It’s shameful to admit it, but it’s perhaps rather surprising that a film about a fashion photographer and designer should end up being so profoundly moving and inspiring.
This is a heartbreaking week for women’s tennis. The death from cancer of Jana Novotna at only 49 evokes memories of one of Wimbledon’s more charming fairytales. Novotna was a lissome athlete who flunked what looked like her best shot at greatness, tossing away a third-set lead in the 1993 women’s final and then crumpling on the shoulder of the Duchess of Kent. Five years later she eventually became the oldest first-time champion. It would make a lovely Hollywood movie.
Instead this year’s second tennis film is Battle of the Sexes. Like Borg/McEnroe, it spirits us back to the 1970s, that implausible decade of wooden rackets, big hair and (ahem) unequal pay. The story is basically true: female champ Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) led a protest walk-out from a tournament circuit which offered much greater rewards to male players, set up a breakaway women’s tour, only to face a phallocratic broadside from left field when fiftysomething former pro Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell) started challenging the top women to a gender-themed play-off.
Riggs had a clown's genius for garish marketing and happily cast himself as male chauvinist pig in order to boost ticket sales. His showdown with King in a Texan jumbo-dome became a famous event which, in retrospect, looks like a sideshow with a slight absence of oomph. So to beef up the script Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty, Slumdog Millionaire) tells the parallel story of King’s discovery of her lesbianism and clandestine affair with Marilyn Barnett (Andrea Riseborough), who travels as the tour hairdresser.
Thus King is fighting a public battle but, because she’s married, she’s also involved in a private one. She's not the only one with marital troubles. Riggs is a compulsive hustler who sacrifices his own family life, and a comfortable marriage to his heiress wife Priscilla (Elisabeth Shue, who gets a tender speech in which she gives him the boot). In this telling what matters to Riggs is the buzz of chasing preposterous bets on court, taking on all-comers while tethered to dogs or goats or wearing flippers.
It’s a role which Carell inhabits with relentless gusto (although his racket play is atrocious). As King, the ever-adorable Emma Stone wears the wire-rimmed glasses and apes the loping walk, and convinces as a steely feminist with a vulnerable core. Her swing’s not bad either (though the big match is CGI’d to the hilt). Riseborough is lovely as a free spirit whose gaydar, in an intimately soft-focus salon scene, tells her Billie Jean is there for the taking.
The facts of the Billie Jean story have been fairly outrageously origamied out of shape, events dragged around, people placed where they weren’t. King’s Australian rival Margaret Court (Jessica McNamee) comes off very badly as a hatchet-faced queer-basher. This being a feelgood fist-pumping version of a complicated narrative, the ugly aftermath of King's love affair doesn’t make it into the what-happened-next blurbs. Instead Marilyn hastens to Billie Jean’s changing room before the big game to fix her hair, the way these things happen only in the movies.
If you accept that you’re being sold a simplified snapshot, Battle of the Sexes is a lot of fun. It has two directors – Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton (who made Little Miss Sunshine) – perhaps to prove that, somewhere on this project, the sexes really can collaborate as equals. Of course it's a necessarily rigged story from which no man emerges with much credit. It's hard to give two hoots for Riggs's private anguish. Billie Jean's walk-on husband Larry King (Austin Stowell) is a lantern-jawed dope. Tennis impresario Jack Kramer (Bill Pullman) may as well horns and a curly tail. Even foppish tennis couturier Ted Tinling (Alan Cumming, not quite the full ticket as an English toff) spouts feeble bullet-pointed bromides - “some day we will be free to be who we are” etc.
There’s an awful image of fellow pro Rosie Casals (Natalie Morales, terrific) talking to camera with a tall patronising commentator clamping his hand round the back of her neck as if she’s his chattel. And spot the briefest cameo for that famous Athena poster of the tennis girl hitching up her skirt to reveal nothing underneath. The bare-faced cheek of male chauvinism needed a damn good slap. This fantasy history administers it lightly, with wit and grace.
Overleaf: watch the trailer to Battle of the Sexes
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
While bird-lovers will certainly not be disappointed by Portuguese auteur João Pedro Rodrigues’ new film, the ambitions of The Ornithologist stretch considerably beyond such avine fascinations. Its opening title, “Whoever approaches the Spirit will feel its warmth, hence his heart will be lifted up to new heights,” ascribed to St Anthony of Padua, hints at a distinctly sacred element, and in fact Rodrigues’ film is (very) loosely based on the life of that saint, the patron both of the director’s native Lisbon and of the lost, another theme that becomes central to his film.
That is not, however, our first impression of the film’s protagonist Fernando (played by French actor Paul Hamy) as he methodically prepares for a day’s bird-watching in an isolated nature reserve, its remoteness defined by the unreliability of any mobile signal; Fernando ignores messages that come through from his presumed partner, who is concerned about his welfare and, in particular, whether he’s taking his medication. Instead he’s determined to enjoy his solitude in this stunningly beautiful landscape, canoeing down the river through high gorges, observing the impressive variety of birds that wheel overhead; his interests clearly go beyond those of the amateur, and he records his observations into a tape-recorder (ornithology was a passionate interest of the director in his youth).
But this absorption means that he fails to notice approaching rapids in the river, and the next thing we know his body is found by two Chinese girls who are hiking through the thick forest, obviously very lost indeed from their Santiago pilgrimage route. From here on the tone of Rodrigues’ film moves ineffably towards the bizarre and spiritually highly-strung: when Fernando wakes up next, he’s been trussed up with ropes, à la St Sebastian, by the pilgrims. Narrowly escaping that one, his attempts to find his way back to civilisation (whatever that might mean in such a context) seem doomed, every new encounter stranger than the last.
Climbing cliffs and negotiating the rocky river bank, he finds that the wreckage of his canoe has become a kind of shrine (main picture), and witnesses strange night-time rituals that hint at a pagan world. (Knowing that these are being conducted in Mirandese, Portugal’s rare minority language, and that the multi-coloured rag vestments are part of the careto ritual may not sufficiently alleviate the viewer’s sense of bafflement.) An unexpectedly sexual tryst ensues with a deaf-mute goatherd (Xelo Cagiao, pictured above with Hamy), turning suddenly violent in a manner that would certainly have intrigued Derek Jarman.
Though Rodrigues himself may not be a believer in any usual sense, there is certainly a sacred quality to the conclusion of his film, which sees the director himself step into the role of his protagonist
But it’s when, around the 100-minute mark, Fernando is pursued by bare-breasted horseback Amazon warriors speaking Latin that The Ornithologist finally loses any semblance of connection to the world as we traditionally know it. The observation delivered at one point here, "There are certain things we shoudn't try to understand", has rarely rung truer. Though Rodrigues himself may not be a believer in any usual sense, there is certainly a sacred quality to the conclusion of his film, which sees the director himself step into the role of his protagonist, as Fernando becomes known as Antonio: the change of name mirrors that of the life of St Anthony, and for those still keeping up there are other episodes from the life of the saint that are referenced, including his talking to the fish.
It’s certainly weird, and rather wonderful. A sublime coda takes the protagonists, Chinese pilgrims included, somewhere else altogether, that closure set to the magnificently secular anthem of Antonio Variacoes’ Canção de Engate; until that point the spare scoring has involved anxiously strangled string sounds from French cellist Séverine Ballon (development on The Ornithologist was slowed by Portugal’s financial crisis, and it became a coproduction with France). Cinematographer Rui Poças, known for his work with Miguel Gomes on Tabu and the wonderful Our Beloved Month of August, catches both the glories of the film's landscapes and the increasingly hallucinatory strangeness of its later action. (After all, we may wonder whether what we have been witnessing are psychotropic figments of Fernando’s imagination, brought on by his not taking his medication).
Rodrigues himself has described what he was aiming for in the film as a “Pasolini-type” Western, and in the sense that we follow an unusual journey that ends in a degree of enlightenment, it’s an allusion that is more helpful than confusing. The Ornithologist won Rodrigues the Best Director award at last year’s Locarno festival, and the film is quintessential festival fare: it certainly won’t win over all viewers – indeed, as a multiplex-emptier it would be unsurpassed – but for those who are persuaded, its eclectic fancy should exert an oblique fascination.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Ornithologist
It's not every day that an actor breaks your heart playing a character who surrenders his. But that's among the numerous achievements of Timothée Chalamet's knockout performance in Call Me By Your Name. Playing a culturally savvy and articulate 17-year-old American who comes of age sexually in sun-dappled northern Italy in 1983, Chalamet's work is a thing of wonder. As is the film, by turns ravishing and wrenching.
Television has paid its dues to the 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act - rather feebly, with some rotten acting, in Man in an Orange Shirt; brilliantly, with mostly superb performances, in the monologue sequence Queers, surely due a second series. Now it's the turn of one of our greatest novelists - no need to add the qualifying "on gay subjects" - to make even richer work than Queers of stimulating our imaginations by leaving us to fill in the gaps.
Director Jakob M Erwa's Centre of My World may be a coming-of-age story, but it’s definitely not a “coming out” one. Youthful hero Phil (Louis Hofmann) has barely reached the third sentence of his voiceover narration before he tells us he’s gay, and absolutely fine about it. There may be plenty of other emotional dysfunction in Phil’s world, but concerns about his own sexuality don’t feature.
It’s an encouraging perspective to start from, particularly when we remember that Erwa’s film is an adaptation of an acclaimed Young Adult novel by Andreas Steinhofel The Centre of the World (Die Mitte der Welt) that was published, and won prizes back at the end of the 1990s, when such assuredness about youthful gay identity might well have been considered the exception rather than the rule. There aren’t many external clues as to exactly when the director has set his film, though New Year fireworks with mention of the new millennium suggest we’re at about the same time that the source novel was published; our sense of the relative innocence of Phil’s world – or at least his place in it – is certainly accentuated by the absence of any of the later paraphernalia of adolescence such as phones or social media. 
Opening with Phil returning home from summer camp in France to discover that a storm has rather devastated the landscape of his small-town home, we sense that it isn’t only the trees that have been uprooted. His twin sister Dianne (Ada Philine Stappenbeck) has gone inexplicably distant, and something has clearly damaged her relationship with their free-spirit mother, Glass. That unusual name isn’t the only thing that makes Swiss actress Sabine Timoteo stand out, and rather fragile to boot: she has never let on to them who their father was, and appears catastrophically unable to keep a man in her life. She even has a ledger listing her past male involvements that has fascinated her children, particularly in their earlier life, of which we see quite a lot in rather overdone flashbacks to an almost parodically blond youth. They all live happily in a rambling country home that’s known, for reasons that aren't divulged, as “Visible”, which is certainly not what could be said about understanding what the family actually lives on, no hint of any daily grind apparent on their balmy horizons. (Pictured above: Louis Hofmann, Ada Philine Stappenbeck, Sabine Timoteo)
Despite such hurdles, Phil has grown into an attractively balanced – and just plain attractive, the youthful beauty quotient of the film, aimed at least partly at the teen market, being considerable – adolescent. His ease about his sexuality – it’s revealing how writing those words brings home how much, and for how long we have assumed, narrative-wise, that growing up gay is bound not to be easy – has been clearly been nurtured as well by the presence of a nicely grounded lesbian couple close to the family, who reliably step in when Glass is having one of her brittle moments.
Yet 'Centre of My World' finally deserves rather more than sarcasm
If that wasn’t supportive enough, his boon companion Kat (Svenja Jung) is clearly delighted she has a GBF with whom she can share bicycle rides (the innocence!) and school gossip. Of which last the newest instalment concerns the appearance of new kid-in-class Nicholas (Jannik Schumann), whose beauty is such, even by this film’s standards, that Erwa introduces him in swooning slow motion. (It is a device, it has to be said, of which the director is inordinately fond, just as his predilection for kaleidoscope-like image-collages is pronounced, too). Cue, we might assume, winsome longing on Phil’s part for this handsome, mysterious stranger…
Not a bit of it. The athletic Nicholas has barely done a couple of laps of the sports track before the two are making out in the shower (they aren’t strangers, in fact, having experienced a shared youth memory which gets rammed home by Erwa’s resorting to that old chestnut, “significant childhood object”). Support from the lesbians comes not only in listening to Phil’s “Is he the one?” musings, but in lending their summer cottage for assignations that look as idyllic in a tasteful soft porn sort of way as the flowers that blossom around the place.
For Phil, however, first love is a bloom bound to come with thorns. A whole range of denouements are due that variously tie up (or not) issues both in the immediate present and left hanging from that odd childhood past. Some of them inevitably bring pain, which we believe rather completely when it comes to Phil and his romantic upset, rather less so with some of the plot gimmicks lobbed at various other players. Yet Centre of My World finally deserves rather more than sarcasm. It may over-employ visual and other forms of gimmickry, and has a saccharine quality that is surely not knowing, but the film’s heart is in the right place. Its final scene, as Phil moves away from the world in which his life began, asserts just how much he has truly come of age – and that his journey has been a real one.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Centre of My World
There are many outstanding things in writer-director Francis Lee’s remarkable first feature, and prime among them is the sense that nature herself has a distinct presence in the story. It brings home how rarely we see life on the land depicted in British cinema with any credibility. God's Own Country is a gloriously naturalistic depiction of the harsh life of farming, of an existence based on close connection to animals and to the earth, set in the Yorkshire countryside in which the director grew up. For a comparable sense of connection to the rural environment, and of the sheer back-breaking work that comes with that link, we have to look elsewhere – to Zola perhaps, or Italian neorealism.
Closer to home there’s much in God's Own Country that resonates with DH Lawrence, his sense of the primal rhythms of life and death, and the way in which the emotions of these working lives are often expressed with a minimum of language. Lawrence has a poem titled “Love on the Farm”, which could work as an alternative title for Lee’s film – except that love is as far from the mind of its main character, twentysomething Johnny Saxby (played by Josh O'Connor), when we first encounter him as anything could be. In an early scene his grandmother catches his character perfectly when she calls him a “mardy arse”, local vernacular for his being moodily withdrawn (it was a nickname that Lawrence was called at school).
The sense of change feels somehow primal
It’s a world in which communication, particularly within the family, is virtually monosyllabic: the first words we hear Johnny speak, some minutes into the film, he addresses to a heifer, and he’s just had his hand inside her to check on her calf (we see a lot of hands exploring animals’ orifices in God's Own Country: Lee made his actors learn such tasks for themselves, no hand doubles here). With his father Martin (Ian Hart) in poor health, Johnny carries the responsibility for the farm on his shoulders, and there’s little else in his life to give it meaning. The fact that he’s gay isn’t an issue in itself – though it’s not spoken of at home – but sex has the same purely physical dimension as the drink he stupefies himself with at the pub every night. When he takes a cow to market, he has a cold fuck with a man who’s obviously an acquaintance, but the idea of continuing any human contact after the act is completed is alien to him.
Johnny’s world is a lonely one: his mother disappeared south at some stage in the past, unable to deal with the isolation and hardship of the farm. Grandmother Deidre (Gemma Jones, playing well beyond her accustomed range) has a sort of scolding affection for him, but she’s more than reserved with her emotions. A childhood friend has come back home for her university holidays – she notices how Johnny has changed, no longer “funny, like you used to be” – and suggests they have a night out in Bradford. When Johnny mentions the idea to his dad, the latter looks at him like he was talking about the moon.
All of which makes the arrival of an outsider an unwelcome disruption. Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu) has come from Romania to help for a few weeks with the lambing – he was the only applicant for the job – and Johnny’s hostility is immediate as he taunts him as a “gyppo”. They are going up to the higher pastures for the lambing, to sleep in a ruined hut and subsist, it seems, entirely on pot noodles. Then up there, when least expected, fate stumbles in: in this stark isolation the hostility between the two men turns into something else, Johnny’s anger giving way to tussling, and that into physical contact. At first they fight in the mud, rutting like animals, before a deeper contact slowly grows between them. They may still guy one another, but their words – “freak”, “faggot” – are no longer insults, rather signifiers of an new, joshing intimacy.
Lee convinces us of this changing dynamic with absolute filmic subtlety. There’s a sense that the bleak beauty of their surroundings, to which Gheorghe is receptive, has started to infect Johnny too, as does the sheer gentleness of the outsider. We see the Romanian bring the runt of a litter back to life and then, in a truly beautiful scene, coat it in the pelt of a dead lamb so that the mother sheep will allow it to suckle.
All of this is conveyed with such tenderness, expressed far more through images than in the very spare words of Lee’s script (his minimal use of music, principally tracks by A Winged Victory for the Sullen, is also all the more powerful for its sparseness). The sense of change feels somehow primal: simply, the two men come down from the hills different people. Johnny has started to feel things that he never knew he could, while for Gheorghe – everything we hear about his back story and homeland is unremittingly pessimistic, “My country is dead” – the possibility of settling, rather than wandering may have become real.
For these two who have felt so out of place in their different worlds, the chance to create a home has suddenly appeared, but Lee’s closing reel will test everything. Johnny, although capable of being surprised by joy, remains his own worst enemy: Josh O'Connor’s face has a remarkable, somehow lopsided vulnerability that conveys all that, and more. In these troubled days of Brexit, it’s salutary to find an outsider portrayed with such total respect. However he may have acquired it – most likely, we guess, though the school of hard knocks – Gheorghe has a self-awareness, and a self-sufficiency, that is both beyond his own years, and aeons beyond Johnny's.
Cinematographer Joshua James Richards portrays these landscapes, these faces with a subtle, surprise beauty that matches Lee’s pacing of his emotional narrative. It’s somehow cyclical, how from the barren earth of winter a new harvest will come forth; over the film’s closing credits we see just that, home-movie archive scenes of harvests past. There’s no praising God's Own Country too highly. Francis Lee may have come out of nowhere, but if we see another film as good this year, we will be lucky.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for God's Own Country
