68th London Film Festival (9/10/24–20/10/24)

The 68th BFI London Film Festival closed on Sunday 20th October with the European Premiere of Morgan Neville’s Piece by Piece (pictured above), a vibrant journey through the life of cultural icon Pharrell Williams, all told through the lens of LEGO animation. In addition to Neville and Williams, the event was attended by an exciting array of special guests from the worlds of music, fashion and sport. The Closing Night Gala took place at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, which returned as the festival’s Headline Gala and Special Presentation venue for a fourth time since its inaugural year in 2021.

Placing audiences at the heart of the festival, the winners of this year’s LFF Audience Awards, as chosen by members of the public, were announced yesterday. Darren Thornton’s funny and heartwarming comedy drama Four Mothers, about one Irish son juggling four very different mothers, took the Audience Award for Best Feature; Holloway, which follows six women who were formerly incarcerated at what was once the largest women’s prison in Europe, was the winner of the Audience Award for Best Documentary; and Two Minutes won the Audience Award for Best Short Film.

The 68th edition welcomed more than 815 international and UK filmmakers, immersive art and extended reality artists and series creatives to present their work at venues across the capital. The festival kicked off with a press conference for the world premiere of Opening Night Film Blitz led by Steve McQueen. The festival’s highly anticipated series of Screen Talks included acclaimed filmmakers Andrea Arnold, Sean Baker, Mike Leigh, Denis Villeneuve, remarkable acting talents Lupita Nyong’o and Zoe Saldaña (star of Jacques Audiard's Emilia Pérez, pictured below), as well as the versatile Daniel Kaluuya.

The festival featured an exciting range of 252 titles (comprising features, shorts, series and immersive works) hailing from 79 countries, and featured 63 languages. All features and series screened to UK audiences for the first time, including 38 World Premieres, 12 International Premieres (6 features, 4 shorts, 2 immersive) and 21 European Premieres (17 features, 1 series, 3 shorts). Across the programme, including events for industry delegates and the immensely popular LFF for Free programme, the festival had 230,342 attendances, the highest in-person attendance in the last ten years.

Source/images: BFI

BFI Flare: The Five Devils (Léa Mysius, 2022)

Five years and numerous screenplays on from her directorial feature debut Ava, Léa Mysius once again steps behind the camera for The Five Devils, which screens today and tomorrow at BFI Flare.  As a screenwriter, Mysius has collaborated with the likes of Arnaud Desplechin, Claire Denis, Jacques Audiard and André Téchiné, and that The Five Devils can hold its own against anything else in Mysius' filmography says much about its tremendous quality.  Of the films Mysius has written for and with others, Desplechin's somewhat underrated Ismael's Ghosts—a quite wonderful distillation of its director's main themes—is the one that has most in common with The Five Devils; both films are narratively complex works that deal with past trauma in a sophisticated, nuanced way.  Perhaps what is most striking about The Five Devils is that at no point does it feel like the work of a director who has made just one previous feature.   

Of course, it is quite reasonable to conclude that Mysius' projects with Denis, Audiard et al. have allowed her to develop as a filmmaker in a way that goes far beyond the experience of writing and directing Ava.  In Ava, Mysius drew a brave, César-nominated turn from the excellent Laure Calamy, and The Five Devils features an equally impressive lead performance, with Blue Is the Warmest Colour's Adèle Exarchopoulos stepping up as put-upon swimming instructor Joanne.  Joanne's young daughter Vicky (Sally Dramé)—who is relentlessly bullied by her schoolmates on account of her hairstyle—possesses an otherworldly ability to both detect and recreate scents.  Vicky's dad, taciturn fireman Jimmy (Moustapha Mbengue), is a somewhat distant husband to Joanne, and the strain on the couple's marriage increases with the arrival of Jimmy's sister Julia (Swala Emati), who lodges with the family upon her release from prison.  

With the sole exception of Jimmy, no one is pleased to see Julia back in town.  Vicky—who immediately noticed the scent of alcohol on her aunt—sets about digging into Julia's murky past, and to do this she uses her finely tuned sense of smell to travel back in time.  From this point on, the narrative seesaws between past and present, often with no clear signpost as to which is which; Vicky's appearance is identical in both timelines, while her parents and Julia look much the same then as now.  The main temporal reference point takes the form of Joanne's colleague Nadine (Daphné Patakia) who, in the present day, bears severe facial scars.  As the film progresses and Vicky continues her forays into the past, the backstories of Joanne, Nadine, Jimmy and Julia are filled in; it isn't a spoiler to say that there aren't many uplifting moments to be had as Vicky navigates this minefield of memories—although a karaoke rendition of Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" provides a few minutes of near-levity.

The Five Devils' brand of magical realism strongly recalls that of Céline Sciamma's Petite Maman, but whereas that film saw time travel bringing comfort to its young protagonist, The Five Devils uses memories merely to illuminate the present.  Despite the warmth of its tactile 35mm cinematography, Mysius' film is, at its core, as icy as the lake that Joanne regularly uses for early morning dips (despite presumably having free, unlimited use of a heated indoor pool—read into that what you will).  Exarchopoulos and Dramé give superb performances as the mother and daughter caught in the maelstrom of the past, while Belgian actress Patakia makes the most of her limited screen time to impress as Nadine, who is arguably the most intriguing character in a film that is by no means short on mystery.  Criminally overlooked at last month's Césars, where its solitary nomination (for Guillaume Marien's fine visual effects) predictably came to nothing, The Five Devils is a terrific, mature and highly intelligent work, one that demands repeated viewing. 

Darren Arnold

Images: Le Pacte

The Sisters Brothers (Jacques Audiard, 2018)

It can often be rather worrying when an established director makes a film in a foreign language for the first time, but the stakes seem especially high when the filmmaker in question is arguably the greatest director working today.  It's fair to say that Jacques Audiard's stunning run from Read My Lips through Dheepan has cemented his place as one of the true greats - a director who rarely seems to put a foot out of place.  Audiard had much to risk by stepping out of his comfort zone to make a film in English; his prior work was always highly nuanced, and filmmakers working in another tongue can often pass over the subtleties of that language.  Happily - and possibly surprisingly - Audiard comes up trumps with The Sisters Brothers, a terrific western that can proudly sit alongside his other works such as Rust and Bone and A Prophet.  The film's quality is evident from the off, and any doubts we may have had are quickly extinguished.

Set in the unforgiving Oregon of the 1850s, the film follows hitmen brothers Charlie and Eli (Joaquin Phoenix, John C. Reilly) as they carry out the bidding of a wealthy Commodore (Rutger Hauer).  As gunfighters, the brothers prove to be as good as anyone around, and even when the pair are outnumbered, they're never outgunned.  Eli is the more sensitive of the two, while Charlie regularly drowns his own demons in alcohol, which often leaves him in no condition to ride - although it seems that little can blunt his fighting skills.  The Commodore sends the two to hunt down Warm (Riz Ahmed), a timid and sickly-looking gent on his way to California with the Gold Rush.  Taking no chances, the Commodore has also hired Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal), a private detective who locates and befriends Warm; Morris grows uneasy at the thought of the grisly end which awaits Warm when the Sisters catch up him, and he and the would-be prospector set out for California together.  With this complication in place, the Sisters find themselves on the trail of both Warm and Morris.

When the two parties eventually come face to face, Audiard brilliantly wrong-foots us and the story takes an unexpected turn.  To detail it here would be to say a little too much, but suffice to say that Warm has been working on a formula for locating gold, and this becomes central to the fates of all four men.  This development comes as part of a whole which feels at once fresh and familiar; Audiard and his trusted co-writer Thomas Bidegain, not for the first time, have created a world in which there's a perfect balance of light and shade.  It is fair to say that the way you view each of the four main characters will change - probably more than once - over the course of the film's running time.  All of this is captured magnificently by the great Belgian cinematographer Benoit Debîe, who recently lensed Gaspar Noé's Climax; Debie makes a major contribution when it comes to putting us in the thick of lawless, dusty 19th century America (although the film was actually shot in Spain).  There are few cinematographers whose work is worth viewing regardless of the director they're teamed with, but Debie's sterling efforts are always worth seeking out; all the better when he links up with the likes of Noé and Audiard.

The Sisters Brothers is adapted from a novel by Canadian author Patrick deWitt, who wrote the screenplay for Terri, which coincidentally also starred John C. Reilly - who's on double duty for The Sisters Brothers, with the actor also taking on the role of producer (alongside Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, no less).  You can see the appeal of the story to Audiard: criminals feature prominently in all of his films (bar A Self-Made Hero), and the same concerns are prevalent here - even if the milieu marks new territory for the director.  A recurrent theme in Audiard's work - of the man who tries to turn away from a life of crime - is also present in The Sisters Brothers.  So, the essence of the film actually isn't so different from what we have come to expect from Jacques Audiard, even if the packaging is unfamiliar.  What is noticeably different this time around is that Audiard pushes more characters to the forefront; usually, his films focus almost exclusively on one or two people, but here he manages to spread the load among the four main characters and, remarkably, they are all equally fascinating.  As such, it's something of an ensemble piece, one which features a quartet of actors on top form.  Whether Audiard ventures into English-language filmmaking again remains to be seen, but what isn't in any doubt is that The Sisters Brothers is a must-see film of tremendous quality.

Darren Arnold

Images: UniFrance

Racer and the Jailbird (Michaël R. Roskam, 2017)

Once you get past its terrible English title, Racer and the Jailbird is a passable crime drama which manages to engage the viewer even as it becomes increasingly ludicrous.  It's the third feature from Michaël R. Roskam, who previously directed two very solid works in the form of Rundskop and The Drop.  The star of those two movies, Matthias Schoenaerts, here reteams with Roskam, and for this film he's joined by Adèle Exarchopoulos, a highly capable young actress best known for Blue is the Warmest Colour.  It's largely thanks to Exarchopoulos' performance that Roskam's film always remains on the right side of watchable.

Schoenaerts' Gigi is part of a Brussels-based gang of armed robbers.  Exarchopoulos' Bibi is a rich kid who also happens to be a very competent racing driver.  The two meet, and sparks fly, although the film neatly sidesteps the obvious (which would be: Bibi becomes the gang's getaway driver) and takes a very different route, as Gigi does all he can to conceal his life of crime from the woman he's besotted with.  For quite some time, the film posits the idea that this arrangement may just work, but we all know that the roof will fall in on Gigi sooner or later; when it does, we're curious to see which way both the film and Bibi will go.

Overstuffed and somewhat undercooked, Racer and the Jailbird works quite well as slickly-made trash, but as the lengthy running time progresses and the ridiculousness piles up, it's a hard film to take seriously.  Eventually, there's a development involving Bibi which marks the point where the film properly jumps the shark, and from then on it's difficult to believe that the director is being sincere.  The remainder of the film is drowning in bathos, and it's hard to know quite what Roskam expects us to make of this stew.  What started off as a taut semi-polar really starts to sag, although an impressive extended shot - presumably a nod to Claude Lelouch - makes for a nice touch at the very end.

While the film is by no means terrible, it's all just a bit too silly, and it's disappointing that Roskam has not kicked on from the The Drop; in his short filmography, this latest effort is easily his weakest movie.  Exarchopoulos, as already mentioned, is great, and Schoenaerts typically puts it all in (in every film he's starred in for Roskam, he's never acted in the same language more than once - that's versatility for you).   The problem with the film lies not with the performances or the mise-en-scène, but in the screenplay - Thomas Bidegain is credited as co-writer, and the film's hardened-crim-forges-relationship-with-innocent setup smacks a little too much of his Rust and Bone (which also starred Schoenaerts, so comparisons come leaping out from the screen).  Bidegain is a very fine writer whose collaborations with Jacques Audiard have produced some of the best cinema of the past decade, but here we can only assume he's 'phoning it in and/or doing it for an easy payday.

Racer and the Jailbird is a good-looking slice of pulp, albeit one which would work much better as an 85 minute experience as opposed to the horribly bloated 130 minutes we're faced with.  While this rote thriller makes for an undemanding evening's entertainment, everyone is right to expect a lot more from Roskam at this stage of his career.  The film has been submitted as Belgium's entry for the Oscars, but it's hard to believe that this is the very best the country has to offer.  It screens at the London Film Festival on  the 4th, 5th and 7th of October (the earliest of those dates coinciding with its release in Belgian cinemas).  It will be released in the Netherlands on the 2nd of November.

Darren Arnold

Images: image.net