Film review

  • The Last Tree

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Shola Amoo (2019)

    Another film missed on its release last year that I was keen to catch up with (on Amazon Prime Video via BFI Player) …

    The Last Tree, Shola Amoo’s second feature, has received plenty of critical praise (and has won prizes).  Both the praise and the terms of its expression are unsurprising, thanks to the subject matter and the film’s prevailing style.  The protagonist of this coming-of-age tale is Femi, a young black Briton of Nigerian descent.  Raised by a white foster mother in rural Lincolnshire, he’s reclaimed by his birth mother and moves with her to inner-city London, where he struggles to come to terms with his new environment.  (The piece is semi-autobiographical.  Shola Amoo is now in his thirties so the action is set shortly after the turn of the century.)  Femi is played at different ages by different actors:  that and his ethnicity are enough for a Guardian piece to introduce Amoo as ‘the man behind the British Moonlight’, although Femi’s challenges don’t include being gay.  The Last Tree opens with eleven-year-old Femi and his (white) Lincolnshire friends playing in idyllic countryside:  the sequence is filmed in slow motion, accompanied by the swelling chords of Segun Akinola’s score.  This combination of elements – childhood games in sunlit meadows, slo-mo, consecrative music – tends to get described as ‘lyrical’ and Sight & Sound doesn’t disappoint.  Kate Stables’s review of Amoo’s film on the BFI website is headlined ‘a lyrical story of British identity pains’.

    The overused adjective is actually fair enough, to the extent that The Last Tree operates, and is effective, on a predominantly visual and purely emotive level.  Writer-director Amoo tells his story chiefly through the faces of the two young actors playing Femi, both of them highly expressive.  Tai Golding is the pre-adolescent boy and Sam Adewunmi the sixteen-plus version.  The countryside locale of the early scenes is obviously designed to maximise the contrast with the later London ones.  Using a ‘”monochromatic” small town’ – Amoo’s description, in the Guardian interview with Danny Leigh, of where he spent his own early years in foster care – wouldn’t have had the same paradise lost effect.  For a time, the narrative’s lack of context raises questions in your mind.  His birth mother Yinka (Gbemisola Ikumelo) pays a rare visit to Lincolnshire and tells Femi’s foster carer Mary (Denise Black) she wants to take her son back.  You wonder:  is it really as simple as that, even if the fostering is done through a private agency rather than social services?   (There’s never a mention of either.)   Five or so years later in London, Femi is being groomed by Mace (Demmy Ladipo), a local gangster.  It’s not evident why Femi is especially liable to this kind of exploitation – far more so, it seems, than his black school contemporaries[1].

    After a while, you realise you’re not going to get this kind of clarification.  It simply doesn’t matter to Shola Amoo, who’s after dramatising the highlights of Femi’s rites of passage to the exclusion of virtually everything and everyone else.  The dialogue is sometimes sharp, as when Yinka yells at her son, ‘I didn’t raise you to behave like this!’, and he calmly replies, ‘You didn’t raise me’.  More often, the script is omissive.  After surviving one of his crises, Femi makes a brief visit to Mary’s home, where he meets the young black boy she’s currently fostering.  (It’s not clear if this is Femi’s first trip back to Lincolnshire since he left it as an eleven-year-old.)   Talking of those she’s cared for over the years, Mary says to Femi, ‘In a way, you’re all my boys’.  He replies, ‘We’re not, though’.  In real life, Mary might well come back with, ‘I said “in a way”…’ and explain more of what she means.  In the film, Femi’s rejoinder strikes her dumb, as if the racial implications of her fostering hadn’t occurred to Mary before – even though the visual evidence suggests she always looks after black kids, despite living in a nearly mono-racial white community.

    By the time The Last Tree had reached its third and final ‘act’, I was rather grateful for Amoo’s never-mind-the-cogency-feel-the-moment approach.  As a piece of dramatic construction, the film is weak and clichéd – in, for example, the juxtaposition of Mace and Femi’s schoolteacher, Mr Williams (Nicholas Pinnock).  Well groomed and well spoken, Williams insists that he can help Femi pass his exams; he also says that he was brought up on the estate where Femi now lives with Yinka.  The teacher and the professional criminal are local black boys made good and bad respectively:  Femi must choose which of their paths to follow.   In a climactic confrontation with Williams, Femi loses his temper and lashes out; after a struggle, he breaks down and sobs in his teacher’s arms.  What happens subsequently – whether Femi passes the exams, and so on – isn’t made clear.   His comforting embrace of Femi is the last we see of Williams.  Since he’s too good to be true, this is no great loss.

    Another plot strand concerns Femi’s relationship with Tope (Ruthxjiah Bellenea), a girl at his school.  With her remarkably dark skin and blue braids, Tope is ridiculed by Femi’s male pals.  The point is to show Femi initially constrained by, then overcoming, peer pressure:  he takes the other boys to task, and grows closer to Tope.  This too is left in mid-air – more of a pity than it is with the Mr Williams subplot:  the unusually beautiful Ruthxjiah Bellenea is a supple emotional presence and there’s a connection between her and Sam Adewunmi.  Even so, it’s hard to feel that, if he had pursued the Tope strand, Amoo would have been interested enough to give it substance or originality.

    The finale sees Femi and Yinka in Lagos, paying a call on Femi’s biological father.   We don’t know how much time has passed since Femi (presumably) chose the right path; whether he or his mother was the prime mover in going to Nigeria; or how long they’re planning to stay there.  We do know the journey to Africa is the remaining necessary stage in Femi’s exploration of his identity.  The scene in which he goes to see his father, at the latter’s palatial home, is, as a cultural insight, the most arresting and amusing in the whole film.  The literally gilded vestibule where Femi waits is bigger than the entire area of his mother’s flat in London.  Femi keeps settling back into the sofa’s plush upholstery.  He gets up to look at an elephant tusk on display nearby.  A maid comes in.  She tenaciously tries but fails to interest Femi (‘sir’) in various things to eat or drink.  Ushered in to meet his father, a pastor (!), Femi also makes the acquaintance of half-siblings he didn’t know he had.

    Femi doesn’t react much to all this.  All that counts from the encounter with his father is that it makes him sympathise with, and appreciate as never before, his birth mother, with whom he’s had a mostly combative relationship.  Out on the streets of Lagos, he’s relaxed and smiling as he has a kickabout with some young local kids – making clear he’s really come home.  The closing sequence is Femi on a Lagos beach:  the seashore setting might seem to connect with The 400 Blows (and its numerous descendants) but proves to be a means of tying Amoo’s end to his beginning, with a reprise of the younger Femi in Lincolnshire.  Even though the characters are consistently underwritten, the film is persuasively acted throughout.  Gbemisola Ikumelo develops Yinka from a shrill termagant into a more nuanced personality.  Denise Black’s Mary has real maternal warmth (or perhaps grandmotherly warmth:  Femi calls her Nan).  The physical contrasts and spiritual continuity between the slender, evidently sensitive Tai Golding and Sam Adewunmi’s imposing yet vulnerable version of Femi work well.   On its own, limited terms, The Last Tree is highly successful.

    12 July 2020

    [1] I can’t identify them, or several other characters, from the IMDb cast list, hence the missing actors’ names in this note.

  • Light of My Life

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Casey Affleck (2019)

    Directed, written by and starring Casey Affleck, Light of My Life begins with a bedtime story, told by a father (Affleck) to his daughter, Rag (Anna Pniowsky).   It’s a variation on the Genesis account of Noah’s Ark; both the man and the conveyance feature in the father’s making-it-up-as-he-goes-along narrative.  Its moral seems to be that Noah’s salvific reputation is exaggerated.  His Ark is far from waterproof – a resourceful fox called Art saves the day.  (Affleck isn’t an actor you think of as putting on voices other than his own.  It’s an amusing surprise that Dad gives the biblical patriarch an Australian accent that nods to the casting of the title role in Darren Aronofsky’s Noah.)  Rag, who’s a critical but thoroughly absorbed audience, looks to be about ten.  That might seem old for a bedtime story but it’s soon clear that her and her father’s circumstances are extraordinary.  Camped out in the British Columbia wilderness, they have only one other for company every day of their lives.

    The diluvial tale is apt because Dad and Rag (we learn that her birth name is Ann, her nickname from Raggedy Ann) are trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world.  Seven or eight years ago, a deadly virus wiped out half the global population.  During the opening story sequence (which runs more than ten minutes and is thoroughly engaging), you’re struck by Rag’s boyishly short hair.  It transpires that the virus victims were exclusively women, including Rag’s mother (Elisabeth Moss), seen in flashbacks through her husband’s memory[1].  Rag, an infant when the plague struck, is one of the few females still alive on Earth and an invaluable commodity as a potential means of regeneration.  In order not to lose her, Rag’s father has decided they must live in hiding.  Rag is always disguised as a boy for the rare occasions when they encounter other people.

    They move from place to place, making occasional trips to populated areas to buy provisions.  The morning after the bedtime story, a man approaches their tent, talks with Dad, compliments him on having such a ‘comely boy’.  The remark is enough to alarm Dad into moving on.  When they find a deserted house, Rags pleads with her father to let them stay there a while.  He agrees, though he’s furious when she finds and puts on girls’ clothes that, to Rag’s delight, fit her.  Dad also makes careful arrangements to enable a quick getaway when it’s needed.  That turns out to be soon.  One of their shopping outings raises suspicions about Rag’s gender that bring a posse of armed men to the house.

    I guess it’s understandable that Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011), which majors on diligent scientific effort to subdue a lethal international virus, has enjoyed a new lease of commercial life in recent months (though watching Soderbergh’s dull movie during lockdown strikes me as doubly masochistic).  This isn’t going to happen with Light of My Life, with its ravaged, post-pandemic setting and almost exclusive focus on a single personal relationship, however representative that relationship may be meant to be.  Affleck’s film is reminiscent, rather, of John Hillcoat’s The Road (2009), which featured a father-son duo on the move in a (more mysteriously) devastated world but the exchanges between Dad and Rag, often quietly humorous, are much more emotionally varied than their equivalent in The Road.  Light of My Life also calls to mind Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace (2018), even though the father-daughter’s nomadic, in-the-wilds existence in that case was dictated less by force of circumstance than by the man’s singular mentality (shaped as that was by his dissatisfaction with normal life).

    Light of My Life presents an idealised, even sentimentalised, view of women.  (Once you’ve watched it, you realise this is signalled in the less than brilliant title, which turns out to describe Dad’s view of Rag and of his late wife, rather than how the child sees her father or the wife her husband.)  Telling Rag the world won’t get back into balance until there are sufficient women in it, Dad laments the tendency of men to get angry, lonely and sad.  In the flashbacks to his wife’s last days, he tearfully tells her he’ll never cope without her; she, dying, selflessly assures him that he will.  In the closing scene, he weeps again; he holds on to his daughter, as he held on to his wife, for comfort.  When Dad talks to Rag about her mother, he recalls how she relished whatever they did together as ‘a love adventure’.  In the film’s final line, Rag offers consolation by telling him, ‘It’s a love adventure, Dad’.  Women, though rendered nearly extinct as a species, can cope with life and death in ways that men can’t.

    Affleck’s script nuances this simplism through Rag’s more astringent reactions.  For a start, Dad introduces the female fox Goldy as the main character in the opening bedtime story but, as Rag observes once it’s through, her male partner Art turns out to have the starring role.  (Later on, Rag adjusts the story to give Goldy the prominence she deserves.)  When Dad does what he sees as his duty by giving his daughter a sex education talk, Rag starts off suppressing impatience that he’s telling her things she already knows (though, from the look on her face when he tries to describe it, menstruation isn’t one of them).  By the time he’s done with reassuring her that what she’ll experience is nothing to worry about, Rag’s mood has changed.  She remains silent but now seems both shocked and resentful.  Her father has been stressing the natural condition of being female.  Their life together depends on his not allowing her to be.

    We never know Dad’s name, which makes sense.  It makes emotional sense too that his and Rag’s last (though again short-lived) refuge was once the home of Dad’s grandparents, a place that holds happy childhood memories for him.  Light of My Life works best as a semi-allegorical drama of the impossibility, or at least ephemerality, of a parent’s guaranteeing protection of their child.  Concealing Rag’s gender resonates with the idea of trying to prolong her childhood (and Dad’s repeated use of the word ‘safe’, to describe pubertal changes among other things, is significant).  Here too, Affleck illustrates the child’s sharp awareness as well as the father’s anguished struggle.  When Rag raises the idea of Dad’s being taken from her, by separation or by death, he insists he’ll ‘always be with you’, come what may.   Rag is often ready to argue when they disagree but here she keeps her feelings to herself.  We read them, though:  she knows that if Dad dies he won’t really be with her; she also knows he needs to make-believe otherwise.

    Dad, from an early stage, is given to flights of emotionally extravagant fancy.  ‘Do you know how much I love you?’ he asks.  ‘To the sun and back’, she replies, having heard it before.  ‘To the sun and back thirty thousand times’, he insists, before asking how much Rag loves him.  She is more measured:  ‘To the top of a tree’.  When he’s humorously, but nonetheless really, disappointed, she adds ‘and back down again’.  In the film’s climax, as they try to escape through an upstairs window of his grandparents’ house, Dad hangs on to Rag, telling her it’s too far a drop.  ‘Dad, let me go’, she keeps insisting.  When he eventually obeys, she does more than survive the fall.

    The occupants of this house are three men, who read the Bible together but have guns on the premises, to protect their animals and ‘keep the wolves away’.  The eldest and friendliest of the trio, Tom (Tom Bower), shows Rag how to use a gun.  Firearms don’t help Tom, who is killed when another three men invade the house in pursuit of the guests there.  Dad, a determined pacifist, changes his ways to subdue two of these assailants but is about to succumb to the third when Rag arrives on the scene and shoots the man dead, accidentally wounding her father in the process.  She capably dresses his wound before finally cradling him in her arms.  The child is mother to the man.

    The sustained drama of the central relationship comes at the expense of detail about the post-apocalyptic world of the story.  The film is strong on stark, ominous mood, thanks to Adam Arkapaw’s cinematography and music by Daniel Hart (who has scored the films of David Lowery, Affleck’s regular collaborator).  Arkapaw drains exteriors and interiors of colour (not so difficult outdoors:  the landscape is under snow much of the time) to bleakly beautiful effect.  Hart’s music, which is used judiciously, combines gravitas and tenderness.  The screenplay is good on the main pair’s gruelling routines:  whenever they move to a new location, Dad identifies a hiding place within it and a means of escape from it, and ensures that Rag commits these to memory.  The script also gives an idea of the informal education she’s getting from her father, as when he explains, in answer to her question, the difference between morals and ethics.  We never get much idea, though, of life outside the principals’ experience, of how society is trying to rebuild itself, or of quite how extraordinary Rag is.  There’s a brief reference to laboratory production of female babies in California but hardly anything more.  It’s almost as if, because Rag is uniquely precious to Dad, she literally is the only girl in the world.

    Casey Affleck justifies his self-casting, banishing doubts as to the wisdom of a still inexperienced director working on both sides of the camera.  Not for the first time, he portrays, distinctively and persuasively, a man both loving and needy.  I don’t know if Affleck really is DIY-inclined but he certainly seems it on screen:  he’s as convincing here as he was in Manchester by the Sea as a capable handyman.  You wouldn’t put it past him building an ark himself.  The bedtime story and birds-and-bees scenes are complementary in various ways, not least in Affleck’s handling of what are essentially two lengthy monologues, punctuated with short interjections from Rag.  It’s vexing to see him described, as he sometimes is, as a hyper-naturalistic mumbler:  he speaks with exceptional emotional precision.  In the opening sequence, his voice is quietly animated and his inflections varied.  In the sex education scene, nearly every sentence ends on the same rising inflection, expressing Dad’s tense determination to get through saying his piece.

    Soon after arriving at his grandparents’ old house, Dad is questioned by Tom, who asks not whether but why Rags is a girl disguised as a boy.  Dad denies this at first but, realising that Tom knows, eventually admits to it.  When he says ‘my daughter’, Affleck conveys how amazing it is to Dad that he’s finally uttering these words to another human being.  Anna Pniowsky, aged ten when the film was made, is a fine partner for him, and Affleck gets an extraordinary performance from her.  She’s a remarkable camera subject, with a touch of the young Mia Wasikowska and, through her boyish appearance, a touch of Jean-Pierre Léaud’s Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows.  Pniowsky’s Rag is touchingly vulnerable yet old beyond her years.  You might think the presence of Elisabeth Moss in a screen work with solemn gender themes and a dystopic setting would be confusing in light of The Handmaid’s Tale.  In the event, Moss is an appealing, unusually warm presence in her small, key role.

    This is the first feature that Affleck has directed since the mockumentary I’m Still Here (2010).  Without having seen the latter, I’d guess the attention it attracted was eventually excessive – by virtue of the allegations around what went on during production.  Light of My Life, in contrast, looks set to stay under the radar.  Shot in early 2017, it didn’t appear until nearly two years later, at the Berlin Film Festival.  Although it was released internationally during 2019, I missed the film when it came out in the UK so it must have been a pretty limited release.  (I caught up with it on Amazon Prime Video.)  This lack of profile isn’t a surprise – the piece is stubbornly anti-commercial – but it’s a pity.  Casey Affleck may well now regret making I’m Still Here.  There’s a great deal he can be proud of in Light of My Life.

    10 July 2020

    [1] I’m not sure if it’s made clear that they were married but I’m calling them wife and husband for convenience.

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