If you’ve ever had an argument with a neighbour, watch Under the Tree and take notes. This mesmerising story of a dispute over a tree blocking the sun in a next-door garden is based, says Icelandic director Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurðsson, on an actual domestic conflict, though surely one with less cataclysmic consequences.
Dallas writer-director Yen Tan has brought 1985 back to stylistic basics, and the resulting resolute lack of adornment enhances his film’s concentration on a story that achieves indisputably powerful, and notably reserved emotion. Independent cinema through and through, it’s economical in every sense and thrives on excellent all-round performances.
Tan’s drama of family relations, set at the moment when the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic was gradually becoming clear to Middle America, takes us back three decades, and there’s a similar feel to the visual style that he and his cinematographer (and producer) HutcH have chosen. They filmed in black-and-white Super 16, which seems to amplify contrasts, heightening darkness and often draining light – there’s a certain graininess, too – that surely consciously plays with the idea of home movies.
Secrets (and half-lies) are never quite what they seem here
Which is appropriate for this narrative, given that protagonist Adrian (Cory Michael Smith) is coming back to his Fort Worth, Texas home for Christmas after three years away in New York. He clearly took the first chance he had to get out of there and head for the big city, drawn by its freedoms of attitude and behaviour. The resulting separation has become much more than just geographic – even though it’s been a long absence, by any standards – and we sense that he’s moved on in every way from the suburban, Bible Belt world from which he started.
There’s certainly a tense distance with his father (Michael Chiklis), when he meets him at the airport, the older man’s down-to-earth quality a contrast to Adrian’s city style: he’s also clearly the stronger force for religion in the family, that security of belief an anchor in a life that, we learn later, included service in Vietnam. Mother Eileen (Virginia Madsen, giving a beautiful performance) compensates for any such paternal chill with an almost anxious affection, while younger brother Andrew (Aidan Langford), barely a teenager, clearly harbours resentment at how his elder sibling disappeared from his life. The only genuinely uncomplicated reunion awaiting Adrian is with the family’s big old German Shepherd.
The reticence here isn’t only because Adrian hasn’t come out to his parents, which makes for uneasy questions about his New York roommates, as well as a re-encounter with a past girlfriend (Jamie Chung) that reaches through the pain and awkwardness to achieve some welcome catharsis. There’s an anxiety about his health, too, with his mother’s concerns about how he’s lost weight, and the stomach flu that is wearing him down: Tan’s story certainly takes its time with its reveals, and his very chaste film gives a glimpse of Adrian's other world only in a brief final moment.
But though a thread of tragedy spins itself through 1985, there’s also a lot of warmth, as well as some lovely humour, to balance that, and a sense that returning home to a world that you have left behind inevitably brings its incongruities. One scene has a high-school contemporary of Adrian’s apologising for how he’d treated him in the past: it’s both agonisingly awkward and redeemingly well-intentioned. This is certainly no return visit of accusation or a demand for recompense; instead there’s a strong sense of paradoxical love, heightened by a sense that it’s in all probability the last time.
The humour works particularly well within the family framework. A shared love of Madonna has Adrian rebonding with his brother, whose cassette collection has been purged on the instructions of the local pastor, as does his sense that the boy is growing up no less of an outsider than he has become himself. There’s a marvellous scene of bonding with his mother, which has her revealing her own dark secret – for these parts, at least: that she hadn’t voted for Reagan in the ‘84 elections. But secrets (and half-lies) are never quite what they seem here, something Tan hauntingly foregrounds in late revelations. They are all the more powerful for being made practically sotto voce, creating a sense of almost unbearablly fragile tenderness.
Tan developed 1985 from the short film of the same name that he made two years ago, which comes as an extra on the forthcoming DVD/Blu-ray dual format release, together with an audio commentary from the director Yen Tan and his DP HutcH.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for 1985
Very few could have predicted Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg becoming a cultural icon, least of all herself. A quiet, studious, first-generation American girl who broke down boundaries, not with force, but with a reasoned reproach and a calm demeanour. From being one of the first women at Harvard Law School to sitting on the highest court in the land, her achievements always shouted louder than she did.
This is a love that begins sweetly, turns terrible, and is told with unflinching directness. Directed by Catherine Corsini, An Impossible Love is based on a novel by Christine Angot (known in France, and increasingly elsewhere, for her powerful autobiographical fiction), which is in turn based on Angot’s own troubling early life and family experiences.
Postcards from London is a surprise. You will certainly come away from Steve McLean’s highly stylised film with a new concept of what being an “art lover” can involve, while his subject matter is considerably more specialised, not least in the sexual sense, than its seemingly innocent title might suggest. Mischievously self-conscious in tone, its niche approach to certain established themes – principally gay culture and art history – leavens any pretension with generous humour.
Harris Dickinson plays Jim, an 18-year-old naif (pictured below) who leaves behind the restrictions of his Essex home life – defined equally by parental admonishments and unnaturally confining walls, it’s a literally enclosed world – for the bright lights of the city, Soho in particular. Where he quickly discovers, Whittington-like, that the streets are not paved with gold, though his striking good looks suggest career prospects lie in a familiar direction. But just as Postcards was shot in its entirety in studios rather than on the much-trodden grimy streets of the neighbourhood concerned – Annika Summerson’s cinematography fully relishes the lighting and colouring opportunities that such an approach allows – the experience that Jim comes to offer is rather more aesthetic than sexual.
He becomes a member of high-class escort club The Raconteurs, which specialises in post-coital cultural conversation that involves a different kind of boning up to the usual one. The fact that he looks like a Caravaggio model makes history of art Jim’s natural field, and his beauty is soon conquering Soho, though somewhat parodically: the one encounter we witness involves some high-comedy, practically Carry On bathos, involving an elderly and portly CofE gent with a fixation on ancient history shooting rubber-tipped arrows at Jim, who’s modelling for St Sebastian (the real transgression is their smoking indoors). From that it’s a short skip to his becoming a muse for Max, a Soho artist of a definite vintage who’s a cross between Francis Bacon – for his sexuality; Bacon’s lover George Dyer is liberally referenced – and Lucian Freud, for the almost obsessive demands an artist can make on his sitters.
But Jim’s artistic affinities run still deeper: he’s so sensitive to a good painting that he falls into a swoon when he sees one, becoming literally caught up, via dream sequences, in its creation. That makes for some lovely behind-the-canvas scenes where he's modelling for Caravaggio (main picture), an experience of some risk given the world that painter inhabited; played by Ben Cura, he’s a fiery character, succinctly summed up by Jim as “definitely a nutter”. That’s just the kind of down-to-earth touch that McLean’s script captures winningly: Jim’s specialisation in the Baroque is tartly deflated by his pronouncing it “bar-oak”.
Dickinson's bluff humour resonates with the visual stylistics that surround him
His condition is duly diagnosed as Stendhal syndrome: caused by high-concentration exposure to artistic beauties, that’s drawn from real life too (and rather in the news lately, Florence as its epicentre). A late plot strand sees Jim’s unexpected ability exploited in new ways, given that he can now effectively authenticate a work of art – faced with a fake, he’s left cold. Though that’s nicely mined for some satire at the pretensions of the art world, it’s an element left slightly high-and-dry at the end of a distinctly picaresque narrative line (“plot” would probably be an overstatement).
Nevertheless it articulates a distinction that's at the heart of Postcards from London: between loving art, in an almost old-fashioned sense – as The Raconteurs do, and as Jim does, corporeally, when he’s absorbed into it – and restricting it to the realm of commerce. In that sense, McLean – and his collaborators, Sally King (art direction) and Ollie Tiong (production design), every bit as much – is firmly in the former camp. It’s there in the film’s affectionate homage to the Colony Room world of Bacon and Freud (with a nod there, surely, to John Maybury’s Love Is the Devil), as well as a cinematic line that takes in Fassbinder (hints of Querelle) and a very generous dose of Derek Jarman – the only influence not, I think, mentioned here by name – from Sebastiane through to Caravaggio.
They have found a worthy inheritor in McLean, whose command of irony prevents Postcards from taking itself too seriously (arguably, unlike some of those progenitors). It’s certainly a departure for Harris Dickinson after the agonised Brooklyn teenager that he played in 2017’s Beach Rats, and his bluff humour here resonates very nicely with the over-the-top visual stylistics that surround him. Beguiling.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Postcards from London
The director of this deeply charming debut feature is the Korean-American film critic who writes under the pseudonym Kogonada; one of his principle interests over the years has been the great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, and there’s something of the same considered emotional restraint of feeling in Columbus, which takes its title from the Indiana location where its slight action is set.
The small Midwestern town turns out to boast – or rather not, since it seems to remain rather little known – a remarkable selection of contemporary architecture, buildings commissioned over the years by enlightened patrons from major industry figures such as IM Pei and Richard Meier, Eero Saarinen and Myron Goldsmith. It looks like something of a paradise of modernism, the sheer pleasure of the shapes all the more striking for the quiet and green location in which they are set.
Subtlety is supreme, as is restraint of pace
If ever you felt that buildings could become characters in a film, that is true in Columbus, where they act almost as a sounding-board for emotions that develop, in the quietest possible way, between its two main protagonists (both have their own connections to architecture). Twenty-something graduate Casey (played beautifully by Haley Lu Richardson) has absorbed the visual experiences that her world offers, and is biding time working as a librarian, reluctant to leave her vulnerable mother, who is recovering from addiction. Any realisation that her world lies beyond the borders of her small town is temporarily soothed by a closeness – but so far, no more – with her fellow librarian Dave (Rory Culkin, sweet, the family allegiances very evident in that face).
Fate brings her together with Jin (John Cho), newly arrived in Columbus after his famous architect father, who was in town to deliver a lecture, collapses with a stroke: they meet (pictured below) between the library where she works, and the guesthouse where he is staying in the room that had been booked for his father (there's something strange in his inhabiting another’s space). His only other company is the older man’s companion/amanuensis Eleanor (Parker Posey, how good to see her back on screen), but while she will eventually move on, the rituals of Korean society suggest that he should remain with his father almost indefinitely, although their relationship in life had clearly been distant.
In terms of what happens, that’s about it… Casey is also training as a tour guide, so it’s natural for her to show Jin around; at first there’s a quiet distance between these two loners, both preoccupied by their parental bonds, and any sense of growing intimacy comes slowly. It is principally unspoken: Columbus is a wonderful film for its treatment of silence, the absences and presences of words somehow mirroring the forms that architecture defines in space.
Subtlety is supreme, as is restraint of pace: he proves that what may not keep our attention can nevertheless maintain our interest. Elisha Christian’s restrained cinematography is perfect in drawing out the delights of the spatial world through which these characters move, as does the ambient electronica of Nashville band Hammock.
The only extra here is a short booklet interview with the director (taken by Jason Wood), but Kogonada’s sparse words convey rather a lot: for instance, when he talks of how Columbus the town offered “magnificent buildings [that] exist within the context of everyday life, made ordinary in their everydayness”. Or how, partly in its balance formalism and humanity, he finds Ozu’s work helps him in “being modern in this world without losing my soul”. An enticing debut, one that stays with you, growing incrementally, after viewing.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Columbus
Like Ken Loach and the Dardennes brothers, Laurent Cantet is a filmmaker with a keen interest in social issues and themes, often using non-professional actors and a naturalistic approach, but perfectly willing to inject a little plot contrivance to spice things up.
There’s a lovely feel of folk freedom to Carlos Marques-Marcet’s second film, which sees the Spanish writer-director setting up creative shop resoundingly in London – or rather, on the waters of the city’s canals that provide the backdrop for Anchor & Hope. It’s there right from the film’s opening song “Dirty Old Town”, in the Ewan MacColl original, rather than the better-known, and far grittier Pogues version: these London waterscapes are lived-in and naturalistic but they’re also photogenic (and beautifully shot by Dagmar Weaver-Madsen).
The gist of the action is nicely caught in MacColl’s line “Dreamed a dream by the old canal”, except that the film’s lead couple, Eva (Oona Chaplin) and Kat (Natalia Tena), are actually living on that waterway. Home is a canal boat, which they steer up and down the banks of North and East London with unhurried freedom: it’s the perfect backdrop for the world they have created for themselves, one defined by their independence – both have on-off jobs, but employment seems hardly a priority – and passion (an early scene makes clear that their sexual spark is very much alight). We never learn how or when they got together, except that Kat is Spanish, although that's a detail you would hardly notice (except in pondering whether it represents the sort of pre-Brexit idyll that we may shortly come to miss rather desperately?).
But the almost unspoken security of their relationship will be tested, a process indirectly set off by the death of their cat, the kind of seemingly unlikely association that actually rings very true to life here. The feline funeral, complete with Buddhist rites administered by Eva’s mother Germaine (played by Geraldine Chaplin, her mother in real life, who has a whale of a time with a role that is both memorably batty and attractively rich-hearted). The film’s opening chapter title may read “We can get another cat”, but Eva’s realisation that she wants her children (a subject so far apparently unmentioned between the two) to know her mother before it’s too late pushes a more immediate issue to the fore.
Kat is underwhelmed by the prospect of parenthood, even when the perfect candidate for surrogate father turns up in the shape of her visiting Barcelona friend Roger (David Verdaguer), a happy-go-lucky bohemian who takes to the idea, initially raised at a tequila-fuelled get-together, with enthusiasm, and then a more unexpected degree of emotional commitment. Marques-Marcet and Jules Nurrish’s script enjoys its comedy – often of quite a loopy kind, into which Verdaguer fits especially well – but hits home when charting the fluctuations of feeling that engross the uneasily expectant trio.
The canal world offers a quietly revelatory pleasure in itself
The immediate reference of Anchor & Hope’s title may be the waterside pub where Kat works part-time, but its associations run deeper, surely alluding to the kinds of secure foundations that allow planning for the future (or not...). Does parenthood bring responsibilities that preclude the kind of impromptu lifestyle that the two women have so obviously enjoyed to date, based on the (relative) impermanence of their canal lifestyle? The film’s closing scenes, as well as its Spanish title Tierra firme, suggest that such ideas are somewhere in Marques-Marcet’s mind.
But his film wears any such seriousness lightly, delighting instead in the emotional dynamics of day-to-day life. (Didn’t Michael Winterbottom, many moons ago, use to explore somewhat similar territory?). Even when the temperature of the film’s bondings chillis, its seasonal setting seems to remain summer. The film's ending is left as fluid as the waters that flow through it – there's a degree of meandering, too, on the length front – while the canal world offers a quietly revelatory pleasure in itself (the Film Offices of the NE and E boroughs must be happy). Marques-Marcet keeps his soundtrack largely diagetic, its sparsity broken only by some lovely Molly Drake folk tunes that add a delicate melancholy. Anchor & Hope has much that charms, and it's good to find a film that treats viewers as grown-ups.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Anchor & Hope
Considering how the UK prides itself on having created the "Mother of Parliaments" and its citizens having once chopped off a king's head for thwarting its will, remarkably little is taught in our schools about one of the seminal events on the way to fully democratising this country: the Peterloo Massacre.