Divorce proceedings turn sour in this devastating debut from writer/director Xavier Legrand. Using the full palette of human behaviour, Custody expertly balances high tension and grounded realism to create a timely and lingering film.
Boxing movies are often about redemption in the ring. From Somebody Up There Likes Me to last year’s Bleed for This via Rocky, the story stays the same: boxer seeks peace though punching. In Journeyman, Paddy Considine travels along a different path. The sporting action happens towards the start, but the heart of the story is in its aftermath.
Last year, the BFI commemorated the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality with the release of Queerama, part of its Gross Indecency film season.
Perhaps it’s fitting that Donald Crowhurst should once more find himself in a race. Even more aptly, it’s a race against himself. You wait half a century for a biopic about the round-the-world yachtsman who disappeared off the face of the earth, and then two turn up at once. This sort of clash sometimes happens in film, and one movie always ends up trouncing the other. Dangerous Liaisons seduced audiences away from Valmont. Capote killed off Infamous.
The gripping paradox of Lynne Ramsay’s terse, brutal thriller is suggested in its title. Adapted from Jonathan Ames's novella, it’s a film distinguished by the force of its images and the compression of its narrative, and while its impact leaves you dazed, you can’t quite believe that what you’ve just seen ever happened.
Following his irreverent superhero reboot Thor: Ragnarok, one of 2017’s most distinctive blockbusters, and his quirky Kiwi indie comedy Hunt for the Wilderpeople in 2016, it’s fair to say that interest in New Zealand director Taika Waititi’s back catalogue is high. Hence, no doubt, the DVD release of Waititi’s second feature, 2010’s big-hearted coming-of-age comedy Boy.
It’s fair to say, too, that the director’s signature style – his bathetic, deadpan wit; his unapologetic silliness; his big emotions – are all there in this earlier movie. But there’s a more serious side to Boy: a sense of ambition to deal with weightier issues, ones of grief, masculinity, family, even hope and potential (a word that the film’s lead seems understandably obsessed by). But they’re all delivered with such a remarkable lightness of touch, and a glorious sense of the absurd, that anything approaching portentous sermonising is swiftly undercut.
Boy (James Rolleston) – real name Alamein, after the World War Two battle – is a Michael Jackson-obsessed 11-year-old in remote Waihau Bay in New Zealand in 1984, gamely looking after his gaggle of younger siblings and cousins while their grandmother is away at a funeral. Among them is his younger brother, six-year-old Rocky (Te Aho Eketone-Whitu, pictured above with James Rolleston), who’s convinced he has telekinetic superpowers, although they never seem to work (or rarely, at least).
After the surprise arrival of his semi-estranged father, also named Alamein (Waititi, pictured below with James Rolleston) – who’s been behind bars for robbery – accompanied by two deadbeat hangers-on, Boy is initially awe-struck. But he soon begins to see through the man’s bluster and bravado, and to realise that the heroic qualities he idolised in his dad existed only in his imagination.
Waititi gets astonishingly natural, utterly convincing performances from his two young leads – both amateurs at the time of filming (Rolleston, the story goes, turned up as an extra before being snapped as a replacement lead just days before filming started). Eketone-Whitu in particular is mesmerising as the otherworldly Rocky, not quite connected with events around him, immediately suspicious of his returning father’s motives, and barely comprehending the tragic fate of his mother. As their needy man-child of a father, Waititi walks a fine line between gormless humour and behaviour that’s far less forgiveable. It’s rather a broad portrayal, but one that’s persuasive nonetheless.
Waititi makes reference to the deprivation of his isolated community, but context is never overemphasised – Boy is very much the story of its characters, despite its portrayal of a Maori people somewhat adrift from the modern world. Likewise, Adam Clark’s expressive cinematography contrasts the jaw-dropping splendours of the North Island landscape with the grimy poverty of a community that seems to be simply killing time.
Boy isn’t without its problems, one of which is its uneven pacing. Waititi seems to throw everything he can at his frenetic exposition – dance routines, animated kids’ drawings, asides to camera and plenty more – but then the far slower second act seems to drag, even threaten to lose its way. And it’s a shame that producers couldn’t rustle up any special features or commentaries to fill out this DVD release. But it’s a tender, big-hearted, often downright hilarious movie all the same, one that feels fresh, sincere, and never calculated. As in his later Hunt for the Wilderpeople – although here in a less polished, grittier way – Waititi dares to place kids firmly as his film’s focus, never patronising or romanticising them, but instead celebrating their strength and resilience.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Boy
This account of the aftermath of a sexual assault is handled with a clear-headed restraint and attention to detail that’s refreshing in the feverish post-Weinstein climate.
Beach Rats is a film that has “indie” etched in its bones. The second feature from Brooklyn-born Eliza Hittman, it was made with support from New York's independent outfit Cinereach, and went through development at the Sundance Labs. Appropriately, it took that festival's Best Feature Director award last year.
It’s strong on the kind of atmosphere that might easily float into nowhere, but is backed up by a striking performance from British newcomer Harris Dickinson that holds the attention in the subtlest ways. Dickinson plays 19-year-old Frankie, who’s on the cusp of adulthood and apparently coasting through an idle summer in the company of friends. An encounter at the Coney Island fireworks introduces him to Simone (Madeline Weinstein, pictured below, with Dickinson), and initiates a tentative, on-off interaction that also never quite gets anywhere.
But underneath such surfaces the young man's world is considerably darker, reflected in the fact that his father is in the last throes of cancer; he’s dying at home, grief and tension hanging in the air. And Frankie is in the course of discovering his identity, tentatively exploring gay contact websites. But Hittman resists driving Beach Rats in any more standard coming-out narrative direction: rather her concern is with Frankie’s state of increasingly uneasy limbo, emotions suppressed until they come close to crisis in late overlaps with external circumstances. 
Hittman talks, in one of the two short interview extracts that come as extras on this release, of her attempt to get into the mind of a teenager pressured by expectations and circumstances (her first film, It Felt Like Love, was a story of female adolescence, so this is both new and familiar territory for her). Frankie’s reticence and uncertainty – “I don’t really know what I like” is a phrase he repeats through the film – means that the changes and charges of emotion are shown in the smallest of gestures.
Dickinson’s striking features are richly expressive of such nuances, and they are beautifully caught by French cinematographer Hélène Louvart’s subtle textures, which also capture the languid summertime atmosphere of the remoter edges of Brooklyn (it’s the director's home territory, very different from the trendier neighbourhoods of the borough we are more used to on screen). The film seems somehow removed from time (no mobile phones), and Hittman creates the fabric of its world beautifully. She draws absolutely natural performances from a mainly non-professional cast – Frankie’s three beach-side companions, as well as his younger sister (Nicole Flyus) – and a deeply insightful role from Kate Hodge as his mother.
It’s a world in which no one intends wrong, but things go wrong. Frankie himself acutely realises his own shortcomings, but the director isn’t interested in judging him. No doubt he will one day reach resolution of some sort, but for now Hittman is honest enough not to suggest answers. Expect to hear much more both of her, and of her star.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Beach Rats
In Between didn’t get nearly enough attention on its cinema release in the UK last autumn, hampered perhaps by its nothingy title and a synopsis that can make it sound like it will be a worthy evening out when in fact it’s anything but. One of the liveliest debut features of 2017, it follows three twenty-something Palestinian women who share a flat in Tel Aviv. It’s sharp, funny and eye-opening.
Director Maysaloun Hamoud draws on her experience as an Arab film-maker living in Israel to create a wholly fresh take on sexual and cultural politics. Imagine Girls and Sex in the City but without the white American privilege and you'd be getting close, although In Between most reminded me of another director who made their debut film focusing on a feisty female central character, Spike Lee with She’s Gotta Have It, back in 1984.
She has lifted the covers on young Palestinians’ love lives, gay friends and high times
Although In Between is an ensemble piece, Laila, played by the stunningly beautiful and super-smart Mouna Hawa is the strongest figure. She’s a lawyer with a mane of curls who sees nothing wrong in showing her cleavage at work. Laila is a secular Muslim who knows exactly what she can expect from her Jewish colleagues in the legal business. And in her downtime she also takes no prisoners; she’s got an appetite for drugs, dancing and female solidarity but is still looking for a man to be her soul mate. Her friend Salma (Sana Jammalieh) finds life a little tougher; she’s a DJ who works shifts in a restaurant as a sous chef where the Israeli boss doesn’t want the kitchen crew speaking Arabic. Meanwhile back home her Christian parents endlessly line up potential husbands because Salma hasn’t dared tell them she’s gay.
As there’s a lot of wild partying in their apartment, it’s not the obvious place for new flatmate Nour (Shaden Kanboura) to find a quiet room to finish her computer studies degree. Nour is a hijab-wearing Muslim with a disapproving fiancé who sees Tel Aviv as a city of sin. He wants Noura to marry him and return to their ultra-conservative hometown of Umm al-Fahm on the West Bank. Their relationship provides the film's most shocking scenes. There’s plenty of vivid drama along the way, all beautifully shot by Itay Gross and made wholly credible by semi-improvised dialogue scenes as not all the actors were professionals.
In Israel the film has been a huge and controversial hit. Maysaloun Hamoud has lifted the covers on young Palestinians’ love lives, gay friends and high times (pictured above: Mahmud Shalaby skinning up with Mouna Hawa). The film was banned in Umm al-Fahm while others criticised the director for receiving some funding from the Israeli government. Hamoud has received death threats because she is challenging fundamentalist religions, casual racism from Israelis towards Arabs and the endemic cultural repression that traps women (and to a certain extent men) in restrictive roles. In Between would make a fascinating double-bill with Menashe – both sympathetic portraits of normally inaccessible communities, ultra-orthodox Jews in Menashe; bohemian, radicalised Palestinians in In Between.
Intended as the first in a trilogy, I can’t wait to see more of the central characters. The DVD release comes with a scrappy short feature compiled from on-set footage and interviews with Hamoud and her Israeli producer, Shlomi Elkabetz. It looks as if they all had fun making the film – there’s a lot of hugging and high spirits – which makes In Between’s cool coherence even more impressive.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for In Between
We follow Kabwita Kasongo on his morning routine, lingering over the shoulder as he treks through the village. A pastel sunrise greets vast landscapes, the morning breeze visible for miles around. He heads to a tree at the edge of a mountain, and begins a day’s work chopping it down. It’s a stunning opening sequence which prepares you for the visceral journey ahead.