The Iranian revolution of 1979 led to the overthrow of the Shah's monarchy and the return from exile of Ruhollah Khomeini. The insurrection marked a significant watershed for Iran, one which saw the start of both the Islamic Republic and Khomeini's decade-long stint as premier. As the 1980s dawned, Iran's efforts to install a new political system based on Islamic principles caused fractious relations with other countries, particularly the US, with the Iran hostage crisis—a standoff that actually began before the official commencement of Khomeini's tenure—resulting in real diplomatic strain between the two nations.
The shadow of the revolution palpably hangs over essay film My Stolen Planet, which tracks the life of its Iranian maker, Farahnaz Sharifi, who was born in 1979. The accident of Sharifi's birth year is largely what drives My Stolen Planet, as she recounts how her experience of pre-revolution Iran is limited to secondhand stories and distressed film reels (more on those later). Through candid footage, we witness the duality of daily life in Tehran, where private freedom is juxtaposed with public oppression. Part diary, part political commentary, My Stolen Planet is very much about memory, both individual and collective.
Sharifi's tale is one of curiosity and discovery as she navigates the intricacies of her identity in a society where questions are, in the main, neither welcomed nor valued. She obsessively collects strangers' 8mm home movies—featuring birthday parties and so on—in the process assembling a collage of yesteryear that conveys an image of a quite different Iran. Poignant excerpts from these films form the emotional core of My Stolen Planet, and the end credits include an appeal to help identify those featured; Sharifi laments how so many treasured recordings ended up discarded by owners fearful of the post-revolution government.
Yet it is these old films that allow the director to form a connection to the past, and she uses them to fill in the blanks of her own life, finding a commonality between herself and these ghosts. My Stolen Planet may be steeped in a Resnaisian obsession with the Before Times, but it still has room for more recent events—such as Sharifi's mother's fight against Alzheimer's disease, and the civil unrest that followed the 2022 killing of Mahsa Amini, both of which, in very different ways, underline the great importance of remembering. Amini's death inspired the title track of Waddinxveen band Within Temptation's Bleed Out, a song which, like Sharifi's film, is a quite unique meditation on identity, freedom and memory.
Mark Jenkin's new film Rose of Nevada is a haunting and atmospheric time-loop drama set in a struggling Cornish fishing village. The narrative centres on the eponymous boat, lost with all hands 30 years prior, which mysteriously reappears, offering two young unemployed men—rootless drifter Liam (Callum Turner) and family man Nick (George MacKay)—the opportunity to crew the vessel. Following their first fishing expedition, they return to shore only to discover that they have been transported back in time to 1993, when the seaside town was still thriving, and the pair are mistaken for the boat’s original crew.
This time-shift brings about a reversal of fortunes for the two men, at least during the periods when they are on dry land (though, in truth, there is little dry land in this rain-lashed coastal village). In effect, Nick has lost his family, while Liam has suddenly acquired one. This dynamic becomes a source of mounting tension between the pair, each of whom has a very different approach to the situation: as the brooding Nick squats in the empty house he will one day own, the blithely opportunistic Liam assumes the identity of one of the drowned fishermen and settles into his new domestic role alongside the dead man’s partner and child.
But their days at sea prove to be a great leveller, and the two men—freed from the complications of life in the village—form a capable team as they labour in perilous conditions to bring in the daily catch, urged on by a ghostly captain (Francis Magee) who reminds them how much those at home depend on their success. Liam and Nick have been given real purpose, yet they cannot escape the awareness that a watery grave awaits them if events unfold as they did for the ship’s original crew. The time-slip conceit recalls that of Jenkin’s excellent previous film, Enys Men, which similarly nagged and needled the viewer.
Rose of Nevada is certainly starrier than Enys Men, with MacKay and Turner both fully committed to this very singular vision, and it feels curiously enmeshed with its predecessor (the eerie mayday call heard in Enys Men hints at a link to the ghost ship at the heart of Jenkin's latest feature). Set in a Cornwall where cream teas and second homes have been supplanted by food banks and leaking roofs, Rose of Nevada offers a commentary on the present from which its two protagonists are ripped—but it is at its most powerful when it unfolds as a Resnaisian meditation in which memory and the past are the prime movers.
Canadian filmmaker Julia Jackman's follow-up to her hugely likeable debut feature Bonus Track is a feminist fable based on Isabel Greenberg's near-namesake graphic novel. The result is a visually striking, if somewhat underpowered, medieval romance. It feels like a film that's striving desperately for cult status, yet it all seems a little too thin and brittle to endure—despite a great central performance from Maika Monroe and the stunt casting of Charli XCX in a supporting role. As their titles suggest, both the film and its source material owe much to the tale of the vizier's daughter Scheherazade, that most expert of storytellers.
Here, the title character, played by Emma Corrin, serves as maid to Monroe's noblewoman Cherry. It falls to Hero to spin the yarns that both hold the narrative together and stall the advances of the louche Manfred (Nicholas Galitzine), who has made a wager with his friend—and Cherry's husband—Jerome (Amir El-Masry) that he can seduce Cherry while Jerome is away for a hundred days, as per the title. All this unfolds within an absurd patriarchal society that worships Birdman (Richard E. Grant), a god who forbids women from reading or writing, yet still allows them to tell stories—a right Hero weaponises as she fights the power.
Hero’s ongoing epic tale centres on three sisters, the most prominent of whom, Rosa, is played effectively by Charli XCX, whose presence proves as distracting as the nightly instalments are disruptive to the film’s overall flow (a late cameo from Felicity Jones, who also serves as a producer, is equally intrusive). Rather than drawing us deeper into the narrative, the story-within-the-story tends to break the spell cast by the crepuscular fairytale world inhabited by Cherry and the others. As the erudite Hero, Emma Corrin is so compelling that there is little need for the illustrative sequences accompanying her stories.
Given that 100 Nights of Hero is based on a work that is itself an adaptation of another, its second-hand nature should be one of its greatest strengths; yet the film is self-conscious when it should be self-reflexive, jarring when it should be seamless. The ending feels as predictable as it does unearned, reinforcing the sense that this is little more than a fantasy pastiche lacking the guile of, say, Alain Resnais' Life Is a Bed of Roses. Still, there are aspects to admire in this uneven 90 minutes, with the appealing performances and meticulous mise-en-scène going some way to compensating for the film's structural shortcomings.
Set almost entirely within the premises of a shopping centre, the late Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman's musical Golden Eighties follows the romantic entanglements of various mall staff as they attempt to juggle their professional and private lives. Recently restored in 4K by Belgium's Cinematek, Akerman's film sees the director and Delphine Seyrig reunite more than a decade on from their collaboration on the incredible, shattering Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Whereas Seyrig commanded the screen for virtually all of Jeanne Dielman's three-plus hours, Golden Eighties features an ensemble cast in which she, playing another character named Jeanne, is joined by Myriam Boyer, Belgian pop icon Lio, Fanny Cottençon, Pascale Salkin and Charles Denner, among others.
The plot revolves around Boyer's Sylvie, a coffee shop proprietor longing for her boyfriend who is away seeking his fortune in Québec, and Eli (played by Boyer's real-life husband John Berry), an American former GI who, by chance, reconnects with clothing boutique owner Jeanne, a Jewish woman he looked after following her liberation from the death camps of WW2. In a setup not unlike that of Alain Resnais' Muriel, in which Seyrig's Hélène receives a visit from an old flame looking to rekindle their past romance, Eli would like to restart his relationship with Jeanne, which ended with her sudden departure. But Jeanne now has a husband (Denner) and son (Nicolas Tronc), the latter of whom has his own romantic problems as he can't choose between the flighty Lili (Cottençon) and the devoted Mado (Lio).
Golden Eighties is a most atypical film from Akerman, who is best known for her formally rigorous works, and it is easy—and reductive—to view it as her riff on the musical films of Jacques Demy (one of which, Peau d'âne, starred a customarily radiant Seyrig). Certainly, its songs, pastel colour scheme and theme of idealised love (which eventually yields to more pragmatic needs) are a good fit for a Demy musical, yet there's a Resnaisian wistfulness present here, and Jeanne's past trauma means that the holocaust, not for the first or last time in Akerman's work, comes under consideration (the director's mother survived Auschwitz). It says much about Akerman's skill that this weighty element can be added in such a way that the resulting film contains not so much as a hint of tonal uncertainty.
It is not inapt to suggest that Golden Eighties is a fine entry point for those unfamiliar with Akerman's oeuvre, and it is certainly the most accessible of her films; as such, it has sometimes been dismissed as one of the director's lesser efforts. But anyone rejecting any project involving Akerman and Seyrig should do so at their peril, and indeed this film has much more depth than its frothy, cheerful veneer might suggest. Perhaps the most striking aspect of Golden Eighties is that it was set and made in the middle of the decade of its weirdly prescient title—the film, especially in this restored version, has the look and feel of a fairly recent 80s parody—so the styles and fashions of the era are presented more or less as they were. Akerman, it seems, was acutely tuned in to the moment she was living in.
Daniel Hui's fourth feature Small Hours of the Night—which screened at the most recent edition of the London Film Festival—received its world premiere at this year's International Film Festival Rotterdam, where it played in the Harbour strand alongside the likes of Michael Gitlin's The Night Visitors, NZ coming-of-age tale (and festival opener) Head South, Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo's horror The Soul Eater, and Damien Hauser's After the Long Rains. The last of these films joined the 16mm-shot Small Hours of the Night at this year's LFF, but while the IFFR saw these two titles as stablemates (in the admittedly wide-ranging Harbour), the LFF placed the films in separate strands, with After the Long Rains assigned to Journey and SmallHours of the Night occupying a berth in Experimenta.
Inspired by the tombstone trial of Tan Chay Wa, Hui's film is a 60s-set two-hander that pits Irfan Kasban's nameless interrogator against Vicki Yang's Vicki. As per the title, much of Small Hours of the Night appears to take place over the course of one long, dark night as the official quizzes his prisoner on various incidents, some of which are actually from the future. For Small Hours of the Night is a film in which time is slippery, à la the work of Alain Resnais, and in one sequence—as impressive as it is eerie—Vicki watches a clock face on which the minutes tick by as normal, yet the date changes every few seconds. The interrogator seems not entirely unsympathetic towards Vicki—think O'Brien's relationship with Winston in Orwell's 1984 (a tale set just one year on from Tan's trial).
Small Hours of the Night is perhaps one of the more accessible examples of experimental cinema, but it's still a demanding film, one that requires much patience and attention. While both of the actors put in strong performances, plenty is asked of them; the story largely unfolds in a single location, and Hui's dialogue isn't always able to keep the odd lull at bay. The film invites us to read around what it presents; for example, it's fairly clear that Yang is playing a composite character, but what isn't obvious is that several figures from the tombstone trial have been incorporated into this persona. Despite its aura of disconnect and frequent temporal shifts, those who stay the course will be rewarded by this haunting film, whose cathartic conclusion proves that even the darkest night is followed by dawn.
With films such as Danton's Death,On Calland We, Alice Diop has carved out a formidable reputation as a documentary filmmaker, and with Saint Omer she takes her first step into narrative cinema. Yet to call Saint Omer a work of fiction is something of a stretch, as the film reconstructs the trial of Fabienne Kabou, who in November 2013 left her baby daughter to drown on a beach in northern France. Intrigued by the case, and with an eye on making a film about the proceedings, Diop herself attended Kabou's 2016 trial, with the experience leading to a feature that is a very different work from the essay film one might have expected from the director. Alice Diop's presence at the actual court sessions further blurs the boundary between verity and fabrication, and as a result Saint Omer occupies an unusual space, one that's somewhere between Diop's previous work and a more orthodox ripped-from-the-headlines drama.
Saint Omer opens with novelist Rama (Kayije Kagame) presenting a lecture on Marguerite Duras, in which an excerpt of Alain Resnais' Duras-scripted Hiroshima Mon Amour is used to help illustrate the point being made; Hiroshima was the feature debut of Resnais, who—like Diop—moved into fiction film after many years of directing documentaries. Explicitly referencing Resnais' immense work is a bold stroke by Diop, one that could easily backfire if the audience's attention is distracted by the clip of a film widely regarded as a classic of 20th-century cinema (even if it is slightly inferior to its immediate successors Last Year at Marienbad and Muriel). But to its credit, Saint Omer survives this risky move and proceeds to follow Rama as she travels to the town of the title to observe the infanticide trial; the writer—who has already identified strong parallels between the case and Euripides' play Medea—plans to use what she witnesses in the court as the basis for a novel. Rama is clearly a stand-in for Diop, and for the purposes of the film the accused, played by Guslagie Malanga, goes by the name of Laurence Coly.
The extremely intelligent, well-educated Coly does not deny leaving her 15-month-old baby to the mercy of a rising tide in wintry Berck-sur-Mer, but she stops short of accepting full responsibility for the crime, instead insisting that witchcraft was the driving force behind the murder. As the judge (Valérie Dréville, terrific) examines the defendant, Coly responds in a calm, measured tone, but there's something about the delivery of her answers that makes her seem less than credible; are those in the court—and by extension the audience—really expected to believe that this highly articulate academic is convinced that she was placed under a curse? As the trial progresses, Rama becomes acquainted with Coly's mother Odile (Salimata Kamate), a patient, kind woman, albeit one who appears resigned as far as her daughter's fate is concerned. In one almost surreal scene, Odile, in a display akin to that of a proud parent, visits a newsagents to purchase a copy of each paper covering the trial
While Rama may have made the connection between Coly and Medea, the young novelist is clearly rattled by some similarities between herself and the woman in the dock: both are black women made pregnant by white men—although Rama's caring, devoted partner Adrien (Thomas de Pourquery) stands in stark contrast to Coly's weaselly ex-lover Luc Dumontet (Xavier Maly), whose testimony appears designed to achieve little beyond extricating the baby's father from this tragic case. All of this is presented in a manner that recalls another film centring on a real-life trial in northern France: Bruno Dumont's Joan of Arc. As with Dumont's film, Saint Omer features a series of long, static takes that will test the patience of many a viewer, but once you tune into the film's highly unusual rhythm it becomes a haunting, hypnotic spectacle. It takes a good while for the full effect of Saint Omer to sink in, and I suspect that this daring, exacting film will reward multiple viewings.
Charlotte Wells' Aftersun will enjoy its Dutch premiere as part of this year's International Film Festival Rotterdam, which runs from today until 5 February. This feature debut is a strong, assured piece of filmmaking, one that owes much to the two central performances by Paul Mescal and newcomer Frankie Corio; both are terrific as a father and daughter on a Mediterranean holiday, but it is their chemistry together that provides the film with much of its emotional ballast. While Mescal's Calum and Corio's Sophie share a very close bond, a great deal of Aftersun's pathos comes from the space between these two, and the film provides a painful reminder that no matter how well someone knows another person, there is always a limit to that knowledge; as Charles Baudelaire put it in "The Eyes of the Poor": "So hard is it to understand one another, dearest, and so incommunicable is thought". Eighty years on from Baudelaire's poem, T.S. Eliot weighed in with his own perceptive take on the same subject in his play The Cocktail Party, whose mysterious Unidentified Guest stated, "What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them".
It is Eliot's words that carry much more bite as far as Wells' exquisitely crafted film is concerned, as the adult Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall) uses camcorder memories to attempt to better understand Calum, a loving, devoted father, yet one who always seemed rather distracted. It says much about Mescal's Oscar-nominated performance that he somehow manages to make Calum simultaneously absent and present, although the 11-year-old Sophie apparently fails to notice her dad's generally well-masked darker moments—which is probably exactly as he would have wanted it. As the older Sophie combs through the 1990s video recordings of a holiday the pair spent at a Turkish resort, the images serve as cues for her extensive memories of the trip; thankfully, the vast majority of Aftersun does not consist of grainy camcorder footage, but rather snippets of old film are used to both frame the story and provide us with the occasional reminder that most of what we are watching occurred a full two decades ago.
Sadly, one suspects that Sophie's scrutiny of these videotapes has reached the point where the clips may be in danger of losing their emotional significance. Her forensic study of these movies makes it seem as if she's not only using them to trigger memories but is also looking for clues, and there is a chance that anything Sophie ascribes meaning to may simply be a result of hindsight; as Susan Sontag pointed out when analysing what is arguably the greatest of all cinematic meditations on memory—Alain Resnais' Muriel—it is quite possible that these images can't be decrypted, as they don't say any more than they say. The good-natured Sophie's recollections of that summer paint a picture of a largely happy time, one when she enjoyed spending some precious moments with her dad, who by that stage had left his native Scotland—where Sophie remained with her mum—for London. Calum did appear to be on very good terms with his ex, as evidenced by a phone call he made during the holiday; indeed, it's hard to imagine Calum being at war with anyone—except, perhaps, himself.
The youthful Calum—who is frequently mistaken for Sophie's older brother—mostly comes across as a pleasant, sensitive man, and if the young Sophie failed to pick up on his more introspective moments, it may have been because she had her own distraction in the form of a boy she'd befriended in the resort's amusement arcade; even without this development, there is no reason why Sophie should have spotted the flickers of self-doubt that occasionally broke through Calum's cheerful exterior. It is quite telling that Sophie revisits both the memories and video footage when she reaches the same age her father was during the holiday; does she think that in getting to this point—at which Sophie is also a parent—she will have a better chance of seeing the world as he saw it? Aftersun instils a rising anxiety in the viewer—not quite Uncut Gems-level stuff, but it nevertheless carries a persistent sense of foreboding. Not that this should be the main takeaway from Charlotte Wells' hauntingly ambiguous film, which expertly depicts the aching gap that lies between children and their parents.
The late Alain Resnais (pictured above, courtesy of Eureka Video) was a true giant of cinema, and his 1963 film Muriel, or The Time of Return is a longstanding favourite of mine. While Resnais made several films widely considered to be classics (including Last Year at Marienbad, Night and Fog and Hiroshima mon amour), I have an unshakeable belief that the shattering Muriel remains his crowning achievement. For some time, I had wanted to write a detailed study on this extraordinary film, and in early 2020—just before COVID cast its long shadow over the world—I started work on Looking for Muriel, which has just been published simultaneously in hardback and paperback by BearManor Media. I thoroughly enjoyed both working with the team at BearManor and exploring the many diverse areas surrounding Muriel, and I hope this comes across in the writing.
I'm very grateful to each and every person who buys my books, so should you choose to order Looking for Muriel: A Journey Through and Around the Alain Resnais Film, please know that your purchase is greatly appreciated. The book is available directly from the publisher, as well as from a number of retailers, including Walmart, Amazon and Google, the last two of which are linked to at the very bottom of the page (to find these buttons, be sure to use the desktop version of the site and scroll all the way down). If you'd like to check if the book is available from your country's Amazon, simply visit that particular store and plug the following number into the search box:
Screening at the London Film Festival on the 10th and 11th of October, Belgian actor-director Lucas Belvaux's film shares a number of features with Dany Boon's Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis: the Nord-Pas-de-Calais milieu; actress Anne Marivin; crowd scenes filmed at RC Lens' stade Bollaert-Delelis; oh, and the word chez in its title. It does significantly deviate from Boon's über-smash in that in no way could Chez nous (English title: This is Our Land) be described as a feel-good movie; it is, however, an absorbing and well-crafted film that has enough momentum to get past some heavy-handed moments.
Single mother Pauline (Émilie Dequenne) is a nurse who, while making a home visit, discovers the elderly patient has died. Pauline waits for the ambulance and a Dr. Berthier (André Dussolier) to arrive for the formalities. Berthier knows Pauline quite well as he treated her late mother and now does the same for her ailing father. The pleasant if reserved doctor invites Pauline round to his house for dinner, where he promptly springs it on her that she's his ideal choice to run for mayor of their town. Pauline is flattered but declines, although some difficult patients in her already tough job make the offer seem even more attractive, and, greatly encouraged by her friend Nathalie (Marivin), she eventually agrees to stand.
The party she's representing - the fictional RNP - are headed by Agnès Dorgelle (Catherine Jacob), a steely politician who has apparently softened the image of the far right by breaking with her father's party and its more in-your-face brand of politics; working from a nominally reformed manifesto, Dorgelle Jr.'s EU-bashing, jingoistic, anti-immigration stance is recognised by most for what it is: a slicker, covert repackaging of the same militant views. Getting attractive, clever, affable everywomen such as Pauline to act as poster girls is exactly what the RNP need if they are to make serious inroads into mainstream politics.
Standing for an extreme party unsurprisingly brings its tough moments, and Pauline's life grows even busier when she reconnects with Stanko, her boyfriend from high school. Stanko is caring and kind to Pauline and her children, yet there's another, sinister side to his life, which is tied in with a murky past involving Berthier. With the election looming, Berthier tells Stanko to keep away from Pauline, as he feels that Stanko's illegal activities - should they be exposed by the press - would sink Pauline's chances of winning.
Chez nous attracted some controversy when it was released in France earlier this year, given how closely Jacob's character resembles Marine Le Pen. Arriving in cinemas before the presidential elections took place, Le Pen's supporters fumed at the perceived attack on their leader. While France - unlike the UK and the US in recent times - ultimately rejected voting for an extreme, Le Pen nonetheless went the distance, losing only in the final round to Emmanuel Macron. While Macron's victory was decisive, Le Pen's Front national had moved from fringe dwellers to a party that won a full third of the vote, and this fuelled the new populist right fire that Brexit and Trump had ignited. The unsettling thing about Chez nous is that it shows a pleasant, reasonable woman being seduced by a party she doesn't really share an ideology with; Pauline is no extremist crackpot, and Belvaux's film shows how a well-adjusted person - one who's only slightly disillusioned - can be lured into darker waters. The film does deal with some thorny issues, and no doubt Belvaux and Dequenne felt relieved that their Belgian passports put some distance between them and the subject.
Dequenne tends to light up any film she appears in, and here she's as appealing as ever, yet she's an actress who never quite seems to get the full recognition she truly deserves. Sure, she's won a couple of times at Cannes, but she's a really remarkable performer who seems destined to remain underrated as lesser Francophone actresses hog the upper echelon. The veteran Dussolier, like Dequenne, is a very likeable, completely dependable presence, and his part here again proves that he can do creepy when required; further evidence of him in this mode can be had in 21 Nights with Pattie and Resnais' Wild Grass. Guillaume Gouix, best known from his role in TV series The Returned, provides good support as Stanko, who's a far more complicated character than he first appears.
There are moments where Belvaux could have dialled it down a bit - in one scene, a TV documentary can be heard in which the narrator talks about a non-native crab that's taking over the English channel, and Jacob's Le Pen avatar is just a bit too broad to be properly successful. Naming the town Hénard is also rather clunky (it's a contraction of the old name for Hénin-Beaumont, a town in Le Pen's constituency which has an FN mayor). At the other end of the spectrum, there's a sublime moment when Berthier corrects a party colleague who's described Stanko as a neo-Nazi - nationalist revolutionary is the term to use, apparently; the brilliant, telling riposte is that not everyone's studied political science. With its atmospheric northern French locations - which the director failed to fully exploit in his disappointing One Night - Chez nous stands as Belvaux's best film for quite some time, and it works very nicely as a solid drama with a political slant. The DVD/Blu-ray is available in France.
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