6 stars

dir: Joanna Hogg

2022

I’m assuming that this flick was filmed during the covid years, because, hey, what’s easier to do when there are restrictions than filming one person doing two roles? But I think, considering the director, and considering the greatness that is Tilda Swinton, if you put the question as to whether it was put together during the pandemic, the director might say “What pandemic?”

I’m pretty sure this is exactly what she wanted to make regardless. I can’t pretend that I know that much about this director, since this is the first of her flicks that I’ve seen. You might get a sense of her once you’ve watched this, though.

I say that like it’s a bad thing, but I guess it isn’t. This has the look and the feel of a ghost story, but it’s neither a thriller, a mystery, or a horror flick. Maybe, if I was forced to pigeonhole it at gunpoint, I’d say it was a psychological drama. The thing is, though, a person watching this cold would have no idea what is happening or why until the end, and then the impression you’re left with might be an unfavourable one. It could be the emotional equivalent of the shoulder shrug emoji.

I don’t know Joanna Hogg, so I don’t know if this sounds like an unfair statement about her: I feel like this film is her making a film about how she feels about her relationship with her mother, and that she needs Tilda Swinton to tell her story, because otherwise, who would?

So Tilda plays Julie, a director struggling with writer’s block and unable to come up with her next movie, and Rosalind, her mother. Julie has organised for them to stay at a hotel which, by no coincidence, was previously a house that Rosalind lived in when she was younger.

When I say ‘hotel’, it’s not like the modern version – if you’re old enough to know, the hotel itself doesn’t look that different from the set for Fawlty Towers. With less hijinks, racism or spousal abuse, unfortunately.

We don’t know why Julie only thinks that by hanging out with her mother that she’ll somehow come up with a screenplay, but that’s her plan. Nothing seems to go right, though. Everything is slightly off. They’re the only ones in the hotel, but they still get crap service. Two people work there, one the girl at reception (Carly-Sophia Davies), and a groundskeeper Willy type called Bill (Joseph Mydell). The receptionist glares at Julie, and always pushes back on anything Julie asks for, and she leaves at night (probably 5pm) by climbing into the same car playing earbleed doof doof house music always.

But the absence of people still means something or someone is keeping Julie awake at night. The generally creepy surrounds, the noises coming from upstairs, the poor quality of the hospitality on offer, the wifi being too slow.

dir: Todd Fields

2022

I can’t even with this film.

Atop almost every ‘best of’ list for last year from every critic and reviewer, it’s definitely a case for me of “these jerks are getting high on their own supply and I don’t get it”. This level of groupthink only comes around every other month or so.

There’s also an almost universal consensus that Blanchett will get another Best Actress Oscar for her performance as Lydia Tár, the main character, in case you didn’t know. I personally take it as a mortal insult, because, really, every award should be going to Michelle Yeoh for her heroic work as a depressed mum in Everything Everywhere All At Once. Were there any justice in this or any other universe, it would be so, but this is not a just universe, and never has been.

So, instead, the award will go to the person that does the most acting rather than the ‘best’.

I’m not trying to imply that this isn’t a well-crafted, carefully constructed movie about… whatever it’s about. It is meticulously crafted. It also has one of the most erudite and over-written scripts of anything I’ve heard in a long time. I don’t know if people in the symphonic world talk like this all the time (how exhausting that must be), but I am pretty sure that people wouldn’t be able to communicate like this constantly without wanting to shoot themselves and / or each other.

Exhausting is probably the descriptor that most often comes to mind to discuss how it felt for me to watch the whole film. It’s over 2 and a half hours long. And maybe there are times where the main character is doing something intriguing, but, honestly, she isn’t that interesting to me.

Lydia Tár is like the greatest conductor in human history. She has won every award imaginable, she’s at the top of her game and top of the ‘classical’ music world. She is the maestro in charge of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. She has a wife, Sharon (Nina Hoss) who is also first chair / violin at the orchestra, and they have a daughter together called Petra.

Tár has a personal assistant, (Noémie Merlant) Francesca, who does everything down to laundry and is pretty much treated like a trained dog. Sit, heel, good dog – without the ‘good dog’ part. Clearly, Francesca has certain expectations and a certain amount of resentment towards Tár, so they were obviously involved in some way. Yes, I mean sexually.

The entire conceit of the film is based on the fact that this acclaimed, world famous conductor might happen to be female, but she’s just as abusive and terrible as many men have been in the same or similar positions throughout the history of conducting, orchestras, or men. The vast difference here is that she will get a comeuppance, whereas none of the others ever, ever paid the price.

(Μήλα)

dir: Christos Nikou

2021

This. Is a Greek film. About a guy. And he really likes apples.

That’s about it. There’s not a lot of subtext going on. Just really likes apples.

Doesn’t, like, love them to the exclusion of everything else. But he does seem to enjoy eating them more than he seems to enjoy eating anything else.

He doesn’t spend the entire film eating apples. That would be absurd, even for an odd Greek film.

But the film is called Apples. So you could be forgiven for thinking the apples are somehow important.

There is a guy here (Aris Servetalis), but I don’t think we find out his name? I don’t think he knows his name, or at least that’s what he tells the people that find him on the bus.

There appears to be, for a film made during the goddamn pandemic, or just before the pandemic, an epidemic, not of people coughing themselves to death with the spicy cough, but an epidemic of sudden onset amnesia. One moment people know who they are and where, and the next they seem to have forgotten everything from before a specific moment in time.

Our sullen guy here is taken to a hospital, and tested and looked after for a while, but there’s no treatment and no cure. People are basically warehoused at the hospital until someone comes to claim them, like they’re lost property. If no one comes, well, they have a program for that.

Our sullen bearded guy is set up in a modest apartment, has some clothes given to him, and a polaroid camera, and money occasionally and physical cassette tapes regularly are delivered to him for his listening pleasure. Of the few things he has, he also has a tape player. How delightfully retro!

He has to listen to the tapes, go out into the world and do what the tapes said to do, and take a polaroid as proof. That polaroid is put into a photo album, and perused by the doctors who seem to break into the apartment whenever they feel like it, admiring their handiwork.

The first task involves going out and asking to borrow someone’s bike, pop a wheelie or two, and then have a photo taken of you on the bike. The guy asks a teenager for his bike, and of course the jerk says no. So he asks an even younger kid, so that he can ride around on an absurdly little bike like he’s Krusty the Clown.

But he gets the photo. The taskings from the cassettes get more complicated, more involved, and start to include other people more. Go to a fancy dress party they said. Go to a strip club, they said. It’ll be fun, they said.

dir: Sebastián Lelio

2022

Sometimes, either through listening to a news story, or watching a movie, all you can bring yourself to do is shake your head and go “that fucking country…”

Sometimes you say it about your own country, usually people outside of America just say it about America after another mass shooting, and sometimes you say it about a country you otherwise love but can’t believe how dumb they used to be because of religion.

Ireland. 1860s. Just after the Potato Famine. Grim times.

Grim times compounded by the abject stupidity of a populace in thrall to the Catholic Church.

An English nurse (Florence Pugh) is hired to watch a girl in alternating 8 hour shifts with a nun. She’s not meant to help the girl, or heal her. Just watch her.

The girl they say has not eaten human food in months, and is being kept alive through the grace of God, or Jesus, or magic. One doctor (Toby Jones) even wonders if the girl is drawing sustenance from sunlight, like a houseplant. If the doctors of this village are this fucking dumb…

No nonsense nursey Lib huffs and puffs around the village getting progressively more frustrated with these hicks and their hickish ways. But there’s nothing she can do. The girl is trapped in a double-bind: if she’s revealed as a fraud her family get kicked out of their house; if she’s seen eating food they’re homeless. If she doesn’t starve they’re probably kicked out as well. So whatever she’s doing, she has to keep doing it, or not doing it, until she dies.

This makes for very frustrating viewing. In truth the frustration of the main character in the face of this abject rural superstitious stupidity is matched by our frustration watching two people trapped by the times and circumstance.

It would help if perhaps Anna (Kíla Lord Cassidy) were more of a sympathetic figure. I mean, don’t get me wrong, the thought and representation of any child suffering is affecting and disturbing, and you’re placed in the position of not wanting that suffering to continue, to end as soon as possible, however that might happen. But, at first, all we can think of is that this dumb girl is doing something dumb for dumb family / religious reasons.