Underwhelming.
And I really can’t properly explain why without spoiling it.
It’s essentially a crime drama set in Russia, with the Ukraine war as a backdrop. The first half is all sprawling setup and suggests a much more interesting film than we eventually get. An awful lot of what you assume is going to be important to the plot is really just window dressing on a pretty small story. There are some memorable scenes, but it never really came together into a good film.
This follows a pair of cousins, the photographer-filmmaker’s neighbours, as they grow up over the course of 25 years. We’re in rural Argentina, surrounded by irrigation canals, poultry and cows. We see two small girls playacting their weddings and funerals (!), going swimming and trying on makeup. Year by year they change from children to teenagers and then to adults. Their relationship changes. Their self-confidence changes.
It’s hard to say if it’s sad. Or if it’s hopeful. It’s absolutely captivating watching them grow up and become different people, but there’s a real sense of lost innocence. It’s hard not to wonder what the childhood versions of them would have made of their grown-up futures.
A very cool film project that I’m glad to have seen.
Oh, I was disappointed in this. I’d expected it to be a dive into what apologies mean, how they differ across countries and languages, some sort of anthropology.
Instead, we get an awful lot of Belgian handwringing. It’s all very well-meaning, but to my mind it fell down on two pretty major points.
First, it seems massively reluctant to draw a line between a personal apology and a representative one. It’s just silly. It treats the idea of apologising for something you have done as the same as apologising for something your people or ancestors have done. And they’re not remotely similar. But the film seems disinclined to distinguish between them.
Secondly, it doesn’t want to criticise the absolute emptiness of the political apology. We watch the progress of some Belgian subcommittee for apologising for their horrendous deeds: it runs for nearly three years and interviews hundreds of people before writing a report that’s buried forever. It’s an absolutely abhorrent waste of time and money. The film seems keen for us to see the eventual acrimonious end as being the real problem. But it’s not. The whole exercise was doomed from the start! We never find out how much was spent on this charade.
As ever, I’m massively glad this was made, I’m glad of the chance to see it, and I’m grateful the director came to the screening. It didn’t hit the mark for me, but I’d take it over a hundred Netflix-produced documentaries in a box any day.
I’ve lumped these two together because they’re both showing in competition this year, but they are very different. Although perhaps they have as many similarities as they do differences.
Both take us to an island. They show us a generational gap being bridged. Both are deeply concerned with the old school—the analogue, the community, the heritage—crashing up against the modern—the impulsive, the independent.
Zejtune follows Mar, whose mother has recently died. Her remaining family are combative and cold, and it was clear she had some serious issues with her mother, but she’s been left three plots of land, with maps scrawled with illegible Italian text that state her right to it. She enlists a wedding singer she meets, who turns out to be a legend of għana (a sort of Maltese folk music, where flamenco meets rap-battle), and sets off around the island looking for her land.
The film isn’t really about that, though. It’s about family and tradition, about historical wrongs and whether they can be righted (or at least forgiven), about land and place and people. There are links back to the fabulous In a Whisper, in the determination of the older characters that the youth should not flee the land.
Memorizu cuts a much slighter figure. It’s a film in which almost nothing happens. Just life, moving along slowly. Yuta sets off from his wife and young daughter to keep his father-in-law company. He joins him in his old-school photographic studio, driving him about for school portraits and wedding snaps.
It’s a much more understated film, but the new runs up against the old—iPhone footage contrasted against the warm film grain—the modern and cosmopolitan crashing up against the fusty and old but deeply community-rooted ways of life.
I loved both.
I think both gave a beautiful slice of life in their respective cultures and took us with them on a journey that was small, personal but deeply satisfying.
A decent documentary about the life of one of the original phone phreakers, proto-hackers of the telephone age.
I’ll be honest—I found the hacking side a lot more interesting than the rest of it. The background to his life and all the parts up to his arrest for fraudulent long-distance calls was pretty fascinating. The later chunk about his answerphone message call line was a bit thin.