Titane
2021
Director: Julia Ducournau
Cast: Agathe Rousselle, Vincent Lindon, Garance Marillier, Bertrand Bonello, Myriem Akheddiou, Lais Salameh
Words – Rhiannon Topham.
Titane, Julia Ducournau’s Palme d’Or-winning body horror film, is not for everyone. It is certainly not recommended for anyone prone to squeamishness, or for those interested only in films which show you everything at face value without any subtext at all. Like Ducournau’s feature debut Raw, Titane is not concerned with social pleasantries, but rather subverting these conventions in the context of a female body and experience seldom, if ever, shown on screen.
The film follows Alexia (an extraordinary leading debut performance from Agathe Rousselle), a woman who had titanium plates fitted into her skull following a car crash during her childhood. As an adult, her sexual attraction to cars culiminates in her work as an exotic dancer at auto shows, writhing and grinding on the vehicles that most excite her. She emits a menacing and cold persona, made all the more apparent when she murders a particularly aggressive and persistent fan who follows her after a show.
Besides strapping herself into the rear seats of a car and bouncing around in a simulated sexual experience, the only thing that seems to get Alexia off is, well, offing humans. Though she does engage with men and women, ultimately these encounters meet fatal ends. When she learns she is pregnant, literally leaking oil, Alexia’s already unhinged demeanour becomes even more untethered. After one catastrophic night, Alexia goes on the run and disguises herself as the grown form of Adrien Legrand, a boy who went missing 10 years ago.
Alexia’s metamorphosis into Adrien (strapping her swelling body with a binder, cutting her blond mullet and smashing her nose against the sink in a public bathroom) signals the film’s transition from gruesome and absurd horror-comedy to melodrama. Adrien is reunited with his bereaved fire chief father Vincent (Vincent Lindon, in a perfect casting), who believes unrelentingly that the mute and dishevelled figure before him is his long-lost son.
Hidden behind Adrien’s muteness is Alexia’s restrained rage, which could unravel at any moment. But a symmetry and something akin to kinship develops between Adrien/Alexia and Vincent. While Alexia binds her breasts and stomach, an increasingly excruciating process, Vincent self-administers injections, presumably steroids, to slow the ravages of time. Both are grappling with their somatic agency by trying to control the uncontrollable and repress the changes that are occurring in their bodies against their will. Their subliminal needs don’t measure with what their bodies are capable of, and their lack of exposure to familial affection makes any attempt at tenderness a painful and uncomfortable experience. This relationship between Alexia/Adrien and Vincent is forged by the characters’ intense emotions and corporeal contrasts, anchored by Vincent’s unconditional love for his son regardless of whether Adrien reciprocates those feelings.
What makes Titane so different—and no doubt shocking to many—is Ducournau’s refusal to frame Alexia as a victim, or to justify her violence as some sort of revenge for her past. Alexia is unrelatable to the extreme, downright detestable for most of the film, and her unorthodox sexual proclivities make her even more difficult to pigeonhole. She’s a character with very few redeeming characteristics, one who uses violence for no other reason than her deep-seated motivations. Alexia isn’t what she seems, but neither are Adrien and Vincent. They are frail characters in myriad kinds of pain, but don’t want you to know it.
The world of Titane is one of confusion and camouflaged vulnerability, where sumptuous visuals and body language often do the talking instead of dialogue. It’s cinema at its most fearless and striking, and I can guarantee you’ve never seen anything quite like it.
C’mon C’mon
2021
Director: Mike Mills
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Woody Norman, Gabby Hoffman
Words – Rhiannon Topham.
The films of Mike Mills are almost the complete antithesis of the big blockbuster; gentle and paced, genuinely humane with an abundance of emotional complexity, but with one or two big Hollywood actors to carry the narrative. His latest, C’mon C’mon is no exception.
It follows the growing bond between Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix), a radio journalist living in New York, and his nephew Jesse (Woody Norman), an imaginative nine-year-old living in California. Johnny offers to look after Jesse for a while so that his sister, Viv (Gabby Hoffman), can take care of Jesse’s father who is struggling with mental illness. The relationship between Johnny and Viv has been strained since the death of their mother, and by accepting their individual and familial shortcomings, this connection is rebuilt over the course of the film.
Shot in a sumptuous black and white, the film is a stylistic triumph. The beaches and palm tree-lined avenues of California are treated with the same muted melancholy as the loud, intense cityscape of New York, showing how untethered emotions can be unaffected by time and place. By levelling these contrasts and stripping away the distractions of colour, the focus of the film is shifted to the importance of sound, and specifically the power of listening. This gives it an almost documentary feel, as every frame serves to tell you something on a personal, societal or global level.
As a radio journalist, Johnny is currently working on a project that involves interviewing young people across the country and asking what the future looks like to them. The answers he receives are profound and reflective of the state of the world today, the inherent difficulties of being socialised among so much animosity, and the hurdles involved in forging your own identity in modern society. Despite his eccentric personality and nascent wisdom, Jesse refuses to be interviewed, and instead uses Johnny’s equipment to immerse himself in the sounds of the natural and man-made environments in the cities they visit together.
There is a real warmth and appreciation of difference in C’mon C’mon, anchored by the vulnerable performances of the three main actors. Phoenix particularly shows his incredible diversity as a performer and his capacity for capturing a specific kind of inner wound. Norman is a revelation as Jesse, tapping into every feeling with his whole body and soul. Ultimately, this is a film about being tolerant and accepting of our flaws and differences, no matter how frustrating the process may be. It is a poignant and heartfelt reflection on parenting and human relationships, and is a recommended tonic to the often overwhelming barrage of ‘content’ available today.
Petite Maman
2021
Director: Céline Sciamma
Cast: Joséphine Sanz, Gabrielle Sanz, Nina Meurisse, Stéphane Varupenne
Words – Rhiannon Topham.
Céline Sciamma’s follow-up to the masterful modern classic Portrait of a Lady on Fire is the beautiful, simple 72-minute drama Petite Maman. It opens with the protagonist, eight-year-old Nelly (Joséphine Sanz), going from room to room saying goodbye to the inhabitants of the care home where her beloved grandmother has just died. We have only just met her, but already Nelly’s compassion is a sign that she will try to make sense of this loss by supporting her mother Marion (Nina Meurisse) in any way she can.
Nelly and her parents drive back to her grandmother’s home so that they can organise her belongings and move everything out. She is excited to locate the hut in the adjoining woods that her mother used to play in as a child, and eventually finds it while she explores as her parents put the contents of a whole life into cardboard boxes. But when Nelly wakes up in the morning, Marion has suddenly vanished, leaving the young child alone with her father (Stéphane Varupenne) who seems to not quite know what to say or do to assuage the grief.
Later that day while out playing in the woods again to pass the time, Nelly encounters a young girl (Gabrielle Sanz, actor Joséphine’s twin sister) who looks just like her, pulling a large branch over to the hut. She waves Nelly over to help and reveals that her name is, Marion.
Sciamma allows this blossoming friendship the space to flourish, and never overtly indicates whether it is a ghost story, an act of science fiction or purely a figment of Nelly’s imagination. Equally, she doesn’t specify if young Marion will always be found in an identical but fresher-looking house on the other side of the woods, or if her existence will cease once Nelly’s father puts the last box in the back of a moving van. It doesn’t really matter, because Petite Maman uses a familiar, youthful playfulness spliced with calmness and reflection in order to unpack the complexities of human life and emotion.
It shows that love, loss, family and friendship can be interconnected in myriad ways. The tension between physical absence but emotional presence is stretched across the equidistance between the past and the future. Petite Maman is a beautiful tale of a young girl simply trying to understand her mother so that she can be there for her during a difficult time, mixing surrealism with realism, child-like appeal with very adult contemplations on morality. It has something for every viewer, not least the reminder that our parents were once children with nascent curiosities and innocent worldviews.
Dune
2021
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Jason Momoa, Stellan Skarsgård, Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem, Dave Bautista, Zendaya, Charlotte Rampling
Words – C.J. Abbott
When it was first announced Denis Villeneuve would tackle Dune, expectations were immediately at cosmic levels. Following his breath-taking science fiction debut with Arrival, and staggering continuation with Blade Runner 2049, it seemed certain Dune was in safe hands. The story of Dune in cinema stretches back decades, before Alien, before Star Wars, before 2001: A Space Odyssey, there was only Dune.
Originally written by Frank Herbert in 1965, the book has become legend, cementing itself as the foundation of modern science-fiction. Considered a bible for the genre, a big-screen adaptation was quickly deemed impossible. Many filmmakers did try, and indeed fail, to capture the essence of the piece. From Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unmade psychedelic epic to David Lynch’s inspired but misguided 1984 release, Dune has always been an untameable beast for filmmakers. Villeneuve had an unfathomable mountain to climb, but if anyone could reach the summit, it was him.
Thankfully, after five years of waiting, after delays, questions regarding sequels, and enduring a global pandemic, Dune has arrived. From the moment the first frame hit the screen, all tensions, expectations, and concerns were buried beneath the sands of Arrakis. Not only has Villeneuve captured the essence of the novel, but he has crafted one of the most ambitious and truly awe-inspiring epics in years.
It is that – epic, in the true sense of the word. The scope of the film blows the mind, everything is on a galactic scale, from the planet-sized Spacing Guild ships, to the monolithic Arrakeen architecture, to the lumbering Harrkonnen soldiers, cinema hasn’t felt this grandiose in quite some time.
Taking place thousands of years into a distant future, humanity has returned to the days of imperial rule, governing houses, and aristocratic decadence. In a universe of plenty, only one world produces spice – Arrakis. This is the substance that allows for interstellar travel, making it the most valuable resource in the galaxy. For 80 years House Harkonnen has ruled Arrakis, their Dune, but by imperial decree, they must relinquish control. House Atreides has been gifted the world, to ensure the production of spice continues. Young Paul Atreides, played by Timothee Chalamet, is the son of Duke Leto, Oscar Isaac, the head of House Atreides, and soon finds himself thrust into a world of deception, betrayal, and, of course, giant sandworms.
Greig Fraser oversaw the cinematography of the film, known for his work on Rogue One, Vice, and Zero Dark Thirty. He has managed to capture the scope of the Dune universe expertly, through the use of biblically scaled wide-shots. Angling the characters, ships, building the vastness of Arrakis and beyond. One of the more esoteric elements of the book was Paul Atreides’ visions, a seemingly nightmarish undertaking on a visual level. Yet, Fraser stripped back the complexity of the description to reveal something beautiful and unknowable. Villeneuve and Fraser gave Dune a crisp visual style that made the world seem alien and familiar, an instantly understandable vision of the future.
This was aided by some incredible sound design, from the booming bass of the Harkonnen warships to the whispered breeze of the sand, every aspect was given meticulous detail and love. Best of all, the portrayal of The Voice, the ability to command others through word, was expertly realised. The sound of the chilling words had an almost horrific tone, terrifying in their strangeness.
All this was held on the shoulders of Chalamet, who goes from a quietly fierce boy to the beginnings of a warrior god over the course of its two-and-a-half-hour runtime. In the role of Paul, Chalamet is in almost every scene, bearing the brunt of the project. Once again, he proves himself to be one of the most capable and versatile actors working today, giving Paul the nobility and leadership the character demands. He wasn’t alone though, as the entire cast brings everything into their parts. Rebecca Ferguson stars as Lady Jessica, the mother of Paul and Bene Gesserit. She is both cold and warm, struggling to reconcile her teaching Bene Gesserit with her mother’s love for Paul. By far, Ferguson gives the most heartbreaking performance in the film, as she slowly watches her boy change before her eyes.
Oscar Isaac is equally impressive as Duke Leto, Paul’s father. He is both wise and loving, a symbol of the very best this harsh world has to offer. In many ways, Leto is the voice of reason, a man betrayed for his kind heart, manipulated due to admiration. On the other hand, completely opposed to him is Stellan Skarsgard’s Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, the brutish and beastly head of Arrakis’s former masters. He is enormous, literally. Each scene with his presence is uncomfortable as his grotesque mass floats through the film. He is a villain that simply just needs to be in a room for the viewer to feel the intimidation.
All this comes together to create a piece that is not only impressive but genuinely important. A film that Hollywood desperately needs to succeed. The combination of intelligent filmmaking with a franchise mentality. Dune leaves the audience wanting more, actually needing more, finishing well before the original book comes to a close. This is a story that is half-finished but still feels narratively satisfying. If and when Part Two ever releases to wrap up the story, if it is at the same level of quality Part One is, this will go down as one of the best franchises in decades.
The Power of the Dog
2021
Director: Jane Campion
Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Frances Conroy, Keith Carradine, Thomasin McKenzie, Genevieve Lemon
Words – Rhiannon Topham.
Jane Campion is a master of atmospheric melodrama. Her latest, The Power of the Dog, is an incredibly textural wild west based on Thomas Savage’s novel of the same name. It follows prosperous cattle ranch owners Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) and George Burbank (Jesse Plemons) in 1925 Montana, a hyper-masculine environment where anything remotely effeminate is performatively derided by Phil while George looks the other way.
The equipoise between the brothers, who at first sleep in single beds beside each other in the same room, is disrupted when they meet Rose (Kirsten Dunst), a widowed restaurant/hotel owner who George marries after a short courtship. The brothers are polar opposites in almost every way; Phil is the quintessentially ornery and reticent cowboy, striding across the plains in his stirrups, bathing only in a nearby creek when nobody’s looking, whereas George is clinically clean, well-presented and timid in nature. Theirs is a combative kind of harmony, ripe for sociological analysis. So, when Rose and her son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who represents just about everything Phil despises, move into the Burbank family home, the paradigm shift is colossal for all involved. Phil took pleasure in upbraiding George’s anti-rancher disposition but appreciated the status quo of their collaboration; Peter’s unabashed interest in the intricacies of flora and fauna seems to physically unsettle him.
Unless you’re familiar with the source material, it’s extremely difficult to predict how the simmering tension and capriciousness will culminate. Campion doesn’t give anything away about the origins of Phil’s hostility, the Burbank family secrets bubbling just beneath the surface or when, how and to whom the manipulation coming from all directions is going to aim its final deadly shot. We’re always expecting a situation to erupt into a hideous brawl, or for something or someone to make an ominous entrance over the mountains Phil spends so much time looking longingly towards. The performances are subtle and finely-tuned, grounded by moments which temporarily displace you from the escalating agitation on the Burbank ranch.
Campion suspends us between apprehension, expectation and an almost celestial sense of some invisible force pushing, pulling and wringing the nascent unhappy family. There are elegant reflections on chosen and given family, the roles we play in our everyday lives and the intricate face-saving involved in seemingly meaningless interactions–all among a harsh but beautiful frontier with a main character energy of its own. We hear a lot about ‘slow-burners’, but don’t let the pace of The Power of the Dog put you off. Everything suddenly clicks in the final scene, and it is so worth the wait.
Lamb
2021
Director: Valdimar Jóhannsson
Cast: Noomi Rapace, Hilmir Snær Guðnason, Björn Hlynur Haraldsson
Words – Rhiannon Topham.
Valdimar Jóhannsson’s feature-length debut Lamb continues the great A24 tradition of menacing animals messing with the human state of mind. The film centres around María (Noomi Rapace) and Ingvar (Hilmir Snær Guðnason), a young childless couple who own a sheep farm in pastoral Iceland. Among the sprawling landscape, they spend all day, every day harvesting crops, tending to their flock and hardly exchanging so much as a glance at one another. There is great sincerity and dolour involved in every moment; a Christmas dinner is had without any kind of festive cheer or visible satisfaction.
Things change when one of their ewes births a supernatural calf, though we don’t see anything of her form past her perfectly-formed lamb head for about 20 minutes after she arrives. We know something is up though. The instant she is born, María’s face reads disbelief, terror and something akin to adoration. The scene cuts to her carrying the child away—what will she do with her? It cuts again to María watching over the lamb-baby as she sleeps soundly in a small metal tub, swaddled in blankets.
The couple affectionately name the baby Ada and tend to her as she rests in a crib dragged from the barn next to their own bed. When we do finally see the child’s body, it’s when María scoops her up from the ground in a misty field after the ewe who birthed Ada has seemingly kidnapped her and attempted to flee. María’s rage directed at the ewe, paired with the ready-made but untouched crib brought out of storage, implies that her maternal affections have been previously thwarted in some way, and Ada offers the potential of a new beginning.
Stylistically the film includes a lot of handsome frames-within-frames, often from the outside looking in when capturing the sheep (ponderously gazing out of a window, ‘when will my husband return from war’ style) and vice versa for the humans. This is a clever choice to establish power, boundaries and perspective, and suits the richness of the bucolic colour palette. However, intentionally or not, a frustration can be found with María and Ingvar never once acknowledging Ada’s form and the mystery surrounding her sudden entrance into their lives. The only person to acknowledge it is Ingvar’s brother Pétur (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson), and even then it is only fleeting before he too becomes entranced by Ada. Pétur is inserted purely to disrupt the happy family facade, and it doesn’t work—the character is a needless addition to the plot and his ‘listen to me, I’m the voice of reason’ nonchalance feels shallow. Lamb sets out to do too much while asserting to do very little, the result is a film that barely amounts to anything, even with an ostensibly absurd twist in the vein of Robert Eggers’ The Witch and similarly bleak examples of monstrous modern surrealism.
Passing
2021
Director: Rebecca Hall
Cast: Tessa Thompson, Ruth Negga, André Holland, Alexander Skarsgård
Words – Rhiannon Topham.
It’s always interesting when an actor turns their hand to directing. Passing is Rebecca Hall’s directorial debut and is an adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel of the same name. Set in 1920s Harlem, it follows two mixed-race childhood friends when they meet by chance in a white-dominated Manhattan area after many years apart. They both now live fairly comfortable middle-class lives in adulthood, but Irene (Tessa Thompson) still identifies as African-American while Clare (Ruth Negga) is ‘passing’ as white.
Clare is delighted by this unexpected reunion whereas Irene is ambivalent. Irene’s disquiet is anchored when she meets Clare’s wealthy white husband (Alexander Skarsgård, who else could there be to play a truly despicable man and husband?) who wastes no time in demonstrating his hideous racist opinions. He doesn’t just dislike Black people, he hates them. He expresses these views casually, because Irene herself can passively pass as white. Remember, this is Manhattan, and Irene wouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near the lavish tearoom where she bumps into Clare. It’s obvious that if this gathering had included Irene’s Black husband (André Holland) and children, the show of civility would be rather different.
With a 4:3 aspect ratio, sharp black and white colour palette and objectively stunning costumes, Passing certainly looks the part of a Harlem Renaissance adaptation. Thompson and Negga also put in sterling performances as the two protagonists, skirting around the emotional awkwardness of a friendship fraught with moral ambiguity. However, besides the stilted script and vagueness surrounding Irene’s sexuality (a fundamental feature in the source material), a glaring issue with this film is the pacing. Clare is drawn back to Irene through loneliness and desperation to reclaim a part of herself she chose to leave behind to pursue wealth and social standing.
The progression from their first meeting through to their increased interaction in Irene’s townhouse and then final act plods along without addressing any of the glaring questions about who Clare is to Irene and vice versa, or how their husbands play pivotal roles in their identities. The closing scene is incredibly rushed and you are left wondering why things came to pass in such a way, given the sparse context and emotional involvement.
The script does little to provide substance to how any of the characters are feeling at any point throughout the film. Silence can often be a powerful method to demonstrating discontent and Thompson subtly shows how the growing unease of Irene’s internal monologue starts to afflict her physically and mentally. However, the moments of quietness are generally not complemented by any kind of narrative progression or development. For example, there isn’t enough polarity between the friends’ domestic deference, particularly the contrast between Irene’s sense of duty to her family and Clare’s eagerness to be away from her husband at any given opportunity.
The subject matter is brave and interesting, and in writing, directing and producing Passing, Hall has shown great promise as a filmmaker. It’s just a shame it doesn’t offer much more than superficial tension and elegance.
Sundown
2021
Director: Michel Franco
Cast: Tim Roth, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Samuel Bottomley, Albertine Kotting McMillan, Iazua Larios
Words – Rhiannon Topham.
A group of four British people (two adults, two teenagers) are vacationing in a plush villa that overlooks the sea somewhere sunny. They clearly live a very comfortable life as they have servants bringing them cocktails as they lounge by their infinity pool. Suddenly, the woman receives a phone call from back home with some upsetting news about her mother. She is distraught and orders everyone to pack their bags so they can get on the first flight home. At the airport, the man, Neil (Tim Roth) says he can’t find his passport and has to return to the resort to find it, that he will get the next flight back to London once he’s retrieved it.
That’s about all we know of Michel Franco’s Sundown for the first 10 minutes or so. It takes a substantial amount of time to even learn anyone’s name (the mother, Alice, is played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, and the teenagers are her children), or to find out where this is all taking place (Acapulco).
The film follows Neil not as he returns to the resort for his passport, but as he relaxes into a more modest hotel by the beach, his passport safely in the inside pocket of his carry-on case where it’s been the whole time.
The narrative unravels so slowly, it’s like a crack in a wall slowly splintering. Tim Roth plays Neil with a contagious serenity, his quiet introspection anchored by very minimal dialogue that takes a ‘tell, don’t show’ approach to storytelling over the course of the 83-minute run. It’s only through Neil’s casual conversations with his new love interest, a bodega assistant called Berenice (Iazua Larios), that we find out that Alice is his sister, not his wife, the teens his niece and nephew. Neil spends his days drinking beer slumped in a chair on the seafront, his nights dining out with Berenice, his phone switched off and shut in a drawer. Oh, and the siblings are absolutely stinking rich heirs to a meatpacking business.
Because of this brevity, we never really find out why Neil decided to stay in Acapulco, or why he refused to go home to England for his mother’s funeral, or why he signed over his half of the family business to his sister. There is a revelation at the end that serves as some explanation, but the viewer is mostly encouraged to piece the story together themselves and come to their own conclusions.
The sparseness and lack of affectation allows for a meditation on the frailty of human existence and all that torments us: love, loss, family, health, having too much time, not having enough time. It upends your expectations of the privileged-middle-aged-man-in-a-crisis trope Franco could quite easily have slipped into, and Roth plays it to perfection. Neil’s in nirvana sitting in his plastic chair, staring out into the horizon with an existential half-smile on his face and the tide lapping his bare feet, entirely detached from the baser urges, at peace with his own hollowness.
The French Dispatch
2021
Director: Wes Anderson
Cast: Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Jeffrey Wright, Frances McDormand, Stephen Park, Léa Seydoux, Timothée Chalamet, Christoph Waltz, Owen Wilson, Saoirse Ronan, Adrien Brody, Elisabeth Moss, Liev Schreiber, Willem Dafoe, Edward Norton, Benicio Del Toro, Jason Schwartzman, Anjelica Huston, Henry Winkler
Words – Rhiannon Topham.
I feel the same about sitting down for a new Wes Anderson movie as I do about watching Frasier reruns every weekday morning—a sense of comfort in the familiarity, knowing exactly what you’re going to get because everything that follows is pretty much the same as what’s come before. It’s safe, predictable. For Anderson’s latest The French Dispatch, this manifests in the director’s trademark formula of regular collaborators (Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, Adrien Brody), his dollhouse approach to dissecting architectural structures and his wry, deadpan glimmers of humour delivered through rapid verbosity.
The French Dispatch is an anthology of crazy accounts from the fictional town of Ennui-sur-Blasé and the eponymous publication, headed by American editor Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray) who journeyed to France for a holiday and never left. The Dispatch is a supplement to a newspaper in Howitzer’s hometown of Liberty, Kansas, and is Anderson’s homage to The New Yorker magazine. Its roster of American expatriate writers and illustrators report on Ennui-sur-Blasé’s community of intellectuals and nonconformists through sophisticated long-reads and the occasional accompanying comic strip.
The three main stories told throughout the film are narrated by the journalists who wrote them and are to be printed in the latest and last issue of The French Dispatch, owing to the recent death of Howitzer whose will decreed the publication be shut down upon his demise. J.K.L. Berensen (Swinton, in another pair of comical false teeth) is an art critic and lecturer who recounts the tale of convicted murderer and painter Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro). Politics writer Lucinda Krementz (McDormand) struggles to uphold her journalistic neutrality as she covers reports on the town’s impending revolution heralded by some spirited students. Finally, the food writer Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright) relates his experience of trying to interview police chef Lieutenant Nescafier (Stephen Park), only to become embroiled in the kidnapping of the comissaire’s son.
This is Anderson’s “love letter to journalists”, and it evidently takes a lot of inspiration from the real people who’ve driven The New Yorker to its great success. It’s hard to predict what past and present New Yorker staff may make of this depiction, but the film was obviously created with the warmest intentions and admiration so you would guess its reception is mostly positive.
It’s possibly his most visually creative live-action feature, and his most self-congratulatory. Yes, we know to expect the usual directory of stars by now, but The French Dispatch is so incredibly stuffed with characters that it’s impossible to feel any sort of attachment with any of them. There’s little to no emotional depth provided at all, and I still haven’t decided whether it blends multiple genres or shirks genre completely. Romance? Hardly. Drama? Too twee. Comedy? Depends who you ask.
Much like some of Anderson’s earlier work such as Moonrise Kingdom and The Royal Tenenbaums, there are the occasional glimmers of melancholy and introspection, bordering on despair. This is treated with the usual languor, befitting of the fictional town name where the Dispatch is based. It’s watchable and largely enjoyable, but by the time the end credits roll it’s hard to pinpoint a particular emotion or opinion about the film at all, either positive or negative.
If you’ve followed Anderson’s filmography and count yourself as a fan, The French Dispatch has everything you want. Just make sure you watch it in a cinema with decent screens, or at least with no one sitting in front of you—because of the director’s proclivity for central framing and symmetry, there are plenty of frames where your focus is brought to the middle of the lower portion of the screen that you might have to crane your head to see.
Last Night in Soho
2021
Director: Edgar Wright
Cast: Thomasin McKenzie, Anya Taylor-Joy, Matt Smith, Diana Rigg
Words – Rhiannon Topham.
Listen, we all feel a bit of nostalgia for bygone eras from time to time. Judging by the current mode of dress and cultural zeitgeist, for many this manifests as a love of all things 90s, a not-too-distant past when ‘things’ were just ‘better’. For Eloise ‘Ellie’ Turner (Thomasin McKenzie), the protagonist of Edgar Wright’s latest Last Night in Soho, everything about London in the 1960s—the music, the fashion, and presumably the romanticisation of living in relative squalor—is a tonic for the overwhelming nature of modern life.
When she moves to London to study fashion just like her late mother and pursue her dreams of becoming a designer, Ellie is still wide-eyed and naive, despite repeated warnings about how London can be, frankly, a bit much. Given her gift (or curse) for seeing and feeling the emotions of the dead, her grandmother rightly worries that living in a city with a seedy story attached to nearly every street might be a struggle. Nevertheless, she moves into her university halls, only to encounter instant friction with her roommate and fellow students, instantly becoming the subject of ridicule from a stereotypically-Mean Girl tribe of her peers. So, with her heart still in the past and her head in some grey area on the space-time continuum, London fails to meet her fairytale expectations and after being there for less than a week she looks for a new place to live.
This brings her to the doorstep of Ms. Collins (Diana Rigg), and the cosy little bedsit on the top floor of her terraced home. It’s like a time capsule of 60s residential modesty, and of course Ellie is hooked. Every night when she goes to sleep, she transports to the swinging 60s and slips into the spirit of Sandy, a young singer and dancer with dreams of becoming the next Cilla Black. The magic of her nocturnal expeditions soon wears off when Sandy’s new beau (Matt Smith), like London itself, turns out to be something that his handsome facade does not suggest. The initial promise of basking in the glamour of Soho nightclubs and making it as a singer crumbles pretty quickly when Sandy is pimped out, revealing the hidden seediness between the walls seeped in cigarette smoke and slick with old man sweat.
That’s all I’m going to say about the plot. What I will highlight as a particular triumph is the demonstration of how spaces are intrinsic to memories and can become characters within themselves. Wright shows that what happens in finite spaces such as underground drinking holes where Ellie encounters the tormented ghosts of London’s past, or way above ground in her bedsit, may not be as prominent as the landmarks and flashy billboards lining Leicester Square but are just as claustrophobic. The only difference is that outside is the heaving body count of the living, but inside are the trapped souls of a horde of apparitions.
However, a fundamental flaw is that it ruins the big plot twist through its repetitiveness. Certain scenes seem almost smug in the way they try to drop hints about how the story will end by repeating the same kind of action we’ve just seen but in a different place, and with a new set of people either not believing what Ellie is saying or treating her with kid gloves or just generally giving her the ‘ick’, lingering slightly too long on specific props or details in a way that says “REMEMBER THIS, IT’S IMPORTANT”. By the time we reach the big reveal, not enough has been said about the ill treatment of women, toxic men, the sex industry and who ‘deserves’ what in life to save the narrative from feeling pretty tonally flat. It’s not enough to look pretty and sound cool if your handling of such heavy subjects as grief, sexism and mental illness gets lost in the doting homage and is veiled with a goofy humour that is particularly mocking of young people today.
REEL STEEL 
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