Category: Social issue films

The Teacher’s Lounge (2023)

A series of minor thefts leads to a school spiralling out of control in this intense, small-scale drama

Director: Ilker Çatak

Cast: Leonie Benesch (Carla Nowak), Eva Löbau (Friederike Kuhn), Anne-Kathrin Gummich (Dr. Bettina Böhm), Rafael Stachowiak (Milosz Dudek), Michael Klammer (Thomas Liebenwerda), Kathrin Wehlisch (Lore Semnik), Leonard Stettnisch (Oskar Kuhn)

Schools can be like whole societies in microcosm, with attention grabbing events having earth-shattering consequences in these tiny worlds. New teacher Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch) finds this out the hard way when she takes matters into her own hands to solve a spate of petty thefts in the staff room, before the blame is pinned on students. Setting a trap, to her surprise she captures on film evidence that the thief is the school’s popular administrator Mrs Kuhn (Eva Löbau), mother of Carla’s star-pupil Oskar (Leonard Stettnisch). Events quickly spiral out of control, as Mrs Kuhn denies the charges and Carla’s attempts to be even-handed and fair leave her isolated at the centre of a storm pitting teachers, students and parents against each other.

The Teachers Lounge is a gripping ‘everyday’ thriller, where events on a small scale capture wider conflicts that rock whole societies. The events themselves seem small – petty theft and arguments over invasions of privacy – but Çatak’s film demonstrates they have shattering impacts on those involved. Loss of reputation, of jobs, the damaging impact on a promising child’s education, the shattering of harmony in a small community – it all explodes due to a few spur-of-the-moment decisions, building on each other so delicately that you are suddenly surprised to find it’s a crisis.

What’s really painful about The Teacher’s Lounge is how scrupulously honest and moral everything Carla tries to do is. What she’s not prepared for, is other people not playing by the same rules. Privately confronting Mrs Kuhn (having caught her distinctive blouse going on camera) with an offer to stop stealing and she’ll say no more about it, she’s amazed and totally shaken by the complete unwillingness to admit any guilt. When the matter is raised with the headmaster, Carla is dumbfounded by Kuhn’s aggressive denial and furious counter-accusation of invasion of privacy. Her cause is passionately taken up by Oskar, accusing Carla of ruining his mother’s life for no reason.

At the film’s heart is a wonderful performance of repressed tension from Leonie Benesch. Carla is a good teacher, but also a slightly distant, perhaps little-too-professional person. She engages more comfortably with the children because the ‘rules’ are clearer. With her fellow teachers, she never seems relaxed. She isn’t willing, as they are, to support (or cover up) for colleagues regardless of the situation. She judges each situation on its own merits – and Benesch superbly shows through her tense frame and strained voice how stressful this is – and adjusts her views and opinions as the situation develops. To everyone else this isn’t a positive but a huge negative, her refusal to follow an agreed line a sign of her flaky lack of loyalty to the team. (Her controversial filming is entirely caused by her mistrust of her colleagues, after watching one of them shamelessly empty an honesty box).

Çatak’s film shows how fragile the rules holding society together can be under pressure. Carla’s compassionate, thoughtful teaching focuses on developing her young students’ empathy and morality. She respects their views and asks for honesty in return. When arguments arise in class, she encourages discussion and consensus building. A jolly welcoming clapping-and-singing routine she practices every morning is about bringing the class together as a group. All of this flies out of the window as events unfold, showing how fragile these precious democratic conventions are.

The control of the teachers in the school turns out to be unbelievably fragile. Carla’s students stop co-operating with her lessons, effectively forming a union. The school newspaper – older students full of idolism about being the next Woodward and Bernstein – trap Carla into a Gotcha interview and misrepresent her opinions, fuelling the crisis (and leading to a near mutiny over a ban of the school newspaper). Carla, naturally, is blamed by her colleagues for the interview.

These fragilities and small-scale repression is just one way Çatak uses the setting to illustrate larger issues. Just under the school’s surface, there is a strong ‘us-and-them’ atmosphere. Both teachers and students demand internal loyalty to their sides. The thefts have already motivated heavy-handed members of staff to pressure (in private meetings) students to inform on their classmates. Carla objects to this but lacks the strength to end it – just as she later objects but does not obstruct a forced search of the boy’s wallets for stolen cash. It becomes more and more clear that Carla’s more considerate, diplomatic way of proceeding simply hasn’t got a chance of getting heard.

There is an uncomfortable air of casual assumptions being swiftly made. The first student suspect is the son of Turkish immigrants (the father’s job as a taxi driver all but used as evidence that the boy is likely guilty). Some of the staff simply can’t believe a boy from his background could have ready cash on him. An unbearably uncomfortable meeting with his parents – who at one point are instructed to speak German – is rife with tension. No wonder Carla is so uncomfortable with her Polish roots being discussed, that she asks a colleague with a similar background to only speak to her in German. Of course that contributes even more to the untrusted sense of distance Carla accidentally gives off to her fellow teachers.

This makes it even more heartbreaking to see Carla’s world slowly collapse in on itself as her attempts to treat everyone’s view points and demands fairly and equally ends with her attacked by both her colleagues and students. With her ever tense, bewildered decency getting ever more crushed Leonie Benesch is excellent in Çatak’s wonderful small-scale morality tale about society today, where the loudest and most strident voices win out. If you were her, you’d be finding an excuse to scream in a classroom as well.

Cry Freedom (1987)

Highly earnest, well-meaning, but tragically mis-focused biopic that doesn’t have the impact it wants

Director: Richard Attenborough

Cast: Kevin Kline (Donald Woods), Denzel Washington (Steve Biko), Penelope Wilton (Wendy Woods), Alec McCowen (High Commissioner David Aubrey Scott), Kevin McNally (Ken Robertson), Ian Richardson (State Prosecutor), John Thaw (Jimmy Kruger), Timothy West (Captain De Wet), Josette Simon (Dr Mamphela Ramphele), John Hargreaves (Bruce Haigh), Zakes Mokae (Father Kani), John Matsikiza (Mapetla), Julian Glover (Don Card)

Steve Biko (Denzel Washington) was a leading anti-Apartheid campaigner, driving the Black Consciousness Movement in the repressive racist state of South Africa. Biko called for Black people to organise themselves and rejected the paternalistic concern of hand-wringing white liberals. Biko was ‘banned’ in 1970s by South Africa’s (in)justice department (meaning he could not be in physical proximity with more than one other person at a time) but didn’t let this stop him campaigning – until he was eventually arrested and murdered in custody in August 1977. His story came to international attention with the reporting Donald Woods (Kevin Kline), the white liberal newspaper editor who befriended Biko, later also banned and eventually fled in disguise from South Africa.

All of this makes very ripe ground for Richard Attenborough to make another socially conscious, unreservedly liberal film, very much in the style of Gandhi. Unfortunately, while Gandhi combined epic sweep and drama with its schoolboy history, Cry Freedom is a deathly serious film, straight-jacketed by recreating events as reverentially as possible and focuses itself in all the wrong places. Cry Freedom is the Biko biography in which Biko becomes a supporting character to exactly the sort of white liberal he rejected having African stories filtered through. Admirable as Donald Woods’ efforts to find justice for Biko was, does it feel like he deserved the focus of over half the film? It’s as if Attenborough had decided to frame Gandhi solely from the perspective of Martin Sheen’s journalist rather than the Father of India himself.

Following the trend of many films of the 80s and 90s, Cry Freedom believes that the only way the regular cinemagoer can relate to a minority group is through the filter of a complacent white person having their eyes opened to how unjust everything is. In carefully following this cliché, Cry Freedom does do a decent job. Woods is patronisingly certain of his liberal views, even while he sometimes fails to even acknowledge his live-in Black maid who unquestioningly calls him ‘master’.

Back-slapping himself on writing the odd sympathetic editorial and convinced one of the big problems of South Africa is the danger of anti-white racism, he’s exactly the sort of hero you get in this genre: the guy who assumes, because the system has always worked for him, it will work for everyone. When he resolves to support Biko, he immediately assumes a friendly pow-wow with Justice Minister Jimmy Kruger (a terrifyingly amorally, avuncular John Thaw) will sweep away all the problems (it, of course, makes things immeasurably worse for everyone).

Cry Freedom largely re-creates the oppressive policies of South Africa, through seeing a white character become a victim of the very persecution, bullying and terrorising the Black community has spent its whole life suffering. (With the big exception that Donald Woods never seems to be in danger of being dragged off the streets and beaten to death in a police cell). It feels like a tone-deaf way of exploring these issues. Particularly as Donald Woods’ eventual escape from South Africa is staged and filmed with a singular lack of energy over nearly an hour of screen time, with interest slowly drained out as Attenborough uninventively turns it into an identikit version of any number of bog-standard behind-the-lines Great Escape shenanigans you’ve seen done a million times better before.

Attenborough, to be fair, saves his energy for the re-staging of the brutal repression inflicted on the Black community. Cry Freedom’s opening and closing sequences – a brutal slum clearance in East London and a restaging of the shockingly violent crushing of the 16 June 1976 Soweto uprising (where indiscriminate police automatic weapons fire killed and injured hundreds of children) – are shot with exactly the sort of humanitarian outrage and cold-eyed recognition of the horrors of conflict that Attenborough bought to Gandhi and A Bridge too Far.

It’s not hard to wonder if this is more the sort of film Attenborough wanted to make, but that funding demanded a white lead so as not to panic mainstream cinema audiences. It makes large parts of the film feel like a missed opportunity. A real immersion in the actual day-to-day lives of Black South Africans – not just the beatings, but the unending, casual racism and oppression – would have created a film of even more power. (The fact the film suddenly ends with a flashback to Soweto – an event not central to the plot at all – makes you wonder if Attenborough suddenly realised that, without it, Cry Freedom would have barely shown a Black face for its last twenty minutes).

But too much of the rest of Cry Freedom feels too dry, reserved and lifeless. Even Biko himself falls into this trap. Denzel Washington delivers a very fine performance, full of the sort of effortless charisma and magnetic leadership that makes you believe that so many would follow him and using wit and moral certainty to stand up to the various bullying policeman he encounters. But too much of Biko’s dialogue with Woods is full of the sort of dialogue designed to inform and educate the audience, rather than create good story-telling. Too many scenes in Cry Freedom’s opening hour feel like a South African politics seminar, no matter how much energy Washington gives the dialogue.

It’s part of the feeling the whole film carries: a very serious political ethics class, mixed with an all-too familiar story of a white man learning first hand just how tough his Black friends have had it for years. Attenborough so clearly means well, it feels almost cruel to knock him and his film: but Cry Freedom feels like a film with a lot of blood, sweat and tears invested in it, which then fails to have the emotional heft it really needs and spends a lot of time telling the wrong person’s story.

Nickel Boys (2024)

Beautiful and emotional film, with a unique filming style, at times too overtly arty but truly striking

Director: RaMell Ross

Cast: Ethan Herisse (Elwood), Brandon Wilson (Turner), Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor (Hattie), Hamish Linklater (Spencer), Fred Hechinger (Harper), Jimmie Fails (Mr Hill), Daveed Diggs (Adult Eldwood)

In the Deep South of America in the 1960s, a Black American couldn’t afford a wrong-place-wrong-time situation. That’s what happens though to teenager Elwood (Ethan Herisse). A star student, who firmly believes in civil rights and the power of moral action, he accepts a lift to college in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to an indefinite time in a Louisiana reform school, the Nickel Academy. Despite its lofty claims, the school is a bastion of racism where the black ‘students’ are housed in shabby huts and subjected to beatings, violence and exploitation as slave labour with almost no chance of leaving. The desperate efforts of his grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) to get his release are doomed to failure and his only friend is cynical Turner (Brandon Wilson). Decades later, an adult Elwood (Daveed Diggs) reacts as shocking news reports of unmarked mass graves of Black inmates are found at the site of old Nickel Academy.

Nickel Boys is adapted by RaMell Ross (making his fiction debut) from a Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Colson Whitehead, itself a fictionalisation of a real-life scandal. Dealing with challenging, difficult subject matter, its remarkable what a poetic, sensitive and subtle film Ross has created. Nickel Boys is a sad, lyrical, deeply tragic film which immerses us in the POV of its lead characters, making us feel the same hopelessness and powerlessness they do in a system designed to make them suffer.

Ross shoots Nickel Boys almost exclusively in POV, initially solely from Elwood’s perspective then switching back-and-forth between him and Turner. The older Elwood is shot as if the camera is strapped to his back (like the weight of the world). Ross commits to an extraordinary degree to this unique look-and-feel, with the camera focusing with the same roaming as a head turn, sometimes frustrating us by looking at the ‘wrong’ thing. What it does, above all, is forces us into the shoes of these boys: we see the sights exactly as we see them, their abusers stare into our eyes, we are made to feel as trapped in this small world as they are.

Ross opens Nickel Boys with its most extraordinary and beautiful sequence – one so perfectly constructed, it’s worth the price of admission alone – as we watch through Elwood’s eyes his growing up through a series of vividly remembered memories, our only glance of him brief reflections. This is a parade of truly striking images: a sidesways horizon with an arm stretched out (Elwood lying on his side); tinsel sprinkling down at us from the tree his grandmother is decorating; hazy soft-focus as a half-asleep Elwood witnesses his parents last-night in town; segregated bus journeys; his first encounters with civil rights; the aggressive searching of himself and another boy by a police officer; and his unjust arrest and imprisonment. It’s a breath-taking sequence, a virtuoso and deeply moving exploration of childhood impressions and contrasting memories.

The rest of Nickel Boys doesn’t quite match this glorious opening, but Ross uses the POV to take a surprisingly brave side-swipe in what we see and don’t see. The film becomes a tour-de-force of half looking, with the horrors of the Nickel Academy largely off-screen and ripe for our interpretation. In that, Nickel Boys would make an astonishing companion piece to The Zone of Interest which similarly took an unusual perspective on atrocity, as something on the edge of our visual and aural perception. When Elwood is beaten, the camera pulls away and cuts to extreme close-ups of black-and-white photos of Nickel Academy students to a cacophony of disjointed sound from Elwood’s thrashing.

Ross turns Nickel Boys into a sensory experience, one of acutely captured sounds and gorgeous imagery. The world of our two protagonists drifts interminably on, from eeking out their labour for the family and friends of the Academy’s staff – and Ross’ film makes clear this is unpaid convict labour – to seeing their ‘education’ ignored. The Black boys are kept at the margins of the grounds, never touching the privileges of the white boys with their football games – the only sport available to them is boxing, and there the school’s Black champ is ordered to take a dive to fix the betting ring among the staff (and ‘disappears’ when he, possibly mistakenly, fails to do so).

In this world Elwood is clinging to the hope that he can make a difference: by keeping a detailed log of the abuses and crimes, he might be able to escape. Elwood is a firm believer in civil rights – in one of the film’s most striking moments he runs across a busy street because he (and us – the visual deception is uncanny) mistakes a cardboard cut-out of his hero Martin Luther King as the real thing. His hope is only dented by the growing despair of his grandmother (a deeply heartfelt performance by Ellis-Taylor) and their swindling by their crooked lawyer.

By contrast, Turner is coldly cynical, convinced they have no chance of escaping the Nick alive. Turner’s bitterness – at one point he holds back Elwood’s precious letters for reasons he barely understands, but linked perhaps to his jealousy at never having any himself – is a sharp counterpoint to Elwood’s optimism, the two finding their contrasting viewpoints draws them closer together.

The legacy of events continues to be felt years later, with Elwood still haunted by his memories, struggling to adjust with his survivor’s guilt. A beautifully judged scene in a bar sees the adult Elwood encounter a fellow survivor (an extremely striking performance by Craig Tate) which not only sees Elwood deeply uncomfortable at this vivid reminder of his past – Tate’s Chicken Pete is fragile, alcoholic and not-all-there – but deeply disconcerted to find Pete has almost no memory of foundational events in Elwood’s life. It’s an affecting reminder that we are seeing one experience, and that the memories of each survivor would be radically different.

Nickel Boys has its flaws. At nearly two hours and twenty minutes, its running time dilutes its impact. Despite fine performances by Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson, the POV shooting at times makes it harder to personally engage with their characters, so focused is the film on sharing their experience at the cost of their reactions (which, naturally, we rarely see). Ross is a little too in love of documentary-style montages, which slow the pace rather than enrich the experience and can dilute the impact. A tighter, less at-times wilfully artistic film might have actually carried more force.

But it’s also a film full of deep sensory impact, that builds towards a shocking and deeply affecting climax that causes us to re-interpret much of what we have seen. And for large chunks, the film’s unique filming style creates a movie full of poetic wonder that places us firmly into the experience of living in a racist, unjust system like this one. For that alone, Nickel Boys deserves to be commended as a thought-provoking, striking film, one that leaves a real impact on the viewer.

Anora (2024)

Superb mix of tragedy, farce and social commentary laugh-out-loud-funny then suddenly deeply moving

Director: Sean Baker

Cast: Mikey Madison (Anora “Ani” Mikheeva), Mark Eydelshteyn (Ivan “Vanya” Zakharov), Yura Borisov (Igor), Karren Karagulian (Toros), Vache Tovmasyan (Garnick), Aleksei Serebryakov (Nikolai Zakharov), Darya Ekamasova (Galina Zakharova), Lindsey Normington (Diamond), Ivy Wolk (Crystal)

Who doesn’t love a Cinderella story? A plucky young woman comes from nothing to find a life of love and riches she never dreamed of is at the heart of dozens of fairy tales. And films for that matter: it’s impossible to not think about Pretty Woman when watching Anora. In fact, you could argue the at-times surprisingly charming, laugh-out-loud funny but cold-eyed realism of Anora is a Pretty Woman corrective, as if Richard Gere woke up a few days later, introduced Julia Roberts to his friends and family and immediately wondered what the hell he had done.

Not just that but Mikey Madison’s beautifully performed force-of-life Ani (real name Anora, but she doesn’t like it) feels far more like a high-end-stripper-and-occasional-sex-worker than Julia Roberts. She’s 24-years-old, living in Brighton Beach and working in a glossy Manhattan strip club. One night the manager asks her to entertain Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the dissolute, immature son of an extraordinarily wealthy Russian oligarch, because she can speak Russian. Ivan is taken with Ani, paying her $15,000 for a week as his girlfriend that peaks (after a hedonistic stay in Las Vegas) in a marriage proposal. Eloping, Ani returns home believing her life has changed forever. That illusion is shattered when Ani’s godfather Toros (Karren Karagulian), and heavies Garnik (Vache Tovmasyan) and hired muscle Igor (Yura Borisov) turn up at their home (really, of course, Ivan’s parent’s home) under strict instructions that the marriage must come to end. Over a long 24 hours of exasperation, farce and slow realisations our Cinderella story collapses.

Anora is a brilliant film, superbly directed by Sean Baker. You’d expect a film of cold-eyed social realism – and there are elements of this in Anora – but it’s also a hugely loveable, charming, surprisingly hilarious and deeply felt film, perfectly paced as its story develops across a series of events that beautifully lead into each other. A lot of its success comes from Mikey Madison’s extraordinary performance, one of those star-making force-of-nature roles where you start off liking her and end up loving her. Madison is warm but prickly and spikey, vulnerable but determined, worldly but naïve, someone who fights her corner to the end but can’t see any change at forming her own future. Madison embodies all this perfectly, switching from wide-eyed naïve delight at her luck, to spitting, incandescent fury when defending her rights, to an increasingly desperate disillusionment mingled with self-disgust as her dreams collapse around her.

Similar to his previous films, Baker presents the world of sex work with understanding and compassion. There is nothing leering about the lens of Anora, even as it opens with a pan (sound tracked to a disco remix of Take That’s Greatest Day) along a row of dancer. Baker understands the professional drudgery of exotic dancing, the hard work and effort needed to give each client the best experience. Ani is a master of ‘put the client first’ patter, her sing-song Brooklyn accent filled with awe at their dull lives, helping her clients believe they are special. What’s striking about Anora is this a world Ani needs to be ‘saved’ from as such – she’s comfortable with her profession, is good at it and understands it’s limits – but it one where she has subconsciously learned her value as a person is directly related to her body and what she is willing to do with it, complex feelings that return at the film’s conclusion with shattering impact.

What she doesn’t truly understand perhaps is people in the long-term. So swept up and impressed with Ivan’s ostentatious wealth, she misses all the clues to his true character. Anyone who still moves around his apartment by letting his feet slide across the floor, who doesn’t know where the water in the house is kept, plays video games obsessively and hurls himself into sex with the rabbit-like intensity of a horny teenager is about a million miles away from the app developer she first imagines he is. Ivan – very well played by Mark Eydelshteyn – might be sweet, excitable and full of joie de vivre, but he’s also staggeringly immature, extremely selfish and barely thinks about anyone other than himself. Or maybe Ani does notice, but she’s so used to being part of a perverse service industry, she assumes this is normal. Ivan may profess to love Ani, but he is the grasping, self-obsession of a spoilt teenager who no-one has ever said no to.

Baker’s care and regard for his characters is beautifully done – in fact what’s striking about Anora is how characters who at first feel peripheral and marginal are organically grow, emerging over time as crucial figures. In fact, what’s striking about it is that it becomes very much a film about class: about the have and have-nots and how all of us – from put-upon fixer to stripper – have more in common with each other than with the super-rich, to whom everyone else are nothing but staff, there to meet their needs. There is only a small degree of difference between the cleaner Ivan teases while she cleans his floors and Ani who he teases while she allows him to get his end away in bed.

This become clear when the film enters it’s hilarious second act, as Ivan’s godfather Toros (a side-splitting performance by Karren Karagulian as man on the verge of a nervous breakdown) can barely hide his resentment at being Ivan’s dogsbody – while still terrified at how his super-powerful parents could ruin Toros’ life in seconds (and clearly wouldn’t think twice about it). Such is their power, Toros leaves his own child’s christening to clean up Ivan’s mess – and its clear he’s been doing this his whole life (his first appearance is easy to miss, ordering Ivan’s drunken friends to get off the sofa at the debauched New Year’s party he throws). Equally good is Vache Tovmasyan as the increasingly bemused Garvik, medicine addled and slowly losing his composure over one never-ending night.

What these characters have in common – along with Yuro Borisov’s Igor, hired muscle like Ani valued only for his physicality – is that to their employers they are less people and more items of furniture or household utensils. Ivan is no different from his tyrannical parents, who may deplore their son’s selfish wastefulness but have never done anything to stop it. Anora’s tragedy (among the comedy) is watching (and Mikey Madison does this beautiful in a series of micro reactions) Ani release only the thinnest slither of affection makes her any different from Ivan’s cleaner. To Ivan, she’s a status symbol – an attractive woman, great in bed who his hangers-on can be impressed by, a tool for rebellion, marrying her the ideal fuck an immature teenager can imagine for the parents he fears and resents.

Baker’s film unfolds all this with astonishing skill, but also an overwhelming energy and joy – and I have to stress again, that Anora’s middle section is hilariously funny, much more so than many conventional comedies – but also an empathy that eventually lands with a devastating and surprising force. Mikey Madison’s extraordinary performance deeply invests in Ani, understanding how her spiky exterior hides a vulnerable interior she rarely exposes. Every performance is outstanding – kudos also to Yuri Borisov who so subtly draws Igor’s quiet decency under his thuggish exterior, that his growing prominence in the film feels completely natural.

Anora is a film that deconstructs the reality of Cinderella stories. But it’s also a film that feels very much about the world today, where all of us have our lives directed and influenced by the super-wealthy in ways we have become so used to, we don’t even notice it anymore. It’s more obvious with strippers, cleaners, fixers and hired muscle. But if Ivan’s parents sank a business, how many families would be drowned in the waves? Under the heartfelt characters, the superbly paced drama, the farce and the emotional moments, Anora captures a universal truth about our modern age that all of us, like Ani, have tried to close our eyes against.

CODA (2021)

Surprise Oscar-winner is reassuring, unsurprising feel-good fare, charming but crammed with familiar beats

Director: Sian Heder

Cast: Emilia Jones (Ruby Rossi), Marlee Matlin (Jackie Rossi), Troy Kotsur (Frank Rossi), Daniel Durant (Leo Rossi), Eugenio Derbez (Bernardo Villalobos), Ferdia Walsh-Peele (Miles), May Forsyth (Gertie)

Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones) feels like she has been working her whole life. The only hearing person in a deaf family, she’s both translator and interpreter. She works early morning shifts on their fishing ship with her father, the imposing-but-playful Frank (Troy Kotsur), and older brother Leo (Daniel Durant), and butts heads with her former-beauty-queen mother Jackie (Marlee Matlin). After graduating from high school, Ruby assumes this will be the rest of her life: until music teacher Mr Villalobos (Eugenio Derbez) helps her discover her gift for singing and, suddenly, a new future of Berkle Music College is possible. But can she balance the conflicting demands of her family and dreams?

CODA is an eminently likeable, thoroughly unchallenging film. If someone dumped a pad down in front of you and asked you to guess, sight unseen, what its main plot beats would be, pretty much anyone who has ever seen a movie would nail 90% of them. But it’s a well-told, charming small-scale story, with a positive perspective on disability and tugs heartstrings with the assured skill of a master. In the end it doesn’t really matter that nothing in it is remotely surprising, challenging or unexpected, because it delivers exactly the emotional response the viewer is likely to want from it.

It’s a film about communication. The Rossi’s need Ruby’s ability to hear, and her ease with spoken English, to navigate the world around them in the fastest, smoothest way. Ruby, meanwhile, is struggling to communicate her own passions, after a lifetime of adapting herself to her family. Unlike them, she wants more than a life on the docks. This guilty conflict with the family she adores ironically makes her constantly avoid communication both with her family and her music teacher (investing his personal time and money in her) about the pressure slowly crushing her.

These increasingly conflicted desires and choices form the film’s heart. Will Ruby make her own life, or stay with her family for as long as they need her? It’s not helped by the fact that her talent (out of all the talents in the world) is one her family can’t fully share in, meaning they struggle to understand her dilemma. (Her mother outright sees Ruby’s singing as nothing more than teenage rebellion – stating if her parents were blind, Ruby would have embraced painting). On top of which, Ruby’s genuinely loving (but insular) family have been her whole world for as long as she can remember.

The Rossis are vibrant and warm-hearted with a salty sense of humour and a stubborn independent streak. Jackie and Frank are so infatuated with each other (even after decades of marriage) they frequently engage in noisy sex (much to the embarrassment of Ruby, when a visit from a would-be boyfriend is interrupted by some extremely loud, bed pounding coitus from next door). They delight in teasing each other – from Leo and Ruby’s inventive sign-language insults for each other to the hilariously intentionally explicit sign-language safe-sex lecture Frank gives Ruby and her prospective boyfriend. But they are also a tight-team, seeing themselves as having to fight for their place in the world and discussing problems with the low income of the fishing business as a unit.

CODA is keen to establish the Rossis not as victims or people the audience should feel sorry for, but as a warm and loving family of everyday working-class Americans, who just happen to be deaf. It’s part of the film’s challenging of perceptions around disability. Frank continues a fishing business started by his father, which he intends to hand to his son, and (eventually) steps up to become a leader in his community. Jackie is a chippy, opinionated woman who still loves the glitz and glamour of her old beauty pageant days while getting stuck into managing the family’s new business interests. All of them are vibrant and romantic, sexual people, confident in themselves and who they are, far from the passive recipients of charity and help that so many disabled people in film have been.

But CODA dodges more challenging questions around disability. It never really engages with the implication that the Rossi family have got so used to having a full-time, free translator, that they have become disconnected from the world around them. I can’t help but feel there is a germ of a more interesting film here about the family (however inadvertently) allowing themselves to be cut off from others. They have let their ability to lip-read slip, filter all their communication with anyone outside the family through Ruby, and have grown so used to her manning the radio for their fishing business that they can’t run the boat effectively without her (leading to inevitable coastguard trouble).

It’s also had a knock-on effect in the fishing community: the other fishermen have clearly never had to really build a relationship with the Rossi’s (after decades, no one on the docks has learned even the most rudimentary sign language or any communication techniques like moving lips clearly when speaking). Jackie is outright resentful of the hearing wives of the other fishermen and neither she nor Frank can imagine actually running a business without Ruby’s to handle literally all the verbal communication involved. The closest the film comes to addressing this is Leo angrily telling Ruby the family aren’t helpless – they managed before she was born and they will if she leaves. But the film doesn’t want to explore the implication that the Rossis allowed themselves to slip into a comfort zone that ultimately proves isolating and even damaging for them.

CODA does get some good material from their struggle to engage with music (even if this is an uncomfortable cliché for some in the deaf community). There are well-staged moments, such as the Rossis attending Ruby’s graduation concert, where we “hear” what they hear (nothing) and need to judge the performance, like they do, from the reactions of those around them. A scene where Frank finally appreciates part of his daughter’s skill by feeling the vibrations of her singing is done with real emotional force. However, it cheats by feeding this into an off-stage conversion where the family switch (overnight) from hesitant to “all-in” for a classic last-minute-dash to get Ruby to her audition.

That’s representative of CODA shifting away from more complex, challenging themes and issues for a heart-warmingly positive tale, familiar from dozens of movies past. Saying that, Heder does a good job pulling together the familiar elements, and Troy Kotsur (Oscar winning) and Marlee Matlin both give emotionally rich performances as the parents. Ruby is excellently played by Emilia Jones – who spent months learning sign language in order to perform the part and improvise with the other actors. But CODA feels like a gentle, consensus film full of pleasant moments and reassuring insights that love will overcome, which perhaps explains why it won an Oscar in a year of more divisive films. There is nothing in it that could possibly rile you up or shake your faith in the decency of ordinary people. CODA is a film designed to wrap around you like a comfort blanket.

Mississippi Burning (1988)

Earnest drama about racism, whose narrative perhaps focuses on less important issues and people

Director: Alan Parker

Cast: Gene Hackman (Agent Rupert Anderson), Willem Dafoe (Special Agent Alan Ward), Frances McDormand (Mrs Pell), Brad Dourif (Deputy Sheriff Clinton Pell), R. Lee Ermey (Mayor Tilman), Gailard Sartain (Sheriff Ray Stuckey), Stephen Tobolowsky (Clayton Townley), Michael Rooker (Frank Bailey), Pruitt Taylor Vince (Lester Cowans), Kevin Dunn (Agent Bird), Badja Djola (Agent Monk)

In June 1964 three civil rights workers – two white New Yorkers Andrew Goorman and Michael Schwerner and a black Mississippian James Chaney – were arrested, released and then murdered by Neshoba County law officials working alongside KKK white supremacists. An FBI investigation (codenamed Mississippi Burning) revealed the crime, arrested the criminals and managed to convict several (but not all) of them on the federal charge of violating civil rights (convinced the state charge of murder would lead to acquittal from racist juries). Mississippi Burning fictionalises this true-life atrocity into a hard-hitting thriller, mixed with the conventions of crime drama.

It’s directed by Alan Parker in the style of Midnight Express, pulling no punches in chucking the vileness of the KKK up on screen. During the course of Mississippi Burning we see Black people chased, beaten, flung out of moving cars onto the street, lynched and a praying child kicked in the face by a KKK thug. Rightly, the murderers are a vile parade of bullies, cowards and knuckle-dragging monsters portrayed by a group of actors (Dourif, Rooker, Sartain and Vince among them) used to going all-in on portraits of the scum of humanity. It’s a tightly directed, intense film – with a repetitively pounding score by Terry Jones – with Oscar-winning photography by Peter Biziou capturing the flame-lit night-time atrocities these repulsive people execute on innocents.

Mississippi Burning is undoubtedly well-made, with a very earnest message behind it. It’s impossible to fault its rightful disgust at the appalling injustice and racism, but you can’t help but feel it’s focusing its heroic lens on the wrong part of the story. It drew fire at the time for its fictionalisation of almost every element – wisely so in its portrayal of the initial crime, where their names and exact nature of their murder are altered – and the way this pushed the FBI (an organisation that had in many cases actively worked against civil rights) into a traditional heroic role, while reducing the Black people to passive recipients of beatings or kind words from whites. It’s hard not to feel today that, for all the skill of the film, the impact of those decisions have magnified the film’s flaws over time.

At heart, Mississippi Burning uses the conventions of a mis-matched buddy-cop investigative drama to add narrative drive to a social issues film. The two FBI agents are played so well by Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe, you barely notice both are stock roles straight out of central casting. Hackman gives such energy and life (with a lovely touch of shame that his own past conduct, as a Southern sheriff was presumably only a degree better than the people he’s investigating) to his role as no-nonsense, veteran maverick who understands the streets, that he transforms this cliché into a real person. Similarly, Dafoe plays the by-the-book, stuffy superior who has too learn rules-bending sometimes break the case, with such commitment you forget how role familiar it is.

The personal narrative of the film revolves around whether these chalk-and-cheese investigators will overcome their initial iciness – they address each other formally throughout the film and butt-heads frequently on the conduct of the investigation – to become a team which feels odd for a film where the other stakes (violent institutional racism) are so large. In many ways an alternative cliché – two disconnected investigators investing more in a case based on the injustice they see and the witnesses they talk to – might well have served it better and also reflected contemporary complaints that the FBI was more interested in the letter than the spirit of the law. Mississippi Burning does, at times, address this by having characters explicitly ask if the FBI would even lift a finger if two of the victims weren’t white. But seeing as the film generally considers raising the question the same as engaging with it, it doesn’t go anywhere.

The film requires the agents to undertake mis-steps in order to educate the audience (would Dafoe’s character really be as ignorant about the nuances of segregation as he frequently is here?) and blunder about for much of the early acts, most notably Dafoe’s public conversation with a Black man in a diner, that inevitably leads to the poor man kidnapped and beaten by the KKK. But on the whole, the FBI are presented as noble straight-shooters, aghast at the state of affairs in the South, rather than a body run by the morally-ambiguous J Edgar Hoover.

It also means Mississippi Burning relegates its Black characters to passengers and passive victims, reliant on white people for protection and vindication. While it would be false to claim the system in the South didn’t leave Black people largely powerless, the film’s failure to introduce a single memorable character giving voice to the Black perspective of a series of crimes that happened to them feels more and more uncomfortable as the film ages (particularly as the film’s hopeful ending very much places racism as a problem in the past, not a dilemma America continues to face).

The film’s real conscience (and the victim given most development) is instead Frances McDormand as the wife of Dourif’s vile racist sheriff. Parker’s film subtly indicating her lack of racism early (she consoling touches the arm of a Black man), and McDormand (who is excellent) brings real force to her pained, frightened longing to do the right thing. She contrasts neatly with the committed vile cowardice of Dourif, Rooker’s swaggering bullying and Stephen Tobolowsky’s Hiterlian racism as a KKK Grand Wizard. Parker successfully makes these guys so repulsive, that when Hackman’s Anderson gets free reign to intimidate, rough-up and bully them back it carries real satisfaction. But the film making the most developed victim of the film’s KKK a white, gentile feels more like filmmaker concerns that otherwise the bulk of the likely audience may otherwise have trouble relating to the bulk of the victims.

Mississippi Burning tries to be hopeful. This extends to some slightly forced moralising – the suicide of one character is attributed to guilt at the crime, rather than the more likely guilt at having ‘betrayed’ his fellow KKK – and a general sense that Mississippi is on the road to peace, feels a bit of a stretch for a region that had decades of continued unrest ahead. Saying that, in its sometimes clumsy way, you can’t doubt its power and its righteous disgust at racism. It’s well directed and has some excellent performances – Hackman and McDormand were both Oscar nominated – but it feels like a film that only focuses on part of an overall picture and not always the right part.

Scenes From a Marriage (1974)

Bergman’s compelling, emotionally charged film is an intense, impressive and surprising tale

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Cast: Liv Ullman (Marianne), Erland Josephson (Johan), Bibi Andersson (Katarina), Jan Malmsjö (Peter), Gunnel Lindblom (Eva), Barbro Hiort af Ornäs (Mrs Jacobi), Anita Wall (Journalist)

A loving couple sit with an interviewer to discuss how happy their relationship is. Ten years later, years after their divorce, they meet in their old weekend cottage for an assignation away from their new partners. Along the way, they’ll lie, fight, cheat but also show time-and-again few people know them better than they do each other. Based on his own marriages and relationships (not least his relationship with Liv Ullman), Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage is a fascinatingly intimate and intense portrait of the contradictory impulses we feel towards the people we know best: how we can, in the same moment, love them, hate them, want to be a million miles away from them and also yearn to take them in our arms and tell them everything.

Skilfully cut down from a six-part TV series – the episode titles become ‘chapter headings’, each signifying a time shift – it becomes a series of intense, almost real-time, conversations between middle-brow professor Johan (Erland Josephson) and successful lawyer Marianne (Liv Ullman). From their ten-year anniversary, their happy-but-functional relationship is shattered when Johan leaves for the (unseen) Paula, heading into divorce, Marianne’s growth in sexual confidence, her little acts of revenge over Johan and their later affair. At all times they prove capable of ripping emotional wounds into each other, but also remaining strangely dependent on love and affection from each other.

It would be easy to say that Scenes of a Marriage is a theatrical piece – it came, originally, from a play Bergman was working on and well over two thirds of its running time features Josephson and Ullman alone on screen. But if the close-up is the language of cinema, Scenes from a Marriage may be the most cinematic film every made. Shot in a cooly observational style by Sven Nykvist, vast swathes of Scenes from a Marriage plays out in searing close-up, the camera studying every inch of the emotional angst its two characters are putting themselves through. Bergman knows exactly how to build the punishing tension in these scenes, frequently climaxing in visceral outbursts.

It is a film about what we say and what we chose not to say and what we decide to hear. The conversation between the couples is framed by their careful considerations: when to hold fire and when to let rip; when to listen and when to choose not to hear. And it’s clear that, when we are first introduced to them, they have mastered the art of not saying anything at all. Smilingly parroting cliches to their interviewer, they later smugly compare themselves to their feuding friends Karatina and Peter (excellent cameos from a searing Bibi Andersson and a provocative Jan Malmsjö). But their conversation never touches on deeper issues (Bergman’s called this chapter ‘The Art of Sweeping Things Under the Carpet’) and their sex life has dwindled to timetabled functionality.

It’s clear they are aware of this growing distance themselves. Johan shares his poetry with a colleague (an expertly reserved cameo from Gunnel Lindblom), complaining Marianne considers it little better than spiritual masturbation and yearns for an expressive freedom he feels is impossible in his marriage. Marianne meanwhile speaks to a client, Mrs Jacobi (a tragic Barbro Hiort af Ornäs), whose story of a lifetime trapped in a loveless marriage with children she never really wanted clearly strikes Marianne as a chilling vision of her own future.

That doesn’t stop Marianne responding with shocked subservience that tips into desperate pleading when Johan announces he wants to leave her. Bergman stages this scene beautifully, with the ridiculous logic people sink into in tragic break-ups. Johan eats a snack meal prepared by Marianne, guiltily confessing his affair, but there is something very real about Marianne’s stunned reaction which sees her planning his packing (because he’s useless at it) and continue their bedtime preparation before she starts pleading him to stay. Just there is something very real in Johan’s reaction: having steeled himself for a fight, her subservience enrages him until he is cruelly tearing verbal lumps out of her. This is the sort of searing emotional up-and-down that rings true, one allowing shock to humiliate them the other transforming shame into defensive, accusatory blame.

But Scenes from a Marriage is a film that utterly understands how much we change under circumstances. Separation is not good for Johan: his new lover doesn’t interest him, his career stalls and he tips into self-pity. Marianne, once the shock and fear of separation passes, discovers she likes her freedom. Her wardrobe shifts to more form-fitting and revealing clothes, she embraces the opportunities of singledom and repays Johan’s desertion with a seduction of him she deliberately doesn’t follow-through on. They now talk more honestly than ever before – and it’s a blistering, verbally and physically violent exchange rammed full of resentment and petty cruelty.

To do this stuff you need actors at the top of their game and who completely trust each other. Bergman certainly has this with his two stars. Josephson’s self-contented smugness moves through arrogant selfishness to desperate vulnerability, his expressive face sometimes puppy-doggish, sometimes drowning in bear-like fury. Ullman is, of course, exceptional. Her masterful ability to react, to let thoughts and emotions play fleetingly across her face was made for Bergman’s close-up film-making and she takes Marianne on a fascinating journey, from near-submissive home-maker to vibrantly confident women of the world while never letting the vulnerability and doubt be too far from her eyes. It’s an extraordinary performance, searing and tender, as raw as knife-edge.

These two play absorbingly off each other, their conversations gripping minefields of repressed then hugely expressed emotions. Their collaboration, guided by Bergman’s close (but not intrusive) camerawork is extraordinary. Fashioned from Bergman’s experiences of relationships, Scenes from a Marriage is, however, strangely hopeful. One of its key themes is that, even when they hate each other, this couple know and trust each other more than anyone else. In times of crisis and pain they always turn to each for a consolatory word or comfort.

There is something strangely warm about their relationship, despite its turmoil, and the film is refreshing in saying friendship and love doesn’t have to end with divorce, but can transform itself into something else, perhaps even something better. Perhaps it’s that strange note of hope that makes Scenes of a Marriage so influential to a generation of filmmakers. It refuses the simple moral standpoints of judgement and suggests the decision to no longer be together (or even faithful to each other) need not be the end all, but instead a bump in a longer journey: that a relationship (and even a love) doesn’t end when a marriage does.

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969)

Savage satire on the cruelty of entertainment, heavy-handed at times but also ahead of them

Director: Sydney Pollack

Cast: Jane Fonda (Gloria Beatty), Michael Sarrazin (Robert Syverton), Susannah York (Alice LeBlanc), Gig Young (Rocky Gravo), Red Buttons (Harry Kline), Bonnie Bedelia (Ruby Bates), Michael Conrad (Rollo), Bruce Dern (James Bates), Al Lewis (“Turkey”), Robert Fields (Joel Girard), Severn Darden (Cecil), Allyn Ann McLiere (Shirl), Madge Kennedy (Mrs Laydon)

Wheeling out the desperate for entertainment was a mainstay of TV for much of the early noughties with the Simon Cowell factory repackaging human lives for entertainment. But it’s hardly a new phenomenon. During the Depression in 30s America, the country was gripped by a new craze: dance marathons. In exchange for prize money and (perhaps!) a shot at stardom, regular people came off the streets to dance (or at least move around the dance floor) for as long as possible (with short breaks every hour). These shows went on and on, hour after hour, day after day for months at a time, with the audience paying to pop in and gawp.

It doesn’t take much to see how class comes into this. The competitors are the unemployed and out of luck, attracted as much by regular food and a roof over their head. The audience are rich and comfortable, tossing sponsorship bones towards the manufactured ‘stories’ that take their fancy. The event is controlled by a manipulative, alcoholic MC (Gig Young) spinning stories and drama for the crowd. As days turn to weeks the contestants become ever more haggard, drained and physically and emotionally shattered: cynical Gloria (Jane Fonda), homeless Robert (Michael Sarrazin), aspiring actors fragile Alice (Susannah York) and distant Joel (Robert Fields), retired sailor Harry (Red Buttons) and bankrupt farmers James (Bruce Dern) and his heavily pregnant wife Ruby (Bonnie Bedelia).

Pollack’s viciously nihilistic satire throws all these into a hellish never-ending treadmill of physical movement and psychological torture that leaves each character washed out, drained, doused in sweat with sunken, sleepless eyes. You can clearly see the links from They Shoot Horses to Rollerball all the way to The Hunger Games. It’s a grim look into part of the human psyche that, ever since the Colosseum, takes pleasure out of watching the suffering of others for entertainment. The crowded audience – eating popcorn and cheering on their favourites – are as indifferent to the sufferings of the contestants as the organisers with their quack medical teams.

Designed to gain the maximum sense of claustrophobia – once we enter the hall for the dance competition, we never see the outside again for virtually the whole film – the film constantly grinds us down with the exhausting relentlessness of the show. Pollack intercuts this with brief shots of Robert being questioned by the police – moments we eventually realise are flashforwards, making it clear tragedy is our eventual destination. A siren that sounds like nothing less than an air raid warning is repeatedly heard, warning competitors any brief respite they have is coming to a close. The actors become increasingly shuffling, wild-eyed and semi-incoherent in their speech and actions, grimly embodying characters acting on little sleep, in situations of constant strain.

But then that’s entertainment! Part of the thrill for the crowd – whipped up by Gig Young’s showman, a man who oscillates between heartless indifference and flashes of sympathy for his stars (hostages?) – is watching them push on through never-ending pressure. It’s clear to us as well – from their desperate, fixed determination to complete any physical challenge set and the relish with which they consume any food given – that the contestants will tolerate anything just to have, for a few weeks, a taste of something they couldn’t hope to get living on the streets.

Their desperation doesn’t even enter into the moral calculations of those running the show. In fact it’s something that makes them easier to manipulate. Part of the MC’s calculations is creating a relatable story of suffering for the chosen few ‘leads’ any one of which can lead to a triumphant feel-good ending. Potential love-matches are pushed together, sentimental favourites are promoted. Alice’s fine clothing is quietly destroyed by the team running the show because it doesn’t fit a narrative of penniless dreamers. The participants are crafted into “characters”: the ageing Harry as the “Old Man of the Sea”, Gloria and Robert – thrown-together, last-minute partners –as star-cross’d lovers (despite their extremely tense personal relationship).

It all gets too much for the contestants. Serious medical conditions are not unusual – the frequent refrains from the (so-called) medical staff that “we’ve got a dead one” before exhausted, unresponsive contestants are slapped or thrown into ice baths to revive them speaks volumes. When a contestant does indeed die, the event is quietly hushed up for the audience with another feel-good fantasy of noble retirement. Those desperate for a shot at stardom – something they have no hope of getting from a show designed to turn them into drained-out zombies for the entertainment of the masses – are reduced to quivering messes. None more so than Alice – played with a heart-rendering fragility by Susannah York channelling Streetcar Vivien Leigh – who begins the film confidently performing a Shaw monologue and it ends it barely connected to reality.

York’s fine performance is one of several in the film. Young won an Oscar as a MC Rocky, the consummate showman who sometimes surprises us with flashes of humanity (which he clearly drowns with the bottle) before his professional ruthlessness kicks in. Red Buttons is excellent as the rogueish Harry who realises he’s out of depth far-too-late, Bedelia and Dern very good as an experienced couple earning a desperate living from marathons. Particularly fine is Jane Fonda who grounds the film with a gut-punch of a performance of barely concealed rage, deep-rooted self-loathing and brutal, angry cynicism as a woman who understands exactly the show she is in but has no choice but to play along, while hating herself for doing it.

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They feel in many ways ahead of its time and for all time – after all, entertainment like this hasn’t died out. Pollack’s film is harshly lit, and his direction is very strong, even if the film does sometimes make its points with a little too much repetitive force. It’s also a film – with its metaphor of suffering horses standing in for suffering people –a fraction too pleased with its own arty contrivance (a slow-mo and sepia tinged opening lays on its symbolism a little too thick, while its flash-forwards yearn a little too much for a French New Wave atmosphere). Michael Sarrazin isn’t quite able to bring depth to the – admittedly deliberately blank Robert – making him an opaque POV character, a role he effectively surrenders on viewing to Fonda.

But despite its flaws, They Shoot Horses Don’t They is a remarkably hard and incredibly bleak film on human nature, which doesn’t let up at all as it barrels to its almost uniquely grim and nihilistic ending. It offers nothing in the way of hope and paints a world gruesomely corrupted and completely indifferent to the thoughts and feelings to the most vulnerable in it. It is ripe for rediscovery.

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.