Joan Of Arc

It is 1429 and the Hundred Years War between France and England for the French throne had already got over one hundred years von the clock. Believing herself to be chosen by God, Joan of Arc (Lise Leplat Prudhomme), leads the army of the King Charles VII of France.

In the aftermath of several victories including the lifting of the siege of Orléans, Joan was eager to continue her mission of killing the English but the French King was less keen. He was pretty much happy to settle for what he'd got, leaving Joan and her followers basically standing around in a sand dune talking long windily about what they'd rather do. The budget was clearly not that great.

One would perhaps have liked to see a spot of medieval warfare at this point but there is none or indeed a bit more background on the situation in England and France at the time but it is assumed you already know this. Instead the film leaps to Joan’s capture, imprisonment, and trial by the pro-English nobility on charges of heresy.

The scenes of her trial in Rouen are even more long winded than those in the dunes, as her accuses constantly try to force a confession out of her while she constantly refuses to deviate from her line that she is God's chosen one.

This stalemate produces an endlessly slow crawl to the conclusion that we all know is coming and it is only sort of broken up by the occasional surreal musical number and some deadpan comedy by the two guards outside Joan’s prison cell. A cell that looks like a concrete bunker left over from World War II and probably is.

The idea of the film is perhaps to highlight the preposterousness of it all, with a lead actress who looks about twelve not only leading an army but being on trial by the French state. Not too sure why it had to be done in such an alienating style though. It’s an experiment that I think I wished I hadn't been part of and perhaps invites comparisons with being burnt at the stake. Comparisons that I won’t make.

Only The Animals

Only The Animals, which was screened on Curzon Home Cinema, opens in the Ivory Coast with a lad cycling with a goat on his back... before we are transported quickly to rural southern France in the snowy winter.

Alice (Laure Calamy) is a farmer’s wife who sells insurance and one of her clients is another farmer, the reclusive Joseph (Damien Bonnard), who is struggling to get over the death of his mother. Meanwhile another neighbour, Evelyne (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) has gone missing.

Alice’s morose husband Michel (Denis Ménochet) is acting rather suspiciously. Uninterested in his attractive wife, he is always working late in his office while his wife is forcing herself on to the equally morose Joseph who seems to just about tolerate the sex with her. There is no accounting for her taste in men.

Then there’s Marion (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), a waitress who was Evelyne’s much younger lover and who became obsessed with her. She is entwined further into the story when her image is confused with the one being used by Armand (Guy Roger N’Drin), the lad with the goat in the Ivory Coast, in an internet phishing scam into which he’s hooked Michel into believing he’s talking to, and sending money to, a girl called Amandine.

Armand needs to make money as he has his own girl trouble. He in love with a woman called Monique (Perline Eyombwan) who is the mother of his child but is now with a wealthier older man who turns out to be Evelyne’s husband Guillaume (Roland Plantin) and they’re headed for France.

There you are, I’ve spoilt the whole tangled circular plot for you. Well almost. It’s a bit more complicated than that and the brilliant thing about the film is how it’s stitched together by telling their overlapping stories with ingenious point of view shifts which often clear up one oddity before presenting us with a new one.

Possibility the best thing I’ve seen this year so far.

Parasite

We finally catch up with the film Parasite which was the first ever non-English language film to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Not only did it win Best Picture but it also won Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best International Film.

The film is about two very different families from opposite ends of the spectrum as regards class and wealth etc. Without trying to sound too ‘Family Fortunes’, there is the Kim family who live in a small basement apartment, have jobs as pizza box folders and freeload on other people's wifi and there is the Park family who live in a mansion and have servants.

The paths of these two families cross when the Kim’s son Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) is offered the chance to take over a friend’s job as tutor to the wealthy Park’s daughter Da-hye (Jung Ziso). He has no qualifications for this but his artist sister Ki-jung (Park So-dam) is adept at forgery and supplies him with a fake certificate to bluff his way into the job.

Mrs Park is so impressive with him, now known as ‘Kevin’ and not knowing he’s already seduced her daughter, that she asks him if he could recommend an art tutor for their son (Jung Hyun-jun).

Enter Ki-jung, or rather ‘Jessica’, allegedly the cousin of a friend and she is quickly hired too. Together they contrive to frame the family chauffeur, getting him fired for having sex in the family car where ‘Jessica’ has left her underwear. They already have a replacement in mind, their father (Song Kang-ho).

They then remove the family’s housekeeper after they exploit her allergic reaction to peaches but passing it off as tuberculosis. When she is dismissed they install their mum (Chang Hyae-jin) instead.

Although still living mostly in their dank basement apartment, they all seem to scrub up surprisingly well when they need to. However the Park’s Son notices that for a bunch of strangers that claim to not know each other they all smell remarkably alike, and like they have come from a dank basement apartment.

When the Parks leave on a camping trip, the Kim’s all move in and revel in the luxuries of their borrowed abode but the old housekeeper appears at the door saying she has left something in the cellar. This something turns out to be her husband, who has been secretly living there for years, hiding from his debts.

Parasite is a clever black comedy that is set up brilliantly in the first half and which descends into farce and violence in the second half as rain curtails the Park’s camping trip forcing them to return home as a violent battle erupts between the Kims and housekeeper's family for parasitic rites to the mansion.

The violence continues the next day at the Park’s son's birthday party leading to several deaths and eventually a new family moving into the mansion while a new resident hides out in the cellar.

It’s wonderful stuff and best seen before the inevitable Hollywood remake.

The Assistant

Jane (Julia Garner) is college graduate who finds herself working as the most junior of junior assistants for an entertainment mogul in New York. She is first in, last out every day and spends the day doing mostly menial duties - making coffee, photocopying, ordering lunch, arranging travel and accommodation for everyone.

She also gets to clean out her boss’s office which involving wiping the white powder off his desk, retrieving used syringes, scrubbing the casting couch, and picking lost earrings up off the carpet which she then attempts to reunite with their owners.

Then she has to fields irate phone calls from her boss’s wife before then getting yelled at by him for interfering in his personal affairs. We see her write two emails of apology pledging to not let him down again, in which she is assisted by her two male colleagues (Jon Orsini and Noah Robbins) who advise her on the content. 

She is concerned when a young actress is flown in from Idaho and Jane is asked to bring her to a local hotel for a ‘meeting’ with her boss which has been moved from the afternoon to evening. She feels she should say something and visits her HR manager (Matthew Macfadyen).

He gives it to her straight and tells her that no one is interested in her concerns. Basically she should turn a blind eye if she wants to keep her job. Keep her head down, like everyone else.

That is the thing. It has been suggested that this film is highlighting the 'MeToo' issue but does it really?

She is treated unpleasantly by everyone in the company, not just by her male colleagues but by her female ones too. Her boss is a sexist, selfish low life but he’s a low life to everyone. Mostly, as suggested, despite a few jokey comments everyone is keeping their heads down which does I suppose make them complicit.

Basically this is a toxic working environment that no one should work in, male or female. I’m not actually sure what Jane thinks she’s going to get out of the job and HR has already told her she’s not her boss’s type! The problem is that she hasn't quit and nobody else has either. Or perhaps I’m just not getting it.

Generally I enjoy slow burning films like this one but it perhaps tries to be a little too subtle and should have dug deeper. While it's obvious who her boss’s character is modelled on, I don’t think there's anything particularly enlightening here.

Who You Think I Am (Celle Que Vous Croyez)

Tonight I book ‘Who You Think I Am’ through Curzon Home Cinema. It’s a subtitled French film, adapted from the novel by Camille Laurens, and for the first time I’m seeing our TV as perhaps too small e.g. I’m struggling to read the subtitles on it.

Claire Millaud (Juliette Binoche) is a divorcee with two children, who teaches literature and we see her analysing ‘Dangerous Liaisons’ with her class. She is seeing a therapist Dr Catherine Bormans (Nicole Garcia) whom she tells that she feels invisible to society now that she is in her fifties but this is a little misleading.

Despite claiming to be ‘invisible to society’ Claire is in a sexual relationship with a much younger man, Ludo (Guillaume Gouix). Yes he is basically using her for sex and doesn’t want to get romantically involved with her but it’s hardly being ‘invisible’. Clearly he finds her desirable and it’s hard to imagine Binoche herself struggling on this front. However, that’s perhaps not the point. Claire clearly has issues, hence the therapist.

One evening Ludo starts ghosting her, leaving his flatmate Alex (François Civil) to field

her phone calls. Her response to being so unceremoniously dumped is to create a fake online profile as a 24-year-old fashion intern called Clara, complete with stolen profile pictures and to then sends a friend request to Alex with a view to stalking Ludo. Pictures that later turn out to be of her niece, whom her husband left her for.

When Alex starts communicating with her, she becomes more and more obsessed with him and he with the image she portrays of herself. Soon they are texting and talking on the phone but for obvious reasons she refuses to meet him.

Their online relationship throws up a rather large plot flaw. That neither of them proposes to turn their cameras on when they chat or, hey, maybe download Zoom. To be fair they probably hadn't heard of Zoom when they filmed this, as hardly anyone had until a few weeks ago.

As Alex grows every insistent on meeting, Claire decides to call off the relationship rather than risk him being disappointed with her middle-aged self but then who’s to say that if they had met who’s to say she wouldn’t have pulled another young boy. Which is where the film goes in an imagined alternative finale which is submitted to her therapist as a manuscript.

In this the real Claire meets Alex post-Clara and they have a full blown relationship. Claire however still doubt herself even in her own fantasy and revives the Clara persona to test his live for her. This has tragic results, that ends up which Claire in an institution for mental disorders and I haven’t even mentioned what supposedly happened to the real Alex after Clara dumped him.

It’s an intriguing film that may or may not be having an almighty dig at social media and the alternative images of themselves that almost everyone creates online but Claire, I’m sure you realise that being young is wasted on the young. With hindsight and experience us oldies are just so much better at it.

Perfect Candidate

We watch the film ‘Perfect Candidate’ on the Modern Films website with a commission going to Broadway Cinema. It was a pain to stream though but we finally got it working from my Macbook to our Roku box.

Maryam (Mila al-Zahrani) is a young doctor in a Saudi Arabian hospital. We see her struggling to treat a man who has an arm injury because he refuses to be examined by a woman and he demands a male doctor, even though she is the most qualified medic available.

She is also concerned about the state of the road that leads down to the hospital but nobody in authority is interested in getting it fixed.

Maryam lives at home with her sisters, Selma (Dae al-Hilali) and Sara (Nora al-Awadh), and her father Abdulaziz (Khalid Abdulraheem). He is a respected musician who is struggling to get over the death of his wife and goes on tour with his band to take his mind off her.

While he is away, Maryam tries to take advantage by flying to a medical conference in Dubai where she hopes to put herself forward for a better job. However when she gets to the airport she is refused permission to fly because her father has failed to renew her travel permit and without his permission, she can’t fly.

She tries to see an official, who also happens to be her cousin, to get this rectified but she can’t even get an appointment with him. His secretary tells her he’s only seeing those who are signing up to be candidates to be a local councillor. So in order to see him, she signs up as a candidate herself. However, even when she sees him he still won’t budge on her permit.

Having signed up as candidate she decides to go ahead with it and armed with a googled checklist of how to win an election, she launches her campaign despite having no chance because she is female. 

We then get a lesson on political life in Saudi, particularly if you’re a woman, where the gender divide denies women a voice. Yet Maryam manages to get her political speech heard because she doesn’t focus on women’s rights like they all expected her to and instead turns her attention to the damaged road outside her hospital. This doesn’t improve her chances of winning but she does at least win that argument and the road is fixed.

Vivarium

Gemma (Imogen Poots) and Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) are a young couple desperate to get on the housing ladder. They wander into an estate agency staffed by Martin (Jonathan Aris), who looks like he’s just come straight off the set of Book Of Mormon.

Even though it isn’t at all what they are looking for, he persuades them to visit a new housing development called Yonder. Yonder is Suburbia on speed with its rows of identical houses with their identical white picket fences and identical manicured lawns.

They are shown around No 9 which is like a show house with everything ready for a couple to move in and complete with a spare bedroom ready for child number one.

When Martin simply disappears, Gemma and Tom can’t wait to make a run for it but they discover that escape is not possible. Every road leads back to No 9 and after driving around until it gets dark, they run out of petrol right outside No 9.

The next day, Tom climbs on to the roof where he sees nothing but more identical houses, so they decide to follow the sun to find a way out. They walk across identical garden after identical garden, always climbing over the identical fences using identical white plastic chairs. When they finally find a house with some lights on, it’s No 9. 

They discover that a box is left outside the house every day containing food and other provisions. The same food and provisions, day after day. Then one day the box has a baby inside it with a note saying, 'Raise the child and be released'.

If you assume that by merely having entertained the ‘dream’ of suburban living ‘sold’ by the estate agent and subsequently found themselves trapped in it then the last thing they should now do is to agree to raise the child. After all, why would you move to suburbia in the first place if the next step wasn’t to have a child to occupy that spare bedroom?

Out of compassion (I guess) they accept the child, thereby trapping themselves more deeply because having the child piles further demands on them. The way Tom and Gemma deal with those demands is by reverting to stereotypical gender roles.

Gemma cares for the ‘Omen’ child or at least tries to reason with it, as it grows at the rate of a dog and screams at the top of his lungs until it gets what it wants. While Tom digs because it makes him feel like he's doing something, and that is what men do.

As the child grows up into a Martin clone it all ends rather brutally as, with their roles affectively fulfilled, they are 'released' but not before we get an insight into other couples doing exactly the same thing in exactly the same trapped environment.

I thought it was a fascinating film, in the vein of the Twilight Zone or Black Mirror. A film about the treadmill of life, that life itself is a trap.

Where many films these days are remakes or sequels any film that dares to be different should be applauded. Vivarium gets a standing ovation from me.