For the last several years, I have got up early on a Thursday morning in September and cycled to the BFI Southbank in order to buy tickets for the London Film Festival. Queuing in person used to be a reliable alternative to the vagaries of an online booking system which was prone to crashing (although these days it works very well). One year, the system crashed so comprehensively that only those in the physical queue were able to purchase tickets until the following day. The trouble now is that this secret is out, and on arriving at around 6.30am this year there were already 30 people in the queue. There’s suffering for one’s art, and then there’s suffering for someone else’s, and I admired (and slightly envied) those who had the patience to sit outside in a camping chair for an entire night.
Many of those in the queue were taking time off work and going to see 30 films or more. The most I have ever managed is 19, and even that felt like a stretch. It’s uniquely disorientating to stumble out of a harrowing war drama and immediately go into a comedy about two cousins transporting a sofa. But such is the nature of LFF – a vibrant, audience-friendly festival where the inexhaustible variety of cinema is exhibited for 12 glorious days.
This year, I saw 12 films. Here’s what I thought of them.
The cinema of exile
I saw three films this year from directors who have all experienced censorship by, or exile from, their countries of origin. The Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev – who currently lives in France – arrived at LFF a mere two weeks after the Kremlin added him to its list of “foreign agents”, a common measure used to attack those critical of Putin’s regime. One wonders what Putin himself would make of Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur (★★★★★), which was largely shot in Latvia but takes place in a provincial Russian city on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine. Gleb is the CEO of a logistics company who is instructed by the local Mayor to produce a list of employees to be conscripted into the Russian Army. While dealing with this, he begins to suspect that his wife is having an affair. Zvyagintsev’s choice to adapt a classic story of infidelity (based on Claude Chabrol’s La Femme Infidèle) within the wider context of Russian militarisation is a masterful melding of the personal and the political. Gleb’s rage and self-interest lead to a greater acceptance of morally questionable actions, reflecting – as through a cracked mirror – the wider moral disaster of the Russian invasion. And while the trappings of Russia’s war machine are insidiously visible as the film moves on – propaganda banners, a huge freight train carrying tanks – the bulk of the drama takes place in airless, interior spaces, full of hard surfaces and long silences. The slamming of doors and clanging of crockery amp up the tension, alongside a sparse, unsettling score. It’s a bravura piece of filmmaking that feels at once thrillingly contemporary and utterly timeless.
Shahrbanoo Sadat’s No Good Men (★★★★☆) was also made outside the country in which it’s set – Afghanistan – though it does make use of archive footage shot just prior to the Taliban’s recapture of the country, the period in which the film is set. It follows a female camera operator at a news channel in Baghdad, who – having separated from her husband – claims to her friends that there are “no good men” in Afghanistan. Her view is gradually challenged by her interactions with an older male reporter who starts to offer lifts home to her and her son. The film captures with joy and edgy humour the hope that a younger generation of Afghan women previously had for a better and more dignified existence, but the gathering clouds of the Taliban’s advance make the final act increasingly upsetting to watch. Sadat makes excellent use of overlapping dialogue and crowd scenes to build suspense, and manages to make Hamburg look very much like Kabul. In fact, the extras are all individually named in the end credits, a vanishingly rare decision which casts the film as a collective effort of the Afghan diaspora to defend the value of both women’s lives and the free press – both distant memories for contemporary Afghans.
Mohsen Amiryoussefi’s The Banning Curse (★★★★☆) wasn’t made in exile, but it does join an ever-expanding lists of Iranian films made inside people’s houses – all the better to avoid political surveillance. None of them however are quite as surreal as this piece of wry cine-autofiction. Amiryoussefi looks back at his past filmography, as well as his interactions with a state body referred to as “the guidance”, which has censored his and many of his colleagues’ films on the grounds of public morality and protecting the regime. In a delightfully bonkers conceit, the director discusses his career with the Angel of Death, who responds by shrieking nonsensical criticisms like a mortally-offended state censor. Amiryoussefi has evidently decided that humour will be his way of contributing to protest cinema in Iran. The results are consistently entertaining and provide fascinating insights into the scrappy process of making art in an authoritarian country.
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way
Five films, from five different countries, offered contrasting portrayals of families under pressure from external forces. Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord (★★★★☆), which won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is likely to generate more debate than any other. Based on a true story from 2016, it follows a Christian family from Romania who move to a small town in rural Norway. Their evangelical faith and conservative values begin to cause frictions with the liberal, secular locals. But the situation escalates when the five children, including a baby, are removed by the Norwegian child protection agency while they investigate accusations of physical abuse. On one level, this is a riveting drama about family separation, with long takes accentuating the discomfort and silence of the children’s absence. But Mungiu also poses searching questions of the different cultures represented by the film: is there ever a role for physical discipline in raising children? Should children’s testimony always be believed over that of adults? Is the trauma of violence worse than the trauma of being taken from your parents? By doing so, the conflicts initially set up by the film – family vs. state, eastern vs. western Europe, Christianity vs. secularism – are blurred and problematised. Intelligently written and sensitively acted, this really is a must-see.
Cultural differences are at the heart of Possible Love (★★★★☆), the latest from Korean director Lee Chang-Dong, who last wowed audiences with the masterful slow-burn mystery Burning in 2018. His newest is equally slow-burn, but turns its attention to the theme of socio-economic inequality in modern South Korea – a hugely fertile ground for recent film and TV (see Parasite and Squid Game). In an elegant conceit, Lee tells the story of a filmmaker from a privileged background who decides to make a documentary about labour issues. She takes as her key subjects a working-class family who suffered from the husband’s loss of his factory job after a strike a few years prior. As revelations about the characters and their past begin to surface, the film comes to question who the documentary is really serving – and just how trusting the relationship is between artist and subject. It’s consistently engaging despite an unhurried pace, with Lee quietly capturing the subtle indicators of class distinctions in a way which feels organic and unforced, not to say painfully British. It’s a handsomely-mounted, mature drama from a director with an intrinsic eye for depicting complex human relationships.
American director James Gray shows the same aptitude for character-driven drama in Paper Tiger (★★★★☆). Set in Queens, NYC in the 1980s, Adam Driver plays Gary Pearl, a former police officer who enlists his brother Irwin to provide some consulting work to a newly-arrived Russian logistics company. But a misunderstanding caused by Irwin comes to embroil him and his family in the tentacles of the Russian mafia. Gray isn’t interested in aestheticising or glamourising organised crime; instead, the narrative explores how the threat of violence can be just as destabilising for an ordinary family as violence itself. Much of the film is agonisingly tense to watch. And if the dialogue is sometimes a bit on-the-nose, the performances are terrific, especially Scarlett Johansson, who as Irwin’s wife portrays with scintillating realism a woman carrying the weight of innumerable burdens. Atmospherically shot on 35mm film – you can almost breathe in the cigarette smoke – it’s a winningly old-fashioned and richly satisfying film.
The threats of both physical and ecological violence are central themes of To Hold a Mountain (★★★★☆), a documentary shot over 7 years in the mountainous pasturelands of Montenegro. The camera captures the middle-aged Gara and her daughter Nada, owners of a small farm, as they campaign against the local mountain being used by NATO for military training exercises. We initially assume that this is going to be an activist piece about the campaign. But revelations about a traumatic event in the past of these two characters transform the film into a sensitive portrait of family love and perseverance. The film has had a rapturous reception in Montenegro, with the President and Prime Minister both admirers, and it’s not hard to see why. It captures the beauty and harsh realities of this unique landscape in a delightfully earthy way: amidst footage of vertiginous mountain passes, gale-force winds, and hundreds of grazing animals, there’s a close-up shot of the back of a cow, positioned to look like the contours of a mountain chain. But the real significance of the film is as a quiet hymn to female dignity and strength, and in this regard it holds immense emotional power.
Quiet emotion is a hallmark of the films of Hirokazu Kore-eda, and his latest, Look Back (★★★☆☆), follows a close friendship between two young girls who are aspiring manga artists. One is outgoing and ambitious, the other socially anxious and withdrawn, unable to attend school. The two develop a productive and very sweet working relationship, with the socially anxious girl increasingly able to embrace life outside her home. This tale of shared authorship and differing artistic ambitions is initially a joy to watch; sadly, the third act is hampered by a narrative twist which delivers melodrama in spades. The great director can hardly be blamed for this – the story itself is based on a manga – but it doesn’t sit well with his natural sense of restraint and capacity for subtle characterisation.
Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime
Four films had a substantial, often noirish emphasis on crime, though with very different tonal registers. Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine (★★★☆☆) follows two CIA operatives in 1973 who go to Easter Island to take a break from their day-to-day work of destabilising democratically-elected regimes in South America. One of them, played by John Malkovich, is dying, and the film takes a reflective, philosophical mood as he approaches the end of his days. Malkovich’s mannerisms have always struck me as somewhat peculiar, but they work well here for a character losing his grip on reality. Sam Rockwell does an excellent straight man and Steve Buscemi provides an entertaining stint as their boss. But McDonagh’s script doesn’t resolve the tension between the morally objectionable and emotionally sympathetic aspects of his characters as successfully as elsewhere. Perhaps it’s just an issue of timing. Drawing humour out of American overseas adventurism seems less funny at the moment given the temperature of the current US administration; there are laughs, but they come more uneasily than they should.
Though not directly involved, the USA did provide intelligence and diplomatic support to the 1955 military coup in Argentina, which ousted President Perón. The 2-year period of military rule which followed forms the backdrop for Glaxo (★★★☆☆), which begins with the arrival of a police officer and his glamorous wife in a small Argentinian town. Their presence attracts the interest of a group of teenage boys, and eventually leads to an act of betrayal whose consequences ripple out through the generations. This is effectively conveyed in the aesthetics of the two main time periods in the film: the 1950s is awash with vibrant colours, rock music, and American-style clothing, while the 1980s section paints a darker picture of empty shops, rural decline, and cancer from asbestos exposure. Noirish elements abound, from shadowy visuals to the presence of a femme fatale, but the story is unnoirish – and somewhat disappointing – in how simple and predictable it is. There are other missteps, including some over-enthusiastic musical cues which take rather too much inspiration from the melodramatic cinema of the period. That said, the performances are persuasive and there are some enjoyably unsettling sequences.
The French comedy-thriller Too Many Beasts (★★☆☆☆) is also unsettling, but not in a good way. It takes place in a town in rural France called Sérieux, where wild boars – bred for hunting – are attacking farmers’ crops, leading to violent reprisals. After a local landowner is murdered, a police officer from Corsica is brought in to help solve the murder, in yet another example of French cinema finding regional accents absolutely hilarious. The film isn’t really sure what it wants to be – a satire of the police? Political statement on rural inequality? Madcap comedy? All these threads pull in various directions but never really knot together into a whole. An entertaining finale involves two main characters getting accidentally drugged as they close in on a solution, but it all feels less Too Many Beasts and more too little, too late.
A film which combines multiple influences in a far more rewarding way is Ray Gunn (★★★★★), yet another animated triumph from visionary director Brad Bird. It takes place in an American city where retro and futuristic elements combine to thrilling effect: jet packs are hired like Lime bikes, but require banknotes to work; there’s an underclass of aliens amidst the human inhabitants; and flying cars coexist with old-fashioned blocky TVs and 1930s-style offices. Sat in one of those offices, his name painted on the frosted glass, is Raymond Gunn, a private detective with an alien sidekick in a trench coat. In true detective-story fashion, Gunn becomes increasingly embroiled in a complicated plot involving a famous singer, her estranged husband, a film executive, and – most importantly – murder. The 3D-animated blend of classic film noir and Metropolis-style science fiction looks absolutely fantastic, and the razor-sharp script respects both elements while finding opportunities for humour – I particularly enjoyed the diminutive alien who’s designed to look like Peter Lorre. A lush, jazz-inflected score by Michael Giacchino adds a classy sheen to what is an immensely entertaining family film, and one of the absolute highlights of this year’s festival.
