Old Yorker

  • The Beasts

    Old YorkerFilm review

    As bestas

    Rodrigo Sorogoyen (2022)

    In the remote Galician village they’ve made their home, Antoine (Denis Ménochet) and Olga (Marina Foïs) are newcomers and, as far as some of their neighbours are concerned, unwelcome intruders.  This middle-aged, middle-class French couple moved to northwest Spain a few years ago to live and work closer to nature, growing and selling their own organic produce, as well as investing in the renovation of abandoned properties in the locality.  Despite their green credentials, it’s their opposition to a renewable energy initiative that has sharpened the hostility of the Anta family – the brothers Xan (Luis Zahera) and Lorenzo (Diego Anido), and their widowed mother (Luisa Mereles).  A Norwegian company wants to buy and develop the area as a wind farm; the Antas, who’ve lived for generations in the village, are keen to sell and get funds enough to move elsewhere.  Antoine and Olga are in a tiny minority in refusing to sign up to the project but their opposition has been enough to prevent its going ahead.

    In response, the Anta brothers make a threatening nuisance of themselves – giving Antoine and Olga the evil eye at every opportunity, trespassing on their property, putting lead in the farm’s well to ruin the tomato harvest.  Antoine reports their behaviour to the Guardia Civil, who merely advise him to talk the problems through with Xan, the elder brother.  Antoine, knowing that won’t work, starts secretly recording what the brothers say and do – which only increases Xan’s fury when he finds out.  Out in their car one night, Antoine and Olga find the road blocked by the Antas’ vehicle.  Xan and Lorenzo get out, brandishing a shotgun; they approach the car and bang on the driver’s window until Antoine winds it down.  He and Olga get home in one piece but she’s now fearful for their safety.  She thinks the Antas would have killed her husband if she’d not been there.

    Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s drama – a commercial and critical hit in Spain, where it recently won no less than nine Goya awards – is always grim but otherwise a film of two halves.  I spent most of the first half thinking:  why is it taking so long?  There were no subplots.  It was obvious where things were heading.  I was wrong about that, though, and the second half of The Beasts proved absorbing – partly because it was unexpected, partly because it was mystifying.  I’d been waiting for the story to develop into an Iberian version of Straw Dogs (1971) – to see Antoine, a teacher before he and his wife changed their lifestyle and country, forced by the barbarism of others into showing his own dark, brutal side in order to survive.  Unlike Dustin Hoffman’s professor in the Sam Peckinpah film, Denis Ménochet’s Antoine looks as if he can take care of himself.  Also unlike the Hoffman character, it turns out he can’t.  The startling removal from The Beasts of its main character and best-known actor (outside Spain anyway) suddenly gives it an unforeseen kinship with Psycho (1960) rather than Straw Dogs.

    On the subject of dogs, there’s a minor, more pleasant surprise.  Antoine’s constant companion, along with his wife, is Titan, their German Shepherd.  In films whose protagonist is on the receiving end of a gradually encroaching campaign of menace, it’s standard practice for the tormentors to break down resistance by killing a much-loved animal belonging to their human prey.  When Antoine and Titan are walking through woodland, and the Anta brothers whistle the dog away from his owner and towards them, you don’t expect to see Titan again other than as a corpse.  The only kind of happy ending in this film is that Titan, in the last scenes of The Beasts, is still going strong.  An opening sequence involving a different species anticipates Antoine’s fate.  Text on screen about cutting wild horses’ manes and electronically tagging the animals introduces visual confirmation of the procedure:  two men are needed to put one horse into a headlock and do the necessary.  When Antoine is accosted in the wood by Xan and Lorenzo, a two-against-one struggle follows and Antoine is smothered to death.

    If the shock of the murder is disorienting, its aftermath is bewildering.  The crime takes place in broad daylight.  Sorogoyen then cuts to Olga, in bed alone, presumably that night.  She registers that Antoine hasn’t returned but without evident alarm.  When she discovers Titan is where he should be, without his master, she appears to assume the worst and to be silently resigned to it.  She embarks on a painstaking, apparently solo search for her husband’s body in the woods, which stretch over a huge area.  She marks off on a map each section that she completes.  There’s a scene where Olga discusses a particular part of the woodland with the Guardia Civil, whose officers seem hardly more engaged than when Antoine first reported the Antas to them, except that the officers tell Olga, ‘that area was combed last year’.  The passage of time since Antoine’s disappearance is as hard to get a handle on as Olga’s grave acceptance of his fate.  She becomes emotional only in an extended verbal set-to with her daughter, Marie (Marie Colomb), who travels from her home in France, where she has a young child, to stay with her mother for some time.  Olga raises her voice in this exchange only in response to Marie’s furious exasperation with her insistence on staying in Galicia in spite of what’s happened and Marie’s fears of what might yet happen.

    The mother-daughter showdown is one of only three scenes in The Beasts where words come thick and fast:  another is a dialogue between Antoine and Xan in the village pub, when ‘Frenchy’, as Xan calls him, insists on buying his adversary a drink and discussing the bones of contention between them.  Antoine says that if a further vote on the developers’ deal results in his being its only opponent, he and Olga will leave the village – but not until they’ve recouped their losses resulting from the destruction of the latest harvest.  Xan derides Antoine’s offer (any further delay, he says, will mean the energy company finds a different site for development) before giving voice to the Antas’ various resentments.  He rails against his family’s lot and at the privileged, entitled position of Antoine and Olga.  He complains that his younger brother, left brain-damaged by an accident some years ago, was once a handsome lad but that, even before the accident, girls never liked Lorenzo, or Xan himself, because ‘we stank’.  This viewer wasn’t sure why personal hygiene was more of a challenge for the Anta brothers than for other villagers leading a hardscrabble existence though you can’t blame Antoine for opting not to raise the question.  But the argument in the pub, especially in retrospect, raises a larger issue about The Beasts.

    From the start, the animus towards the newcomers is economically focused – more definitely than in Straw Dogs or John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), which The Beasts also occasionally brings to mind:  this receives its fullest expression in Xan’s litany of complaints.  It’s not surprising that plenty of reviewers assume that Sorogoyen and his co-writer Isabel Peña are commenting on the continuing rise in western democracies of bitter xenophobia among the financially dispossessed.  (The screenplay is inspired by a real-life homicide, in the Galician village of Santoalla, that took place in 2010 and was the subject of a feature-length documentary, Santoalla, by Andrew Becker and Daniel Mehrer, released in 2016.)  This doesn’t fit, though, with other aspects of the drama.   It seems most of the community are in the same financial boat as the Antas and share their enthusiasm for selling the land but the other villagers aren’t comparably hostile towards Antoine and Olga, which makes it harder to see Xan, Lorenzo and their mother as representative.  The only other character with plenty to say about the wind farm proposals is Rafael (Machi Salgado).  His father, who has recently died and left his property to Rafael, was one of the few others standing out against the development proposals.  His son holds a different view and tries to persuade Antoine and Olga to change their mind.  The film’s third talky scene consists of a virtual monologue from Rafael, whose motives for selling aren’t the same as the locals’.  He owns a dry-cleaning chain:  he wants a quick financial return on his inheritance because he already has a successful business to run.

    Once Antoine is gone, there’s no further mention of the wind farm (it seems Xan was right when he insisted the developers would simply look elsewhere) and Olga takes over as the main character.  She runs the farm alone, with some help from Pepiño (José Manuel Fernández y Blanco), an untypically pleasant local.  Some reviews of The Beasts suggest that this too has a larger meaning – that the noisy male antagonism that dominates the film’s first half gives way to quiet female stoicism and getting on with things in the second.  A short conversation between Olga and Madre Anta near the end of the film might seem to bear this out:  her husband’s body is yet to be found but Olga calmly tells the Anta matriarch that only the two of them will be left once the old woman’s sons have gone to prison for Antoine’s murder.  But if this remark has symbolic import it doesn’t make much realistic sense:  the other local women (rarely seen) aren’t being left by their menfolk to fend for themselves.  And Marie, a more prominent character than Madre Anta in the second half of The Beasts, is far from quietly stoical – even if she does eventually return to France accepting that her mother will stay put.

    Although the film is labelled a thriller on both Wikipedia and IMDb, it’s remarkable for not making use of smoking guns.  Anticipating the Antas’ attack in the woods, Antoine sets his camera to record what happens there; Olga, on her tireless search for her husband, in due course discovers the camera but it turns out the memory card is irreparably corrupted.  The film ends with Olga, after being informed by Pepiño that a body has been discovered, on her way to identify it.  On the way, the car she’s in passes Madre Anta, walking alone, and Olga’s face betrays a faint gleam of vindication.  Marina Foïs plays her with impressive consistency and concentration but Rodrigo Sorogoyen has set his lead actress a difficult task:  Olga remains hard to fathom.  Her opacity chimes with DP Alex de Pablo’s ingenious lighting of The Beasts.  The look of the Galician landscape, even under blue skies, is stubbornly sombre.

    29 March 2023

  • The Inspection

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Elegance Bratton (2022)

    The Inspection announces itself as ‘inspired by true events’; those events are from the life of its writer-director, whose first dramatic cinema feature this is.  Elegance Bratton was born in New Jersey in 1979.  At the age of sixteen, he came out as gay and was kicked out of home.  He drifted for a decade before joining the US Marines:  after basic training, he transferred in 2005 to the Marine Corps’ Combat Camera Unit, which trained him in film-making and photography.  (He left the Marines to study at Columbia.  He has since made several shorts, a TV series and a documentary feature.)  At the start of The Inspection, Ellis French (Jeremy Pope) gets out of bed in a homeless shelter in Trenton, New Jersey and visits his estranged mother – to get the birth certificate he needs to enlist in the Marines.  Most of the remaining action takes place at boot camp on Parris Island, South Carolina.  The film ends in 2005, when Ellis successfully completes his training and meets again with his mother, Inez (Gabrielle Union).  Knowing in advance that the protagonist is Bratton’s alter ego makes the boot camp scenes a bit less hard to stomach:  we can rest assured that Ellis will survive the physical and verbal abuse to which he’s subjected, much of it homophobic, and come through.  It’s the persisting central importance in the story of Inez – and our presupposition that she’s based on Bratton’s own mother, to whom The Inspection is dedicated, in the closing credits – that proves more of a problem.

    Although they don’t get easier to watch, the rigours and ritual humiliations of military training – especially the victimisation of recruits the drill instructor and other thugs take against – are familiar enough on the cinema screen.  Black and gay, Ellis is a potentially distinctive victim on the grounds of ethnicity and sexuality but only the latter really counts.  The bellowing drill sergeant, Laws (Bokeem Woodbine), is himself African-American:  his cultural prejudice, at the height of the War on Terror, is directed chiefly at Ismail (Eman Esfandi), the one Muslim in the small training unit.  Ellis’s gayness – in what was also the era of the US military’s ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ (DADT) policy – is another matter.  The rote questions barked out at the new arrivals include ‘Are you now or have you ever been a homosexual?’ and Ellis yells back no, though it’s plain to see Laws doesn’t believe the answer.  In the showers, Ellis has an erection and is beaten up by others in the unit.  I didn’t understand a short sequence that Bratton inserts just before this mayhem kicks off:  Ellis appears to imagine the other recruits undressed, in a different location, giving him the come-on.  Generating a sexual fantasy while they’re actually naked in the showers together seems a bad moment for Ellis to choose – why would he need to anyway, in order to be aroused?  But from this point on, Ellis is a marked and bullied man.

    Autobiographical it may be but The Inspection often seems the work of a seasoned moviegoer rather than of someone who suffered the particular treatment meted out to Ellis French.  For example, Laws and the other drill sergeant, Rosario (Raúl Castillo), are a well-tried chalk-and-cheese double act (their forerunners in military cinema include the cynical and idealistic sergeants, played by Tom Berenger and Willem Dafoe respectively, in Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986)).  From the start, in contrast to the unyielding Laws, Rosario keeps a benignly watchful, if not always an effectively protective, eye on Ellis.  The young man’s worried his mother hasn’t replied to his letters; he begs to borrow Rosario’s phone to call her at work to check she’s OK, and Rosario uneasily agrees.  The sergeant proves he has his own personal problems and is emotionally vulnerable in a phone call to his wife that Ellis happens to overhear.  Each of these episodes has a standard-issue feel.  The only exchange between them that doesn’t, comes late on when Ellis sees Rosario showering alone, approaches him, and the sergeant anxiously warns him off.   Again, I didn’t get why Ellis seemed to be asking for trouble (and so near to graduation into the Marine Corps).  Even if Bratton is advancing the legitimate argument that DADT was essentially homophobic and unjustly prevented gay members of the military from expressing themselves, his means of illustrating the point are puzzling.

    Things improve for Ellis in the home straight of his training.  Harvey (McCaul Lombardi), the nastiest of his fellow trainees, is exposed for what he is.  During target practice, Harvey (forename Laurence!) falsely claims that Ellis has scored much lower than he really has.  There may be other homophobes in the unit but the rest of them seem to recognise the need for fair play.  In the ‘Crucible’ exercise that culminates their training, the Marines-to-be have to paint their faces.  Seeing Ellis, Laws exclaims, ‘What the entire fuck, French!  How did you manage to fag up something as simple as war paint?’  To which Ellis loudly replies, ‘Sir!  This recruit does not know how to not piss you off, sir!’   This is a genuinely funny exchange (it got a well-deserved laugh in the BFI Flare Festival audience) but it’s also the standout instance of The Inspection’s presenting military homophobia as somehow more innocuous once Ellis has got to grips with it.

    Scaling down the abuse he receives in boot camp is also designed to foreground Inez French’s enduring inability to accept her son’s sexuality.  At the start, when Ellis tells his mother he’s enlisting in the Marines, she laughs derisively; handing over his birth certificate, she tells Ellis that, unless he reverts to being ‘the son I gave birth to’, he should ‘consider this certificate void’.  A devout Christian, who works as a prison officer, Inez doesn’t expect Ellis to complete the training; when, thanks to Rosario, he makes phone contact, her immediate reaction to hearing his voice is ‘They’ve thrown you out’.  (Given her attitude, let alone their longstanding estrangement, it’s hard to see why Ellis is surprised that Inez hasn’t been answering his letters.)  She turns up at the passing-out ceremony, sees Ellis in the line-up and weeps with joy.  He treats her to lunch in the restaurant where other new Marines celebrate with their families; she disparages the food but enthuses about her son now having his pick of the girls who, Inez says, will be queuing up for him.  Frustrated but determinedly pleasant, Ellis replies that boot camp hasn’t turned him straight.  Inez instantly flies into a rage so vociferous that Laws intervenes:  in the brief dialogue that follows, the hard-bitten drill sergeant is a spokesman for liberal-minded moderation compared with the mother.  She and Ellis have a further showdown, in a somewhat more private area of the restaurant; she reminds him she gave birth to him when she was sixteen and unmarried, and could easily have abandoned him as a baby.  Ellis tells his mother he’ll never give up on her but they part on bad terms, as far as she’s concerned.

    Jeremy Pope had a small role in Regina King’s One Night in Miami (2020) and appeared in the TV series Hollywood and Pose but is best known to date for his work on stage.  He’s a compelling screen presence, however:  as Ellis, he creates a real force field, without recourse to histrionics.  Pope is especially good at limning the character’s self-control.  He’s by far the best thing in The Inspection though he doesn’t fully conceal its weaknesses.  It’s a relief to watch knowing things will work out all right for Ellis/Elegance yet this also has the effect – in conjunction with the rites-of-passage mechanics of the piece – of neutralising Bratton’s portrait of what Laws describes to a fellow officer as the business of making ‘monsters’.  Perhaps because he already knows the answer himself, the writer-director doesn’t bother to explain why joining the Marines is Ellis’s only escape route from living as a down-and-out.  (He has friends:  we see him saying goodbye to them before he visits his mother at the start but they’re never seen or spoken of again.)  And just about everything to do with Inez feels overdone, including Gabrielle Union’s playing of her.  Justifying himself in his mother’s eyes drives Ellis and seems to be what drove Elegance Bratton to make The Inspection.  His own mother died shortly before it went into production, which may well have intensified Bratton’s need to do this.  But he’s either unwilling or unable to dramatise, other than very crudely, Ellis French’s awareness that his mission to do well by his mother is doomed to failure.

    26 March 2023

Posts navigation