After a disappointingly limited programme in 2020 – due, of course, to COVID-19 – the London Film Festival made a triumphant return in the first few weeks of October 2021. Once again, hundreds of films from around the world were on offer, screening in actual cinemas. And while it may not have been a vintage year – there were not enough archive films or comedies, two of my favourite categories – it was a huge joy to rifle through the festival programme once again, circling in pen the films that looked most exciting.
Most of this year’s festival took place on the South Bank, both at the BFI and at the enormous Royal Festival Hall, which played host to all the main gala screenings. The cinemas were at full capacity, and while we were informed before screenings that masks were “expected”, mask-wearing itself was very inconsistent. As such, with a nervous eye on my upcoming holiday, I saw fewer films than I normally would. Nonetheless, I experienced enough of the festival to gain a renewed enthusiasm for the diversity of contemporary cinema, and for the vision, talent, and drive of filmmakers from around the world.
This year I managed 11 films. Here are my thoughts on them.
The Pleasures of the Big Screen
A number of films stood out for their immense visual and sonic flair, functioning as spectacular reminders of the power of the big screen experience. Ironic, then, that the first of these, the explosive western The Harder They Fall (★★★★★), will probably be seen by most people on Netflix. Directed by the London-born Jeymes Samuel, who is mostly known as a musician, the film focuses on the cowboy Nat Love and his quest for revenge after his parents are murdered. With its largely black cast, including Idris Elba, Regina King, and Lakeith Stanfield, the film acts as a much-needed corrective to the whitewashed canon of the cinematic western. Historians estimate that as many as one in three cowboys in the old west were black, and yet classic westerns show little, if any, awareness or interest in this fact. Samuel’s riposte to this is to take a range of real historical figures – including Nat Love, Stagecoach Mary, and Cherokee Bill – and throw them all together in one film. Furthermore, the film is not really about race, or racism: instead, it is a tale of love and revenge where the characters just happen to be black. Samuel’s assured direction and some spectacular performances make this a western of rip-roaring swagger, with propulsive cinematography, stylised dialogue, a pulsating soundtrack (largely by Samuel himself) and a villain with golden pistols. It is outrageous, glorious fun, and I can’t wait to see it again on the big screen.
The visionary director Edgar Wright makes spectacular use of locations closer to home in Last Night in Soho (★★★★★), his first horror film. Thomas McKenzie is excellent as Eloise Turner, a sixties-obsessed young woman from Cornwall who travels to London to study at a fashion college. Eloise is motivated but shy, and McKenzie brilliantly portrays her sense of awkwardness and unease at university life in a big city. And then she suddenly finds herself transported to 1960s Soho, and the film takes a turn for the sinister. Wright has lived in Soho for over twenty years, and he fantastically captures both its garish glamour and its moral murkiness, both in the sixties and in the present day. The increasingly frenetic horror is handled with all the style, panache, and manic energy that we expect from him. Indeed, while Wright draws on the psychological horror of Roman Polanski and the baroque nastiness of Dario Argento, this is very much his own film – stylistically distinct in the bravura way it mixes past and present, dream and reality, in one intoxicating wallop. The addition of a nostalgic soundtrack, jokes about South London, and the appearances of some genuine British legends (particularly Terence Stamp and Diana Rigg) make this another wild classic from one of Britain’s most exciting directors.
The rather more fanciful location of the French town Ennui-sur-Blasé is colourfully realised in Wes Anderson’s new film The French Dispatch (★★★☆☆). Located in this town is the French foreign bureau of a fictional newspaper, the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun. The newspaper’s team of foreign correspondents are in the process of producing their final issue, and each of the four main articles forms a separate storyline in the film. Anthology films often suffer from a lack of consistency and structure, and The French Dispatch is no exception. The student revolution story is much weaker than the others, and the brevity of each storyline often prevents meaningful emotional engagement. However, there are still some wonderful set-pieces, all shot through with the offbeat humour and exacting detail that we expect from Wes Anderson. Moreover, the visual style is Anderson at his most inventive: the film moves effortlessly between black-and-white and colour, wide-screen and academy ratio, and live-action and animation. Moreover, each shift of form is meaningful in some way. We burst from black-and-white into colour when Jeffrey Wright’s food journalist tastes some of the exquisite food of Lieutenant Nescaffier; elsewhere, when Adrien Brody’s art dealer is confronted by a gang of prisoners, the screen suddenly widens to wide-screen, as if the narrower academy ratio can’t pack all of them into the frame. As a tribute to journalism, it’s somewhat ramshackle, and hardly Anderson’s best film, but with enough enjoyable moments to justify seeing it on the big screen.
Funny Haha
I made a conscious effort this year, as I always do, to see at least a few films which reflect on the art of cinema itself. Humidity Alert (★★★☆☆) is an agreeably light comedy about a South Korean cinema putting on a screening and Q+A of a new film during the COVID-19 pandemic. As if the chaos of enforcing mask mandates wasn’t enough, the air conditioning malfunctions, one of the actors has a major argument with his fiancée, and almost no one turns up to the screening. I particularly enjoyed the scene with the post-film Q+A, a fixture of film festivals which (as in the film) occasionally does descend into pretentious over-analysis and audience members holding onto the microphone for too long. I felt the film could have had more laughs, but I loved how it ultimately presented cinema as a blissful balm for the soul in a confusing and difficult world.
An unexpected delight was Money has Four Legs (★★★★☆), a rare film from Myanmar, which focuses on a film crew trying to complete a project amidst the personal drama of the director and actors. The film transitions gradually, and not always smoothly, from wry social realism to increasingly madcap comedy, with some very well-performed set pieces, including a hilariously slow car chase. It’s also bold enough to satirise the (often severe) censorship of the Burmese film industry. At the start of the film, a humourless censor lists all the apparent ills of the fictional script – too much smoking, too much drinking, and not enough positive portrayals of the police – but each of these ills turn out to be features of the real film’s actual plot. I found it enormous fun, and enjoyed how it introduced me to the previously unknown world of Myanmar’s heavy metal scene.
Let me take you on a journey
Several films this year focused on significant journeys or trials undertaken by their characters. Cannon Arm and the Arcade Quest (★★★★☆) is a documentary about a group of men in Denmark who love playing old arcade games. One of their number, Kim, attempts to play the game Gyruss for 100 hours straight. We follow his heroic efforts, complete with five-minute naps and strategic trips to the loo. The film makes us really root not just for Kim, but for all his supportive friends. Most of the arcade game group are hugely intelligent and high functioning, but somewhat on the margins of ordinary society: Kim himself rarely speaks. The philosophical narration can be a bit overbearing, but overall this is a fascinating film about an unusual subject.
A very different kind of trial is seen in Small Body (★★★★☆), which tells the story of a woman named Agata who gives birth to a stillborn child. We are in rural Catholic Italy in the late nineteenth century, and as the child was not baptised, the community believes that it is unable to enter heaven. Agata hears of a church in the mountains where the child might be briefly revived and baptised, and she sets out on her own to find it, with the baby’s coffin strapped to her back. These locations of miraculous revival – known as “respite sanctuaries” – genuinely existed across Western Europe from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and while Agata’s faith in them may seem strange to us, we still identify with her. Celeste Cescutti’s quiet, measured performance, and the intimate handheld camerawork, create a powerful sense of determination amidst horrifying loss. Moreover, the film’s tougher moments are balanced out by a dreamlike, mellow, often magical atmosphere and tone.
A similar sense of magic in the midst of a harrowing situation pervades the French animation The Crossing (★★★★★). The film follows two young refugee children who are forced to flee for the border after their parents’ arrest. The exact location, and the ethnicities of the characters, are fictional; as such, the story has a powerful sense of universality. The animation itself is groundbreaking: this is the first feature-length film created using oil paint on glass. The style privileges impressionistic textures and vibrant colours over exacting, photorealistic detail. But director Florence Miailhe transcends the limitations of the form by creating a genuine sense of depth. Her thrilling and vivid evocation of the environments of the story – combined with the evocative sound design and music – make the film a truly immersive experience, however experimental its visual style. Visually stunning throughout, and with a compassionate and involving narrative, this was one of the best films at the festival, and deserved a much wider audience than was permitted by its two late-night screenings.
Also groundbreaking and immersive, though in a very different way, was Il Buco (★★★★☆), which tells the story of a 1961 expedition into the Bifurto Abyss, a vast cave in the gentle pastoral landscape of Calabria, southern Italy. We observe the preparations of the team, and then descend with them deep into the cave. We occasionally come up for air to spend time with a group of local shepherds, who are unbothered by the expedition while they deal with the challenges of their own lives. This is a slow, meditative film with very little dialogue or dramatic conflict, and yet it is completely mesmerising throughout. The caving sequences in particular are technically masterful. Shooting on location in the actual cave, director Michelangelo Frammartino envelops us in complete darkness, with the cavers’ headlamps the only source of light. Moreover, he creates an extremely evocative soundscape, capturing everything from the sonorous echo of the cavers’ equipment to the almost imperceptible dripping of water. It’s a film that carries us along in its unhurried rhythm as it thrusts us into the heart of the earth.
Current affairs
Two final films were noteworthy for saying something vital about our current moment in time. The Neutral Ground (★★★★☆) is a politically charged and deeply personal documentary about America’s tortured relationship with its civil war past. In an unvarnished and blackly comic style, director CJ Hunt describes how, in response to the liberation and enfranchisement of African-American slaves, white southerners created a false history of their pre-civil war society known as the “lost cause mythology”. Central to this narrative were the fanciful ideas that slavery was largely benevolent rather than oppressive, and that the causes of the civil war had very little to do with slavery; indeed, Hunt interviews southerners today who blithely parrot these ridiculous views and celebrate their Confederate past. All of this is structured around the increasingly acrimonious debate over the persistence of statues of major Confederate figures that litter the southern states of the US. Although it’s an entertaining film, Hunt ultimately resists trivialising the issue, especially when he turns up in Charlottesville during the “Unite the Right” rally in 2017 – the one moment where our otherwise genial host seems to genuinely fear for his life. I thought this was a brilliant, brave, and amazingly assured debut film, which cuts to the heart of a major dividing line in American politics – not just between pro- and anti-statues, but between truth and falsehood. It should be required viewing.
Finally, there was the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero (★★★★★), which was possibly the best film I saw at the festival this year. The film follows a man on leave from a prison sentence for debt who finds himself in possession of a bag of gold coins. Rather than use the money to pay off his debt, he seeks to return the bag to its owner, and unexpectedly becomes a social media star on account of his good deed. But then rumours begin to circulate that the story is made up. As in his other films, Farhadi uses a deceptively simple story to discuss broader issues in modern Iran: honour, family relationships, and class, amongst many others. In A Hero, he specifically examines social media as a relentless driver of public perceptions of right and wrong, with much of the plot revolving around online comments and the sharing of incriminating videos. Yet Farhadi is not interested in the visual landscape of the internet – instead, his camera is continually aimed at his characters, and the myriad ways in which they respond to the online drama. With some immensely convincing performances, A Hero is Farhadi at his best – a film which genuinely feels like a thriller despite its domestic setting.
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