Louis Theroux: Love Without Limits

★★★

“You said you have a lot of sex?” asks Louis Theroux, this question the first words spoken in Love Without Limits. It sets the tenor for this documentary, which is essentially an hour of a polite, fumbling, uptight, bespectacled Englishman dithering indirectly around asking ‘anyway, how’s your sex life?’

Theroux has arrived in Portland to ‘get to know’ the growing culture of “ethical non-monogamy”, to meets its local participants, and dig into the idea/ideal as a whole. It’s investigative filmmaking in the friendliest fashion. Theroux only asks tough questions on occasions, and, even then, proffers them with as much tip-toeing, politeness, empathy, and even self-abnegation as possible.

As is familiar with Theroux’s screen persona, Love Without Limits is essentially situation comedy: the uptight Brit thrown amongst the (theoretically) sexually-liberated. Furthering the sitcom vibes: at times it feels like it’s a longform episode of Portlandia, the relationships herein just the latest bespoke creations of a town so kept-weird it borders on self-parody.

Though Theroux is full of empathy, forging genuine human connections with those people he speaks to, there’ll be people who watch Love Without Limits to laugh at those on screen. It’d be unsurprising if it caused spasms of delight amongst alt-right trolls, for example, given some of the fuzzy far-left folks on screen are literal cucks.

But, though Theroux is again playing the Englishman abroad —in a far-away land of multiple partners and chaotic family units, where the neologism “compersion” is spoken of with such reverence it takes on near-religious significance— he’s a traveller in search of understanding, edification, empathy. Even when he takes part in an eroticised ‘tasting session’, laughs give way to varied, conflicting feelings. “It was all rather embarrassing, but at the same time, a little bit liberating,” Theroux ultimately offers.

That gives Love Without Limits resonance beyond its comedy. The openness of the subjects, even if at times it seems performative, is the great revelation of the film; Theroux —and, let’s not forget, a camera crew; and, in turn, exposure-to and judgement-from the outside world— is welcomed, arms wide open, by all.

He wanders into poly homes for breakfasts, dinners, and open-door domesticity; this whole realm so quotidian than even Dionysian sensual revelry comes across as banal suburban group-workshop. Occasionally there’s an almost Star Trek-like feeling to it all, as if our traveller has stumbled upon a utopian paradise, one that’s sure to be revealed a some dystopia, the delightful façade camouflaging a dark secret.

That dark secret never comes, but there’s darkness beneath all the professions of free-love. Theroux is —as both storyteller and human-being— drawn to those figures, herein, who seem sad or removed or marginalised by multiple-partner scenarios, who find themselves bumped down in the hierarchy by a fresher face, or a better fuck. The camera lingers on the men a little off-centre, with the hints of sadness in their eyes. The whole thing ultimately plays as bittersweet: even the most liberated of sexual scenarios still a roiling mess of human anxieties and insecurities.

The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs

★★★★

It may or may not’ve been originally conceived as a Netflix series, but, now, The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs has arrived —on play-at-home screens— as the 18th film for the Coen Bros. It’s duly episodic by nature: six separate stories about death in the old West, joined together by a tales-from-the-one-book framing narrative; a tired device that, here, seems incredibly beautiful, with colour-plate pictures artfully suggesting the story to come.

Tim Blake Nelson plays the titular character, a singin’ cowboy strode out of an old oater and into a realm of hyper-stylised ultra-violence, gunslingin’ turned slapstick comedy. James Franco is a luckless bank-robber who ends up, twice over, at the end of his rope, awaiting his hanging. Harry Melling is an armless, legless high-theatrical orator, driven from town to town for one-night-only performances by Liam Neeson’s silent ‘impresario’; a travelling roadshow where each relies, wholly, on the other. Tom Waits plays a prospector who arrives in a verdant, Edenic valley, and seeks to find its gold. Zoe Kazan is an unwed woman journeying in a wagon train on the Oregon trail, anxiously walking towards an unknown future, accompanied by a yipping miniature dog. And, finally, five people are sat in a stagecoach barrelling through the snowy night, their conversation filled with meta-storytelling, their journey maybe entirely symbolic, perhaps being driven towards the afterlife.

On their own, these shorts are all delightful: filled with strangeness, pathos, humour, mortality. Taken as whole, it’s another particularly Coen-ish work: conversant in old studio pictures, wonderfully photographed, delightfully cast, populated by idiosyncratic characters, and, most notably, written with an astonishing ear for idiomatic vernacular. It’s not anywhere near the brothers’ best film, but it feels way too good to get lost in the endless ranks of streaming content.

Widows

★★★1/2

Steve McQueen’s fourth feature —and long-awaited follow-up to 2013’s 12 Years A Slave — is, surprisingly, a heist movie. But it’s not just a heist movie; instead, its central theft inverts the gender politics of the familiar ‘job’. A host of widows —with nothing in common, save for the men they lost!— band together to pull off a plot left behind by their husbands. It’s heist as assault on the patriarchy, taking down grandstanding, overbearing male symbols as we go. It’s essential revenge on men-in-power, the victims of this inversion criminals and politicians, people who’re often one and the same.

Widows is an ambitious remake of a British mini-series from 1983, written by Lynda La Plante. McQueen transplants the drama —and the attendant subtext— to Chicago, where American economic inequality is manifest on a grand scale, written across the North/South division of America’s Second City. The heist is set against an election campaign to be alderman of a ward on Chicago’s blighted Southside, where the entrenched elite (father/son political team Robert Duvall and Colin Farrell) are politicking, posturing, and perhaps doing deals with a pair of ruthless local rivals (Brian Tyree Henry and Daniel Kaluuya). Whilst our widows (Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki) plot their job, the electioneering runs parallel; each, essentially, grand criminal acts, of varying virtue.

The writing —by McQueen and Gillian Flynn— is taut, and the direction often inspired. These elements come together in a virtuoso one-shot in which Farrell and his Lady Macbeth-styled political advisor/offsider, Molly Kunz, leave a political rally, get into a car, and drive to their next campaign stop. The camera follows them, but then sits on the outside of the car as we drive; the figures occluded behind glass, their conversation —a behind-closed-doors ‘outing’ of their political amorality— feeling magnified by the hiding of their faces; the shot holding for the whole car-ride, before we ‘get off’ in a whole new world, and rent district. Combining this great writing/directing with a top-shelf cast (also: Liam Neeson, Cynthia Erivo, Carrie Coon, Jacki Weaver, Garret Dillahunt, Lukas Haas), Widows is an expertly-mounted prestige-picture. Maybe making a crime movie where everyone gets shot is a huge comedown for McQueen, whose 2008 debut Hunger is one of the 21st-century’s greatest cinematic works, but it’s still a hard film to fault.

The Children Act

★★★

The great Iranian director Asghar Farhadi often uses legal proceedings as exploration of society and humanity; ordinary citizens coming before powerful men —judges, lawyers, doctors, wardens, sheiks— who are, in an Islamic country, effectively adjudicating on behalf of God. In The Children Act, a film based on a novel by Ian McEwan, there’s an exploration of that great power; the way a judge holds the fate of others in their hand, whilst having not nearly so much control over their own personal life.

We meet Emma Thompson’s central character sitting in judgement like some modern-day King Solomon, deciding whether conjoined twins should be separated, killing one to save the other, enacting the "logic of the lesser evil". This leads to another case where she’s, effectively, playing God: a 17-year-old Jehovah’s Witness (Dunkirk lead Fionn Whitehead) is refusing a blood transfusion amidst leukaemia treatment; but, as minor, his religious convictions hold no weight against the titular legal ruling.

After Thompson intervenes on behalf of the boy, granting the hospital the legal right to administer a transfusion, her Godly power transfers her into a Godlike position in his life. Feeling as if he owes her his life, he becomes devoted to her. In such, it becomes a study of what it means to be a God, or at least an exploration of divine power-dynamics: If you intervene once, must you again? Do you have a responsibility to your worshippers? What're the real ramifications of your Godly actions? Whilst Richard Eyre's film has its cinematic limits, it gets at big thematic questions; even better that the exploration of them brings to mind Bender floating through space.

Puzzle

★★★1/2

When we first see Kelly Macdonald in Puzzle, she’s boxed in by a frame-within-a-frame, imprisoned by composition. She’s a housewife tending to housework, preparing her suburban New Jersey domicile for a birthday party. The great reveal is that the party is her own; thus, we meet a woman expected to do everything around the house, with nothing ever done for her. She’s gone from tending to her father to tending to husband and sons; her maiden-name, literally, meant mother. The premise of the pic is that her life is changed, and mind opened, when she falls into the world of competitive jigsaw-puzzling; a love of puzzles, and of Irrfan Khan, helping her escape her prison.

It sounds twee and crowdpleasery, but there’s a real sense of grace to Marc Turtletaub’s film; in which domestic spaces are chiaroscuro temples, silences linger with meaning, Dustin O’Halloran’s score chimes true, and the drama is allowed to slowly build, with even its biggest dramatic moments tending towards pleasingly-underplayed. The characters are drawn with sensitivity, empathy, hints of interior complexity; Oren Moverman and Polly Mann’s script not about forwarding stereotypes, but studying human behaviour.

Lean On Pete

★★★

Lean On Pete is a roadtrip through the frontier of the new American West: a parade of exurban squalor, subsistence living, and hustle for simple survival. Andrew Haigh —the English filmmaker behind Weekend, 45 Years, and the cultishly-beloved TV series Looking— brings a clear outsider’s eye to a story that a far-lesser filmmaker could’ve turned into hard-lives-on-hard-land romanticisation.

There’s seeming romance in its premise: a lost teenage boy (Charlie Plummer of All The Money In The World) falls into the world of small-time dirt-track horse-racing. There, he gets meagre cash thrown to him by cranky Steve Buscemi, gets to spend quality time with Chloë Sevigny, and bonds with the titular race-horse. When he learns Lean On Pete is due for the glue factory, he makes off with a car, trailer, horse; journeying cross-country, in true coming-of-age style, through lost-innocence, towards adulthood. There’s strong subtext to this beyond a bourgie ‘finding of self’, though. On the lam, moving into increasingly desolate vistas, he’s not just seeking meaning, but trying to escape the shame of poverty.

Strange Colours

★★★1/2

Strange Colours is an Australian movie with an astonishing sense of place. This isn’t a film set in the mythological ‘outback’, but in Lightning Ridge, NSW; a tiny opal-mining outpost that draws wanderers, dreamers, no-hopers filled with hopes of striking it rich. Director Alena Lodkina first chronicled this milieu in the short documentary Lightning Ridge: The Land Of The Black Opals, and returned to make her debut feature. It’s a drama essentially about a daughter’s relationship to her deadbeat dad, but really it’s about this setting: community captured on camera, in a film vividly photographed by DOP Michael Latham (who also shot Gabrielle Brady’s great Islands Of The Hungry Ghosts, another small, site-specific Australian film that’ll hopefully find its way to regular-release cinemas).

Kate Cheel arrives in Lightning Ridge, fresh off the bus, visiting her bedridden father (a duly-terrifying Danny Jones, ex-con turned star of Amiel Courtin-Wilson’s Hail). She’s taken a year off her studies, is on her way, she thinks, to Alice Springs, but she’s not sure, restless, wandering. This symbolises a place in which lost souls blow in, then never leave. The cast is filled with various non-actors, their accents thick, colloquialisms many, beards bushy; oddballs and charmers who’re brought on screen with real empathy. They’re all men, most broken men; collectively representing the patriarchy, in all their fuck-ups, failed-dreams, and clutched stubby-holders. Lodkina, having travelled to Lighting Ridge, previously, herself, dramatises how it feels to be an outsider, a woman, navigating outback Australiana’s perennially-macho culture.

I Used To Be Normal: A Boyband Fangirl Story

★★★

In the closing credits of I Used To Be Normal: A Boyband Fangirl Story, there’s an outtakes-esque device that shines a light on the long production history of any documentary. We see the film’s four subjects in headphones, rocking out to the object of their titular affection. But then we see a host of other obsessives who we’ve never met, those interviewed subjects who, evidently, hit the cutting-room floor along the four-year making of the film, for whatever reason. It makes viewers think more about the people director Jessica Leski has chosen to follow, how their stories illustrate the film’s greater themes.

There’s Susan, an elderly Melburnian who’s spent a life in thrall to Beatlemania. There’s Dara, a 30-something Sydneysider who’s had to come out twice-over: first as queer, then, perhaps more shamefully, as a Take That superfan. There’s Sadia, a 20-something in San Francisco, whose tween obsession with the Backstreet Boys still hasn’t left her, and can at times seem troubling. Then there’s Elif, a Turkish-American teenager who grows up on camera, but is met in the midst of her One Direction love at its most euphoric and hyperventilating.

The film marries their personal stories with studies of the boyband as construction, and conversations on the psychology of fandom. It starts out played for laughs, gets dark (boyband fandom leading to relationship struggles, family problems, blowing money on a nightmarish Backstreet Boys cruise), but ultimately ends in a place of optimism. A boyband phase is seen not as some moment of misbegotten bad-taste, but a rite of passage, inextricably wed with establishing self-identity, discovering nascent sexuality, and a need to scream in the face of a world that grants you little other power and agency.