While 2023 will go down in film history as the year that, inexplicably in my opinion, audiences chose Oppenheimer over The Flash, the BFI London Film Festival offers a chance to look ahead to the year to come. It is a prestigious affair, which means that it is dominated by big-name directors whose films will soon be queueing up for Oscars recognition, along with many lesser-known films that won&#8217;t make it to UK cinemas outside of the festival.
This year is especially notable for the number of distinguished directors lining up who are returning to the big screen for the first time in years. Wim Wenders makes a return with not one but two films: the documentary profile of artist Anselm Kiefer Anselm and the Tokyo-set drama Perfect Days. David Fincher teams up again with his co-writer from Seven for The Killer and Lukas Moodysson presents the sequel Together 99. Meanwhile Victor Erice’s Close Your Eyes wins the prize for longest absence, coming a full 30 years since the Spanish director last made a feature film.
Joining them are Sofia Coppola’s biopic of Elvis’s wife, Priscilla, Richard Linklater’s neo-noir comedy Hit Man and festival favourite Koreeda with Monster. Steve McQueen widens his epic vision after the Small Axe film series that chronicled racism and immigration in the UK, with Occupied City. Occupied City is a four-and-a-half-hour chronicle of 130 locations in Amsterdam, contrasting their present-day to historical footage when they still hosted the persecuted Jewish community. The Nazi past is also revisited in Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, which promises a more dreamlike or hallucinatory experience than McQueen’s exploration of archival memory.
If instead it is actors who draw you to the cinema, then you will keenly await All of Us Strangers, an intimate portrait of a friendship that brings Andrew Scott (the ‘hot priest’ from Fleabag) together with man of the moment Paul Mescal. Bradley Cooper stars in and directs Maestro, about the life of legendary 20th century conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein. Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick feature in the Australian Outback thriller The Royal Hotel, reuniting Garner with director Kitty Green after the excellent study of workplace abuse The Assistant.

The film that picked up the greatest buzz over the summer festival circuit is Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things. Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo star in this Victorian-set sci-fi adaptation of Scottish writer Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel. Lanthimos has made a career in staging the unruly clash between imprisoning convention and sexual desire, each time in a more outlandish setting. Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon instead plays its historical re-enactment in a more sombre key, recounting one of the most unremittingly grim episodes in the genocide of the Native American population – with Lily Gladstone and <a href="https://platformonline.uk/posts/how-david-attenborough-is-getting-planet-earth-wrong">Leonardo DiCaprio</a> playing the leads. Intersecting with the discovery of oil in Oklahoma and the beginnings of the FBI, the story is a reminder of the brutality underlying capitalism, racism and state force.

the-kitchen-kano-kaluuya

The-kitchen-kano-kaluuya

Two British productions provide the opening and closing night galas, neatly representing two contrasting views of the nation. The first is Saltburn, a tale of privilege and desire in Oxford University with an ensemble cast that includes Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike and Richard E. Grant. The second is The Kitchen, the directorial debut of actor Daniel Kaluuya. Set on an estate in 2040, the film is a near-future critique of gentrification and its effect on working class family and community.
You may have noticed that both The Kitchen and Poor Things use sci-fi to insert flights of creative imagination in the otherwise more imprisoning genres of, respectively, social realism and costume drama. This seems in fact to constitute a new trend. Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal are taken into space in the relationship drama Foe, while the 80s-set coming of age story Croma Kid promises to be ‘the <a href="https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff/Online/default.asp?BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::permalink=croma-kid-lff23">only Dominican-set scifi</a> you will see this year’ according to the BFI’s programme. Add to this the romance Fingernail and the character study Sky Peals and sci-fi is now boldly going into genres where it had rarely gone before. While the sci-fi boom of the 50s came at a time of the space race and the atom bomb, this intimate, lower-budget sci-fi is perhaps more appropriate to a time when technological change has more lowly ambitions than the post-war attempt to conquer the universe.
Before we go, we would like to draw your attention some films that are unlikely to make it to the multiplex – but will be well worth your time to seek out. Cobweb is a 70s-set thriller comedy amid the South Korean film industry. Housekeeping for Beginners provides a queer perspective on status and sexuality in what is the latest entry from the small but impressive Macedonian film industry. Ryusuke Hamaguchi, director of the slow, beautiful Drive My Car, takes a poetic look at community and the environment in Evil Does Not Exist. Europa promises a thrilling critique of neoliberal capital and rural landscapes by Austrian-Iranian director Sudabeh Mortezai. Starve Acre is a return for Daniel Kokotajlo after his impressive debut Apostasy. While Apostasy examined the cult mindset of a Jehovah’s Witness, Starve Acre sees him move more firmly into folk horror, a genre which is now everywhere, offering as it does the chance to expose the unsettling weirdness underlying the everyday habits we take for granted.
See <a href="https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526164926/folk-horror-on-film/">new book</a>, Folk horror on film: Return of the British repressed, edited by Kevin J. Donnelly and Louis Bayman, out this October. The BFI London Film Festival takes place <a href="https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff/Online/default.asp">4 to 15 October 2023</a>.
<pre>Featured photo: Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese)</pre>

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Our film editor Louis Bayman previews the 67th BFI London Film Festival. Here’s what to look out for.

Social realism meets sci-fi at the BFI London Film Festival 2023

This year was a truly classic edition of the London Film Festival, which returned to public screenings after last year’s online-only event. The winner of the Official Festival Competition was the excellent Hit the Road, an Iranian road movie that was also the debut film from Panah Panahi, son of Jafar Panahi, the veteran director whose satirical visions of contemporary Iran got him arrested and banned from filmmaking. Not that this has softened his son’s filmmaking, who directs a road movie about a chaotic family in what starts out as very funny and ends up as deeply moving, even fantastical by its end. The emotional range develops with the varied landscape they travel, as the family get further away from Tehran and end up near the mist-strewn border with Turkey. Perhaps also paying tribute to the fractious closeness of family, the six-year-old Rayan Sarlak gives one of the all-time greatest child performances in cinema as the family’s younger son. While this was a worthy winner amid a wonderful year’s array of films, we thought we’d give you the results from a few of our own categories.
<h5>Best artistic use of black and white</h5>
I’m still a little bit conflicted on whether this one should go to Belfast, a surprisingly touching drama directed by Kenneth Branagh set on a residential street in the Northern Irish capital amid the beginning of the Troubles. It’s more a family drama than an exhaustive political account, but no the worse for demonstrating how history determines even the most private situations. The black and white gives a retro quality that is less nostalgic than it is a reminder of what violence and pain take away.
But for sheer artistic brio the award must go to The Tragedy of Macbeth, the festival’s closing gala, and the first ever film made by Joel Coen without his brother Ethan in tow. Denzel Washington plays the title role and Joel’s wife Frances McDormand plays Lady Macbeth, perhaps an in-joke given the character’s classic role in driving her husband’s solo ambitions. The dialogue moves at quite a pace, but the swirling fog, the jet-black ravens and the air of violent fantasy in the monochrome film stock convey enough of the dramatic atmosphere for anyone not already familiar with Shakespeare’s play.
A special mention for the least artistic use of black and white goes to Paris, 13th District. This is a partnership between Jacques Audiard, whose role on films like A Prophet make him a worthy contender for France’s most macho filmmaker, and scriptwriter Celine Sciamma of Portrait of a Lady of Fire, whose Petite Maman also premiered at the festival and which extends her interest in the workings of female subjectivity. This partnership surely had great potential. But Paris, 13th District is never more than a plodding romantic drama with neither romance nor drama, which believes itself more edgy than it actually is. Its black and white is thus only a pointless stylistic flourish designed to mask these deficiencies.
<h5>Worst misuse of 20th century history</h5>
There were some fantastic period dramas in this year’s festival, with Spencer giving an intense glimpse into Christmas Day 1992 when Diana decided to divorce Charles, and Power of the Dog marking Jane Campion’s return to the cinema with an anti-western set in Montana in 1925. Then there was Munich – Edge of War, an attempted resuscitation of the reputation of Neville Chamberlain, the man who decided that appeasing Hitler would save Europe. This large production, based on the book by Robert Harris, begins promisingly enough, with George McKay a nervy but patriotic translator roped into an espionage plot to steal Hitler’s secret briefing papers and thereby halt the invasion of Europe. Unfortunately the spy drama never really gets anywhere, leaving us instead with a tribute to Neville Chamberlain, played in stolid costume-drama form by Jeremy Irons. A closing intertitle helpfully informs us that appeasement was part of a chain of events that ‘eventually’ led to Hitler’s defeat. I must have missed the intertitle reminding the viewer that this was only after the fall of mainland Europe and the Holocaust. I can only guess that the target market is anyone who finds arguments about Winston Churchill’s legacy so interesting that they want to move onto a more challenging recipient of their admiration.
<h5>Best &#8216;spooky season&#8217; picks for Halloween </h5>
Cannes festival winner Julia Ducournau comes in at a near-miss for this award with Titane. This blend of serial killer, body horror, sci-fi and art film would have been a sure-fire winner for an award for best sex scene with a car – not in a car, but with one. Yet in a film that is all about the difficulties of classification, what starts out as horror ends up as a love story. Even if it then blurs the line between sexual and familial love, by way of a fugitive killer breaking her own nose and hiding her own impregnation by a car – that is not a typo – to impersonate the missing child of a lonely firefighter.
And so our hands-down, guts out, scream-till-you-embarrass-the-person-next-to-you winner of this particular award is DASHCAM. It’s a sillier, bigger budget, somewhat less focused but still highly enjoyable follow up by Rob Savage to last year’s Host, which was set entirely within the 55 minutes of a deeply scary Zoom call. The premise behind DASHCAM is instead a livestream by freestyling rapper and online anti-masker controversialist Annie Hardy as she comes to Britain to visit a friend, steals his car and gives a ride to the wrong prematurely-aged stranger with a mystery disease. The limitations of the dashcam technology are used to exploit the fact that what we can’t see is often scarier than what we can. And the constant comment stream, although hard to follow alongside the action, is hilariously familiar to anyone who has ever participated in an online community. It will be interesting to see if this updating of the ‘found footage’ film (such as The Blair Witch Project) will offer filmmakers enough mileage to become a new subgenre of horror for the internet age. I’d say this gross-out, jump-scare film is definitely one to enjoy alongside a packed, groaning audience at the cinema, although I can’t help wondering if maybe the true authentic viewing experience would, for once, be a cracked iPhone with a dodgy connection.
The BFI London Film Festival took place <a href="https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff/Online/default.asp">6 to 17 October 2021</a>.

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Our film editor, Louis Bayman, tells us how the 65th BFI London Film Festival went down, including road movies and Halloween picks.

The Hits and Misses from the 2021 BFI London Film Festival

We reported <a href="https://www.the-platform.org.uk/2020/10/06/the-platform-preview-to-the-bfi-london-film-festival-2020/">earlier this month</a> that the London Film Festival would be a more intimate affair than usual, much of it at home, with no gala performances and a smaller selection of films.
Of course, the festival did still have its headline acts. Ammonite, its closing finale, was a touching tale of love set in 1840s Lyme Regis (which we will review at greater length soon), with Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan as its leads. It was an effective if conventional choice, like the festival opener, Steve McQueen’s historical recreation Mangrove. Personally, I found McQueen’s other entry to the festival, Lovers Rock, more interesting, although a minor film and a kind of ‘B-side’ to Mangrove. McQueen’s genius is more for establishing a certain setting than in plot and it is put to especially good use in this almost non-narrative film of a Ladbroke Grove house party thrown at some point in the 1980s.
In the absence of an official competition the online audience picked the festival winner, awarding the prize to Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round, about a group of schoolteachers who realise that their job is more fun if they drink every day. While there’s no arguing with taste I found this somewhat moralistic film a rather white, male and middle-aged choice compared to the diversity that the festival had put effort into displaying elsewhere.
The clear winner for me of the more crowd-pleasing films was the gorgeous, touching, One Night in Miami. Based on a stage play by first-time director Regina King, it imagines a meeting in a Miami hotel room between Cassius Clay, Malcolm X, Sam Cooke and Jim Brown, as they each contemplate a life changing decision: Clay to join the Muslim Brotherhood and Malcolm to leave it, Cooke to address social change in his music and Brown to depart the NFL to try a career in Hollywood. The decisions are as personal as they are political, and its central question – what does black success mean in a white society – is made to resound with a contemporary relevance despite the retro setting.
However, the festival is a chance to see films which won’t ever get the red carpet treatment. So here’s my list of six of the best to look out for beyond the big releases:

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one night in miami

<h5>UNDINE 
Dir. Christian Petzold (Germany/France)</h5>
Undine turns the conventional romance of a random city encounter into an absorbing and ultimately disquieting tale of love and pain. It will be familiar territory for viewers already acquainted with director Christian Petzold and lead actress Paula Beer, but it develops his concern with Europe’s historical scars in a more allegorical direction. Its lead character, Undine, is a guide to the architectural history of Berlin and is named after a water nymph of ancient legend. She becomes a figure who skirts the enigmatic realms of fantasy and disappointment, memory and myth.
<h5>NEVER GONNA SNOW AGAIN 
Dir. Małgorzata Szumowska, Michael Englert (Poland/Germany)</h5>
Another film that holds a delicate balance between social commentary and fantasy is this film about a Ukranian masseur who accrues a cult following in a wealthy Polish suburb. Born in Pripyat in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster, masseur Zhenia seems at first like he might have arrived as part of a moral lesson about migrant labour for the privileged members of the gated community, who simultaneously depend upon and look down on him. But as they fetishise the healing power of his tender strength, the near-wordless presence of this mysterious outsider comes to take on an altogether different, almost magical-realist quality, as the possibly sacred emissary of some cosmic power.
<h5>THE INTRUDER 
Dir. Natalia Meta (Argentina/Mexico)</h5>
This Argentine film takes its enigmas in a creepier direction. Starting out in comic vein as a woman realises that she doesn’t actually like the man she has gone on holiday with, his death soon after their arrival paradoxically makes him someone she can never truly be rid of. Meanwhile, she becomes the subject of the rather insistent attentions of an admirer she meets in the church where she sings, and, in a further inconvenience, her mother randomly decides to move in indefinitely. As a voiceover artist for horror films, this film is also part of a sub-genre of thrillers about a sound recordist, along with Blow Out, The Conversation and Berberian Sound Studio, that explore the eerily disembodied nature of the voice. The intruder of the title could thus be any one of a number of uncomfortably close beings, including her relationship to her own physical self.
<h5>A COMMON CRIME 
Dir. Francisco Márquez (Argentina)</h5>
This second Argentine thriller is another imaginative recreation of the slow falling apart of the boundaries, and the sanity, of its central female protagonist, but the dissolution here reveals a series of uncomfortable truths about social class. Cecilia is a university lecturer, happily able to quote Althusser and Gramsci on bourgeois ideology. But when her maid’s son knocks on her door, her refusal to help him has fateful consequences. While showing up her conformity to the ultimately brutal logic that it is her day job to critique, this is also the first film I have ever seen that manages to find dramatic material in a dissertation supervision session, and a superb combination of psychological and political insight.
<h5>AFTER LOVE 
Dir. Aleem Khan (UK)</h5>
The success of this deeply moving British drama owes in large part to the central performance of Joana Scanlan, who plays Mary Husain, a resident of Dover whose ferry-captain husband Husain dies unexpectedly in the opening sequence, only for her to find out that he had a secret life just over the border in Calais. The film follows her as she works her way into the household of his secret mistress and son. While such a plot would in less capable hands be barely credible, the quiet brilliance of Scanlan’s performance means that the themes of betrayal, race, death and mourning are played with intelligent subtlety and heart-breaking conviction.
<h5>LIMBO 
Dir. Ben Sharrock (UK)</h5>
It was a good year for British features, as shown by this comedy-drama about refugees seeking asylum in Scotland. What begins as a deadpan, rather absurdist culture-clash comedy turns to an intense portrait of the tragedies of dislocation. The humour’s absurdism is a nice way to show up both the awkwardness of cultural awareness and the bureaucratic cruelty of the exile situation. But it reaches real emotional depth in its second half as it probes the travails of Omar, a gifted young musician and Syrian refugee who must contend with the family he has left behind, the war he has fled and the music he may never play again.

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Limbo Film 2020

<pre>Featured: After Love (Aleem Khan)</pre>

After Love Film 2020 cropped

A Chernobyl-born cult leader, a hypocritical university lecturer, and a Syrian musician turned refugee are some of the memorable characters in our selection from this year’s London Film Festival.

Six of the Best from the BFI London Film Festival, 2020

What does a film festival do when festivity is banned?
It is often said that crises lead to change, but the changes we make when in crisis mode reveal our essential natures more than any planned or premeditated actions do. In the classic 1978 film Dawn of the Dead, when the US suburbs are infected by a zombie apocalypse, the mindless hordes continue to perform the one habitual ability they have left: they go to the mall. In times of coronavirus, when the higher functions of sociability are denied and even the malls close down, we go en masse online.
Lockdown has been a boom time for streaming services like Netflix and Amazon, whose captive global audience is of a scale that dwarfs the ‘Major Studios’ of Hollywood yore. But while film may be thriving as entertainment, cinema as an institution is in grave peril, its production halted; and theatrical exhibition trickled to a socially-distanced minimum.
The Cannes Festival <a href="https://ew.com/movies/film-festivals/cannes-2020-special-event-october/">cancelled</a> all its offline events as a response to the first wave of the pandemic back in June. If our autumn heralds a grim sequel to those early summer times, the BFI London Film Festival’s hybrid programme seeks to avoid such disruption, balancing online and in-person activity in a way that is neither lockdown nor normality. Tickets are on sale to reduced-capacity auditoriums over the festival. Around 100 fewer feature films are being exhibited this year, with only 58 titles to choose from and no Official Competition category. While film production was halted internationally this year, this slow-down will only really be apparent at next year’s festival. This year, one can assume that the larger distribution companies have decided to scale back their involvement, given that there are far fewer A-list titles than usual. Presumably the expense involved in shipping over the big stars and movie talent, plus all of the other promotional activities that the big companies usually devote to a festival, must not seem like a great investment when you’re playing to limited audiences, with no red carpet or gala events.
The withdrawal of the big-money releases leaves a more intimate and perhaps more diverse festival, which will play across the country both in cinemas and on streaming services. The festival opens with 12 Years a Slave director Steve McQueen’s Mangrove, an appropriate choice to coincide with Black History Month, centring on the landmark true-life battle of Black activists <a href="https://platformonline.uk/articles/frank-crichlow-and-the-mangrove">&#8216;The Mangrove Nine&#8217;</a> against police racism. It ends with Ammonite, about palaeontologist Mary Anning, played by Kate Winslet (co-starring Saoirse Ronan). Both of these films indicate the continuing importance of historical drama to prestige British cinema.
The big festival-circuit hit playing this year is Nomadland, a chronicle of recession-era America starring Frances McDormand, winner of both the Toronto and Venice festivals this summer. In a historical what-if, Regina King’s One Night in Miami puts Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, James Brown and Sam Cooke together for in a hotel room one evening in 1964. An artistic partnership we eagerly anticipate is Spike Lee’s direction of Talking Heads singer David Byrne in American Utopia, a film of the Broadway musical. Meanwhile Supernova promises a two-hander between Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci, both of whom advance previews report to be on top form.
Riz Ahmed stars as a British-Pakistani rapper who suffers a life-threatening illness in Mogul Mowgli. I also look forward to Relic, the directorial debut for Natalie Erika James and another entry into the increasingly rich body of contemporary horror cinema directed by women. Bad Tales promises a cynical take on human nature amid a group of family dramas set over one summer, a film made up of episodes and, thus, a format which seems to be making a comeback after films like Wild Tales, Certain Women and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. I am also hoping it will provide a sighting of that <a>increasingly rare animal</a>, a modern Italian film worth getting excited about.
No contemporary director is better at bearing the continuing scars of Europe’s unhappy past than Christian Petzold, and so we are keen to watch Undine, a Berlin-set romance whose title refers to a mythic water nymph. Never Gonna Snow Again appears to be an intriguing Polish-German social satire on migration. Farewell Amor promises a more earnest, heartrending tale of exile as an Angolan man is reunited with his wife and daughter in New York.
From the still images I’ve seen, the Irish animation Wolfwalkers seems to be a beautifully inventive rendition of myth and legend in a time of colonialism. The festival also features a restoration of the banned and once presumed lost 1976 Iranian gothic film Chess of the Wind.
Perhaps the escapism of cinema and its grand picture palaces was always a historically limited model, destined one day inevitably to lose ground to the individualised, private sphere of the home. With video-on-demand already being the major way in which we watch films, driving the continuing proliferation of screen media into our homes, on our laps and our mobile devices, we were already a long way from the larger-than-life communal experience of the picture palace well before Covid-19 hit. The hybrid events at the festival, its nationwide reach and its more intimate roster suggest that even crisis can be a spur to new experiences and continued invention. We shall be back with our verdicts after a few weeks of assiduous home viewing.
The BFI London Film Festival takes place <a href="https://www.bfi.org.uk/london-film-festival/strands/feature-films" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.bfi.org.uk/london-film-festival/strands/feature-films&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1602061595870000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGioY1LUoVY_lvsmJtNPPihA-QLhA">7 to 18 October 2020</a>. 
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<pre>Photo Credit: Nomadland</pre>

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Our film editor Dr Louis Bayman previews the selection at this year’s online version of the BFI London Film Festival.

The Platform Preview to the BFI London Film Festival, 2020

As election fever takes hold and a weary populace is asked to steer the country away from the current political decade, we at The Platform take a look at the nation according to its cinema, with a glance at some of the British films featured at last month’s <a href="http://platformonline.uk/the-platform-preview-to-the-bfi-london-film-festival-2019">BFI London Film Festival</a>.
<h5>Official Secrets 
Dir: Gavin Hood (2019)</h5>
We start then with the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war, in the first film I have seen that manages to make the early noughties look retro. It follows the real story of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/sep/22/katharine-gun-whistleblower-iraq-official-secrets-film-keira-knightley">Katharine Gun</a>, the whistleblower who leaked a failed request by the US and UK to spy on UN Security Council delegates to blackmail them into passing a resolution supporting war. Keira Knightley plays the central role in what is both a slick thriller and an impassioned plea for public integrity, as Gun risks her livelihood and freedom against a war based on lies, a point that resonates with our post-truth age. Its espionage drama resembles Watergate saga All the President’s Men, but mixed with the heritage charm of the English countryside as Gun turns renegade amidst the rolling hills of Cheltenham. The pace is slow and the events of the case – the government drops the charges, but goes ahead with the war – are too recent to surprise, but the subplot of how it threatened her Kurdish husband with deportation holds real suspense.
Official Secrets is now showing at UK cinemas.
<h5>Greed 
Dir: Michael Winterbottom (2019)</h5>
The unfairness of systematic injustice is brought up-to-date in this satire that depicts ‘Greedy’ McCreadie, a fictional boss of a series of clothing firms. McCreadie plans a lavish party in a mocked-up amphitheatre on a Greek island to celebrate his 60th birthday. The ancient-world setting hints that the <a href="https://www.cityam.com/sir-philip-green-in-talks-to-secure-300m-by-christmas/">Philip Greens</a> and <a href="https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-7547543/Mike-Ashley-pledges-fight-House-Fraser.html">Mike Ashleys</a>, to whom the character clearly refers, are modern embodiments of the timeless cruelty of imperial ambition. Director Michael Winterbottom always does his best work with actor Steve Coogan, who plays McCreadie, and the film is further enlivened by a vast array of comic talent. But it strains under the weight of its own ambitions, as its 100 minutes tick off every topic from corporate greed, financialisation and Thatcherism, to sweatshop garment workers, migrant labour, the Greek debt crisis, Syrian refugees, reality TV, an Oedipal subplot and a Commons select committee investigation. Its political conclusions about the evil of the 1-percenters may come as no great revelation, but there is a lot of fun to be had along the way.
Greed is scheduled for UK release in February 2020.
<h5>Saint Maud 
Dir: Rose Glass (2019)</h5>
“Nothing worth trying comes easy,” repeats young nurse Maud to herself in this intimate drama from the debut for director Rose Glass that <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/oct/12/london-film-festival-morfydd-clark-saint-maud-monos">earned star Morfydd Clark a special mention</a> in the festival awards at the BFI. She plays Maud, the carer for louche and terminally ill dancer Amanda (Jennifer Elhe). Strangely attracted by Amanda’s charisma yet repulsed by her lifestyle, Maud increasingly isolates herself within the certainties of religion until she eventually envisages herself as a latter-day martyr. Her belief in her divine mission is at odds both with the fish-and-chips surroundings of her anonymous seaside town and the mortification of the flesh she decides to endure. This film plays out as a psychological horror, with similarities to The Exorcism of Emily Rose, or Midsommar, in that the mundane safety of an everyday modernity is at odds with a biblical world of gruesome suffering powered by the awe of metaphysical forces. The film hints that a guilty past motivates Maud’s conversion, but it is a shame that, unlike Midsommar, it isn’t able to use her deranged ecstasy to undercut our confidence in our own normality. Her irrationality is explained away as one feeble-minded woman’s psychosis (a similar problem to another psychological horror that played at the festival, the US/UK co-production The Lodge) and the film rather misses its opportunity to turn into something more unsettling.
Saint Maud is coming to UK cinemas soon but the release date is yet to be announced.

<h5>Muscle 
Dir: Gerard Johnson (2019)</h5>
This rather blokey film is small in its ambition, shot in a stylish black and white, whose grim toughness plays nicely against the tense hilarity of the central relationship of its male leads. It features unsuccessful call centre salesman Simon, who joins a local gym in an attempt to regain some purpose. While his wife can’t stand his company, Simon finds a new buddy in the hulking shape of ex-army personal trainer Terry . Terry puts Simon on a strict new regime, but quickly appears to have a deeper motive than mere professional interest, as he insinuates himself with unhinged intent into every facet of Simon’s life. Simon is put on a regime that denies him carbs after 6pm, but can accommodate all-night sessions of cocaine and super-strength cider. The film’s concluding twenty minutes indicate an uncertainty about how to conclude things, but the crackling intensity of the muscular absurdity that bonds the two men makes this film well worth seeing.
UK release date is yet to be announced.

greed-film-2019

Greed-film-2019

So it would seem, from its films at least, that contemporary Britain is a place of unfairness and disappointment. It would also seem to be populated by lonely people whose attempts to escape failure only cause them further harm. Notably, all of the films mentioned above are set on the coast, with the exception of Muscle, whose South Shields is nevertheless on the banks of the Tyne. The water allows an idea of escape beyond the grey constraint of routine, while it also confirms our landlocked entrapment. Wherever the coming decade may take us as a society, as some of our films indicate, we shall not be sailing towards it on a wave of collective optimism.

<pre>Featured photo: Keira Knightley as whistleblower Katharine Gun in Official Secrets.</pre>

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Four new British films to catch on the big screen

The Murky Coastal Waters of this Isle: New British Film Releases

The 63rd edition of the BFI London Film Festival starts this Wednesday evening with the opening night gala The Personal History of David Copperfield. Starring Dev Patel in the title role, with performances from Ben Wishaw, Hugh Laurie, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Peter Capaldi and Tilda Swinton, this is an exciting choice for a festival that aims to show off British talent. More interesting still is its pairing of Charles Dickens’s Victorian social commentary with Armando Iannucci as director, a man known for the biting political satires The Thick of It, Veep and The Death of Stalin.
Meanwhile, the closing night gala on Sunday 13 October is Martin Scorsese’s epic tale of union boss and mobster Jimmy Hoffa in The Irishman. Bringing together Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci and Harvey Keitel, we wait to see whether this will be a legendary showstopper of veteran talent or the world’s most extravagant old dudes’ reunion, but let’s be positive and put our money on the former. The third of the big-budget showcases Knives Out, which brings together yet another cast to die for (geddit?) in a whodunnit that assembles Daniel Craig, Christopher Plummer, Ana de Armas, Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis, Toni Collette, Michael Shannon and Don Johnson.
As you might be able to tell, the festival veers towards more star-driven entertainment than many other festivals. Other galas we’ll be looking forward to include Greed, which is Michael Winterbottom’s critique of corporate chutzpah starring Steve Coogan, Marriage Story, Noah Baumbach’s account of a break-up featuring Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson, and Le Mans ’66, a retro account of a motor racing duo played by Matt Damon and Christian Bale. Meanwhile Taika Waititi follows Thor: Ragnarok with a raucous anti-fascist comedy Jojo Rabbit, set in the final days of the second world war about a boy whose imaginary friend is Adolf Hitler. Among the slightly less crowd-pleasing highlights is Ema from the Chilean director Pablo Larraín, whose career continues to move into ever more poetic abstraction with a reverie on time, memory and dance. Céline Sciamma takes instead an abrupt move away from the setting of her 2014 social drama Girlhood with her new film Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Exploring the intensity of female relationships instead in 1760, she shows desires igniting between a young noblewoman and the lady hired to paint her portrait.

bfi-preview-the-last-black-man-in-san-francisco

BFI Preview - The Last Black Man in San Francisco

We at The Platform would also recommend you to take this opportunity to see some of the films that may create less of a buzz, but that you should definitely try to catch on the big screen. First up is The Last Black Man in San Francisco, an account of gentrification in the city and a highly creative vision of attachment and loss within a changing city. I also enjoyed Lara for reasons I find it harder to put my finger on, but this tale of one lonely woman on her 60th birthday and her difficult relationship with her concert pianist son had me thinking deeply about both undeveloped talent and the passions we all carry within us. Waiting for the Barbarians sees Ciro Guerra encapsulating once more the self-defeating violence of colonialism as he depicts an organised descent into brutality in an unnamed outpost of Britain’s Asian empire. François Ozon likes to probe the mysteries behind the stories we recount; he takes this theme into much darker territory in By the Grace of God, which follows the personal testimonies of campaigners against abuse committed by the Catholic Church in Lyon. Back in America, Clemency takes a close-up view of what is, at times, excruciating detail of the last weeks of a prisoner on death row.
We couldn’t finish this round-up without a few recommendations that pay tribute to the fantastical ability of cinema to conjure up new worlds. So why not go see Nicholas Cage flip out in Color Out of Space, a hallucinatory vision a rural family whose garden is struck by a meteor that brings with it a legion of trippy horrors. Or for more earthbound psychopathy, try Deerskin, in which Jean Dujardin falls so in love with his new deerskin cowboy jacket that he will literally kill for it. The Whistlers sees the Romanian New Wave’s trailblazer Corneliu Porumboiu take on the crime genre in a more action-packed way than his previous Police, Adjective, featuring a corrupt cop who learns to communicate with and work out the plots of an international criminal gang who whistle to each other. And the first English-language movie by Jessica Hausner, Little Joe, imagines an environment in which a new breed of flower is genetically modified to induce happiness in its owner. What begins as a subtle sci-fi meditation on nature and motherhood turns with a consummate lightness of touch into a serious philosophical question about the sincerity of all emotional expressivity.
These are our recommendations for now. We’ll be back with some further reflections once the festival is underway!
The BFI London Film Festival takes place <a href="https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff/Online/default.asp">2 to 13 October 2019</a>.
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<pre>Featured: The Irishman, Netflix
Body: The Last Black Man in San Francisco, BFI LFF </pre>

BFI Preview &#8211; The Irishman _newsite

Changing cities and fantastical worlds lie beyond the star-studded galas and British talent on display at this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

The Platform Preview to the BFI London Film Festival, 2019

In an era when Donald Trump announces policy by Twitter and Boris Johnson refuses to attend television interviews, we can forget that politics not that long ago was something that happened live, in large-scale public events that engaged the people as an active citizenry, rather than a passive audience.
Nobody embodied this kind of politics better than the miners. Mining represented not only a job but a whole community, celebrated in songs, paintings, demonstrations and get-togethers that placed the workers of the world as inheritors of a future progressive utopia. This documentary takes place in 2018, the 135th year of the biggest annual celebration of them all, the Durham Miners’ Gala or “big meeting”, a festival not just for miners but for socialists and trade unionists internationally.
Although mythology around the northern working class rarely acknowledges it, the miners took part in the liberation movements that shaped our modern consciousness. Their all-out strike in 1984-85 also warned of a Tory future of low-wage, precarious work, where each are unprotected to the cruelties of the market. This warning seems far-sighted, given the problems of our current society. The banners displayed at the Gala proclaim a history of class struggle, with messages of peace and love, equality and brotherhood. The miners were never just concerned with their own issues, but gave active solidarity to 19th-century movements for Hungarian and Italian freedom and to Irish and Anti-Apartheid movements in the 20th. Hopeful US Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders sends a message of support to the 2018 Gala, which was dedicated to the leader of the Kurdish Workers’ Party Abdullah Öcalan, imprisoned by Turkey.
The Gala was founded by the Durham Miners’ Association, a group of liberal Methodists, at a time when socialist ideas were starting to offer the industrial working classes a vision of a society of equality and justice in contrast to the rapaciousness of Victorian capitalism. This industrial capitalism was built on the energy provided by coal, making the miners at the time “probably the most powerful workers in the world,” as one participant puts it.
The documentary intersperses comments from participants at the 2018 event with reflections on its history. It gives voice to the many women involved, marking the inclusivity of an event that is also open to new movements – one of the feminist groups mentions the arrival of the transgender women’s group. A female trombonist from Humboldt County, California, has brought her ‘Trump Not Welcome’ banner. Some of the inclusivity turns to incongruity: an artist discusses a painting depicting a white dove in flight, symbolising acceptance of the end of the industry. This discussion then cuts to the Gala brass band playing the closing notes of a free arrangement of Donna Summer’s ‘Hot Stuff’.
This heady mixture is part of the Gala’s nature. Mining culture replaced an older tradition of folk festivity with that of the industrial labourer, found in brass bands, craft, political opposition and revelry. As a break from the regimentation of industrial life, the Gala centres on a march through the city, combining political demands with a carnival celebration of working class culture. While it celebrates the nobility of labour, many of the participants display mixed feelings about the dirty, hard work of mining. The celebration produces strong emotions, and the documentary shows us public joy, the melancholy of the brass band, the solidarity of togetherness and the hope for a better future – all part of the literally moving aspect of the crowd of people on the march.
In the middle decades of the 20th century, when the British trade union movement was at its height, the Gala hosted international ambassadors and future prime ministers. Many attendees speak of Jeremy Corbyn as a return to those years. The mood of festivity means that the interviewees only briefly consider what such politics might mean when the power of the trade unions has been greatly reduced, and the mining industry eradicated. While for previous Labour leaders, attendance at the Gala was a key manoeuvre in the achievement of political power, attendance for Corbynism is a symbol of principled attachment to a cause which to many may seem lost.
The mood is thus celebratory but inevitably nostalgic. The focus is on keeping a tradition alive – on “doing the same thing that they were doing for a hundred years or more” as one participant puts it – but this is also an elegy for a socialist future that never came. During the 1984-85 strike that ended up breaking the miners’ union, miners were referred to as “dinosaurs” from Britain’s past. Yet as the documentary shows, this strike saw lesbian and gay men welcomed into mining communities (a story notably recounted by the film Pride, 2014) and women at the forefront of support groups.
In celebrating a struggle that spans epochs and crosses the globe, this documentary plays its part in keeping a common cause alive.
THE BIG MEETING will be <a href="https://www.galafilm.co.uk/">released in UK cinemas</a> from 6 September 2019 (dir. Daniel Draper)
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<pre>Photo Credit: The Big Meeting /  Shut Out The Light</pre>

Durham Miners Gala

Director Daniel Draper documents the beginnings of British socialism as we know it through the Durham Miners’ Gala.

Celebrating the Miners: The Historic Tradition of a Working Class Community Lives On

By the end of the year, cinemas are dominated by high-end dramas, many hoping for <a href="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/tag/oscars/">Oscar success</a>. This year a striking number of them have one feature in common. Whether it’s Widows, The Favourite, Dogman, Assassination Nation, <a href="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/2018/10/11/films-for-the-metoo-era-the-bfi-london-film-festival-2018-round-up/">If Beale Street Could Talk</a>, Happy New Year Colin Burstead, Lizzie or Wildlife, each story is in some way set in motion by revenge. In exploring the different facets of the revenge motif, they encapsulate film’s continued ability, even in this small-screen 21st century, to offer a larger than life canvas on which to project both the viler fantasies, and the social conscience, of our wider culture. 
Revenge works to intertwine at least two stories at once: the initial grievance and the quest for redress. It is then inherently dramatic, offering the decisive culminating action lacking from its near cousin, the grudge, yet with a suspense that is absent from the simple outburst. Widows, Steve McQueen’s female heist drama, exploits this multi-story potential most fully, weaving together a panorama of male aggressions that move from the criminal underworld and ever further outwards into the political field, the city police, and the women’s home lives. Revenge consumes the men in the film, who find in it an indispensable way of asserting their power in the world. The women are simply trying to keep alive, yet in so doing, they discover the strength of a mutual reliance that propels them towards the twists of the finale. 
Revenge is played instead for all its petty ridiculousness in costume drama The Favourite. Set during an intractable war with France, a dispossessed Abigail (Emma Stone) works her way up from servant and into the very bosom of Queen Anne’s trust (Olivia Colman), displacing the Queen’s advisor Lady Sarah (Rachel Weisz). The setting of the royal court stages a grotesque caricature of established power, which director Yorgos Lanthimos previously found in the patriarchal family in Dogtooth and the dystopic institution for middle-aged singles in The Lobster. Nobody here comes out smelling of roses. Abigail first arrives at the court covered in shit, pushed out of her carriage into the muddy grounds where the disaffected local peasantry defecate in disapproval at the monarch. Lady Sarah ends up literally disfigured by spite, trapped in this absurd cycle of retribution. 
Revenge inevitably embitters those whose hearts it grips, yet its power lies in the universal appeal of getting one’s own back. From this perspective, revenge is not demeaning but fulfilling, offering an irresistible fantasy of catharsis for the weak. Such it is in Dogman (dir. Matteo Garrone), whose unflinchingly trusting dog-groomer protagonist embodies the loyalty ascribed to his canine clients. This man’s best friend, however, is a local bully on whose behalf our hero even serves a prison sentence. Will one final betrayal push him too far? This beautifully told story is my own personal favourite of 2018. 
Common to all the films above is how they reveal revenge’s double character, involving the indulgence of animalistic anger and the ennobling pursuit of justice. The Furies were the origins of justice in classical mythology, goddesses of vengeance who in Hesiod’s Theogony were born from the drops of blood which fell to earth when Uranus’s castrated genitalia were thrown into the sea. Revenge was at the centre of the theatrical revolution of the Elizabethan stage, considered to be a primary virtue and a necessary defence of honour. But as Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet were only the most famous fictional characters to discover, revenge has a remorseless capacity to draw in innocent and guilty alike. 
In this vein, Assassination Nation tells the how a middle-class American community becomes in a few short weeks beset by a modern witch-hunt. In a fantasy of social disintegration for the social media age, an anonymous hacker causes chaos by revealing the online private selves of the town’s authority figures to public scrutiny. With the frenetic energy of a hyperactive teenager, social cohesion quickly breaks down amidst the hysteria of a moral panic. It is common for high-school movies to present their juvenile protagonists as subjects of the laws of the jungle. This film extends the logic to the rest of the adult community, and by extension to contemporary America. The town focuses its testosterone-driven aggression on our heroines, who become the scapegoats – and eventual punishers – of a world driven mad by the contradictions of its own hypocrisy. 
As the witch-hunt allegory suggests, vengeance all too often provides the cloak by which aggression masks itself as defence. Marcel Proust observed that only in the rare cases of direct sadism does cruelty recognise itself as such; much more often, persecutors need a scenario in which their cruelty can be imagined as only a righteous response to a perceived attack. In our current times of right-wing extremism, hatred is legitimised through narratives of false victimhood; blaming migrants for economic devastation while rewarding bankers, and appointing sex attackers to the Supreme Court while their accusers pay the price in public vilification. 
This contemporary context gives added relevance to the elegiac If Beale Street Could Talk, Barry Jenkins’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning <a href="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/2017/03/03/hidden-figures-celebrating-inconvenient-black-women/">Moonlight</a>. It tells the story of a romance conducted through the glass of a prison visiting-room, after a vindictive white policeman makes an innocent young black man pay for the crime of standing up for his girlfriend. The setting of this adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel of racism and love in a divided America is the 1970s. Its vision of the complexities of relationships conducted under broader conditions of oppression is only too relevant, in a poignant drama of black America kept down by a white power structure enforced through a false claim to protecting public safety. 
While revenge in all its different forms is manifest upon our screens as this year comes to a close, the possibility to really put things right will have to wait until we have changed our world for the better. In this, next year’s cinema will need to take its cue from reality.
<pre>Image via Vox</pre>

How upcoming Oscar contenders and Oscar snubs explored the types of revenge that make up our society

Remorseless, Cathartic, Petty, but Just: Revenge Films Paving the Way to Oscars 2019

The BFI London Film Festival kicked off last night in ambitious form, with Oscar-winning director Steve McQueen’s female heist drama, Widows. After the violent deaths of criminal gang members, their widows assemble to arrange a robbery aimed at paying off their dead husbands’ debts. An all-star cast includes Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki and Cynthia Erivo. Planning the heist leads the women into unexpected conflict with municipal politics, and election candidate Colin Farrell, who is simultaneously fending off both his father’s political legacy and an unexpected challenge from a section of Chicago’s black community. In earlier times, this kind of social panorama would bring to mind the novelistic sprawl of Dickens or Balzac, although the source material here is courtesy of Linda La Plante. The screenwriter is Gone Girl’s Gillian Flynn, and the backdrop of urban decay in Widows most immediately seems to recall the TV series The Wire.
I won’t reveal whether the heist is successful, but I can tell you that McQueen only partly pulls off his job. A dramatic plot and an intelligent artistry add many effective touches, alternating, however, with too much directorial tricksiness and some clumsiness in the attempts at social commentary. One wishes McQueen had planned things as well as his characters have, who discuss in one scene how much weight their bags can take, for he has stuffed too much into this film for my liking, and the seams show signs of wear and tear.
The other headline gala screenings include the world premiere of Stan &amp; Ollie, an account of the late career of two film comedians played by Steve Coogan and John C Reilly. Yorgos Lanthimos returns for his third entry in four years after The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer with The Favourite, a period drama set in an early 18th-century Britain at war with France. The Favourite offers another strong set of female leads. Queen Anne is played by Olivia Colman, her friend Lady Sarah by Rachel Weisz, and Sarah’s cousin Abigail by Emma Stone. Weisz and Stone compete for the queen’s affections in a film that has been described by the festival organisers as “riotous”. This promises a surprising development for a director who came to prominence with the Greek film movement known as the “weird wave”.
A few films that we at The Platform anticipate with great excitement include Lizzie, the true story of the case of Lizzie Borden, who in 1892 became the main suspect for the axe murder of her father and stepmother, in an affair that may now be reconsidered in light of repression and patriarchy. Assassination Nation promises a revelry in violence, rebellion and other wicked delights, as a group of schoolgirls update the tale of the Salem witch trials in a high-school drama for the <a href="https://platformonline.uk/articles/the-handmaids-tale-fails-to-challenge-patriarchy">#MeToo</a> era.
In a more sedately sardonic vein, Marielle Heller’s Can You ever Forgive Me? continues the new Hollywood trend for retro 1990s with a tale of the literary forger Lee Israel. Moonlight director Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk, an adaptation of a novel by <a href="https://platformonline.uk/articles/lessons-james-baldwin-taught-me-2">James Baldwin</a>, as well as the Coen Brothers’ multi-episode film, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, and Alfonso Cuarón’s black and white vision of 1970s’ Mexico City, Roma, are more of the big releases we eagerly anticipate.
Scaring us perhaps for some of the wrong reasons, Luca Guadagnino’s release of Suspiria promises a ‘feminist’ update of Dario Argento’s 70s’ horror classic. Although its screening is still to come, the Call Me by your Name director has reportedly created a sepia-toned two and a half hours – which I fear may replace the lurid delirium of the original with a film aimed more at being the subject of cultivated dinner-party conversation than the unleashing of disrespectable energies of horror. On the other hand, Knife+Heart, a serial killer film set in 1979 in the world of the gay porn industry and starring a wondrous Vanessa Paradis, was the outstanding entry of the pre-festival press screenings. Disco, dildos and death have rarely gone so well together.
Finally, the festival will provide the opportunity to see a number of acclaimed non-English language films that may be difficult to see otherwise on the big screen. Italian director Alice Rohrwacher offers us Happy as Lazzaro (I don’t know why the UK distributors didn’t translate the name as ‘Lazarus’). Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s The Wild Pear Tree, on the other hand, continues the Turkish director’s transposition of Chekhovian drama into cinematic realisations of the poignant complexities of unsatisfying relationships, thwarted minor ambition, and the stifling nature of small town life in modern Turkey.
<pre>Photo Credit: Widows / Fox</pre>

Widows &#8211; Film &#8211; BFI LFF

This year’s festival begins with a promising selection of films in an era of bolder social debates

Films for the #MeToo Era: The BFI London Film Festival 2018 Round-Up

It is a quirk of human consciousness that, whether collectively or as individuals, we work out where we are going by trying to make sense of the past. Time flows continually, and the present does not exist, since as ancient philosophers pointed out every moment is fleeting. Given that we can only guess as to the future, the past has particular authority over the direction of our societies. While conservatives urge us to keep calm and think of Churchill, progressives still dream of the spirit of ‘45 and the ethos of the welfare state.
In 1922 in Paris, two celebrity intellectuals, Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein, debated whether time is an objective, mechanical fact or an aspect of experience, felt in multiple and dynamic ways. Film has a great ability to capture time as a feeling, recalling worlds long gone and elapsing whole years in minutes within tremendous states of longing or anticipation. This was on my mind as I watched a number of historical films at the recent <a href="https://platformonline.uk/tag/lff2017/">BFI London Film Festival</a>.
One of the best, Mudbound, takes ‘return’ as its subject. Told through six different voice overs, its diverging points of view give it the feel of being both modernist and recalling the classic novel. Two young men, one black and one white, return to their families in rural Mississippi after distinguished service in Europe in WWII. In a South determined to maintain old racial hierarchies the real battle is at home, where there is no place for heroes. Its end returns to its opening scene as the two families pass each other in hostile silence, the white brothers burying their recently departed, violently segregationist father, and their black dependents forced to confront a rather different tragedy.
‘Return’ has a wider meaning in a US whose 400-year history of racial hatred refuses to be buried. Last year’s documentary of writer and activist James Baldwin, <a href="https://platformonline.uk/articles/lessons-james-baldwin-taught-me-2">I Am Not Your Negro</a>, began by contrasting footage of police attacking Black Lives Matter protesters in Ferguson in 2014 with the faces of southern whites insulting black students trying to go to school in the early 1960s. The title of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ latest book, We Were Eight Years in Power, only indirectly refers to Obama’s presidency, as it quotes Reconstruction blacks in the 19th-century after their brief participation in political life was terminated by a racist South who was keen to halt the advance of equality after the end of slavery. The Ku Klux Klan, a group dedicated to restoring the values of the slave era, appear in Mudbound in a scene whose horror owes in no small part to its contemporary relevance given <a href="https://platformonline.uk/tag/donald-trump/">President Donald Trump’s</a> flirtation with their current Grand Wizard, David Duke. It is hard in these post-racial times to maintain faith in progress, when the beasts of the past raise their unslain heads once more.
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote of Americans in the wake of WWII that they were “men who had been swamped, lost in too large a continent, as we were in history, and who tried, without traditions, with the means available, to render their stupor and forlornness in the midst of incomprehensible events.” Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying gives a sense of this forlornness in a land now forced also to contemplate its greatness as itself history. Set during the capture of Saddam Hussein, it follows three ageing ex-Vietnam vets played by Laurence Fishburne, Bryan Cranston and Steve Carrell as they take a road trip across a rather downbeat America to bury the latter’s son who was killed in action in Iraq – or so the military claim. As they consider ageing through the prism of their own disillusion with a government who lied about Vietnam and has lied again about Iraq, the leads are just about engaging enough to carry the male badinage of the script. The casting of Fishburne as a preacher who has renounced his youthful debauchery is a minor masterstroke given his first role as a whacked-out 17-year-old marine in the classic Vietnam film Apocalypse Now, but the fantasy of patriotic reconciliation that ends the film undoes the confrontation of past ingloriousness that precedes it.
A rather different kind of fantasy is found in the creature-romance adventure The Shape of Water from Pan’s Labyrinth director <a href="https://platformonline.uk/articles/bfi-lff-perspectives-confronting-the-wicked-past">Guillermo del Toro</a>. Like that earlier film, the fairytale allows escape from the all too human violence of repression, as the battle between US and Soviet scientists centres upon classified experiments on a captured Amazon reptile river-god. Science fiction more normally extrapolates from today to offer a vision of our potential future, but this homage to the classic sci-fi inverts this relationship and is set in the 1960s of the sci-fi B-movie’s heyday. This period is rendered as a weird place removed from nature, and the inhuman objectives of its Cold War fanatics provide a comment on our relationship to the ecosystem, and a song of love for its virtuous wonders.
Remaining much closer to the historical record of imperial power is Zama, Lucrecia Martel’s tale of an 18th-century Spanish colony on the Asuncion Coast. Martel drops us in this location without explanation, somewhat in the manner that we find her lead character, a Spanish magistrate, continually promised a transfer home that never comes. The setting on the water’s edge, and an antagonistic relationship both with the subjugated people and the bands of outlaws surrounding them, turns this into a beautifully-realised tale of the state of non-being that is waiting at the hands of a distant, stagnating colonial power.
In writing on the decline of faith in progress, Svetlana Boym noted that “the 20th century began with utopia and ended with nostalgia.” This would fit the British film The Party, Sally Potter’s political satire of a disastrous celebration held by Kristin Scott-Thomas as an opposition MP taking up a position as Shadow Health Minister. Although its setting is contemporary, the 71-minute chamber piece is shot in a black-and-white that recalls the era when its characters’ worldviews were first set. Its all-star ensemble embodies the permutations of post-68 politics, from Bruno Ganz’s homeopathic life-coach to Cillian Murphy’s Blairite privatizer. The brilliance of its balance between sensitivity and farce rescues the film from being as ostentatiously self-regarding in its politics as the well-heeled and well-intentioned intelligentsia that it caricatures.
Marcel Proust wrote that “the time at our disposal every day is elastic: the passions that we feel expand it, those that inspire us shrink it; and habit fills it.” The films discussed above not only fill the time, but place such individuality of experience within the scope of history. They restore to us our perspective, and connect our feeling to something wider.
<pre>Photo Credit: Mudbound / Netflix</pre>

Re-Living American History On_Louis Bayman_27_10_2017_UA

The passage of time is depicted in imaginative ways by directors of Mudbound, Last Flag Flying and The Shape of Water