BFI Flare 2024: Sex is Comedy

Edith Chapin's terrific documentary—which screens tomorrow as part of this year's BFI Flare—focuses on the highly specialised work of the intimacy coordinator (IC).  The film's subtitle The Revolution of Intimacy Coordinators (French: La révolution des coordinatrices d'intimité) serves to differentiate it from Catherine Breillat's 2002 feature Sex is Comedy, although the fact that the films carry the same main title—which in both instances is in English—is no coincidence: the ever-edgy Breillat's meta-movie, which drew on her experiences making Fat Girl, revolved around a filmmaker attempting to shoot an intimate scene involving two actors who dislike each other.  Immediately prior to Fat Girl, Breillat had directed Romance, whose release was littered with controversial incidents—not least the accusations of the film's star, Caroline Ducey, who claimed the writer-director had exploited her during the filming of explicit sex scenes.

Romance was made at the tail end of the last century, in a pre-#MeToo world where the role of IC didn't exist; post-Weinstein, however, the need to employ a specialist to oversee such scenes has become much more urgent.  Sex is Comedy: The Revolution of Intimacy Coordinators features Brussels-based IC Paloma García Martens, who worked primarily as a costume designer on films as diverse as Thomas Vinterberg's Kursk, Claude François biopic Cloclo and the Cannes-winning Blue is the Warmest Colour before branching out into her current profession.  Chapin's film documents Martens' work on another Flare 2024 selection, Split—a series that debuted on France Télévisions' all-digital channel Slash—but also takes in a useful conversation with French actress-director Ovidie and a trip to London, where Martens meets with the intimacy coordinator of Netflix's hit show Sex Education. 

While fans of Split will no doubt find Sex is Comedy: The Revolution of Intimacy Coordinators to be an illuminating behind-the-scenes look at the TV show, it should be said that the film works extremely well as a standalone documentary.  As the person at the front and centre of the film, Martens is an erudite and likeable presence—as is Sex Education's IC, David Thackeray—and this nominal subject is good value as she outlines the day-to-day activities of an IC on set.  The longer we spend with Martens, the clearer it becomes that very few people are cut out for a successful tilt at this profession; you suspect that Martens' prior film industry experience stood her in good stead for this exacting role (and it's possible that the much-publicised fallout from Blue is the Warmest Colour—a film which, like Romance, could have sorely used an IC—informed her present career choice).    

 

Running at just under one hour, Edith Chapin's taut, deftly edited film is never anything less than fascinating, and it's particularly engrossing when Martens details how she works with Split's actors as one particular scene is filmed, on a closed set, before some squelching Foley sounds are added in postproduction; this last stage brings some levity to proceedings, and it should be said that, despite the serious nature of the job undertaken by Martens, humour plays an important—possibly essential—part in putting all concerned at ease.  On a less positive note, we get to witness the great stress involved when the same scene subsequently runs into nightmarish censorship issues.  Yet Sex is Comedy: The Revolution of Intimacy Coordinators is an overwhelmingly uplifting experience, and it provides real insight into both the rise and methods of the IC.

Darren Arnold

Images: France Télévisions / Cinétévé

Druk (Thomas Vinterberg, 2020)

Director Thomas Vinterberg's new film Druk (English: Another Round) is a production that received support from the Netherlands Film Fund, and it played at the London Film Festival just last month.  Vinterberg's previous film, Kursk, was a solid if unspectacular retelling of the tragic fate of the eponymous Russian vessel, but Druk sees the director on altogether more familiar ground, and this efffort feels much more organic than his serviceable submarine movie.  For this latest film, Vinterberg reunites with his Jagten star, the excellent and reliable Mads Mikkelsen, and the results are almost as impressive as the pair's previous joint venture.  Between these two collaborations, Vinterberg made a brace of English-language films (Kursk and Far from the Madding Crowd) with Belgian star Matthias Schoenaerts, an actor whose style is somewhat similar to Mikkelsen's; it is easy to see why the director has favoured these two performers in recent times. 

Mikkelsen's Martin is a high school teacher going through the motions in work and life, and both his family and pupils seem bored of a man who seems to have largely lost interest in the world.  Things change when Martin and three of his colleagues agree to test out the theory of Norwegian psychiatrist Finn Skårderud, who hypothesised that humans have a blood alcohol deficit of 0.05% and should look to redress this in order to function properly.  Naturally, putting this theory into practice takes a bit of trial and error, and the four participants take to keeping bottles and breathalysers stashed away in the workplace as they look to maintain the level prescribed by Skårderud.  After a few adjustments, Martin gets to a point that allows him to reconnect with both his wife and his students; life has certainly picked up for Martin and his friends, but how long before the constant drip-feeding of alcohol escalates into something more serious?

While Thomas Vinterberg will most likely always remain in the long shadow cast by his breakthrough feature Festen—a film that is now 25 years old—he more often than not makes interesting, accessible films, and Druk is definitely one of his better efforts.  The film is helped no end by a well-judged lead performance from Mads Mikkelsen and, good as his co-stars are, there's a sneaking suspicion that Druk would be greatly diminished without Mikkelsen's presence; his Martin is by no mean a dislikeable man, but is rather someone who's lost his way a little, and the actor channels an affable world-weariness that is always relatable.  Not unlike Mikkelsen's character in Jagten, Martin is basically a decent guy who finds himself in a hole he needs to dig his way out of, and while the situation in Druk isn't nearly as grave as that in Jagten, Martin still has his work cut out if he's to save his relationship with his wife and sons.

Druk contains some very convincing scenes of drunkenness and, just like recent documentary Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (which could quite easily partner Druk in a boozy double bill), it convincingly conveys the seductive, appealing nature of drinking, although Druk pans out as a cautionary tale as opposed to Bloody Nose's observational, non-judgmental take on barflies at play.  Druk can be fairly predictable at times, but it's an authentic piece of cinema, one that again confirms how reliable Thomas Vinterberg has become—although he would no doubt be aghast to be labelled as such.  It seems quite a coincidence that two of Vinteberg's very best films have starred Mads Mikkelsen, and with any luck the pair will collaborate again in the near future; of course, if it turns out that Mads is busy (as he may well be), perhaps his very able stand-in Matthias Schoenaerts will be available?

Darren Arnold

Images: image.net

Kursk (Thomas Vinterberg, 2018)

It's hard to believe that next year will mark the 20th anniversary of the Kursk submarine disaster, which saw 118 men lose their lives during Russia's first significant naval exercise since the fall of the USSR.  Although only on a training mission, the Kursk was carrying a full complement of live weapons, and these were the source of an accidental explosion which saw the stricken vessel sink to the bottom of the Barents Sea.  Shortly after settling, a second, much larger explosion - which registered 4.2 on the Richter scale - was recorded.  It was hours before anyone realised that the submarine was missing - its rescue buoy, reportedly welded in place, had failed to deploy - and many days before a rescue team was able to get inside the vessel; by that stage, as we all know, it was far too late.  The Russian government came under much criticism for its handling of the incident - after locating the submarine yet failing to attach a diving bell to it, the government rebuffed a number of offers of help from other nations including France, Germany and Israel, with President Putin - who at that point had been in his role for just a few months - eventually accepting help from the UK and Norway.  The British-Norwegian teams of divers worked to help access the submarine and facilitate the recovering of the bodies.

The real horror at the heart of the Kursk story lies not with the deaths of those who perished as a result of the initial explosions and subsequent flooding - although that is horrific enough - but in the submarine's ninth compartment, where 23 men managed to hole up in the dark and cold.  In this area, the men had an air pocket that would have sustained them for a while, but nothing like the time it took for help to arrive.  The released parts of a letter written by a Captain-Lieutenant, who fumbled his way around the page in the dark while using his illuminated wristwatch to note down the time, are the only real personal glimpses we have of what it was like for these men who, as it turned out, were hideously unlucky to have survived the explosions and their immediate aftermath.  The Captain-Lieutenant is played by Matthias Schoenaerts, an appealing and dependable actor who captures the essence of someone who was both liked and respected by his men, and who did his best to keep everyone's spirits up in the face of a clock which was always going to run out.

Kursk, a production from Luc Besson's EuropaCorp, sees Schoenearts reteam with Thomas Vinterberg, with the two having previously collaborated on 2015 literary adaptation Far from the Madding Crowd.  Vinterberg's roaring success of a debut feature, Festen, was released before the Kursk even sank, and in the intervening years he's largely struggled to live up to his first film, although his Oscar-nominated Jagten was terrific.  He is, however,  a consistently interesting filmmaker, and one who has always worked fairly steadily, although a fairly orthodox film like Kursk provides him with few opportunities to apply the kind of off-kilter flourishes we might expect from this director.  The pan-European cast also features Léa Seydoux, Colin Firth and Max von Sydow; if nothing else, the production, which may well be dismissed by some as a Euro-pudding, stands as a display of international co-operation that's in sharp contrast to both the belligerence at the core of the Kursk story and the current global political climate.

That the sinking of the Kursk (which, like the Titanic, was widely considered unsinkable) comes early in the film and not at the climax tells us much about the scale of the terror here; in many movies, the critical explosions would come after a long buildup.  Kursk proves to be a tough watch - as a film based on terrible real-life events, its preordained outcome hovers over the entire running time; matters are made much worse through watching the near-miss of the diving bell as it fails to lock onto the sub.  Some of these men came so close to being saved, but the tragic tale sticks to its awful path, as it must; it's like Open Water on a much larger scale.  Kursk is a competent if rather workmanlike film, yet one which grows more disturbing once you've seen it; it's only in the hours and days after seeing the film that the sorry fate of these men will really haunt you.  EuropaCorp's films - outside of Besson's own directorial efforts - tend to be fairly generic, and the starry Kursk is no exception.  But regardless of its merits, Kursk's very existence serves as a reminder of a disaster many of us won't have thought about for some time.

Darren Arnold

Images: EuropaCorp