Film review

  • Diamantino

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt (2018)

    IMDb and Wikipedia term this Portuguese film a fantasy/comedy/drama.   It’s a satire of celebrity involving urgent political issues of today – Europe’s refugee crisis, the rise and rise of nationalist populism – as well as genetic modification and gender identity.  At Cannes last year, it won the Critics’ Week Grand Prize and was nominated for the Queer Palm.  Gabriel Abrantes’ and Daniel Schmidt’s Diamantino, which the co-directors also wrote, is certainly one of 2018’s more idiosyncratic movies.

    Cristiano Ronaldo is the most famous person in Portugal and the obvious inspiration for the title character – the superstar footballer Diamantino Matamouros (Carloto Cotta), who narrates his story in voiceover.  His goal sends his country through to the final of the 2018 World Cup (the film premiered at Cannes a few weeks before the real thing), where Portugal’s opponents are Sweden.  The Swedes are 1-0 up with a few minutes to go, when Diamantino is brought down in the penalty area.   At first, he seems to be injured but he quickly recovers to take the spot kick.  He fails to score and is instantly transformed from hero to zero, the agent of national defeat and dismay.  His tearful reaction to letting the side down naturally goes viral:  he’s branded a cry baby to complete his ignominy.

    There’s a good reason for the missed penalty.  The day before the final, he and his adored, adoring father (Chico Chapas), on Diamantino’s yacht, encounter a raft of African refugees, including a woman (Djucu Dabo) mourning a son who’s drowned.  This makes a big impression on Diamantino.  He usually gets in the zone at crucial moments of a match by seeing the football pitch as a sea of pink and the other figures on it as giant, fluffy dogs.   (These placid, outsize canines slo-moing in candyfloss are Diamantino‘s first camp image, and an enduring one.)  Preparing to take the vital penalty, Diamantino sees something different – a vision of the refugee woman and, by her side, his father, who, unbeknown to his son, has just collapsed and died, as he watched the match at home.

    Bullied by his rapacious identical-twin sisters Natasha and Sonia (Margarida and Anabela Moreira) to embark on a campaign of public contrition to regain his star status and commercial clout, Diamantino tells a chat show that he intends to adopt a refugee child.  Lucia (Maria Leite) and Aisha (Cleo Tavares) are lovers, and work colleagues in an organisation investigating financial sharp practice.  They go undercover to expose Diamantino’s money laundering, etc; they assume the refugee child project is the fallen star shooting a line as part of his unscrupulous charm offensive.  Posing as a nun, Lucia introduces a young Mozambican man Rahim – actually Aisha in disguise – to live with and spy on Diamantino.  At the same time, Natasha and Sonia, following an approach from government minister Ferro (Joana Barrios), sign up their brother for a revolutionary treatment.  Pioneered by Dr Lamborghini (Carla Maciel), who shares her name with the make of Diamantino’s favourite car, the technique aims to clone genius.  The minister wants to use it to reinforce football’s potency as opium for the masses.

    If Diamantino has plummeted from grace, why is the neo-fascist government replicating him now – or, later in the film, using him as a different kind of political pawn?  (He’s the face of a campaign to leave the EU and build a wall to keep immigrants out.)  As you watch Diamantino, you soon realise it doesn’t do to ask such questions.  Movies with no pretensions to realism often ignore the difference between including events that wouldn’t happen in the real world and events that don’t make sense even according to the rules of the unreal world the film has devised.  Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt go further than that.  They have plenty of bees in their bonnet, want them all in the same story, and don’t mind how much or little sense the concoction makes.  The exuberant visuals also reflect this approach:  as Guy Lodge’s Variety review rightly notes, ‘the film’s aesthetic is made to seem as wild and haphazard as its storytelling’.  The result is bizarrely entertaining and confoundingly appealing.

    The writer-directors’ starting point – or one of their starting points – was manifestly to lampoon the ludicrous material wealth and egotism of a Ronaldo type.  In his vast seaside villa, bling décor and reminders of Diamantino’s greatness are everywhere to be seen:  his handsome face is emblazoned even on the pillow cases.  But the satire of mega-stardom is quickly eclipsed by the hero’s lovable innocence.   Diamantino isn’t so much a brainless jock as a holy (though secular) fool.  He’s also a virgin, who seems never to have had any kind of romantic attachment – impossible as that seems for a soccer star who’s spent years in the media spotlight.   At his first meeting with Dr Lamborghini, she asks if he likes girls.  He doesn’t realise she means sexually:  he says he likes girls and boys, animals too.  Until Rahim moves in, Diamantino is sharing his vast home with just Natasha, Sonia and a black kitten called Mittens.

    His father’s death and Diamantino’s football exile turn the hero’s life into one dominated by females.  His vulnerability in their company is magnified by his often being, unlike them, more or less undressed.  The women’s positions of authority and their mainly negative characterisation coalesce into one of the film’s most striking features.  (Another, for British viewers at any rate, is to see an in-out EU referendum treated as the stuff of fantasy.)   Minister Ferro and Dr Lamborghini’s double act of sinister politician and scary scientist recalls old-style sci-fi melodramas, where these roles have usually been male ones.  Lucia, the senior partner in the relationship with Aisha, is increasingly portrayed as narrowly possessive of her.  The stridently malign twins Natasha and Sonia are – as well as crooks (it’s they, not their blameless brother, who have been directing his riches to a secret account in Panama) – fairytale ugly sisters.

    There’s more than one echo of Cinderella in the Matamouros ménage.  Though the father isn’t exactly Baron Hardup, it’s his hysterically selfish twin daughters who bring on his fatal collapse.  When Natasha and Sonia order Rahim to clean up the place, it’s one of the few times Diamantino is roused to oppose his sisters’ will, heatedly telling Rahim it’s not his job to skivvy.  Only the childlike Diamantino could fail to work out from Cleo Tavares’s shape that Rahim is a girl:  although the sisters supposedly don’t notice either, treating Rahim as Cinders nearly suggests otherwise.

    Once the father’s gone, Diamantino and Rahim are the only two likeable characters, and the development of this pairing is intriguing albeit bewildering.  Diamantino refers to Rahim as his son. though being a father appears to consist largely of feeding him on Diamantino’s own preferred diet of bongo juice, Nutella waffles and whipped cream.   The two often share a bed, lying side by side.  Father expresses real, though hardly more than paternal, physical affection; son/Aisha, although s/he prefers girls, is more and more fond of Diamantino.

    Dr Lamborghini notes at the start of the treatment that it could trigger a partial sex change for the subject:  as the story reaches its climax, Diamantino not only discovers Rahim’s real identity (and is very hurt by the discovery) but suddenly sprouts breasts – which make him more attractive to Aisha.  The consummation of their relationship trumps everything in the film.  In the end, Diamantino hasn’t really developed a conscience about refugees: he’s fallen in love with someone who pretended to be one – and faked her gender into the bargain.  With all the villains of the piece hurriedly disposed of, Diamantino and Aisha romp naked on the seashore and his voiceover tells us they’re happy together.   There are no longer any secrets between them.  Diamantino has boobs as well as a penis.  The film may have been largely hostile to women but it seems the baleful Lamborghini treatment wasn’t an entirely bad thing.  It makes the protagonist more gender-fluid.

    Carloto Cotta is a big name in Portugal.  Audiences there may therefore be best placed to appreciate his achievement in Diamantino.  Although he’s had important roles in Miguel Gomes films, including Tabu (2012), I’d not seen Cotta before and would guess many people in the same position will assume, because he’s so physically suitable for the role, that he’s just dropped lucky here, playing the only kind of role he’s capable of playing.   I’d bet money that’s not the case.  Cotta starts with a splendid, acute impersonation of a high-profile footballer, from the ball control skills to the lachrymose histrionics.  He goes on to express quite marvellously the guileless nature behind the star persona.  His whole body somehow exudes innocence.  He captures Diamantino’s simple-mindedness with empathy and wit.   He, above all, ensures this film is as hard to resist as it is to define.

    19 July 2019

  • Only You

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Harry Wootliff (2018)

    Elena (Laia Costa) and Jake (Josh O’Connor) meet by chance one New Year’s Eve.  They spend the night together, fall in love and decide, without further ado, to start a family.   In the early stages of Harry Wootliff’s debut feature – she’s previously made shorts and written, mostly for television – the couple enjoy a physically passionate relationship and are very happy together.  In other words, Elena and Jake travel a fair emotional distance in a short time and the handheld camera that Wootliff favours, particularly at the start of Only You, gives an impression of sustained activity.  Once they’ve moved in together, though, the story, for a while, doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.   The protagonists are clearly devoted to each other.  You feel their happiness has to be marred by one of two things:  serious illness or difficulties in making a baby.   It’s the latter.  Elena’s failure to conceive brings their partnership to the edge of collapse – and over the edge.

    Elena is Spanish and Jake English but the story takes place mostly in Glasgow.  I was never clear as to why Elena had next to no contact with her family in Spain or what her job was:  anyway, she’s well enough off to have bought her own flat in Glasgow.  At the start, Jake is close to completing his research degree studies in marine biology (and he gets his doctorate).  An only child, he’s still close to his widowed father Andrew (Peter Wight), who lives somewhere in the English countryside.  Elena’s encounter with Jake happens after she’s left a New Year party at the home of her best friend Carly (Lisa McGrillis).  The latter’s elder brother Shane (Stuart Martin) has been hitting on Elena; Carly has encouraged her, without success, to respond positively.  Unlike Elena, Jake hasn’t been drinking but DJ-ing.  Whereas the conversation at Carly’s party occurs on screen, Jake reports what he’s been up to – when he and Elena hail the same cab in the early hours of New Year’s Day, and end up sharing it.

    That difference is an immediate hint that Only You will primarily be strong-willed Elena’s story but Harry Wootliff quickly tells us plenty about Jake.  When Elena protests she hailed the cab first, Jake doesn’t argue; it’s the cabbie (Joe Cassidy) who insists that Jake was the one who caught his eye.  Jake’s conscientious, somewhat naive nature is suggested in his explanation, good-humoured but seriously meant, of why a DJ needs to stay sober.  Two people dead-heating in competition for a taxi isn’t an entirely unknown starting point for a screen romance.  It’s as if Wootliff wants to take a cliché and, through credible individual detail, reanimate it – and she succeeds.  During the car journey, Elena thinks she’s going to throw up and has to get out of the cab.  She says she’ll walk home from where they’ve got to; she and Jake part company.  Yet when Wootliff cuts from this straight to Elena’s flat, and Jake is there, it’s entirely convincing, thanks largely to the regretful, uncertain look we noticed in Josh O’Connor’s eye when Elena walked away from him down the street.   We don’t know exactly what happened in the meantime – perhaps Wootliff has adjusted another cliché:  an instruction to the cab driver to follow that girl, instead of follow that car.  At any rate, it makes sense that Elena and Jake are still together.

    I’ve dwelt on the opening because, with due respect to Harry Wootliff and her fine cast, it’s the best part of Only You.  Most of what follows is well directed and acted but Wootliff takes time – a minute under two hours – to tell what is a slender story, even though it obviously deals with an important subject.  (There are no subplots to speak of.)   The quasi-documentary description of the IVF procedures Elena undergoes throw into sharp relief her anguish at not becoming pregnant.   The age difference between her and Jake – at thirty-five, she’s nine years his senior – is dramatised intelligently.  She’s immediately anxious about it, asking him to guess her age; when he says twenty-nine, she doesn’t put him right for some time.   It’s persuasive that this is something Elena is always more worried about than Jake and that her age-related infertility is a double whammy.

    Yet when the couple decide to forget (not, it turns out, for long) about trying having a child, go dancing together and Wootliff chooses Bronski Beat’s ‘Smalltown Boy’ to accompany the dance, the effect of the music is striking.  This  song is almost bound to supply an emotive boost, even when, as here, there’s no connection between its powerful lyrics and the story on screen.  In this case, ‘Smalltown Boy’ makes you realise how much the narrative needs fortifying.  (In Robin Campillo’s 120 BPM, it was a reflection of the story’s accumulating power, rather than a shot in the arm.)  It’s rather odd this is the musical highlight of the film, with Elvis Costello’s ‘I Want You’ running a respectable second.  On his first visit to her apartment, DJ Jake enthuses over the ‘great taste’ of the vinyl collection Elena inherited from her father but he never seems to get beyond the Costello album, although Wootliff does put on the soundtrack some very pleasant Spanish vocals, accompanied by guitar.  I wondered beforehand which version of ‘Only You’ – The Platters or Yazoo – was going to feature in the film.  The answer is neither.

    Elena and Jake find it increasingly hard to avoid friends and contemporaries who have babies or are expecting them.  Wootliff doesn’t show so deft a touch dealing with this aspect of their ordeal:  the couple’s social life verges on the masochistic.  The direction is both heavy-handed and a little evasive in a sequence late on.  Carly, now a mother, marries her long-term partner (Gregor Firth) and asks Elena to be her maid of honour.  By this stage, Jake has moved out; at the wedding breakfast, Elena is a spectre at the feast, wearing a dress more suited to a funeral.  An older man called Mike (Tam Dean Burn), presumably Carly’s father, insists on saying a few words although the bride, smiling but ready to be embarrassed, reminds him they’d agreed no speeches.  Mike, probably with a few drinks under his belt, talks about how a marriage is something forever having to be ‘reconceived’ and ‘reborn’.  It’s a pity we don’t see Carly’s reaction to her father’s choice of metaphor, which appears simply to give Elena the idea of reconciling with Jake.  Only You is too honest, though, for that to happen in an easily happy ending – and too genuinely concerned about its principals to give them an unequivocally miserable one.  Elena and Jake are a couple again in the final shot but their tentative attitude is a reminder that their future together looks uncertain and challenging.

    The acting is just about impeccable.  I was impressed by Laia Costa, whom I’d not seen before.  (Her breakthrough was in the title role of Sebastian Schipper’s Victoria.)  Brightly (even irritatingly) flirtatious in the early stages, Elena is gradually exhausted by her frustrated obsession.  It erodes her volatility and her bloom.  On television, Josh O’Connor has leavened the increasingly mechanical charms of The Durrells and the creaky, often overacted BBC version of Les Misérables with a welcome astringency.   He did fine work in Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country but Only You is his best screen performance yet.  Jake is a regular guy, in a relationship that he wants but which is mired in unhappiness he didn’t bargain for and struggles to bear.   O’Connor shows a lot of vocal skill:  Jake speaks in the near-monotone characteristic of his age and middle-class background yet O’Connor gets expressive emotional precision into the lines.  The reliably excellent Peter Wight is acute and touching as his father, even though Andrew’s crucial pep talk to his son in the closing stages is conventionally written.  Lisa McGrillis is another familiar face from television:  in the sitcom Mum, she plays, with formidable accuracy and to greatly annoying effect, the partner of Lesley Manville’s even more annoying son.  It’s rather startling to hear the Essex girl of Mum talking in a Scottish accent at the start of Only You.  I don’t know whether McGrillis is Essex or Glaswegian or neither but she’s talented:  she looks and sounds equally right in both roles.

    17 July 2019

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