"The Party" (2017)

Sally Potter’s recent career trajectory has been quite interesting. Having spent the 1990s and 2000s exploring the varying ways with which personal and group identity affect perception (The Tango Lesson), societal status (Orlando, The Man Who Cried) and interpersonal relationships (Yes), she has since taken a more overtly political shift, using her characters’ multiplicity of lived experiences and points of view to critique the radical chic middle class she grew and blossomed in. After satirizing society of the spectacle values in the bold but ultimately shallow fashion mystery Rage and examining the deleterious effects of politics as escapism in the splendid coming-of-age drama Ginger & Rosa, her latest film continues its predecessor’s dissection of liberal hypocrisies.

Set entirely in a posh London apartment, The Party observes the disintegration of seven privileged elites’ marriages and lives as (presumably Labour) party apparatchik Janet (Kristin Scott Thomas) celebrates her access to power with husband Bill (Timothy Spall) and a select group of five friends: Caustic cynic April (Patricia Clarkson), her New Age healer of a soon-to-be-ex-partner Gottfried (Bruno Ganz), cocaine-addled stockbroker Tom (Cillian Murphy), women’s studies professor Martha (Cherry Jones) and her pregnant wife Jinny (Emily Mortimer). The announcement of unpleasant news regarding Bill’s health starts a chain-reaction of revelations and developments that confront these people’s moral and philosophical convictions to the reality of human nature.

As in Blake Edwards’ similarly-titled Hollywood satire, Potter uses the uninvited guest (in this case, Bill’s illness) as the disruptor of established order, exposing behaviours, codes and motivations to scrutiny. What separates Potter’s film from Edwards’ and other similarly-structured plays and films is the direct link she draws between her characters’ egoism and the politics that form the foundation of their lives; guest or host, every guilty party’s outburst is sparked by the pressure their political narcissism exerts on their lives.

The resulting tension between the personal and the political is what infuses the dialogue with its incisiveness; Martha’s justification for allowing a friend to use her apartment for extra-marital trysts (“I thought it better than in your house”) is only slightly funnier than the wronged party’s self-aggrandizing claims of “saving our country from profiteering butchery”. Professional capitalist Tom’s raw-nerved emotionality is informed by a common-man conservatism provides a magnificent foil to both Gottfried’s maddeningly calm pseudo-philosophical platitudes and Bill’s neoliberal bourgeois smugness (“Money bought this house, not fucking ideas!” he retorts to the latter’s intellectual penis-waving). In one of the film’s more bittersweetly funny moments, April piercingly summarizes generational feminist rifts by gently reminding a betrayed Janet that “sisterhood is a very ageing concept.”

Potter, of course, is not critiquing beliefs themselves so much as examining what happens when we demand our politics define our relations to one another and dictate our conduct. No matter how cruel, selfish or arrogant her characters may behave, her style evidences her innate sympathy for them; note how the soft black-and-white cinematography and light-handed camera movements with which she films this verbal internecion resembles 1960s independent cinema. In doing so, she effectively casts the characters’ failings in the ambience in which the ideals behind them were conceived, lending an underlying nostalgic poignancy to every cut and blow they exchange. It’s a subtle touch that exemplifies Potter’s knack for visualizing her protagonists’ feelings through light, colour and shadow.

Running at a grand total of 71 minutes, The Party is a brisk and pleasant watch but no less sharp or fulfilling for it. Without quite reaching the profundity of Ettore Scola’s similarly-themed epic We All Loved Each Other So Much, Potter nevertheless dissects Britain’s ruling political class with the knowing accuracy only a fellow member could achieve.

"Widows"

“Never thought I’d marry a white man – or a criminal”. So bitterly ponders Veronica Rawlings (Viola Davis) as she remembers her late husband Harry (Liam Neeson), whose violent death alongside his comrades in a botched robbery of crime lord Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry) has exploded the comfortable boundaries her social status once guaranteed. It’s a line that neatly summarizes the film’s themes and perspective thereon, an implicit acknowledgement of whiteness’s symbolic social power that dares to connect it to organized crime’s aspirational role in American cultural history.

Transposing Lynda LaPlante’s 1983 BBC miniseries of the same name to a 2008 Chicago on the verge of the election of one of its most illustrious sons, Steve Rodney McQueen’s Widows turns Veronica’s predicament and consequent leadership of an unlikely all-female gang of robbers into a metaphor for today’s intersecting identity politics. As she enlists working and lower-middle-class fellow widows Alice (Elisabeth Debicki) and Linda (Michelle Rodriguez) to do her bidding, her quest for personal liberation becomes a symbolic reparative crusade against white patriarchy that lays bare previously unexamined privileges she once enjoyed.

Consider her first meeting with the other women at a spa, and the business-like coldness with which she hands them money as if it were a toolset: her pacing is brusque, her expression stony, the imperiousness of her tone somehow amplified by the unmistakeable fear beneath it. Her tough businesswoman persona isn’t an act so much as a defence mechanism triggered by the social past these women reflect back at her. As Jamal Manning himself puts it to her so succinctly: “You’re nothing now. Welcome home.”

These class dynamics power the women’s interactions with a tension that quickly bleeds into peripheral plots surrounding alderman Jack Mulligan’s (Colin Farrell) reluctant efforts to maintain his family’s power in a predominantly black ward and Alice’s sugar-daddy arrangement with a dollar-store Christian Grey (Lukas Haas), to the point of achieving a kind of poetic rhythm as scenes and dialogue echo and build upon each other: when Veronica repeats Manning’s earlier putdown in a rare display of vulnerability after a physical altercation with Alice, their relationship progresses into a newfound solidarity bolstered by inter-class understanding; when Mulligan’s racist father (Robert Duvall) reminds his son their only purpose and duty as politicians is survival, his words evoke a dark reflection of Veronica with the added subtext of racial anxiety.

These touches give Widows a sly playfulness that McQueen’s filmography noticeably lacked until now. Approaching his political subjects with an art student’s eye for corporeality and texture, his previous films studied their pain and physical destruction to occasionally excessive degrees (Shame) but Widows opts to humanize its characters through pointed behavioural details rather than debasement. In doing so, he evidences a hitherto unsuspected talent for black comedy and political humour, best exemplified in a gun show scene during which Alice appeals to a female customer’s class guilt and white female solidarity by pretending to be an impoverished Russian illegal immigrant fleeing abuse (“You’ve always said a gun is a girl’s best friend” her daughter pipes up in a scathing punchline).

It’s perhaps unsurprising that McQueen would show such a canny understanding of our current divisions, but the satirical accuracy with which he anticipates both the hope and painful divisions that would characterize the Obama era comes as an especially welcome contrast to his previous propensity for occasional self-seriousness. Using the fatal police shooting of the Rawlings’ son (in front of a wall plastered with Obama posters no less!) as an instigator to the disaggregation of their marriage and lives, McQueen metaphorizes the 2008 election as an exposure of white patriarchal hegemony’s inherent, destructive fragility.

This is where McQueen’s visual artistry comes into play; from the opening shot of Harry’s playful pre-coital roar match-cutting into the gunfire of his fatal robbery, he visualizes a connection between virile masculine performance and toxic violence with an almost comic book-like panache that expresses his character’s mindset without versing into outright caricature. In a new twist on his familiar long-take conversations, he films Mulligan venting his white masculine anxieties (“have you ever slept with a black guy?”) to his campaign manager (Molly Kunz) from the car hood, both protagonists out of sight, as the camera films the housing projects he’s inherited for half the journey before slowly turning to the right to show his own affluent neighbourhood just as his manager urges him to man up. It’s a highly evocative, undercover journalism-inspired sequence that neatly distils the film’s themes of social determinism, neoliberal hypocrisy and patriarchal fears with a formal elegance and stylistic intelligence many modern such takes sorely lack.

These audiovisual highlighting of individual expressions and the politics that inform them make Widows feel alive in every frame, accentuated by McQueen’s use of reflections and motivated camera moves to express his characters’ fractured identities and teleguided social trajectories. None of that life, however, would come to be without the actors’ superb work: always a magnetic presence even in mediocre material, Viola Davis’s ability to convey an intricate network of feelings with the smallest shifts reaches a pinnacle untouched since Antwone Fisher. There’s a scene early in the film where Veronica talks to her driver (Garrett Hedlund) who offers to leave her employment due to her inability to keep affording his services. Look at Davis’s face; her face is a mask of sincere gratitude and sadness, yet there’s also a spark of grim inspiration behind them as she finds a solution that could help them both – at great potential cost to him. Not many actors can convey so much with so little.

Davis’s commanding performance is superbly complemented by her partners-in-crime – Elizabeth Debicki in particular stands out as an abused woman taking gradual ownership of herself – but it’s the small roles that make Widows’ denizens feel truly lived in. Be it Robert Duvall’s resentful patriarch struggling for what little power he has left, Adepero Oduye’s complex embodiment of capitalist identity politics (“I am an empowered female minority business owner!”) or Jon Bernthal’s chillingly casual abuser, every bit part is like a snapshot of a fully-lived life, isolating feelings and experiences in a precise here and now that better enhance their greater social relevance.

Widows is not without its flaws; the screenplay, credited to Steve Rodney McQueen and Gone Girl’s Gillian Flynn, wraps subplots around each other in a way that occasionally suffocates individual characters (such as Jacki Weaver’s abusive mother and Brian Tyree Henry’s Jamal Manning, whose motivations are only explored on a surface level) and stunt certain plot developments. Still, McQueen’s perfect attunement to his characters’ emotions and movement coupled with his and Flynn’s political acumen make this socially perceptive thriller one of this year’s essential viewings.

"Bohemian Rhapsody"

Who was Freddie Mercury? To the general public, he was a larger-than-life rock icon, a pioneering musical genius whose sexually fluid showmanship transcended boundaries and set a standard of showmanship never since surpassed. To those who knew him, he was a man of many contradictions, as shy as he was extravagant, as selfish as he was kind, a flamboyant figure whose hedonistic excesses were matched by his coyness regarding his private life.

All biopics, to one degree or another, have to answer such a question but the unique sociocultural complexities of Freddie Mercury’s identity make it particularly essential to Bohemian Rhapsody’s central thesis. He was a queer Parsi immigrant who resisted any such categorization as strongly as his music did; how did his relationship with his own identity affect his art? How did his music, in turn, express the truth of who he was – if at all?

Bohemian Rhapsody tentatively touches on these questions but fails to probe them beyond a surface level. Instead, it moves through his life as if it were a series of questions on an exam sheet, each answer technically correct but unedifying and uninformative beyond the simple assertion of facts and summaries.

Early scenes of Mercury’s life with his family show him at odds with his tradition-minded father (“good words, good deeds, good thoughts”) who disapprovingly notes his adoption of “Freddie” as an anglicized alternative to his birth name Farrokh, implying a rejection of his heritage. This accusation of assimilation is reflected in the third act when a jilted ex-manager (and ex-lover) disparages him as remaining at heart a “scared P*** boy” – also echoing a loutish audience member’s racial slur during the band’s first performance. Mercury’s own feelings about his ethnic identity, cultural heritage and sense of belonging, however, remain elusive; twice he voices his vision of Queen as belonging to those who don’t belong anywhere, but the screenplay seems curiously uninterested in digging any deeper. In lieu of conflict, we simply get a half familiar all-too-quickly-resolved arc of a queer man coming out to his conservative father and finally earning his approval.

The clearest indications about Freddie Mercury’s inner struggles come from conversations with his long-suffering ex-girlfriend Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton) during which they talk about the adulation of the crowd. They frame his excessive partying, poor choice in friends as manifestations of a need for love and validation directly connected with struggles over his sexuality and self-presentation. Mercury’s life, the film suggests, was defined by an ongoing quest to be his own person and to figure out who that person was. That’s not a bad perspective to take but it requires a certain willingness to take risks in cutting through Freddie’s self-image and examining his insecurities – risks that director Bryan Singer is unwilling to take.

As a band, Queen were bold, innovative and risqué. They blurred lines between genres, experimented throughout their career while remaining distinctly mainstream, and exuded – largely through Freddie’s songs and stage performances – a titillating sexual energy that was naughty, playful and brash but never crude. A director truly in touch with that energy would have connected it to Freddie’s unapologetic individuality and used it to illuminate the secret feelings that animated it but Singer instead plays things disappointingly safe, mainly using Queen’s music as bland illustrations of selected “making-of” scenes that tell us very little about how these songs actually came about or what drove them. Freddie’s passion for music and art are only glanced at, taken for granted as if they sprang ready-made from his mouth. Even his famously lavish, drug-fuelled parties are a shockingly tame affair, devoid of any danger or sensuousness, as if someone had recut The Wolf Of Wall Street for pensioners.

Only intermittently does the film match its subject’s personality, in montages where Queen’s music comes to life in voicing the nuances of Freddie’s sexuality (ironically, with two songs he didn’t write). One sees a performances of “Another One Bites The Dust” interspersed with Freddie being guided by Svengali-esque manager/lover Paul Prenter (Allen Leech) into the gay leather sex club Mineshaft, culminating in a frontal shot of him entering a dark room at the top before a cut to black segues into a press conference during which he starts exhibiting HIV symptoms. Strongly reminiscent of Cruising, this sequence is as evocative as it is problematic in its tonal implications, using the song’s unmistakeable beat to strong erotic effect while also questioning the feelings behind Mercury’s iconic sexual expression. Another cheeky flourish involves Freddie talking to Mary on a payphone as a trucker invitingly walks in a men’s restroom as “Fat Bottomed Girls” climaxes to the lyric “Get on your bikes and ride!”. While arguably misrepresentative, these montages nevertheless show a flair and musical understanding that’s missing from the rest of the film, probably attributable to late-stage replacement Dexter Fletcher.

That a mediocrity like Singer ended up helming a biopic about one of pop music’s great geniuses would only be shocking if the surviving band members’ understandable protectiveness of Mercury’s legacy wasn’t common knowledge. The choice to use the 1985 Live Aid concert, widely seen as the band’s finest live performance and the moment that propelled them back to the top after a brief dip, is quite revealing in that respect: It allows screenwriters Anthony McCarten (already responsible for the equally over-reverent The Theory Of Everything and Darkest Hour) and Peter Morgan to evacuate any of the real pain that might come with dealing with Mercury’s flaws or his struggle with AIDS and instead package his experience into a ready-made, one-size-fits-all tale of redemption and triumph.

This lack of honesty makes the task of Mr. Robot’s Rami Malek all the more unenviable, and his success in doing so feels almost miraculous. While he lacks some of Mercury’s swagger, he underlines his vulnerability and sense of displacement with a subtle precision that lends his scenes insight that’s often missing from the dialogue. His best moments involve small tonal shifts in his voice and body movements that clues us in on the fear beneath Freddie’s exterior cockiness, whether he’s criticizing his bandmates or phoning Mary with a glass of champagne to combat loneliness. Moments such as those hint at the film Bohemian Rhapsody could have been were it more interested in taking a closer look at Freddie’s inner life than in hitting biographical checkpoints.

It was perhaps a fool’s errand to expect any Hollywood film to shine light on the complexities of Freddie Mercury’s life, art and identity, particularly at a time when things are more commodified than they ever were before, but his genius deserved much better than the audiovisual equivalent of an authorized biography. Neither real life nor fantasy, this Bohemian Rhapsody remains resolutely stuck far too safely in the middle, too afraid of harming its subject’s image to illuminate it in any significant way.

"Carnival Of Souls"

One evening in 1962, director Herk Harvey was driving past Salt Lake when he spotted an abandoned amusement park by the beach. It was a most unusual-looking pavilion, almost Eastern-looking in design, with big round domes and a long pier stretching out towards the horizon. The sight, especially striking at sunset, struck Harvey as “the weirdest looking-place [he’d] ever seen” and after a short walk inside, the man knew he had found a perfect location for a horror film. Once home, he called writer John Clifford and asked him to write a script that would revolve around the building.

The place was an old Mormon resort named Saltair, and the film that would subsequently immortalize it was Carnival Of Souls.

At first glance, Carnival Of Souls looks and sounds little different from the dime-a-dozen black-and-white B-movies that would usually play after the main feature: Unknown actors, small-town setting, visibly dubbed dialogue in exterior scenes… Indeed, the opening drag race scene initially looks like it could have been lifted from one of the many Wild One knock-offs that populated drive-ins in the 50s and 60s. But as the race goes on, the film’s identity slowly takes shape in conjunction with that of its protagonist Mary (Candace Hilligoss), a quiet, pensive-looking blonde, initially indistinguishable from the other two members of her girlfriend trio until close-ups of her worried, uneasy face start drawing the contours of a personality. By the time she has emerged from the river, a lone figure covered in sand, she appears to us fully-formed, seemingly reborn from the crash, framed in both the revealing frontal rise and the wider reverse-shot as a periurban Venus.

From this point on, Mary is identified apart from her surroundings – apart from her fellow victims, none of whom are mentioned again, and apart from a physical world which will incessantly crush, dominate and erase her until her identity is no more. The entirety of her ensuing journey to Utah as a newly-hired church organist is a continuous battle for her existence, autonomy and integrity – not only against the strange invasive foreign bodies only she can see but also the plurality of the people she meets.

And so Harvey instils within us a growing sense of unease by consistently underlining the alien-ness of Mary’s environment as well as her own disharmony with her fellow humans. Observe the shots of her life after the crash as an organist inside a factory (!), see how the pipes closer her in and fragment the frame into a mosaic. Pay attention to the positioning of her arms, the vacant expression in her eyes and the way her body slightly twists and bends as she plays, like an articulated porcelain doll. And note how the low-angle reaction shot of workers listening curiously to her music echoes an earlier shot of pedestrians on the bridge witnessing her rebirth. Now that she has gained an identity of her own, Mary is a curiosity, subject to the oppressive gaze and invasive bodies of others. Even seemingly ordinary interactions with other people – bosses, landladies, doctors – are tinged with unease; her rapport with male characters in particular is consistently defined by their attempts to control her. Some examples are obvious, such as the doctor’s paternalistic treatment of her fears or her creepy neighbour’s persistent disregard for her personal space or expressions of sexual disinterest. Others are more insidious, subtly emphasized by Harvey’s framing, composition and shot length; it’s in the stillness of Mary’s torso as her old boss touches her shoulder from behind and advises her to “put her soul” into her church work instead of seeing it as just another job, or the ever-so-slightly uncomfortable close-up of the minister’s expectant face as he assesses his candidate’s job performance before beaming with satisfaction. It’s in the way Harvey holds the camera on the church cleaning lady’s gaze for an unnaturally long time as she listens to Mary playing outside the frame.

Throughout the film, Mary is in constant conflict with the people and society around her, pressured to assimilate and conform, be it by worshipping at the church she works, accepting men’s advances or simply seeking out the company of others. Ever since rising from the scene of her accident and not acting like the traumatized victim everyone expects her to be, she has marked herself out to be corrected or – as she first experiences traumatically in a shopping centre – annihilated altogether. In that respect, her interactions with her neighbour are surprisingly profound: Initially coolly resistant to his sexual harassment, she becomes more tolerant of his presence and flirtations following a night of terror while nevertheless establishing clear boundaries that he continually dismisses. As her dissociation with reality grows stronger, she chooses to attach herself further to him, right until her panicked reaction to the apparitions around her scare him away. Not only is this a stunningly eloquent dramatization of how we shape our very existence and identity through the gaze and approval of the other, it’s also a relationship anyone knowledgeable about survival mechanisms in especially patriarchal environments will recognize with grim familiarity.

None of this, of course, means Carnival Of Souls should be seen as a feminist film but it adds further texture to Mary’s nightmarish experiences by implicitly connecting them with her stubborn individuality, to the point where the final plot twist – which I shall not reveal – feels more allegorical than literal. The horror derives less from the ghoulish apparitions stalking Mary than from the growing sense of dissociation Herk Harvey creates before unleashing them on his heroine’s psyche. Closer in style to the French New Wave experiments of Alain Resnais than the splattery schlock of William Castle, it signifies Mary’s spatial and temporal disconnection through ingenious match-cuts and Gene Moore’s eerie funerary organ score, which subconsciously links her chosen vocation to her ghostly stalkers and the world they entice her to. This is especially well-illustrated in a remarkable nocturnal driving scene during which Mary unsuccessfully tries to change radio channels when her upbeat jazzy tune is slowly replaced by Moore’s now-diegetic score. As the titular carnival, Saltair becomes a physical embodiment of Mary’s non-belonging, an expressionist beacon of unconscious intuition and dreams, dominating her with empty spaces that nevertheless feel more welcoming than the human world she endures more than lives in. By the time the “real” world has truly rejected her, its atemporal, spatially abstract darkness feels more concrete and somehow less hostile than the vast, populated world of indifferent humans outside.

Carnival Of Souls was the only feature film Herk Harvey ever made. The film passed without notice at the box-office and fell into the public domain, gaining a cult reputation only thanks to late-night television airings and subsequent festival screenings. Harvey, who had since returned to making educational shorts before retiring in the early 1980s, lived just long enough to see it justly recognized as the landmark in psychological horror that it is.

"The Meg"

Most people know Steven Spielberg’s Jaws invented the summer blockbuster, a super-genre which, we are reminded every other year, is slowly dying. Although it is unlikely to happen, it would be a poetic kind of justice if The Meg were to strike the deathblow, so desperately does it try to recreate its predecessors’ mix of B-movie tropes and stylistic sophistication with none of their wit or craft.

Sold by the trailers as a tongue-in-cheek Piranha-style festival of sea chases, one-liners and screaming vacationers, The Meg actually spends its first two acts as a slow-burning suspense thriller, as burnt-out deep-sea rescuer Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham) rescues a science team from a giant prehistoric Megalodon shark then tries to stop the beast from destroying the base and eating everybody. As far as monster movie go, it’s not a bad premise; but one whose innate silliness needs to be either fully embraced or countered with a smart exploration of its thematic implications – neither of which happens here.

Instead, the entire film plays out with deliberately-paced po-faced seriousness often reminiscent of James Cameron, with loving pans of underwater fauna, relaxing string music and close-ups of Statham staring off-screen while uttering “Oh my God” under his breath. There’s a distinctly old-fashioned vibe to the writing and style, owed perhaps to the sensitivities of producer Gerald R. Molen (Days Of Thunder, Jurassic Park, Twister), that might have added charm were director Jon Turteltaub (National Treasure) not sorely lacking in self-awareness or imagination.

This is most abundantly demonstrated by the film’s stubborn insistence on keeping the titular monster off-screen for most of the first act and favouring brief, close shots whenever it does appear during that time. No doubt Turteltaub meant to take cues from Jaws but in doing so, he forgot that that film’s strategy was born from the necessity of hiding as much of the unconvincing fake shark as possible. No such needs exist here, where the shark is entirely CG and thus lacks the physical presence that would make its sporadic appearances feel genuinely visceral.

Worse than reminding audiences of superior movies, this approach also disrupts the film’s pacing with false build-up that treats each of the shark’s appearances as if it were the first. Not only does this rob the action beats of their potential scare factor, it highlights how lifeless Turteltaub’s direction is, particularly during the many, many dialogue scenes where actors spout flat, technobabble-laden dialogue at each other like digital avatars of characters from previous movies.

To complain that the story and characters are clichéd would be breaking down an open door: familiarity and repetition are part of B-grade blockbusters’ appeal. Cliché becomes a problem in these films when it’s deployed haphazardly without understanding how or why it works, such as it is here: The science team leader being Statham’s ex-wife is used as a primary motivator only for their past relationship to play no subsequent role in the story beyond encouraging him to pursue Chinese oceanographer Suyin Zhang (Li Bingbing). The opening sequence establishes tension between two characters only for it to be completely defused before the first act is even over. Everything about Rainn Wilson’s tech-bro billionaire screams Greedy Capitalist™ but his actions never gel harmoniously with the plot the way similar characters did in Aliens or King Kong. It’s as if the screenwriters (working very loosely from a novel by Steve Alten) didn’t trust in the basics of their premise and felt the need to over-furnish it with superfluous B-plots and character details without thinking of how they tie into each other.

The Meg is guilty of many offenses, from its lazy plotting down to the way it treats its female characters as damsels in distress, but most unforgivable of all is just how boring it is. You’d think a film about Jason Statham fighting a giant prehistoric shark would be at least mildly entertaining but even the Transporter star’s cocky charms are wasted in vain efforts to make these proceedings dramatic. For all its vaunted bite, this clay-finned giant is a woefully toothless one.