Olivia Colman will in due course be appearing as Elizabeth II in The Crown, surely a role of a very different hue to her portrayal of Queen Anne in Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite (shown at LFF).
The story of French author and transgressor of social mores Colette has been told before on screen and in song, but this new film version (shown at London Film Festival) from director Wash Westmoreland not only zings with zeitgeisty relevance, but gives each of its stars, Keira Knightley and Dominic West, one of the meatiest roles of their respective careers.
Atmosphere definitely dominates over narrative in Lucrecia Martel’s fourth film – long delayed, Zama follows almost a decade on from her similarly opaque The Headless Woman – but the Argentinian director offers bracing consolation for some early longeurs in her depiction of a downtrodden functionary hero who is existentially trapped in a crazed colonial world.
Played by Mexican actor Daniel Giménez Cacho, Don Diego de Zama has been festering for years as a magistrate in a riverside hell-hole that must be one of the Spanish Empire’s most far-flung possessions (apparently Paraguay, though geographical location is as loosely defined here as is the 18th century historical setting). If his tricorn hat and crimson jacket must have initially suggested an element of louche elegance, the rot obviously takes its toll on those who remain too long in these parts. It’s manifested in a distracted lethargy, with energy expended between apparently meaningless bureaucratic tasks and desultory engagement within this enclosed would-be garrison of civilisation.
The chaos of 'Zama' seems to be everywhere, and outside time
Beyond it lies the world of the natives, who are presented more as clusters that respond with servile obedience to any random demand than as individuals, and the diversion of a liaison with a local woman has given Zama a mestizo child. But any attachment there is as empty as the lackadaisical (and bruisingly futile) flirtation he carries on with the wife of a senior official. “Europe is best remembered by those who were never there,” she advises, perceptively highlighting the vacuity of society’s rituals copied in a location in which they can only ever be irremediably alien.
Zama’s every petition for relocation – at some stage in the past he has even acquired a wife and children in Buenos Aires, but their existence is vrtually fabular – is met by absurdist rebuttals that evince the particularly Kafkaesque bureaucracy that rules this remote corner of empire. The casual dismissal with which his requests are treated is nothing, however, to the casual brutality that pervades the whole colonial enterprise, in which human ears, supposedly cut from the corpse of a local bandit, are treated as a gambling token. 
An adaptation of the 1956 novel by Antonio di Benedetto, the film’s sense of absurdist confinement in a meaningless world surely recalls the work of the Argentinian writer's contemporary Samuel Beckett, as well as his literary master, Dostovesky. The existential gesture of escape that Zama takes in the film’s final reel changes the visual tone of Martel’s world almost beyond recognition. From the dusty, claustrophobic brown hues that define the settlement, his bedraggled group of adventurers sets out on a sort of Heart of Darkness journey into a luscious wilderness, the deceptive beauties of which disguise dangers lurking both without and within.
Portuguese cinematographer Rui Pocas captures those closing landscapes as almost hallucinogenic in their wide vistas: they seem to shatter any colonial illusion that the European interloper can ever find a place here. Martel is a director for whom sound has always been as important as image – if not more so – and both dominate here over text. Her sound designer Guido Berenblum melds the insistent sounds of nature into an aural fabric of dislocation, made all the more abtruse and disorientating by snatches of human speech that seem to hang in the air, neither dialogue nor voice-over in any traditional form. It’s a crazed sensual tapestry that is completed by easy contemporary guitar duo melodies (from Los Indios Tabajaras) that only emphasise their beguiling anomaly. Martel may compel us to accompany her legion of the lost on their particular 18th century journey, but the chaos of Zama seems to be everywhere, and outside time. Oneirically intense, it’s auteur filmmaking at its most ambitious.
Overleaf: watch the preview for Zama
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.
It’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)
They’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
“To our enormous suffering!” There are many macabre vodka toasts, accompanied by some appropriately gruelling visuals, in A Gentle Creature, but that one surely best captures the beyond-nihilist mood of Sergei Loznitsa’s 2017 Cannes competition contender. It’s a film guaranteed to leave viewers – those who make it through to the end of its (somewhat overlong) 140-minute-plus run, that is – scrabbling to find words to describe what they have just seen. The likes of “visceral” or “phantasmagoric” somehow aren’t enough to catch the film’s mixture of horror and hallucination, both elements made all the more alarming for being embedded in a brutally concrete vision of Soviet-Russian reality.
Loznitsa knows the ex-Soviet world very well indeed and conveys its worst-dream qualities with pitiless stylistic precision. Born in Belarus, he trained as a scientist in Ukraine, then studied film in Moscow at the end of the 1990s, but has lived in Western Europe for close on two decades now. Whatever issues he has with the character of the country and/or its political regime(s), Russian nevertheless remains the working language (though he’s a master of silence, too) of his impressive oeuvre which now encompasses some 18 documentaries, as well as feature films like his debut My Joy (2010) and its follow-up, the WWII partisan drama In the Fog (2012); his latest, Donbass, about the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, played at Cannes this year.
It allows Loznitsa to build to a penultimate scene of unmatched, sickening cruelty
Appropriately he’s taken the title of A Gentle Creature – Une femme douce, in its French version: the film was made with a wide range of European backing – from Dostoevsky, though his script is actually only very loosely linked to that writer’s story of the same name (which was much more closely adapted by Robert Bresson in 1963). But Loznitsa is not chasing literal resemblance here, instead he’s wrung out the darkest drops from Dostoevsky’s 19th century nightmares (with a draught of Gogol, too), then strengthened them with a rich stylistic dose of Stalinist totalitarianism, and added an aftertaste of agonised post-Soviet anti-humanism that reeks of the blasted landscape of Putin’s present day. “In Russia, you are a stakeholder in hell,” he says succinctly in the booklet interview that accompanies this Blu-ray release.
Story is hardly the central element in an action that’s effectively a fabular chronicle of the misadventures of the film’s eponymous (and anonymous) heroine (Vasilina Makovetseva). Her sharply distinctive features betray little in reaction to the accumulating travails she encounters on a journey of tribulation, and that quality is more than matched by her forceful lack of words. It begins when her solitary provincial existence is disrupted when the parcel that she had sent to her husband in prison is returned without explanation, and she travels there to discover what has happened.
You could almost say that the film’s main presence is the prison itself, or rather the small surrounding town that lives off it parasitically (location filming, unsuited for Russia for obvious reasons, took place in Latvia, centred around just such an environment). It’s not just the sternly impenetrable building itself, or the reception windows (main picture) that offer visitors terse contact, but the whole human atmosphere, one in which “man is wolf”. From the ranks of exploiters and hanger-on prostitutes (pictured below), through the deceit of pretend-fixers and the cruelty of the police, right down to the hapless human rights activists and the big boss himself, it’s like a macabre game from which Loznitsa’s heroine – and we, the viewers, no less – can only hope to wake up.
Except it’s exactly that consolation which the film’s final 40 minutes, a kind of film-within-a-film dream sequence, denies us, presenting instead a highly stylised parodic riff on the rituals of Soviet society, a set piece with a high sense of theatre that contrasts abruptly with the grotesque confusion of what has come before. I’m not certain that it convinces completely, at least not for viewers for whom the original iconography isn’t immediately recognisable, but it allows Loznitsa to build to closing scenes of unmatched, sickening cruelty.
It’s an experience from which you may well want to flinch, but its cumulative power makes A Gentle Creature Loznitsa’s most substantial achievement to date, certainly in the scale of his vision. Whether the accompanying reduction in subtlety counts as a loss too far is another matter, as is whether this is a sheer too-wilful darkness (that distinctive Russian concept of chernukha) rather than anything more considered. More perversely, does the film’s total absorption in its strongly defined stylistics, its “performance” manner, even somehow qualify any immediate “message”?
But, as Lozntisa says at the beginning of a substantial July 2017 filmed interview that is the main extra here, the important thing is “to ask questions”, to disconcert. He’s revealing on a range of topics, including his collaborative approach to work with his regular crew, principal among whom is Romanian cinematographer Oleg Mutu (who certainly works across a broad, often painterly canvas here); there’s lively discussion of the interrelation between his documentary and fiction work, too. Rounding out this excellent Arrow Academy release is a video appreciation from film historian Peter Hames on Lozntisa’s career to date, together with a booklet essay by critic Jonathan Romney, and a trenchant print interview from the director that accompanied his Cannes premiere. Like the remarkable faces of his protagonists, A Gentle Creature is an unforgiving – and unforgiven – experience, and the sheer bravura of its achievement offers scant final consolation. Disconcert, Lozntisa certainly does.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for A Gentle Creature
Fifty years after the 1968 Soviet invasion that so brutally interrupted it, the Czech New Wave really is a gift that keeps on giving. It still astounds that such a sheer variety of cinema was created in so short a time – really just six or seven years, not even a decade – by such a range of talent. It’s a rich vein of film history, one that has been revealed in recent years in exemplary releases from distributor Second Run; if it left you with any concern, it was when this remarkable source might begin to dry up.
Not for a long time, if their latest is anything to go by, though it’s no less astonishing that Miloš Forman’s debut feature Black Peter (Cerný Petr) is being released on DVD in the UK only now. Forman died just four months ago, and it’s moving to watch his 1964 film, a triumph of humour and improvisation that combined a subtly subversive analysis of society with such “compassionate humanism” in relation to his characters (that last accolade comes from Ken Loach, an avowed disciple of Forman).
The store-detective’s responsibility towards shop-lifters is 'to educate customers in honesty'
You won’t find a better introduction to the context in which Forman was working at the time than the 30-minute interview Life As It Is: Miloš Forman on His Czech Films that comes as the main extra here. Filmed in New York in 2000 by Robert Fischer of German documentary company Fiction Factory, it’s part of a longer 115-minute film that takes Forman’s career through to the cusp of the new millennium (it was apparently only screened in full earlier this year and no doubt deserves to be seen as a whole, while further extracts will surely accompany future home entertainment releases). There’s such a wealth of detail (and some previously unseen footage), ranging from insights into the period in which Forman was becoming a film-maker, through to his working methods, including that distinctive combination of non-professional and trained actors that plays so brilliantly here.
He is especially revealing on what it meant to come of age in the post-Stalin years: a fantastic range of older cinema talent, banned from working in the field, was teaching at Prague’s celebrated FAMU film school, while Khrushchev’s call to give youth an opportunity (in his 1956 speech to the 20th Party Congress) surely worked in Forman’s favour, as well as that of his contemporaries. (The New Wave directors worked in such different directions that rivalry didn’t become a factor, he says; rather they stayed together as a front.)
His cinematic inspiration came from both Italian neo-realism (de Sica, especially) and the vérité of the French New Wave, but fuelling both was his reaction against the meaningless propaganda-type films of the previous decade with their Socialist Realist portrayals of “life as it should be”. Open rebellion may have still been impossible in the early Sixties, but comedy, a genre relatively unpoliced by the cultural authorities, allowed for such suggestive irreverence.
Black Peter shares much with Forman’s following film, the better-known A Blonde in Love from 1965, particularly in its central dance-floor scene that catches the sheer awkwardness of youth, the agonies of teenage tribulation. But the central character here is male, 16-year-old Peter (Ladislav Jakim), aimlessly (and hopelessly, it has to be said) beginning his first job, as a store-detective. Spying and surveillance are recurring themes, articulating wider issues about this socialist society, that are sweetened by euphemism, the store-detective’s responsibility towards shop-lifters being “to educate customers in honesty”.
But Peter is far more concerned with what's happening away from the store, not least life at home with his parents: the stern Jan Vostrčil is a magnificent presence as his father. (Pictured above left: Vostrčil, a nonpareil non-professional, was in real life a brass-band conductor, persuaded by Forman and his assistant director, Ivan Passer, to take the role only days before filming started; he would work with both again). Then there’s romantic interest Pavla (Pavla Martínková-Novotná), who’s as composed and confident as Peter is awkward and hapless (main picture).
Their tentative courtship may be the main subject of the long dance scene, but so much else is going on as well, not least the antics of the initially assertive, latterly tipsy young brick-layer Čenda (pictured right, right: Vladimír Pucholt, the main professional actor in the film). Pucholt’s hilarious exchange with Peter on the correct intonation for pronouncing the Czech word for “hello” is a show-stealer, but the more serious final scene, which he plays alongside Jakim and Vostrčil, is equally striking.
The film is presented from a brand new 4K restoration which strived to come as close as possible to how Czech viewers would have seen the film at the time. As close to “guerrilla filmmaking” as the communist system could have allowed, Black Peter was made on a minimal budget – Forman was even shooting it in tandem with another early work, the 50-minute brass band story If There Were No Music – but that didn’t stop it taking the main prize at the 1964 Locarno festival (over competition from new films by Godard and Antonioni, no less).
This release includes a new 15-minute interview with actress Pavla Martínková, filmed this year in the same stadium in the small town of Kolin where the dance scene was shot. Film historian Michael Brooke’s audio commentary is rapid and irrepressible, its enthusiasm as infectious as its discoveries are fascinating. Sheer delight.
Overleaf: watch the new trailer for Black Peter
The naturalism of Gabriel Mascaro’s Neon Bull has an engrossing inconsequence – if that's not a contradiction in terms – that surely betrays the Brazilian director’s origins as a documentarist. Narrative in any traditional plot sense is the least of the film’s concerns, subordinated to our growing engagement in the distinctive world that it captures, which is that of the vaquejada, the rodeo community of the country’s Nordeste region. It’s Mascaro’s second feature, and although he’s moved on to working with professional actors, the collective achievement here is to dial down any sense of thespian presence or process to almost nothing.
There’s little sense of beginning or ending, nor of urgency or haste, and the director and his Mexican DP Diego Garcia (who went on to work with Apichatpong Weerasethakul on Cemetery of Splendour) certainly relish the long shot. Instead, its highlights involve moments that concentrate the nuances of interrelationships between protagonists, and reveal different aspects of their lives. This dusty, dirty cowboy world is lived close to the earth, and brings contact with animals – horses as well as bulls – but its macho elements are tempered by surprises that reveal unexpected aspects of gender dynamics (however abstract that term feels for so spontaneous a film).
Sex is in the air throughout the film, but not always where you would expect
The rodeo element in vaquejada involves releasing bulls from pens, for them to be brought down, sometimes by the tail, by two riders over a short distance of the arena; the animals appear not to be harmed, and the travelling company moves around from one event to another in a large open lorry that provides living space for humans and beasts alike. The chief vaqueiro, or bull-wrangler, is the lithe Iremar (Juliano Cazarré), supported in an unlikely partnership by the rotund, lethargic Zé. They are the male element in an “alternative family” grouping completed by Galega (Maeve Jinkings), who drives the lorry (and repairs it), and her often stroppy pre-teen daughter Cacá (Aline Santana; the two women, pictured below). We may guess that Iremar’s unspoken closeness to Galega indicates a past relationship, but Cacá is the child of a different (absent) father, although Iremar certainly plays a paternal role in her life: one scene reveals movingly how he responds to her vulnerability.
But this vaqueiro’s other fascination is fashion, and he designs and makes the outfits that Galega wears for the stylised dance routines she performs to wild applause from the wider (exclusively male) rodeo crowd: the stage act is completed by a horse mask, complete with mane, and hooves for feet, over Iremar’s scanty, body-clinging threads. Sex is in the air throughout Neon Bull, but not always where you would expect: one comically bathetic scene has Iremar and Zé sneaking into a bustling night-time horse auction to attempt to steal sperm from a stallion (the procedure is as graphic as you might expect).
The repercussions of that bring a third bull-hand into the action, one who combines the masculinity of the occupation with an obsession with keeping his long hair elegant. If that seems an unexpected combination in such rough-and-tumble surroundings, it brings on some steamy passion. The film’s extended final scene – an addictive single shot of eight minutes or so – sees Iremar fascinated not only by his engagement with a woman, but also by the surroundings of the clothing factory where they have their tryst, as part of a different world in which he would like to be involved.
Mascaro’s achievement is to absorb the viewer into the physical world of his film, from its almost inarticulate characters to the hand-to-mouth lives that they lead. (You might ponder similarities with the horse world of Andrew Haigh’s Lean on Pete, namely the protagonists' total but resolutely unsentimental engagement with the animals which are part of their work.) The “Making of” feature which is one of the extras on this Second Run release gives a sense of how, through acting classes and improvisations, Neon Bull’s cast prepared for and created the film’s remarkable ensemble easiness.
The second extra here is a 30-minute interview with Mascaro from a 2016 Norwegian film festival, its subjects ranging from his documentary roots to the changing character of Brazil’s North East (the director’s native region), and its differences from the parts of the country, like Rio or Sao Paolo, that outsiders, not least cinema-goers, know so much better. Neon Bull won the Special Jury Prize in the Venice Horizons section back in 2015, and went on to festival success around the world, followed by distribution in all the territories you would expect – even the United States – except Britain. That oversight is now corrected: this is a film muscular in its execution, but one whose depths go far beyond such categories and resound long after its conclusion. Mascaro was only 32 when he finished it: we are sure to be hearing much more of him in the future.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Neon Bull
French director Michel Hazanavicius made a name for himself with his OSS 117 spy spoofs, Nest of Spies (2006) and Lost in Rio (2009), set in the Fifties and Sixties respectively and starring Jean Dujardin as a somewhat idiotic and prejudiced secret agent. But it was with The Artist in 2011 that he hit the jackpot, marrying his gift for period recreation with a story of genuine depth and warmth.
Very early in his career, Andrew Haigh worked as an assistant editor on such Ridley Scott blockbusters as Gladiator and Black Hawk Down. He didn't actually meet Scott in person until years later, when the eminent director had no recollection of him.