomes me. We wanted to make a movie where people don’t have to do that. They can just press play, see themselves as the hero and be inspired.

Could you also speak on casting Gabrielle Union as your mother?

My mom was killed about three days after the movie was greenlit. It changed the whole tone of everything we were doing on set. I’m really grateful to Gabrielle Union for helping to bring my mother back to life. When it comes down to it, my mother was a really beautiful woman. She was a smart woman, and she was a tough woman. She was an orphan at age 10. I needed someone who had that quality of strength and beauty, but also who could contain the contradictions of a woman.

My mom was the first person to ever love me completely. She’s also the first person to ever reject me wholly. Gabrielle was able to make herself into a vessel and allow me to talk about all of this.

Why ‘The Inspection’ for the film’s title?

I’m a big feminist reader and trying to be the best feminist I can, as a man. Simone de Beauvoir, in The Second Sex, says that one is not born a woman, that one becomes a woman. And I think the same thing is true for men, that we’re not born men. We learn how to be men. And how we test the limits of that knowledge, of gaining that mastery of masculinity in the Marine Corps is through the inspection.

Whenever you’re in the presence of someone in a higher rank than you, there’s an inspection going on. That person above you is supposed to look at you and determine if you’re up to military standard. Now granted, once we’re in the fleet, actually in service, most people are not making demerits. But if you do anything that varies too much out of the mold of how we’re supposed to be, then somebody’s going to reprimand you for that and try to get you back into the mold. So, ‘The Inspection’, to me, is a metaphor for the ways in which masculinity is constructed, interrogated and, hopefully, dismantled.

How did you settle on the name, Ellis French, that you gave your onscreen surrogate?

I’ve been a Francophile since I was seven or eight. For one of my first big projects in what I think you call primary school, we had to pick a country and for a week tell the whole class about it. France was mine, so I brought in baguettes. We couldn’t drink red wine, so I brought in Kool-Aid. And Ellis is my nickname at home, so ‘Ellis French’. It was also my old Grindr name… no, I’m just kidding.

In a new series, we’re celebrating the films we loved that aren’t likely to dominate the awards race. Over the new few weeks, our writers make passionate arguments for the performances and craft that stood out to them, from blockbusters to arthouse and everything in between.

Awards for acting sadly don’t always – or even often – go to the best performances of the year, but rather to the “most” performances. To the actors straining so hard to show audiences the work they put into their role, or campaigning relentlessly across Hollywood’s press circuit. Perhaps it’s actually effort and not achievement that voting bodies value most highly when assessing performance.

Take the two frontrunner female performances of this year: Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Quan Wang in Everything Everywhere All At Once and Cate Blanchett as Lydia Tár in TÁR. Both actresses give finely nuanced performances and they are good films, but in their own ways, each is the most attention-seeking, affirmation-demanding performance showcase of its actress’s career. TÁR even opens with a lengthy list of the character’s exceptional accomplishments – practically an author’s note as to why the audience should care about her.

I’m not a critic who believes that subtlety and restraint automatically make a performance better. Maximalism, maudlin emotionalism, and even didacticism all have their place in cinematic storytelling, but it is clear that certain character types attract praise over others. The subtle, grounded, self-effacing protagonist, without any striking tragic flaws who embarks on a relatable human journey just doesn’t excite the way a multiverse-jumping supermom or womanizing megalomaniac composer do.

But — so the critic’s impotent cry always goes — it should. Case in point: Virginie Efira, the ravishing Belgian actress who broke through to international audiences in 2016 with a small role in Paul Verhoeven’s Elle, and cemented her status as one of the most versatile and exciting stars of the contemporary French film scene with her leading role in his next film Benedetta. 

For Efira, a former weather forecaster and host of American Idol-type programs in Belgium, to break through a crowd of actresses with a higher density of raw talent than can be found most other national scenes right now (think Laure Calamy, Léa Seydoux, Marion Cotillard, Noémie Merlant, and that’s just the younger cohort) is impressive. That she did so firmly past ingénue age, the age where too many actresses are offered their most challenging and diverse parts, is even more astonishing.

Efira starred in a whopping four films that premiered in some form last year, but it’s not on the basis of hard work that she deserves the highest honors of her profession for her efforts. Across these four films — Régis Roinsar’s Waiting for Bojangles, Serge Bozon’s Don Juan, Alice Winocour’s Paris Memories, and Rebecca Zlotowski’s Other People’s Children – Efira fully manifests and demonstrates a complete, dextrous control over what every performer needs to transcend the the label of mere “actor” and become a star: her star persona. That is, as Richard Dyer would put it, the idiosyncratic and invigoratingly clear social type or cluster of ideologies that Efira’s very presence on screen reflects that hasn’t been reflected before, to an audience who has been hungry for it.

In these last two films in particular, Efira crafts such deeply faceted, viscerally textured portraits of ordinary women (just the kind you might know, see on the street, or even be) that her performances ascend to the level of the sublime, transmissions of pure feeling.

Paris Memories follows Mia, a woman recovering from a terrorist attack inside a Paris restaurant (Winocour based her film on accounts from her brother and other survivors of the horrific 2015 Bataclan shootings). The shock of violence deadens her senses, cottoning over her memory, which eventually pries her away from her current partner (Grégoire Colin) and sets her on a rocky, riveting path toward re-integration. Other People’s Children tells the story of Rachel, an English teacher who strikes up a romance with Ali (Roschdy Zem) at guitar lessons. Rather than focusing on their waxing and waning affections, director Zlotowski pans to Rachel’s relationship with Ali’s young daughter Leila – sometimes ecstatic, sometimes fractious, and always laced with the indefinable melancholy of the step parent.

Both Mia and Rachel are augured into the crucible of midlife angst. The pain of bowing in and out of relationships has lost the delicious edge that comes with youthful freedom from responsibility. Career has calcified around both characters like limestone, and they both wonder what would happen if they broke free. And both women are approaching the precipice past which pregnancy would be impossible, so motherhood weighs heavy on the mind. But here is the unique spark that makes Efira’s screen presence so incandescent: she navigates each journey with a kind of grateful curiosity. An openness to experience that has been weathered but not compromised by life’s tougher passages. Efira’s expressive face is both pillowy and feline, her fennel-seed eyes always betraying a kind of wry warmth even in the midst of humiliation, terror, and despair. 

Efira can exude both innocence and experience simultaneously, both confidence and selfless humility. Her innate poise and affability recalls Ingrid Bergman, and like Bergman, Paris Memories and Other People’s Children herald that this middle passage may be the most extraordinary period of her career.

Wrapping your head around anthropogenic climate change can often leave one feeling frustrated and defeated. The problem calls for our urgent attention and immediate action, but many of its dangerous consequences – such as species loss or global warming – are slow, verging on generational. It is this principle of climate change that can cause the issue to easily slip out of our day-to-day collective consciousness, and allow it to perennially loom in the background of our lives.

Every few years, media coverage of climate change is disrupted by a big blockbuster eco-disaster movie, thrusting the conversation about the role movies play in our climate discourse back into the mainstream. Back in 2004, the release and success of Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow received an inordinate amount of American press coverage, scientific scrutiny, right-wing hysteria, and endorsements from prominent political figures like Al Gore. Since then, the genre has seen an influx of releases, each with varying degrees of success, and each with vastly different scientific accuracy. Audience appetite for these films has slowly declined over time, with newer releases such as 2017’s Geostorm and 2022’s Moonfall struggling to prove financially viable.

But perhaps the eco-disaster genre is too easily dismissed as simple schlocky popcorn entertainment. Could it be that we are overlooking a key player in our environmental discourse? One uniquely positioned to bring the violence of climate change into our collective cognisance? Movies within the eco-disaster genre apply so many unique and wonderful tools that have the capacity to totally transform our relationship with climate change, even if it is just for a two-hour run time.

Take for instance the presentation of time within an eco-disaster movie. Early into The Day After Tomorrow, Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid), an American paleoclimatologist, is presenting his research at a UN global warming conference in New Delhi. Jack has found that 10,000 years ago global warming brought about an Ice Age, entirely transforming the planet’s climate. Jack explains that if humanity continues its current rate of burning fossil fuels and polluting the environment as forecast, a new Ice Age will occur in 100 to 1,000 years from now.

This becomes the only moment where the climate disaster is communicated on a timescale even relatively close to that of which we have come to expect in our climate discourse. When Jack’s forecasted climate catastrophe begins to unfold over a matter of days, not decades, the film entirely shatters our temporal experience of climate change.

In Tokyo, hail the size of footballs fatally pour down on the city. Los Angeles is devastated by multiple tornados, tearing down buildings and shattering the Hollywood sign. New Delhi is hit by a snowstorm, and Nova Scotia is victim to a tidal surge. As our hero Jack predicted, a storm system develops in the northern hemisphere, ‘flash-freezing’ anything in its wake.

Geostorm compresses time in a similar way. In the opening of the film, our protagonist’s daughter Hannah (Talitha Bateman) explains that in the year 2019 there was a rise in extreme weather events that became increasingly catastrophic. We are shown genuinely real footage of human displacement due to flooding, hurricanes, tornadoes, and droughts. This sequence feels familiar, like a segment we may see in the news, as it is rooted in the timescale in which we actually experience the effects of extreme weather events.

Suddenly the film dramatically accelerates the climate timeline. We are told that the East River in New York has surged, swallowing all of Lower Manhattan, and days later a heatwave in Madrid kills two million people within 24 hours. During the climax of the film, the ‘Dutch Boy’ satellite system goes rogue, causing mass-scale extreme weather events rather than mitigating them. The unstoppable global climate cataclysm is even given a countdown timer akin to the Mission Impossible series.

All of a sudden the consequences of climate change have been completely transformed to become an immediate threat. The way these movies compress time to its most extreme brings climate change within our sights, into the foreground, and invites us to consider its proximity to our lives.

Eco-disaster movies do not just play with time, but our spacial understanding of climate change too. In no other genre will you find the scale and magnitude of climate change greater than in an eco-disaster movie. In Emmerich’s 2012 the Yellowstone Caldera (a supervolcano underneath Yellowstone) erupts in an enormous ball of flames, reminiscent of a nuclear explosion. In reality, the last super-eruption in Yellowstone took place tens of thousands of years ago. When watching an eco-disaster movie, the audience must face environmental catastrophe on an exaggerated scale they will likely never directly experience in reality, making the genre an effective vehicle for us to see the violence of climate change.

It is nearly impossible to sit through an entire eco-disaster film and not bear witness to an extreme weather event obliterating one of our iconic historical monuments, often in the most spectacular ways imaginable. In Flood a storm surge collides with the London Eye. In Geostorm, the Kremlin is melted by a heat-ray, and the Burj Khalifa is toppled over by a tsunami-like wave. In The Core, lightning takes out the Tomba del Milite Ignoto in Rome.

Seeing our landmarks torn apart before our eyes is undoubtedly a compelling existential delight, but these sequences feel so impactful and sublime for a reason. Not only do these landmarks symbolise structure and order in our world, but also they act as geographical ‘anchors’, cemented in a position in the world that we recognise and understand. Landmarks such as the White House, the London Eye, and the Statue of Liberty are universally recognised in their scale, proportion, and location. Watching their destruction connects to that sliver of spatial understanding we innately have, linking the consequences of unchecked climate change with things we connect with.

With the idea of geographical identity in mind, it is important to recognise where these movies can still play into false understandings of climate change. To capture the largest audience, blockbuster eco-disaster movies will predominantly focus their destructive sequences in highly-developed European, American, or Asian countries. In 2012 it is Washington DC, and Los Angeles, in Geostorm it is Hong Kong, Moscow, and Orlando, and so on.

If eco-disaster films continue to lean on recognisable imagery within prominent global cities, they may inadvertently advance the misinformation that these cities are disproportionately at risk from climate change. Information taken from the Global Climate Risk Index 2021 makes clear that the countries that have suffered the most impact of weather-related loss events are not European or North American at all. Countries in the top ten most affected include Myanmar, Mozambique, Zimbabwe as well as the Bahamas – but the countries most at risk are rarely represented in eco-disaster films.

It is important, however, to recognise that whilst eco-disaster movies may help us to view climate change up close, they often do little to encourage optimism. The genre’s ‘all will be lost’ and ‘few will survive’ endings repeatedly feed into a doomist mindset, in which climate change is too far gone to do anything about. As long as we engage with these films in order to feel and experience climate change, and remember it should embolden us to act, the eco-disaster movie genre could find a neat place of value in the wider fight against rampant climate change.

At the beginning of January, a porter (Samuel Finzi) and an Old Man (Iossif Surchadziev) while away their time eating walnuts and doing a crossword as they await the return of their boss Petar Motorov. The clues of the crossword concern world literature, global geography and international cuisine – in other words, about a whole universe beyond these men’s immediate, enclosed environment in a snowbound cabin near the woods. The porter only occasionally ventures to enter the adjacent, abandoned Soviet-era hotel, its ruins decorated with fallen portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Brezhnev. There he refuels the generator that keeps the lights and heat on in this otherwise dark midwinter.

They might as well be waiting for Godot. For as the horse-drawn sleigh returns with not Petar Motorov but a frozen wolf, and as a succession of visitors: twin brothers (Zachary Baharov and Svetoslav Stoyanov) whose snowplough has broken down nearby; a muscly tattooed priest (Leonid Yovchev); a smiling Mummer (Borislav Chouchkov) and his three masked accompanists.

These all call into question whether Petar Motorov is real or a mere legend before they all likewise disappear into the dark woods on that same sleigh. The film, too, becomes a puzzlebox for the viewer, drawing us into its compounding enigmas and demanding that we think our way out of hermetic spaces in which we, along with the characters, have become lost. For here the raven that the Old Man keeps in a cage, and the lobsters that the porter tends in tanks in the hotel’s repurposed rooms, are metaphors for a very human condition of trying to grasp the infinite and the metaphysical from within the narrow confines of mortal, embodied experience.

In its adaptation from Yordan Radichkov’s 1974 allegorical play of the same name, January has also accumulated all manner of cinematic references. Its (mostly) monochrome presentation, folkloric fixations and even its very title evoke Rainer Sarnet’s 2017 film November, while its marriage of realism and the irrational, politics and parable recalls Béla Tarr’s similarly black-and-white 2000 work, Werckmeister Harmonies.

The snowbound setting, all-male cast, beleaguering peril and paranoia suggest John Carpenter’s The Thing from 1982, while the frozen hotel, an axe, twin children in a corridor, an infernal Bartender (Malin Krastev) and an old interior painting apparently, impossibly depicting the main players, all specifically reference the timeless chills of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

Yet the horror in January is of a more existential order, as these men are confronted with decidedly Cartesian conundrums: are they awake or dreaming?; might they even be, as in the famous Taoist riddle, part of an animal’s dream?; or are they indeed alive or dead? “It’s always like this in January”, the Bartender will tell the porter, in words that reflexively conjure the film’s title. “The wind blows over the snowdrifts and you can’t be sure of anything.” That sense of uncertainty pervades this first fictive feature from documentarian Andrey Paounov, which is beautiful and unnervingly eerie in equal, equivocal measure.

If you were on the internet in 2017, you probably at least heard about Cat Person. The New Yorker short story by Kristen Roupenian set the internet ablaze, praised for its searing insight into heterosexual power dynamics and the perils of modern dating – and was swiftly optioned to be turned into a film, written by veteran screenwriter Michelle Ashford and directed by Susanna Fogel of The Spy Who Dumped Me Fame.

While it’s possible to tease out a feature-length project from a short story (recent shining examples being After Yang and Burning) it’s often an uphill battle; what might work as a short, sharp shock in prose doesn’t always translate onto screen. In the case of Cat Person, the brevity of the source material is thinly-stretched into a two-hour runtime, padded out with tedious subplots and a new, excruciating ending which undermines the initial point of its creation.

Emilia Jones and Nicholas Braun are poorly cast as 20-year-old Margot and 33-year-old Robert, who meet at the movie theatre where she works after he buys popcorn from her. While Jones and Emilia are, in fact, those ages in real life, this disparity doesn’t translate on-screen. Braun is twitchy and looming, lacking the intensity of his novella counterpart, while Jones fails to capture the naïveté which the narrative depends upon. For her, pursuing a romantic relationship with Robert is more of a social experiment, as she engages in conversations with her female friends about feminism and rolls her eyes at her overbearing, extremely wealthy mother and stepfather.

Robert is less a character so much as a Twitter parody brought to life. He’s a movie bro who mansplains Indiana Jones to his Gen Z not-girlfriend and considers Depeche Mode bedroom mood music. It’s not that men like this don’t exist, but rather, what does this film have to say about them? There’s no indication as to what Margot sees in Robert, aside from exchanging ‘witty’ repartee over text. When they first go on a date, she suspects him of locking them in a cupboard in the science lab at her college.

Margot’s mind frequently gives way into nightmarish visions – she sees her dorm-mate attacked by a stray dog, she pictures Robert assaulting her – and while this could be an attempt to address the ways in which women are socially conditioned to spot danger before it happens and see men as a potential threat, the film has no interest in unpacking the personal ramifications of this, or indeed the power imbalance which made the source material interesting. In fact, the film’s atrocious third act seems to prove Margot was right to be suspicious all along, and the film descends into a rote horror for the last 15 minutes.

This lack of ideas is reenforced by a dizzying number of pop songs used to underscore what’s happening on screen, creating the sense that the creative team reached for familiar references when they lacked for a developed narrative. Quirky meta flourishes – such as Margot talking to a disappointed version of herself during a sexual encounter with Robert, and a hard cut to Robert discussing a moment with Margot in a therapy session as though it’s a scene from a film – are perhaps intended to create a little levity, but only underscore the film’s identity crisis and lack of understanding about where feminism is in pop culture by this point.

Since its release, Cat Person has been the subject of much controversy, as the woman who apparently unknowingly inspired the story spoke out about Roupenian, and confirmed the man who Robert was based on had passed away since the story was written. It feels as though the story of Cat Person itself is now more interesting than the content that was publisher in the New Yorker – at least, it’s certainly much more compelling than this self-satisfied, bafflingly staged adaptation.

With the Sundance Film Festival currently in full swing, the cinema world is oriented around Park City, Utah, for the moment. But with the next major date on the calendar fast approaching, the Berlin Film Festival has stolen a bit of the spotlight this morning as the programming committee has unveiled their Competition picks for this year’s festivities.

President Kristen Stewart and her to-be-announced panel of jurors will pass judgement on a lineup well-stocked with esteemed fixtures of the international arthouse, a handful of high-profile key gets challenging the perception of the Berlinale as a less-glossy cousin of Cannes and Venice. The most eye-catching among them may be the German cinema’s latest pride and joy Angela Schanelec, returning to the festival with the incestuous family drama Music after her glowingly reviewed I Was At Home, But… netted her a Silver Bear award for Best Director in 2019. Also representing Deutschland’s interests in Competition will be feminist trailblazer Margarethe von Trotta, the improlific Christoph Hochhäusler, and the great Christian Petzold, his new thriller Afire (formerly The Red Sky) turning up the tension during a heatwave at a summer holiday home.

They’re joined by a global collection of well-regarded artists including French living legend Philippe Garrel, whose drama The Plough follows a nomadic family touring with their long-running puppet show act, and Portugal’s João Canijo, back at last with a follow-up to 2011’s Blood of My Blood. Those keeping track of English-language cuts will be interested in BlackBerry (Canadian Matt Johnson’s account of the proto-smartphone’s meteoric rise, featuring Jay Baruchel, Glenn Howerton, and Cary Elwes), and the return of South Africa’s John Trengove with Manodrome (an of-the-moment satire that sees an Uber driver played by Jesse Eisenberg joining a libertarian masculinity cult in the woods led by Adrien Brody).

Though Celine Song’s debut Past Lives will have already played at Sundance by the time it comes to Berlin, the early positive reviews (in particular for performances by Greta Lee and John Magaro) have put it on attendees’ radar. And in a first for the Berlinale, an anime feature has cracked the Competition slate, Your Name and Weathering With You director Makoto Shinkai back with Suzume, in which problems arise once a hunky boy is transmogrified into a chair.

And that’s not to mention the eye-grabbers tucked away in the sidebar categories, such as Dustin Guy Defa’s indie The Adults; The Echo from Tatiana Huezo, director of Prayers for the Stolen; In Water, the latest transmission from the Hong Sang-soo-niverse; Golda, Guy Nattiv’s surprisingly Helen Mirren-led biopic of Golda Meir; and the formal experiment Reality, in which Sydney Sweeney enacts the transcript of NSA whistleblower Reality Winner’s interrogation by the FBI.

Screen Daily has the complete list of selections for what’s sure to be a crackerjack Berlinale, though Little White Lies will soon start running our on-the-ground coverage confirming that much. Until then, all we can do is wait and hope that all will emerge unscathed from the eventual premiere of Sean Penn‘s new documentary about the war in Ukraine.

The 73rd Berlin Film Festival will take place from 16 to 26 February.

In a new series, we’re celebrating the films we loved that aren’t likely to dominate the awards race. Over the new few weeks, our writers make passionate arguments for the performances and craft that stood out to them, from blockbusters to arthouse and everything in between.

When Reeves’ noir take on the Caped Crusader exploded onto the silver screen with a title card so strikingly gargantuan and vivid in red, its image replayed in my mind long after the credits had rolled. This daring entrance acts not just as a precursor to the movie itself, but also as a symbol to the bold visual creativity that drives the entire film. It can often feel like artistic verve is absent from the homogeneity of the comic-book genre – yet here Reeves’ and Director of Photography, Greig Fraser, utilise a distinct visual design for the camera that fulfills character, atmosphere, and emotion. It isn’t just the work that warrants recognition, but also the team’s innovative and unorthodox approach to realising it.

Inspired by the aesthetic of 70’s thrillers such as Klute and All The President’s Men, Reeves and his team chose to use older anamorphic lenses synonymous with this bygone era of filmmaking. Despite being technically defective by today’s standards, Reeves and Fraser loved the imperfect beauty of these “broken” lenses; namely the murky deep bokeh and focus fall-off that occurred towards the edges of the frame. Whether or not these details are perceptible to the average eye, their visceral quality transcends our own technical knowledge of photography, and evokes a cinematic vocabulary that we subconsciously understand.

In the film’s opening monologue, as a masked Bruce Wayne drifts through the Halloween revellers of a rain-soaked Gotham, the crowd and the city’s peripherals blur around the protagonist. The filmmakers manipulate the distorted element of their lens to their advantage, pulling the audience away from the costumed chaos and into Bruce’s own singular point of view. It enables us to see the world through his nocturnal eyes, and reminds us that the best cinematography almost always serves the story.

Fraser and co. didn’t stop there, and in order to complete their 70’s aesthetic they took extreme measures to recreate that iconic celluloid look found only on film stock. Not only does it unify their visual palette with vintage continuity, but digital was viewed as “too clean” for their gritty narrative of crime and corruption, so film’s intrinsic grain added this tangible sense of hard-boiled spirit to The Batman.

But loads of contemporary filmmakers still shoot on film – what makes this any different, you might ask? Well for starters, they didn’t shoot on film – The Batman was shot digitally. In a story primarily operating within the dark shadows of Gotham’s underbelly, shooting digitally on the ARRI Alexa-LF became a necessary requirement to capture such low-light environments. Nevertheless, Reeves still didn’t want to compensate on his vision, and in order to obtain a film emulsion beyond digital emulation, colourist David Cole had the finished footage exposed onto the film negative itself. Not once, not twice, but several times; creating a truly authentic texture that elevates the final film. Now if that’s not dedication to the cinematic experience, what is?

The cinematography of Reeves’ adaptation also exists in a heightened reality; one where the creative design will happily delve into the theatrical, whilst always being grounded by some form of realism that makes it accessible. One of the film’s most exhilarating sequences is the batmobile highway chase – a set piece fuelled by burnt rubber and bullets, but one equally memorable for its evocative lighting. A wash of warm sodium street light illuminates the scene, which paints the vehicular pursuit with a fiery hue that ignites the action. Yet, despite the dramatic lighting, pragmatic framing steers it away from total surrealism. The camera is locked onto the cars with hard mounts, embodying their unique point of view and in turn positioning the viewer directly into the experience. We’re right there, hurtling through traffic and holding on for dear life, courtesy of Fraser’s calculated composition and the crew that implement it.

The graphic power of The Batman’s cinematography is perhaps best expressed towards the latter half of its grand finale. After an explosive takedown of the Riddler’s army up in the rafters of Gotham Square Garden, Batman descends the flooded stadium to find himself submerged by water and total darkness. Producing a flare that engulfs our hero in a loud red and guides the citizens of Gotham to safety, the shot has already become a part of the character’s rich iconography. The expressionistic colour – a recurrent motif of the film – imbues Robert Pattinson’s performance with mythic weight that resonates emotionally.

Upon entering the Iceberg Lounge in the first act, the club’s crimson lights dramatically herald Bruce’s penchant for vengeance, yet by the film’s climax, the colour red is now emblematic of Batman’s capacity for hope. Across the entire runtime, whether it be low-angle shots of Batman’s boot stomping into the omnipresent rain or close-ups of Pattinson’s eyes baring Bruce’s soul to the lens, Fraser makes sure to consistently deliver on a deeply intuitive level. You don’t just see The Batman – you feel it.

We’re big fans of Hirokazu Koreeda here at Little White Lies, and his latest dramedy Broker is no exception. Song Kang-ho stars as Ha Sang-hyeon, a laundrette owner who has a shady side business: together with his partner Dong-soo (Gang Dong-won) they occasionally steal infants left in a local church baby box and sell them to couples looking to adopt a child. Their operation is threatened when new mother Moon So-young (Lee Ji-eun) returns after leaving her baby and catches onto their scheme. Together they set off on a road trip to interview prospective parents for Moon’s baby, with detective Soo-jin (Bae Doona) hot on their tail.

What sounds like the premise for a crime thriller is, in fact, a masterfully-executed comedy-drama in Koreeda’s hands, investigating the pressure of motherhood, societal inequality, and what truly makes a family. To celebrate the forthcoming UK and Irish release of Broker, we’re excited to launch Picturehouse’s exclusive illustrated poster for the film, which captures key moments in loving detail.

With standout performances (Song Kang-ho won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival) and a whole lot of heart, you can check out the trailer for Broker below. This is one you’ll want to pack your tissues for.

Broker will be in UK and Irish cinemas on February 24^th

Meet Lydia Tár. She’s the chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, is soon to record Mahler’s 5th Symphony and is a fervent patron of the arts. So says New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik (playing himself), on stage with his subject and reading the carefully constructed biography penned by Tár’s assistant Francesca (Noémie Merlant) at the New Yorker Festival allowing Tár to promote upcoming book ‘Tár on Tár’.

It’s clear that Lydia Tár takes herself very seriously, performing the perfect upper-middle-class artist to a room full of admirers. But it’s not all work. She lives in Berlin with her wife and concertmaster Sharon (the always great Nina Hoss) and their daughter Petra in a Brutalist-style apartment so cold, you’d think no one’s lived there for years. But it all comes crashing down when she’s accused of abusing her power to sleep with young female members of her orchestra, one of whom committed suicide.

Tár, Todd Field’s portrait of the artist as an abuser, is the funniest horror film of 2022. In an early scene, Tár is seen delivering a lecture to a group of her Juilliard students and starts chiding one of them, Max, for rejecting the masters of classical music (specifically Bach) on their personal lives and views they held. What we witness isn’t two people on equal footing having the infamous the “Art vs Artist” debate, but instead someone in a position of power using every rhetorical trick they’ve accumulated over the years to ridicule a person she deems beneath her. Blanchett adorns Tár’s ridicule with humour and the wisdom of an older mentor – an excellent “U-Haul Lesbian” joke is delivered with the mannerisms of someone who just walked out of lesbian’s ‘Dream Wife’ Pinterest board.

When it comes to the subject of abusing power, Lydia Tár is not a man like most of her cinematic predecessors, nor does she want to be one. It’s hard to believe she lives in Berlin, for it seems like the life she’s leading is of the kind that can be lived anywhere. So much so that every time Tár steps out of that world, a layer of horror shrouds the film. The film adopts Tár’s perspective, and her nightmares are filled with abstract figures in the fog, not the memories of awful things she’s done.

The film is not interested in showing what Tár did, though it gives plenty of clues. Field is more interested in showing us the haunting of Lydia Tár: the screams she hears from the woods on her runs; the ominous ticking of a metronome stuck in a cabinet; the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it ghosts that are like a symphony of their own. They haunt Tár not for guilt she feels, but the fear she has over them coming out and ruining her life.

Lydia Tár is not a man like most of her cinematic predecessors when it comes to the subject of abusing power, nor does she want to be one. Instead, she wants to assert herself as masculine. From calling herself Petra’s father to her suits and mannerisms, Tár is performing a type of masculinity she’s learned over the years to become who she is. And as we learn from her conversations with an old mentor, the world of classical music is filled with men who abuse their power. Lydia is not the first, and won’t be the last.

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