Monthly Archives: March 2020

  • Little Joe

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jessica Hausner (2019)

    The title character is both a laboratory-created plant and the boy that it’s named for.   The protagonist is Alice (Emily Beecham), best described as a breeder.  She’s the mother of young teenager Joe (Kit Connor) and she leads the scientific team that develops his namesake.   Jessica Hausner (Lourdes, Amour Fou), who wrote the screenplay for Little Joe with Géraldine Bajard, dramatises the disturbance wrought in Alice’s life through the interaction of her two main roles.  Her supposedly beneficent lab creation has various maleficent effects.  Her son, accidentally pollinated by one of the plants, which his mother smuggles out of her workplace and brings home, begins to show an unfamiliar hostility towards Alice.

    Little Joe requires more care than the average house plant.  Its USP is a scent that makes its owner ‘happy’.  As evidence emerges that all exposed to its pollen are behaving strangely, and Alice is fearfully convinced that the plant has mutated into a pathogenic virus, the lab head Karl (David Wilmot) insists that it does make people happy ‘but not in the way we intended’.  It’s hard to know what he means because Hausner hasn’t made clear what was intended or what ‘happy’, in this context, means.  Is the plant’s scent the equivalent of a happy pill, an anti-depressant?  Or does it induce a deeper feeling of wellbeing?   In his Observer review, Mark Kermode writes that ‘Little Joe’s mood-lifting smell triggers the production of oxytocin – “the mother hormone” that will make you “love this plant like your own child”’.  This is relevant to the central character – the film might equally have been called ‘Alice’s Choice’ – but how exactly does it apply to her son?  Whatever Little Joe’s feel-good properties may be they’re all the more remarkable in view of the plant’s unprepossessing appearance.  The hot-looking, ugly red blooms do anything but raise the viewer’s spirits.

    Emily Beecham’s Alice, much prettier than her creation, is also a redhead:  her hair is the only colourful thing about her.  Alice has a pale complexion that goes with her etiolated wardrobe.  You barely notice the difference when she removes her lab coat (the usual white modified to a sickly shade of eau de nil).  Her blouses, trousers and tracksuits are off-white, the palest pink or beige – drained of warmth.  Her usual level of reaction makes Alice seem remote, even robotic.  Apparently a caricature of scientific dispassion, she nevertheless has regular sessions with a psychotherapist (Lindsay Duncan).  These interviews serve mainly to emphasise the patient’s unnatural pallor.  The therapist, ensconced in an armchair covered in richly-patterned material, dresses in bold floral prints.  She poses several questions to Alice in the course of the film but you really want her to ask, ‘Why do you wear such weird clothes?’

    You don’t expect a screen sci-fi lab creation to turn out well or a present-day arthouse film to be a cheerleader for consumer-oriented genetic engineering.  Little Joe runs true to form in both respects but Jessica Hausner grafts onto them a gender politics parable.  As well as Alice and her eerily composed therapist, there are two other noteworthy female characters.  The sole purpose of Joe’s sort-of girlfriend Selma (Jessie Mae Alonzo) is to add to Alice’s disconcertment.  The girl has an oriental look and the inscrutability that’s gone with that since the days of silent movies.  (The sometimes matching music by the Japanese Teijo Ito also includes big percussive sounds and a cacophony of animal noises.)  While Selma is forgotten about in the closing stages, Alice’s colleague-cum-rival Bella (Kerry Fox) is a persistently more significant figure.  She used to be the lab’s star plant-breeder but her career has been interrupted by mental illness.  Bella has recently returned to work but her abortive attempts to cultivate a plant that can survive weeks of neglect are upstaged by Alice’s development of Little Joe.

    Believe it or not, Bella is routinely accompanied to the lab by her dog (named Bello).  He goes missing one day and, when he turns up, his nature has changed for the worse.  After having him euthanised, Bella tells Alice the dog must have been affected by whatever Little Joe is emitting.  Bella’s behaviour from this point onwards is erratic, though consistent in supplying a twist to the plot.  Exposed to the plant’s pollen herself, she announces that her earlier suspicion of Little Joe was no more than an expression of her paranoid tendencies:  she says she’s fine now.  Not long afterwards, she denies having inhaled pollen and announces to her colleagues, in the staff canteen, that she only pretended to be fine – in order to blend in with them.  Bella rushes from the canteen in great distress.  The ensuing confrontation with Karl and Alice’s assistant Chris (Ben Whishaw) ends with Bella’s attempting suicide.  This, at least, is what is reported as happening – it isn’t shown on screen.

    Bella doesn’t reappear but Hausner compares and contrasts her fate with the heroine’s.  Alice resolves to destroy the Little Joes by reducing the lab temperature.  Chris forcibly prevents her, knocking Alice to the ground and exposing her to the plant’s pollen.  By the time Little Joe is nominated for a prestigious award that offers the prospect of international commercial success, Alice has abandoned her plans to rid the world of it – plans she now ascribes to her own paranoia.  Early in the film, Alice and Chris went out for a drink; he tried to kiss her but she resisted.  When Chris apologises for hitting her, Alice kisses him.  Joe’s rebellion against his mother includes wanting to go and live with his estranged father.  Alice is, for her, upset by this but, once she’s breathed in Little Joe, concedes the issue.  She drives her son out to the rural home of his father Ivan (Sebastian Hülk), to start a new life there.  Alice will be content with the botanical rather than the human Joe.  Whereas Bella eventually refuses to fit in, Alice accedes to the wishes of the men and the boy in her life who are determined to get their own way.  Her initial sterilisation of the plants causes them to pollinate more aggressively.  Exposure to Little Joe’s pollen seems to mean inhaling the infection of male hegemony.

    Jessica Hausner’s style is as clinical as her main character’s appearance and register.  The action takes place in a real world yet the street where Alice and Joe live, let alone the interior of their home, seems just as hermetically sealed as the strictly controlled environment of the laboratory and its greenhouse.  (The film was shot in Liverpool and various locations in Hausner’s native Austria.)  The plotting is correspondingly and artificially restricted.  On the search for Bello, Chris is startled by the dog.  During an argument at home, Joe hits his mother and sends her sprawling.  A junior member of the lab team (Phénix Brossard) locks Bella in the greenhouse and she has to clamber out.  These things happen – for immediate impact or to move the story along or, in the case of the domestic, to foreshadow Chris’s striking Alice later on – but leave no residue in terms of what the characters say or do subsequently.  Hausner and her DP Martin Gschlacht repeatedly use a camera movement whereby two people on opposite sides of the frame are gradually excluded from it until the screen shows only the space between them.  Hausner probably intends this to convey something important.  The prevailing artfulness of Little Joe makes it hard to see in it anything more than her conspicuous technique.

    I didn’t see Emily Beecham’s widely praised performance in Daphne (2017).  She’s very accomplished here but you can’t help thinking it wasn’t the strongest field of female leads at Cannes last year for Beecham to land the Best Actress prize for Little Joe.  She sometimes seems like a less animated Nicole Kidman (that’s not counting the zombified Kidman of Destroyer).   Beecham is well supported by Kerry Fox, Kit Connor and Ben Whishaw, whose natural empathy and truthfulness give Chris a bit of ambiguity that the film badly needs.  David Wilmot’s Karl wears jokey T-shirts but they don’t really work as an amusing counterpoint to his senior role in the lab.  Wilmot’s bug-eyed look immediately suggests a mad scientist rather than an anorak.  The suggestion of zaniness is wholly redundant.

    27 February 2020

  • End of the Century

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Fin de siglo

    Lucio Castro (2019)

    A man who looks to be in his late thirties arrives in Barcelona.  He goes to the Airbnb apartment he’s renting there.  He seems sad as he opens the fridge in the apartment kitchen, which contains just a few basic supplies, and, later that day, as he eats and drinks alone at an outdoor café.  Looking down from the apartment balcony on his first night in Barcelona, he notices another man, roughly the same age as him, walking in the courtyard; when he goes to an otherwise deserted beach the following morning, he sees the man again.  Both swim in the sea, though without speaking to each other.  Back in the apartment, the tourist returns to his balcony, catches sight of the other man a third time, and now calls out ‘Kiss’.  This is the word emblazoned on the latter’s T-shirt and the first word spoken in End of the Century, about fifteen minutes into the film (which runs only eighty-four minutes all told).  Not long afterwards, the two men are having sex together.  Chatting over drinks that evening, the visitor to Barcelona admits to a strange feeling he’s met his companion before.   The other man has a simple explanation:  they were briefly lovers, in the same city, twenty years ago.

    That was at the end of the twentieth century – a time when, as revealed in flashbacks to the first affair, neither Ocho (Juan Barberini) nor Javi (Ramon Pujol) was comfortable with his sexuality.  They got to know each other through a mutual friend, Sonia (Mía Maestro).  Ocho, an Argentine on a backpacking holiday in Europe, was spending a few days at Sonia’s apartment; Javi was her boyfriend.   In the intervening decades, Ocho has become a poet and set up home in New York.  He’s had a longstanding relationship with another man, which has just ended, at least for the time being.  Although a Barcelona native, Javi is also now a visitor in the city.  He has a husband and daughter in Berlin, where he works in children’s television, and is back in Spain to see his parents.  His marriage, as he tells Ocho, is an open one.  The flashbacks reveal other major changes in the protagonists’ lives and attitudes, beyond coming out as gay, since their first meeting.  In those days, Ocho, who grew up as an only child, was eager to have a family.  Javi was an aspiring film-maker, planning a documentary about the dawn of the new millennium.  He was also sure that he didn’t want to be a father.

    Once the Argentine writer-director Lucio Castro, whose debut feature this is, has described the two men’s first liaison, Ocho’s failure instantly to recognise Javi becomes hard to credit.  (The look on Javi’s face after the encounter on the beach suggests that he does immediately recognise Ocho.)  One’s natural reaction is to feel that these intense early interactions, which took place at a time when both men were at least partly in denial of their sexual orientation, would be powerfully memorable.  There’s a further confusing element:  other than Javi’s different haircuts in the two parts of the story, his and Ocho’s appearance is virtually unchanged in the course of twenty years.  They look considerably older than the late teenagers/early twentysomethings they’re meant to be in 1999.  In the present-day story, the relationship between Ocho and Javi is again short-lived.  Javi is clear that his extra-marital affairs can go only so far.  He’s also firmly committed to his young daughter.  At the end of the film, Ocho is alone again in the Airbnb apartment.  Meanwhile, though, Castro has inserted sequences through which the mystery of the plot thickens.  In these scenes, not only are Ocho and Javi living together in what appears to be a settled relationship; they also have a child.

    The surface narrative of End of the Century may be increasingly puzzling but this adds substance to Castro’s main theme – a theme that T S Eliot-oriented viewers (like me) might think of as ‘What might have been and what has been/Point to one end, which is always present’.  Except for Ocho’s remark, in one of the couple’s last conversations, that ‘I hardly remember anything’, the script doesn’t allude explicitly to the uncertainty of memory – but it gradually infuses End of the Century, along with a strong sense of the synergy between memory and longing.  After he has watched, from his balcony, Javi walk away for the last time, Ocho returns to the kitchen and opens the fridge.  Its contents are just as they were when he first arrived there.  Castro seems to suggest in this moment that it’s possible everything we’ve seen in the meantime – or at least since Ocho first caught sight of the young man in the ‘Kiss’ shirt – was what might have been, taking place only inside the solitary tourist’s head.

    Seen in this context, the unchanging age of the actors makes fine expressive sense.  When Pedro Almodóvar was working on his adaptation of a trio of Alice Munro short stories, comprising a continuous narrative that covered a period of forty years, he at first planned to shoot the film in North America and cast Meryl Streep, and Meryl Streep only, as the heroine Juliet.  He didn’t (as I understand it) intend to try to make Streep look the ‘right’ age throughout.  None of this came to fruition, chiefly because Almodóvar was uncomfortable about writing and directing in English; the eventual result, Julieta (2016), had two main actresses, playing younger and older versions of the title character.  What Lucio Castro does in End of the Century is essentially akin to what Almodóvar first thought of doing.  By having the same actors, in their late thirties, play the main characters as forty-year-olds and twenty-year-olds, Castro reinforces the inaccessibility – except through memory – of the characters’ younger selves to the people they’ve aged into.  To quote Burnt Norton again, ‘all is always now’.

    I was taken with this film from the start.   When Ocho first enters the Airbnb apartment, the sound of the front door closing behind him isn’t loud but is resonant:  it’s the sound of arrival in strange surroundings when you’re on your own, when the noises of a new place register sharply, unmodified by the sound of other human voices.   The sequences on the beach and in the sea seem to show Ocho, perhaps Javi too, engaging in a beguiling courtship ritual.  The first sexual intercourse between the pair is graphic and extended.  In the sense that it doesn’t convey much about each man’s personality, the sex here is arguably protracted and voyeuristic – even though its initial impact is strong, thanks to Ocho’s solitariness in the preceding scenes.  Elsewhere, Juan Barberini and Ramon Pujol build characterisations that are eloquent and individual.  These physically contrasting actors are consistently excellent.

    As Sonia, Mía Maestro, a well-known singer-songwriter in Argentina, has a beautiful and distinctive voice.  Other than Sonia’s singing and the background Hi-NRG music that paves the way for Ocho and Javi’s first bonk in 1999, the soundtrack is sans score until the shots of an unpeopled Barcelona that end the film.  (These are accompanied by original music from Robert Lombardom which also plays during the closing credits.)  When he talks to Ocho about the documentary he’s going to make, Javi describes his fear of the impending millennium.  Among its several virtues, Lucio Castro’s film is a skilful, supple illustration of how it’s become easier to live an openly gay life in the course of the two decades since.  It’s not Castro’s fault that, in plenty of other respects, the world in the year 2000 is beginning to feel like paradise lost.

    27 February 2020

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