KNIVES OUT
It’s pretty funny that Rian Johnson’s first film after Star Wars: The Last Jedi is called Knives Out, given that’s essentially a description of the internet invective that grew around his much-discussed franchise instalment. His attempt to break with dated tropes — to, in so many words, “let the past die” — became a lightning-rod for manboy-fanbois and alt-right trolls, the resulting furore an as-it-happened study of fan entitlement run amok and mobilised online toxic masculinity.
While there is a character herein — Jaeden Martell’s 16-year-old prep-school prick — described, in so many words, as “an alt-right troll”, Knives Out isn’t, however, some response to Johnson’s experiences. Instead, it’s a movie that he’s long yearned to make, coming up with the premise in the wake of his wonky ‘teen-noir’ debut, 2005’s Brick. And that premise is, simply: a contemporary riff on the classic murder-mystery movie.
Unlike Kenneth Branagh’s recent re-do of Murder On The Orient Express, there’s nothing anchoring Knives Out to the past, to tradition, and — importantly — to sincerity. What Johnson has fashioned is a movie all too aware of its movie-ness, a semi-satirical riff on the whodunit genre. It’s sharp, smart, wry; bouncing around its busy narrative with a sense of delighted, delightful play. It’s rare to get a sense that a director is having fun — filmmaking is far too logistical, costly, and stressful an endeavour — but you get the sense, here, that Johnson is having fun.
As is his cast. Befitting the genre, a host of famous folk — Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Don Johnson, Katherine Langford, Riki Lindhome, Martell — are gathered in a gothic mansion in the wake of a shocking death. It’s the grand country home — all dark wood and floor rugs, creepy dolls and gathered clutter — of the celebrated mystery novelist Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer, who is great). On the night of his 85th birthday, surrounded by his colourful family, he dies in mysterious circumstances, something befitting one of his own novels.
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This, of course, feeds into meta-movieness — or, perhaps, meta-genreness — of the whole magillah. It’s not just the whodunit structure, with its twists and turns, but the way a character literally sits down to watch an episode of Murder She Wrote, the time someone says, “The game is afoot, hey Watson!” or when LaKeith Stanfield, playing a no-nonsense detective, compares the setting to a “Clue board”. He’s investigating alongside old Johnson pal Noah Segan, playing a state trooper who can’t — professional manner be damned — contain his gushing enthusiasm for the novels of the dearly departed. He’s the one pointing out the parallels between the ‘real’ events, in the story, and the fictional narratives Thrombey has spun; and subsequent second-act flashbacks reveal, in turn, that the writer, even when staring death in the face, was jotting down notes on murder tropes.
The cops on hand soon take a backseat to that ultimate whodunit trope: the freelance sleuth, who’ll dig deep into the suspicious motives of the various rich folk, and crack the case, his great revelations delivered, with a flourish, via an in-the-parlour finale. Here, it’s James Bond (for the time being) himself, Daniel Craig, who plays Benoît Blanc, a PI with a thick Louisiana accent, piercing blue eyes, and an ever-inquisitive nature.
This lead character, too, is a comic creation, with due irony; if there’s one thing the disastrous Holmes & Watson got right (and, quite possibly, it was just the one thing), it was the notion that the mystical Sherlocking visionary is a cliché well past its prime. Here, Craig is both hot on the trail and, at times, way off; at once clueless bumbler (there’s a great scene where he’s blasting a song through headphones, singing along, oblivious to skulduggery happening nearby) and the sharpest instrument in this flick’s kooky-character toolkit.
The comic depiction of this central sleuth suits the film’s comic tone. While there are some allusions to contemporary politics — critiques of economic inequality, entitlement, and anti-immigration rhetoric — they feel more like asides than the central devices; themes that are hinted at, but certainly not the reason for this film’s existence. Johnson wasn’t out to make a movie about anything, really. Except, maybe, other movies. That’s both the joy of Knives Out, and the thing that limits its effect. It’s a hell of a lot of fun, for both director and viewer, but you’ve gotta leave it at that.
★★★1/2
MRS LOWRY & SON
Pretty sure your old pal Film Carew has never used the term “whinging pom” in a review before. After all, it’s hardly the stuff of intellectual cinema criticism. But that’s the phrase that came to mind, again and again, in Mrs Lowry & Son.
It’s, effectively, a movie tied to the celebrity of English painter LS Lowry; this towering figure of 20th-century British art even being played by Timothy Spall, five years removed from his acclaimed turn as JMW Turner in Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner. But, as its title suggests, this isn’t a film about Lowry, but about him and his mother. And their horrible, dysfunctional, cooped-up-in-one-house relationship. Based on Martyn Hesford’s stage-play, it betrays its origins: two commanding actors — Spall and Vanessa Redgrave — going head-to-head in a drama contained almost entirely within one bedroom. In the abstract, perhaps that doesn’t sound too bad. But, holy shit, is the resulting film excruciating.
The ‘drama’ extends as far as this: in 1934 Lancashire — cue gramophones, phone boxes — Spall is a struggling painter, failing to find any interest in his art brut artwork of grim industrial cityscapes. Redgrave is his aging, infirm, bed-bound mother; forever disapproving of her son, full of bitterness and resentment. This results in, roughly, 90 tedious minutes of her screeching things like, “You’re not an artist and you never will be!” with a sour scowl on her face. As she lets loose a litany of insults, epithets, and complaints, the only likely response is perhaps thinking of a cruel phrase in return.
★1/2
BY THE GRACE OF GOD
Like last week’s Official Secrets, By The Grace Of God, based on a true story, is a movie about the power of information, and the attempt to hold an all-powerful entity to task for its public lies, abuses of power, and crimes. It finds a host of adult men banding together — forming an association, using the power of publicity — to, finally, hold to task the one priest who sexually abused them all in their childhoods.
The narrative is spun off from the real-life crimes of Father Bernard Preynat, who was indicted in 2016 due to accusations he molested over 80 boys across decades, ‘shielded’ and passed around by the Catholic Church as he did. The case sparked huge debate and controversy in France; and, in turn, that has spilled over to this film. Various lawsuits were issued by Preynat and others perpetrators depicted herein, and the movie’s producers believing there was resistance, from French producers, in tackling such a subject.
What’s most surprising, perhaps, is that By The Grace Of God — a measured, issues-driven drama sure to earn plaudits as ‘important’ — is the work of François Ozon. The French filmmaker has been so prolific that it’s natural he’s made movies in many genres, of many kinds. This marks Ozon’s 18th feature in 22 years, but it’s unlike any he’s made previously. If there’s one quality that unites his films, it’s a wry look at sexuality and perversity; qualities that colour even his darkest dramas or relationship studies. While Ozon long ago graduated from his one-time ‘enfant terrible’ status — probably with the back-to-back of 5x2 and Time To Leave early in the century — he’s hardly changed his spots; his previous picture was, after all, the bonkers psychosexual thriller The Double Lover.
But with By The Grace Of God, Ozon plays things duly sober and straight. This is a serious drama about a serious subject; a film all too aware of its place in a broader conversation in French society. Melvil Poupaud, Denis Ménochet, and Swann Arlaud play the three principle figures in the drama; each victims of sexual abuse in their childhood, men of different demeanours and lives united only in their suffering.
The narrative is not a depiction of a journalistic investigation or a legal preparation, but it has that same feeling: many a montage is dedicated to the gathering of information. Here, the case isn’t just being made against a single man, but an institution; this as much about the cover-up as the crime. Ozon strikes a balance between the larger social crusade and the effects on the individual; By The Grace Of God at once about holding perpetrators to task and dealing with the lingering after-effects of trauma.
★★★1/2
ATLANTICS
Your old pal Wikipedia lists Mati Diop’s Cannes Grand Prix-winning Atlantics as a “supernatural romantic drama film”. Which kind of makes it sound like Ghost. While it is about a young woman (Mame Bineta Sane) being visited by the ghost of her lost lover (Ibrahima Traoré), this isn’t a tale of love triumphing over all, even death. Instead, it’s a searing critique of Senegalese society: of the exploitation of poor workers, of the structures placed on young women, of moralising conservative Muslims, of the way the police work for the wealthy and society bends towards those with money and power. It’s a movie forever drawn Westward, towards the ocean, the horizon, the setting sun; where desperate young men board a boat heading to Europe, hoping for a new life, only to meet a watery grave.
The first scene of the movie introduces us to these young men, in the middle of a workplace dispute; the opening making Atlantics feel like some West African riff on Ken Loach. But soon social-realism gives way to magic-realism, as the men disappear, in the middle of the night, vanishing like spirits; their absent felt in the empty, eerie beachside bar where they once met their lovers. Later, the men will return, as actual spirits, to possess the bodies of lovers left behind; turning their eyes white, their demeanour eerie. From beyond the grave, they’ve come back to collect their lost paychecks, to seek spectral revenge on the boss (Diankou Sembene) that withheld their money.
At the centre of this is Ada, who’s distraught when her beau vanishes, and rattled when he’s rumoured to have returned. She’s being married off to the wealthy Omar (Babacar Sylla), the horrors of this arranged affair conveyed in a glorious scene in which the celebrations are drowned in wobbly, discordant electronics, a highlight of the glorious score by Fatima Al Qadiri. When a fire breaks out on her wedding bed on her wedding night, the angry investigating police officer suspects her love, Souleiman, is the cause (he, of course, is, but in a more ghostly form than expected). It casts suspicion on Ada, who is hauled to the police station, and then submitted, by her ashamed parents, to the humiliation of a doctor’s office ‘virginity test’.
This starts a chain reaction in which our heroine rejects the life expected of her, and the social and cultural expectations placed on women. Hell hath no fury like lovers scorned by circumstance, torn apart by fate; both corporeal woman and spectral man defiant, seditious, out to turn the tables. In Atlantics, the best revenge is living — and dying — well.
★★★★
I LOST MY BODY
It’s a tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme: a love-story where a disembodied hand seeks reattachment to the boy it once belonged to. So goes the wacky premise for Jérémy Clapin’s freshly-streaming animated oddity, which’ll surely draw curious viewers by dint of its premise alone.
Where horror movies have long made a habit of bestowing unexpected entities with malevolent intentions — wigs, tyres, jackets — I Lost My Body is certainly not a movie in which a hand crawls around with ill will and bloodlust (though there is a scene, herein, where the hand hitches a ride on a pigeon, then strangles it in an attempt to stay alive). Instead, the story — loosely based on a novel by Guillaume Laurant, who wrote the screenplay for The Fabulous Destiny Of Amélie Poulain — bounces between twin narrative modes, each bringing trials, tribulations, and sincere emotions.
Our disembodied hand, having clawed its way out of a medical lab, sets out on a trans-Parisian journey, coming face-to-uh... hand with the horrors of the urban milieu: traffic, trains, escalators, rodents, rubbish. Clapin’s direction plays with environmental scale in a fashion reminiscent of Honey, I Shrunk... movies: sewer rats and angry pigeons are rendered terrifying when they’re of a similar size. The other half of the narrative finds a young man, Naoufel, harbouring a crush on a local librarian, spending his days debilitated by yearning, struggling with the loneliness of being a transplant in Paris, and working beside a terrifying (given the circumstances) table saw.
In the middle, there are memories of Naoufel’s youth; but we’re never sure if he’s the one doing the remembering, or if it’s his lost hand. The screenplay eventually reveals how carefully, and thoughtfully, it’s been assembled as each of these hazy images, and their meaning, is slowly revealed; the motif of buzzing flies, especially, lingering throughout. In such, I Lost My Body is a movie about fate. About fateful accidents and fateful reunions, and lovers both brought together and kept apart by circumstances and coincidences beyond them. In this hand-drawn animation about a hand, you always feel the hand of the author, presiding over this fated tale like a god.
★★★1/2
