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Film 08 08 07
A GHOST STORY dir: David Lower y Starring: Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara
Geremy Jasper, late of NYC rockers The Fever, turns his hand to film directing with feel-good feature debut, Patti Cake$. Patricia Dombrowski (Danielle Macdonald) is an overweight, white, working-class 23-year-old who dreams of becoming the next queen of rap. Patti is aggressive in her ambitions, but her life is far from easy. Her mother, Barb (Bridget Everett) is an abusive alcoholic who still reels over her fumbled career as a musician. Then there’s Patti’s cantankerous grandma (Cathy Moriarty, of Raging Bull fame) whose medical bills are skyrocketing, meaning Patti has to put in overtime as a waitress. Fortunately, her fellow rapper and friend, Jheri (an impressive debut from Siddharth Dhananjay) always has her back, and when they meet the brooding and self-described anti-Christ (Mamoudou Athie), they form a musical trio. Then comes their big chance: the opportunity to perform in front of Patti’s hero – OZ (Sahr Ngaujah). The narrative blends elements of 8 Mile with the tenacity of Precious, but Jasper’s lighter touch draws on his own experiences of growing up in New Jersey before being signed. He also demonstrates his credentials as a former music video director with a series of neon daydreams that look like an MTV generation version of The Wizard of Oz, contrasting with the saturated grey of New Jersey. Then there are the 19 original songs Jasper wrote for the film, all of which feel authentic to the world he’s created in a story that hits all the right beats. Patti Cake$ is raw, and a little rough, but there is a lot of joy. Most of all it is refreshing to see a talent like Macdonald emerge, who is undoubtedly destined for great things. ! Joseph Walsh
ATOMIC BLONDE dir: David Leitch Starring: Charlize Theron, James McAvoy, John Goodman I found the experience of watching David Leitchdirected spy thriller Atomic Blonde oddly calming: like watching a giant octopus pulse through a reinforced aquarium wall. Sure, I didn’t have a clue what was going on, but that’s OK – why demand an intelligible plot when you can watch Charlize Theron beat people up? As my understanding of what actually happened in Atomic Blonde is about as surfacelevel as Paris Hilton’s DJing ability, here’s a plot summary I cribbed from Google: Theron is an undercover MI6 agent sent to Berlin during the Cold War to investigate the murder of a fellow agent and recover a missing list of double agents, before it falls into the wrong hands. Based on the Oni Press graphic novel series The Coldest City, I enjoyed the depiction of 1980s Berlin, a place of grey buildings and once-futuristic hotel suites where Theron broods in ice-cube filled baths. But let’s be real, we don’t care about the plot. You watch Atomic Blonde for three things: the fight scenes, the soundtrack, and Charlize Theron (Vetements fans will also enjoy the outfits.) The fight scenes are excellent: one particularly brutal seven minute scene in which Theron fights off multiple attackers on a Berlin staircase is reminiscent of the famed knife fight from The Bourne Identity in sheer ferocity. The soundtrack, featuring Depeche Mode, George Michael and David Bowie, is exactly as it should be. And Theron is note-perfect: cool and statuesque, but still, crucially, humane. If Mad Max: Fury Road introduced us to Theron as an action heroine, Atomic Blonde cements her firmly in the genre. Let’s have more of the same, please. ! Sirin Kale
! Louise Brailey
09
GOD’S OWN COUNTRY dir: Francis Lee Starring: Josh O’Connor, Alec Secareanu, Gemma Jones You'd be forgiven for thinking that windswept Yorkshire isn't the most obvious setting for a steamy love story, but there's nothing obvious about God's Own Country. A remarkably restrained debut from director Francis Lee, it centres on young farmer Johnny (Josh O'Connor), who toils alone on the family farm under the watch of his sickly father (Ian Hart) and stern grandmother (Gemma Jones). At night, he has meat, potatoes and a tinny for dinner, then drinks himself unconscious. There's a shot of a caged magpie. Within minutes, it's clear this is a man suffocated by duty and desolation, and newcomer O'Connor etches an extraordinary portrait of an individual in emotional arrest. Seven minutes in, he's rutting another guy in the back of a trailer. He doesn't smile for nearly an hour, brooding and antagonising and pushing every button he can find. “We?” he grunts when his rutting partner suggests a date. “No.” Recalling the novels of Harper Fox, particularly Scrap Metal, Lee's film excels at exposing the cracks in life at this remote farmstead. Even before the arrival of Alec Secareanu's chiselled farm hand, Gheorghe – a quiet Romanian who strikes up a clumsy romance with Johnny – God's Own Country rivets as a study of human frailty and family tension. In a landmark year for LGBTQ rights, God's Own Country shuns 'gay movie' cliches – there's no 'coming out' melodrama here – as, in the harsh wilds of Yorkshire, Lee uncovers affecting tenderness in the unspoken and the understated. ! Josh Winning
REVIEWS
PAT TI CAKE$ dir: Geremy Jasper Starring: Danielle Macdonald, Bridget Everett, Siddharth Dhananjay
A Ghost Story opens with a quote from Virginia Woolf’s A Haunted House: “Whatever hour you woke, there was a door shutting”. David Lowery’s extraordinary work is, like Woolf, concerned with exploding ideas of time, and particularly, those personal hauntings that tug at the threads of the past and unravel the present: memories. Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck play an unnamed couple, from whose bookshelves (Nietzsche!) and vocations – he writes melancholy, fragmentary pop – we deduce their status as hip, but sad. When Affleck’s character is killed in a car crash, he returns with a sheet over his body. A crude idea of a ghost – eyeholes and all. Given the film’s tiny budget, quite the gear change after Lowery’s last film Pete’s Dragon, the device is deeply affecting. Beneath the dirtied sheet, Affleck’s stature grows increasingly crumpled as he observes his partner move through the stages of grief and beyond. Some people will find the pacing infuriating (Lowry cites Asian ‘slow cinema’ directors like Tsai Ming-liang as inspiration). But there’s something compelling in how the audience is implicated in the meditation: decades pass in a jump cut or else minutes stretch on forever, as is the case where we’re condemned to watch Mara eat an entire pie in one, drawn-out scene. The thesis continues in both the screen ratio, a Polaroidesque square – hey, I said they were hip – and most effectively, the score. Snatches of aural jetsam augment the rasping drones, or motifs return, altered, like half-remembered dreams. Sure, A Ghost Story has tendency towards an almost cosmic pretentiousness, but Lowery channels a substantial emotional charge from very human anxieties: of being alone, of being forgotten. After all, what could be scarier than that?