BFI Flare 2024: The Blue Shelter

Today marks the start of this year's BFI Flare, which gets underway with two screenings of Amrou Al-Kadhi's debut feature Layla—a film that serves as the festival's opening night gala.  But tomorrow is when the event gets properly up and running, with Flare 2024's first full day offering up films such as the eagerly anticipated Dutch-British co-production Silver Haze, Sav Rodgers' uplifting documentary Chasing Chasing Amy, Orthodox feature Unspoken, and Elliot Page-starrer Close to You.  While feature films are very much the festival's bread and butter, shorts are by no means neglected by Flare; indeed, short films have their own dedicated strand—where, typically, several thematically linked works are combined to form a programme which lasts roughly the equivalent length of a standard feature. 

One such programme—and there are 11 in total at this year's festival—is Cosmic Dreams: Through the Looking Glass, which screens tomorrow evening in BFI Southbank's NFT3; this particular collection is one of three shorts programmes playing on Thursday, the others being A Taste of Spain and Methods for Facing a Hostile World.  Cosmic Dreams plays home to Jérémy Piette's dreamy, elegiac The Blue Shelter (Le Garçon qui la nuit), which takes its place alongside Joana de Sousa's Between Light and Nowhere (Entre a Luz e o Nada), Alden Peters' Friends of Sophia (see trailer below), Jeanette Buck's Safety State, Antonia Luxem's On Falling, and Frankie Fox's Goodbye Python.  With a running time of 26 minutes, The Blue Shelter is fractionally the longest of the half-dozen films included in Cosmic Dreams: Through the Looking Glass, and certainly the most memorable.

Piette's film centres on Arthur, a young man quietly dreading the end of summer.  Arthur and his friends are enjoying a languid day at a sun-kissed Breton beach, where they spend their time reading, drinking and taking occasional dips in the sea.  Not far from the group, a lone sunbather proves somewhat distracting for the pensive Arthur, who attempts to take a beer over to the man until he's talked out of it.  As the day wears on, the friends join in a mass singalong to Robi's "On ne meurt plus d'amour", a rendition as joyous as it is wistful.  The Blue Shelter subsequently takes a left turn into magical realism as Arthur is separated from his friends and enters a vaguely unsettling crepuscular world; this surreal closing sequence is soundtracked by a haunting interpretation of another well-known song: Brigitte Fontaine and Areski's "J'ai 26 ans".  

Given the two very different halves of this film, Jérémy Piette proves most adept at stitching them into a cohesive whole, and his skill in doing so should not be underestimated (cf. Boléro, another short from this year's Flare, which founders in its attempt to change tack midway through).  Parallels have been drawn between The Blue Shelter and the sweaty, leery films of Abdellatif Kechiche, but such comparisons seem both wide of the mark and lazy.  Rather, Piette's film appears to be more influenced by the work of François Ozon and Jacques Rivette, with a splash of Steven Arnold's Luminous Procuress thrown in for good measure.  The Blue Shelter—whose warm, tactile Super 16mm cinematography recalls that of Christian Avilés' similarly lengthed La herida luminosa—is a fine, ambitious debut, one which captures the essence of a summer that is anything but endless.     

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

The Iron Claw (Sean Durkin, 2023)

In the years since his 2011 directorial feature debut, the impressive and decidedly Haneke-esque Martha Marcy May Marlene, Sean Durkin has directed just one other feature film—2020's The Nest—prior to his latest effort, the biographical The Iron Claw.  In between his first and second movies, Durkin made the superb miniseries Southcliffe, a harrowing four-parter centring on a spree shooter played by a particularly terrifying Sean Harris.  The Tony Grisoni-penned Southcliffe may well be Durkin's finest achievement, and just last year he returned to the small screen to direct half of the episodes of another acclaimed miniseries: Dead Ringers, a remake/reboot of David Cronenberg's 1988 film of the same name.  Durkin has also produced other directors' films, notably those of Antonio Campos (Afterschool, Simon Killer, Christine) and Nicolas Pesce (The Eyes of My Mother, Piercing).   

The largely 80s-set The Iron Claw charts the travails of a Texan family of professional wrestlers ruled by a fist of, er, iron belonging to patriarch Fritz Von Erich (Holt McCallany), who is at the tail end of a solid career in World Class Championship Wrestling (WCWW).  As Fritz's time in the ring draws to a close, he's keen for his offspring—he and his wife Doris (Maura Tierney) are parents to half a dozen boys—to tag in.  When the couple's firstborn, Jack (Romeo Miloro Newcomer), dies in a freak accident at the age of six, the protective Kevin (Zac Efron) becomes the eldest of five, and as teenagers he and his brothers are pushed towards wrestling careers, irrespective of the varying levels of enthusiasm among the siblings.  Under the domineering Fritz's harsh guidance, the boys achieve a great deal on the wrestling circuit, with middle son Kerry (Jeremy Allen White) becoming the most successful of the brothers.  Sadly, the numerous titles won by the Von Erichs are more than offset by a series of family tragedies.

If The Iron Claw wasn't based on a true story, most would dismiss its plot developments as implausible, but the horrifying truth is that 

at the age of just 35, Kevin was the last surviving son.

  By this stage, Kevin and his wife Pam (Lily James, excellent) had started a family of their own, and the new father was understandably so concerned about the Von Erich line being cursed that he opted to give his first child the real family surname of Adkisson (Von Erich was only ever a ring name).  The physically transformed Efron is outstanding as Kevin, a kind, polite and sensitive man outside of the sport, yet one who poses a formidable opponent to the parade of de facto villains he faces in the squared circle.  Refreshingly, Durkin has opted to film each of the wrestling matches in one long take, and the results are convincingly unconvincing; as is so often the case with the cartoon world of wrestling, the question of authenticity remains unresolved.

Given his CV, Durkin seems an unlikely candidate to helm a wrassling movie—but many of us thought much the same when Darren Aronofsky announced he would be making The Wrestler.  Like Aronofsky's wonderfully bleak tale, The Iron Claw is a wrestling film that packs an existential wallop; that this punishing picture is backed by so-hip-it-hurts indie studio A24 (Midsommar, Uncut Gems, Moonlight) tells you it is likely to be anything but a rote sports drama, and Sean Durkin proves a good fit for a story in which the next misfortune is never very far away.  That said, the writer-director does know when to exercise some restraint, as evidenced by the omission of youngest brother Chris Von Erich—who committed suicide in 1991—from the film; even as it stands, the litany of agony presented in the IFFR-selected The Iron Claw comes perilously close to having a numbing effect.  Yet the coda is suitably moving, and for the most part Durkin's engaging film possesses a warmth that was all but absent from his previous work.

Darren Arnold

Images: A24

One More Shot (James Nunn, 2024)

Having had its Dutch premiere at the Pathé de Kuip as part of International Film Festival Rotterdam on Sunday, James Nunn's One More Shot has its fifth and final IFFR outing tonight, when it screens at the city's Pathé Schouwburgplein.  One More Shot is playing as part of the festival's Limelight strand, where it takes its place alongside the likes of Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, Kaouther Ben Hania's Four Daughters and Sean Durkin's The Iron Claw; while Nunn's film may pale in comparison with these acclaimed titles, it's a serviceable action movie which deserves better than its straight-to-video fate.  With this in mind, One More Shot's Rotterdam screenings afford a rare chance to see the film in a cinema, and it's safe to say that far worse films will be granted a theatrical release between now and the end of the year.  While the movie's absence from multiplexes will prove disappointing for its cast and crew, it's easy to imagine One More Shot enjoying a long life on the small screen.

One More Shot is a direct sequel to James Nunn's 2021 feature One Shot—in between these ventures, the filmmaker helmed creature feature Shark Bait—and both films are novel in that each appears to have been filmed in a single continuous shot.  As such, the films' titles are quite witty, although it should be pointed out that considerably more than one gunshot is fired in each film.  One More Shot joins its predecessor and the likes of Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman and Sam Mendes' 1917 in a select group of movies that have been edited to look as if they were filmed in one take, even if such efforts might have to defer to those films that are bona fide one-shot features—such as Russian Ark, Victoria and Medusa Deluxe.  One More Shot reunites Nunn with the first film's star, Scott Adkins, who came to the project fresh from his memorable turn in last year's epic John Wick: Chapter 4—a film that featured a jaw-dropping single-take fight sequence as it set about redefining the modern action flick.

Here, Adkins reprises his role as crack Navy SEAL Jake Harris, who in the first film was in the thick of it as his squad attempted to transport Amin Mansur (Waleed Elgadi) from a CIA black site.  Mansur had been detained on account of his involvement in a plot to launch a terror strike on Washington DC, and One More Shot opens with the prisoner and Harris arriving in the US as the clock ticks down to the attack.  The American authorities have brought along Mansur's heavily pregnant wife Niesha (Meena Rayann) as leverage, but before the CIA can begin interrogating their man, an army of mercenaries led by Robert Jackson (Michael Jai White) storms the airport in an attempt to retrieve Mansur.  Harris, who has only just had his part in this fraught business ended by Tom Berenger's apoplectic CIA officer, soon realises what's going on and sets about dispatching countless henchmen via a variety of brutal methods—although, more often than not, a gun is involved.  

The one-shot film is something of a curio: it can be hard to reconcile the impressiveness of the achievement with the notion that it's not much more than a technical exercise.  Here, though, there's a real-time urgency to the film, and the kinetic presentation manages to maintain interest in what is essentially a glorified video game (as indeed was the aforementioned 1917).  Adkins—in the sort of role usually reserved for the likes of Jason Statham—is good value as Harris; disappointingly, White is given precious little to do up until his (admittedly impressive) big fight scene with Adkins—both actors have a background in martial arts, which lends a satisfying authenticity to the face-off.  The rest of the acting is pretty variable, with Berenger phoning it in and Gemma Arterton's less-famous sister Hannah struggling to make much of an impact as a brusque CIA agent.  But One More Shot is all about the spectacle, and Nunn, working with a relatively low budget, has crafted a likeable, competent and generally entertaining action thriller.

Darren Arnold

Images: Screen Media Films