Monthly Archives: July 2018

  • Racer and the Jailbird

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Le Fidèle

    Michaël R Roskam (2017)

    When I first saw that Matthias Schoenaerts was starring in something called Racer and the Jailbird, I assumed it was a further step down for him into vacuous ‘international’ cinema (though a step down from Red Sparrow may be a contradiction in terms).  When I noticed that the director was Michaël R Roskam – the maker of Bullhead (2011), which gave Schoenaerts his breakthrough role – I thought again:  besides, the French title of this new film (a Franco-Belgian co-production) is Le Fidèle, suggesting something more quietly serious.  It turns out the English translation is just as close in spirit to the movie that Roskam has made.  He doesn’t want to jettison the arthouse elements entirely but his crime-action drama is straining to succeed in the global marketplace.  The first name on the screenplay is Thomas Bidegain (Noé Debré and Roskam are also credited).  Bidegain co-wrote A Prophet (2009) and Rust and Bone (2012) with Jacques Audiard but Racer and the Jailbird is an awkward concoction.  It’s no surprise it’s gone down badly with critics and failed commercially too[1].

    Schoenaerts is Gino (Gigi), a Brussels gangster with a cover story that he’s in the automotive import-export business.   Adèle Exarchopoulos is Bénédicte (Bibi), who works for her father’s engineering firm and drives racing cars competitively.  Roskam opens with a flashback to Gigi’s childhood, demonstrating the otherwise fearless boy’s terror of dogs (a phobia that’s seriously overworked in what follows).  The narrative then switches to the present; briskly gets Gigi and Bibi, who are introduced through her brother (Thomas Coumans), into a relationship; and illustrates each of them doing their own thing.  This makes for a regular supply of bedroom scenes; fast-moving cars, whizzing round a racing circuit or away from a crime scene; and bits of dialogue that are obviously significant because they’re so deliberately placed.  Bibi asks Gigi if she can trust him and if he has any secrets.  The answers are yes and ‘I’m a gangster – I rob banks’:  Bibi laughs – he’s joking, of course.  Her own secret, she tells him, is that she’s immortal and her dream destination is Buenos Aires.  When Gigi, in an old-school moment, asks Bibi’s father Freddy (Eric De Staercke) for his daughter’s hand in marriage, Freddy says it’s a good idea – ‘You look the faithful sort’ (hence the French title) – but warns that Gigi has to ‘stop lying’ about the car import-expert business and ‘be a man’.

    Although Bibi didn’t take Gigi seriously when he said was a professional criminal, she begins to suspect the truth after meeting some of his associates socially.  Serge (Jean-Benoit Ugeux), Younes (Nabil Missoumi) and Gigi go back a long way, to juvenile detention centre.  Bibi’s increasing realisation that Gigi may not have been joking is well done and a sequence in a bar, where the couple are drinking with Bibi’s pals and their girlfriends, is excellent.  There’s enough going on between the characters and beneath the jokey conversation to raise hopes that Roskam may be looking to dramatise the men’s professional vs private lives à la Godfather.   The hopes are short-lived.  The story soon plummets into cliché, without appearing either to recognise it as such or to try to reinvigorate it.  The leading man takes part in one last big heist before giving up crime for the leading woman he loves (and has now married).  The heist goes disastrously wrong and Gigi, Serge et al end up in prison.

    Once Gigi is behind bars, you wonder for a while why Roskam went to all that dynamic action-movie trouble in the first part of the film.  This, at any rate, is exposed as box-office-minded padding to the story of star-crossed and devoted lovers.  It’s hard to see that the predicament they now find themselves in would be any different if Gigi had been a smaller-time crook and Bibi never behind the wheel of a racing car.   But Racer and the Jailbird then lurches into sustained and increasingly gruesome melodrama.   Gigi and Bibi want a baby and secretly have sex during her prison visits but she can’t get pregnant and receives fertility treatments.  On temporary release from jail, Gigi gets bitten by a (small) dog in a busy street, kicks the animal and, when the police are called, panics and goes on the run.  Bibi hides him until she decides he’d better give himself up.  Bang goes Gigi’s parole.  Back inside, he keeps trying to escape, which seems a good way of delaying his release indefinitely.

    It never rains but … medical tests reveal that Bibi has ovarian cancer.  She engages some Albanian gangsters to get Gigi out of prison – but only if she dies.  She dies.  Gigi is informed of the plan to get him out of jail and arrange safe passage to Buenos Aires.  He doesn’t want to go, telling the gangsters that Bibi didn’t understand he was hellbent not on escape, just on being with her.  The gang leader Bezne (Kerem Can) tells Gigi he has no choice in the matter:  the gang won’t get paid unless Gigi goes free.  (I didn’t follow how this requirement was to be applied, now that Bibi was dead.)  Bezne has Gigi savagely beaten up and sent, for his own safety, to a different prison.  The breakout happens en route and there follows another flashily violent episode in the course of which the hero sort of conquers his cynophobia, though with a guard dog biting, among several other body parts, the Albanian hand that fed Gigi.

    The closing sequence of Racer and the Jailbird is an extended, driver’s-eye-view car journey through a deserted Brussels at dawn.  The last of Gigi’s getaways, this not only recalls earlier scenes photographed from a similar perspective (including Bibi’s on the racing track) but is also a reminder of Michaël R Roskam’s film-making talent, hidden from view for so much of this movie.  Voiceovers repeating in Gigi’s mind the significant dialogue from the first half-hour detract only a little from this sequence, which wonderfully captures the headlong speed and sinuosity of the car’s progress through the streets and invests the cityscape with a grave beauty.  The sense of uncontrolled forward impulsion is very strong but the car doesn’t crash.  It stops outside a cemetery.  The last we see of Gigi, he’s climbing over the high, locked gates of the place, presumably in search of Bibi’s grave.

    The film leaves you asking questions albeit not searching ones.   Even if Bibi doesn’t misunderstand Gigi’s motivation for trying to escape from prison, why does she think he’d want to end up in Buenos Aires without her?  What becomes of her father and brother, both of whom seem important to Bibi, as she is to them, but who disappear without trace when she’s terminally ill?   Why Le Fidèle rather than La Fidèle (or Les Fidèles)?  Did Roskam think Matthias Schoenaerts’s talent and star status were enough to mend the split personality of Racer and the Jailbird and make it money?   It’s somewhat understandable if Roskam did think this:  Schoenaerts certainly moves between the action-man and human aspects of the story with remarkable ease.  Adèle Exarchopoulos, so good in Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013), shows her quality again here but seems less comfortable than Schoenaerts on the commercial movie side of things.   The film is well acted throughout – perhaps Kerem Can slightly overdoes the sinister-charismatic Bezne but, after all, he is playing someone from Albania.   The negative racial stereotyping of which cinema is now so wary never seems to be avoided when it comes to Albanians.

    18 July 2018

    [1] At the time of writing, the film has a 30% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and has recouped around $350k of a $9.6m budget.

  • Pin Cushion

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Deborah Haywood (2017)

    Lyn (Joanna Scanlan) and her teenage daughter Iona (Lily Newmark) arrive in a small Midlands town.  The pair have a warm, close relationship – laughing and dancing together in the living room, sharing a bed, affectionately calling each other Dafty One and Dafty Two.  We don’t know where they were before or why they and their budgie Joey, very much one of the family, have moved home but Lyn’s determinedly upbeat attitude immediately implies that her expectations of a new, happy life are wishful thinking.  Iona, though she smiles back at her mother’s optimism, has an air of apprehension.  Lyn has a pretty face, a weight problem and a hump on her back.   Her wardrobe is multi-coloured and eccentric.   In her outdoor clothes, including a furry hat in the shape of a cat’s head, she’s a cross between bag lady and court jester.  The orthopaedic shoe on her right foot is more conspicuous by being one of a pair of bright yellow heels, which she combines with darker stockings.  Slender Iona, with her googly eyes, thick lips, Pre-Raphaelite russet hair colouring and pale complexion, could be described as beautiful but not conventionally so.  The first definite sign of what lies in store for the main characters in writer-director Deborah Haywood’s debut feature Pin Cushion comes as mother and daughter walk home from a shopping trip.  Two teenage boys laugh at Lyn (‘”The bells, the bells! … hey, imagine if your mum looked like that!’) and throw something at her.  She’s quietly ashamed and upset by the incident.  Iona, once they’re indoors, makes a cup of tea to make her mother feel better.

    In spite of their closeness, Lyn and Iona are soon concealing from each other how they’re spending their time.  Iona pretends she’s made friends at her new school with three girls – Keeley (Sacha Cordy-Nice), Stacie (Saskia Paige Martin) and Chelsea (Bethany Antonia) – who actually, and threateningly, make fun of her appearance and sexual innocence.  Lyn gives her daughter a positive spin on her repeatedly futile attempts to socialise.  A neighbour, Belinda (Chanel Cresswell), calls, in need of a stepladder.  Even though she’s actually using it at the time to decorate, the awkward, self-conscious and anxious-to-please Lyn lends her ladder to Belinda, who takes it without a smile or word of thanks.  ‘I think we’ve made a friend there,’ Lyn tells Joey.   Iona also has a less unhappy secret to keep from her mother.  A boy called Daz (Loris Scarpa) takes a shine to her; they sometimes meet in the evening, when Iona tells Lyn she’s seeing the girls who torment her during the day.  Daz brings into focus another kind of concealment in the story.  Iona is soon ashamed to admit that Lyn is her mother.  One night, Lyn sees Iona and Daz kissing in a bus shelter and shouts her daughter’s name.  Iona hurries off without answering Daz’s question, ‘Who’s that woman?’

    Pin Cushion has a strong subject and certainly holds your interest but the writer-director was more interested in creating a distinctive surface than a well worked out screenplay.  The plot has a destination:  Deborah Haywood isn’t bothered about things that don’t make sense in the process of reaching it.  She and her designers must have had a lot of fun dressing Joanna Scanlan and the set of Lyn and Iona’s house, crammed with kitsch ornaments and busily patterned wallpaper.  Even the look of Lyn’s baking efforts – shocking pink cup cakes, etc – is super-twee.  The stylised design and naturalistic acting, some of it very good, don’t mesh.  The script is a succession of incidents and one-liners that deliver instant impact but are rarely credible or followed through.

    On the evening that Lyn pretends to have a date, and which she spends sitting alone on a bench in the street, Iona, desperate to be accepted by them, has Keeley, Stacie and Chelsea round to the house.  They bring two uninvited boys along.  The budgie is let out of his cage; ornaments get broken; Joey alights on a chair and is crushed to death when the fat gatecrasher sits on him; the kids get drunk; Keeley starts a guess-or-strip game that ends with Iona losing nearly all her clothes.  This is a pivotal scene in the story but Haywood is highly selective as to what’s important in it.  Unbeknown to Iona, Keeley and Stacie took photographs of her undressed and send them to other kids and to Iona’s mother.  In contrast, Lyn’s reaction to the crime scene she returns to after her night on the bench is understated, until it’s played for grotesque comedy.  She sheds a tear over Joey but Haywood gives more attention to Lyn’s elaborate memorial to the budgie (‘A dearly loved son and brother’) and subsequent visit to a performance by a skanky, leather-trousered psychic, who assures his audience, ‘There is no death, only transformation’.  This scene would be stronger if it didn’t occur in the aftermath of Joey’s demise – that is, if trying to communicate with the next world came across as the logical consequence of Lyn’s failure to make contact with people in this one.

    The film is shot through with striking detail that, on quick reflection, doesn’t ring true – a phrase that naturally brings to mind one of the first such examples:  do twenty-first century kids still jeer at a hunchback with the old Quasimodo line?  Iona has a fantasy, and lies to the girls at school, that her mother is an airline stewardess – a weirdly antiquated idea of glamour.  Daz is a larger problem.  Haywood introduces him to illustrate that Iona, unlike Lyn, has the possibility of access to a normal life and as a potential source of tension between mother and daughter but Daz then becomes an encumbrance to the story.  Haywood wants to define Iona as on the receiving end of bullying and as primarily concerned to fit in at school.  She virtually ignores the difference that having a good-looking boyfriend might make to Iona’s attitude towards Keeley et al.  She has to have Iona stop seeing Daz for the sake of getting in with the ‘mean girls’, with inevitably unhappy results (including Daz’s short-lived fling with Keeley).

    Even more important, Haywood’s concentration on Iona and Lyn as victims results in her skimping on the other important theme of the story:  the daughter’s need to escape a mother who’s loving but, with Iona her only friend, suffocating too.  Iona’s rejection of the reality of Lyn finds expression not only in the airhostess make-believe but also in a voiceover fantasy that ‘I was abandoned as a baby and this old hunchbacked lady found me in the forest.  She loved me and raised me and then one day she walked me to the edge of the forest and set me free’.  Yet the emotional bond between them is strong and Iona’s campaign for acceptance at school cuts her off from Lyn more conveniently than credibly.  In dramatic term, Haywood skates over the possibility that Iona, whether or not she was bullied, would have to put some distance between herself and an infantilising mother.

    After the photos go public, ‘IONA IS A SLAG’ gets painted on the wall behind the bus shelter where she and Daz once kissed.  (In Deborah Haywood’s home town of Swadlincote in Derbyshire, a ‘pin cushion’ means someone promiscuous – ‘a girl that takes more pricks than a pin cushion’.)   The film interestingly distinguishes the ill-treatment of misfits by a teenage group compared with an older one.   While Keeley and Stacie are actively nasty to Iona, Lyn is an embarrassment whom adults prefer to ignore.  One of the film’s most powerful moments comes when Lyn enters a gathering of local women and seeks their help.  She shockingly describes how, in her younger days, she realised that getting raped was the only way she’d be able to have a child and not be alone.  These other women are literally a knitting circle, wearing badges that identify them as ‘friends’, which is what Lyn tells them she needs.  One of the women, Anne (Isy Suttie), suggests that ‘a support group’ would suit Lyn better than ‘a friendship group’.  Even so, Anne, who’s doing a psychology course, invites her to an assertiveness session, which she thinks may help.  Lyn goes along to the session, only to discover the same collection of knitters there.  They include the implacably unfriendly Belinda, still in possession of the stepladder, in spite of Lyn’s several polite enquiries.  Lyn fails miserably in a role-play session with Belinda, where they enact the real-life bone of contention between them.  Anne calls on Lyn after the assertiveness session to inform her that the group has decided she doesn’t fit in and shouldn’t come back.  Although this satirical episode works reasonably well, there are things in it that don’t.  The tricoteuses sound a good idea but knitting is too domestically modest for the women Haywood is targeting, whether the pretentious, hollow do-gooder Anne or the blatantly vicious Belinda, herself a misfit in this insincerely friendly company.

    Haywood is well aware of the shadow of Carrie.  When Iona goes uninvited to a party at Daz’s house and knocks the vile Keeley to the ground, the worm seems about to turn on her oppressors (albeit without the help of telekinetic powers).  That’s as far as Iona goes but in this set-up there’s more than one despised heroine to take revenge.  Her dependence on Iona may make her daughter’s home life as claustrophobic as Carrie’s religious-maniac mother made her daughter’s but Lyn is so horribly wronged that you want her, even more than Iona, to fight back.  Lyn eventually retrieves her stepladder by force.  She lures Keeley and Stacie to her house on the pretext of wanting to reward them for being such good friends to Iona.  She calls them upstairs, awaiting them there with her head in a noose put up with the help of the stepladder, her feet encased in severe black shoes rather than the sunshine-yellow high heels.  Lyn’s last words before she hangs herself are, ‘You won’t forget this in a long time’.  That doesn’t seem an entirely safe bet.  It’s hard to forget the scene where Keeley, mucking about in a history lesson at school, is asked by the teacher what the Holocaust means and replies, ‘Is it a ride at Alton Towers?’ – another snappy but, for the writer-director, inconsequential line.

    In conversation with the BFI’s Anna Bogutskaya, Deborah Haywood describes why she wanted Joanna Scanlan to play Lyn:

    ‘I watched her do an interview … and it was the way she was listening to the person who was interviewing her, she had this kind of unpredictability behind the eyes.  I thought she was either going to go mad on that person and give them a bollocking or answer them really passionately and thoughtfully.  I couldn’t tell which way it would go, and that really excited me.’

    This describes well Scanlan’s distinctive screen presence and Haywood’s enthusiasm for working with her is understandable.  Lily Newmark is nuanced and expressive, and partners Scanlan well, but it’s the latter’s portrait of Lyn, her sustained wit and empathy with the role she’s playing, that dominates.  The integrity of her acting also has the effect, though, of emphasising Haywood’s preoccupation with making her authorial mark at the expense of her subject matter.  She’s after a fantastic, macabre fairytale quality; she gets it, with the help of Natalie Holt’s plaintive, eerie music, the ingenious colour schemes and DP Nicola Daley’s lighting.  Yet Joanna Scanlan’s painful humanity exposes as decorative what Guy Lodge in Variety calls the film’s ‘heightened, macramé-and-macaroons aesthetic’.

    No doubt budget constraints forced Haywood to restrict the number of Iona’s antagonists.  Most of her school contemporaries are remarkable not for their pack mentality but for their silent neutrality – they’re extras.   The force of the bullying theme is weakened too by the crudely shallow playing of the wicked queen Keeley and her acolyte Stacie, and the initial trio of ‘mean girls’ turns out to be only this duo.  From the start, the beautiful, soft-featured Chelsea looks incongruous beside the other two; she takes her leave before things get too nasty on the night the others cause mayhem chez Lyn and Iona.  We’re probably meant to assume that, as the lone black girl in the class, Chelsea, like Iona, was forced to ingratiate herself with Keeley and Stacie in order to protect herself.  After Lyn’s suicide, her daughter goes to live with Chelsea and her mother, and this doesn’t appear to be a new kind of imagining on Iona’s part.  The movie’s closing image is more ambiguous in this respect.  The ‘people’s psychic’ tells Lyn, who’s sitting (improbably) in the front row of his audience, that he knows she’s been through a lot and that he can see a fluffy white cat sitting on her lap.  There’s a feline-fantasy leitmotif – from Lyn’s headgear, through a scene in which she and Iona look at kittens through a pet shop window, to Lyn’s pretending first to own a cat then to be one:  Iona comes home to find her mother lapping cream from a saucer.  The last shot of Iona shows her in bed with a big white cat beside her.  Is it real or a jokey supernatural manifestation of her mother?

    As I watched Pin Cushion, I thought:  there’s no denying it’s striking but I hope the director doesn’t think she’s made a serious contribution to exposing a major social problem.  Some hope.  After the film was over and I’d jotted down a few thoughts, I read the BFI programme note, in which Haywood tells Anna Bogutskaya:

    ‘I think that’s … why people are responding to the film, because it is so true, it’s still happening.  It’s not like I’m picking a subject and making it up, it’s from real experiences and people recognise those experiences.’

    I think this is having it both ways.

    17 July 2018

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