DVD: Anchor & Hope

★★★★ DVD: ANCHOR & HOPE Dilemmas of love, responsibility on London's canals

Dilemmas of love, responsibility make for bearable lightness of being on London's canals

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?).

Anchor and HopeBut 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

DVD: Reinventing Marvin

Moving from raw to mannered, partial Edouard Louis adaptation only partly convinces

You have to turn to the brief interview with director Anne Fontaine that is the sole extra on this DVD release to discover the real source of her film Reinventing Marvin. Though Fontaine and Pierre Trividic’s screenplay is credited as original, it draws heavily – Fontaine calls it a “free interpretation” – on Edouard Louis’s bestselling 2014 autobiographical novel The End of Eddy, which told the story of his growing up in the French provinces in an environment profoundly hostile to his emerging gay identity.

It’s an undeniably powerful picture of a youthful outsider, one for whom lack of understanding at home, in an unsympathetic working-class family, proved almost as cruel as the school bullying that his sexuality evoked. But Louis offered no clue as to how he came to escape a world that could so easily have trapped him, no suggestion of the process – and, crucially, who helped along the way – that saw him evolve into who he is today, with a confidence that was able to overcome such beginnings. In other words, just how the “reinvention” alluded to in the film’s title actually took place.Reinventing MarvinFontaine has filled in that gap by positing an imagined concept that the Louis figure, here named Marvin Bijou – the awkwardness of that surname, translated as “Jewels”, seems horribly ironic for a context that is anything but sparkling – found his path out of that desolate early milieu through theatre. Early encouragement from a sympathetic schoolteacher is fortuitously followed by engagement with an intuitive stage director-coach, who draws Marvin both out of himself and into the Parisian gay scene. Never entirely losing his shyness, his involvement in that culture grows, encouraged by a largely benevolent sugar daddy figure who moves in circles of which the youth could once barely have dreamed.

With the film’s action framed by the young man’s development of his life story into a stage script, this unlikely dream narrative is completed by acquaintance with Isabelle Huppert, no less, who plays herself (pictured above, Huppert with Finnegan Oldfield). What else remains but to put on a show with her that will bring him fame, as well as a chance to revisit, and in some way make peace with, those childhood roots? There’s barely a cliché of the well-trodden “self-realisation through art” formula left untouched, with the gradual childhood absorption of the young Marvin (an absolutely winning performance from Jules Porier, main picture) in the challenges of his chosen artistic path familiar from the likes of Billy Elliot.

Huppert plays beneficent with her customary aplomb

But Fontaine's story seems somehow to predicate the world of her grown-up protagonist; he later changes his name to Martin, adopting the surname of that first supportive teacher, too. Finnegan Oldfield is undeniably attractive in that role, but aesthetic engagement comes to dominate over emotional involvement as the story progresses. Fontaine talks of needing to find actors who could “fit with each other”, and there is indeed an almost uncanny echo between the shape of their faces, especially evident in a shyness around the mouth, of the two; she cast Oldfield first, but the essential presence here is surely Porier, who brings an absolute, open-eyed freshness – one that can be almost agonising to witness – to the world that he negotiates with such difficulty. Reinventing Marvin hits home when dealing with the pain and awkwardness of its early scenes, far more than the mannered direction, rather overstretched at 115 minutes, which it takes later en route to a rather portentous finale.

It may be a story about a kind of redemption, but those childhood scenes remain more memorable, albeit in an almost gruesome way, than anything that follows. Gregory Gadebois is tremendous as Marvin’s indolent, overweight father, who oversees his hapless prolo household with alcoholic brusquerie, a characterisation that leaves us to question the film’s suggested resolutions. Vincent Macaigne, attractively sympathetic as the youth's drama teacher Abel, is never more convincing than when he’s disabusing his moping protégé about the lasting interest of his incarnation as “tormented working-class fag”. Huppert plays beneficent with her customary aplomb, even as we wonder whether she would be moving in these circles in the first place.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Reinventing Marvin

Bohemian Rhapsody review – all surface, no soul

GOLDEN GLOBE SHOCKER Bohemian Rhapsody defies the critics and wins Best Motion Picture - Drama

Malek’s star performance fails to save a clichéd script and characterless direction

If a Queen biopic called for drama, scandal and outrage, then Bohemian Rhapsody spent its fill in production. Several Freddies had been and gone, rumours swirling about meddling band members, and then director Bryan Singer’s assault accusations caught up with him. In a way, it’s impressive the film came out so coherent.

Company, Gielgud Theatre review - here's to a sensational musical rebirth

★★★★★ COMPANY, GIELGUD THEATRE A sensational musical rebirth

Marianne Elliott's gender-swapped Sondheim is a revelation

The most thrilling revivals interrogate a classic work, while revealing its fundamental soul anew. Marianne Elliott’s female-led, 21st-century take on George Furth and Stephen Sondheim’s 1970 musical comedy Company makes a bold, inventive statement, but somehow also suggests this is how the piece was always meant to be. 

The Inheritance, Noël Coward Theatre review - tangled knot of gay fairy-tale and reality

★★★★ THE INHERITANCE West End transfer for Stephen Daldry's production of baggy epic

A virtuoso ensemble justifies this youthful baggy monster's West End transfer

Its roots are in an emotional truth: Matthew Lopez saw the film, then read the book, of Howards End when he was 15 and 11 years later came across Maurice. He joined the dots between an apparent period-piece offering timeless wisdom about the human condition and the gayness he found he had in common with EM Forster.

DVD: A Moment in the Reeds

★★★★ DVD: A MOMENT IN THE REEDS Intimate gay-themed Finnish indie drama on belonging

Intimate gay-themed Finnish indie drama muses on what it means to belong

Mikko Makela’s debut feature is as sheerly concentrated a piece of filmmaking as you can imagine. The Finnish director – previously better known as an actor – manages his principle cast of three immaculately as they play out a powerful drama that takes in family relationships, sexuality and the immigrant experience, and the sense of belonging (or not) that the last two issues generate.

There’s another strong presence here, too, namely the lakeside location in which, as its title hints, A Moment in the Reeds is set; it has the kind of isolated, back-to-nature beauty that is so appealing on long summer days (and would be unimaginable in winter). The film's loose story revolves around the renovation of a summerhouse that Juoko (Mikka Melender) is preparing to sell; his son Leevi (Janne Puustinen) has come home from his graduate studies in Paris to help, though his efforts are distracted and half-hearted. Leevi's slight blond beauty somehow accentuates his callowness and a sense that he has lost his connection with the place, while his conflicted (if largely unspoken) interaction with his father revolves around his homosexuality and his dead mother, whose relationship with Juoko had clearly been strained.

A Moment in the ReedsThe fact that Leevi is gay is clearly no secret, but it remains a subject best avoided: indeed, what connection can there really be between this son, who is writing a thesis on “gender performativity”, and his gruff father who has probably never travelled far from the place of his birth and retains the prejudices of an older world? Sensing that his son may not prove much of a help with the renovation, Juoko has hired a handyman from an agency, and there’s considerable, if uneasy comedy when Tareq (Boodi Kabbani) turns up. A refugee from Syria who has claimed asylum, he is taking odd jobs until his command of the language allows him to continue in his profession as an architect (such skills only help with the task in hand).  

That lack of linguistic connection means that Leevi has to act as translator, while he clear also enjoys his father’s discomfort at the fact that so obvious an outsider has turned up. It’s not that Juoko is hostile – in fact, his efforts to communicate in broken English seem friendly enough – rather that the unfamiliar disconcerts him; Leevi, meanwhile, is casual about the third man’s presence, not least because the latter is clearly more concerned with his work. It’s only when the older man is called away urgently and the two are left alone, that an unhurried closeness develops, as the Finn recalls earlier times he had spent in the place; later, their work finished for the day, the two unwind in the sauna.

Then, as they relax over beers in the gloaming, a sense of deeper connection arises, not least over anomalous shared details (both, in their very different ways, are effectively evading military service). Then, over a locking of glances, the acknowledgement of mutual attraction reveals itself, and a new closeness, one of wordless contact, sets in: as they gradually open up to one another, the two actors play their physical contact with real intimacy. Although the father reappears periodically, they are rather left to their own devices, and Makela captures beautifully their easy connection in some moody slow motion shots over landscapes.

We suspect that Makela’s original script was spare, its bones fleshed out through improvisation

It’s a film in which the principle of “less is more”, dictated at least in part, one assumes, by budgetary considerations, works beautifully. There’s barely any music – some does appear, but only well after the hour mark – though the soundtrack is rich in its sense of nature, bird song especially. Iikka Salminen’s often hand-held cinematography has a special eyes for faces, as well as compounding the sense of surrounding silence: his camera catches the nuances of emotion beautifully. A closing credit notes “additional dialogue by the cast”, and we suspect that Makela’s original script was spare, its bones fleshed out by its actors through improvisation over considerable and rewarding rehearsal.

A Moment in the Reeds has earned comparison with British director Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country, not least for its study of a gay relationship developing in rural isolation between outsider protagonists from very different worlds. Though both films excel in the closeness of their initially unlikely romances, Makela’s is notably different, not least in its giving voice to the refugee immigrant experience, as Kabbani’s character reveals something of what he went through in his crossing of Europe to reach this new country that he is now determined to make his home. (Kabanni, an openly gay Syrian actor, is himself an immigrant to Finland.)

Most of all, the Finnish film has a greater sadness, with its sense that, even when two outsiders come together, the chances of achieving happiness remain so fragile. Makela has delivered a truly sensitive piece of filmmaking – with his style already finely formed, it will be fascinating to see what he turns to next.   

Overleaf: watch the trailer for A Moment in the Reeds

DVD: Mario

Keeping the game straight: Swiss youth drama tells how football treats its gay players

Swiss director Marcel Gisler’s film tells a story that is hardly new – but neither, sadly, is it old, as in about a thing of the past. That professional football continues to be homophobic, a world in which it is virtually impossible for a star player to come out as gay while continuing to play at the top of the game, is no secret. Two decades on from the suicide of Justin Fashanu, the destructive consequences are all too well known; recent fictional reminders, such as John Donnelly’s The Pass (made into an accomplished film by Ben A Williams two years ago), suggest that little has changed.

Where that Russell Tovey-starrer concentrated its action into intense bursts, the more nuanced Mario takes time to develop (arguably, slightly too long) as it tells the story of Max Hubacher's title character, whose ascent towards a professional football career runs in parallel with his first love – and ne’er the twain can meet. The phlegmatic Mario is a rising star in the Under 21 team of YB Bern, with promotion in sight; he certainly lives for his football, even if he’s rather obviously playing out his father’s ambitions as much as his own.

The 'market value' of a player who’s been outed falls dramatically

When outsider Leon (Aaron Altaras) is brought into the team – Leon has only come from Germany, but in these Swiss ‘burbs the concept of “outsider” is exaggerated, while his good looks suggest a Mediterranean type – an element of rivalry kicks. Both play as forwards, a duplication that could complicate future prospects, but rather than stimulating rivalry Mario’s coach counsels him to “seek interaction”. The two duly end up sharing a flat, and few viewers will be surprised by how that interaction progresses.

Leon is certainly the more forward of the pair, while for the more gauche, even callow Mario it’s his first love. (There’s irony, or perhaps not, in the fact that Hubacher would be a shoo-in for anyone needing to cast a young Putin.) But such powerful feelings aren’t enough to make him disregard the certainty that the faintest rumour would wreck any future in the professional game. When the rumours do start circulating – no surprise there, given that this seems a rather vindictive, small-town world, with a locker-room atmosphere that’s heavier on vindictive jibes than eroticism – their moment of decision approaches remorselessly. Closing-reel developments catch the increasingly desperate and destructive deceptions required to maintain stadium image intact (fake WAGs by now long in mandatory tow). It’s not over-complicated in dramatic development, but the film plays out with telling power, backed by performances from its two leads that do convince about their attachment.MarioWhat Gisler certainly captures is the hypocrisy behind the system itself. It takes Mario’s otherwise lugubrious coach to point out that club management not only has to be seen to be treating the issue with appropriate sensitivity, but that the “market value” of a player who’s been outed falls dramatically. In one of the extras here, “Breaking Taboos”, the director recalls how the president, now openly gay, of Hamburg St Pauli (the club features in the film, and like YB Bern clearly wasn't afraid of the association), used exactly that phrase to him.

Mario tells a sad story, one that leaves us to ponder just what makes football’s determination that such secrets be kept so categorical. It’s not management – which readily suggests help from therapists to players known to be gay – nor surely the majority of fans who have long moved on; "sponsors" get cited, while the press certainly sticks to old guns. Gisler concludes his commentary by hoping that the film will “keep discussion alive”, though he admits he remains in the pessimistic camp. Unlike his actor Altaras, whose optimism shines through: Mario needs to be shown in football youth training camps, he suggests. Sadly that’s not likely to be happening in this country, given that the film was given an 18 certificate for “strong sexual images, sex references”. Astounding: the BBFC really should get out more.  

Overleaf: watch the preview for Mario

The Miseducation of Cameron Post review - learning the right way

★★★★ THE MISEDUCATION OF CAMERON POST Learning the right way: Desiree Akhavan’s composed but shocking story of gay conversion

Desiree Akhavan’s composed but shocking story of gay conversion

This is Desiree Akhavan’s second film, following on from her rather ironically titled Appropriate Behaviour of 2014. That was a coming-out drama about a bisexual, Iranian-American woman, whose story closely reflected the director’s own – and Akhavan played its lead role, too. With The Miseducation of Cameron Post, she has widened her perspective considerably, and her new film, while surely retaining gay community admirers, will also speak, it must be hoped, to a considerably wider audience. On which note, mainstream name Chloë Grace Moretz’s presence in the title role, as well as the film's winning the Grand Jury prize at this year’s Sundance festival, can only help.

It’s to the director’s credit that Cameron Post is a film that plays down opportunities for obvious drama in favour of something much more considered, more reflective. Akhavan has made the story of her eponymous late-teenage heroine’s experience in a gay conversion therapy centre, a Church-led correction facility that aims to change participants’ sexual orientation, largely non-judgemental. We see Cameron’s lonely experience through her own eyes, and feel it with her, but blame, such as it is, is attached more to the abstract principles of blind religious dogma rather than (largely) to those directly involved in the process.The Miseducation of Cameron PostIt’s an adaption of Emily Danforth’s 2012 coming-of-age novel that told the story of a 12-year-girl who, after the death of her parents in an accident, is adopted into the evangelical Christian family of her aunt. The film has taken the final third or so of the book, from Cameron’s developing relationship with schoolmate Coley – their passionate embraces are interspersed with watching films like Priscilla, Queen of the Desert – through to their being discovered, by an accompanying “boyfriend” date, making out in the back of a car during the school Prom.

It’s a moment of sheer shock for Cameron, one which will turn her world upside down: until then she’s been a sports star, and the pervasive background religion has not obviously intruded into her life. Now it certainly does, though not with any fire-and-brimstone denunciation, rather sotto-voce words from pastor and family that see her sent off to God’s Promise, a rather particular educational establishment that’s set in the beautiful wilds of nature.

Sessions to “pray away the gay” take place alongside therapy that tries to establish childhood experiences that may have led to “SSA”, same-sex attraction, instincts, and thus “cure” it. (There are more curious – for British eyes, at least – manifestations of religion in everyday life here, such as the “Blessercize” TV channel, which brings God into the gym.) It’s overseen by the coldly concerned Dr Lydia Marsh (Jennifer Ehle), who established the place after “converting” her own brother, Reverend Rick (John Gallagher Jr). (Pictured above: John Gallagher with Chloë Grace Moretz)

'There’s no such thing as homosexuality,' the doctor insists at one point, 'Would you let drug addicts throw parades for themselves?'

The irony here, and about the only positive aspect of Cameron’s initial experience, is that for the first time in her life she can be open about herself, in the company of those who have been through similar experiences. There are distinctions between those attending, however, from anguished determination to clutch at any straight straw – however precarious such convictions of change may be – through to the more sagacious resignation adopted by the two new friends she makes, Jane Fonda (Sasha Lane, from Andrea Arnold’s American Honey) and Native American Adam Red Eagle (Forrest Goodluck); their bonding is encouraged by the weed that those two are clandestinely growing (and which, in a nicely gothic touch, Jane conceals in her artificial leg). There’s further irony in the fact that both had been living in their wider environments without family issues, in particular Adam, whose tribal identity as a third-gender, or “Winkte”, almost endorsed his sexuality; only when external circumstances – her mother marrying an evangelical, his father going into politics  – changed, were they sent away for reformation. (Pictured below: from letf, Chloë Grace Moretz, Sasha Lane, Forrest Goodluck)The Miseducation of Cameron PostThey’re all too aware that release back into the wider world will depend on the appearance of change rather than anything else. But their readiness to bide time in so laid-back a fashion doesn’t extend to all, however, as one searing late scene – with a stand-out role from Owen Campbell – reveals.

But this isn’t a lock-up environment, and good behaviour ameliorates some of the facility’s hardship, which principally involves isolatiion (following Danforth’s book, the film is set in 1993, so has no phones or internet). That’s a note that reveals some of the dramatic strands on which Akhavan has surely drawn: you can’t help thinking of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, for its associations both of confinement and concomitant absurdity, with Ehle’s character a loose variant of Nurse Ratched (she’s even referred to as a “Disney villain” at one point). “There’s no such thing as homosexuality,” the doctor insists at one point, “Would you let drug addicts throw parades for themselves?” Reverend Rick can’t match his sister’s unflinching certainties, however.

Akhavan has cited John Hughes as another point of reference, and as a teen movie Cameron Post was surely always going to adopt an attitude that bounced back against authority. It’s a coming-of-age drama, in which learning from new human contact plays a far greater role than any group therapy, made clearest when, in a late scene, Cameron can simply ask, “How is programming people to hate themselves not emotional abuse?”

The surface composure of Akhavan's film rather belies the director's emotiional engagement; she certainly leaves the question of what the future may hold for her heroine open. We can hope that Cameron will never allow herself to be persuaded away from what she has learned on her bleak journey. As well as that Akhavan’s film may reach some of the young viewers, in her homeland especially, for whom its story could prove essential.  

Overleaf: watch the preview for The Miseducation of Cameron Post

Edinburgh Festival 2018 reviews: La maladie de la mort / The End of Eddy

EDINBURGH FESTIVAL 2018 La maladie de la mort / The End of Eddy

Two striking explorations of sexual identity stop short of grabbing the emotions

 

La maladie de la mort ★★★  

Toxic masculinity in all its appalling variety is a hot topic across Edinburgh’s festivals this year – just check out Daughter at CanadaHub and even Ulster American at the Traverse for two particularly fine and shocking examinations.

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