Monthly Archives: August 2020

  • White Lie

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Yonah Lewis and Calvin Thomas (2019)

    Katie Arneson (Kacey Rohl), a dance student at college in Hamilton, Ontario, is something of a campus celebrity and heroine.  Her face is all over the place on posters promoting her crowd-funding campaign, to cover her next round of cancer treatment in Seattle.  It’s a new, expensive form of immunotherapy and there’s still a way to go to hit the $10,000 target; but a fundraiser is coming up in the next few days, and Katie is popular – liked and respected by fellow students, loved by Jennifer (Jen) Ellis (Amber Anderson), her English girlfriend.  The thing is, Katie doesn’t have cancer at all.

    As a liar, Katie is as conscientious as she’s fluent.  She shaves her head; exposes an upper arm scar – the legacy, she says, of surgery to remove her original melanoma; takes tablets that include (along with placebos) appetite suppressants.  She’s a picture of ill health.  She tells people she tires easily but that doesn’t stop her from dancing – which makes her all the more admirable.  Katie’s also in the process of applying for a $2,000 bursary to be awarded to a student with serious health issues.  Julia Stansfield (Christine Horne), one of the college staff, thinks she stands a good chance of success but the awarding body hasn’t received copies of her medical records and the application deadline is imminent.   Katie looks convincingly puzzled as she tells Julia she’s already submitted the documents – no problem, though, she’ll bring further copies to the departmental office tomorrow.  In fact, there is a problem.  The urgent need for paperwork attesting to her illness triggers accumulating complications that supply the tangled-web plot of White Lie.

    The Canadian writer-directors Yonah Lewis and Calvin Thomas (both in their mid-thirties) reveal Katie as a fraud at an early stage, inviting us to engage with a protagonist whose behaviour is indefensible.  This is a bolder undertaking than it would be in a film where the offender is a flamboyantly entertaining monster rather than, as Katie is, a credible ordinary person.  Lewis and Thomas later reveal something of her troubled adolescence.  She blames her father for her mother’s suicide, in light of which Katie faked a different kind of illness so as to delay returning to school.  Even so, this backstory hardly amounts to an explanation of her present deception, let alone an excuse for it.  We have to deal with Katie as she now is.  By avoiding emphatic censure of her, Lewis and Thomas ensure that we decide what to think of this dominant central character.

    Their focus on Katie allows Lewis and Thomas to describe, as if peripherally but to shocking effect, the corruption of medical professionals who enable her to prolong her pretence.  She regularly gets her medications from Owen (Connor Jessup), a lab worker.  She asks if he knows someone who could supply fake records and Owen puts her in touch with a young hospital doctor called Jabari Jordan (Thomas Olajide).  He obliges, reluctantly and at a price.  (Jordan’s one-off fee is exactly the value of the bursary Katie’s planning to use his forgery to obtain.)  Later in the story, when her credibility has been publicly challenged, Owen gets Katie an appointment with Dr Becker (Darrin Baker), an older practitioner.  He’s more than willing to devise a detailed programme of subterfuge for the longer term – at an even higher price.

    Successful fund-raiser she may be but Katie can’t afford the doctors’ charges without help from elsewhere.  The devoted, well-off Jen is always ready to provide the cash Katie needs and always swallows the untrue story of what she needs it for.  But the tight schedule for paying Jordan, in order to get her medical records filed with the bursary application, forces Katie to seek help from a different quarter – her estranged father, Doug (Martin Donovan).  White Lie features good naturalistic acting through the whole cast and Katie’s pivotal exchange with her father is a highlight.  Doug listens, wary but apparently sympathetic to what Katie is saying, before explaining that he and his new partner have remortgaged their home and he doesn’t have the money to help.  Still speaking quietly, he goes on to say that he wouldn’t help even if he could.  Doug, recalling what happened with her in high school, doesn’t believe his daughter.

    The structure of White Lie requires Kacey Rohl to carry the film, and she does.  Rohl  conveys especially well how lying has become second nature to Katie: the fact that she’s well aware of what she’s doing makes her actions no less compulsive, though she’s calculating too.  When Doug leaves a voicemail on Jen’s phone, Katie manages to delete it and block further calls from him on the number.  Doug then takes the more drastic step of putting a post on Katie’s crowd-funding page, announcing, ‘with a heavy heart’, what he’s sure is her deception.  Kacey Rohl is effective, too, in realising Katie’s aptitude for attack-as-the-best-means-of-defence, for making herself the injured party.  When she sees what Doug has done, she marches round to the home of her college friend Kadisha (Zahra Bentham), whose mother Colette (Sharon Lewis) is a lawyer:  Katie wants to sue her father.  Later on, she breaks off from a showdown with Jen to take a phone call from a local radio station.  They’d like to interview Katie as part of a series about people on the receiving end of social media abuse or allegations.  She accepts with alacrity.

    Jen is horrified to think she’s being deceived but when they resume their heart-to-heart after the radio station call, Katie is even more emotional than her distraught partner.  She says she’s always been fearful of losing Jen, worried that the cancer might drive Jen away.   It’s not just in this big scene that Katie, suggesting she‘s the one liable to be betrayed, exploits the idea that people not suffering from cancer can feel uneasy being close to someone who is.  You wonder if this is also an element of why Katie has been putting on an act in the first place:  her illness, as well as making her the centre of attention, allows her to keep her distance.  Both those things make her special, as does the combination of getting noticed and guarding a secret.  (Lewis and Thomas make more imaginative use of the isolating effects of cancer than the writer and directors of another recent film, Ordinary Love.)

    Does Katie have genuine feelings for Jen?   If she loves her (and feels loved by Jen), isn’t she inclined to tell Jen the truth and hope to be forgiven?  The answer to both questions could be yes; the way that answer emerges is, typically of White Lie, singularly complicated.  After Becker has outlined how they go about sustaining her seemingly life-threatening condition, Katie confounds him by asking about the possibility of a programme to work towards remission.  Is this because her life with cancer is getting just too complicated or because she sees a potentially happy future with Jen (even if she means to arrives at it via another lie)?   Colette is likewise astonished when Katie, after seeking (and getting) assurance that her feigned illness in high school isn’t something she can now be punished for, asks if that would also be the case if she was inventing illness now.  In the short exchange that follows, Katie virtually admits to shamming her cancer – before reiterating that she intends to sue Doug.  Her admission to Colette is startling not only because it’s unexpected but also because of how Katie expresses it:  this isn’t a confession of wrongdoing, just a matter of fact.  It’s also a foretaste of what will happen in the film’s remarkable closing scene.

    Katie’s tearful protestations to Jen have the desired effect.  The two go to bed reconciled;  in a taxi en route to the radio station, a few hours later, Jen is insistent that Katie mustn’t be secretive any longer about her cancer treatments:  from now on, Jen says, she wants to be with her all the way.  The absolute assurance of support appears to trigger another sudden outburst of sincerity from Katie, as she waits with Jen outside the room where her interview will take place.  Soon afterwards, she’s called in.  Jen doesn’t react dramatically to what Katie tells her.  She looks through the glass of the recording studio at her partner’s face, animated by her new feelings of security in their relationship and the prospect of going on air to execrate her father.  Jen’s face also wears an unaccustomed expression that says she now realises the truth.  When Katie inadvertently came clean to Colette, the latter gave her the card of a colleague to contact if Katie really did want to start legal proceedings.  Colette then levelly asked Katie to leave her house.  Similarly calm, Jen prepares to exit the radio station and, perhaps, Katie’s life.  The message of both sequences is that, for Katie, dishonesty was the best policy.

    I liked and admired White Lie in spite of its strongly unpleasant subject.  Lewis and Thomas have created an authentic character study rather than a case study, and cleverly use Katie’s personality to justify what would otherwise come over as implausible bits of plotting.  When you watch that early sequence in which Julia Stansfield brings up the missing medical records, you wonder how Katie could possibly have expected to avoid the issue.  As you get to know her, you accept that she would dare to hope she might.  By the same token, Jen’s endless credulity might seem hard to accept; but she is in love with Katie, and Katie is repeatedly persuasive in justifying herself to Jen.  It’s refreshing to see a new independent film from North America in which the characters aren’t defined by their sexual or ethnic identity.  Katie and Jen are lesbian, Jordan is a man of colour, as Becker is white:  their actions aren’t explained by these factors.   Yonah Lewis and Calvin Thomas have the skill and integrity not to stack the deck or preach to the converted.  They demand their audience make up its own mind.

    12 August 2020

  • The Traitor

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Il traditore

    Marco Bellocchio (2019)

    Tommaso Buscetta (1928-2000) was one of the first high-ranking members of the Sicilian Mafia to bite the Black Hand that fed him by turning informant against the organisation.  Save for a few flashbacks to earlier points in Buscetta’s life, Marco Bellocchio’s biographical drama concentrates on his last twenty years.  The Traitor starts with the protagonist’s decision to emigrate from Sicily to Brazil in 1980 – a reaction to the increasing and, in ‘Masino’ Buscetta’s view, corrupting influence on the main Palermo Mafia of a group from neighbouring Corleone.  This lengthy (153-minute) film closes with Masino’s own death from natural causes in Florida two decades later.  He lived most of that time in the US, under false identities designed to protect him from the retribution of ex-partners in crime.  His non-violent death might be considered a happy ending for Buscetta.  At one point in the story, he says that to die in his bed would be a triumph.

    The Corleonesi are an immediate reminder that Corleone was a place name first and a family name – the name of the most famous Mafia family in cinema history – second.  Like each of the Godfather films, The Traitor begins with a big social gathering.  On 4 September 1980, the feast day of Santa Rosalia, patron saint of Palermo, the Palermo and Corleone mobs hold a party to celebrate the deal they’ve struck to share the immensely lucrative local heroin trade.  Buscetta (Pierfrancesco Favino), in his white suit and open-necked dark shirt, stands out from the other senior Mafiosi in their black tie outfits.  His pessimism about the consequences of the deal – he fears the Corleone contingent will ignore the ‘code of honour’ that has governed Palermo Mafia operations – distinguishes him too.  He decides to leave Europe with his third wife, Cristina (Maria Fernanda Cândido), and his younger children.   He reckons his two eldest sons, Benedetto (Gabriele Cicirello) and Antonio (Paride Cicirello), are old enough to make up their own minds, and they stay in Sicily.  Their father trusts his longstanding Mafia colleague Pippo Calò (Fabrizio Ferracane) to take care of Benedetto and Antonio.  Masino’s pessimism is vindicated, his trust in Calò misplaced.

    The saint’s day party concludes with a group photograph.  Bellocchio follows this with a series of close-ups of several men in the photo, naming each one, before cutting to Buscetta’s life in Brazil, in 1984.  The description of his life there is interspersed with the serial execution of people shown in the earlier close-ups, culminating in Benedetto and Antonio.  The Corleone Mafia, led by Totò Riina (Nicola Calì), is responsible for these killings.  The narrative moves too quickly to explain why these individuals were murdered – in a short interview in Sight & Sound (September 2020), says that Riina’s men simply ‘eliminate whatever gets in their way’.  The screen makes quite clear, though, the numbers of killings carried out by the new power structure.  A running total appears in the bottom left-hand side of the frame:  the figure ticks quickly upwards, pausing a few moments to record the death of each of the featured party guests before resuming its swift climb.

    This is a flashily effective device and the montage of killings by the Riina gang similarly slick.  Even if Bellocchio is using these things as a sardonic comment on Mafia movie tropes, it’s hard for the viewer to see them as anything more than such standard practice.   The same goes for the episode follows Buscetta’s arrest by the Brazilian authorities, who torture him in an attempt to get information about his own and others’ crimes.  In one sequence, he’s forced to watch as his terrified wife is held outside an airborne helicopter with only her captors’ grip preventing her plummeting to earth.  The tone and tempo of The Traitor change dramatically after Buscetta’s extradition to Rome, in his interviews with the renowned anti-Mafia campaigning judge Giovanni Falcone (Fausto Russo Alesi).

    Bellocchio (who wrote the screenplay with Valia Santella, Ludovica Rampoldi, Francesco Piccolo and Francesco La Licata) would have done well to include more scenes involving Falcone, who, in his dealings with Buscetta, is unsmiling, deeply angry, businesslike and humane.  We see each man surprised to be favourably impressed by the other.  Even so, there must have been a distance travelled between the flickers of respect that Buscetta shows Falcone and the 487-page confession he made to the judge, which brought the Sicilian Mafia to its knees.  We don’t see enough of this journey.

    Instead, Bellocchio is impatient to move on to the trials, in the second half of the 1980s and the early 1990s, at which Buscetta was the star prosecution witness.  His testimony is regularly interrupted by the men he’s accusing, who yell threats and insults or resort to more drastically disruptive tactics (one strips naked, inviting the court to take a good look).  Even when these men, including Calò, have been imprisoned, they reappear at a subsequent trial, noisily joining in from inside their cages at the back of the court.  Occupying a substantial amount of screen time, the trial set pieces must have taken some staging but they’re not imaginative and some elements don’t ring true.  If it’s par for the course for defendants or convicted criminals to do their best to derail proceedings, how come the ineffectual presiding judge is apparently astonished by such bad behaviour?

    Bellocchio tends to be overemphatic.  Once Buscetta, Cristina and the younger children are settled in the US, there’s a promising opportunity to show how they can never feel safe there.  A wary exchange of looks between Masino and another man in a supermarket works well enough; a longer sequence, when the family go to an outdoor restaurant and the house musician starts singing in Sicilian to let the exile know he’s been rumbled, is more obvious (and it seems unlikely that Buscetta would choose a venue where he was so publicly on display).  When another state witness admits in court that he and Calò murdered Benedetto and Antonio, their father’s unusually emotional reaction is powerful but Bellocchio spoils the effect by showing (again – this time in more gruesome detail) how Buscetta’s sons died.

    Nicola Piovani has composed a fine score, evocative of Nino Rota’s Godfather music but sufficiently individual too.  And there are good bits in The Traitor – for example, a startling montage of celebrations in bars and jails, as news breaks of Falcone’s assassination by the Mafia.  For the most part, though, it’s less intense, incidental moments in the film that are the most engaging – like Masino’s singing ‘Historia de un amor‘ to an audience of family and friends at his birthday party,  the choice of song resonant because Bellocchio has used it earlier in a different context.  Some of the more colourful details are humorous too.  Buscetta yells at his Brazilian captors for pronouncing his name wrong (as bruschetta minus the ‘r’).  After the mayhem and torture we’ve been watching (including Cristina’s helicopter outing), the flight attendants’ safety drill demo on Buscetta’s plane back from Brazil to Rome seems laughable.  As he chats with fellow ‘traitor’ Totuccio Contorno (Luigi Lo Cascio) in their custodial sanctuary, Buscetta carefully applies black dye to disguise his greying hair.

    Giulio Andreotti (Giuseppe di Marca) makes two brief, effectively contrasting appearances.  In the first, he’s trouserless in a men’s outfitter’s.  Buscetta, in the same place at the same time, has to ask his minder if this spindly senior citizen really is Andreotti.  Their second encounter is in a courtroom, where Andreotti is on trial for alleged Mafia associations and Buscetta giving evidence against him.  The defendant still looks like a funny old man but you see his sharp brain working as he takes notes of what Buscetta is saying.

    Pierfrancesco Favino gives a good performance in the lead but, in spite of appearing in nearly every scene, isn’t given much scope to penetrate his character’s surface.  Defectors like Buscetta are known in Italy as pentiti – the ‘repented’.  Marco Bellocchio claims in S&S that his film raises questions like, ‘Can a man truly and profoundly change in the course of his life or is it just a pretence?  Is change a way of healing, of repenting?’, and more.   I couldn’t see that these questions were explored much in The Traitor.  At the start of his conversations with Falcone, Buscetta asserts there’s no such thing as the Mafia, which he dismisses as a media invention.  He says his allegiance is, rather, to Cosa Nostra.  He talks wistfully about the values that once underpinned the organisation to which he had devoted his life – looking out for needy paisans, and so on.  It’s incredible that everything went bad thanks solely to the Corleone clan around 1980.  That Buscetta and others became pentiti was self-evidently a good thing but the lack of depth to the film’s portrait of its protagonist makes it hard to avoid reacting as Falcone does, when he derides Buscetta’s hypocritical nostalgia.

    The closing scenes are among The Traitor‘s most dramatically effective.  Buscetta, who has terminal cancer, takes the night air, sitting outside his home in Florida, armed with the gun he still always carries.  In one of his interviews with Falcone he described his first assignment for the Palermo Mafia.  Buscetta was charged with killing a man who was attending the christening of his baby son.  Outside the church, when he catches sight of Buscetta (in his twenties, played by Giovanni Crozza), the man thinks and acts quickly.  He takes his son from his wife and holds him close.  The code of conduct to which Buscetta subscribes prevents him from firing while the prospective victim is holding his child.  Buscetta tells Falcone that the man continued to use his son as a bodyguard throughout the years ahead, taking care never to be seen in public without the boy.  Easier said than done, you feel, but never mind.  This is much as we see him reveal to Falcone but the killing is clearly a piece of unfinished business not just for Buscetta but for Bellocchio too.

    As Buscetta starts to doze in his chair on the Florida porch, his mind returns to the wedding day of the marked man’s son; when the groom left with his bride, he also left his father exposed.   Cristina Buscetta comes out onto the porch to check on her husband, who’s now unconscious.  She quietly removes the rifle from his grasp:  he won’t need it any more.  The last thing in Buscetta’s mind before he dies is the memory of killing the man at long last deprived of his filial shield.

    10 August 2020

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