SUSPIRIA
4/5
“This isn’t for vanity!” howls an old, necrotic wretch, flesh sagging like a melting doll, barely kept alive by the blackest magic. This sunglasses-clad, almost-Jabba-esque figure has been wheeled out to watch a troupe of ballerinas strut their satanic stuff, occultist symbols depicted by way of dancers’ bodies. She’s witness to an elaborate witchcraft ritual, staged to keep a coven in youthful health and summon a demonic maternal figure from beyond the pale. “This,” she yelps, “is art!”
It’s an exclamation pulling double-duty for Suspiria, a remake of Dario Argento’s 1977 giallo classic. This Suspiria is no mindless recreation, but defiant work of art. It’s the work of a filmmaker, Luca Guadagnino, fresh off delivering a classic of his own, Call Me By Your Name. Rather than some horror fanboy out to pay homage to the past, Guadagnino has his own vision for this old story of a prestigious ballet academy built by witches.
His Suspiria is set in the year of the original, 1977, in Berlin; this academy built in a stretch of Kreuzberg staring directly at the dividing wall. This introduces the socio-political subtext of the film, in which the spectre of the Holocaust lingers more terrifyingly than any supernatural spirit, and where the divisions of communism symbolise the strictures, control, and repressiveness of the patriarchy. It’s a film filled with women, about female power in physical, metaphysical, and sexual fashion; where old demarcations between good and evil, and the stigmatisations that come when people — or genders — are deemed the latter.
There’s young starlets (Dakota Johnson, Mia Goth, Chloë Grace Moretz), cult character actors (Angela Winkler, Sylvie Testud), a tip-of-the-cap to the original (Jessica Harper), and, most notably, Tilda Swinton in triplicate, playing the old wretch, the ballet-school’s ‘inspirational’ director, and, under layers of prosthetics, an old-man psychotherapist who’s a far-better investigator of the school’s hidden secrets than the only male cast-members, a pair of cocky, haughty cops.
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What makes this Suspiria really sing, though, is that Guadagnino is — as he showed, in near-magical fashion, with Call Me By Your Name — a filmmaker who excels at having every element of his films work in concert, and shine on their own. Whilst there’s the obvious appeal of having Thom Yorke on the soundtrack — or, if you’re a cinema nerd, having Weerasethakul lenser Sayombhu Mukdeeprom as cinematographer— nothing shows the loving devotion to every detail like the non-generic closing credits, which seem rapturously beautiful just by avoiding the standard-issue white-crawl-on-a-black-screen, a cinematic convention that most pictures don’t bother to avoid.
Those credits arrive as final exhalation, a comedown at the end of a sprawling 152-minute running time that’s nearly an hour longer than the 98-minute original. Many of those minutes are sunk into Suspiria’s sustained crescendo, a final-act freakout — see: the opening para above — that goes way out there and keeps going. It’s the crowning moment of the movie, not just for its ridiculousness, but because it’s a work of fresh invention, unseen in the original.
At that finalé, the film’s grey/brown visual palette — out to evoke the dreariness of Eastern Bloc communism — suddenly turns a surreal red, as if the whole frame has been drenched in blood. Guadagnino has previously been a photographic naturalist, even as his narratives like Melissa P., I Am Love, and A Bigger Splash have played as lurid melodramas melodrama. But, with Suspiria, he throws his film into sustained hyper-stylisation, growing more surreal, spectral, and ridiculous as it goes. The bonkers, go-for-broke climax summons wild daring and genuine ambition, qualities not usually associated with the safe cinematic realm of remakes.
ROMA
4/5
After the globe-conquering, Oscar-winning, 3D IMAX-immersive success of Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón wanted to make a more personal project. And, so, here comes Roma, a movie-star-free family drama set in México in 1970, inspired by his own childhood, shot in black-and-white, and partly spoken in the Mixtec language; a film in which the absence of a deadbeat dad causes ripples through the lives of his wife, children, and the housekeeping staff. It’s a work of humanism: its drama domestic, its acting largely realist.
But, for all the supposed ‘smallness’ of this film, Roma is another visual marvel by Cuarón, a collection of virtuoso tracking shots, whole scenes playing out in single-takes. His camera explores domestic spaces, evoking how the child sees the home as a grand temple. It floats through environments, as if echoing the movements of breeze or spirits. And, avoiding edits, sometimes the unbroken takes find the tension building palpably; as in a scene at the beach where the sea grows rough, and the camera tracks to the shoreline, back to the beach, out into the waves, and back in again.
That’s one of a handful of grand set-pieces herein. There’s a student-protest that turns violent, teeming masses sent scattering. There’s a forest fire that breaks out near a rural hacienda, gathered families out to dowse the flames in all-hands-on-deck desperation. There’s a group of martial arts students, moving in formation, there's a disturbing quality to the fact that they’re being trained as a militia. And there’s a harrowing sequence when the unexpected arrival of childbirth sends us into the tumult of a teeming maternity ward, and a moment of desperate medical intervention.
Though it’s billed as a ‘small’ film by Cuarón, these shots are works of grandeur, technical and visual marvels that feel like shots from a blockbuster. Fittingly, the film is so cinematic that it’s challenging the standard practices of its producers, Netflix, who may even be granting it a cinematic release. In Australia, Roma is opening the CineLatino festival, offering local audiences a glad chance to see it on the big screen.
SHOPLIFTERS
3.5/5
Hirokazu Kore-eda cut his teeth making documentaries, which has informed his narrative approach. The prolific filmmaker authors family dramas in which stories are set in recognisable reality, and underpinned by an understanding of human behaviour. Often, these family dramas are ways of poking at Japanese society, which is certainly the case with Shoplifters, his Palme d’Or-winning exploration of the cultural weight of blood ties, the conservative fear of a welfare state, and the elasticity of familial bonds.
After Like Father, Like Son (melo)dramatised the nature/nurture debate, here, Kore-eda pushes the theme further: Shoplifters about a family of low-level thieves, who steal from stores, welfare agencies, and audience’s hearts. Only, they’re not a family, in the purest sense. Though embodying traditional roles (grandmother, mother, father, siblings) they’re unrelated, joining together in a form of survival. Each family member, in their own way, is unwanted by society, finding a sense of belonging only together.
Though he’s informed by social-realism, Kore-eda is a born crowdpleaser, and Shoplifters certainly plays that way: the film full of warmth, charm, humanity. The director’s favourite recurring actors Lily Franky and Kirin Kiki (who’ve been in four and six Kore-eda flicks, respectively) lead the cast, but it’s always the performances that the director elicits from children — here, debutantes Miyu Sasaki and Joy Kairi — that are the most remarkable. The great child performances and depiction of an off-the-grid family bring back memories of Kore-eda’s great 2004 film Nobody Knows; comparisons that Shoplifters both earns and fails to quite live up to. It may’ve won the Palme d’Or, but Kore-eda’s thirteenth narrative feature feels more like the latest workmanlike entry in a pleasing career than some unexpected triumph.
THE OLD MAN & THE GUN
3.5/5
Speaking of warmth and charm: here comes Robert Redford, in what’s being billed as his final film performance, with a glint in his eye and a smirk on his lips, his movie-star magnetism evidently undimmed by the passage of time. The 82-year-old Sundance don headlines the terribly-named The Old Man & The Gun, playing a bank-robber who does his job with a friendly folksiness, charming bank tellers more than threatening them. His partners-in-crime are Danny Glover and Tom Waits, which gives you a taste of the killer cast on hand, here; Casey Affleck, Sissy Spacek, Elisabeth Moss, Tika Sumpter, John David Washington, and Keith Carradine all along for Redford’s ride off into the sunset.
Director David Lowery — who, previously, made the Malick-lite Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, the unexpectedly-good Disney family flick Pete’s Dragon, and the Rooney-Mara-eats-a-pie real-estate-and-ghosts masterwork A Ghost Story — mounts this crowd-pleasing film as shrine to Redford, and, in turn, to ’70s American cinema. Shot on grainy 16mm, it has the look, and, with Redford and Spacek getting down to some gentle courting, it has the icons.
Lowery makes all this playing-on-cinema-history explicit when Affleck, the detective on the case of the Over The Hill Gang, comes across our master-crim’s many mugshots, all of which are repurposed Redford headshots. Then, in a montage of the character’s career of prison-breaks — which rattles along, comically, to almost Wes Anderson degrees — we see a young Redford, in The Chase, verily glowing in his youthful handsomeness; old film repurposed anew, in celebration of a leading man’s life on screen.
