Viraldice

A notice hangs on the headboard of a public staircase that reads, “Don’t forget to smile”. As he saunters underneath it, Joaquin Phoenix’s violently depressive deadbeat rent-a-clown, Arthur Fleck, pulls out a black marker pen from his pocket and scrubs out the words “forget to”. This, in a grotesquely rotten nutshell, is the flash-fried turkey that is Todd Phillips’ Joker, a film which shoots for the moon in its attempt to deliver a lapel-shaking statement on the malign tenor of Our Times, yet ends up settling for feeble posturing, asinine pop psychology and political analysis charged with all the cynicism of a mollycoddled teen dropout in fake Oakleys and a home customised Linkin Park tee.

The story takes place during a garbage strike in Gotham City circa 1970. Super rats roam the streets with impunity. The only sound you can hear is that of the mental health services slamming down their shutters for the last time due to slashed budgets. All of this is a recipe for disaster when it comes to a hangdog loonbag like Arthur. One of the many laughably bad script decisions here is to gift our anti-hero with a crudely invented mental disorder which causes him, in moments of high anxiety, to start cackling like a maniac. The cognitive dissonance of having a man laughing heartily at inopportune or awkward moments is the film’s one and only motif, and Phillips hammers it for all it’s worth. Which, it turns out, is not a lot.

It is the tale of a man who lives with his mother in a dingy apartment and openly harbours the ambition of becoming a stand-up comedian. He is cracked and clearly troubled, but the film handily takes place in a world were empathy has died and capitalist dirtbags crush the vulnerable under the heel of their designer loafers. Business magnate Thomas Wayne makes a faux pas on TV when he refers to the underclass rabble as “clowns” who are unable to get their act together. And lo, a movement is born, and they’re tooled up, on the streets (there are no chatrooms in the 1970s) and baying for the blood of fat cats.

The first big problem is that the film cannot decide whether it wants to keep its powder dry in terms of its relationship to the wider world of superhero lore. It opens on a classic 1970s Warner Bros logo in a misguided attempt to connect itself to one of cinema’s golden eras – making it appear even worse by comparison. It tries desperately hard to come across as edgy, but coldly refuses to swerve from the hard-painted lanes of templated Hollywood filmmaking. It ends up resembling nothing more than a Suicide Squad spin-off movie. Yet its ambitions are certainly more lofty.

It craves that viewers draw a connection to Martin Scorsese’s 1982 masterpiece The King of Comedy and, to a slightly lesser extent, 1976’s Taxi Driver. And its toadying relationship to those films may ultimately be its undoing, in that it sits clawing at the trouser hem of some of those towering examples of modern film art. It misappropriates, misreads and maybe even misremembers key themes and cack-handedly mangles mischievous ambiguities into a ham-fisted character shading. Robert De Niro turns up to consecrate the bond, the big twist being he is unspeakably awful in the supporting role of a flashy late night TV host.

Elsewhere, the film is interested far less in forming a credible psychological profile of Fleck than it is taking wavy-armed pot shots at a society that would cultivate such a twisted soul. This is evident in the fact that Fleck unsubtly alludes to the idea in virtually every scene prior to the moment when he literally bellows it into the camera. It’s strange to watch a film about a character who claims repeatedly that he doesn’t believe in anything, but then its makers refuse to work with that precarious mindset to actually include something, anything in the film that doesn’t feel recycled from elsewhere, or is at the slavish service of a plotline of near-offensive predictability.

As is customary these days, a dialogue around the film’s intentions and meanings may erupt in the public sphere (the film almost addresses the idea directly), but this dialogue would be unwarranted and undeserved, as the language used to make its case is so flimsy. There’s a one-size-fits-all political allegory at its core, and there is nothing impressive about a work of art where any half-assed interpretation sticks firmly. There is no ambiguity here.

In terms of Phoenix, it’s hard to tell whether this is a poor performance, or if he just has precious little to work with in material which never has him push beyond a cosy safety zone. Fond memories of Freddie Quell and Doc Sportello, from Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master and Inherent Vice respectively, work to make the schtick he’s rolling out here seem so affected and empty.

Many scenes involve him contorting his bare torso (he is literally “twisted”), allowing the camera a leery view of his protruding ribcage or hunchback-like shoulder blades. It comes across as if Phillips is desperate to emphasise that he’s a serious artist with a serious leading man who is going full method on this sucker, but constantly loses sight of actually sculpting a semi-interesting or even lightly coherent character. It’s a sign of Joker’s across-the-board superficiality which runs marrow deep.

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If we are to believe that all good art comes from suffering, it seems that the characters in Dolly Wells’ well-intentioned but half-baked directorial debut, Good Posture, have let the process eclipse the product. A break up leads to a documentary shoot, but little tangible emotion leads the way in this underwhelming indie comedy.

The film begins as a chapter of New York teen Lilian’s life is ending. Lilian (Grace Van Patten) has been living with her boyfriend, but when he dumps her she’s forced to move in with family friends, a couple of houses down the street. She’s temporarily staying with family friends while she waits, possibly naively, for her father and his new girlfriend to move back to New York and scoop her up. Lilian hangs out with various people – an ex-lover, new friends, unreliable role models. Van Patten’s gutsy conviction just about pads out her character, but it can’t compensate for the flimsy and somewhat reductive design of the teenage angst on show.

Lilian’s life finds a purpose when she strikes up a relationship with Julia Price, the famous and intimidating novelist she’s staying with. It progressively (albeit predictably) turns from hostile to amicable, as the two women become pen pals across the hallway. Unanswered and often unconvincing questions start to tumble: is Lilian inspired by Julia? Is she jealous? Does she crave her love because there’s no one else left, or because it’s what everyone else does?

No single thread is developed far enough to make these women feel three-dimensional, as Lilian’s half-hearted attempt to make a film about Julia is as close to ‘art’ as her ambitions get. It then makes you wonder just what happened to Lilian in the first place – was she really heartbroken? Does she have a heart? Wells’ script asks smart questions about female independence, but Lilian’s passion for, well, anything, never really makes it onto the screen.

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Cinema is often described as a “broad church” but I see it more as an iceberg. A small percentage of titles achieve visibility while the majority languish beneath the surface, no less majestic for existing beneath sea-level. The 2019 BFI London Film Festival programme makes a virtue of diving beneath the surface (if you’ll permit me to keep riding my metaphor) to platform and champion works beyond the usual festival favourites of old established auteurs.

Navigating the programme is an exercise that requires more imagination than purely scanning for name-brand recognition. Yes, there is a glitzy tranche of headline-grabbers. Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman is a closing night film of marketing dreams, and there are plenty of titles arriving with Cannes, Venice and Toronto buzz. (Welcome to our town Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Mati Diop’s Atlantics, Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, Corneliu Porumbiou’s The Whistlers, Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life, Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse and Sarah Gavron’s Rocks to name but a few).

Still, this is a a programme made up of 229 features and 116 shorts, and once you flick past the headline galas, recognisable breadcrumbs are less frequent, and figuring out what you want to taste becomes a more daunting task. As a consequence, individual programmers stand in as tastemakers. You read blurbs, look for passions and themes that emerge across a particular programmer’s choices.

For example, Michael Blyth, maven of the Cult strand whose devotion for genre films is coupled with diligent appraisal of a film’s scope will always give me a few solid viewing ideas. In this case: Vivarium, which stars Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots, is a satirical sci-fi about a couple whose attempts to mount the property ladder land them in a strange netherworld. Then there’s Nocturnal, an “atmospheric” debut by Nathalie Biancheri that focuses on the relationship between a 16-year-old girl and an older male admirer.

Another programmer worth attending to is Tega Okiti whose taste was seen in action during August across the BFI season No Direct Flight London, which she co-programmed with curator Gaylene Gould. For the LFF Okiti continues to place cutting-edge talent from Africa and its diaspora on the map: Nigerian feature The Man Who Cuts Tattoos is set in an Edo village and follows the emotional and literal growing pains of a young girl who must undergo the practice of scarification.

First-time feature director Michael Omonua made a short called Brood with a bold, absurdly funny motif that bodes well for this new flick. Another debut comes courtesy of actor-turned-director Aki Omoshaybi whose Real is a portrait of a new couple attempting to subdue their personal hardships in order to grow an intimacy together.

Elsewhere programmer Sophie Brown has written a from-the-heart article recommending five titles from the Debate strand. She positions her choices as lightning bolts capable of illuminating the dark places in our current world, writing here, “There’s an urgent need for imagining alternative futures, but in order not to repeat history, we need to understand how we got here.”

I’m intrigued to see with keener eyes a part of the world (Hoxton) that I superficially know in The Street by decorated photographer Zed Nelson, and also Rewind by Sasha Joseph Neulinger, which sounds like an audacious and personal attempt to reckon with both childhood traumas and the group behaviours that enabled it to continue unabated.

This is the first year with Tricia Tuttle in the official (as opposed to last year’s acting) role of Festival Director. For a sense of the values she brings, listen to her discussing her work with shout-outs to three of her top female-directed picks: Mirrah Foulkes’ Judy & Punch; Billie Piper’s Rare Beasts; and Marielle Heller’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood on Anna Smith’s podcast Girls on Film. For the full gamut of female-directed titles, programmer Kate Taylor has compiled this handy and exhaustive list.

Having spent as much time as my limited lung-power will allow swimming around the more submerged titles, I am drawn to Malgorzata Szumowska’s The Other Lamb because Hannah Woodhead of this parish told me “it’s about joining a cult because the cult leader is hot” – a concept that makes me feel seen and attacked. I Die of Sadness Crying For You is a documentary about a Spanish song form that channels female pain.

Shooting the Mafia is the new documentary by Kim Longinotto whose work exists in a sphere of transcendent empathy. Episodes one and two of forthcoming BBC series Trigonometry are on my list because it’s by deadpan Greek genius Athina Rachel Tsangari, and Wet Season because it’s the second feature by Anthony “Ilo Ilo” Chen and works within my extended metaphor about being underwater.

To close: this preview is but a small haul of the goodies to be found, and compiling it has awoken a humility that feels appropriate. There it a type of attitude rampant among film fans that reminds me of people I met when I was travelling, who would reel off lists of countries they had visited, like: “Vietnam DONE, Thailand DONE, Laos DONE.” We’re never done.

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