Film review

  • Scrapper

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Charlotte Regan (2023)

    Another year, another debut feature about a pre-adolescent girl’s relationship with her erratic father from a young British writer-director called Charlotte.  Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun, which premiered at Cannes, was among the big success stories in 2022 cinema.  Charlotte Regan’s Scrapper first screened in January 2023 at Sundance, where it won the snappily-named Grand Jury Prize for the World Cinema Dramatic Competition.  Like Wells, Regan gets strong performances from her two lead actors.  The resemblances between the two films don’t go much further, however.  Aftersun is imaginative and a bit disorienting.  Scrapper is quirky but shallow.

    Twelve-year-old Georgie (Lola Campbell) lives on a council estate in east London (the film was shot on the Limes Farm Estate in Chigwell).  More remarkably, she has been living there alone since the recent death of her single parent, Vicky (Olivia Brady, seen in flashbacks and video footage).  Georgie claims – to social services and to Zeph (Ambreen Razia), the mother of Georgie’s sole friend and confidante, Ali (Alin Uzun) – that she shares the house with an uncle called Winston Churchill, and they all believe her.  Ali, with his mum’s permission, sometimes sleeps over at Georgie’s.  When social services phone to speak with the uncle, Georgie plays them a recording she’s made of a man’s voice – provided by a local shopkeeper who’s happy to help.  The recording is perfectly adequate because the questions asked by Georgie’s social workers (Asheq Akhtar and Jessica Fostekew) are predictable and perfunctory.  As far as these two are concerned, Georgie is attending school; she actually spends her time doing housework and stealing bikes, which she sells on to Nina (Aylin Tezel), whose lock-up is full of them.  One day, a young man (Harris Dickinson) arrives at the house and invites himself in.  This is Jason, the long-absent father whom Georgie doesn’t remember and whose arrival she instantly resents.  She tries to lock him out but he gets back in through an upstairs window.  Jason seems genuinely eager to get to know his daughter and there’s nothing threatening about him – except that he threatens to report Georgie to social services unless she’ll have him in the house, which she reluctantly agrees to do.  He sleeps on the settee that Ali slept on when he stayed nights there.

    The title refers to the child protagonist, who (a) is combative and (b) has built a scrap heap to the ceiling in what used to be her mother’s bedroom, which Georgie always keeps locked.  At the start of the film the proverb ‘It takes a village to raise a child’ arrives on the screen; it’s immediately crossed out and replaced by ‘I’ll raise myself thanks’.  The first time we see Georgie in the kitchen we notice on the wall a note about the five stages of grief.  Georgie is also crossing out each of these in turn – and, as she tells Ali, as quickly as possible.  Scrapper‘s narrative shows her gradually warming to Jason and learning, though without acknowledging this explicitly, that it’s OK to need someone and that that someone can help you cope with bereavement.  Already known (though not to me) ‘for her award-winning shorts and music videos’, Charlotte Regan decorates her film with details not only distinctive but designed to suggest that Scrapper is more thoroughly eccentric than it is.  The first such detail epitomises this.  ‘It takes a village to raise a child’ appears in a standard typeface whereas ‘I’ll raise myself thanks’ is handwritten.  That hint of individuality is deceptive.  The handwriting is pretty conventional, too, and the story plays out as a formulaic comedy-drama:  Georgie and Jason overcome years of separation and much suspicion on the girl’s part to build a relationship that’s trusting, affectionate and only mildly offbeat.

    Regan has been praised for blending social and magic realism.  The no-frills working-class context, in conjunction with Georgie’s alarming situation and feisty nature, supplies the film with a toughness that proves to be only a surface toughness.  The heroine isn’t in any danger to speak of.  She herself is responsible for the only physical violence in Scrapper when she sets about another girl.  Although Georgie and Ali discover a rifle bullet in Jason’s travel bag and she wonders if he means to kill her, she’s not frightened by the idea.  (It turns out Jason acquired the cartridge in his boyhood days of metal detecting and keeps it as a souvenir.)  Regan’s wacky interstices – animated talking spiders, Georgie’s visualised imaginings of who her father really is:  a montage of these shows Jason as a vampire, a convict, a gangster – serve to make the world of the film humorously artificial.  And although the subject – an only child’s loss of her only parent – seems bold, we rarely get much sense of what Georgie is experiencing emotionally.  A rare exception is the sequence where she loses, and searches frantically for, her mobile phone, which contains video footage of her mother; but that symbolically locked bedroom stays locked even after Jason gets hold of the key and inside.  In the story’s climax, which explains why he’s come back into Georgie’s life, he leaves his phone in the house so that his daughter can listen to the (very long) voicemail that the dying Vicky left on it, pleading with her ex to look after their child.  In other words, Regan is happy to rely on straightforward pathos when it suits.  She also consistently prefers an instant pay-off to coherence.  After biting into Jason’s ‘burnt garlic bread’, Georgie loses a tooth and her father reminds her to put it under her pillow for the tooth fairy.  She doesn’t know what he’s talking about – because, we’re meant to think, she’s had an upbringing too grimly challenging for sentimental inventions.  This generates a funny exchange:  when her father enlightens her, Georgie reckons the tooth fairy must owe her ten quid by now.  But why wouldn’t Georgie already know about the tooth fairy?  The evidence suggests that Vicky did all she could to care for her and make her childhood happy.

    Scrapper’s artificiality is increased by the stylised look of characters major and minor.  Georgie almost invariably wears a West Ham football shirt bearing the name of Dagenham Motors (an erstwhile sponsor of the club); Jason has cropped blonde hair à la Eminem (or, again, the way Eminem’s hair used to be:  I assume the writer-director, who grew up on a North London council estate, has set the action in the mid-noughties, when she was twelve).  Regan occasionally uses as a chorus people from the estate or otherwise on the margins of Georgie’s life, who make disparaging comments about her:  three identical little Black boys (the Oyesanwo brothers – Ayobami, Ayokunle and Ayooluwa), each dressed in a yellow shirt and sitting on his bicycle; five catty little white girls, all in pink (including Freya Bell as Layla, whom Georgie punches in the face); the two social workers; Mr Barrowclough (Cary Crankson), a teacher at Georgie’s school.  The sarcastic treatment of the social workers is laid on too thick and that of the teacher didn’t make sense to me.  His first remarks make clear he’s scornfully aware that Georgie’s not in school but when he bumps into her later in the film, Barrowclough is presented as concerned for her welfare, though ineffectually so.  Is his failure to put social services in the picture about Georgie meant to be a scathing (grossly unfair) comment on the apathy of public authorities?  That idea presumably also explains why, when Georgie and Jason first team up to steal a bike, the police spot them running away but don’t try to track the conspicuous duo down.

    In spite of all this, newcomer Lola Campbell and, especially, Harris Dickinson make Scrapper worth watching.  Jason says he was only eighteen when Georgie was born and that he and Vicky weren’t together long; it’s unclear how many of the last twelve years he has spent in Ibiza, from where he’s just returned (he had a job selling tickets for clubs on the island).  He may be thirty but Jason is portrayed as still a big kid – he’s never seen in long trousers for a start.  When it looks as if he’s abandoned Georgie again, she finds him kicking a ball about with local boys half his age; at the end of the film, he seems to have developed into her new best mate as much as a father figure.  (Ali is virtually dropped from the second half, a pity because Alin Uzun gives a nice performance.)  Harris Dickinson’s height means that Jason is a literally big kid or a tall one anyway.  The beanpole callowness is amusing but Dickinson has empathy to spare.  He’s never making fun of the character.  Even allowing that the film was shot two years ago, he’s playing alongside less experienced feature-film actors – adults as well as children – but he blends in very naturally.  The talented Lola Campbell is at her best in her scenes with him.  Standing on a station platform at the start of a day out together, Jason tells Georgie that he and Vicky used to invent conversations between strangers who caught their attention.  Jason and Georgie now do the same; as they watch a couple of commuters on the opposite platform, a man and a woman, they work up a dialogue about a collapsing marriage.  This improvisation is Scrapper‘s most enjoyable moment.  You don’t necessarily believe that Georgie is in character here.  You do know that Lola Campbell and Harris Dickinson are having fun with the improv.  Their pleasure is infectious.

    29 August 2023

  • Tori and Lokita

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (2022)

    The Dardenne brothers’ films have repeatedly featured very young leads – from The Promise (1996) and Rosetta (1999), through The Kid with a Bike (2011), to Young Ahmed (2019) and now Tori and Lokita.  Even when children haven’t been the main characters on screen, they’ve more than once been crucial presences or absences.  The protagonist of The Son (2002) is a father in mourning, driven to take revenge on the man who killed the title character.  In The Child (2005), a petty crook and new father sells his infant to a black-market adoption ring then has second thoughts.  In five of the seven films mentioned, the children are white Belgians but that has changed in the Dardennes’ most recent work.  The eponymous Ahmed is from a Belgian-Asian family.  Eleven-year-old Tori (Pablo Schils) and sixteen-year-old Lokita (Joely Mbundu) are African immigrants to Belgium.

    Parent-child relationships of various kinds have been central to all these pictures until this latest one.  They’re not unimportant in Tori and Lokita but they are markedly different from before.  It isn’t surprising, given the age gap between them, that Lokita feels an almost maternal responsibility for Tori although, as the plot develops, she needs his help too – increasingly urgently.  The film’s actual parent-child relationship is necessarily remote.  Lokita is expected to earn money in Belgium for her family back in Cameroon; she makes several phone calls to her mother, explaining why this is easier said than done.  Lokita has five brothers; they don’t include Tori but in their new country he and Lokita are trying to pass themselves off as orphan siblings from Benin.  Lokita is applying for a work visa:  in the opening scene she’s being interviewed by Belgian immigration officers whose questions focus on her claim to have recognised Tori as her brother in the orphanage he’d been placed in; another sequence shows Tori rehearsing Lokita in the answers she’ll give in her next interview about the orphanage.  It’s later on in the film that we learn the pair actually met on the refugee boat that brought them from Africa to Sicily.

    Other details of Tori’s orphanhood are presumably meant to be true – that his mother died giving birth to him and his uncle claimed the death was due to the newborn’s ‘powers of a witch’.  At any rate, Tori’s status as a persecuted ‘sorcerer child’ in Benin has enabled him to obtain residency in Belgium.  He goes to school and shares a room with Lokita in some kind of youth hostel.  Lokita’s lack of a work visa means she has to live by her wits and earn where she can – not only to provide for herself and Tori but also in order to pay off debts to the Africans who smuggled them into Europe.  Tori is devoted to her, ready with Lokita’s medication for the panic attacks to which she’s prone, joining her in singing to diners in an eatery, for which they’re paid a few euros by the place’s owner, Betim (Alban Ukaj).  He also lets the kids have pizza and focaccia going spare but the bleaker side of their association with Betim soon emerges.  He’s at the centre of a drug ring and the youngsters are two of his couriers.  He offers Lokita bits of extra cash in return for sexual favours – offers she always resists but sometimes can’t refuse.

    When her visa application fails, Betim proposes a deal:  Lokita will tend his cannabis crop, in a remote hangar-like location, for three months; in return, Betim will illegally arrange for her to receive the papers she needs to stay in Belgium.  Betim’s sidekick Luckas (Tijmen Govaerts) drives her to the hash house – Lokita is made to wear a blindfold on the journey – and shows her the ropes.  She has a bed and food but is otherwise shut off from the world; with her phone confiscated, she can’t even communicate with Tori.  The separation distresses them both but fearless, resourceful Tori is determined to end it.  Hiding in Betim’s car, he gets a ride to where Lokita is virtually kept prisoner and finds a way in.

    As usual in a Dardennes film, the setting is the Liège area in the present day and the visuals are dismally realistic:  the scenario can’t end happily unless the brothers have suddenly gone soft, and they haven’t.  It’s nevertheless a shock when Luckas, irritated by Lokita’s anxious protests after he has coldly explained the rules of her new assignment in the cannabis hangar, slaps her face; this moment prefigures the greater shock of the bullet he fires into Lokita’s head in the climax to the film, shortly after she and Tori have escaped from the place. (A second bullet from Luckas follows – just to make sure.)  The film’s closing sequence is Lokita’s funeral, at which Tori speaks briefly.  The closing line is his ‘Now you’re dead and I’m left alone’.  The grimness of Tori and Lokita can push a viewer (this one anyway) into the desperate, futile tactic of telling yourself it’s-only-a-movie though you know full well the whole point of the exercise is to describe and condemn socio-economic and political reality.

    For a while, I wondered if the film was nothing more than that.  I was eventually convinced that it was – and dramatically richer – thanks to the strength of the main characterisations and especially the central relationship.  Tori and Lokita is the third Belgian film in the space of less than two years (after Playground (2021) and Close (2022)) to feature exceptional work from child or adolescent actors.  Joely Mbundu is thoroughly natural as tall, melancholy Lokita; she has a beautiful face and a lovely singing voice.  Pablo Schils is even more remarkable, not least by injecting against-the-odds humour into proceedings.  Tori’s laughter – heard when he asks Lokita a trick question in their run-through for her next grilling by immigration officers and after the boy gets one over on Betim – really is infectious.  On the other hand, Tori’s repeated calling of Lokita’s name is wrenching:  first as he tries, standing outside her cannabis cell, to attract her attention; then when he discovers her dead body.

    Even if the writer-directors are too much realists to be hopeful, their sympathy with the plight of young immigrant exiles in Europe, caught in a pincer movement between bureaucracy and criminal exploiters, does lead the Dardennes to heroise Tori and Lokita unreservedly.  It would take a hard heart, though, to see this treatment as sentimental rather than humane.  What’s also impressive about the brothers as politically serious film-makers is their presentation of the bad guys in the stories they tell.  In the cinema of Ken Loach, the Dardennes’ political confrère, those playing representatives of the iniquitous system that Loach is skewering, are encouraged to interpret their characters as intentionally malign – with the result that they rarely come across as unwitting parts of the same system that is victimising the ‘good’ people in the set-up.  The Dardennes’ approach is more intelligent.  Betim behaves viciously but Alban Ukaj’s good performance never smacks of moral commentary by the actor, as performances in Loach films often do.  Ukaj shows Betim, rather, as enmeshed in an economic structure which compels him, like Lokita and Tori, to work hard for a living.  For Betim, that means sweating to keep up with orders for meals he cooks in the restaurant kitchen as well as organising the supply and sale of marijuana on the streets.

    21 August 2023

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