Film Carew: Magic Magic, Austenland, Enough Said, On My Way

MAGIC MAGIC

The American trailer for Magic Magic - which is not embedded below because it's fucking awful - puts you in the place of Juno Temple, an All-American gal who, fresh off the boat in big bad Chile, suddenly finds herself holed up in a rural house with creepy Michael Cera, weird Agustín Silva, and bitchy Catalina Sandino Moreno. Soon enough, things start to turn disturbing, and our teen heroine is stranded in the wilds, in a foreign land, where there's something eerie in the air. The only problem is that this isn't a generic horror-film. In fact, Sebastián Silva's semi-English-language debut borders on parody thereof; not just of horror-film tropes, but of Americans abroad. Temple is so scared of being in a foreign land with strange people that she summons sustained delusion, so sure that being in a shadowy house with strangers will lead to bad things that she wills them into being. It's a paranoia-thriller in which there's little-to-no basis for the paranoia; Temple isn't wise to a conspiracy that only she can see, but lost in a haze of medication, sleeplessness, anxiety, and egocentrism.

That's the central text, but Silva (the young Chilean hipster behind The Maid and Old Cats) is too restless, too intuitive a filmmaker to make this just a skewed take on old tropes. He immediately conveys a sense of unease visually: framing the opening scene so the characters heads are chopped off; soon making Temple 'disappear' in a shower, like a phantom, before a simple reveal shows sees simply sitting down. Christopher Doyle serves a stint as DOP, signalling the film's fondness for visual invention, and visual beauty. When the horror-movie harbingers come, they're emotionally unsettling: blistered puppies left to die on a highway; a bloodied parrot; a secret abortion; fucking on a dog's grave. Silva's script has a sly wit and a dark tone, and when 'horror' is manifest it's with bizarre black-comedy; like when Temple recoils in horror at the sight of a randy dog, hurtling over the hill in slow-motion, coming to hump her leg.

Magic Magic takes its band-name-esque title from Agustín's penchant for hypnotism; and when he unexpectedly lures Temple into a trance - the best moment of unexpected cinematic hypnosis since Julio Médem's The Red Squirrel - what happens is both hilarious and horrifying, speaking of the human capacity for casual sadism and generation-smartphone's detachment from reality. From there, things get even darker, even stranger; with the howling wind and the screech of parrots the cacophonous soundtrack. Temple's individual delusion becomes a collective hallucination; and Silva's story is no longer about the solipsist's mind, but the power and danger of the group; at how people can be manipulated into letting go of their principles, at 'going with the flow', even if it takes them to dark, disturbing places. It leads to a pleasingly-open conclusion; in which the narrative ends at a perfectly-judged moment, leaving its unsettling feeling lingering. Audiences hoping for the comforts of genre may be disappointed, but any lover of cinematic adventure will find Magic Magic a genuine delight.

AUSTENLAND

"Did someone say 'Felicity'?"

The trailer for Austenland also is awful, but, then again, so's the film. The premise - an American tourist holidays to a fantasy Jane Austen camp, where find staged romance in a  fake restoration - has endless potential; given how easily it could be about 21st-century society, where people oft prefer fantasy over reality, and willingly confuse the two. The rom-com screwjinks (just go with it, it feels right), come when Keri Russell's everywoman - who is, as per the rom-com rulebook, routinely humiliated - is confused between what is pantomime and what is bona fide; torn between the Darcy-esque JJ Feild and the regular-joe Bret McKenzie. But director Jerusha Hess - one of the Mormons behind the laughless dirge Napoleon Dynamite - seems uninterested in any resonance in the text; instead delighting in a howlingly-unfunny turn from Jennifer Coolidge, which is so brutally bad I contemplated fleeing the cinema after about 30 seconds screentime.

ENOUGH SAID

Is Toni Collette set to kill the Veep as well now?

In a recent roundtable interview with Hollywood Reporter, Nicole Holofcener confessed that, making Enough Said, she “couldn't figure out how to make that plot device work and where to put it and have it not be stupid.” Sadly, it doesn't seem like she figured it out. Her latest film begins promisingly enough, with Julia Louis-Dreyfus and James Gandolfini playing divorcées embarking on a modest, realistic romance; each burnt by the past, reticently entering into courtship with no delusions of grandeur. Louis-Dreyfus still carries that infectious, charismatic laugh; Gandolfini is a big, wheezing teddy-bear with a wicked gleam in his eye; together they're funny and charming. Holofcener's old muse Catherine Keener is on hand to offer the filmmaker's familiar take on upper-class social commentary, playing the self-mythologising, new-agey poet whom Louis-Dreyfus befriends. And the most interesting storyline - or at least a B-story that blesses the film, rather than detracting from it - may be the friendship between Louis-Dreyfus's daughter, Tracey Fairaway, and her sweet-yet-needy BFF Tavi Gevinson(!).

Enough Said is, in these dramas, a film situated at a particular place in life; and Holofcener has a keen eye for what it means to be a middle-aged person entering into a new relationship, striking up a new friendship, or preparing to send your only child off to college. But any hopes for a modest, humanist drama are scuttled the moment the plot device arises. In a dire sitcom contrivance pulled from a second-rate farce, Louis-Dreyfus discovers that, unbeknownst to her, Gandolfini is really Keener's ex-husband; and, thus, we get another rom-com in which one character is maintaining a lie in the face of a flowering romance, and then the secret gets revealed, and there's a down moment near ending, and etc. If you're looking at the glass-half-full, maybe you think it's great that Holofcener can imbue a Hollywood-approved genre-pic with so much emotional truth, but its major plot-turn is pure falsity; making the glass-half-empty take one of aching disappointment.

ON MY WAY

Catherine Deneuve at a drive-in near you

Catherine Deneuve, that grand old dame of French cinema, gives a glowing leading-lady turn in Emmanuelle Bercot's On My Way. It's, effectively, a wandering road-movie, in which Deneuve walks out of her financially-struggling restaurant, off on a journey of no destination. She's attempting to escape her fate, at least for a day, but Bercot's drama is about the thing that you can never outrun: the past. Age hasn't brought Deneuve's character wisdom; instead, early traumas have become a prison, her life long trapped by things that happened over four decades ago. Though a (somewhat disinterested) grandmother, she still lives with her own mother; a symbol matched by the fact that the Miss France pageant from 1969 is calling her up for a reunion. The film picks up some familiar road-movie steam and builds, of course, to the big reveal of what traumas occurred all those years ago, but Deneuve's glowing lead-lady turn comes with layers; the actress giving the film gravity, grace, and vulnerability.