CIVIL WAR**** Frightening

CIVIL WAR IS a viscerally exciting movie. Its cine verity style plunges you into the heart of the action, much of which is both heart-stopping and, seemingly clipped from news flashes and war documentaries, feels very real. (Cinematographer Rob Hardy pulls us directly into the action) Kristin Dunst is Lee, an immensely credible war-hardened, “get the shot” photo-journalist whose point of view becomes our point of view through the story. The movie basically follows the journey of four journalist, Dunst and her writer, Joel (Wagner Moura) along with a fellow battle-hardened journalist (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a naïve, often scared photographer who, in awe of Lee, tags along, literally for the ride. The four of them are headed to Washington, where Joel wants to get a quote from the embattled president (Nick Offerman).

The movie steers clear from taking sides politically and -seemingly- offering up any overt commentary about the US situation today. We view the unfolding carnage, chaos and societal collapse (by the maestro of societal collapse, writer director Alex Garland of Ex Machina and 28 Days Later) through the dispassionate lens of the observing journalists. There are no interjected conversations about what political or economic actions caused this collapse and civil war; the journalists are the observers, the recorders for posterity. 

They observe a lot. They are at the centre of an unfolding catastrophe where there is one group – the Western front – aligned with another group against a third or fourth groups. What values or beliefs these opposing groups stand for are irrelevant. What matters is that they’re killing each other, with that one group that our protagonists are following, heading toward their big prize, the president of the USA.

We do know one fact: that the president is or has become a dictator and is a likened with various European dictators. It also becomes clear that the act of observation is as destructive, in its own way, as any bullet. For all her tough exterior, Lee is plagued by her history of observations – of brutal killings, of people set on fire, of bombs and destruction. There’s a point when the protective armour of the adrenaline junkie spirit (which they all wear) becomes weakened by such a constant bombardment of the simple act of seeing; and, through photography, remembering. Getting to the truth is dangerous business. Lee’s point comes when she finds herself in a bizarre dress boutique with Jessie (the young photographer). They’re in a town that is seemingly outside the conflagration around it; Lee is persuaded to try on a dress and smile for Jessie’s observing camera. It captures both her shy smile and a glimpse of a life before the collapse. It feels like the moment when Lee changes and the baton of the dispassionate observer passes to the younger photographer. We know one day her breaking point will also come.

But the suggestion is that such intensity of observation takes its toll not simply because of the brutalities seared into the brain but because the core truths that emerge become profoundly destabilising. And this is at the heart of the movie’s, of Garland’s point of view. In one scene the four journalists find themselves witness to a terrible event. A group of men, maybe aligned to one of the groups, or more than likely just roving armed vigilantes, are emptying a dump-truck of its load – dead, bloodied bodies – into a vast open grave. The men confront them, and in an attempt to mollify them, Joel reassures them that he’s a fellow American, just like them. In the response that follows lies the gist of the movie; “But what type of American are you?” asks one of the vigilantes. Because at the heart of the civil war, of America’s actual on-going internal civil war, is the question of identity. Once, Whitman’s boast about America, that “I am large I contain multitudes” was enough of a statement of identity: American as the wide, open, generous land of welcome. Now, the movie suggests, the idea of America has become reduced, shrunken to parochial identities of race and political tribes. The destruction the journalists observe is not so much that of a country, but of its governing idea.

And that -observed- truth; the observed reality of a country, ideologically self-destroying, is truly frightening.

CIVIL WAR: Dir/writer: Alex Garland (Ex Machina, 28 Days Later). With: Kristen Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny (Priscilla), Stephen McKinley Henderson, Nick Oferman. Cinematographer:  Rob Hardy (Mission Impossible: Fallout. Ex-Machina)

PERFECT DAYS **** Near perfect movie

PERFECT DAYS IS a small gem of a movie. Its focus is the quiet, uneventful life of Hirayama, a Tokyo public toilet cleaner. It’s a job at the very bottom of the social hierarchy; one that confers no status; only invisibility. He isn’t – as would most people- in search of better. And that’s the point, the parable of the movie. It’s an image of the spirit at peace with itself. I guess, in this evocation of deep -agnostic – spirituality, it’s an image of a kind of Zen calm.

For Hirayama, this job, because of its unvarying sameness, is perfection itself. Every day he arises from his minuscule flat at the same time and follows the same routine: coffee, toilet cleaning, lunch in a park where he always exchanges nods with a regular there; he then takes a photo (using film) of the same tree (he has boxes of these photos in his flat), more cleaning, a visit to a bath house and on and on. Every day.

He executes his work with meticulous care; he has enough money to be free from want; he is intellectually curious and fulfilled; he clearly has a small eco-system of friends. He is a man fulfilled. The movie poses the question: what need is there for more?

The movie, from director Wim Wenders (who also made a documentary about Pope Francis) finds the perfect balance between this spiritual, symbolic dimension and ‘the real world’. His protagonist is both of this world and apart from it; it is his slight eccentricities (He still listens to cassette tapes…of American 70’s rock and jazz; still uses film) that, like a few others in the story, make him both genuinely weird and also clearly uplifted above the vanities that we regard as normal. 

This repetitiveness, the banality of unvarying sameness, the images of the ebb and flow of light that merge into dream-like images that knit the narrative together, suggest a transcendence of time. It is as if the unchanging flow of one day into another indicate both the passage of time and its irrelevance to the spirit. Hirayama’s demeanor of quiet calm is in stark contrast with the images of Tokyo rush hour, of people scrambling into his toilets in desperation, of his young assistant forever planning for a future that will never happen, of the need to move up, move on, move forward. 

And then one day his niece turns up. She is running away from her controlling, vastly wealthy mother – his sister- the very image of ‘achievement’ or ‘ambition’. Her worldliness is such that she simply cannot fathom the spiritual simplicities of her brother. But the reality of the world continually presses in on him: his assistant unexpectedly quits the job, forcing him to break routine and hustle; a young girl steals one of his cassettes etc. These minor, pedestrian dramas are contrasted with the deeper existential drama of death. He has a chance encounter one night with a man dying of cancer; a man running out of time. They play a silly game of chasing each other’s shadows, as if they’d both rolled back time and were still children; as if the life most people live is just one of chasing shadows…of wealth, love, happiness. 
Perhaps the perfect day lies in never chasing the shadows. Just stop, wait for the flow of light on the tree; and then the let joy come to you 

Koji Yakusho who plays Hirayama won the 2023 Cannes best actor award; and deservedly so. His, mainly speechless visualization, without any mawkishness or sentimental absurdity, of his character’s engagement with the joy of living is priceless.

PERFECT DAYS: Dir/Writer: Wim Wenders. Co-writer: Takuma Takasaki. With: Koji Yakusho (Babel), Tokio Emoto. Cinematographer: Franz Lustig

WICKED LITTLE LETTERS**** Wicked!

THIS QUINTESSENTIALLY BRITISH comedy is both huge, regressive fun (all that cussing!) and a clear-eyed observation about the misogyny and moral hypocrisy at the heart of Edwardian England. Director Thea Sharrock has found the right balance between light, at times Keystone-cop comedy with serious social commentary. It’s the true story about Littlehampton, a small English village that made national news when its residents were bombarded by a series of crude scatological letters sent by a mysterious writer. Who could it possibly be?

At the heart of the tale are two women, polar opposites and neighbours. Edith Swan (Olivia Coleman) is the frumpy, holier-than-God spinster, still living with her parents and under the thumb of her controlling father (Timothy Spall).  Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley) is a free-spirited, foul-mouthed widower (she claims) and mother of one. She is everything polite society despises and therefore clearly the culprit.

Rose’s putative husband was killed in the War; and the grim reality of the great war is the not-so-subtle contrast with the absurdity of a society now in need of -moral- protection not from the Huns, but from impolite language. It’s a criminal offence. Fortunately, the village of Littlehampton is under the protective care of Britishness by means of a police department and its prosecutorial authorities who know that single, unwed mothers are a scourge from whom all vices flow. Rose must clearly be guilty.

But the war has resulted in a stirring of female consciousness; after all, they had to carry the can while the men were all off being killed; there’s a rebellious spirit lurking in the polite bosoms of the many war widows of the village. And the spirit of this new age, when women refuse to be just seen and not heard, is in the form of a young female Police Officer (Anjani Vasan) – a new concept, unacceptable to her fellow, male officers. She’s the dissenting voice of reason, demanding proof instead of prejudice; clearly a dangerous precedent.

Both Rose and Edith find their own not dissimilar ways of breaking free from the corseted constraints of their male dominated societies. The women may lack the sticks and stones, but aha, with words…truth will out.

Coleman and Buckley are two of my favourite actors; their on-screen cussing, bitching chemistry is a pure joy. As the father, Timothy Spall is the real-world version of the pantomime villain. The police are pantomime buffoons; he embodies the dark centre of the kind of repressive insincere morality that nowadays finds it high ground in railing against ‘woke’. The race neutral casting adds a nice element of editorial sarcasm to what would have been all white Britain. Nice touch.

Go see it: a small film with a big bang.  

WICKED LITTLE LETTERS Dir: Thea Sharrock (Me Before You). With: Olivia Coleman, Jessie Buckley, Timothy Spall, Anjani Vasan (Killing Eve) Writer: Jhnny Sweet. Cinematographer: Ben Davis (The Banshees of Inisherin). Production Designer: Cristina Casali (The Personal History of David Copperfield)

BOB MARLEY: ONE LOVE** Puppy Love version

THE CHALLENGE IN any bio pic is that of knowing what to put in and knowing what to leave out. Think of it this way: luggage is what you take with you; baggage is what you dump. It becomes even more difficult when the person(s) trying to differentiate between luggage and baggage are so intimately involved in the selection process (say, a wife for instance and her favourite son) that everything is just too damned important to leave out.

Bob Marley: One Love is such a mess of luggage and baggage that there’s no point of focus and no narrative arc. It feels like a movie scripted in a board-room. If you’re looking for insights into what made a small town, Jamaican group into the world’s biggest music power-house, with a global appeal that transcended nationality or race, look elsewhere. If you’re trying to understand why the Wailing Wailers and its genius percussionist Neville Livingston or Bunny Wailer turned into Bob Marley and his back-up band, the Wailers, look elsewhere. If you’re trying to understand why the album regarded as the best of the twentieth century, Exodus, so brilliant articulated the zeitgeist of the age, look elsewhere.

But if you want baggage, producers Rita Marley (Bob’s wife and son) Ziggy sure have a movie for you.

ALL THE IMPORTANT events in Marley’s life, from his earliest memories of abandonment by his white, cum proxy slave-master father to his first encounters with Rita, his first beloved, his involvement with Rastafarianism and everything in between, catalogued and compiled by someone in the hope that no-one can complain of something, anything, missing, it’s all here; in condensed form… a sort of Liner notes version of a life.

Often the scenes don’t lead anywhere (In one, Marley tells Rita that he was born Nestor but his friends called him Robbie. Which begs the question, why? We’ll never know. Marley and Rita are gunned down; cut to Marley running into the hospital pushing the gurney with Rita on it. So was he actually shot? How came the speedy recovery?). The creative idea (whose?) was clearly that more was better than less. Ahem, except one major event – his relationship with Cindy Breakspeare, his white mistress, Miss Jamaica and mother of son Damian Marley – and a few other women here and there (and pretty much everywhere else). Rita after all produced the movie (“hell hath no fury etc.”)

But no matter, it’s a perfectly pleasant movie. The music’s great; Bob and Rita are well-acted (by Kingsley Ben-Adir and Lashana Lynch: two Brits with flawless Jamaican accents); and Marley’s edgy sexiness has been burnished into a Bridgeton type brown beauty. 

It’s all Bob and all Rita all the time.  Chris Blackwell who shaped the Wailers and made them acceptable to a white Western audience is there, smiling and nodding but without any defined character (Norton who plays Blackwell usurps the role usually played by ‘the wife’ character in various movies: a hazy slightly irrelevant background figure). 

There are actually no defined characters. The Marley that emerges has been sandpapered into deified perfection; and Rita is the saintly presence behind his success. Bob Marley: One Love actually should have been called The Story of Saint Rita Marley And Her Singer/Songwriter Husband. And had it followed the Priscilla playbook, it would have made a more honest movie.

Don’t think of Bob Marley: One Love in the same context as, say Rocketman, in which Elton John (who produced the movie) was willing to have all the worst of his character gloriously exposed in order to make a point about truth in art. Nor should you compare this with Maestro, another movie seeking to dig into the nature of creativity. This is less a movie per se, more an exercise in branding, like the Transformer movies. The movie is there only with one purpose in mind: Re-energise the glory of Bob and sell more records.

It’s not as though the production talent is not there: the team that brought us the excellent King Richard has been reassembled. Brad Pitt is in the exec production chair. But they must all have been under “heavy manners” to deliver what the Marley family demanded.

How sad. What a sell-out. Though various anonymous characters mouth the words, the profundity of Marley’s power to galvanize and articulate the inchoate anger of Black people, and of white people seeking a more just world, and of art as a weapon against anger and violence, is a story that is still to be told.

But that will have to wait until the Marley family bow out and give real art a chance for honesty.

BOB MARKEY:ONE LOVE. Dir: Reinaldo Marcus Green (King Richard). Writers: Terence Winter (The Sopranos), Frank Flowers (Ziggy Marley Music Video), Zach Baylin (King Richard). With: Kingsley Ben-Adir (Barbie, One Night in Miami), Lashana Lynch (No Time to Die). James Norton. Cinematographer: Robert Elswit (King Richard), Production Designer: Chris Lowe (Spectre) Music: Chris Bowers (The Colour Purple)

THE ZONE OF INTEREST***** A Slow Burn

THIS IS THE story of Rudolf Hoss (Christian Friedel): not a name that most people would recognise. He was the business genius who understood all those aspects that make for robust business success: excellent logistics management, inventive strategies, the relentless focus on targets etc. He didn’t come from money; but his outstanding success ensured that he was rapidly promoted through the ranks; he was the envy of his peers, was rewarded handsomely with a wonderful home, replete with servile staff, and he enjoyed a great deal of expense paid, champagne-fueled travel.

And the reasons for all this success? He was the person who figured out how to kill as many Jews as possible by building a gas chamber that never had down time. 

He was the Nazi in charge of Auschwitz.

As the movie makes clear, it was just a job (killing people) that he excelled at. This is an examination not so much about the banality of evil, but of its normalisation. We’re introduced to his charming wife, Hedwig (Sandra Huller from Anatomy of a Fall), his gorgeous family (Hoss’ eldest daughter went on to become a leading model in post-war Spain), his fabulous home with its extensive gardens and delightful kids’ plunge pool etc. The family have lovely picnics at the nearby lake; they entertain their colleagues and guests; they’re a tight and loving family. And there’s no need to go far to work: the gas chamber is just across the wall from their home. It belches dark smoke from time to time; occasionally there’s ash (which their gardeners use as fertilizer) and there are deep guttural sounds, more like moans that come from its furnaces. 

There’s always a background sound, a sort of low rumble; a constant aural reminder that, as we look on with horror at the life of this happy blonde German family, dad’s in the business of mass extermination. It’s like living next to a train line: you soon get accustomed to it. The movie asks the question, “Just how is that possible?” There is a moment in one of his many boardroom meetings (just like any other boardroom meeting, except in this one the senior executives are all Nazi officers) when Hoss, the acknowledged hero of logistics management, is tasked with ‘disposing’ of 700,000 Jews. They’re about to be shipped in, like new stock, from Hungary. Hoss works out how many trains that would take X the amount of persons/train X time etc. No problemo.

And while dad is wrestling with the logistics of the holocaust, mum is pissed off that his promotion/transfer might require the family to relocate. She’s absolutely not having that. She’s settled there in her large home, proud of her nickname as the Queen of Auschwitz; and there’d be all that fuss about changing schools etc. She suggests he call Adolph or someone to ensure that she doesn’t need to move. As far as she’s concerned, he can go do whatever he has to do and simply visit from time to time. There’s no question that she loves her status and her home (not to mention all those Jewish prisoners who are her house staff) more than him. He meanwhile has his own servile Jewish ‘substitute’.

The movie makes its point clearly: what we must fear is not (just) to murder of millions, but its normalisation. Even now, as the AfD proudly struts its Nazi affiliations and a putative imbecile president boasts of his dictatorship chops, it’s this normalisation of evil that threatens.

It’s a powerful movie that is deeply respectful of not sensationalizing the reality of the holocaust for cheap Hollywood exploitation. The scenes are drab, the dialogue feels overheard: just the banal chatter of people; the arc of the story progresses through vignettes and minute shifts (which can make it at times pretty boring). The emotional horror of it all is an after-burn. It doesn’t try to shape your emotional response (in the way the cynical The Holdovers did). It hits you right after the movie’s over…that OMG, WTF shock of what you’ve just seen.

Director Jonathan Glazer (Under the Skin), who wrote the screen play from an adaptation of a Martin Amis book, simply allows the reality the story to present its evidence, without over dramatising it. And the way he does this is clever and inventive. The Washington Post recently had an article about Hoss in which there were photos of his family (at play, in the garden etc). Some of these photos were directly reproduced in the movie. It’s as if we’re not really watching a reconstruction of events (a movie in other words), merely an animated stitching together of the real…like an extended home movie (thanks to Lukasz Zal’s superb cinematography).

It doesn’t all work. He uses extended periods of blank screen (so long you wonder whether there’s an operator who’s fallen asleep) as a device (why?). It cheapens the integrity of the story…feels contrived and ‘arty’. Rudolf’s wife is (Sandra Huller) is the outstanding human presence in the movie. Huller allow us to see in her the embedded fault line between culpable knowing and willful ignorance, as she blithely discusses “those Jews and their Bolshevik ways”. As Rudolf, however, Christian Friedel is a cypher. Perhaps this is Glazer’s way of signaling his character’s inner death. But the actor projects nothing; we have no sense of this monster as an individual. You remember his hairstyle more than him.

No matter. This is an important movie. It should not be missed.

The ZONE OF INTEREST Dir/Writer: Jonathan Glazer. With: Sandra Huller, Christian Friedel (Babylon Berlin) Cinematographer: Lukasz Zal (I’m Thinking of Ending Things)

THE END WE START FROM****Compelling

THE END WE Start From starts with the sound of rain. Insistent, drumming on the rooftops and the windows, it fills every crevice with rivulets of water. The woman (Jodie Comer) is at home; heavily pregnant. Like the weather outside, her contained waters also break; and as rivulets turn into rivers, she finds herself in a slowly flooding hospital where she gives birth. The hubby (Joel Fry) is terrified at the rapid breakdown in society; food is becoming scarce and desperate crowds have to jostle for precious food parcels. He fears for his inability to protect his wife and newborn girl. 

This latest dystopian drama is all the more absorbing because of its sense of immediacy. It feels less like the fictionalized dystopian dramas that crowd our screens and more like a news item/documentary. The annual floods on TV news in the UK, are indeed the stuff of our everyday viewing. But instead of the anonymous country villages with their water-logged shops, this newscast features a half-submerged London with filth and detritus clogging the fetid waterways that have replaced streets. The scenes of crowds in vast Care Centres, guarded by army personnel, and caged behind wire fences, are like videos of the typical refugee centres we’re accustomed to seeing. This isn’t so much a work of fiction, it’s a work of warning. There’s no hysteria, no overwrought drama (other than the annoying sound-track), just a matter-of-fact glimpse into the inevitable result of our collapsing climate and the melting of glaciers. This is London in five, maybe ten years.

Sell your cars, buy a boat!

And that’s just the background to the story. It’s a story of survival; of a young mother’s strength in protecting her baby, as she eludes dangers, forges friendships and searches for an exit strategy; an escape from Armageddon. The woman is unnamed; she is ‘The Mother’. Her mission is the archetypal mother’s mission: to care and protect her offspring. But the further she walks/rides/boats away from danger, the more she realises that running away (how do you run away from climate collapse?) offers not escape, simply escapism. As the title suggests, her journey, as a protector, must return her to where it all began (for her), where she can be a part of the repair, heal and protect process, not simply one of those who, like most of the men, flee.

It’s a movie very heavily weighted from a perspective of female strength and resilience. We meet a number of fearless women, including another young mother with whom The Mother makes a strong bond (Katherine Waterstone). The men are all pretty pathetic: they run away, sink into despair or fight with each other. 

But director Mahalia Belo’s movie is no anti-male creed. It’s a heavily symbolic movie about the earth. As we noted, we are first introduced to The -pregnant-Mother when her waters along with the flood’s break. No coincidence that! Such parallels punctuate the story-line. At one point, we see The Mother strip off and plunge into a dark and unwelcoming sea where she immerses herself into its cold and turbulent waters. We see her scavenging road-kill (a dead rabbit) and cooking it next to some sort of raptor, an eagle, maybe which is eating the discarded skin. She is the flood. She is the sea. She is the eagle. The Mother is Gaia. She is Mother Earth. She, the earth, damaged, must protect her offspring and heal herself. This is the lens that, for me anyway, adds a heady depth to the movie. 

Fortunately you don’t need all this deconstruction to enjoy or appreciate this movie. It exists wonderfully well simply as the picaresque journey of a mother and child in a destroyed world. The acting talent is formidable. Jodie Comer (Killing Eve) is compellingly believable as she makes no outer show of projecting what is clearly, her extraordinary inner strength. She’s just doing what any mother would do. Her friend, O (the Katherine Waterston character), is the more affectionate, down to earth side of The Woman; a happy companion and anti-dote to The Mother’s brooding sense of existential dread. And there are some nice cameos from Benedict Cumberbatch and Mark Strong.

Mahalia Belo’s directing is viscerally immersive; the Production Design by Laura Ellis Cricks (especially the scenes in the submerged London) with Cinematographer Suzie Lavelle’s clean, unfussy lighting, feel so real, they could have been filmed everything live. Quite a few of the production crew worked on the TV Series, Normal People; and the cine verité style of shooting and scriptwriting carries through to this, much to its credit.

THE END WE START FROM Dir: Mahalia Belo. Screenplay: Alice Birch (Normal People) from the novel by Megan Hunter. With: Jodie Comer, Joel Fry (Cruella), Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Strong, Katherine Waterston (Slow Horses; Fantastic Beasts) Production Design: Laura Ellis Cricks

THE HOLDOVERS*** Not My Cup of Tea

THE HOLDOVERS IS a well written (there are some hilarious zingers) and, helmed by the always watchable Paul Giamatti, wonderfully well-acted movie. I can see why it’s so well-liked by so many critics. The title refers to that lonely group of pupils at an expensive boarding school who, for a variety of reasons, are forced to spend the Christmas holidays in the school. Paul (the Giamatti character), a much-loathed teacher, has been dragooned into the role of babysitter, along with Mary (Da Vine Joy Randolph), the head cook.

Paul is a curmudgeonly, sarcastic pedant, whose relationship with his students shows no trace of human warmth or empathy. Mary is a matronly mother hen, still grieving over the death of her son (in Viet Nam…the period during which the movie is set). Because his parents have gone AWOL, Angus (Dominic Sessa) is the rebellious, much-expelled student; the last holdover stuck with the company of this teacher he despises. 

It doesn’t take a genius to write the arc of the story from here: you just know we’re going to be courted to look deeper and feel their pain; that the heartless shall become full of heart and that the rebel will be an angel in disguise. True to form, Paul, the heartless teacher’s heartlessness is explored and we discover that it’s all a shield against a disappointed life. The rebellious student’s rebelliousness is also revealed as a shield; he’s a bright, thoughtful person. And the conscience figure of Mary (Shall we call her Hail Mary?) is more a racial stereotype than a real person: the Black mama as quasi saint; font of empathy and homely wisdom.

It all feels like a Hollywood slight of hand: “to know me is to love me”…the people you thought were horrible are really OK after all.

Layers of cliche and sentimentality are, fortunately, tempered by the story’s focus on the entitlement of the rich. Paul is the lonely, Quixotic figure that lunges at the status quo; one where money and donations offer a free-pass for lazy, not particularly bright kids en route, undeservingly, to their Ivy League futures. His type, the pedant who still cherishes an idea of education as an ennobling force, where an exam pass not a free pass matters, will, it is implied, always be an object of derision. His is a belief system out of step with the reality of the ‘real world’ compromised by a need for more cash. There can be no happy ever after endings.

The movie is engaging intellectually. And vomit-inducing emotionally. It is a rich idea undermined by the cheap sentimentality at its heart 

THE HOLDOVERS. Dir: Alexander Payne (The Descendants, Election). Writer: David Hemmington (How I met Your Mother). With: Paul Giamatti, Da Vine Joy Randolph (Only Murders in the Building, The Lost City), Dominic Sessa. Cinematographer: Eigil Bryld (No Hard Feelings)

POOR THINGS***** Start writing your Oscar acceptance speeches

IT’S A SIMPLE enough premise: A mad scientist (Willem Dafoe) working out of a lab clearly bequeathed to him by Dr. Frankenstein, saves the life of a drowned pregnant woman, Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), by switching her dead brain with that of the baby within her and re-animates her. Simples. The scientist, Dr. Godwin Baxter, who Bella calls God, has made his first creation. And voila: into his world is ‘born’ a physically fully grown woman with the brain of a baby. She is his creation but in effect her own child. The intellectual development of her brain, like the growth of her hair – two inches per day – progresses at an exponential speed. And we follow the development of this child cum infant cum toddler as she learns how to talk, walk and interact with society beyond smashing plates and spitting out the food she doesn’t like (as children tend to do). She learns how to become human.

She, along with Godwin the scientist/creator, and a devoted housekeeper (Vicki Pepperdine), all live in an hermetically sealed world. Their own private Eden. It is a bizarre place where chimeras (she interacts with a half dog, half duck entity) wander around. And into this world, a young medical student, Max (Ramy Youssef), is invited to enter. His job is to meticulously record all the visible results of God’s bold experiment. He notes Bella’s speech patterns, the development of her motor neuron skills: walking, and her dawning awareness of the world around her.

He is patient and non-judgmental; he wins her trust and affection. But, unlike his neutered boss, Max cannot but recognize that this child has the body of a very sexy, innocently inhibition-free, woman. Her own big breakthrough is her discovery -using what seems to be an apple- of masturbation and orgasm. And thus, Bella, the bold experiment of a man playing God, has made the leap from sentient being to a sexual one. 

Eve has discovered her own paradise.

And so, as with any fledgling adult, she must leave the womb of her world for the, inventively original/bizarre/surreal, world without. There, the maturing Bella, arrives at the profound truth that self-fulfilment extends way beyond self-gratification. Her route out into this ‘real world’ is via a lawyer, Duncan Wedderburn, a louche, decadent self-styled Casanova (an absolutely riveting performance by Mark Ruffalo). He sees her simply as an easy lay. Perhaps it should have been the other way round.

His mistake animates the narrative of the heart of the tale: the dichotomy of how the world (mainly men) see her/women – as submissive, as conquest, whore, property, child-bearer – in contrast with how she sees herself in relation to this world. The story constantly illustrates examples of her anti-social behaviour, particularly in public places. This behaviour is just expression of the core idea: that she – this self-made (her own child’s brain within herself) woman- refuses to be put in her place and socialized and defined by society’s accepted norms of behaviour. She is the ultimate existentialist entity: someone who is faithful to her own idea of self, indeed what it means to be human, and who refuses to be simply the product of society’s creation. 

The movie poses the questions: At what point does socialization (learning how to conform to society’s rules) result in social conditioning? How does the individual retain individuality in the face of society’s demand for conformity?

And at the heart of conformity…the very heart of creation is of course, sex.

The movie uses sex and nudity as its creative vehicle. At one point, her husband tries to drug her, in order to have a clitorectomy performed so that she can become what women are supposed to be: sexually neutered wombs for Handmaiden’s Tale style propagation; and, as she had learned as a prostitute, for their own private sexual gratification. Female empowerment and female sexuality is, by whole swaths of society and most religions, a deeply, viscerally feared thing. It is Adam’s primal fear of Eve: a woman with agency.

Bella is a woman with agency; not just a “poor (and therefore to be pitied) thing”.

Director Yorgos Lanthimos’ fabulously unrestrained fantasy style (some of the most inventive production and costume design this year) that constantly switches colour palates and perspectives is perfect for his story. It allows him to ‘get away’ with his character’s outrageousness. Every scene of nudity and sex is his in-your-face challenge to the audience’s submissiveness to imposed standards of ‘decency’ and to recognize the urgency of his conceit about female agency and personal empowerment.

This type of movie-making is difficult to pull-off; its weirdness can easily make it simply silly. But the powerful seriousness of its theme that has clearly been personally (it feels) embraced by its three principle actors – Stone, Dafoe and Ruffalo – and the compelling visionary world created, make this the absolute outstanding movie of the year.

It’ll be Emma’s second Oscar winner.

POOR THINGS Dir: Yorgos Lanthimos. With: Emma Stone (La La Land, Birdman, The Favourite), Willem Dafoe, Mark Ruffalo, Ramy Youssef, Vicki Pepperdine. Writer: Tony McNamara (Cruella and the creator of The Great), from the book by Alasdair Gray. Costume and Production Design: Shona Heath and James Price (Paddington 2). Cinematographer: Robbie Ryan (The Favourite)

ONE LIFE**** Superb

AS THE CREDITS rolled at the end of this superb movie, the audience, instead of rushing out, sat stunned into silence; stunned by the sudden reminder that there was once a time when values such as altruism, moral certitude and generosity of spirit actually existed. 

The (true) story begins just at the cusp of Hitler’s invasions of Czechoslovakia (as it then was). Nicholas Winton (Anthony Hopkins) an English City banker, upon learning of the urgent need to evacuate children, whose parents, mainly Jews, are already being rounded up and incarcerated, takes leave from his job and sets about doing something about it. First, he visits Prague, even then under the de facto control of the Nazis, to meet with a small British refugee agency there and to witness for himself the dire state of the children. Amongst the many – dirty, cold, abandoned, hungry – children already orphaned by ‘disappeared’ parents, he meets a young girl of twelve who is looking after an infant. The child is not her sister; just a baby abandoned by parents who are probably dead.

It is a formidable task, worsened by the reality that The British Home Office has not prioritized Czechoslovakia for refugee status. He’s on his own: must secure visas for every child as well as responsible foster parents in Britain as well as £50/child. Along with his no-nonsense mother (Helena Bonham Carter), Winton’s doggedness, persuasiveness, and infectious compassion to do the right thing, motivate not only reluctant civil servants, but an entire nation of ‘ordinary people’.

Why is he doing this? As he tells a skeptical rabbi, he’s not Jewish; he’s not even particularly religious. His actions are not based upon any religious imperative, only a deep humanist one. He ends up shipping out and saving the lives of eight train-loads of kids, almost seven hundred of them. There is a scene near the end when, some-time in the 80’s as a guest of one of those This is Your Life TV shows, the host introduces him to two of the persons his heroism had saved. She then asks whether there is anyone else in the audience whose life had been saved by his acts. The entire audience stands. That scene alone is worth the price of admission.

Director James Hawes (Slow Horses) has given us an incredibly moving film. It is emotional but without a hint of sentimentality or confected emotion (even the musical score is restrained mainly to a single piano knitting the scenes together). The actual plot pulses along and feels more like an action war thriller. There is threat at every turn. And every scene propels the story forward; no time for mawkishness, no time for tears. Lucinda Coxon’s script is eloquent when it needs be, but generally unfussy and to the point.

But the beating heart of the movie: the centre of its gravitas and compelling believability is Anthony Hopkins as the older Winton. As the younger Winton, Johnny Flynn is very much the man of determination and purpose.

As his older version, the determination is still there, but now tempered by age, by guilt at one of the trains that was captured by the Nazis (Was it sheer hubris to keep trying to get kids out even in the face of clear danger?) Winton now is a man burdened by the weight of memories, stored in a tumble of boxes all over his house, bent by the weight of years, but still alive to the possibilities of joy and happiness in the world. It is a stunning portrayal.

One Life makes you realise the extent to how much we have lost. Now that “refugee” has become a term of opprobrium and manufactured fear; and we’re governed by lesser mortals more inspired by populist hate and dumb viciousness, the actions of a person such as Nicholas Winton stand out. And at a time when expediency has replaced ethics and hate has replaced humanism, you mourn the world’s loss of faith in its better self. 

And perhaps that’s the moral of the movie. 

ONE LIFE. Director James Hawes. With: Anthony Hopkins, Helena Bonham Carter. Johnny Flynn (The Outfit), Romola Garai, Jonathan Pryce. Writer: Lucinda Coxton (The Danish Girl) Composer: Volker Bertlemann (All Quiet on the Western Front). Cinematographer: Zac Nicholson (The Death of Stalin)

PRISCILLA*** Return to Sender

SOPHIA COPPOLA IS a director whose style (and success) lies to a large extent in her intensely visual literacy. She’s a goddess of semiotics…each image laden with symbolism and meaning. In Priscilla, her Elvis (Jacob Elordi) for instance is a giant of a man, towering like a Colossus over the petit, doll-like stature of his child paramour, Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny, who looks perfect for the part as the adult child).

It’s an image that immediately communicates -without the need for words – the absolute inequality of their relationship. She the child, he the adult; except that he really isn’t the adult. He’s just the image of one. Adults are few and far between in the movie…Priscilla’s stern parents are the only grown-ups in this infantalised world. For Elvis is as much a child as she is, happy frolicking with his gang of acolytes and soaking up the adoration of his besotted fans. The big difference is that she’s the child with nothing; he’s the child with power, money and fame.

Their relationship is bizarrely asexual, like pre-puberty children, romping in the bed. His seduction of her – so effortless, this fan in awe of her teen matinee idol – is not about sexual conquest. It’s about his need to sculpt an idealised version of his image of an abstract idea of ‘the perfect woman’. Image is all: he arranges her face to suit this idealisation, chooses her clothes, establishes clearly the parameters of their relationship. She – this unreal, created Priscilla – is the chaste stay-at-home virgin, possessed of everything he thinks a girl could possible desire, except desire itself: big house, small dog, shiny new car, couture that makes her small sixteen year-old frame look like a fifty year-old’s. She’s both his child and his mother…neither sexually desirable.

The clothes, the environment of the home, the trappings, the hairstyles are all image perfect. These are the semiotics of entrapment. And beneath these symbols of his fantasies, his child-like simulacrum of love and marriage lies the (even) darker reality of drugs, deception and the Deus ex machina of the Colonel calling the shots.

It’s very clever. And emotionally sterile.

On the one hand, Coppola has brilliantly laid out her case of Priscilla: the girl imprisoned in her gilded cage. We know that at some stage the girl in the grown-up clothes must age into the clothes themselves. But the movie doesn’t carry us emotionally there. For Priscilla’s internal emotional life, there’s an emptiness, a vacuum. We know she’s depressed and repressed because we’re shown her sad and then happy and then depressed etc. But the emotional arc that the story needs; that felt life that must pull her into her into our zone of empathy is absent. Coppola seems to have depended to such an extent on music and imagery that the whole enterprise, lacking an actor who can convey inner feeling, seems to live only on the surface. The result is a short movie (by these days’ standards) that feels longer than it is.

She should have taken one look at the dull script and then ordered her assistant to…return to sender. Oops she wrote it too.

PRISCILLA. Writer (from the book by Priscilla Presley) and director: Sophia Coppola. With: Cailee Spaeny (Mare of Easttown), Jacob Elordi (Saltburn). Cinematographer: Philippe Le Sourd. Costume Designer: Stacey Battat (Still Alice). Composer: Phoenix