My Week in Film: 22nd Jan - 28th Jan
I’ve decided to watch a film every day this year. Here are the films I watched in the week ending 28th of January.
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22nd Jan - Stealing Silver (2017)
Maisie Williams doesn’t age, for good or for worse.
I didn’t have much time last Wednesday so I had to rush to watch a short film. I remembered Omeleto, a channel on Youtube that had an impressive collection of short films. The first one that caught my eye had Maisie Williams in the thumbnail. I liked her in Game of Thrones. Why not give it a go?
Stealing Silver is about a young woman played by Williams who moves back into her sister’s house after a traumatic event. Her sisters leaves for a week and tells her about the older man living across the road, how she helps him out due to his declining mental state.
What follows is a slow story about not much in particular. Trauma and intergenerational friendship are played with but it’s not a film of any great note. Granted, every produced film is a minor miracle but this didn’t grab me. I was bored throughout its twenty minute runtime.
Williams is fine, the other actors not so. There’s a small thread at the beginning where Williams’ character suspects the old man might be a Nazi but it doesn’t lead to anything.
Not much to say about this one. Felt like a copout film choice but again, I was pressed for time.
23rd Jan - Take Shelter (2011)
Now this was incredible.
I love Michael Shannon. He’s one of the world’s underrated actors and this is his best performance.
Curtis LaForche has a perfect life: good job, beautiful family and close friends. However he keeps getting visions of an imminent, apocalyptic storm. Unnatural rainfall, swirling clouds and ominous masses of birds twisting into dark sharps in the sky. He keeps these visions secret even as they cause both paranoia and strain to his relationships. Combined with his own families history of mental illness, he has to determine what is reality and what is his mind.
Take Shelter is a masterclass in creating tension and doubt with narrative. Every scene with Shannon and his fellow actors generates nerve-shredding intensity, a tightrope act predicated on the (potentially) poor mental health of this incredibly sympathetic character who wants to protect his family.
I had watched Jeff Nichols’ latest film The Bikeriders last month and it was good but I had no idea that this was what he was capable of. There was no sensationalising the subject matter in a typical Hollywood fashion; it was a beautifully told character study of someone in pain.
The scene at the Lions Club dinner was breathtaking. It was the apex of a fantastic arc the entire story had been building towards and it will go down in my mind as one of the finest I have ever seen. Can’t recommend this enough.
24th Jan - Scrapper (2023)
This was a film that, on paper, I should’ve enjoyed. I gravitate towards stories about working-class people and I appreciate genuine efforts to tell these stories. Charlotte Regan was, like I am now, an aspiring filmmaker from a working-class background. I wish her all the best for her future career and I’m sincerely happy she got to make this.
However I haven’t much positive to say about Scrapper. As much as I tried to get wrapped up in it, I couldn’t connect. Every time I thought it was going to charm me, it managed to push me away with a brutal twee-ness that doesn’t let up.
A lot of this is down to the performance of Lola Campbell, who plays Georgie. How fair is it to critique the performance of a child? Completely? Fine if handled well? Or not? Either way she’s an irritant of the highest quality.
There’s not much in the way of originality. It’s a paint-by-numbers plot in a more upbeat Andrea Arnold or Ken Loach style, punctuated by stylised cutaways of people who our protagonist knows. With the exception of the triplet biker boys1 the value of these cutaways is little.
The film is shot well in a pastel colour palette which would be fantastic in any other film. It doesn’t serve a clear purpose here though and further muddies the tone of a confused film. The cinematographer is Molly Manning Walker whose own film, How To Have Sex, is fucking brilliant. I would recommend watching that instead.
25th Jan - The Brutalist (2024)
I treated myself to an IMAX viewing and I was not disappointed.
Before you balk at The Brutalist’s three hour runtime I can assure you that this film flies by. I’d heartily recommend spending the money to watch this in the nicest cinema you can because this is a film that deserves to be seen in the best way possible. It’s shot on VistaVision, the method of choice for the 1950s best films, in order to properly capture the feel and tone of the period according to Corbet.
It works perfectly. The grandness of the subject matter (architecture and the American Dream) are rendered exquisitely in both Lol Crawley’s incredible photography and the story’s throwback structure. Don’t be surprised if you see a spate of films release soon with an intermission cut into the reels. It felt fantastic to be able to contemplate the first hour and a half for fifteen minutes and reinvigorated me for the second half.
Adrien Brody is great. Felicity Jones, despite being in half of the film, blows almost everyone away but Guy Pearce was phenomenal. He plays the role of Harrison Van Buren with a control and geniality that would be deserving of the lead in any other film. If he doesn’t win an Oscar this year then we should give up as a film-loving society.
It’s the first film to leave me speechless in a long time and I will be thinking about it for a while.
26th Jan - The Substance (2024)
I’m not going to poison this post with the profound negativity The Substance inspired in me. You can read the full review here.
27th Jan - Red Rooms (2023)
A low-key but disturbing thriller that focuses on loneliness, true-crime obsessives and the impact of technology on our lives.
I hate true crime. As a “genre” it is worse than the worst of cheap exploitation, of gore-fest no-budget horrors. The flippant and tactless way its subjects are treated and the consumerist circus that has sprung up around them, all compounded by an ever-desperate cadre of grifting influencers makes me uncomfortable. The worst example I ever saw was a YouTuber who, whilst applying make-up in a casual and friendly way, was describing the details of a gruesome sexual assault and murder in Middle America with zero emotion.
Red Rooms takes a kinder viewpoint than me, looking at the morbid voyeurism of Kelly-Anne, a Quebecois model/hacker/poker player2 who becomes obsessed with a triple murder trial. In a long initial scene, the details of the case are explained via the opening statements of the prosecuting and defending lawyers. We are placed in the middle of the jury as the disgusting details unfold; we are invited to judge.
Kelly-Anne is a fascinating character, portrayed by Juliette Gariépy, whose para-social fixation is contrasted intelligently by occupation, that of a fashion model. Someone who should have an active social life who lives in a way that borders on misanthropic.
It’s a film concerned with loneliness at its core. The effects that being alone has on people and what they do to deal with it. Clementine, another trial-goer, is shown as a dorky outcast who has travelled far from home and camps out in the street, looking to be the first in the queue when the courthouse opens. She hangs on to Kelly-Anne, finally finding human connection, before her new friend’s obsession proves too much even for her.
The youngest victim’s mother is also alone; someone whom few people can relate to her suffering. She attends the trial with family or friends, but when she goes home there’s no one else there for her. Her own reaction to this emotional isolation is to fight for justice on behalf of the victims. A healthier but incredibly taxing way of coping.
As the film goes on Kelly Anne, who’s cold demeanour rarely falters, becomes increasingly erratic and self-destructive. This culminates in a moment where I had to pause the film and take a few minutes to myself. I kept saying “Oh my god” over and over, I was shocked. The best apart about that moment was the expectation was completely different. I presumed it would be much worse but it was far more despicable than I could imagine. It may even be more incredible than the ending, which features a nerve-shredding sequence that nearly made me sick.
28th Jan - The Teachers’ Lounge (2023)
An allegorical powerhouse that demands of its audience but rewards them in equal measure.
The Teachers Lounge is an inherently political film. All art is but İlker Çatak’s pushes this to the forefront in smart, subtle ways. In a well-to-do German school, someone is stealing money and school supplies. This leads to borderline illegal practices such as interrogating students and profiling. Our lead, the young and idealistic teacher Carla Nowak (played by Leonie Benesch), struggles against these practices and the damaging effects they have on the trust between her and the students.
Using the school as a microcosm for Western society is a masterstroke; a progressive school where equality is assumed reveals itself as a fundamentally. unequal place. Teachers are in charge, children are to be taught. The system’s balance of power teeters on the brink with accusations against foreign students and the stigma attached to the accused.
Benesch is fantastic. With films about inspiring teachers, many go down the Dead Poets Society route. But in this we see just how impossible those stories are in an education system so closely resembling the ‘real world’. Students are prepared for a society that they are powerless in from a young age.
This doesn’t stop them from from trying however. The use of a student newspaper and student council (that sits in on disciplinary meetings between teachers) are effective metaphors for how average people can use their collective voice to influence powerful decision makers.
The performances are brilliant. Every child actor in this film, amateurs according to Çatak, are flawless. The various members of faculty provide complexity to the film’s main themes.
It’s done in a realist way, aside from one moment of on-the-nose symbolism that doesn’t mesh with the rest of the picture. This use of subtlety magnifies the razor-sharp writing and plotting.
However the film’s greatest strength is not in its metaphor but in the charged tension that gathers around the increasingly sympathetic lead, a person who wants to do right by her students and her morals. That is the heart of the film; the struggle of one decent person trying to work for the disenfranchised masses. That’s why I love this film.