There is fictional Nordic noir. And then there is this, the real thing. Subject matter really couldn’t be much darker than that of Mayhem: A Memoir in which publisher, philanthropist and heiress Sigrid Rausing gives her perspective on her younger brother Hans Kristian’s long-term drug addiction.
So who killed Cinnamon? Six weeks ago we saw the strangled sex-worker – packed in a pink suitcase – pushed into Bondi Bay. The finale of Top of the Lake: China Girl withheld enlightenment. Puss, the chief suspect, denied responsibility. Why would the baby-farmer destroy such a valuable (pregnant) asset?
Hearing that a music video director has just made their first feature film generally strikes fear into my heart. But in this instance, Geremy Jasper has done a pretty good job, directing a warm and quirky drama about a young woman from a working-class, chaotic family who dreams of being a famous rapper.
Patti Cake$ is an archetypal indie film, the kind that are acclaimed every year at the Sundance Film Festival by critics sated on Hollywood formula. It won a hefty distribution deal there from Fox mainly because it ticks all the right boxes – it's a character-driven tale told with considerable charm and has a personal backstory – drawn from the writer-director’s own youth growing up in gritty New Jersey and playing in a band.
Danielle Macdonald, with all her bulky charm, is utterly endearing as Patti
Patricia Dombrowski (Danielle Macdonald) aspires to reinvent herself as Killa-P or Patti Cake$ and storm the rap scene with her ingenious rhymes, but the cards are stacked against her. She’s very white, very overweight and very unsupported by her family. There’s an absent dad, a boozing mother with bad taste in boyfriends, and a dying grandmother; Patti is the breadwinner, working shifts in a deadbeat bar. Watching the Australian actress Macdonald who plays Patti swaggering down the street with her headphones on thinking she’s cool, we know that her bubble is due to be popped. Sure enough there are shouts of "Move it, Dumbo!" from a passing car because Patti is someone rarely encountered in the movies – an obese young woman, here owning the main role as opposed to providing comic relief.
Patti Cake$ isn’t simply a white version of Precious or a remake of 8 Miles, though it definitely echoes some of their themes.There’s a standout performance from Macdonald herself and some extraordinary scenes with Scorsese-veteran Cathy Moriarty as Patti’s grandmother who gets involved in her musical endeavours. Jasper's casting ticks a lot of diversity boxes to get the band together: the (gay?) best friend role goes to Siddharth Dhanajay, who works in a pharmacy and sings backing vocals.
Then there’s the mysterious heavy metal-goth who lives in a shack in the woods near the cemetery. He barely talks but knows how to mix a track and play guitar. He says he’s the anti-Christ and calls himself Basterd; it goes with his white contact lenses à la Marilyn Manson. Basterd’s played by African-American actor Mamoudou Athie (last seen playing Grandmaster Flash in Baz Luhrman's hiphop saga, The Get Down). Basterd's character evolves and he becomes more than just a memeber of Patti’s band (pictured above).
There’s some slightly clichéd mother-daughter confrontation scenes which are just about salvaged by the ferocity of Bridget Everett’s performance as mom. She's a singer who could have been a contender but is now a lush. Everett is better known as a raunchy cabaret performer and she can really belt out a power ballad at the karaoke bar; her musical style both clashes with and is incorporated into Patti’s band in a slightly hokey finale. This is not a perfect film, some of the plot twists are a little obvious while others defy credibility, but it's hugely enjoyable. There’s some inventive camerawork, excellent editing and a real sense that this is a story that comes from its creator’s heart. And Danielle Macdonald, with all her bulky charm, is utterly endearing as Patti.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Patti Cake$
Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill wrote Late Company when he was only 23. It would be an impressive achievement at any age, but it seems all the more remarkable that so stark a dissection of the consequences of a tragedy should have come from so young a writer. Written in 2013, it was his fifth play.
There’s a rare combination of the sacred and the secular in Shubhashish Bhutiani’s debut feature Hotel Salvation (Mukti Bhawan). The young Indian director developed the film through a Venice festival production support programme awarded on the strength of his short film Kush, a prize-winner in 2013, and the combination of different worlds and talents that development process must have involved has worked very well indeed. There’s a rich and moving sense of atmosphere to Bhutiani’s tale of life and death – or, more exactly, the moment when life comes to an end, and a different dimension opens – as well as a father-son relationship that offers an incisive perspective on the values of contemporary India.
Representing an older, almost timeless world is Daya (Lalit Behl). At 77, he’s living his life out peacefully with his family, son Rajiv (Adil Hussain) and his wife and daughter. In contrast, the world of the younger generation is anchored in the stressed routines of the quotidian, particularly for Rajiv, a salaryman who seems always to be up against deadlines, as well as the pressures of an office swamped in paperwork. It makes for a degree of friction at home.
That certainly doesn’t mean the old man can’t be infuriating
But the drama really starts when, out of the blue, Daya announces to his family that he has had a dream that convinced him that his end is near, and that he wants to make a final pilgrimage to die in the holy city of Varanasi. Ahead of that, he ritually donates a calf at the temple, another natural, traditional episode in the wider rhythm of eternity.
Rajiv has permission from his boss to accompany his father to Varanasi, for a notional period at least, although he is still hassled over the phone all the time. They check in at the titular Hotel Salvation, and Bhutiani delights us with some of the other characters in residence. The establishment is run by the eccentric Mishraji, who believes that he knows when each of his residents will die: there’s a limit of 15 days for a stay, though it’s a restriction that in due course will be nicely waived.
The other guests may be waiting for the end, but that doesn’t stop them enjoying more everyday routines, among which is an unlikely evening television show titled Flying Saucer. Daya establishes a particular bond with Vimla (Navnindra Behl), a widow who had accompanied her late husband here years ago and has stayed on ever since. There’s much affectionate humour in their interaction: there’s a moment when Daya appears to be on his deathbed, surrounded by mourners and musicians, with Vimla trying to catch his last words. “What did he say?” a musician asks. “That you sing in tune, please,” she replies.
As father and son explore their surroundings, including the sacred river and the ghats that lead down to its banks, they begin to understand one another better; Rajiv comes to reappraise the values of the world by which he has allowed himself to become so absorbed. That doesn’t mean the old man can’t be infuriating – indeed, on occasions he almost seems to relish being just that. But the rhythm of life feels timeless, and Daya in fact appears in better health than ever.
Resist any easy parallels to The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: Bhutiani directs with great subtlety, drawing out nuances that barely need to be verbalised (if a screen association is necessary, there are resonances with Alexander Payne’s Nebraska). The budget of Hotel Salvation can’t have been large, but the director and his cinematographers Michael McSweeney and David Huwiler relish the different contrasts of light on stone and water, as well as the bright colours of place and attire. Hotel Salvation is a film of great tenderness, one that relishes the details of physical reality, even while acknowledging that leaving all behind is the most natural, even essential thing of all.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Hotel Salvation
Summer's here, which can only mean Hollywood blockbusters. But it's not all Spider-Man, talking apes and World War Two with platoons of thespians fighting on the beaches. There's comedy, a saucy menage-à-trois, a film about golf and even a ghost story. It's called A Ghost Story. We hereby bring you sneak peeks of the season's finest and more titles anticipated in the autumn (and hey, the trailer might even be the best part).
AUGUST
The 1960s were “hilarious”, says one young character in this revival, starring Broadway icon Stockard Channing, of Alexi Kaye Campbell’s 2009 family drama at the Trafalgar Studios. How so? “Oh you know, the clothes, the hair, the raging idealism.” The thought of hippies marching for political causes, smoking Gauloises on the Left Bank or storming the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, and all the time wearing sandals and beads. Yes, to anyone under the age of 60 that must seem funny.
There's enough plot for a dozen plays buzzing its way through Mosquitoes, Lucy Kirkwood's play that uses the backdrop of the Large Hadron Collidor (LHC) to chronicle the multiple collisions within a family.
If you're going to cobble together an entirely pro forma film, it's not a bad idea to give Shirley MacLaine pride of place. At 83, this redoubtable pro is no more capable of falsehood now than she ever was. It means that, although individual moments of The Last Word may find you rolling your eyes, its central performance rivets attention from first to last.
Donald Trump’s electoral success was, we have been told, fuelled by the anger of the American working class. But how do you show that kind of anger on stage, and how do you criticise its basis in traditional masculinity?