8 stars

dir: Anna Foerster

2022

Lou is the kind of ovaries-to-the-wall action flick starring an older American tv / film movie icon (at least to me) that you rarely if ever get to see these days.

Many action flicks come out every year. They’re perfect for people who hate too much dialogue or speaking or people reaching out to each other across the emotional divide that seems infinite until it isn’t. Lou is tough and uncompromising, and almost dares you not to like it.

Lou (the great Allison Janney) is a no bullshit, no sentiment woman living on an island in the Pacific North West. She has a dog and doesn’t even really seem to like the dog that much, but she does feed him, usually fresh deer that she kills herself.

With her BARE HANDS. Joking. She shoots them THEN finishes them off.

There is a storm coming to the island (of course). On the news that she spies in a local store, or it might have been the bank, Ronald Reagan is denying that any of the Iran / Contra stuff ever happened, or having any involvement in any of it, which was of course a lie. Lou is looking at the screen like maybe she can melt Reagan with her rage alone. It’s funny, because you get the impression that, for whatever reason, Lou personally knows how much what Reagan is saying is pure bullshit.

It’s also telling us when this is all happening. It’s the 80s. There aren’t a lot of Kate Bush needle drops or Madonna hairstyles or fingerless gloves, or kids playing Dungeons & Dragons. It’s a just a time and place with no mobiles, and few ways to get around on an island without a vehicle.

We watch, as the film begins, an entire sequence where Lou, for reasons of her own, digs up something on her property, burns some stuff, writes a letter to someone, then puts the barrel of a rifle under her chin and prepares to pull the trigger. The story then winds back the day leading up to this moment, and shows it to us again in more detail before it progresses any further.

(Zgjoi)

dir: Blerta Blasholli

2021

Hive is based on a true story about a woman just trying to get by in this world. The problem is: this fucking world in which we live.

Some parts of this world seem to be easier to live in that others. For Fahrije (Yilka Gashi), the reality is she lives in a part of the world where seemingly the entirety of society is stacked against her, for no good fucking reasons.

I guess it helps to set the scene as to where and when. The where is Kosovo, the when is after the Kosovo War in the late nineties, and the reality is that Fahrije, like a lot of other women, hasn’t seen her husband since the massacres began.

There are a lot of mass graves waiting to be excavated, still. I had hoped there would a time in European history when new mass graves would stop being dug, and yet when you see what the Russians are doing AGAIN in Ukraine…

I despair. I am not as strong as Fahrije. She doesn’t despair, she just keeps moving forward.

She is a Kosovar Albanian. She has two kids to look after, and her wheelchair bound father-in-law. I don’t know why, but she is not allowed to get a job. The society, the community doesn’t tolerate women working or even really spending too much time out of their homes.

This community doesn’t even like the idea of women getting their licences and driving cars.

So, she has no husband to work and provide the family money, but it is also frowned upon for her to work and support her family. Clearly the best thing to do would be for them all to die.

Fahrije is not alone in this predicament. A group of women whose husbands similarly haven’t returned or whose remains haven’t yet been identified, also have no means of support and stop themselves from doing anything that would draw the ire of the menfolk.

It’s paralysing to watch this kind of thing. Someone offers them driving lessons or work, and the women tell themselves and each other “I cannot do these things, they will all call me a whore”. And true to their word, random men call Fahirje and any other woman whores for daring to support themselves and earn a subsistence living.

Everything is slow and agonising in coming, but Fahrije is persistent. Where the other women fear what the community will say, Fahrije sees that lack of choice they are being offered (this charity set up for the women barely has any money for their day to day lives, and there’s no widow’s pension or government help, apparently) as giving her all the more motivation to succeed in her endeavours.

Because she’s got no other fucking choice.

dir: Terence Davies

2022

It seems almost redundant saying that a film made by Terence Davies is a sad one, because…If you’ve seen any of his films, especially his more auto-biographical ones, you know. This one, however, is a biopic, of the life of the poet Siegfried Sassoon (Jack Lowden, as the younger version) who fought in and then rejected the underlying premises of the so-called Great War, before he was institutionalised for his disobedience.

He writes to his superiors with exasperated disgust that his betters have been lying to the poor soldiers going off to die, and so they fight under false pretences. As such he rejects their authority in sending him off again, and objects, conscientiously or otherwise, to the war itself.

If he were a poorer man, they might have fucked him up royally for defying the right of Empire to do as it will. But as he is from a wealthy family, well…

Unlike the way those kinds of stories usually go, he was neither mistreated, lobotomised nor electro-shocked half to death. He merely had some chats with a sympathetic doctor (a very gentle and charming Ben Daniels, in a film filled with charming but not gentle people), and meets one of (I think) the loves of his life, being Wilfred Owen (Matthew Tennyson).

The slight, pale Owen, who stutters and seems quite fearful, if we, the audience, know of him, it’s in the context of his famous poetry about just how horrible being in the trenches was. His poem Dulce et Decorum est must have been taught to every school kid throughout the Commonwealth, or at least the schoolboys, back in the 1980s. Or maybe I should narrow it down further to those of us who were taught out of Seven Centuries of Poetry in English…

After they spend a brief enough time together, Owen is deemed to be fit for service again, and is sent off for the purposes of irony to be killed a week before the end of the war.

Oh cruellest fate. If Sassoon didn’t have enough disgust for the war and the Empire beforehand, he has even more cause now.

His chats with the good doctor allow him, in that safe space, to confess to often experiencing the love for his fellow man that dare not speaketh its name, which the doctor himself mentions he has experienced himself. The question is made of how one is meant to live this life in an era where people without enough connections can still be destroyed for it.

Discretion seems to be the key. Also, being rich seems to help.

dir: Gasper Noé

2022

This is more like what I had in mind when I recently wrote about the small sub-genre of dramas dealing with old people facing old age, and the younger people trying to muddle through looking after them. Films that don’t shy away from how hard old age can be, and how hard it can be to look after such oldies properly.

However, this flick is directed by the same man who 20 years ago made Irreversible, a film so horrific in its content that I don’t even want to talk about it. Since then he’s made complex and almost experimental films that have in no way tried to do what his first two hideous films did (the other one being I Stand Alone, which, again, I don’t even want to talk about), but have been no less provocative.

Of one of those previous films, I will say that the message at the end was “Le Temps Detruit Tout”, or “time destroys everything”. Vortex starts with the dedication: “To all those whose brains will decompose before their hearts.”

One should know going in this isn’t going to be cheery stuff. The director himself nearly died in 2020 of a brain haemorrhage, and prior to that looked after his mum who had dementia. So maybe he’s got a feel for mortality, and for the complexities of looking after helpless old people.

The central old couple here are in their 80s, and start off seeming okay. They have a cluttered apartment in the 10th arondissement, in Paris, near, of all places, the Stalingrad train station, and we first watch them having an evening aperitif on the balcony.

“Life is a dream, isn’t it?” she says to him.
- “A dream within a dream.”

Most of the film is shot with at least two cameras, one focussing on Him (legendary Italian director Dario Argento), and one generally focussing on Her (Francoise Lebrun) simultaneously. So we often are watching what’s happening to either of them when they’re in the same apartment or apart. It’s giving us two slightly out of kilter perspectives on something that’s happening right in front of us.

Right from the start it’s obvious she has no idea what’s going on around her, where she is, what she’s meant to be doing, or even who her husband is, most of the time. He spends time trying to find her at the local shops, and clearly this has been happening more and more lately.

Back in her apartment, it is all unfamiliar to her. We watch most of a day proceed (not in real time – it’s a long film but it’s not 24 hours long), and for the majority of that day she has been baffled by everything around her, muttering in half formed sentences to herself. Irritated by photos in which she and other people are captured, but she recognises neither herself nor the other person, and turns them over.

Oh irony of ironies: in her previous career she happened to be a psychiatrist, who would examine and diagnose people going through exactly the kind of dementia that she’s living with now, but, because of the dementia, she doesn’t really get that she has dementia, but she knows that something is profoundly wrong.