Film review

  • My Everything

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mon inséparable

    Anne-Sophie Bailly (2024)

    In the slick French TV/Netflix comedy series Dix pour cent (2015-2020), about a group of talent agents and their high-profile clients, Laure Calamy stands out in an accomplished cast.  As Noémie, PA to one of the partners in the agency, she’s often required to do ridiculous things but gives them a funny truthfulness – she’s always fresh and inventive.  Calamy has a special talent for expressing a character’s impulsiveness and making it believable – a talent shown to great effect in her César-winning performance in Caroline Vignal’s My Donkey, My Lover & I (2020).  It’s in evidence again in My Everything, showing at the London Film Festival, but writer-director Anne-Sophie Bailly’s first cinema feature stretches Calamy’s ingenious credibility to the limit.

    Calamy is Mona, the single mother of an adult son, Joël (Charles Peccia Galletto), who has learning disabilities.  It seems Joël’s father, now living in Belgium, has never been on the scene.  Mona works as a beautician-masseur in a shopping mall, Joël as a manual labourer in the training and support centre for young disabled people that he attends.  He also has a girlfriend there, Océane (Julie Froger), and gets her pregnant.  They’re determined to have the baby and start a life together despite the opposition of their parents:  Mona and Océane’s mother (Rébecca Finet) doubt it’s wise or practicable; Océane’s father (Pasquale D’Inca) is angrily hostile to the idea.  Mona also has mixed feelings about losing Joël.  As the film’s title (its French title anyway) suggests, his condition means that mother and son have always been very closely attached.  Mona feels she has sacrificed a lot for Joël’s sake though she now has a social life of sorts.  Her friend Séverine (Aïssatou Diallo Sagna) spends the evening with Joël while his mother goes out with two other women to a bar, where Mona chats up a Belgian man, Frank (Geert Van Rampelberg).  They then sleep together at her home.  There’s a tricky moment when Joël, shocked to discover this unexpected guest during the night, turns violent with him but Mona gets Frank’s phone number before he leaves.

    When Mona and Joël take a day trip across the border into Wallonia, My Everything turns increasingly implausible, though not at first.  After a noisy argument in a packed restaurant, they’re not speaking to each other when they visit a department store:  they’re just like an ordinary couple who’ve just had a row.  It’s there that Joël goes missing; Mona anxiously tells a store assistant that her son has disappeared and the woman assumes he’s a child, putting out a message on the public address about ‘petit Joël’.  Mona looks unavailingly for her son among the crowds lining the streets for a local carnival procession and reports his disappearance at a police station.  She then phones Frank; they spend the evening and the night together.  Early next morning, Frank discovers in Mona’s bag the police report form she completed, and furiously asks how she could do what she’s been doing for the last few hours when her disabled son was missing.  That’s the question the film’s audience has been asking, too.  Anne-Sophie Bailly is now seriously testing Laure Calamy’s gift for authenticating crazy spontaneity.

    Calamy plays brilliantly Mona’s loss of temper and control in the restaurant (even if it’s surprising, given how long and loudly her outburst goes on, that none of the staff intervenes).  It wouldn’t be hard to accept Mona’s contacting Frank if she somehow knew Joël was in safe hands for the time being.  We might even suspend disbelief if Mona, almost to get her own back on her son, decided to make the most of her sudden, unexpected ‘freedom’.  (It would certainly have been worth watching Laure Calamy express such feelings.)  But for Mona to hotfoot it to the police station then, as soon as she has reported Joël missing, to call Frank, is pushing it.  And Bailly, directing her first dramatic feature for cinema, opts for this purely to engineer what happens next, and to bring the crisis in Mona and Joël’s relationship to a climax.  Joël kept trying to join the carnival procession.  After being restrained, he was taken to the police.  It seems he gave them the address of his father, Christophe, because that’s where Joël is next morning, when the police contact Mona.

    This sets up a scene involving Mona, Joël and Christophe (Jean de Pange), along with the latter’s wife and their two young daughters.  The scene is gripping and very sad but Anne-Sophie Bailly has it in for Christophe somewhat unfairly.  When Mona arrives, he tells her he has put Joël (alone) in the kids’ playroom, virtually saying that’s the right place for someone he assumes to have the mind of a child.  It’s understandable Mona is enraged by this but it can’t have been easy for Christophe, who hasn’t seen his son in years, to receive an out-of-the-blue visit from him, accompanied by the police.  Another explosive argument between Mona and Joël, at Christophe’s, triggers the longer-term separation of mother and son; but Bailly’s censure of the father also presages a shift in the film’s main theme.  In the closing stages, My Everything becomes chiefly about showing Joël and Océane as more capable than their protective parents assumed.  When Mona’s elderly mother dies, Joël and Océane turn up at the funeral, where he insists on reading words from Ecclesiastes as a tribute.  This marks the start of his and Mona’s reconciling.  (She makes it up with Frank, too.)  She and Océane’s mother help their children move into a rented flat.  Then the baby is born.  All the indications are that Joël and Océane will be good, loving parents.

    It’s particularly important for Anne-Sophie Bailly to stress ability not disability because the actors playing Joël and Océane are themselves disabled.  Charles Peccia Galletto (a professional actor) and Julie Froger (a non-professional until this film) are both touching, and the whole cast is strong, but Bailly’s film is essentially the latest demonstration of its lead’s talent.  By the end of My Everything, it’s hard to avoid thinking the writer-director has sacrificed coherence for the sake of a succession of high-impact individual sequences – but there’s no denying that impact as you watch Calamy in them.  Even when Mona eventually becomes almost a subsidiary character to Joël and Océane, Calamy still steals the show:  her distress when Mona drops a box, breaking crockery she’s bought for the young couple’s flat, is piercing.

    My Everything is a weedy title:  while a literal translation of the French obviously doesn’t work, its suggestion of a bond that’s also enchaining could have been retained simply by turning the French noun into an English adjective (just as Intouchables (2011) became Untouchable).  In contrast, Call My Agent!, the English title of Dix pour cent once Netflix acquired it, is very effective.  The hook of that series is, of course, that the clients of the fictional talent agents and their staff are – and are played by – real French screen stars.  Laure Calamy has now become such a deservedly big-time actress that, if Dix pour cent were resurrected, she could no longer be playing a secretary underling.  She would have to play herself.

    19 October 2024

  • The Summer Book

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Charlie McDowell (2024)

    Charlie McDowell (whose parents are Malcolm McDowell and Mary Steenburgen) introduced his film at the London Film Festival,describing it as ‘a love letter to nature and human beings and interaction and family … I hope you’ll slow down to watch it and breathe more calmly’.  This proved easy – I was soon drowsing.  That’s not intended as a cheap shot:  I feel slightly guilty for not thinking better of this well-intentioned adaptation of Tove Jansson’s novel, first published in 1972.  But in order to engage as screen drama, McDowell’s version of The Summer Book needs more than DP Sturla Brandth Grøvlen’s often beautiful seascapes and Hania Rani’s intricate music.  In the uneventful circumstances, these are rather too dominant.

    Jansson’s novel is hardly action-packed in the conventional sense yet it’s not in the least dull.  It’s essentially a conversation, between an old woman and a young girl – a grandmother and her granddaughter, Sophia – who spend a summer together on a small island in the Gulf of Finland.  (The film was shot on location in the Finnish archipelago at a time of year when, as McDowell’s intro explained, it was light for around twenty-two hours of the day.)  As they explore the island, Sophia and her grandmother talk about life, nature and their dreams – rather less about mortality though both are keenly aware of the recent death of Sophia’s mother.  As well as the voices of her two main characters, Jansson’s writer’s voice is also present throughout the book.  Charlie McDowell and Robert Jones, who wrote the screenplay, don’t find a way of substituting for, let alone emulating, that voice.  This may be the film’s fundamental weakness but it’s not the only one.

    Getting Glenn Close to play the grandmother is a coup for McDowell that comes at a cost.  Close delivers an acting masterclass, except that, as often with this formidable performer, it’s a masterclass aware of its own mastery.  Her benign, weather-beaten face magnetises the camera.  She delivers her lines – often comprising words of wisdom – in carefully Scandi-accented English.  She skilfully delineates Grandmother’s declining physical powers.  You get an increasing sense that the film is about the old woman – or about Glenn Close’s acting prpwess – to the relative exclusion of Emily Matthews’ Sophia, certainly to the exclusion of a third supposedly significant character, Sophia’s widowed father, played by Anders Danielsen Lie.  At times, we’re meant to marvel at seventy-seven-year-old Close’s daring:  most conspicuously, when, after Grandmother has been swimming, she sheds her costume and walks naked through a sun-drenched wood.  In the final minutes, she emerges from her house on the island to commune with nature again – this time by peeing in the great outdoors.  After that, she contentedly lays her head on a pillow of rocks and closes her eyes.  This is presumably the end of her life and it’s definitely the end of the film.  If she has died, it says a lot about The Summer Book that neither Sophia nor her father gets the opportunity to react to the death.

    The family trio’s accents are oddly assorted.  There’s Glenn Close, an American meticulously pretending to be a Nordic speaker of English; Anders Danielsen Lie, who is a Nordic (Norwegian) speaker of English; and Emily Matthews, who’s English and isn’t asked to suggest anything different.  Matthews is likeable and natural but this Sophia looks a good deal older than the six-year-old child of Tove Jansson’s book – too old to be asking some of the questions that she asks in the film.  Danielsen Lie, though not given enough to do, expresses, usually, without words, a remarkable burden of lonely melancholy but is also involved in one of the narrative’s rare bits of dramatic incident that’s also its silliest episode.

    Feeling bored, Sophia asks God to send a storm to liven up her holiday.  The storm arrives during a family trip to a nearby island, which has a now disused lighthouse, though the interior looks very well kept and Grandmother doesn’t warn Sophia to be careful as she races into the place and heads excitedly for the top.  She arrives there just in time to see the first lightning flash.  There’s soon a tempest happening and her father is out at sea, on the boat that brought them to the island.  The boat capsizes and he struggles in the water, it seems in danger of drowning.  His mother and daughter await his return (though not, I thought, as anxiously as you’d expect).  When he eventually appears, he hugs Sophia tight, still wearing his soaking wet clothes.  It’s a wonder that, a screen minute or two later, he’s the only one with a cough and in need of medication.  This is one of his mother’s concoctions of leaves and berries of the island.  She explains their salutary properties to Sophia in more detail than either the child or The Summer Book‘s audience needs.

    18 October 2024

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