4 stars

Black Panther (2017)

André Crous

Not Ryan Coogler’s best work, but Black Panther’s mixture of big-budget special effects, intimate mythology and a yearning for what might have been is much needed.

Black PantherUSA
4*

Director:
Ryan Coogler
Screenwriters:
Ryan Coogler
Joe Robert Cole
Director of Photography:
Rachel Morrison

Running time: 135 minutes

Oakland, California, is where the revolutionary Black Panther Party was born in 1966. It is also where Oakland native Ryan Coogler, whose first two features – Fruitvale Station and Creed – are modern-day masterpieces, starts his superhero movie adaptation of the famous Marvel Comics character, in 1992, before moving to the present. But in a majestic, visually striking opening sequence, he tells the story of Wakanda, a nation hidden in the heart of Africa and endowed with limitless sources of the supermetal vibranium that have ensured the country’s financial survival and technological prowess despite its isolation.

The presentation of this history lesson calls to mind the opening minutes of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, but the work of Coogler’s director of photography, Rachel Morrison, is much more sophisticated, as we appear to swing through time in an unbroken take whilst time unspools in the valleys below. Connecting Wakanda with Oakland is also the job of the camera, as it eventually swoops into the opening scene over a basketball court and settles on a young boy, who looks up and sees a space ship hovering above his apartment block. The links that Cooger and Morrison establish between past and present, poverty and technology, are a continual source of wonder because it is unusual to see this level of care taken in constructing a superhero film.

The titular Black Panther, king of the Wakandans, is played by Chadwick Boseman. Also known as T’Challa, he is the son of the former King T’Chaka, portrayed by South African veteran actor John Kani, and South Africa features everywhere in Black Panther. Not only is Wakandan really the Xhosa language (Nelson Mandela’s mother tongue and the second-most widely spoken language in the country), but one of the story’s main villains, Ulysses Klaue, is a white South African whose speech drips with an Afrikaans accent. Finally, the name T’Chaka is, of course, an unmistakable reference to one of the greatest military leaders the world has ever seen: Shaka, king of the Zulus.

But just as Shaka’s heirs could never match his acumen for waging battle, T’Challa does not do well in a comparison with his father, T’Chaka. This much is evident in his pitiful display of brawn shortly before his investiture: What is expected to be a coronation turns out to be something much more uncertain, as four of Wakanda’s tribes agree to T’Challa’s status as the new sovereign, but one tribe rejects him. This tribe, the Jabari, re-appears after centuries in hiding and have had no part in Wakanda’s development as an ultra-modern civilisation filled with technology that goes far beyond anything else on Earth, never mind the rest of the African continent. They are sceptical of the Wakandans’ talk of unity, particularly when they are themselves hiding out from the rest of the world.

This uneasy unity, of being one while being many, is an issue South Africa has sought for decades to address, even dubbing itself the Rainbow Nation. But for all the utopian idealism such metaphors inspire, it takes hard work for peace to be sustainable, and the tension is evident in Black Panther, too. Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), who is a Wakandan spy in Nigeria and helps to save a group of women from an unnamed terrorist group (clearly Boko Haram), continually pushes T’Challa to share Wakanda’s knowledge and riches with the less-developed world instead of hoarding it for itself.

The same thread runs through the film’s most complex vein, as its powerful male characters struggle to decide whether to help the world’s vulnerable or to turn inward and be selfish with the endless vibranium resources. While T’Challa is reluctant to find a solution, the arrival of Erik “Killmonger” Stevens (Michael B. Jordan), a US war veteran and covert operations specialist who knows how to bring down a foreign government, forces him to face reality.

Although he is clearly the villain, Killmonger’s past (he grew up an orphan), justified feelings of betrayal (his father, N’Jobu, was T’Challa’s uncle, and he was killed by his own brother, King T’Chaka) and sense of purpose (he wants to use Wakanda’s technology to give power to the world’s disadvantaged black populations), not to mention his extraordinary good looks, all make him a complex character whom we empathise with even as we root for his enemies.

Such complexity is a welcome change from the standard big-budget and superhero fare. But it’s a shame T’Challa isn’t seen to be struggling with this issue more seriously. In fact, the ruler of the world’s most technologically advanced nation is surprisingly ill-prepared for the throne and the duties that come with it.

Just like Eddie Murphy’s Akeem Joffer in Coming to America, T’Challa seems to have skipped any and all discussions in the royal household about the road to being a king. His friendly demeanour endears him to most of his people, but he is clearly uncomfortable as regent, and his decision to change Wakanda’s approach to the outside world, well-intentioned though it may be, seems to be made without him realising how difficult it will be.

One of the film’s first scenes take place at the “Museum of Great Britain”, which houses artefacts looted by the British Empire over the centuries. There is a nagging question throughout as to whether things will change for Wakanda once it opens up to the world and its riches are discovered. Will it suffer the fate of fellow African countries whose resources have been plundered through outside meddling? Or will its mixture of tradition and advanced technology (not unlike a religious superpower such as the United States) protect it against the onslaught of an aggressive globalisation?

Although by far one of the best superhero films out there, Black Panther nonetheless never veers too far from the well-beaten path of its predecessors, and the good inevitably triumphs over the bad without much of a scuffle. The film raises many issues that will require a thorough probing in a sequel, however, and if these issues are addressed head-on and in keeping with the rules of the real world instead of those of superhero fiction, it will easily clear the bar set by this first instalment.

The Virgin Spring (1960)

André Crous

Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring involves the rape of a virgin in medieval Sweden and questions the meaning of God’s (initial) silence when her father takes revenge.

Virgin SpringSweden
4*

Director:
Ingmar Bergman
Screenwriter:
Ulla Isaksson
Director of Photography:
Sven Nykvist

Running time: 90 minutes

Original title: Jungfrukällan

Ingmar Bergman’s Virgin Spring opens with fire and closes with water. We expect a baby to be born, but instead, a virgin is raped and dies. We are reminded of God around every corner, but his apparent absence rings just as loudly. It is up to the viewer to decide whether to interpret these opposites as proof of balance or as markers of a fundamentally unpredictable existence.

Following on the heels of The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, two of Bergman’s best-known films, Virgin Spring is less visual but equally interested in pressing questions related to mortality. In the opening scene, set in medieval Sweden, we see a wild-eyed servant girl, Ingeri (Gunnel Lindblom), quietly beseech the god Odin to come to her aid. The evening before, she witnessed her master’s teenage daughter, the pale-skinned, blond-haired, ever-smiling and pure-as-snow Karin (Birgitta Pettersson), dance with many young men, and she envies the attention the girl received from everyone. We later learn that she is asking Odin to put a stop to all this, failing to realise that the answer may not look very pretty.

Karin, a single child whose strong bond with her well-to-do parents is emphasised from the beginning, is sent to deliver candles to a church. The candles need to be delivered by a virgin, and Karin fits the bill. She even wears a special dress sewn by 15 “maidens”. For her own safety, she is accompanied by Ingeri, who is not very keen on talking to her, but during a conversation along the way, Karin tells her “no man will get me to bed without marriage”. Rather ominously, Ingeri suggests it might not always be her choice to make, but they continue onwards through the forest before Karin can consider the implication.

In the first half of the film, which culminates in the shocking rape and murder of Karin at the hands of a trio of vagrant brothers, there is a very strong focus on the two very different women. Karin knows nothing of the evil in the world, but perhaps because she is killed, she elicits some empathy from the viewer. We almost forgive her her ignorance because she passes away after a vicious assault.

By contrast, Ingeri seems to be slightly more world-wise and suspicious of men’s intentions. But she also reveals herself to be just as weak as Karin. At many turns, she becomes positively hysterical when overcome by fear or guilt or uncertainty, which makes her look all the worse. This film seems to imply that women are passive victims, while men are either malicious or vengeful.

But it is the rape scene that defines the film. Although mild in comparison with films of subsequent years, the act itself offers a few excruciating seconds of indirect assault, as the camera is positioned next to Karin’s face while she is being violated. While it only lasts a moment, and Bergman quickly reneges by going for a long shot that shows the full assault, this initial approach is stunningly effective and shows the “less is more” adage in action.

With the actions of the three goat herders that lead to Karin’s death, the focus turns to the male characters. By a stroke of pure bad luck for them, the malicious trio subsequently turns up at the estate of the late daughter’s parents, seeking food and shelter for the night and offering her 15-maiden-woven dress for sale – the same one she was wearing when they killed her. The youngest among them realises too late their fate is sealed and his petrified silence leads to their own deaths.

But the prospect of death hangs over the entire narrative. At the very outset, Frida, the housekeeper, mentions she nearly stepped on two dozen little chicks at night. She picks one up and says, “You poor thing, live out your wretched little life the way God allows all of us to live.”

Much later, when Ingeri has an awkward conversation with a man living in the forest, he shows her a few rudimentary implements that we quickly realise are to be used for an abortion: “Here is a cure for your anguish. Here is a cure for your woe. Blood, course no more. Fish, stop still in the brook.” To emphasise this point, he grabs her by the groin, but she manages to flee the scene.

The film’s interest in Odin, perhaps the best-known deity from Norse mythology, is tied to two rather debauched characters: the hysterical, irrational Ingeri and the aforementioned perverted man in the forest. By contrast, The Virgin Spring associates the god of Christianity with slightly more rational impulses. Even when Karin’s father, Töre (Max von Sydow), takes murderous revenge for his late daughter’s death, he does so after felling a birch tree and taking a sauna. This is not impulse but considered action.

In the film’s final scene, Töre lifts his hands to the heavens and delivers a prayer in which he looks up towards the Sun and questions why God saw his daughter’s rape but did nothing, why he saw Töre kill the three men but did nothing. “You allowed it to happen”, he seethes.

Of course, what he gets in response is more nothingness. Just like God failed to listen to him when he prayed to his crucified son the previous morning and asked that he “guard us this day and always from the devil’s snares. Lord, let not temptation, shame nor danger befall thy servants this day.” Like so many other believers in the centuries to follow, Töre decides that God requires penance for others’ sins but does not have to justify his own actions (or, more accurately, his passiveness when evil happens). Töre resolves that his “sin”, namely that he killed those responsible for Karin’s tragic death on Earth, will be sufficiently washed away by him building a church in honour of this god of his.

But then, something miraculous happens. When Töre and his wife, Mätare, move Karin’s body, water bubbles up from where her head had lain. Ingari washes her face, presumably to wash away her previous belief in Norse gods and all of her sins committed under the label of paganism. She appears to be happy for the very first time. And for a moment, all we can hear is the flow of the water, the symbol of life, even as the very dead body of Karin is draped in her parents’ arms.

The Virgin Spring does not have the visual inventiveness nor the intellectual force of many of Bergman’s other contemplations on religion and existence, but its simple plot is stripped of excess and easy to follow. It lacks real depth and eschews any serious probing of the issues it raises, but the final deus ex aqua moment shows a director open to making the presence of the extraordinary felt.

BlacKkKlansman (2018)

André Crous

Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman is an artistic recreation of history, whose spotlight on the past also has the intended consequence of illuminating the present in all its whiteness. 

BlacKkKlansmanUSA
4*

Director:
Spike Lee
Screenwriters:
Charlie Wachtel
David Rabinowitz
Kevin Willmott
Spike Lee
Director of Photography:
Chayse Irvin

Running time: 135 minutes

America has always been a deeply racist place. From its founding to the American Civil War through Jim Crow, church bombings and lynchings up to the Charleston church shooting and the Charlottesville protests in the past few years, not to mention redlining, racial profiling and the stunningly disproportionate mass incarceration of the country’s black citizens, many (or most) whites have always struggled to accept the idea of racial integration. Perhaps because, for them, integrating meant not only compromising but surrendering their long-standing power.

And yet, in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers proclaimed that “all men are created equal”, even as they conferred a “three-fifths” status upon non-whites via Article 1, Section 2, of the Constitution. This tension has underpinned continuous conflict, and the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1965 did little to quell the social distrust and downright hatred that had already been festering for centuries.

At the beginning of Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, based on a true story, a young black man by the name of Ron Stallworth (played by John David Washington) applies to be the first black police officer at the Colorado Springs station. He gets the job, but racist attitudes don’t just vanish like fog before the sun. He is undeterred, however, and quickly works his way into the intelligence division, where he stirs the pot by making a phone call to the Ku Klux Klan to express his alleged interest in joining the infamous white supremacist organisation.

Now, obviously, a black man is not going to rock up to the KKK and infiltrate it, no matter how talented a policeman he is. This is a real story, after all, not a comedy sketch by Dave Chappelle. Stallworth needs a white stand-in, and he finds a willing partner in the form of Flip Zimmerman (mesmerisingly portrayed by Adam Driver), whose Jewish heritage, which would be equally objectionable to the Klan if they ever found out, is luckily less apparent than Stallworth’s blackness.

Zimmerman infiltrates the Klan, which calls itself “the Organization”, by posing as Ron Stallworth, even as the real Stallworth continues to speak unrecognised over the phone with various hardcore white supremacists, including America’s most notorious pro-Aryan celebrity, David Duke. Eventually, Duke and Stallworth strike up such intimate conversations that Duke considers him a friend, little knowing that the colour of their skins is not as he imagines them to be.

Finnish actor Jasper Pääkkönen, who also played a white supremacist in Dome Karukoski’s outstanding 2013 drama Heart of a Lion, stars here as Felix, easily the most ominous KKK character in the cast. Immediately and continuously suspicious of Zimmerman’s/Stallworth’s intentions, Felix also speaks in such an insidious way it is hard to view him as anything other than a villainous piece of filth. The rest of the Organization’s local chapter is filled out by Walter (Ryan Eggold), who might even pass for a regular Joe outside the hate group, and the dim-witted and/or permanently inebriated “Ivanhoe” (Paul Walter Hauser).

But Spike Lee’s re-telling of this 1970s story is not meant purely as a middle finger to the white supremacists of the era. He makes no bones about connecting the story of racism perpetrated by whites against blacks to present-day America, and by hinting at a link between the Black Panther and Black Lives Matter movements, he also makes clear that history, as the saying goes, may not repeat itself but certainly does rhyme. Sometimes this bridge between the past and the present is so chilling it becomes almost hilarious. One example is the moment when the idea that someone like David Duke might one day occupy the White House is shot down as unrealistic – a self-explanatory subtweet of the 45th president.

At other times, the bridge is devastating: BlacKkKlansman‘s final moments underscore its importance as the first Trump-era Hollywood film to take the worst of the present-day political situation and turn it into art, just as George Clooney did by making Good Night, and Good Luck., a film that used the McCarthy era to make a point about patriotism and the importance of a free press in the midst of George W. Bush’s Iraq War. Lee all but states outright that Donald Trump – with his “America First” slogan with its antisemitic origins and his “good people on both sides” apology for Nazis and white supremacists who chant “blood and soil” and do much worse – is the new head of the KKK. The final scenes in the film are even more powerful than news footage we have seen because they are suddenly fully contextualised as part of a history of hatred and intolerance.

Despite some unnecessarily long-winded stabs at comedy – including an opening sequence with Alec Baldwin playing an inept narrator of a white supremacists’ propaganda video, as well as a screening of Birth of a Nation, in which the viewers’ behaviour is just as over-the-top and overtly racist as in D.W. Griffith’s notoriously anti-black film – this might very well be Spike Lee’s best film since at least 25th Hour and probably since Do the Right Thing.

Sweet ‘n Short (1991)

André Crous

While some would correctly argue that the films of Leon Schuster, South Africa’s most profitable director, have done lasting damage to the industry’s reputation, his Sweet ‘n Short was a prescient work of art.

Sweet 'n ShortSouth Africa
4*

Director:
Gray Hofmeyr
Screenwriters:
Leon Schuster
Gray Hofmeyr
Director of Photography:
James Robb

Running time: 90 minutes

I never thought I would review a Leon Schuster movie, much less do so positively. Schuster is the candid camera king of South Africa, and for the past three decades, he has barely changed his formula: Stage outrageous situations, often with a racial undertone, then reveal the prank to the victim so that everyone can have a good belly laugh at being so gullible. His films are cash cows for the South African film industry, often spending their entire run at the top of the box office charts, but no one would describe them as paragons of cinematic excellence.

And yet, in the waning days of apartheid, during the uncertain time between the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and the country’s first democratic elections in 1994, Schuster wrote and played the lead in a film that used equal measures of comedy and intelligence so well that, one might reasonably argue, he played a significant role in assuaging white South Africans’ fears about the future and helped pave the way for a smooth transition to a post-apartheid era. That film was Sweet ‘n Short.

Schuster stars as the titular Sweet Coetzee, a 40-year-old TV sports broadcaster who has been with the station for half his life and recently received a service award. He spends the night celebrating, wakes up late, has to get dressed as he speeds down the highway and barely makes it to work on time before utter catastrophe strikes. Crestfallen, he takes to the casino, where he wins the jackpot, moments before an inept criminal crashes into him and sends him off to the hospital. When he wakes up, the world has changed.

Actually, it’s only South Africa, but during the apartheid years, it might as well have been the world. Most noticeably, the previous white/black hierarchy has been reversed, and in what might very well be the highlight of intellectual and comedic symbiosis in Schuster’s work, we see the country’s most famous Afrikaans news presenter, Riaan Cruywagen, read the day’s news in Zulu. It is difficult to emphasise how mind-blowing this depiction would have been to a white South African viewer in 1991.

There are many other sly additions that serve as a wink and a nod to the potential transformation that South Africans were anticipating once the whites would no longer be in power: Among others, the national rugby team’s name change from Springboks to Zambucks (Zam-Buk is a wildly popular antiseptic ointment in South Africa); the flamboyant South African “Shaka” war cry based on the New Zealand “Haka”, but with a local twist; and the renaming of the D.F. Malan Hospital in honour of the country’s first-ever Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Albert Luthuli.

Given the apartheid-era Communist Party’s long-standing support for the ANC, it should come as no surprise that Russian is quite prevalent in Schuster’s depiction of the New South Africa – from businesses advertising their goods in Cyrillic to them selling the traditional ushanka fur hats. But all of this is treated with a gentle chuckle, as if Schuster is seeking to re-assure a frightened white viewership that, even if the blacks and the communists got to run the country, its warm, friendly spirit would continue to triumph, and there is nothing to be afraid of.

One particularly prescient moment of screenwriting comes at the end of the first act, when Coetzee and Alfred (Alfred Ntombela, whose filmography overlaps almost perfectly with Schuster’s), his guide in the New South Africa, attend a rugby match. The match is preceded by a breathtakingly moving rendition of a new national anthem, written by Wendy Oldfield. Because it consists of lyrics in many of South Africa’s 11 languages, it conveys the kind of unity that such a hymn ought to produce, and the pride with which all the different races at the match sing it is simply extraordinary. It should be noted that the country’s new post-apartheid anthem ultimately also contained words sung in Afrikaans, English, Zulu, Xhosa and Sesotho.

But like so many of Schuster’s other films, Sweet ‘n Short sees him dress up in blackface for the sake of getting a laugh, albeit at the expense of whites who get easily flustered and are made to look ridiculous because they are so obviously racist. Now clearly, this is quite different from the minstrel context in the United States in that racist whites are the butt of the joke here, but one can also easily make the argument that Schuster is reinforcing particularly egregious stereotypes of blacks by giving these caricatures any airtime at all.

Tackling a serious topic at a time when there was a great deal of worry in the country, Schuster and his director and co-screenwriter, Gray Hofmeyr, succeeded in creating an insightful (even intelligent) and comforting piece of entertainment that prepared his (white) countrymen and -women for the immense political and societal changes that lay ahead. But given the major role he plays in getting South Africans to the cinema, it is an utter tragedy that Schuster’s subsequent efforts have been skewed towards a much lower common denominator.

Lady Bird (2017)

André Crous

On the verge of adulthood, 17-year-old Sacramento native Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson confronts the slow dawning of reality.

Lady BirdUSA
4*

Director:
Greta Gerwig
Screenwriter:
Greta Gerwig
Director of Photography:
Sam Levy

Running time: 95 minutes

Widely praised for its sensitive handling of a teenager’s coming of age, Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird is at its best when it advances our understanding of the titular main character’s parents – in particular, her hot-blooded but sometimes icily passive-aggressive mother, Marion (a stunning portrayal by Laurie Metcalf). Unusually, we gain a compassionate understanding of parents as people who, just like their children, are a volatile mixture of emotions and motivations.

“Lady Bird” (Saoirse Ronan), a name the 17-year-old Christine McPherson has recently adopted as part of a phase of rebelliousness that her mother looks upon with disdain, is growing restless with life in Sacramento, which she describes, with as much love as hate, as the “Midwest of California”. She wants to move far away for college, preferably the East Coast, where the Twin Towers had come down nearly a year earlier. But Marion’s continual insinuation that her daughter is too immature to cope with life on her own leads to many a bout of screaming, as well as a broken arm, with no clear winner.

The ups and downs of Lady Bird’s final year of high school include not only the boom and bust of losing her virginity and unexpected revelations about her love interest’s sexual awakening but also the consequences of her lies, well-intentioned though they might be.

The high school in question is Immaculate Heart, a co-ed Catholic school run by good-natured nuns who both provide spiritual guidance and make hilarious attempts at discipline (at the prom, one of them tells a couple they should dance six inches apart… “for the Holy Spirit!”). Lady Bird runs a very unconventional campaign for class president, and she and her best friend, Julie, snack on communion wafers when no one is watching. Then, one day, she signs up for the school play, and everything changes.

She meets angel-faced Danny (Lucas Hedges in a role that is the polar opposite of his turn in Manchester by the Sea), who plays the lead, and this meeting leads to a relationship that gives her an opportunity to enlarge her social network, which eventually includes the wealthiest and the weirdest characters around, like Kyle (Timothée Chalamet), the black-haired, porcelain-complexioned quasi-intellectual but cute-as-a-button loner.

Lady Bird’s laugh-out-loud comedy is tightly wound to its insightful and always empathetic glimpses of the jitters just below the surface, as when Lady Bird’s parents find out she tells her friends she comes from the wrong side of the tracks, or when her father and brother meet accidentally while applying for the same job. But nothing comes close to the outwardly straightforward but emotionally intricate screenwriting gem that is the scene at a department store’s changing rooms, where Lady Bird is trying on a dress for prom:

LADY BIRD: I love it.

MARION: (unsure) Is it too pink? (beat) What?

LADY BIRD: Why can’t you say I look nice?

MARION: I thought you didn’t even care what I think.

LADY BIRD: I still want you to think I look good.

MARION: OK. I’m sorry, I was telling you the truth. You want me to lie?

LADY BIRD: No, I just wish… I just… I wish that you liked me.

MARION: Of course I love you.

LADY BIRD: But do you like me?

MARION: (hesitates) I want you to be the very best version of yourself that you can be.

LADY BIRD: What if this is the best version?

This absolutely heartrending interaction – in a public space, no less – is simple but saturated with tension. Both mother and daughter face disappointment while simultaneously digging deep to be honest without hurting each other. They want to be independent but they also want to be accepted. They want to be themselves but don’t want to fall short of the other’s expectations of them. In other words, they accurately reflect flesh-and-blood human beings. And this depth is evident in many of the characters, including Lady Bird’s soft-spoken but ever-supporting father (played by Tracy Letts), her older brother, Miguel (Jordan Rodrigues), and the latter’s girlfriend, Shelly (Marielle Scott). Miguel and Shelly’s studded faces belie their sensitivity over their own marginalisation, but the more they speak, despite their small roles, the more they creep into our hearts.

And yet, while the film makes a point of being situated in a rarely depicted locale (Sacramento) in an unusual year (the relatively recent 2002, which is just long enough ago for the music to sound both old and immediately recognisable and the fashion to look ridiculous because it’s dated but not yet retro), it doesn’t make much of its context: It’s good that Sactown gets some love, but we rarely get to see more than the Tower Bridge. And there is no obvious reason why the story is better told in 2002 than in 2016 or 2017, except that flip phones, which are all the rage on this timeline, now just look quaint. One giant blunder is the film’s soundtrack, which is ludicrously packed with “Best of…” tracks from 2002. There is no reason to remind us so aggressively that the film is set in that particular year. It’s not important – this is not American Graffiti. 

Luckily, Gerwig’s direction is flawless, and so is her sense of rhythm: She lets her camera take in an entire emotional realisation, for example, when Lady Bird realises Kyle has lied to her and goes from loving and cuddly to crestfallen, in an unbroken take. But she also recognises the value of cinematic synecdoche, as when one entire scene consists of a very brief shot, not even three seconds long, showing Lady Bird’s toe curled in the bathtub, which we can safely assume indicates a level of self-pleasuring that is self-evident in the context but does not need to be made any more explicit.

Anchored by Ronan’s and Metcalf’s superb performances as flawed but benevolent individuals, Lady Bird is an affectionate portrait of life as a senior whose goal is opaque and whose strategy for reaching it is never much more than a draft – a Plan A without a Plan B. The film is immanently watchable because it brims with optimism while never minimising the stumbles along the way. We get to see rare moments of joy shared by mother and daughter, even as they seem to be fighting non-stop throughout the story, and in the process, we are reminded that parents are people, and that life’s lessons only end when we die.

Looper (2012)

André Crous

Seriously pondering the conundrum of being killed by one’s future self, Rian Johnson’s Looper is almost unique in being both an intelligent and an entertaining time-travel film.

LooperUSA
4*

Director:
Rian Johnson
Screenwriter:
Rian Johnson
Director of Photography:
Steve Yedlin

Running time: 120 minutes

Looper stands alone among a horde of wannabe-serious science-fiction films dealing with time travel; the inherent contradictions in the premise are taken seriously, but not so seriously that the audience gets lost in long-winded explanations. Besides, most viewers should be familiar with these contradictions already – for an insightful yet entertaining recap, go watch the Back to the Future trilogy again.

Director Rian Johnson’s film delivers on the promise he displayed in Brick, a neo-noir film replete with its own Raymond Chandler-esque dialogue, almost a language unto itself, though set in the present. That film, as does Looper, starred the ever-impressive Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a high-school student who gets involved in the underworld when his girlfriend is killed.

The plot of Looper concerns the existential conundrum faced by a number of individuals in the present, which is 2044 in the state of Kansas: The title refers to those who carry out the job of killing people sent back from the future, where it is much more difficult to get rid of bodies.

Recently, however, the people sent back have been the Loopers themselves, 30 years older. This is called “closing the loop”. They arrive bound and gagged, and when the job is done, their present-day versions discover gold strapped around the bodies of their older (and now, late) selves, giving new meaning to the phrase “a golden handshake”.

In this way, the Loopers can live pleasant lives for the next 30 years while they wait to be sent back to the past and be killed by themselves.

Killing oneself is bad enough, but living with that guilt and yet building a life for three decades only to have it taken from you, even if you know it is coming closer every morning you open your eyes, is agony. The emotional turmoil is beautifully presented in a brief sequence that sees Gordon-Levitt turn into Bruce Willis, who is shot, in more ways than one, in a scene about a half-hour into the film.

Both actors play the role of Joe, and when, in the film’s most frequently presented reality, young Joe doesn’t kill old Joe, they are both in danger because news travels quickly between the present and the future, where the Rainmaker, a mystical figure who is closing all the loops and wielding ever-more power, is none too pleased by the way events are unfolding back in 2044.

For this reason, Joe makes it a priority to find the Rainmaker as a child and kill him, what with the latter’s being responsible for the death of a very important person in Joe’s life. It turns out there are three possibilities as to who the baby Rainmaker might be, and while old Joe goes off into the city to track down two of them, young Joe stays behind in rural Kansas to find the third one. Once the child is killed, old Joe should evaporate, as he would never have been sent back here in the first place, and the loop would remain open…

On a Kansan farm, young Joe finds Sara (Emily Blunt), who is raising her young boy, Cid, on her own. Cid seems rather precocious, and we quickly catch on to the likelihood this is the feared overlord of the future. Young Joe, despite himself, strikes up a friendship with Sara while old Joe continues his killing spree in the city, not knowing whether the execution of a young child will make things right or count for collateral damage.

The film itself doesn’t have many narrative possibilities here, but even though we know how things are likely to develop, the scenes on the farm with the young Joe and Cid the toddler have tension that keeps us from second-guessing the actions of the characters or the director.

But Johnson’s vision of the future is not bleak at all – as the wheat fields make abundantly clear – despite the ghastly poverty we are shown in some of the opening scenes. He presents us with a future that is very recognisable, and it even features the mild-mannered Jeff Daniels as the Loopers’ handler in the present.

Don’t discount the small details in the film, as many character traits, minor as they may seem, often have a role to play later on. Admittedly, there are questions to be asked about the wisdom of crime bosses in the future to send someone back only to be killed by their younger selves without any kind of supervision, given the very easily comprehensible moral dilemma. But such questions are negligible because Looper is tight enough to focus your attention in the moment.

Few films can balance a credible treatment of time travel with a narrative that is engaging and thrilling, and whatever you think about the deceptively closed ending, this one deserves great praise.

Profile (2018)

André Crous

Profile, Timur Bekmambetov’s thriller for the 21st century, makes clever and abundant use of everyday technology to replicate immediacy and inspire fear in the viewer. 

ProfileUK
4*

Director:
Timur Bekmambetov
Screenwriters:
Brittany Poulton
Olga Kharina
Timur Bekmambetov
Anna Érelle

Running time: 105 minutes

“Screen live” is the new hand-held. By having the film screen essentially replicate a computer screen, the viewer gets the visceral sensation that things are taking place “for real” without any apparent staging or editing. Of course, in the back of our heads, we know this is all directed (in this case, by Russian director Timur Bekmambetov), but onscreen, we see applications or services that we know – Skype, FaceTime, Gmail – used as we use them, and thus, we sympathise with the main character. But because the lesson of positioning the camera in the physical space of the protagonist failed as far back as the infamous Lady in the Lake, “screen live” films use a much better option: the Web cam.

Obviously, the reason for using “screen live” is to emphasise both the pivotal role that electronic communication plays in the story and to create a novel sense of immediacy and enhance the feeling of realism. The astounding Canadian short film Noah was one of the earliest examples and is still the benchmark, particularly because of its dynamic style of filmmaking that also incorporates a kind of a fast motion to bridge gaps in time, but Bekmambetov’s Profile is another serious and largely successful push for this kind of approach to narrative representation.

Based on the real-life story of French journalist Anna Érelle, who posed as a Muslim girl online to find out more about the recruitment of girls from the West by ISIS fighters and was swept up in a web of trouble, Profile transposes its story to the UK, where Amy Whittaker (Valene Kane) is looking for her next big story to break. Constantly behind on her rent and desperate to be taken more seriously in the newsroom, especially by her fast-talking boss, Vicky (a flawless, pirouette-like performance by Christine Adams, who dominates every Skype broadcast in which we see her), she creates a fake Facebook profile as a recent convert to Islam and starts liking and sharing ISIS videos.

She quickly gets noticed by a young man named Abu Bilel Al-Britani (Shazad Latif), a British-born ISIS fighter now living in Syria who asks her about her path to finding Islam and gently quizzes her about one day coming to Syria to join their noble cause. Every conversation with him is a giant lie, and she has to record it all on Skype. At the beginning, an IT employee at the news station, who knows Arabic and whose mother is from Syria, listens in on the conversation and finds the whole thing chilling. So do we, because the full-screen format of the interaction makes us feel we are also implicated in the lie, and we know the punishment for crossing an ISIS fighter – we have seen it in glimpses of the beheading videos that Amy reposts on her profile under the moniker “Melody Nelson”.

To make herself feel more integrated and in order to prevent herself from feeling guilty, helped along by the devastatingly handsome, charming and persuasive Bilel, she gradually cuts off her social interaction with her boyfriend and other friends and focuses on extracting as much information as possible from Bilel. She wants to know how young girls become vulnerable enough to contemplate leaving their community for ISIS-controlled Syria, and the picture Bilel paints is one of a paradise of freedom with ample opportunities to live in luxury for very little money. Compared with the financial difficulty Amy faces in London, we can quickly see how she might be enticed and how she is simulating the conditions for herself to be radicalised, too.

Bekmambetov manages to sustain this constant dread in the pit of our stomachs for a very long time as we see Amy being gripped ever more tightly in the hands of the terrorist, even as she knows better, a bit like the fable of the boiling frog. They spend a great deal of time together, with Bilel doing most of the talking, and she sees him in many different situations, from him playing football with his fellow fighters to cooking at home – an activity they share via Skype that is terrifying precisely because it is so intimate.

The acting from both players is superb, particularly because Kane and Latif are asked to do something quite unusual: always look directly into the (Web) camera. There is almost never any direct physical interaction between the person appearing onscreen and anyone else. And yet, this virtual interaction, nourished mostly by the tension that is generated by all the windows opening and closing as Amy tries to collect information in secret, consistently grabs our attention. Thus, “screen live” is used not only to convey a sense of immediacy and a feeling of familiarity but also to grab our attention and raise our level of anxiety.

On an interesting side note, we see the breathless coverage of ISIS in the media, as Amy locates articles online while she is chatting with Bilel. Most of this coverage is about the atrocities committed by the radical Islamists, complete with videos of their actions. But funnily enough, Profile shows all of this information is usually blared across the website of the Daily Telegraph tabloid, which has the opposite effect on many of its readers than the one that is intended: The sheer volume of videos makes the events feel less distant, and thus, those who are susceptible may just be supported in their radicalisation.

While the last 15 minutes of the film devolve into slight hysteria, and the film does cheat a little by skipping over all of Amy’s offline conversations and interactions, this is a powerful piece of filmmaking that lays out a clear path for other directors looking to profit off of this relatively novel format. Time has to be limited, the focus has to be very clear, and the filmmaker should make every effort to utilise the possibilities of his or her screen, which means switching between programmes and windows for the sake of dynamism, secrecy and revelation. Profile does all of this, and the importance of the real-life origins of the story in framing the events as more than just feasible cannot be underestimated. On top of the message that even the smallest interactions online can have very real-life consequences and that you are never really anonymous in the virtual world, this is a very topical film.

This is Bekmambetov’s first time directing but third time producing a “screen live” film. The other two were the 2014 horror Unfriended and 2018 Sundance thriller Search. 

Film viewed at the 2018 Berlin International Film Festival.

U – July 22 (2018)

André Crous

The terrorist attack of 22 July 2011 is recreated in meticulous detail by focusing on people’s reactions to the horror rather than explaining the inexplicable.

U - July 22Norway
4*

Director:
Erik Poppe
Screenwriter:
Erik Poppe
Director of Photography:
Martin Otterbeck

Running time: 90 minutes

Original title: Utøya 22. juli

There is nothing to be done, because all of it has already happened. But for nearly 90 unbroken minutes, we accompany one girl as she flees the attack, hides from the gunfire and struggles to understand what has happened in this idyllic outpost in the Norwegian countryside. This is a depiction of the terror inflicted on a group of youths in July 2011 on the island of Utøya.

Director Erik Poppe’s brave decision to centre his entire film on one character is, without a doubt, the best possible choice he could have made. Not only does it keep the viewer in the dark about the full extent of the carnage, thus keeping us in suspense throughout, but it also anchors the emotions in one place instead of weaving a necessarily incomplete tapestry of various strands. In the film’s opening moments, following an incongruous sequence in the capital where a bomb has exploded, Kaia (Andrea Berntzen), right on the cusp of becoming an adult, looks straight into the camera and says, “You’ll never understand.” It turns out she has an earpiece and is speaking on the phone to her mother, who has called to inquire about her following the explosion in Oslo.

From this moment on, we follow Kaia wherever she goes, though at a slightly less intimate distance than Mátyás Erdély’s camera in the similarly lensed Son of Saul. She has recently fallen out with her younger sister, who made slightly inconsiderate comments in front of their fellow campers, which Kaia considered inappropriate. Thus, they get separated early on, and within a few moments, youths are rushing from the forest as shots ring out.

What follows is persistent confusion about the source of the attack, about whether it is even an attack, about what measures should be taken to elude the gunman and about how much longer this will take. Unlike a conventional work of fiction, there are no clear leaders, and even the villain is a big unknown, as we barely catch of a glimpse of him, with two or three chilling exceptions.

For 72 minutes, the actual length of the attack in 2011, we hear the bone-chilling shots on the soundtrack – sometimes farther away and seemingly duller, at other times up close with booms loudly reverberating enough to shake us in our seats. This is the music of the film, which doesn’t have a musical score and thus relies on the diegetic sound to provide it with the relevant soundscape.

In the foreground, Kaia is trying to deal with something she never expected she would face. After all, this is the calm, peaceful Norwegian countryside, not an American school. We already catch a glimpse of this distance from danger in the first few minutes, when there is some very superficial discussion about the bombing in Oslo. The only person who seems to be clued into the danger of what is going on is Issa (Sorosh Sadat), whose background makes him more sensitive to how others’ actions will shape people’s perception of him.

In retrospect, the Oslo-set opening sequence is wholly at odds with the rest of the film. Geographically, it is separate from the bulk of the film, which takes place on the island of Utøya. Temporally, it takes place a mere two hours before the events on the island but is shown almost exclusively through documentary (including surveillance) footage. Most importantly, however, it is not presented from Kaia’s perspective. Thus, we have two distinct sections in the film, even though both were the result of actions by the same man: the far-right terrorist, who luckily goes unnamed here, with even the actor uncredited. But the film would have been much better had it limited itself to the island. In that way, we would have learned about the bombing in Oslo the same way the children do: from each other, with much remaining opaque.

There is nothing exceptional about Kaia, and that is good. She is not immediately concerned with locating her sister because the adrenaline has overwhelmed her. Her efforts to save her sister and others are not heroic nor complicated: She does what she knows, but she knows as little as everyone else and is mostly functioning on a primal desire for survival by playing a potentially fatal real-life version of hide and seek.

Because we experience the story from Kaia’s perspective, we know almost nothing of the situation in general, except that people are in danger. We see them running, trying to get away; we see them after they have been shot; we see them dying; and we see them when they are already dead. As time passes, the body count increases, and we slowly the gravity of the invisible but very audible danger. Of course, this tight focus poses the director numerous dramatic challenges, including how to keep the story as realistic as possible and not inject unnecessary fictional drama or sugar into the mix.

Poppe appears to take the gamble late in the film that his apparent single-take staging absolves him of criticism that the narrative takes a melodramatic turn, but because of the focus on the single character, it is hard not to take notice. Hiding out with Magnus (Aleksander Holmen), a boy from the west coast city of Stavanger who openly admits the youth camp piqued his interest not because of the politics but because of the potential to meet girls, Kaia strikes up a cute conversation with him that sets up an emotionally manipulative ending to the film. The camera work is very well executed and whatever cuts there are invisible to the naked eye.

This is an ambitious and at times visceral, though not entirely successful, dramatisation of events on that tragic day in July 2011. The direction sometimes draws attention to itself, and beyond Kaia, her unanswered phone calls to her sister and the desperate phone calls between her and her mother, the film doesn’t offer much in the way of characterisation. It emphasises the confusion among the young people by having them ask the same questions over and over again – a natural and entirely logical response to this wholly unnatural event – but, except for the opening minutes, there is little chemistry between the characters, and it feels like a staged 72 minutes of tension rather than an ordeal filled with flesh-and-bone human beings.

That being said, this is a remarkable story told in a fresh way that makes the experience an unforgettable one. But if the director had spent as much time on developing his characters as he clearly did on blocking his actors, this could have been an extraordinary film.

Viewed at the 2018 Berlin International Film Festival.

Simulation (2017)

André Crous

Simulation, a film from Iran directed by and featuring Abed Abest, cleverly strips its actors and set design to the bone and turns its chronology upside down to address the unspoken. 

Simulation / TamarozIran
4*

Director:
Abed Abest
Screenwriter:
Abed Abest
Director of Photography:
Hamid Khozouie Abyane

Running time: 85 minutes

Original title: تمارض
Transliterated title: Tamaroz

It’s far from a perfect comparison, and the two films go in very different directions, but calling Abed Abest’s Simulation a Persian Dogville is a useful shortcut for saying it has austere, even Brechtian, stage design and deals with very real events and emotions while also being visibly and deliberately artificial. While the two films’ directors find filmic solutions to what is essentially a stage-bound production, the Iranian filmmaker doesn’t have his Danish counterpart Lars von Trier’s radical taste for doom and gloom. And yet, given the setting of Simulation’s first (i.e. final) act, a police station on the Iran-Iraq border, the tone is far from light.

The reason why the first act is also the last act is that the last act turns out to be the first: Abest starts with the climax and then works his way back (similar to, but much less detailed than, Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible). In so doing, he presents us with an inverted chronology of events that unspool until we reach the dramatic moment of stasis when a decision is made that ultimately leads to the tragedy of the film’s opening minutes.

In the opening scene, three young men are brought handcuffed into the police station in Abadan, the site of major conflict during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. Accompanying them is Esi, a much older man. This early part of the narrative may very well be the most important, as two conflicting stories quickly emerge. The three young men are accused of attempting to burgle Esi’s home. They deny any wrongdoing and say Esi assailed them for no reason whatsoever, even though he had invited them in as his guests. Esi has a very different account, but both sides seem equally passionate and sincere about their version of events.

Simulation‘s first few minutes are very different from anything we are used to seeing in the cinema and already hint at a strong sense of alienation: The opening credits sequence features a particularly unusual approach, namely to show the actors approach and look directly into the camera. They do so mostly one by one, while in the background a giant green screen is impossible to miss. Something else that draws our attention in the film is the fact that some details seem deliberately off. For one, although Esi is continually referred to as an old man, the actor, Danial Khojasteh, is about the same age as the three “young” men and does not behave in a way that suggests he is that much older than they are.

The vibrant green spills over into the rest of the set design, as most of the objects, from doors to tables to mobile phones, are all the same kind of… let’s call it “green-screen green”. In interviews, Abest has suggested that his idea was to allow these coloured objects to serve as types of intra-scenic green screens onto which the viewer can project his or her own imagined colours or textures. In a way, then, it is easy to interpret the green as a kind of freedom for the viewers to add or construct their own ideas. And although the connection between the green here and the green of the 2009 Iranian Green Movement in Iran is never made explicit, it goes without saying that this potential for symbolism will be at the forefront of most viewers’ minds.

However, what the blue sneakers mean (all the character wear exactly the same kind) beyond serving as a facile reference to “blue screen” is much less clear.

The opening scene at the police station, filled as it is with contradictory information about the events earlier that same evening, also creates a sense of dread that will hang over the entire film, no matter how bright the final moments are. In fact, as with Noé’s (admittedly much darker) film, the levity of the conclusion only serves to emphasise the despair of the scenes leading up to it.

The central part of the story takes place at Esi’s home. A man who lost his loved ones during the war (in a wonderfully staged, unexpected flashback inserted between the scene at the police station and the one at his home), Esi has become a rather wealthy businessman and, by the looks of it, a well-established bachelor. When he answers the door late at night, his expression and body movements make it immediately clear he is thrilled that the three young men – Abed (Abest himself), Vahid (Vahid Rad) and Aris (Majid Yousefi) – have paid him a visit. As the evening wears on, it becomes more and more evident he is a gay man, a fact seemingly acknowledged by the director when Esi starts playing an Elton John song on his bright-red piano. It may not be Madonna or Judy Garland, but the signs can only be missed by someone who is wilfully blind. This being a film from a country where homosexual acts are punishable by death, the film doesn’t venture much farther than innuendo.

As the four of them sit on a pair of couches in Esi’s lounge, the camera does something unusual. It divides the scene into blocks without using any cuts. Abest is very skilled at creating the illusion that the action is playing out in real time: Every time the camera moves to focus on a different character or pair of characters, the action “freezes”, meaning the actors stop moving until the camera, with a dramatic flourish, has reached a new spot. In this way, we get the feeling that there are no false cuts. In fact, the editing seamlessly combines different takes, but for those reading the subtitles, these transitions go by almost entirely unnoticed.

It comes as no surprise that Abest starred in the lead in Shahram Mokri’s stunning Fish & Cat (ماهی و گربه), a single-take feature film that was also very creative in its approach to time. 

Abest has said that the film is whatever the viewer chooses it to be, thus neatly putting the onus of proving the presence of controversial themes on the viewer. And yet, despite the sparse décor, there is more than enough information to work with – not only the dialogue, which is so abundant that the film often struggles to distinguish itself from a theatrical production, but also the gestures, the looks and the multitude of sound effects that are deployed. At times, the sound is clear and natural, but at other times there is a slight echo that makes it sound like it was recorded surreptitiously, perhaps by microphones planted on the premises by paranoid authorities.

The meaning of the title is not particularly self-evident (What is the simulation, and what is being simulated? Is the film a simulation of Abest’s imagined story? Of ours?), but we get that the film is an artistic representation rather than a mimetic one. And yet, because the story is easy to follow despite the play with time and design, the viewer is quickly immersed in the action, trying to figure out what comes next by trying to find the intentions behind the actions.

Simulation is creative, smart, daring and unexpectedly engaging.

Viewed at ÍRÁN:CI – the Festival of Iranian Films in Prague 2018.

The Shape of Water (2017)

André Crous

Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water is a stylish glimpse of an unusual love story set amid Cold War paranoia in Baltimore in 1962.

The Shape of WaterUSA
4*

Director:
Guillermo del Toro
Screenwriters:
Guillermo del Toro
Vanessa Taylor
Director of Photography:
Dan Laustsen

Running time: 120 minutes

The wonderful thing about fantasy films is that the bar of realism is set slightly lower than in most other stories. It’s not so much that the filmmaker can get away with more but that we relish the deviations from the strictures of reality, or realism, instead of criticising them. Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water is set in Baltimore in the early 1960s, in the midst of Cold War paranoia, with set design that is magnificent, rich in detail and full of colour, but the film is also indisputably a work of exuberant imagination.

We begin underwater inside an apartment filled with watery silence. A young woman is peacefully sleeping in mid-air (or, rather, mid-water) above a couch. At least, we tell ourselves she is only sleeping. The image is mesmerising, and it derives its power not from the visuals alone but also from the accompanying voiceover. The narrator, who will shortly reveal himself as the woman’s neighbour, Giles (Richard Jenkins), asks us, “If I spoke about it… if I did… what would I tell you?” By framing the story through this voice-over and emphasising the act of telling, the film firmly establishes itself as a (narrative) tale.

The woman is Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins), and she works as a janitor at the government-run Occam Aerospace Research Center, whose main goal seems to be to beat the Soviets at this whole space thing, although the film is light on details. Her best friend, whom she has worked with for a decade, is the garrulous Zelda (Olivia Spencer), who spends most days speaking enough to carry entire conversations all on her own. She has to, not only because Elisa is quite shy but because she is mute, and she has lifelong scars on the side of her neck to prove it.

One day, a giant water-filled container arrives at the research centre, and the many-starred military officials mention something about it being one of the most sensitive shipments they have ever received. It turns out to be an amphibious humanoid – a fish-man – that has the shape and size of a man but is covered in scales and has nictitating membranes, like windshield wipers, instead of normal eyelids. Most importantly, it doesn’t speak, although it does squawk.

Thus, rather predictably, Elisa and the creature strike up a relationship. She plays him music and even feeds him the eggs she packed for lunch. He shows very little caution and is almost immediately taken with her. The feeling is mutual. In a beautiful scene delivered in sign language to her neighbour, Elisa explains that, for the first time, lack of speech is not a “lack” at all. But she is not the only one to take an interest in the creature: By virtue of their own status as outcasts or outsiders (the mute Elisa, the gay Giles, the black Zelda and the Russia-born Dr Hoffstetler), a number of people around her are drawn to and sympathise with this foreigner par excellence.

With respect to these outsiders, the film gently sketches their hopes and dreams, with the exception of Zelda, whose race and its limited value in 1962 Baltimore are only superficially and indirectly implied, for example when others engage in casual racism. The most egregious behaviour in this regard is that of Colonel Strickland (Michael Shannon), an odious man who only washes his hands before using the bathroom and rapes his wife in a very icky scene that takes place in broad daylight. He is the menacing power figure who looks down on anyone who doesn’t look like him, whether they are women, blacks or scale-covered critters.

Del Toro’s light touches throughout the film ensure more than a passing guffaw. One of the most cited moments is bound to be Elisa’s recurring masturbation in the bathtub every morning, which alternates with shots of eggs boiling in hot water on the stove. And most scenes involving one of the centre’s highest-ranking scientists, Dr Robert Hoffstetler, are precariously balanced on a knife’s edge between seriousness and uproarious comedy thanks to the facial expressions of actor Michael Stuhlbarg. And whenever he meets with a foreign power, the passwords that are exchanged at the rendezvous have something Coen brothers-esque about them. 

The director is also particularly sly with his transitions, and one example is the cut from severed fingers being dropped into a bag to Corn Flakes poured from another bag for breakfast. The implicit connection grosses us out even as we acknowledge the purely abstract connection with a laugh.

Elisa and the Amphibian Man (played by Doug Jones), as the credits call him, grow closer and eventually engage in an obviously consensual moment of bestiality that will undoubtedly draw laughter at every screening. Their silent bond is unbreakable and beautiful, although an imaginary black-and-white song-and-dance number late in the film feels wholly out of place.

Something else that feels out of place is the amount of access that the low-ranking Elisa has to what is supposed to be the research centre’s prized possession. She visits her amphibious friend nearly every day without ever facing punishment for trespassing. Fantasy films loosen the restrictions on how we perceive their realism but not their credibility, particularly if the story is set in a real world–like environment. And these visits in The Shape of Water push plausibility beyond breaking point.

While the meaning of the title is not at all apparent, the visuals are stunning, and not since Alfonso Cuarón’s 1998 Great Expectations has there been a film so focused on reminding us of the colour green. From the doors at the research centre and the punch clock time cards to Elisa’s dress, any number of items of furniture and, of course, the blueish shades of green in the water are ever-present and frame the tale as something out of the ordinary that vibrates vital energy.

There is no question this is the most solid piece of filmmaking that Guillermo del Toro has ever delivered, and while it is much more mature than your average fantasy film, it has the kind of magic that transports the adult viewer to a wonderland most often associated with nostalgia for childhood.

Viewed at the Bratislava International Film Festival 2017