DVD: Beach Rats

★★★★ DVD: BEACH RATS Limbo over an uneasy Brooklyn summer, from an American indie director to watch

Limbo over an uneasy Brooklyn summer, from an American indie director to watch

Beach Rats is a film that has “indie” etched in its bones. The second feature from Brooklyn-born Eliza Hittman, it was made with support from New York's independent outfit Cinereach, and went through development at the Sundance Labs. Appropriately, it took that festival's Best Feature Director award last year.

It’s strong on the kind of atmosphere that might easily float into nowhere, but is backed up by a striking performance from British newcomer Harris Dickinson that holds the attention in the subtlest ways. Dickinson plays 19-year-old Frankie, who’s on the cusp of adulthood and apparently coasting through an idle summer in the company of friends. An encounter at the Coney Island fireworks introduces him to Simone (Madeline Weinstein, pictured below, with Dickinson), and initiates a tentative, on-off interaction that also never quite gets anywhere.

But underneath such surfaces the young man's world is considerably darker, reflected in the fact that his father is in the last throes of cancer; he’s dying at home, grief and tension hanging in the air. And Frankie is in the course of discovering his identity, tentatively exploring gay contact websites. But Hittman resists driving Beach Rats in any more standard coming-out narrative direction: rather her concern is with Frankie’s state of increasingly uneasy limbo, emotions suppressed until they come close to crisis in late overlaps with external circumstances.  Beach Rats

Hittman talks, in one of the two short interview extracts that come as extras on this release, of her attempt to get into the mind of a teenager pressured by expectations and circumstances (her first film, It Felt Like Love, was a story of female adolescence, so this is both new and familiar territory for her). Frankie’s reticence and uncertainty – “I don’t really know what I like” is a phrase he repeats through the film – means that the changes and charges of emotion are shown in the smallest of gestures.

Dickinson’s striking features are richly expressive of such nuances, and they are beautifully caught by French cinematographer Hélène Louvart’s subtle textures, which also capture the languid summertime atmosphere of the remoter edges of Brooklyn (it’s the director's home territory, very different from the trendier neighbourhoods of the borough we are more used to on screen). The film seems somehow removed from time (no mobile phones), and Hittman creates the fabric of its world beautifully. She draws absolutely natural performances from a mainly non-professional cast – Frankie’s three beach-side companions, as well as his younger sister (Nicole Flyus) – and a deeply insightful role from Kate Hodge as his mother.

It’s a world in which no one intends wrong, but things go wrong. Frankie himself acutely realises his own shortcomings, but the director isn’t interested in judging him. No doubt he will one day reach resolution of some sort, but for now Hittman is honest enough not to suggest answers. Expect to hear much more both of her, and of her star.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Beach Rats

Clio Barnard: 'We need to talk about sexual abuse' - interview

CLIO BARNARD: 'WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT SEXUAL ABUSE' Interview with 'Dark River' director

The director of 'Dark River' discusses tackling sexual trauma and why she’s drawn to Yorkshire

Clio Barnard has quietly been building a reputation as one of Britain’s most human storytellers. Her debut feature The Arbor was a mesmerising look at the life of playwright Andrea Dunbar, blurring the line between documentary and performance.

Loveless review - from Russia, without love

Andrey Zvyagintsev's visceral new film casts an unforgiving eye over his homeland today

After the anger, the emptiness… Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless is his fifth film, and harks back to the world of complicated, somehow unelucidated family relationships that characterised his debut, The Return, the work that brought Zvyagintsev immediate acclaim back in 2003. His previous film, the tempestuous Leviathan from four years ago, was defined by a degree of social involvement that was new in his filmmaking, and engaged with contemporary Russia through the prism of politics. Its story of a lone individual’s clash with the corrupt society that surrounded him could not but provoke strong emotion.

Loveless sets out to do something different. It’s a film of wintry emotional withdrawal – a perfect pairing of season and subject – about the absence of almost any natural human core in the world it depicts. It’s as critical of its society as its predecessor was, but on a more oblique level, and arguably bleaker for that remove. There’s something of a loss in translation, too: the Russian title Nelyubov means, literally, “not-love” – almost “anti-love”, closer even to “hate”, but not quite that extreme. “Loveless” lacks the necessary muscle, as well as that particular Slavic antonymic essence that can assert absence as something far more visceral than simply a lack of presence. (The film’s French-language title, Faute d’amour, perhaps comes closer to the sense of the original.)

Zvyagintsev makes us view these proceedings almost as if we are observing animals 

It is not a film defined by over-complexity. There’s a luminous clarity to the world that Zvyagintsev and his co-writer Oleg Negin (the director’s collaborator since his second film, 2007’s The Banishment) have created, which hints at the simplicity of parable. And “clarity” is as good a word as any to describe the particularly composed, poised cinematography of Mikhail Krichman, who has worked with Zvyagintsev from the very beginning. The sense that a style has evolved between them is strong.

The spare script drops us in medias res into the painful throes of divorce. Any love between Zhenya (Maryana Spivak, pictured below) and Boris (Alexey Rozin, lower picture) has eviscerated itself long ago; the final, symbolic dissolution of their marriage awaits the sale of their flat, which is one of those typical Russian living spaces where middle-class comfort within belies a coldly imposing, anonymous exterior. Desperate to leave their old lives behind, both have new partners, and the only remaining impediment to their assumed (separate) future happiness – one to which they have clearly not paid overmuch attention – is their 12-year-old son, Alyosha (Matvey Novikov, main picture). The only thing they still spar about is what to do with him, each wishing to offload responsibility onto the other.LovelessLovelessOur sense of the boy’s alienation is conveyed practically without words, but speaks so powerfully: Zvyagintsev builds towards an unforgettable scene that defines the extreme of his agony, all the more shocking for its being set against the banality of his parents’ ongoing lives. We see them in their separate professional environments – Zhenya runs a beauty salon, Boris is a middle-management salaryman – as well as with their new partners. Boris fears that his divorce will be unacceptable to his ultra-religious employer, which is almost more of a worry than that he and his heavily pregnant girlfriend, the younger Masha (Marina Vasilyeva), are going be living with her mother. Zhenya has found new security with the older Anton (Andris Keishs), drawn as much by the attractive way of life that the prosperous single businessman offers her as by any attraction of the heart.

The director is engaging again with the differences of social class (which in Russia is defined as much as anything else by economic status) that were at the centre of his 2011 film Elena: it’s clearest in early scenes in which the couples are eating, one in an exaggeratedly posh restaurant, the other bringing their supermarket purchases back to the kitchen table. Then we watch them as they make love. The way that Zvyagintsev presents all this is characteristic: somehow he makes us view these proceedings almost as if we are observing animals, subjects engaged first with appetite, then recreation (sex-ercise?). The alienation is double, not only in the world of the director’s characters, but in his perspective, too.

This 'lovelessness', we come to understand, extends far beyond the present divorce

When Alyosha disappears – he’s reported missing from school before his distracted parents even notice his absence – the couple is forced to reengage, while the plot takes on an element of ongoing urgency and some rather welcome procedural tension. The police won’t take action immediately, recommending instead a volunteer search-and-rescue group (it's based on real-life Moscow precedents) to take over the investigation; it initiates increasingly large-scale searches of the area (the anonymous suburb in which the family lives borders on woodland). But there’s surely something ambiguous in how we perceive this citizen group action: it’s all impressively efficient and coordinated, especially when set against the lethargic reluctance of the police – yet do we wonder, in the wider context of Russian history, about the ramifications of such collective energy?

If Zvyagintsev leaves us to make up our minds on that one, he pulls no punches in the night scene in which the couple drive together to check whether their son has run away to his grandmother. Natalya Potapova plays Zhenya’s mother as a harridan haunted by history – her son-in-law describes her as “Stalin in a skirt” – and we begin to appreciate how her daughter has become who she is. The reception the old woman gives them is matched for acidity only by the bile they throw at one another along the way.

It’s a revelation that proves as terrifying as anything brought in the film’s resolution, which develops incrementally towards a conclusion that has all the inexorability of the territory (it comes with some exterior locations that match even Tarkovsky’s Stalker for wondrous dereliction). The dimensions of terror widen, becoming somehow ontological: this “lovelessness”, we come to understand, extends far beyond the present divorce, right “back to the beginning”. Is it fanciful to think of those moments of birth (rebirth) in Russian history of the last century, to go back to 1991, the collapse of the certainties and seeming securities of the Soviet world, even to 1917? It’s for the viewer to decide.

Of course, there’s another context behind Loveless too, the cinematic one that Zvyagintsev has alluded to not least in his acclaim of Ingmar Bergman, whose Scenes from a Marriage is, not surprisingly, a film he has referenced directly. But what is most potent in the way that the Russian director depicts his homeland is the sense that no alternative outcome could finally be possible, so rotten is this world in which the concept of empathy seems to have been entirely lost. Zvyagintsev may have altered his register – where Leviathan was painted with a broad brush, Loveless is a scalpel dissection – but his message remains constant.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Loveless

Blu-ray: Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno

★★★★ BLU-RAY: HENRI-GEORGES CLOUZOT'S INFERNO Clouzot's famously unfinished film, dissected with affection

Clouzot's famously unfinished film, dissected with affection

Watching what remains of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno (L’Enfer) serves to remind us just how good his earlier work was. Inferno marked the beginning of the end, its shambolic production beginning Clouzot’s descent into obscurity.

DVD: In Between

Fresh, energetic and highly entertaining portrait of three young women looking for love and equality in Tel Aviv

In Between didn’t get nearly enough attention on its cinema release in the UK last autumn, hampered perhaps by its nothingy title and a synopsis that can make it sound like it will be a worthy evening out when in fact it’s anything but. One of the liveliest debut features of 2017, it follows three twenty-something Palestinian women who share a flat in Tel Aviv. It’s sharp, funny and eye-opening.

Director Maysaloun Hamoud draws on her experience as an Arab film-maker living in Israel to create a wholly fresh take on sexual and cultural politics. Imagine Girls and Sex in the City but without the white American privilege and you'd be getting close, although In Between most reminded me of another director who made their debut film focusing on a feisty female central character, Spike Lee with She’s Gotta Have It, back in 1984. 

She has lifted the covers on young Palestinians’ love lives, gay friends and high times

Although In Between is an ensemble piece, Laila, played by the stunningly beautiful and super-smart Mouna Hawa is the strongest figure. She’s a lawyer with a mane of curls who sees nothing wrong in showing her cleavage at work. Laila is a secular Muslim who knows exactly what she can expect from her Jewish colleagues in the legal business. And in her downtime she also takes no prisoners; she’s got an appetite for drugs, dancing and female solidarity but is still looking for a man to be her soul mate. Her friend Salma (Sana Jammalieh) finds life a little tougher; she’s a DJ who works shifts in a restaurant as a sous chef where the Israeli boss doesn’t want the kitchen crew speaking Arabic. Meanwhile back home her Christian parents endlessly line up potential husbands because Salma hasn’t dared tell them she’s gay.

As there’s a lot of wild partying in their apartment, it’s not the obvious place for new flatmate Nour (Shaden Kanboura) to find a quiet room to finish her computer studies degree. Nour is a hijab-wearing Muslim with a disapproving fiancé who sees Tel Aviv as a city of sin. He wants Noura to marry him and return to their ultra-conservative hometown of Umm al-Fahm on the West Bank. Their relationship provides the film's most shocking scenes. There’s plenty of vivid drama along the way, all beautifully shot by Itay Gross and made wholly credible by semi-improvised dialogue scenes as not all the actors were professionals.In Between

In Israel the film has been a huge and controversial hit. Maysaloun Hamoud has lifted the covers on young Palestinians’ love lives, gay friends and high times (pictured above: Mahmud Shalaby skinning up with Mouna Hawa). The film was banned in Umm al-Fahm while others criticised the director for receiving some funding from the Israeli government. Hamoud has received death threats because she is challenging fundamentalist religions, casual racism from Israelis towards Arabs and the endemic cultural repression that traps women (and to a certain extent men) in restrictive roles. In Between would make a fascinating double-bill with Menashe – both sympathetic portraits of normally inaccessible communities, ultra-orthodox Jews in Menashe; bohemian, radicalised Palestinians in In Between.

Intended as the first in a trilogy, I can’t wait to see more of the central characters. The DVD release comes with a scrappy short feature compiled from on-set footage and interviews with Hamoud and her Israeli producer, Shlomi Elkabetz. It looks as if they all had fun making the film – there’s a lot of hugging and high spirits – which makes In Between’s cool coherence even more impressive. 

@saskiabaron 

Overleaf: watch the trailer for In Between

DVD/Blu-ray: The Mystery of Picasso

★★★ DVD/BLU-RAY: THE MYSTERY OF PICASSO Pablo at work: Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1956 art documentary, with wonderful extras

Pablo at work: Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1956 art documentary, with wonderful extras

What a gallimaufry! The polymath Picasso (1881-1973) was one of the most prolific, obsessed and best-known artists in the history; in fact, without qualification, he remains the best-known, for his genius, his mastery of so many media, his public personal life.

DVD/Blu-ray: I Am Not a Witch

★★★★ DVD/BLU-RAY: I AM NOT A WITCH Rungano Nyoni’s strong and intriguing debut feature is a challenging African fable-satire  

Rungano Nyoni’s strong and intriguing debut feature is a challenging African fable-satire

Rungano Nyoni’s debut feature premiered at last year’s Directors' Fortnight in Cannes, and immediately marked the Lusaka-born, Wales-raised director down as a figure to watch. Putting her film into any category is more challenging, though, with its elements of fable and somewhat surreal satire, although “surreal” and any associated hints of the absurd risk saying more about the perspective of the observer than the world Nyoni herself depicts.

But however you look at it, I Am Not a Witch is a startling, vibrant piece of filmmaking. Over a spare 90 minutes Nyoni follows her nine-year-old heroine on an unlikely journey: rejected from one community because she stands out as an unlucky outsider, she is attached to a state-supported witch colony, then exploited as a curiosity and for commercial ends by her semi-official “minder”. The name she is given by the community of much older women into which she is partly absorbed is Shula, which tellingly means “uprooted”. She’s outstandingly played by Maggie Mulubwa, a tribal girl found by Nyoni, whose silence through most of the film leaves her face to speak, indelibly, about unspoken fear and apprehension and plaintive bafflement.I Am Not a WitchThere’s such sadness there: the few moments when Shula seems to be discovering something about herself, for herself, are so tentative that the film’s conclusion almost comes as a tragic relief. In parallel to the wider position of women in society, Nyoni has come up with an unnerving central image for her community of witches: they are tethered on long ribbons, attached to huge bobbins, that supposedly prevent them from flying away. Her opening scene shows a witch camp (the director spent time in one such place, in Ghana) being visited by tourists, a pitiful place where impassive old women sit around apathetically, their faces daubed in white.

At least when they are taken out to work – they travel on a special lorry, converted to accommodate their bobbins, a bizarre and unforgettable sight – there’s a certain sense of community, of personality, laced with unlikely, sometimes dark humour (the visit of a wig-seller peddling the latest models, mis-named after US pop celebrities is just one such moment). Gin is another consolation for them. Surrounding official structures, nominally perhaps benign but in practice indifferent, are resolutely male, embodied by the rotund Mr Banda (Henry BJ Phiri, pictured above, centre) – he’s attached to “Tourism and Traditional Beliefs” – who exploits the girl for money, making her adjudicate village disputes or perform to bring on rain. He’s not actually cruel to her, though: his own wife is a “reformed” witch, having earned nominal respectability “because I did everything I was told” (she puts her bobbin in a supermarket trolley when she goes out).

This is a society in which superstition is a convenient garb for prejudice

Nyoni leaves the plentiful elements of mystery in her story to speak for themselves, not least because Shula remains the passive protagonist throughout, but there’s no escaping the fact that this is a society in which superstition is a convenient garb for prejudice. There’s an undeniable aesthetic consolation – not perhaps the right way of putting it – especially in the work of cinematographer David Gallego (previously seen in the no less strange jungle exploration of Embrace of the Serpent), whose compositions capture the arid beauty of the film's scrub landscapes and delight in its particular visual details. A score from Matthew James Kelly is dominated by treated Vivaldi effects for violin, complete with snatches of Schubert and Estelle’s “American Boy”. 

This DVD release includes two of Nyoni’s short films. From 2011, her 23-minute Mwansa the Great is a playful Zambia-set story of a village boy attempting to assume the mantle of his late father, in a family environment where the female presence, in the form his assertive younger sister, looms large. There are lovely moments that touch on the contrasting worlds of children and adults, a theme also there in Listen, from 2014. The 13-minute film, codirected with young Finnish-Iranian filmmaker Hamy Ramezan, was in Directors’ Fortnight too, its story of immigrant experience, and how past attitudes can’t be escaped even in new worlds, all the more chilling for the concentrated, formal control with which it is executed.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for I Am Not a Witch

Best of 2017: Film

BEST OF 2017: FILM Favourite films from the past 12 months, plus some stinkers, from TAD film writers

Favourite films from the past 12 months, plus some stinkers, from theartsdesk's film writers

It was the night Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, those old robbers on the run, will want to forget. Thanks to a clerical error, the Oscar for Best Picture briefly ended up in the clutch of the overwhelming favourite. Then the mistake was spotted and La La Land had to cede ground to Moonlight.

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