A blood born virus that turns the body slowly to marble. A hospital-ward of slowly petrifying patients. Growing up as an immigrant teenage girl with a junkie uncle. Julia Ducournau’s films always go in pretty hard and this is no exception.
There are obvious AIDs parallels. But the film never really gets too bogged down in the illness (despite the astonishing visuals of the increasingly stony afflicted). This is a film about trauma, worry and loss. It’s bound up in the mother-daughter relationship, as the emaciated spectre of uncle Amin leers and chuckles from the sidelines.
I loved it. I’m not totally sure I understand it. But it doesn’t matter. It was a wild roller-coaster of a film. I had no idea at all where it was taking me and enjoyed every moment of it. Ducournau remains firmly on my “watch anything she makes” list.
Bechdel pass, natch.
On paper, I’m a big fan of this one. The unexpected death of a psychiatrist’s patient kick-starts a murder mystery. It’s a thriller in which reality and relationships are called into question. A series of small crimes, the burglary of her clinic, tells Jodie Foster she’s on the right track as she digs deeper into the family life of her deceased patient. Are the clues hidden in the sessions they’d shared?
Sadly, I didn’t love it. Foster’s acting was amazing, but the script wasn’t convincing to me. Her character goes off the rails too quickly, too completely. I never quite believed that this grown-up, serious professional would be raving about visions of 1940s Paris. Nor that the characters around her would accept her madness with a casual Gallic shrug.
We were always going to see the new Jafar Panahi film. After Taxi Tehran and No Bears, you can sign me up for any new film from Panahi. And more broadly, all of the Iranian cinema we’ve seen at the film festival has been gold.
This, fresh from winning the top prize at Cannes, is no different. It’s a fairly simple premise: what do you do if given the chance to take revenge on your torturer? And the story doesn’t do anything massively unexpected. But Panahi’s films are about the characters and they’re all just so human.
Life in 1970s rural Brazil does not look fun. We join Iracema, an anagram of America, in her precarious existence on the edge of the transamazonian highway. There are moments of joy - markets, festivals, bars - but there is a lot of very hard, grim survival too. Men are awful - aggressive, predatory, violent. The women aren’t much better. Somehow Iracema scrapes by, sleeping with truck drivers for lifts, bartering for cigarettes and booze.
Meanwhile, the amazon burns in the name of progress.
Brendan Fraser is a down-on-his-luck actor living in Tokyo, when he stumbles upon the Rental Family agency. Soon he’s moved on from being an anonymous mourner at funerals to being fake family, partners and friends.
It’s a surprisingly heartfelt little story.