Apparently it takes the end of the world to see a female-directed film released, and here we have another one. I seem to recall some quibbles about the director’s Suffragette, but this is a remarkable piece of work in the Ken Loach tradition.
23 Walks (Paul Morrison, 2019)
In this romantic comedy for pensioners, you have the collision of two film styles.
Hope Gap (William Nicholson, 2019)
Curiously, for a film set in Seaford in East Sussex, parts of this were filmed in Yorkshire. And this is just a couple of weeks after what may well be the same East Sussex cliffs stood in for East Kent. I look forward to Folkstone being the location for a remake of Wuthering Heights. Continue reading →
Babyteeth (Shannon Murphy, 2019)
Based on a stage play by Rita Kalnejais, this is a black comedy and a coming of age story and a Fault in Our Stars cousin. It is by turns hilarious and scary and moving, although it skips over something at its heart. Continue reading →
The Truth (La verité, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2019)
Tucked away in the credits is the detail that the film that veteran actor, Fabienne Dangeville (Catherine Deneuve), is making with starlet Manon Lenoir (Manon Clavel), Memories of my Mother, is an adaptation of a short story by Ken Liu, in which a space-travelling mother visits her daughter every seven years.
I’d quite like to see that film, which is not to dis this one.
Dangeville’s son-in-law, Hank, a struggling American actor who may have a drink issue, is played by Ethan Hawke, possibly best known for the Before … movies, made every seven years with Julie Delpy.
Well, actually, every nine years, but Juliette Binoche as his wife and Dangeville’s daughter, Lumir, is not that far from the Delpy role. Hawke, to be honest, does little, but be awkward about how much French he speaks or understands.
The two of them are visiting their mother on the occasion of the publication of her autobiography, called, natch, The Truth, although it is plainly nothing but. Noses have been put out of joint, pasts libelled, and there is a dark secret from decades ago involving a rival actress.
Deneuve is, as you’d expect, radiant, as she’s been since The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. You never quite know when her character is helpless or actually just artful.
The Whistlers (La Gomera, Corneliu Porumboiu, 2019)
I suppose I thought this was made under the spell of Tarantino, but possibly more Kubrick’s The Killing, but it is a shuffled narrative about a crime. It is beautifully choreographed to music — notably Iggy Pop’s The Passenger — and has some random moments of violence (an American in the wrong place at the wrong time is particularly amusing, a minor supporting character less so).
Make Up (Claire Oakley, 2019)
So, there may be a spoiler here — it’s there, frankly, in the categories and tags (don’t look!) but it may well be there in other reviews. Stop, if you care. Maybe no one is reading, anyway.
Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Céline Sciamma, 2019)
Some point after 1725, the artist Marianne (Noémie Merlant) is commissioned by a Milan-born countess (Valeria Golino) to paint the portrait of her daughter Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), whom she intends to marry off to a Milanese nobleman after the death of her elder daughter. Héloïse, formerly a novice at a nunnery, has other ideas and has already worn out a (male) painter. Marianne must pretend to be a companion, and paint in secret. Continue reading →
The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers, 2019)
A curious psychological horror, which begins in the Empire Marketing Board zone of Drifters and goes via Knife in the Water to A Field in England, with the Total Bollocks Overdrive cranked up to twelve and then cranked up further.
Parasite (Bong Joon-ho, 2019)
This was on my list to see since I first caught the trailer – a narrative of a young working class student becoming a tutor to an upper middle class girl which was clearly going to take a right turn into horror territory. I caught up with it after the Oscar win (a win that apparently means a broken system has been fixed) and it was surprisingly or unsurprisingly full.
Subject to Change 