Daphne, the independent feature debut from director Peter Mackie Burns, was released to little fanfare last year, a fact somewhat emphasised by the other films advertised on its DVD release – Moonlight and Lady Macbeth – more lauded releases from distributor Altitude Films. Even the special features fail to commemorate anything but the trailer.
Hounds of Love is the latest in a long line of small-budget Australian horrors “based on true events” – it must be something about the heat. However, stellar performances and a refreshing depth in characterisation make this thriller stand apart from its genre mates.
It was the night Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, those old robbers on the run, will want to forget. Thanks to a clerical error, the Oscar for Best Picture briefly ended up in the clutch of the overwhelming favourite. Then the mistake was spotted and La La Land had to cede ground to Moonlight.
In the most unlikely of places, there is one of the world’s most prolific directors. He has produced over 110 films, he’s mobbed wherever he goes, and he inspired people through the darkest of civil wars; yet outside of Afghanistan, no-one knows the name of Salim Shaheen, the self-proclaimed "Prince of Nothingwood".
Like a bizarro-world echo of Lenny Abrahamson’s Academy-titillating Room, Dave McCary’s endearing indie feature takes a potentially hideous tale of abduction and control and transforms it using the amazing healing powers of fantasy and creativity.
Icelandic writer-director Gudmundur Arnar Gudmundsson has made an impressive feature debut with this story of crossing the threshold from childhood to young adult experience. Heartstone acutely and empathetically catches the path from innocence to experience of its two 14-year-old protagonists, Thor (Baldur Einarsson) and Kristján (Blær Hinriksson), in which the film’s twin themes, coming of age and coming out, become uneasily intertwined.
Gudmundsson opens his story at a leisurely pace – and, at a few minutes over the two-hour mark, there’s no calling its rhythm hurried – as we discover the world in which the two teenagers live. It’s the summer holidays, and they’re loping around with friends, fishing from the harbour side of the remote village that is home. When a shoal of fish swims by unexpectedly, the kids are soon struggling to pull them out of the water fast enough, before casually bashing them to death on the concrete. It’s an indicator that nature here is coloured by tooth and claw (an allusion referenced literally in one early visual), without overmuch room for sentiment. Such a mood will colour the human development that follows, too.
But this is also nature, in the sheer physical sense, at its most impressive (pictured above). The craggy coast around the cluster of houses that makes up the isolated village rises up towards spectacular mountains, which somehow dwarf any human activity with their scale. In summer, as the light stretches around the clock, the beauty is awesome, memorably captured in Norwegian cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen’s widescreen vistas. But we sense that when winter comes – Heartstone closes as the first dusting of snow falls – the cold isolation of the place will be as complete as the luminous airiness with which it seasonally alternates.
Coming-of-age stories like this, especially from Nordic and Scandinavian climes, are almost a trope of cinema, often defined by the gentleness of their revelations, the sometimes quirky benignity of their settings. Gudmundsson consciously avoids any such tenderness, with nature’s cruelties mirrored in the immediate human environment, like how the village’s older teenagers tease the younger generation. There’s a similarly sharp atmosphere at home, with existence for the sensitive Kristján dominated by a hard-drinking father, and family life for Thor – the nice irony of his name is emphasised by the fact that, though he’s determined and tough, he’s still a minnow in size – coloured by two elder sisters who are as unforgiving with him as they are with their single mother (Nína Dögg Filippusdóttir, a lovely performance).
The father has gone off with a younger woman, and any sympathy for their mum's tentative attempts to find someone to date in this backwater is notably lacking. We see what it involves for her when the adults get together for the village-hall dance – a thrash, if ever there was one – and her attention falls on the outsider Sven (Søren Malling, a visitor in every sense: he’s Torben, from Borgen). Nevertheless there’s a sense of tough-love affection in this family unit that is finally reassuring, as well as an element of comedy to the sisters, Hafdis (Ran Ragnarsdottir) particularly; she writes poetry of Plath-like intensity that she reads out at meals.
Contrasting yet complementary female company comes with Beta (Dilja Valsdotttir) and Hanna (Katla Njalsdottir, pictured together above), with whom the boys tentatively explore the first hints of sexual consciousness at furtive sleepovers, which come with games of Truth or Dare, the forfeits precipitating different kinds of intimacy. Gradually the unsuspecting best-friend closeness between Thor and Kristján becomes something more complicated, though the scenes of revelation are laced with a lightness that allows for it all to be treated as game-playing. The ramifications become clearer in an episode in which the four of them go camping on their own in the mountains, where the landscape itself seems to pull a response from Kristján that he somehow can’t resist.
Gudmundsson treats the repercussions of his story with understated sensitivity: Heartstone may have won the “Queer Lion” at last year’s Venice film festival, but the sexuality here is one of exploration rather than action (Céline Sciamma’s Tomboy is one other such film that comes to mind). In all such tales of the growing self-awareness of youth, the quality of the playing from the young cast is crucial, and Gudmundsson has drawn hugely sensitive performances from his two leads. The landscapes that surround them may be monumental and memorable, but the sincerity and naturalness of these two performances is almost microscopically exact.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Heartstone
In the week that the police announced the final Grenfell Tower fire death toll, this is a timely release. Paul Sng’s 82-minute documentary, narrated by the actress Maxine Peake, is a serious investigation into the state of social housing in the UK, most especially the way it’s being co-opted into the private sector to make as much money as possible for corporate free market ideologues and those trailing in their wake.
Sng, along with his cinematographer Nick Ward and editor Josh Alward, have made a small budget go a long way, utilising striking imagery of urban desolation, intercut with old, black and white photographs of areas such as the Gorbals in Glasgow and Nottingham’s St Ann’s Estate, alongside simple, well-chosen graphics comparing the money being offered to buy people out with the profits on the cards for “management companies”.
Dispossession begins with the huge council housing boom kick-started by Clement Atlee’s post-war Labour government. It tells us that by the beginning of the Eighties 42 percent of the population lived in social housing while today that figure is less than eight percent, with 1.4 million people on waiting lists for council homes. It goes on to point out how Margaret Thatcher’s hugely popular policy of offering the right to buy council properties was really the start of the rot. Very little of that money fed back into building new social housing. The body of the film then utilises the examples of multiple estates and high-rise properties across Britain that have been systematically run down through lack of investment, then bought out by private investors.
Among the notable villains are Tory-“advising” estate agent giants Savills, with their transparently disgraceful plan to remove the tenants of the successful, albeit rundown, Cressingham Gardens Estate near Brixton. The residents have got together and fought, all but proving on paper, with evidence, that demolishing their homes would destroy a 40-year-old community, benefitting no one but rich people trying to make themselves richer. It's a particularly callous and ruthless version of gentrification. An elderly female resident, very definitely someone’s gran, proclaims, near tears, “To the last breath of my body, I will fight them.” It’s difficult to fathom a reason, unless unscrupulous money-suckling wealth accumulation has suddenly become morally viable, how anyone could possibly side against her. Dispossession is rich in such information, riling the viewer up with a sense of righteous fury.
Sng was responsible for the 2015 documentary Invisible Britain, about the career and politics of laptop punk-poets Sleaford Mods. Dispossession could do with some of that film’s fire and energy for, while it’s an important polemic, it would be better suited as a late-evening BBC Four programme rather than a DVD on the commercial market. Nevertheless, Sng succeeds in laying out his shocking information in a clear and erudite fashion, making this an essential watch for those interested in understanding how their country, their very birthright, is being sold out from under them.
The only extra material on the DVD is a couple of trailers.
Overleaf: Watch the trailer for Dispossession: The Great Social Housing Swindle
This is not a movie to see in the front row – intrusive close-ups, hand-held camerawork, colour saturated night shots and a relentless synthesiser score all conspire to make Good Time a wild ride. An unrecognisable Robert Pattinson plays Connie Nikas, a nervy con artist who enlists his intellectually disabled brother Nick in a bank robbery. The heist goes horribly wrong and the camera clings to the brothers and their nightmarish fate over the next 24 hours. Directed by real-life brothers Josh and Benny Safdie (the latter also plays Nick), Good Time sometimes plays like an extended homage to the early films of Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann and Abel Ferrara.
There’s a touch too of Dog Day Afternoon, particularly in the role of Nick. I’m always wary when able actors "play crip": it’s tantamount to blackface and shouldn’t be necessary when there are plenty of talented disabled performers. But in this case the amount of violence and degradation inflicted on the character of Nick would make it hard for a director to ask an actor with intellectual disabilities to endure without accusations of exploitation.
Casting major actors like Robert Pattinson and Jennifer Jason Leigh as his train-wreck girlfriend is a significant step up from the Safdies’ previous film. Heaven Knows What (2014) featured unknown non-professionals as actors playing versions of themselves, homeless heroin addicts trying to get their next fix. Buddy Duress (pictured above) was one of the Safdies' street discoveries and he gets a key role in Good Time.
Having done time himself, Duress is wholly convincing as the chaotic Ray, another desperate chancer caught up in Connie’s machinations. Ray has had his face bashed up in a drug deal gone wrong; he looks like a Francis Bacon portrait made flesh. There’s a cameo too from Barkhad Abdi (Oscar-nominated for Captain Phillips) that obliquely highlights the institutional racism of the NYPD.
But it’s getting a big star like Robert Pattinson and giving him a dark, meaty role that has amply paid off here. By this point, he's well and truly escaped from the languid vampire of the Twilight films. Connie is a superbly ambiguous character. Is he just an opportunistic thug duping everyone around him, or is he genuinely protective of his disabled brother? Good Time would make an interesting double bill with Rain Man, another tale of brotherly exploitation with a major star choosing to play against type. But unlike Rain Man, there’s very little moral redemption in the Safdies’ nightmarish vision especially in the third act, which includes the ruthless manipulation of an underage girl (Talia Webster, pictured above with Pattinson). All neon and nastiness, Good Time is both exhausting and exhilarating.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Good Time
The Viennale is one of the best film festivals in the world and an indispensable part of Vienna’s cultural life. Yet this year’s edition was launched amid trying times.