Film review

  • The Beta Test

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jim Cummings and PJ McCabe (2021)

    For those, like me, not previously familiar with the term, a beta test (according to an online dictionary consulted) is ‘a trial of machinery, software or other products in the final stages of development’.  In Jim Cummings and PJ McCabe’s bleak yet bracing comedy thriller, which the directors co-wrote, the product in question appears to be a prospective life partnership:  the protagonist Jordan Hines (Cummings) is soon to marry his fiancée Caroline (Virginia Newcomb).  Jordan and his work colleague PJ (McCabe) are film industry agents, and perhaps the title term is also part of the Hollywood lexicon.  In any event, The Beta Test describes a trial by fire for Jordan, personally and professionally.

    In the film’s prologue, over supper in their Los Angeles apartment, Annie Borgli (Malin Barr) confesses to her husband Kris (Christian Hillborg) a short-lived infidelity.  Annie received a purple envelope containing an invitation to a one-off, no-strings-attached assignation in a hotel room.  She accepted the invitation.  Kris appears to receive the news calmly, before stabbing a fork into Annie’s chin and proceeding to kill her.  A little way into the main narrative, Jordan receives his purple envelope and the RSVP enclosure, hesitates to act on it then yields to temptation.  On arrival outside the hotel room, he puts on the mask he’s required to wear for the duration of proceedings inside.  A steamy encounter takes place but Jordan’s barely out of the place before he’s regretting having entered it.  The attack in the opening sequence isn’t the only LA spousal revenge killing on account of a purple-envelope confession:  producer Raymond Lee (Wilky Lau), whom we’ve seen Jordan try and humiliatingly fail to sweet-talk into a movie deal, is slain by his angry wife (Lya Yanne).  Jordan gets more and more hysterically twitchy about the risk of exposure of his moment of madness – what this would mean for his future with Caroline and, especially, his career.  At the same time, he’s increasingly determined to track down whoever is sending out the distinctive stationery.

    The story is set in the post-Weinstein American film industry – there are references to ‘Harvey’ as a thing of the past – but the agency in The Beta Test is called (acronymically) APE, and Jordan’s workplace behaviour gets worse as he becomes more rattled by events.  He viciously bawls out his PA Jaclyn (Jacqueline Doke) – to her astonishment but ‘That’s the film industry for you,’ Jaclyn’s female colleague dully observes.  (I think this is just about the only line spoken by the actress concerned but she does disillusioned wonders with it.)   Jordan’s high-handed invective and smarmy hustling for business feel like two sides of the same coin – a debased currency.  Manically overbearing and desperately entitled, he’s the unlovely soul of the business he represents.  When he smiles, as he does whenever he thinks it necessary, his teeth (or dentures) are pearly white.  Yet he’s a less than competent shark.

    He’s increasingly paranoid, to boot – his state of mind underlined in agitated strings music from Ben Lovett (who also scored Jim Cummings’s previous feature, The Wolf of Snow Hollow).  The soundtrack includes too, and amusingly, the Vivaldi music used in Kramer vs Kramer.  The injections of classy music somehow capture the chasm between Jordan’s high anxiety and the grubby happenings that ratchet it up – so do impressive overhead shots of Los Angeles freeway traffic, by day and night.  Annie Borgli’s killing is garish enough to verge on shockingly comical – as The Wolf of Snow Hollow, consistently managed to be – but this savagery isn’t, despite what happens to Raymond, repeated, and the violence in The Beta Test is predominantly verbal.  In retrospect, the brutal opening seems a jarring miscalculation but Cummings and McCabe hardly put another foot wrong.  The psychological and horrific aspects of the material are unusually well aligned.

    There are other particular echoes of The Wolf of Snow Hollow:  the unmasking of the prime mover in the story is a bit of an anti-climax; the closing scene delivers an unnerving parting shot.  The former is more of an anti-climax here because the culprit – the excellently named Johnny PayPal (Kevin Changaris) – is given, in the climactic confrontation with Jordan, an overlong monologue about his beta testing of an ‘Eros algorithm’, based on people’s online search histories.  In the closing scene, Jordan and Caroline have weathered the storm, and are still a couple.  They’re about to leave an eatery and Jordan gets the bill.  As he makes brief eye contact with the waitress (Olivia Applegate), we remember that he pulled off his mask just before exiting the hotel room.  Either the waitress recognises him or Jordan, for the foreseeable future, is going to be haunted by fears of recognition by his hotel lover.  This final twist is strengthened by one the script has already delivered.  Caroline (well played by Virginia Newcomb) is affectingly lovely and long-suffering until it’s revealed to the audience – as it never is to Jordan – that his fiancée also received a purple envelope.

    The characters Jim Cummings played in Thunder Road and The Wolf of Snow Hollow were struggling to recover from failed marriages.  It makes a change to see him preparing to enter matrimony.  Not a very refreshing change, given what Jordan’s like – it seems a safe bet he and Caroline won’t live happily ever after – but watching Cummings is a pleasure.  Over the course of three features behind the camera, he has made giant strides as an actor – remarkable given that he’s been directing himself.  PJ McCabe was likely an added help on this occasion but, whatever the explanation, the result is impressive.  With his neat good looks, Cummings is physically well equipped to play a screwed-up individual putting on a concealing act and, by extension, to subvert traditional images of the leading man.  He makes the disjuncture between outer and inner Jordan doubly electric to watch, as he switches on and off an ingratiating manner.  As in The Wolf of Snow Hollow, his breakdown is alarmingly credible.  What’s more, Cummings has a confounding ability to make you root for the men he’s playing, however badly they behave.  You don’t, as a result, think any better of Jordan Hines but you do have to admit a degree of emotional complicity with him.  Discouraging viewers from standing safely, judgmentally outside a smart satire like The Beta Test does the film an invaluable service.

    15 October 2021

  • Azor

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Andreas Fontana (2021)

    Buenos Aires, 1981, during the period of Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’, in which the ruling military junta killed – or ‘disappeared’ – thousands of political dissidents.  It’s a puzzling disappearance, that of a colleague, which brings private banker Yvan de Wiel (Fabrizio Rongione) from Geneva to the Argentine capital, though his chief mission there is to pay court to wealthy clients, including those previously looked after by René Keys, the man who’s gone missing.  Yvan is accompanied by his wife Ines (Stéphanie Cléau), whose elegant calm is also designed to reassure the clientele.  Swiss director Andreas Fontana’s Azor includes a sequence in which the de Wiels attend a high-class soirée, where Ines, in conversation with the hostess, explains various terms of banking slang.  One of these gives Fontana his title:  azor means ‘be quiet, don’t give much away’.  The two women’s chat is one of the most entertaining bits in the film, which is all too aptly named.  Azor, showing at the London Film Festival, is an assured debut feature but excessively restrained.

    Shortly after their arrival in Buenos Aires, Yvan and Ines witness two young men being held at gunpoint in the street by militia, in broad daylight.  The Swiss visitors, sitting in their chauffeured car, aren’t evidently disturbed by what they see, even though, when the camera returns to the street, one of the young men is no longer there.  This economically effective piece of scene-setting introduces the ominous tone that prevails throughout Azor, so completely does Fontana eschew scenes of violence.  That should make a welcome change and the description of the sinister surface of Argentine society – or the super-moneyed part of it on which the narrative concentrates – is carefully detailed.  But the film feels continuously anticipatory, until its last ten minutes or so, when Yvan, briefcase in hand, makes a clandestine, nocturnal boat trip into terra incognita.

    It’s no surprise this episode has been admiringly described as Conradian, especially in light of the rumours Yvan has heard that Keys has ‘gone native’, but it turns out to be remarkable in a different way.  The deal Yvan seals on his heart-of-darkness excursion appears to invigorate him.  On the boat’s return journey, his eyes are bright with excitement, for the first time.  It’s another welcome change, in principle, that a screen banker isn’t an overt, corrupt bastard from the word go but this, too, pays diminishing dividends.  Fabrizio Rongione’s Yvan is a meticulous, low-key figure whose presence aligns perfectly with Fontana’s style.  He’s also a verging-on-dull protagonist.  Yvan himself seems increasingly oppressed by comparisons made between him and the dodgy, charismatic Keys (Alain Gegenschatz), who appears against a painted tropical jungle background at the start but isn’t seen subsequently.  Perhaps Keys was an overt, corrupt bastard.  In the film’s closing shots, Yvan looks pleased that he may have begun to emulate his disappeared ex-colleague.

    I have to confess another reason why I struggled to engage with Azor, which Fontana co-wrote with Mariano Llinás (who’s Argentinian).  When Yvan meets with a covey of suspicious-looking types in a gentleman’s club, one member of the group chides another for failing to understand that Yvan isn’t a commercial but a private banker.  In response, the financial ignoramus’s eyes glaze over:  this was maybe the only moment in the film when I sympathised with a character.  I’m sorry I didn’t like Azor – I wanted to, particularly in light of Andreas Fontana’s modest, engaging introduction of it at this Festival screening at Curzon Soho.  That’s how I came to recognise the director on the screen, in a cameo as a bar pianist playing ‘Feelings’.  The choice of that hackneyed international standard is spot on for a story with an early 1980s setting but it’s also ironic in a film where emotions, like the nefarious actions of a government, remain mostly under wraps.

    14 October 2021

Posts navigation