Category: Social issue films

American Fiction (2023)

Intelligent, challenging satire mixes with moving family drama in this excellent debut

Director: Cord Jefferson

Cast: Jeffrey Wright (Dr Thelonius “Monk” Ellison), Tracee Ellis Ross (Dr Lisa Ellison), Issa Rae (Sintara Golden), Sterling K. Brown (Dr Clifford Ellison), John Ortiz (Arthur), Erika Alexander (Coraline), Leslie Uggams (Agnes Ellison), Adam Brody (Wiley), Keith David (Willy the Wonker), Okrieriete Onaodowan (Van Go Jenkins), Myra Lucretia Taylor (Lorraine), Raymond Anthony Thomas (Maynard)

Dr Theolonius “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) is fed up. His new book is getting no traction with publishers, who want a “Black book” not the classics-inspired literary novels Monk writes. His family life is at a point of crisis: his mother (Leslie Uggams) has rapidly onset dementia, his doctor sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) is divorced and tired of being the only child looking after her, his plastic surgeon brother Cliff (Sterling K. Brown) is embracing his coming-out and divorce with drugs and a parade of younger boyfriends. In need of money to pay for his mother’s care, Monk pours his frustrations into writing exactly the sort of book publishers want: My Pafology, a crime-drugs-and-deadbeat filled stereotypical low-brow “Black” novel that he submits as a joke. Needless to say, the liberal white publishers come back with bank-busting advances, wowed by this “authentic Black voice” – much to Monk’s disbelief and self-loathing indignation.

This satire is the flashy clothing American Fiction dresses itself up in. In this impressively confident debut from writer-director Cord Jefferson, it frequently pulls out some whipper-sharp comic lines as it skewers the guilt-ridden pretentions of the liberal white elite, so concerned with being seen to care about embracing Black culture, that they don’t even notice they have effectively ghettoised Black culture into exactly the sort of crime-and-drugs nonsense Monk satirises in his fake novel. It’s a good joke, and the fact that Cord Jefferson’s film wears it a bit thin (the parade of self-congratulatory white people falling over themselves to praise the novel are fundamentally reprising the same joke each time – nothing new is added once you’ve got it the first time) doesn’t change that.

Interestingly, as I sat in an Oxford cinema-screening exclusively filled with white people laughing, I realised American Fiction is its own sort of meta-satire. How many people in the cinema I sat in realised they were proving the point of the film? American Fiction displays to white people a funny sketch about our own concerns to be seen to be saying and doing the right thing. We laugh at these idiots and reassure ourselves that we would never be so utterly unaware about our patronising gate-keeping, while also embodying many of the attitudes the film is skewering. We want to be seen to be right-on and laughing at the right things. It’s a neat way for Jefferson to both entertain and challenge us.

Jefferson’s film is partly about urging us to break beyond our shallow ideas of what “Black America” must be. Monk comes from an affluent middle-class family that, skin colour aside, wouldn’t like out of place in the Hamptons. His background is one of beach-house second-homes, art on the walls, lacrosse sticks in his bedroom and a family where everyone has a doctorate. He even has a devoted housekeeper, expertly played by Myra Lucretia Taylor, who’s both an honorary aunt and also a shrewd commentary on stereotypical Black servants, calling the children “Mr Monk” and “Mr Cliff”.

While Monk writes about the urban ghetto with satiric anger, it’s clear that world is almost totally alien to him. The film itself acknowledges it: in an intriguing exchange, Issa Rae’s author of a more stereotypical ‘Black’ novel (We’s All Lives in the Ghetto) even calls out Monk for us air of class-based judgement around other parts of the Black community, social commentary I would have liked the film to challenge more (The film encourages us to question Monk, a snob and arguably a slight bully, but frequently gives him a pass by contrasting him to the ridiculous and more selfish characters around him). It would have been interesting to see more of the reaction to the book from Black readers, not just white ones eager to show their credentials.

American Fiction though takes on the targets it goes for with a certain aplomb. Publishers, literary prize givers and the overtly-but-dutifully-PC are effectively skewered. It’s also one of the few books that really gives a sense of writing. Monk’s drafting of the novel sees the characters he is bringing life to appear in his study with him, parroting his dialogue and then turning to discuss character, motivation and make suggestions to the author. More of this, giving us more insight into the novel and the assumptions that underline Monk’s writing of it, would have given an interesting extra dimension to the film’s satire.

Jefferson’s clever and vibrant film suckers us in with satire, but really flourishes as a complex family drama. He offers an affecting and compassionate storyline of siblings who have grown apart due to their natural inclination to independence, distance and repressed emotion. (It’s suggested this is a trait inherited from their father, a famed surgeon with a rollcall of infidelities.) American Fiction beautifully sketches very natural portraits of siblings who know exactly how to push each other’s buttons, but also quickly fall back onto a shared language of memories and mutual experience. For all the satire, it’s as a heartfelt, small-scale family piece that the film really excels.

This is partly because it gives such wonderful opportunities to a fabulous array of actors. Jeffrey Wright, so often a supporting player quietly adding depth to a series of under-written franchise films, is excellent as Monk. Wright perfectly captures his hangdog resentments, his bitterness at not getting a fair deal and middle-age ennui. He also brings to life the pre-emptive walls Monk has built up to keep pain (and other people) out, the same intellectual distance that makes his books hard-sells. Combine that with Wright’s expert comic timing – not only his awkwardly uncomfortable shifts into his urban persona, but also his head-in-hands exasperation at the shallowness of the world – and this is a brilliant showcase for a consistently impressive actor.

Equally fine is Sterling K Brown as Monk’s frequently selfish brother Cliff, trying to enjoy life while he can – like Wright, Brown’s comic and emotional touch are spot-on. The film touches on themes of generational homophobia – their increasingly senile mother, sensitively played by Leslie Uggams, is clearly disapproving of his sexuality – but doesn’t hit this beat too hard. Tracee Ellis Ross is a breath of life-filled air as Monk’s sister while Erika Alexander gives emotional weight and depth to a slightly underwritten part as Monk’s new neighbour turned girlfriend Coraline.

American Fiction is frequently stronger when it focuses on crafting this low-key, realistic family drama, refreshingly clear of manufactured drama. What people will remember though is funny (if slightly one-note) satire – Monk even turns his story into exactly the sort of cross-racial appeal movie ready to collect awards, that you could argue American Fiction itself is. American Fiction ends with several alternative endings, each of which just made me feel Jefferson himself wasn’t sure how to end it. But, on the whole, this is a highly promising debut from Cord Jefferson, crammed with excellent dialogue and performances, which casts a fresh and urgent eye on important questions.

The Razor’s Edge (1946)

A bubbling soap full of incidents, disguising itself as a meditation on philosophy

Director: Edmund Goulding

Cast: Tyrone Power (Larry Darrell), Gene Tierney (Isabel Bradley), John Payne (Gray Maturin), Anne Baxter (Sophie MacDonald), Clifton Webb (Elliott Templeton), Herbert Marshall (W Somerset Maughm), Lucile Watson (Louisa Bradley), Frank Latimore (Bob MacDonald), Elsa Lanchester (Miss Keith), Cecil Humphreys (Holy Man), Fritz Korner (Kosti)

“What’s it all about?”: a question asked long before Alfie and it’s the one asked by Larry Darrell (Tyrone Power) as he returns from World War One to Chicago. Suddenly those garden parties and country clubs all look rather empty and shallow. Larry is engaged to Isabel (Gene Tierney), but he’s not interested in office work and domesticity. He wants to live a little bit, to find out what life is about. Doesn’t he owe that to the man who died in the war to save his life? With just $3k a year (over $50k today, which must help), he heads for the artistic life in Paris. After a year apart, Isabel decides it’s for her (£3k a year? What kind of life is that!) and marries a banker so dull he’s literally named Gray (John Payne). Flash forward to 1929 and the Crash has upturned the lives of the Chicago bourgeoisie – perhaps Larry’s inner contentment will mean more after all?

Adapted from W Somerset Maugham’s novel – with Maugham as a character, played by the unflappably debonair Herbert Marshall – The Razor’s Edge is a luscious period piece with pretentions at intellectualism but, rather like Maugham, is really a sort of a soapy plot-boiler with a veneer of cod-philosophy. Not that there’s anything wrong with that – after all the suds in Razor’s Edge are frequently rather pleasant to relax in – but don’t kid yourself that we are watching a thoughtful piece of cinema. It’s closer in tone to Goulding’s Oscar-winning Grand Hotel than it might care to admit.

Our hero, Larry Darrell, should be a sort of warrior-poet, but to be honest he’s a bit of a self-important bore. Played with try-hard energy by a Tyrone Power desperate to be seen as a proper actor rather than action star, Larry has a blissful “water off a duck’s back” air that sees him meet calamity with a wistful smile and the knowledge that providence evens everything out. Be it the break-up of an engagement or the death of close friend, little fazes Larry who has a mantra or piece of spiritualist advice for every occasion. Bluntly, our hero is a bit of a prig whose middle-class spirituality has all the mystical wisdom of a collection of fortune cookies.

It’s no real surprise that the film’s weakest parts are whenever Larry engages with the vaguely defined collection of homilies and mumbo-jumbo he picks up about spirituality. All this culminates in an almost embarrassingly bad sequence in the Himalayas, where Larry stays under the clichéd tutelage of a shoe-polish-covered Cecil Humphrey as a Holy Man whose every utterance is a vague collection of Diet Yoda aphorisms. Larry, with all the self-importance of the financially secure middle class, returns to the West sublimely certain of his own higher contentment and rather patronisingly looking down on the rest of the characters as shallow, grasping bourgeoisie.

The Razor’s Edge’s insight into human spirituality essentially boils down to “step out of the rat race and you’ll be a better man” – again made much easier, since Larry “forsakes” worldly wealth but can still dapperly turn out to a fancy function in a perfect tux. To be honest it becomes a bit wearing to see the other characters treat him like a sage and more than a bit mystifying why Isabel remains stubbornly obsessed with him for her whole life.

But if she wasn’t, we’d lose a large chunk of the appeal of the movie. The Razor’s Edge’s philosophy may be paper thin, but as a soap it’s spot on. And the scheming, manipulative, vindictive, snobby and entitled Isabel is a gift of a part, seized with relish by Gene Tierney. Isabel wants Larry, not so much because of who he is but because he belongs to her, and she can’t believe he was willing to let her jilt him without a fight. The epitome of the self-obsession of the modern age that Larry has rejected, Isabel consistently puts herself first, clings to the luxuries of high living and can barely hide her bored disinterest in the tedious Gray (a perfect role for the solid but uninspiring John Payne). Isabel schemes and attempts seduction of the saintly Larry, and her hissable antics provides The Razor’s Edge with much of its enjoyable thrust.

Because as a soap is where this film is most happy. It’s actually very well staged and shot by Goulding, full of carefully considered camera moves (including a late “wham” line which we don’t see a character react to, leaving their response open to our interpretation) and skilfully using depth of plain to showcase a series of luscious sets and impressively recreated Parisian streets on sound stages. The Razor’s Edge has a lot of very professional Hollywood craft behind it.

Its event-filled sub plots also give a host of excellent scenes and fun dialogue to its supporting cast. Anne Baxter won an Oscar as the tragic Sophie, a bubbly socialite (and old flame of Larry’s) from Chicago, whose husband and baby are killed in a car accident, tipping her into years of alcoholism and (it’s implied) life as a “good-time-girl” in a seedy Parisian bar. Baxter seizes this role for what it’s worth, from initial charming naivety to tear-streaked discovery of her bereavement to fidgety attempts at sobriety after Larry decides to marry her to keep her on the straight-and-narrow (needless to stay, temptation is put in the way of the pacing, smoking, fist-forming Sophie by the blithely shameless Isabel). It’s a very effective and sympathetic performance.

Clifton Webb, at the time Hollywood’s leading waspish figure of camp, has an Oscar-nominated whale of a time as Elliot Templeton, preening but generous socialite, delighting the finer things in life (from fine wines to perfectly stitched dressing gowns) who provides a catty sounding board to Isabel and whose final hours are spent bemoaning being snubbed by a countess. Herbert Marshall delivers a perfect slice of British reserve and gently arch commentary as Maugham (the real Maugham prepared a script which was junked by the studio, ending his Hollywood career there and then), purring his dialogue with his rich, velvet tones.

It serves to remind you that The Razor’s Edge works best as an event-packed piece of social drama, which it swiftly becomes as deaths, tragedy, alcoholism, scheming and feuds pile on top of each other in the second half with the blissful Larry casting a quietly judgemental but kind eye over everything around him. For all its attempts to look into the human condition, this is where The Razor’s Edge is at its best: engaging supporting characters and a hissable villain, all leading to a series of juicy plot developments. For all its literary pretentions, it’s at best a shallow From Here to Eternity.

The Old Oak (2023)

Loach’s swansong is a passionate, if slightly out-of-time, call for peace and understanding

Director: Ken Loach

Cast: Dave Turner (TJ Ballantyne), Ebla Mari (Yara), Claire Rodgerson (Laura), Trevor Fox (Charlie), Chris McGlade (Vic), Col Tait (Eddy), Jordan Louis (Garry), Chrissie Robinson (Erica), Chris Gotts (Jaffa Cake)

The OId Oak is likely the swansong for 87-year-old Ken Loach, Britain’s leading independent film-maker and high-priest of left-wing political cinema. It’s an engaging valedictory effort, crammed with fine Loach touches. But it’s a film that feels slightly politically out-of-time, which works better not when making tub-thumbing points but as a simple plea for a love and understanding. There are worse things Loach (who I’ve sometimes found rather trying for all his brilliance) can sign off with.

In a small town near Durham, TJ Ballantyne (Dave Turner) is a former miner and passionate union man now struggling to keep his pub, The Old Oak, alive in the face of mounting costs. World-weary, he is roped into helping Syrian refugees settle in their new homes in the town. Many locals, bitterly feeling the town has been left behind by government, can barely hide their fury at these refugees. But TJ finds they re-ignite in him a desire to make the world a better place, particularly as he forms a fatherly friendship with Yara (Ebla Mari), a passionate young photographer, who doesn’t know if her own father is alive or dead and wants to build links between the refugees and the local community.

The bond between TJ and Yara is at the heart of this gentle film, with Loach drawing beautifully natural performances from Dave Turner (a former fireman union boss) and Ebla Mari. One of Loach’s greatest strengths has always been his ability to poetically draw out hugely endearing relationships. TJ and Yara are a perfect example, two people who recognise loss and isolation in each other. TJ’s purpose in life has gone, never finding anything to replace his union campaigns of the 80s, estranged from his family and going through the motions to keep his pub alive. Yara has lost her home and everything she has known, the only memento of her father being her treasured camera, facing hostility from all around her.

The Old Oak centres this relationship in a passionate cry for empathy between different communities. The refugees arrive lost, isolated, confused and scared, fleeing conditions far harsher than many of the people in the town could understand. Far from having an easy-ride (as many accuse them of, seeing them get free homes and furniture) they desire nothing else but to go home, but are forced to make the best of it here. It’s a perspective that never occurs to many of the townspeople, seeing them only as interlopers not victims with whom their community – that has never really recovered from pit closures – has more in common with than they suspect.

TJ and Yara both recognise this – and want to build bridges not burn them. Much of The Old Oak revolves around TJ’s efforts to convert his disused back room – a shrine to union action when the room was the heart of the mining community – into a food bank to support both refugees and local alike. Loach’s humanitarianism comes to the fore here in the brief stories we hear about the users of this food bank: the small boy who can’t believe the food is free, the sulky teenager who finds care she rarely encounters elsewhere, the proud boy promised his ‘secret’ thathe needs the food bank will be kept. These are real people, with real problems, which Loach excels at bringing to life.

Loach is equally skilled at subtly staging personal pain. The director of Kes hasn’t lost his touch with the staging of deaths of beloved pets. The emotional pull TJ’s dog Mara has over him – much of his life’s meaning coming from tending for this small dog – and the impact of her loss is beautifully played with a raw grief by Dave Turner and staged with maximum emotional impact by Loach without a stroke of sentimental manipulation. Just as the smashing of Yara’s camera in the film’s opening moments by an unpleasant yob, berating the arrival of these interlopers, carries real impact from the gentle desolation on her face. The building of relationships, instigated by mutual pain and a hope for a better future, is The Old Oak’s strongest material.

It’s the political content that never quite pulls itself into focus. Loach’s sympathy for the working-class community is clear. He demonstrates forcefully these communities have been left with almost nothing, lacking hope or purpose and facing lives of underfunded lack of opportunity. No wonder kids bristle when they see refugee children given old bikes and toys for free. Or that locals bristle at seeing houses assigned for free after they have had to scrimp and save to buy theirs. But I wonder if Loach finds himself slightly confused with some of the prejudices and lack of socialistic international brotherly love in some of the working class today.

Loach has always clinged to the idea of the workers of the world uniting. But throughout The Old Oak he tacks away from really facing the racially-based anger and prejudice in some working class circles and avoids tackling where some of this racism and xenophobia comes from. Or facing the fact that it’s more widely shared, on some level, by more people than he might care to think. (He seems more relaxed linking it to old battles – inevitably one of the most hostile is the son of a scab from the mining days.)

The film shows the angry grousing of the many of the regulars, but avoids getting under the skin of why they are angry about this invasion of their space, eventually writing them off as simply lacking true working-class solidarity. While sympathising with the struggles faced by many of the working class, as a consequence of decades of under investment and alienation from the status quo, Loach feels uncomfortable with acknowledging how some of this has fed into prejudice – or how the working-class dreams of Scargill have been corrupted into “us and them” ill-informed ranting.

Instead, Loach wants to fast-track to a picture he’s more comfortable with, showing many of the local community perform sudden 360 turns towards acceptance and brotherly love, with remaining racists written off as bad apples. The creation of an atmosphere where the younger generation are encouraged to feel xenophobic racial hatred – kids beat Yara’s brother outside of the school, filming it to post on YouTube, where it is watched with glee by some of the regulars – is unaddressed. It’s telling Loach seems certain getting everyone together for an old-fashioned socialist sing-along will help solve problems. It feels like a naïve, if touching, idea that doesn’t really ring true.

The Old Oak sometimes feels like a film from a man slightly out-of-step with the times (the many clumsy shots of phones playing YouTube videos adds to this). It’s a film made up of effective scenes – including a heartfelt sequence in Durham cathedral – but not quite drawn together into a satisfying whole, with so many plot developments kept off screen that it starts to feel it hinges on contrivance. It works best as a simple, human plea for love and understanding – but a more accurate understanding, or a willingness by Loach to really turn a harsh eye on the negative side of the working-class communities he has dedicated his life to, seems to have evaded it.

Poor Things (2023)

Distinctive, challenging and hilarious film that mixes social issues with quotable dialogue

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Cast: Emma Stone (Bella Baxter/Victoria Blessington), Mark Ruffalo (Duncan Wedderburn), Willem Dafoe (Dr Godwin Baxter), Ramy Youssef (Max McCandles), Christopher Abbott (Alfie Blessington), Kathryn Hunter (Madame Swiney), Jerrod Carmichael (Harry Astley), Hanna Schygulla (Martha von Kurtzroc), Margaret Qualley (Felicity), Vicki Pepperdine (Mrs Prim), Suzy Bemba (Toinette)

“It’s Alive!” cries Frankenstein as his creation is sparked to life before abandoning it to become a revenging monster. Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things imagines a different creature – nurtured (admittedly as part of an eccentric experiment), maturing at an accelerated rate, discovering physical and intellectual stimulation and deciding they can’t get enough of either of them. Adapted from Alastair Gray’s novel, Poor Things is a vibrant and challenging film that, for all its sex, is a feminism-tinged Frankenstein that says no to societally enforced ideas of shame and conformity.

In Victorian London, Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) is the creature, a stumbling, barely articulate young woman when she is introduced to trainee doctor Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) by her guardian (her “God”) Dr Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). “Bella” is resurrected corpse – the body of a suicidal pregnant woman, the brain of the child she carried. Developing at an accelerated rate, Bella is both Godwin’s experiment and his surrogate child. But as Bella discovers the pleasures of the body and the wonders of the world around her, she wants to experience life outside of the house. Eloping – with the agreement of her guardian – with roguish lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), Bella discovers not only sensual pleasures but deeply engaging intellectual pleasures across Europe, determined to become her own woman defined by no-one.

Poor Things is practically a dictionary definition of a Lanthimos epic (fish-eyed lenses, spidery text captions, a jarring mix of period and modern) and is almost impossible to categorise. It is, in turn, serious and thought-provoking, laugh-out-loud funny, uncomfortable and challenging. Shot in a deliberately artificial manner, its cinematography and sets reminiscent of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, it’s Victorian but also a remix of everything from Metropolis to the mansion at the heart of Sunset Boulevard, here turned into a Dr Moreau style den of freakishly spliced animals. It makes for something wildly, unpredictably unique visually, a smorgasbord of the real, the overblown and plain weird.

With a sharp script by Tony MacNamara, crammed with quotable lines (sometimes Lanthimos has a bit too much of an eye on creating GIF moments) Poor Things reinvents itself as constantly as its hero. Opening in rich black-and-white to chronicle Bella’s early years, it explodes into a gorgeously expressive Powell and Pressburger colours as she experiences the world. It superbly mixes the real with the weird, shaping its collection of bizarre characters into living-breathing people while keeping the world around them a melting-pot of styles and genres.

Poor Things has been attacked by some as semi-pornographic or exploitative. In fact, it’s a complex and daring look at female empowerment. On first discovering the pleasures of, well, self-pleasure (with a selection of vegetables), Bella is immediately told such things are not done in polite society. But Bella refuses to see “furious jumping” as shameful, but just a source of pleasure and experience like any other. If she takes pleasure in the act with someone, why should be ashamed? And if she makes all the decisions about what does and doesn’t happen with her body, who should judge her?

Bella is a curious hybrid her whole life: the body and feelings of an adult, with a swiftly developing brain, absorbing understanding of the world around her swiftly. Like a child she lashes out at the rules Godwin and his protégé Max place over her (partly for her protection, partly to continue their psychological development experiment). But this comes from her increasing frustration at having her horizons limited by these men, deciding what and who she can see. Lanthimos takes clear from the start Bella can take as much sensual pleasure in feeling fallen leaves under her body or watching fireworks in the sky as anything else and doesn’t feel she should be denied it.

Poor Things sees Bella demanding, and then making, her own decisions – and to hell with expectations. Whether throwing plates at dinner because she wants to leave or choosing to run away to Europe with caddish Duncan for the experience of it, she shall make her own choices. Decisions being made for her, infuriate her: Max’s refusal to let her leave or Duncan’s decision to take her, unannounced, on a cruise. Bella will talk to who she wants and experience anything she finds curious. If she decides to go on the game in Paris in a high-class brothel (on the basis that she enjoys sex, the hours are short and it pays well) who gives a damn if Duncan is appalled. He doesn’t – for all he might like to think so – own her.

These are complex and challenging ideas, as Bella jokes she has become “the means of her own production”. But Bella believes the only thing in the world should make us ashamed is the suffering of others: witnessing a slum in Alexandria she is moved to tears at the indifference that lets children die in poverty, with only platitudes for these “poor things”. And you can see her point: why flinch at personal misconduct but not even blush at the idea of others dying because of our inaction. That’s why she doesn’t want to be constrained by societies ideal, be that enjoying sex, reading Marxism, dancing all night long or wanting to punch a baby that won’t stop crying in a restaurant.

All these complex ideas are brilliantly captured in Emma Stone’s extraordinary performance. It is, of course, a physical marvel, her body slowly, jerkily, developing, but also a rivetingly complex embodiment of a hugely complex personality, absorbing everything around her, processing it and then shaping it into her own world view. It’s reflected in the gorgeous eccentricity of her dialogue – she is “a changeable feast” of views, peppering her sentences with astute (and funny) unique metaphors “finding being alive fascinating”. She makes Bella determined, naïve, exceptionally wise and insightful, uncertain, kind and unforgiving. It sits perfectly at the heart of a film about a woman refusing to be ashamed and determined to better the world around her. It’s a brilliant creation.

One of many in the film. Godwin, a hideously disfigured famous surgeon, was the subject of his own father’s experiments (Godwin describes with matter-of-fact scientific curiosity a series of repugnant surgical experiments, including the removal of organs to discover if the body needs them – “turns out we do”). Godwin seems at first a blinkered mad scientist, but in Dafoe’s brilliantly layered performance, a humanitarian with a sense of fair play is revealed, who genuinely cares for his creation and refuses to stand in her way. Although she calls him “God” he is far from a messianic tyrant, instead refusing to repeat the mistakes of his own tyrannical parent.

He contrasts neatly with Ruffalo’s rake. Ruffalo has a whale of a time in a ‘leave nothing in the locker room’ performance of comedic excess. Duncan seems at first a threatening rake, but becomes infatuated with the mysterious Bella (something she finds more and more wearing), crumbling from worldly-wise playboy to a spoilt schoolboy whining about things he can’t have. Ruffalo inverts Bella’s development: as she becomes more mature, he degenerates into a dependent child.

Which fits because Poor Things is a Frankenstein-in-reverse story of a woman not being defined by men. Those who try fail, left to choose either to support her or flail against her rights. Lanthimos’ work is striking, original and hugely dynamic, brilliantly mixing striking visuals with searching questions. Why shouldn’t women feel the same lack of shame in their bodies and accomplishments as Bella does? It’s an urgent question – that’s getting lost in discussions about the films. Often as wildly funny as it is freakily weird, its deliberate artificiality and anachronisms help create a film that is a playground of ideas. I’m still working out what I feel about it all now – and how refreshing to have a film as bold as that to consider?

L’Argent (1983)

Bresson’s final film: challenging, cold, hard to watch, definitely leaves you thinking

Director: Robert Bresson

Cast: Christian Patey (Yvon Targe), Vincent Ricterucci (Lucien), Caroline Lang (Elise), Sylvie van den Elsen (Grey haired woman), Michel Briguet (Grey haired woman’s father), Beatrice Tabourin (Ka photographe), Didier Baussy (Le photographe)

Robert Bresson is today so widely acclaimed as one of the patron saints of cinema, it’s odd to think that in 1983 at Cannes he was furiously booed when he won the director prize for L’Argent. But Bresson’s style had always been divisive – before the vindication of history – and L’Argent, his final picture, is one of the purest, most uncompromising slices of Bressonism you are likely to see, not to mention an uncomfortable and deeply challenging work of art. Uncompromising in almost every sense, it is a film that climbs under your skin and troubles your mind for days after watching.

Based on a short story by Leo Tolstoy, L’Argent’s theme is the corrupting influence of money. Two rich kids, troubled by the small allowance from their parents, forge a 500 Franc note and exchange it for change in a photography shop. The owner, keen to get rid of the offending note, instructs his assistant Lucien (Vincent Ricterucci) to pay working-class Yvon Tonge (Christian Patey) with it. When Yvon uses it in a café, he is arrested and charged, his pleas of innocence ignored. Losing his job, with a wife and child to support, Yvon slides down a slippery slope encompassing theft, jail time, tragic bereavement and murder leaving him a brutal shell of the man he was before.

Bresson’s film deals with the inexorable inevitability of fate, once it is prodded in a certain direction by the destructive forces that govern our world. Those forces are themselves governed by cold, hard mammon and the selfishness and casual cruelty of those who have it or want it. Bresson’s film is littered with shots of hands at work – nearly always that work involves the passing of bank notes from one place to another. Money is what makes the world go around – it dictates power and privilege and it fundamentally decides who is believed and who is punished.

Yvon can plead in vain he is innocent of passing fake notes, because no one is going to listen to a working class joe with scarcely a penny to his name rather than the vouched-for employee of a respectable middle-class businessman. Yvon even ends his first court case by being rebuked for bringing into disrepute the names of such thoroughly respectable people. By contrast, when concerned her son might get caught up in the whole filthy affair, the mother of one of the original forgers simply hands over a wedge of cash to the cheated shop-owner to make the problem go away. Money talks.

And it has cast its verdict on Yvon, deciding he should be chewed up by the system and spat out a very different man. From the moment we first see Yvon arrested for the false note, we know he is doomed. Just as we know, from seeing Yvon’s first reaction to being accused (a violent shove that sends a waiter tumbling and glass smashing on the ground) that there is a capacity for violent revenge in him. Later, like a dim echo of this first moment, glass will shatter again on another floor, dropped by a grey-haired old woman hiding the fugitive Yvon. It’s a salutary reminder (one the film delivers on, with chilling impact, a few minutes later) that Yvon has a darkness that can harm others.

It’s a hardness sharpened by time in prison. Returning to the fertile ground of A Man Escaped, Bresson offers a chilling indictment of the prison system. Formal, cold and uncaring, it is a breeding ground for resentment and rage. The authorities read all incoming mail, but in no way think about its contents and the impact it will have on the receiver (the mail reading room is a voyeur’s paradise, the chance to observe the secret goings on of everyone before they even know it themselves). Incoming mail discovers Yvon’s sick daughter has died and his wife is leaving him for good. No attempt is made to support Yvon who quickly succumbs to rage (looking to strike a mocking fellow inmate with a metal serving spoon), punishment by isolation and a suicide attempt through stockpiling chill-pills (much easier to shut inmates up rather than help them).

Throughout Bresson shows the onslaught of cruel events on Yvon with his characteristic spare style (no music, well drilled actors, perfectly timed shots, composed to convey information in the most economical style possible). But L’Argent is also a film strikingly devoid of moral judgement. It’s very much left open to us when, how and why we may or may not lose sympathy with Yvon. After all we truly see him suffer, after trying his very best to play by all the rules (reporting where he got the fake note from, telling the truth in court) only for him to lose everything.

Is there a chance for redemption for Yvon? He discovers money talks and the world is fundamentally uncaring (after all it took his freedom, child, wife and a large part of his mental health). Photography shop assistant Lucien reaches the same conclusion: he’s been fleecing his crooked boss for weeks (‘I thought crooks looked after each other’ he tells his boss) but decides on one last theft to redistribute the wealth to the needy. Same conclusions, different methods to punish the world.

Yvon however decides to no longer restrain the dark impulses within him. He murders senselessly twice, grabs a few notes from a hotel cash desk and then finds himself protected be a selfless older woman (who he encounters initially eyeing up for theft). Staying in her home, her family in the same house, what will he do with this woman who does good things and expects nothing in return?

L’Argent is far from an optimistic film, with a hard-working family man turned into a family-free convict. In this uncompromising film, the final sequence is almost unwatchable in its bleak, terrible power as Yvon commits his final, inevitable, sins with a passion-free fixity of purpose almost impossibly horrible to watch. Bresson’s perfectly constructed film, full of detailed, clockwork precision has been slowly building to this horrific end, a natural one for a film highlighting the uncaring cruelty of the modern world.

Because money also doesn’t care about the damage it leaves, the collateral deaths or the cost on those on the margins. Was it this hopeless, systemic, inevitability the viewers at Cannes found so worthy of boos? The progress of events, one connected to another (and L’Argent, despite its structured formalism, is full of events of the least-Bressonist you can imagine, including a car chase) that forms a terrible, unsettling and unreassuring picture? Bresson leaves our judgement of Yvon entirely up to us: Tolstoy’s novella looked at the journey of redemption for its lead character. Bresson shows us the crimes and nothing else. If there is to be redemption or forgiveness we must ask ourselves if we can do it.

Separate Tables (1958)

Guilt and shame under the politeness in this stagy and almost-very-brave Rattigan adaptation

Director: Delbert Mann

Cast: Rita Hayworth (Anne Shankland), Deborah Kerr (Sibyl Railton-Bell), David Niven (Major David Angus Pollock), Burt Lancaster (John Malcolm), Wendy Hiller (Pat Cooper), Gladys Cooper (Mrs Maud Railton-Bell), Cathleen Nesbitt (Lady Gladys Matheson), Felix Aylmer (Mr Fowler), Rod Taylor (Charles), Audrey Dalton (Jean), May Hallett (Miss Meacham), Priscilla Morgan (Doreen)

Bournemouth’s Hotel Beauregard offers comfortable rooms and separate tables for dining. No wonder it’s popular with a host of regulars and out-of-town guests. But at each of those separate tables, drama lurks. Unflappable Pat Cooper (Wendy Hiller) manages the hotel and is secretly engaged to John Malcolm (Burt Lancaster), a down-on-his luck writer a little too fond of a pint in The Feathers. Their secret relationship is thrown into jeopardy when John’s ex-wife Anne (Rita Hayworth) arrives from New York, keen to get John back. Meanwhile, Major Pollock (David Niven) hides a secret behind his “hail-fellow-well-met” exterior, one which will threaten his place in the hotel and friendship with mousey Sibyl (Deborah Kerr) – a woman firmly under the thumb of her domineering mother (and resident bully) Mrs Railton-Bell (Gladys Cooper).

Delbert Mann’s film merges two Terence Rattigan one-act plays into a single, respectable piece of middle-brow Masterpiece Theatre viewing, which Mann subsequently effectively disowned (even after its seven Oscar nominations) after losing control of both editing and scoring to producer Lancaster. (Mann, quite rightly, loathed the hilariously out-of-place Vic Damone crooner number “Separate Tables” that opened the film.) Mann had already replaced Laurence Olivier, who dropped out after Lancaster’s company felt the film needed two American stars to make it box-office (handily they chose Lancaster himself and his business partner’s fiancée Rita Hayworth).

Lancaster and Hayworth are incidentally the weak points in the cast, their Americanness hopelessly out of step with Rattigan’s extremely English style and setting. Both actors are all too clearly straining to “stretch themselves” in unlikely roles, giving the film a slight air of self-indulgence. (Hillier later archly stated her best scene from the original was handed to Hayworth, while Lancaster recut the film to move up his first entrance.) The will-they-won’t-they tug-of-war between the two of them is Separate Tables’ least interesting beat and it’s to the film’s detriment that it, and these two awkwardly miscast actors, dominate so much of the film’s middle section.

They were already playing the dullest half of Rattigan’s double bill. Rattigan’s passion, and by far the film’s most electric moments – even if they only really constitute just under a half the runtime – revolve around the scandal of Major Pollock. Pollock, it is swiftly revealed, is not only prone to exaggerate his class, schooling and military career (his knowledge of alleged alma mata Sandhurst and the classics is revealed to be sketchy at best) but also carries a secret criminal conviction for harassing young women in a cinema.

While such harassment is of course recognised as beyond the pale today, it’s very clear in Separate Tables that Pollock’s misdeeds are standing in for a crime that literally “dare not speak its name”. Rattigan was one of Britain’s most prominent closeted homosexuals and his original intention had been for the Major’s crime to be fumbled cottaging. In the 50s it was unspeakable for the lead to be a sympathetic frightened homosexual so, in what looks bizarre today, it was far more acceptable to make him a timid sexual molester. However, the subtext is very clear, unspoken but obvious. One only has to hear the tragic Major sadly say “I’m made in a certain way and I can’t change it” and talk about his shame and loneliness to hear all too clearly what’s really being talked about here. Isn’t the Major’s pretence about being “the Major” just another expression of the double life a gay man had to lead in 1950s Britain?

This sensitive and daring plot is blessed with a wonderfully judged, Oscar-winning performance by David Niven (dominating the film, despite being on screen for a little over 20 minutes – the shortest Best Actor winning performance on record). Niven had made a career of playing the sort of suave, debonair military-types Pollock dreams of being – so there might not have been an actor alive more ready to puncture that persona. Recognising a role tailor-made for him, Niven peels away the Major’s layers to reveal a shy, sensitive, frightened man, desperate for friendship and acceptance. His heart-breaking confession scene (clearly a coded coming out) is beautifully played, while the closing scene with its hope of acceptance gains hugely from Niven’s stiff-upper-lip trembling with concealed emotion.

Niven’s performance – (Oscar-in-hand he rarely felt the need to stretch himself as an actor again) – centres the film’s most dramatic and engaging content. The campaign against the Major is led by Mrs Railton-Bell, superbly played by Gladys Cooper as the sort of moral-crusader who needs to cast out others to maintain her own ram-rod self-perception of virtue. Cooper uses icy contempt and overwhelming moral conviction to browbeat the rest of the guests in a sort of kangaroo court into blackballing the Major, a neat encapsulation not only of the power of the loudest voice but how readily decent people reluctantly acquiesce to it to avoid trouble.

Her control has also crushed her daughter’s spirit. Deborah Kerr’s performance is a little mannered: Kerr works very hard to embody a mousey, dumpy, frumpy spinster and make sure we can see she’s doing it. But she works beautifully with Niven and her meekness means there is real impact when the mouse finally (inevitably) roars. The rest of the guests are a fine parade of reliable British character actors: Felix Aylmer reassuringly fair and May Hallett particularly delightful as a no-nonsense woman who doesn’t give a damn what people think and trusts her own judgement.

Linking all plots together, Wendy Hiller won the film’s other Oscar as the hotel manager. Hiller was born to play decent matrons, bastions of respectable fair play who reluctantly but stoically bear personal sacrifices as their own crosses. She’s a natural with Rattigan’s dialogue and brings the best out of Lancaster, as well as providing all the drama (and sympathy) in the film’s other plotline as a surprisingly noble “other woman”.

Separate Tables is a middle-brow slice of theatre filmed with assurance. But when it focuses on Major Pollock it touches on something far more daring and much more moving than anything else it reaches for. Here is true low-key, English tragedy: under a clear subtext, we see the horror of a man who pretends all his life to be something he is not and the terrible judgements from others when he is exposed. It’s that which gives Separate Tables its true impact.

Fiddler on the Roof (1971)

Film adaptation successfully aims for drama and emotion over showbiz bells and whistles

Director: Norman Jewison

Cast: Topol (Tevye), Norma Crane (Golde), Rosalind Harris (Tzeitel), Michele Marsh (Hodel), Neva Small (Chava), Molly Picon (Yente), Paul Mann (Lazar Wolf), Leonard Frey (Motel Kamzoil), Paul Michael Glaser (Perchik), Ray Lovelock (Fyedka), Zvee Scooler (Rabbi), Louis Zorich (Constable), Alfie Scopp (Avram), Howard Goorney (Nachum), Barry Dennen (Mendel), Ruth Madoc (Fruma-Sarah)

Sometimes it’s a surprise to remember Fiddler on the Roof is one of the most successful musicals of all time. A sensation when it opened on Broadway in 1964, it became the first musical to pass 3,000 performances and was soon playing all over the world. Based on a series of stories by Sholem Aleichem about life in a Jewish village in turn-of-the-century Imperial Russia, it feels like odd material for a hit. But it’s universal themes of the struggles between generations, persecution of a community and finding a balance between tradition and change struck a universal chord. So, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Jewison’s film version became the biggest hit of 1971.

It’s 1905 and milkman Tevye (Topol) lives his life by the traditions of his faith and Jewish community, balancing a series of competing demands like a fiddler perched on a roof playing his fiddle (it’s a tortured metaphor but it’s the title…). He has three daughters – sensible Tzeitel (Rosalind Harris), romantic Hodel (Michele Marsh) and kind Chava (Neva Small) – all of whom need marrying off, ideally to suitable husbands. But can life continue for ever when you live in a country rife with antisemitism, with pogroms as regular as clockwork?

Fiddler on the Roof was perfect material for a director as passionate about social issues as Norman Jewison. It balances comedy and theatricality very effectively with gritty realism and a sense of generational trauma at the suffering inflicted on innocent people for no reason other than their heritage. Although the film is undoubtedly too long (at nearly three hours), this does make the mood transition from gentle comedy to loss and bleakness something slow but relentless, helping it carry even more impact.

Jewison effectively translates stage musical to screen reality. Fiddler on the Roof is neatly edited, it’s opening number Tradition showing a montage of everyday-activities in the village (meat chopped, clothes sewn, pray books opened) with every action cut to mirror the song’s beat. It avoids glossy choreography in favour of something either more cinematically literate like this or more intimate, with many songs delivered in medium-shot, the camera zeroing in on the thought process and allowing the actors to give intense, emotional renditions.

Not that Jewison isn’t averse to a big theatrical number. Matchmaker, Matchmaker is the first number that could be on the Broadway stage but gets away with its moments of classical beats of choreographed movement because of the playfully-natural delivery of Harris, Marsh and Small. Jewison saves his real fire for Tevye’s Dream, liberated from the film’s realistic approach by happening in a dream. This number is pure theatre, with a chorus of dancing ghosts and a diva-ish spectre (played by Hi-de-Hi’s Ruth Madoc of all people) giving it everything they’ve got.

But Fiddler on the Roof’s main beat is realism. Oswald Morris’ Oscar-winning cinematography – its slightly sepia tone captured by stretching a pair of tights over the lens, its gauze clearly visible at points – displays a world that is, for all the vibrancy of the people living in it, frequently cold, unhospitable and difficult. That matches the attitudes of their Russian rulers, prejudiced bullies whose local representative stutters the sort of excuses about “just following orders” that are even more chilling with our knowledge of the horrors to come forty years later.

What makes the village flourish is its community. Run by tradition and faith, where (for better or worse) everyone understands their roles, duties and expectations. Fiddler on the Roof is about how far these can be pushed in changing times, structured around a man’s choice of his daughter’s husbands. Can Tevye accept a daughter choosing for herself? How about a daughter marrying a firebrand radical who wants to leave the village? How about another wanting to marry a gentile?

They are ideas initially beyond the ken of Tevye, a firm traditionalist with passing dreams of riches but who wants a world where nothing changes. To make this dyed-in-the-wool conservative a warm and entertaining figure, requires the right casting. In America, the role was associated with its originator Zero Mostel (desperate to play it on film). But Jewison felt Mostel’s personality was too large for cinema, that Mostel’s theatricality would work against the realist film he wanted. Instead, he cast the Israeli actor playing the role in London’s West End, Chaim Topol.

It was a masterstroke (much as it crushed Mostel and outraged fans). Topol, like Yul Brynner in The King and I, would define his career with the role, playing it over 3000 times on stage in a series of productions over almost forty years (eventually Harris would graduate from playing his daughter to his wife!). Astonishingly he was only 35 in 1971 – a brilliant combination of make-up and Topol’s gift for physical acting makes him feel 25 years older – and Fiddler, for a large part, relies on his charisma and charm. Topol is as comfortable with the conversational address to the camera – which dominates much of the film’s opening – as he is with the world-weary sadness and frustrated anger Tevye responds to the changing world around him with.

Topol’s performance works in perfect tandem with Jewison’s aim to ground and avoid flights of whimsy or vaudeville comedy. The harsh conditions don’t dampen the warmth in the community – wonderfully captured in the marvel that greets the arrival of tailor Mostel’s (an endearing, Oscar-nominated, Leonard Frey) sewing machine – and means the Tsarist repression and gangs of Cossacks who ride in, torches in hand, to burn and pillage carry real impact.

Jewison’s film carries foreknowledge of the Holocaust throughout, not dodging the knowledge that communities like this would be destroyed under Nazism. The film’s closing exodus may bring hope for Tevye and family (bound for New York) but also brings death to those who speak of heading to Krakow. It’s part of understands why tradition is so important to Tevye: as the imaginary fiddler follows Tevye’s family on the road, we understand the link to a shared cultural past is what gives identity and hope to a people facing persecution at every turn for thousands of years.

Fiddler on the Roof mines it’s material for emotion and character over showbiz bells and whistles. While it undoubtedly takes too long to explore in depth its slight plot, its length does conversely add even more impact to its closing look to the future. A fine musical adaptation.

What’s Love Got to Do With It? (1993)

Tina Turner biopic sails into dark marital waters in a hard-hitting film

Director: Brian Gibson

Cast: Angela Bassett (Tina Turner), Laurence Fishburne (Ike Turner), Vanessa Bell Calloway (Jackie), Jenifer Lewis (Zelma Bullock), Penny Johnson Jerald (Lorraine Taylor), Phyllis Yvonne Stickney (Alline Bullock), Chi McBride (Fross), Jame Reyne (Roger Davies) Richard T Jones (Ike Turner Jnr)

How did Tina Turner become the Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll? The hard way. Possibly the hardest. Tina Turner’s relationship (and marriage) to her initial discoverer, Ike Turner, lasted almost twenty years after their first meeting in 1956. During that time, Ike helped form her style – and viciously beat and assaulted her on a regular basis, increasingly in drug-fuelled bouts of jealousy as her talent and fame surpassed his own. What’s Love Got to Do with It? sees Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne bring this biopic and spousal abuse drama to the screen.

Well directed by Brian Gibson, with neat mixture of mock-documentary and home video footage carefully spliced into the film, What’s Love Got to Do with It? is practically the dictionary definition of a tough watch. It doesn’t flinch in showing the escalating violence in the Turner marriage. Bleeding noses, black eyes, furious fists and a rape scene in a recording studio that is almost unbearably visceral, What’s Love Got to Do with It? indeed: this is marriage as Dantean hell.

Tina Turner later felt the film went too far in depicting her as victim, but also not far enough in showing the violence in their marriag [AN1] e. (Ike Turner, needless to say, was equally unhappy – but who cares.) What she praised though was Angela Bassett’s performance. Cast at short notice, Bassett worked overtime to master Turner’s vocal and physical mannerisms. It’s a nailed-on performance, but Bassett also completely drills down into the heart of a woman who finds herself lost in a situation outside of her control, terrified but discovering the inner strength needed to lead her own life.

It’s a hugely emotional performance. Bassett makes Tina fiery, determined and talented – but even the strongest person can find themselves trapped in (and defending) destructive relationships. Despite the early example of Ike’s previous girlfriend Lorraine (a very good Penny Johnson), driven to a suicide attempt by Ike, despite his vanity and jealousy being clear early on, (as well as his control freak desire to dictate every inch of her life ,including changing her name to Tina Turner without her agreement), Tina is captivated by Ike.

As their relationship deteriorates, for all his vileness, Bassett’s Turner defends and excuses her husband. Whether he beats her up at home in front of the kids (and brings a dress home later as an apology) or smashes a cake into her face in a restaurant, it’s never quite his fault. He’s fragile, he’s an artist, sometimes she just makes him mad. Bassett brilliantly shows how this Orwellian double think can settle in, so that a woman like Turnerstays with her abuser for 16 years of marriage, until she realises she can break free.

Bassett’s electric performance is perfectly complemented by Laurence Fishburne’s burning, self-pitying performance of weakness and insecurity masked by anger and fury. Fishburne turned down the film five times (it was Bassett’s presence that eventually persuaded him). He felt the film didn’t do enough to show why Turner became the man he did. To be fair, he’s probably right. Turner has an early scene where he speaks of his childhood trauma (a fig leaf for his bullying) which Fishburne gives a real humanity, and he invests the early sequences with charm and charisma.

But Fishburne, like Bassett, doesn’t slack on the energy. As cocaine and envy eat Ike up, his body language becomes more bear-like, his speech ever more mumbled. His eyes cloud over with a look of hate. Only actors who trust each other completely could play these appalling scenes of domestic violence with such complete and utter commitment. Both Bassett and Fishburne give a horrible life to these shocking and sickening moments of hurt and pain.

Both actors essentially elevate material that, at heart, is standard biopic stuff, built around the usual obstacles – albeit the obstacle this time is hideous domestic violence. We see the roots of Turner’s career, the early hits, the terrible turmoil, so appalling that the final act triumph really moves. Gibson recreates Turner performances with expertise, each packing a real punch. Bassett’s capturing of Turner’s performance style is spot-on and her lip synching is flawlessly convincing.

What’s Love Got to Do with It demonstrates how hard it is to escape abusive relationships. But, the film though doesn’t quite manage to fully build the real life behind the characters. I can get why Tina Turner felt the film positioned her as too much of a victim, as it prioritises this aspect of her life before all others. While it’s made clear that Ike lived a life in which he victimised a series of women, the film’s focus on this issue diminishes the other aspects of Tina’s life and the building of her own career, making her for a large part of the film a punching bag for an abuser.

So, the survival makes for deeply affecting viewing. To see Tina return the punches and flee from a hotel in LA to find refuge in another hotel (she was granted a free room by a deeply sympathetic hotel manager who can read between the lines). Her refusal to be scared when, like all bullies, Ike comes crawling back begging forgiveness and then switches smoothly to threats when that doesn’t work. And above all the triumph of her career. The only thing she wanted from the divorce was the name “Tina Turner” – she had bled for it. And we saw it. What’s Love Got to Do with It might be, in many ways, a standard biopic but with two such forceful performances it has special moments.

EO (2022)

Skolimowski’s passionate call for animal rights is a modern Au Hasard Balthasar

Director: Jerzy Skolimowski

Cast: Sandra Drzymalska (Kasandra), Tomasz Organek (Ziom), Lorenzo Zurzolo (Vito), Mateusz Kościukiewicz (Mateo), Isabelle Huppert (Countess)

You can make a lot of judgements on humanity, based on how it treats animals. EO, a poetic and deeply heartfelt film, makes a passionate plea for kindness and respect in our treatment of the natural world, qualities it all too often finds lacking. In that sense, it’s surprisingly different from its ancestor Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthasar. Where Bresson turned the rite-of-passage of a donkey into a Calvary-like journey, with the donkey a poetic substitute for Christ, Skolimowski’s film presents a donkey who is nothing more or less than a donkey, but whose experiences become universal for our treatment (and mistreatment) of animals.

We first meet EO as a circus performer, working closely performing tricks with Kasandra (Sandra Drzymalska). When the circus’ finances collapse, under the demands of animal rights activities EO is taken from his home and deposited in a sanctuary where he feels unsettled and uncertain. From there, his life becomes migratory as wanders encountering violent football hooligans, exploitative mink farmers and the odd decent person, progressing towards an abrupt fate that parallels Bresson’s Balthasar.

Even more so than Bresson’s work, Skolimowski’s EO front-and-centres its donkey star. Among many things, EO is a strikingly beautiful art film. The camerawork – shot by two DPs who pull the film together into a beautifully consistent visual style – is radiant, presenting a series of luscious 4:3 images which capture both the beauty of nature and the starkness of man’s presence in it. Several scenes are shot with a slightly frog-eyed lens, its blurred wet-looking edges suggesting EO-perspective POV shots. Skolimowski presents several sequences with a red-tinged dream-like quality, that suggests EO’s own day-dreams – soaring vistas, locations that visually merge together, flashes of his circus life. All this pushes EO himself into the film’s lead role, a real character.

But yet no attempt is made to anthropomorphise this animal. Although the camera lingers over EO’s face, his emotions are left entirely for us to interpret. In many ways, EO is a proof for that old editing test: show the same neutral face followed by a series of contrasting happy and sad events, and the mind will interpret that neutral face as holding different emotions. That is what EO does marvellously. Perhaps we just imagine EO’s joy at seeing Kasandra again (she is certainly moved – drunk, but moved). Perhaps his fear and discomfort in his new animal shelter home is us reading in what we might feel in his place. When EO kicks a mink battery farmer in the face, do we feel he’s angry because we are? There are no answers from EO: he’s just a donkey.

Nevertheless, he is a donkey on a journey and Skolimowski’s film is a surprisingly sharp-edged fable, deeply critical about our unthinking, brutal exploitation of animals. To too many of us, the film argues, their rights are not worth considering – they are dumb creatures good to work until they are too difficult to keep alive or we wish to use their bodies for something else, from clothing to food. EO’s encounters with humans invariably see him being used for their own needs, rarely considering what the desires of the donkey might be.

Skolimowski establishes from the film’s opening, with its animal rights activists who are (surprisingly considering the film itself is an act of animal rights activism) smug, self-righteous and so convinced they know what is best for EO that they are crucial in separating him from the only human in the film who cares for him. Far from ill-treated in the circus, it gives EO a home, love and a purpose. The instant he is removed from this circus, all three of these elements disappear from his life.

Not that Kasandra is an unequivocally positive influence in EO’s life. Settled onto a farm – again we read depression into his refusal to eat, although maybe EO’s just not hungry – EO’s new surroundings are not unpleasant (in fact, the farm seems to be partly about helping disabled children connect with animals, in a sweetly touching sequence). Kasandra gate-crashes one night, drunk, feeds EO a muffin and then disappears over the horizon. Her presence does enough to cause EO to follow her, escaping from his pen and walking out into the Polish countryside.

This pilgrimage through a forest and shooting range (laser guided hunters track wolves, EO at one point starring at a dying wolf, left to bleed out from the hunt), leads eventually to a village football game where EO’s braying causes one side to miss a crucial penalty. Suddenly EO is flotsam in a hooligan-tinged battle between rivals. The winners adopt him as a sort of comedy mascot, before forgetting him in their drunken haze. Hooligans from their rivals beat EO nearly to death, in a twisted act of revenge. EO has no say in either side of this war, merely becoming a passive and innocent war-ground that humans can exact their primal instincts on.

Treatment of animals is increasingly, cruelly, exposed. Nursed back to health by a vet (a worker at the hospital matter-of-factly asks why they don’t put EO down), he is sold to a mink farm that feels like nothing less than a brutal prison, where animals live in misery until their inevitable skinning to make a scarf. Trafficked across countries with horses, EO is again adopted by a stranger who uses him as a sounding board for his own concerns (this happens arguably three times: Kasandra arguably sees EO’s as a sentimental toy, a drunk unties EO before the fateful football ground because he wants his “friend” to be free and Vito uses him to stave off loneliness). This is as nothing compared to the film’s bleak ending – a terrifying view of the ruthlessness we push animals towards their fate.

EO is so masterful at front-and-centring the experience of an animal, and investing it with immense interpretative empathy, that it means the film actually drags when humans enter the frame. The film feels like it has to include scenes with humans in to bulk up it up to feature length (a better EO would surely be about 60 minutes long). A Polish truck-driver (Mateusz Kościukiewicz) playfully flirts before discovering man is just as inhuman to man as he is to animals. Vito and his mother-in-law, Isabelle Huppert’s countess, play out a small-scale human drama which seems trivial and uninteresting compared to the animal message that dominates the film.

Perhaps this is because EO succeeds so utterly in making us care and even (perhaps) understand the perspective of an animal. It’s a superb act of interpretative art – filmed with an astonishing visual beauty and with a gorgeous score of Pawel Mykietyn – and warm empathetic understanding. It also builds into a surprisingly moving and powerful message on the importance of treating animals with the same dignity and kindness that we would expect to be treated with ourselves. It makes for a thought-provoking and immersive film, that emerges successfully from the shadow of its forbear.

Sansho the Bailiff (1954)

Mizoguchi’s masterpiece, a stirring, humane fable tinged with the tragedy of the real world

Director: Kenji Mizoguchi

Cast: Kinuyo Tanaka (Tamaki), Kyōko Kagawa (Anju), Eitarō Shindō (Sanshō the bailiff), Yoshiaki Hanayagi (Zushiō), Ichirō Sugai (Minister of Justice Niō), Ken Mitsuda (Fujiwara no Morozane), Masahiko Tsugawa (Zushiō as a Boy), Masao Shimizu (Taira no Masauji), Chieko Naniwa (Ubatake), Kikue Mori (Priestess), Akitake Kōno (Tarō), Ryōsuke Kagawa (Donmyō Ritsushi)

You could imagine the lead characters of Sansho the Bailiff as Hansel and Gretel. There is a fairy tale quality to Sansho the Bailiff, combined beautifully by Mizoguchi with a throbbing humanism. Imagine a fairy tale named after The Wicked Witch of the Gingerbread House then spliced with the trauma of captivity. Mizoguchi’s film is a gorgeous, deeply moving and heartbreaking fable, that yearns for us to hold to our inner goodness but shows the terrible struggle to sustain this in a cruel world and the terrible costs we go through for glimmers of hope.

Based on an old Japanese folktale, an eleventh century feudal official is unjustly dispatched into exile. He leaves his family with a mantra: “without mercy, man is a beast. Even if you are hard on yourself, be merciful to others.” A few years later, while travelling, his wife Tamaki (Kinuyo Tanaka) and children are tricked and sold into slavery. Tamaki becomes a prostitute on the island of Sado, her children slaves on the estate of the brutal Sansho (Eitarō Shindō). As young adults, the son Zushiō (Yoshiaki Hanayagi) has buried his humanity as a cruel overseer but his sister Anju (Kyōko Kagawa) still clings to hope and her father’s principles. Can Zushiō’s principles be reborn, despite the brutality of their surroundings?

Mizoguchi’s film is a masterpiece on man’s capability to inflict suffering and cruelty, most particularly on women. Although full of qualities of a classic folk tale, Sansho the Bailiff is grimly realistic and unflinching about the suffering that slavery can inflict and remarkably unblinking in the human cost escaping from such a world can be. There are no fairy tale endings in Sansho, no clear victories, no satisfying conclusions. For every flash of hope, there is the grim realisation of the cost others have paid to achieve it. In particular, women carry an appalling burden of sacrifice.

The family is cruelly invaded in Sansho suffering a double separation – first the other members from the father, then the wrenching separation of mother from children. Shot throughout with a calmly controlled focus by Mizoguchi, with long takes combined with carefully controlled angles that frequently give a terrible distance to events, making the viewer feel powerless to prevent them. Tamika – played with extraordinary humanity and depth of emotion by Kinuyo Tanaka – suddenly understands what is happening and responds with a desperate struggle (which sees her faithful servant unceremoniously dumped off a boat to drown) while her children struggle hopelessly on land. Superbly subtle editing and framing that stresses distance (placing mother and children at opposing ends of the frame in alternate shots) only add to the sense of a family being torn apart.

This is as nothing to the grim world of Sansho’s estate. Slaves who do not work are beaten. The children are thrown into a shack and bluntly told to work or die. Anyone attempting to escape the estate is brutally branded. Old retainers at the end of their working life are expelled to die in the hills. Even Sansho’s son Tarō (Akitake Kōno) can’t bear life on the estate, refusing to brand recaptured slaves (much to the contempt of his father) and leaving for a life as a priest. Mizoguchi wants to show us a world where humanity has no concern for its brothers and sisters. Later we will see no one in power really gives a damn about the morality of estates like Sansho.

In this environment, the son gives up and makes the sacrifices he needs to survive. He becomes dead-inside, forgetting his father’s words and killing his humanity, the man Tarō refused to be. He will brand a recaptured slave (an old man who welcomed him on his arrival years ago) without a second glance. Yoshiaki Hanayagi’s eyes are dead, his spirit a curled animal which has forgotten itself. It’s his sister Anju, beautifully played with sensitivity and hope by Kyōko Kagawa, who clings to their past life and the belief that they can return to it.

To make that return, it’s Anju who will make terrible sacrifices. Sansho the Bailiff is awash with the cost of the world’s cruelty and lack of humanity on women. Tamika is torn from her children, her faithful servant drowned. On Sado, Tamika’s desperate attempt to escape and find her children sees her dragged back to the brothel and hamstrung to prevent her trying again. The dream of seeing her children again – captured in a beautiful sequence as she hobbles to the top of a cliff and sings notes of her sad song of longing for her children – becomes almost a curse, a continual beating on a bruise that will never heal, a longing others will taunt her with.

Memory lies through Sansho the Bailiff like a golden thread. Moments of quiet nature remind Tamika of her husband. His words will be constantly repeated by his family, the last-remaining link to an old life and principles that feel impossible to sustain in their new one. To close your mind to memory and the past, as Zushiō does, is to kill part of yourself. Tamika’s song of yearning is a new memory link. These memory links are strong – they have to be to try and sustain us.

And the words of her song travel. A new slave in the estate speaks of the sad song, to Anju’s delight – finally contact of a sort with her mother. In a moment of magical spiritualism, the words Tamika sang on the cliff seems to travel across the wind to be heard by her children at their lowest point. Zushiō in particular seems to wake from a deep sleep, and suddenly finds the humanity he had so brutally repressed. Mizoguchi shoots these moments with the same affecting simplicity – but it’s that carefully composed, painterly minimalism that gives them such huge power.

This powerful minimalism is nowhere more effective than Anju’s supreme sacrifice (the fate of women in Mizoguchi’s world). Giving Zushiō the chance to escape, Anju becomes aware that torture for knowledge of where her brother went is inevitable. With serene certainty she walks into the river to drown herself, moving with a sense of freedom she has not known for years. In a single shot we see her walk until Mizoguchi cuts away then back to show bubbles calmly rising to the surface of the water. It is an act of love, stunningly simple and hugely moving – and apiece of a world where freedom and any trace of goodness can only come about through irreversible sacrifices.

Like a folk tale Zushiō is restored to his father’s office, but finds he can make few changes. Slavery is abolished at Sansho’s estate – but the system cannot really be changed. The slaves know this to – they take their chance to sack the estate, aware that fortune’s wheel could return them once again to servitude. Sansho learns nothing from the events, and the suspicion is the next governor will pardon him (after all he brings more revenue in than anyone else). Sansho is the real world and he is inescapable – so much so he even owns the name of a film in which he is a minor player.

It builds towards the final conclusion on a windswept beach, perhaps one of the most heart-rending moments on film. In a Western film, this would be a scene of joyful reconciliation in which two damaged people heal through sharing grief. Mizoguchi had lived through the horrors of war and knew this would have been a lie. Reuniting doesn’t wash away the pain or heal the wounds – physical or spiritual – and doesn’t change the world. It’s just two people on a beach, clawing towards a moment of peace in a difficult world.

Sansho the Bailiff is clear-eyed and realistic about a world where people hurt each other and care nothing. Told with a classic, artistic simplicity, it is both a deeply moving and deeply spiritual piece, a great humanistic artist making his ultimate statement on the nature of the world. An essential film.