Tag: Film Review

The Dry

MA 15+, 117 minutes

4 Stars

Review by © Jane Freebury

The details of Jane Harper’s bestselling novel are known to many readers the world over, yet the film adaptation with Eric Bana is no less likely to be a success. Even though we know in advance what happens.

Purists may resist the imposing presence of Bana as Aaron Falk. He is a different physical type from his character on the page. In Harper’s words, her protagonist is pale, blond and freckled, burdened with a complexion that presents a distinct disadvantage under the harsh outback sun.

Bana, on the other hand, is a good fit for man of the land. He hasn’t been cast as a Hollywood superhero for nothing, and he fits equally well as a federal police officer here, the financial crimes analyst from the city.

Aaron goes back to Kiewarra, the town where he grew up, to attend the funeral of an old friend, Luke.

On return, Aaron is made to feel he no longer belongs. As an outsider from the metropolis, as a representative of overarching authority but also as a person with a smear against his name.

There is the suspicion that he didn’t say all he knew when a local girl, Ellie Deacon (BeBe Bettencourt), was found drowned 20 years before.

In The Dry, the people of Kiewarra have had a brush with the apocalypse, and they are toughened. From relentless drought, the existential glow of bushfires on the horizon and the plume of dust that rises behind everything that moves. It has not rained in 324 days, and there are no prospects it will any time soon.

In his (fictional) hometown in regional Victoria, Aaron is a five-hour drive from Melbourne but light years away from the world he knows. Suddenly pitched back into the bush, he comes alive to it for the first time in 20 years, and it is sensory overload.

Memories triggered by a return to place, can be so powerful. Nothing else has been laid down there since they were formed, and they are as fresh as yesterday.

Aaron discovers he remains implicated in what happened to Ellie, so he has an investment in the truth, even if ‘isn’t something you can expect to find in this town’, as someone says. But Aaron is not a member of the town ecosystem and he has clarity of recall.

After attending the funeral of former friend Luke Hadley, shot dead along with his wife and young son, Aaron decides to stay on, despite the glacial welcome he has received. He will take more leave and remain in town because the more he hears about the shootings, the less convinced he is that Luke was to blame.

A visit to Luke’s grieving parents is met with suspicion by grieving father, Gerry (Bruce Spence). The teenage girl found drowned at a popular swimming spot was a friend of his and Luke’s, so what more does he know?

At the hotel where Aaron is grudgingly given a room, the hotelier in wild bushman’s beard and several hostile others, had me wondering whether The Dry was going to veer into ‘outback gothic’. The atmosphere has more than a touch of Wake in Fright, the brawling, brutal classic Australian outback thriller of 1971.

No night-time kangaroo hunts or drunken games of two up, just a mood of menace

The town schoolteacher here, John Polson’s conflicted Scott Whitlam, is an after-hours pokies addict. It’s a difficult role to play.

The Dry screenplay, a collaboration between Connolly and Harry Cripps, stays true to the book, however. There are no night-time kangaroo hunts or drunken games of two up, just a pervasive mood of menace.

Not everyone spurns Aaron. Gretchen (a lively Genevieve O’Reilly) doesn’t. She signals her interest, and there is a short-lived flirtation. O’Reilly’s performance is very engaging, but also well-judged where I found some minor characters overdrawn.

About what it means to return to place, where you grew up

The director, Robert Connolly (Balibo, Paper Planes) has observed that his film is a story about what it means to returns to the place where you grew up. As such The Dry is a story about ‘staying or leaving’, something many can respond to.

Connolly has kept the lid on things, ensuring his story remains character-driven when it could have become melodramatic, even over-wrought. Ensuring the narrative works as a crime thriller and not an outback gothic drama. The Dry is a compelling film that has really enhanced its source.

First published in the Canberra Times on 1 January 2021

How to Be a Good Wife

M, 108 minutes

4 Stars

Review by © Jane Freebury

How to Be a Good Wife opens at the crack of dawn, as everyone gets ready for a busy day. The new school year is about to begin with a fresh intake of girls who will learn the ‘pillars of wisdom’ for successful household management and a happy marriage.

In 1967, the universities in France may have been festering with revolution but there were other options for parents who wanted to prepare their daughters for life. There were more than 1,000 institutes across the country like the Van Der Beck Institute that offered courses for educating teenage girls on how to become the perfect homemaker and wife.

a surprising footnote to the 1960s turned into marvellous farce

Writer-director Martin Provost has turned this surprising footnote to the end of the 1960s in France into a marvellous farce, just what the 2020 silly season needs. A comedy set in a school of good housekeeping and good manners in a walled town known best for its vineyards and strudel. Far from the ructions in Paris in the lead-up to May 1968, but not quite far enough.

As the cock crows, head instructor Paulette Van Der Beck (Juliette Binoche) is already dressed, looking snappy in a pastel pink fitted number, high heels and string of pearls. One last spray of lacquer to her rigid hair and she’ll be ready.

it has been easy to forget Binoche is a really good comedienne

From the outset, Juliette Binoche is wonderful in this central role. With so many serious and occasionally devastating roles she has played over the years, it has been easy to forget that she is a really good comedienne. Matched with Provost’s snappy lines and direction, her work here is a triumph.

An extended opening montage that introduces the institute and its assorted characters is one of the film’s delights. Paulette’s introduction to the new students is set off against an amusing series of vignettes that show how things work in practice.

Paulette’s ‘pillars’ of wifely wisdom are reminiscent of 1950s manuals for good housekeeping, full of advice on how to keep hubby happy, that do the rounds online. They contain advice about making hubby comfortable after a long day at work, plumping up pillows, offering to remove shoes, while speaking in a soothing voice. One I’m thinking of ends with the maxim ‘a good wife always knows her place’.

There are other signs that there is fun ahead. Sister Marie-Therese (Noemie Lvovsky, of Camille Rewinds) is sprung with her ciggie. A former member of the French Resistance, she now seems to have a debilitating superstition of redheads. A new redhead has enrolled, and they have never had one before.

Yolande Moreau and Noemie Lvovsky in How to Be a Good Wife. Courtesy Unifrance

The third whacky female is Gilberte Van Der Beck, the headmaster’s unmarried sister, played by Yolande Moreau. Her performance was commanding in Provost’s most highly awarded film, Seraphine.

After a few comic scenes of Paulette’s husband, school principal, Robert Van Der Beck (Francois Berleand) ogling then new student body, he is swept from the frame by a cardiac arrest.

Then Gilberte and Paulette discover that Robert has left the school’s finances in ruins. They seek advice from banker Andre (Edouard Baer), who turns out to be Paulette’s long lost old flame.

Their renewed attraction takes HTBAGW n a whole new direction. The pacing changes awkwardly as scenes of romantic drama ensue. However, a light farcical tone is restored as Andre proposes while hanging from a downpipe and reciting a recipe to prove his credentials.

Paulette, Gilberte and Marie-Therese have their work cut out with the class of ’67, who are in many ways a more feisty, worldly bunch than their cloistered teachers. They don’t need liberating like their seniors do and it’s their generation that will carry feminism forward, after all.

The bumbling adults are the main event, with the girls relegated to subplots. However, a young Brigitte Bardot lookalike (Marie Zabukovec), and two in a tentative romance (Anamaria Vartolomei and ‘the redhead’ Pauline Briand), bring a heap of verve and brio along that the film benefits from enormously. Zai Zai Zai Zai!

Schools of etiquette and deportment haven’t disappeared, of course, and today no doubt teach with gender equality in mind.

Farce doesn’t appeal to everyone, but the French do it brilliantly when they do it well. Despite a few diversions into other territory, this film is very entertaining, and turns its title on its head.

First published in the Canberra Times on 26 December 2020

Featured image: Noemie Lvovsky and Juliette Binoche in How to Be a Good Wife. Courtesy Unifrance

A Call to Spy

M, 124 minutes

3 Stars

Review by © Jane Freebury

This handsomely produced American film is set in Europe during World War II, when things were going badly for the Allies. It was looking likely Hitler’s forces would cross the Channel at any minute.

A Call to Spy was filmed in Philadelphia and Budapest. Locations that pose as France and London, in subterfuge entirely appropriate to a tale about espionage.

Based loosely on the remarkable facts, it is about women who became British spies early in 1940-41, when Britain’s prospects of survival had hit rock bottom.

The British did not send women into the field, until then. When some gutsy and dedicated women responded to Churchill’s call for women to join a ‘secret army’ working undercover in Nazi-occupied Europe. This was the same organisation that Nancy Wake, the ‘white mouse’, belonged to.

A Call to Spy isn’t a million miles from the film Charlotte Gray, released in 2001 with Cate Blanchett’s character a blend of famous female spies.

A Call to Spy is directed by Lydia Dean Pilcher, whose filmography mostly includes production credits. Her direction is fine, and the high production values have contributed to convincing sets and costume that evoke the wartime period well enough. However, there are other weaknesses to this, a story whose telling is long overdue.

The main character here is Virginia Hall, a woman who lived for danger. She was American, a brave woman who tried to enter the US foreign service but was rejected because of her disability, a wooden leg that was the result of a hunting accident.

Here she is played by actor Sarah Megan Thomas, who also wrote the screenplay.

Hall eventually opted for espionage, joining up to Churchill’s Special Operations Executive that worked in the field with the French Resistance. The SOE was sometimes dubbed the ‘Baker Street Irregulars’ due to its clandestine existence.

After service in the field, Hall slipped into the obscurity she seemed to choose, but still received medals for outstanding service including the French Croix de Guerre. A glance at her Smithsonian entry online confirms an extraordinary wartime record. Her prosthesis, a wooden leg known as ‘Cuthbert’, has even been honoured.

Postwar, she tried again to become a diplomat.  Eventually she joined a newly formed agency known as the CIA, becoming one of its key operatives.

In addition to Hall, the central character, there is another woman of great potential interest, Noor Inayat Khan (Radhika Apte), apparently the daughter of the man who introduced Sufism to the West. A pacifist Sufi Muslim who joined the SOE, she was an able radio operator, the first to be sent into occupied France.

Why, with such a scintillating backstory, is it low on dramatic tension?

Noor ended up on her own in France, as did Virginia. She showed exceptional courage during Gestapo torture and was eventually shot in Dachau.

She became the first Muslim female to be decorated as a British war hero, receiving the highest civilian medal, the George Cross, posthumously.

The facts are all extraordinary.

So why, with such a scintillating backstory, is the film rather bland and low on dramatic tension? The writing is pedestrian and there is little that shows how remarkable these women and Vera Atkins (Stana Katic), the woman who recruited them, really were.

Unfortunately, there are also too many moments when the performances of key characters don’t ring true. Apte as Noor and Thomas as Virginia and many others are fine but there are scenes between Katic’s Atkins and Linus Roache’s Maurice Buckmaster (Law and Order), her boss, that let the ensemble down. Very clunky performances.

The screenplay needed more research built into it, to make clear the significance of these women and their unique stories. There is instead a screed of stunning facts left for the very end, before the final credits.

The historical background is riveting. Wish I could say the same of the film.

This true tale of espionage, little known, has managed to beat the latest James Bond fantasy to the cinema screen. Another better film may come along that does justice to this remarkable story.

First published in the Canberra Times on 26 December 2020

The Furnace

MA 15+, 116 minutes

4 stars

Review by © Jane Freebury

 

 

Among the memorable moments in the classic film, Gallipoli , there’s a standout that is set in the desert, the Australian heartland. Two young men on their way to enlist in Perth are having a chat with a cameleer they have just run into.

It’s worth revisiting this conversation for its observations on our place in the world, and for the ambivalence it expresses about our Red Centre. It can of course be found on YouTube.

The cameleer doesn’t know that World War I is underway and hasn’t the foggiest idea why countries are fighting. When the pair tell him they are going to join up and travel to Turkey so the enemy won’t end up here, he pauses for a think. Squinting as he surveys the desert plain, the camel driver observes ‘And they’re welcome to it’!

The Furnace, a remarkable first feature from writer-director Roderick MacKay, is set in 1897, a short two decades earlier. A time when whole teams of cameleers plied the vast deserts of Western Australia, carrying supplies to remote mining settlements when the state was in the grip of gold fever.

From incidental character to the centre of the frame, the cameleer emerges as protagonist in The Furnace. The young Egyptian actor Ahmed Malek in the role of Hanif, a camel driver from Afghanistan, brings impressive nuance and depth to this home-grown, gold rush Western.

David Wenham and Ahmad Malek in The Furnace

At the tender age of 15, Hanif had been sent abroad by his family to work. He is clearly still a boy, just as the others say, and has yet to learn to learn how to negotiate the adult world. His expressive features betray his confusion and dismay too well.

His close friend, Woorak (Baykali Ganambarr, from The Nightingale), is a Badimaya man of similar age who helps him find food. Hanif fumbles while handling his rifle. It’s the first thing we find out about him.

Hanif had been safe under the wing of Jundah (Kaushik Das), his avuncular Sikh foreman, until the day a white settler shot him dead. The settler objected to Hanif using water from a well to wash his feet for the Muslim prayer ritual, and Jundah was shot in the process of trying to divert attention away from the boy.

Suddenly alone, Hanif comes across a man badly wounded in a skirmish that left a number of Chinese dead in mysterious circumstances. Hanif’s world truly starts to unravel when he takes up with Mal (David Wenham), purportedly a prospector but, as he carries no tools, most likely a common thief. Wenham’s character doesn’t, unfortunately, extend much beyond caricature.

It transpires that the ‘crazy white man’ is a marked man. Mal has stolen gold in his possession. Two bars’ worth that inconveniently carry a Crown stamp, a dead giveaway.

Incapacitated by his gunshot wound, Mal needs help for the next stage of his plan and inveigles Hanif to be his partner to achieve it. The boy will help Mal reach his destination, a clandestine furnace, in return for one of the bars.

So Hanif becomes an unfortunate partner in crime, indentured to a criminal on a journey through the outback to an undisclosed location. All for the price of the trip home to Afghanistan.

The Furnace is set in Kalbarri, WA, and on location in the Mount Magnet area of the state’s Mid West, home to one of the state’s longest continuously operating goldmines. Mount Magnet began operating in the 1890s.

Another aspect of the film’s authenticity, is the use of languages. Pashto, Punjabi, English, Indigenous Badimaya (an endangered language) and Cantonese would have been heard in WA at the time.

In the 19th century, before rail and road infrastructure in the outback, the camel trains provided a lifeline for remote communities. The cameleers, collectively still known as the ‘Ghans’, came from many countries – Pakistan, Persia, Turkey, India, and Afghanistan – providing indispensable transport and supplies.

Despite the scale of the film’s narrative, with twists and turns and an abundance of characters moving around the landscape, the dramatic tensions hold tight.

The Furnace is impressive, an engrossing and compelling tale. An ambitious undertaking, yes, with many players and conflicting angles. It could have come asunder but a compelling central character, who is engaging, unaffiliated and ready to learn, was a discerning place to start.

First published in the Canberra Times on 12 December 2020

The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart

M, 107 minutes

4 Stars

Review by © Jane Freebury

The song in the title of this doco about one of the biggest pop music groups ever, may not be the one that comes to mind first when thinking about the Bee Gees, but it is certainly apt. For all the amazing successes they had, the Gibb brothers had more than their fair share of heartache.

Another way of looking at it was that How Can You Mend a Broken Heart was a comeback single. It was one of the first tracks from the Bee Gees, brothers Barry, Maurice and Robin, when they got back together again in 1971 after their break up two years earlier. And it was the first to reach No 1 for them in the US.

The Bee Gees were particularly good songwriters. A very talented, versatile and enduring success in pop music but it seems despite all the awards and the accolades they still get a hard time of it in the court of received opinion.

The anti-disco movement that began in the late 1970s was tough on the Bee Gees, and other, mainly Black American performers. Perhaps this doco will help bring a re-assessment of the Bee Gees and the many fabulous songs they wrote, for themselves and many other performers.

An interview with the last remaining Bee Gee at home in Miami bookends the story. Even Barry Gibb, the tall, good-looking one with even teeth and a mane of brown hair, has come to look his age. He is of course the only one of the four brothers still with us.

But what a journey it was. Right at the start, footage from a concert in Oakland, California in 1979 is a reminder of how big they were. ‘Classic sixties pop’, someone observes. They may have started surfing the same wave as the Beatles et al, but they outlasted the fab four, with hits in every decade since to the 1960s when they began.

In Oakland they were riding high on the massive success of their soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever which earned them, for better and worse, the enduring moniker Kings of Disco. Prep for a ‘disco demolition’ night that would go some way towards trashing the Bee Gees’ reputation was well underway in Chicago, spearheaded by a local radio DJ.

Barry, Robin and Maurice had certainly come a long way since calling Australia home. After the Gibb family migrated here from Britain in 1958, they were only here a short while.

Were they part of a Pommie diaspora of pop celebs who stayed and made their name here? No, in less than a decade, the Gibbs were back in the UK, though not before they had had laid down a local hit single, Spicks and Specks.

Doco director Frank Marshall, who does a decent job, is known mostly as a producer has directed a few high-impact titles like Arachnophobia and Congo but he did have a great team of key creatives assisting. Documentary writer Mark Monroe (Chasing Ice, and The Cove among the many titles in his filmography) and editors Derek Boonstra, in particular.

The film is the usual meld of archival images and interview material, a little rigidly matching image to narration until the clips lengthen, the rhythm relaxes and the film hits its stride.

We hear assessments of the Bee Gees’ contribution to music from the likes of Eric Clapton, Justin Timberlake and Coldplay frontman Chris Martin.

the revelations are mostly about the bond between the men themselves

We also hear a bit from the brothers’ partners. But the doco’s personal revelations are mostly about the bond between the men themselves, including the bond with much younger Andy who developed his own career. Brotherhood brought the usual fraternal rivalries but it also brought the gift of compatible voices and a natural synchronicity.

It is said by interviewees on more than one occasion that had the Bee Gees not been brothers they would never have stuck together.

The pop idols’ struggle with fame, the substance abuse, the internecine squabbles, and the strain of wanting independent recognition, all have a familiar ring. As does the usual excess, like one of them, Maurice perhaps, owning six Rolls Royces before the age of 21.

The Bee Gees’ flamboyance is superficial and easy to shoot down. The catalogue of great songs is another matter entirely.

First published in the Canberra Times on 6 December 2020

Featured image: Robin, Barry and Maurice Gibb in their heyday

Oliver Sacks: His Own Life

M, 151 minutes

4 Stars

Review by © Jane Freebury

The subject of this fine documentary was one of society’s eccentrics. A medical doctor and a writer of books with whimsical titles like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars. He was the kind of person whose life story is, I’d say, best told in the documentary film genre.

His lust for life, restless curiosity and pioneering spirit built many dimensions into the man. Dr Oliver Wolf Sacks was bundle of contradictions. Too many, it seemed, for a single individual. Who would believe this life story in any other form but documentary?

If truth is indeed stranger than fiction idea, it has made this film from distinguished New York- based documentarian Ric Burns so much more successful than the fiction feature Awakenings of 1990. That film was loosely based on Sacks’ first book and starred the late Robin Williams as the mercurial medical doctor and writer of renown and Robert De Niro.

Shortly after Sacks announced in 2015 that he had terminal cancer and six months to live, he agreed to become the subject of this new doco. A portrait while dying was another bold move from an unorthodox individual.

a doco in which a gay man gets the straight treatment

Sacks grew up in London during WWII, the youngest child in an Orthodox Jewish family who eventually became a doctor like his parents. After receiving his medical degree from Queens College, Oxford, he left home and Britain for good, and sought freedom in America after his parents cruelly rejected him when he revealed he was gay.

Arriving in California as a 27 year old, he interned at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco. Outside of work hours, he threw himself into what 1960s California had to offer. He became a biker who loved to drive his BMW into the desert at night, he got into amphetamines in a big way and naturally he fell in with the gay scene.

Then it suddenly all stopped. Sacks became celibate, and remained that way until he met Bill Hayes, a writer, who was his partner during the last six years of his life.

Crucially, Sacks had moved to New York in the mid-1960s and started work at the Beth Abraham Hospital for chronic disease. Some of his patients there had been in a catatonic state since they contracted lethargic encephalitis in an epidemic during the 1920s-30s. It was a turning point in his medical career.

In his best-selling novels and essays, Dr Sacks devoted himself to documenting the strange ways and byways of the human mind. His work was based on his clinical experiences treating patients with chronic conditions like Tourette’s, dementia and Asperger’s.

He became a pioneer in helping patients long deemed brain dead to respond to music by singing or dancing, thereby shedding their frozen states and demonstrating that their minds were still responsive.

It is hard to square the interview scenes in this doco of the frail and elderly Sacks chatting with close associates with the famous images of him as a leather clad biker. Or even the muscled man emerging more recently from the river in the Bronx after a long distance swim. He was a lifelong distance swimmer who took to the water every day.

That familiar shot astride his BMW motorbike, looking quite the stud, was published on the cover of his book On the Move: A Life. The doctor also wrote of his own issues.

There seem to be many reasons why this British-educated, US-based neurologist became famous. There’s his clinical, ground-breaking work with his patients with chronic conditions, then there is the man himself. All good reasons for seeing this documentary on one of life’s true eccentrics who believed that it was the fate of every human being to be singular and unique.

The man was many things, all bundled together in the one burly body. Doctor and patient, all in one. And yet, despite his many sides, he says he feels he is ‘a single person’.

Oliver Sacks, neurologist and prolific author, is a gay man who gets the straight treatment here in this doco directed by Ric Burns. Hopefully Sacks’ life story won’t be made into a fiction feature, though it seems inevitable it one day will. Hard to imagine it could be more revelatory than this excellent documentary about one of life’s true individuals.

First published in the Canberra Times on 5 December 2020

Misbehaviour

M, 106 minutes

4 Stars

Review by © Jane Freebury

When organisers were getting ready for the Miss World contest in 1970, there were plans afoot to gatecrash the televised event and spoil their party. A group of radical young feminists in another part of London were hatching a plot to disrupt it as the winner was announced with the world media watching.

Misbehaviour, based on true events, is about the main players in the story. The group of radical young women and some of the key contestants, and others too. American comedian Bob Hope who officiated and the British entrepreneur behind it, Eric Morley.

It is delicious to watch the two opposing forces, the organisers and the disrupters, on a collision course during the set-up in the early scenes.

I thought the very versatile Rhys Ifans might have done more with his role as Morley, but thought again. As a recent owner of the sister contest in the US, Miss Universe, Donald Trump has probably already done enough to besmirch the name of men in the beauty business.

Girls misbehaving stop the world

The male characters are fascinating, especially the pageant host Bob Hope. Greg Kinnear is outstanding as the very dubious king of comedy, an embodiment of 1970s male chauvinism. A flagrant womaniser who thrived on the opportunities afforded him, but the Misbehaviour story belongs to the women.

To the protesters who got themselves arrested and to the contestants. In particular the bolshie favourite Miss Sweden (Clara Rosager), the winner Miss Grenada (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), and the blow-in, Miss (Black) South Africa (Loreece Harrison).

As Sally Alexander, a single mother and mature age student at University College London, Keira Knightley has the lead role.

A few early scenes explain her personal journey and convey the tenor of the times. The way the interview for a university place is conducted by a panel of male academics, and her experience in tutorials once she gets in.  Sexist foibles were not confined to men in show biz.

Serendipity connects Sally with a collective of radical young women who deface and subvert advertising posters. They turn them into feminist messages of protest, when they’re not producing their own campaign posters demanding equal rights for women. One of the women is Jo Robinson, played by the terrific Irish actor, Jessie Buckley (Wild Rose, I’m Thinking of Ending Things).

It’s Knightley’s character, a single mother with a male partner, who supplies the narrative focus and the glue between the world of academia and radical collective that believes that television is an arm of state oppression.

Women’s liberation was, of course, one of many activist movements afoot in 1970. The movement against the Vietnam War was huge, and the anti-apartheid movement was big too.

The year, 1970, was pivotal for people of colour in the beauty pageant too. Not only did the Miss World organisers have angry feminists to deal with, they had activist Peter Hain (played here by Luke Thompson) to answer to as well.

There is a small scene in which the white South African anti-apartheid protestor who had spearheaded the anti-apartheid movement collars Morley. He wants to know why there is no black South African contestant at Miss World, to reflect the reality that 80 percent of the country’s population was black. Morley quickly sends South Africa a request for a black contestant to stand alongside the white woman already in attendance.

makes its points with sharp writing, spirited performances and a light touch

The year that the Miss World contest was besieged by feminist protests was the year that the first black woman won the contest. It makes for an interesting exchange in the ladies powder room between Knightley’s Sally Alexander and Mbatha-Raw’s Miss Grenada, a dignified Jennifer Hosten.

At the film’s conclusion, the filmmakers include present-day cameos of Hosten and other key characters. It’s good to see that the experiences in 1970 did no one any professional or personal harm.

Many of the key creatives on Misbehaviour were women, from the producers to the co-writers, Rebecca Frayn and Gaby Chiappe. Director Philippa Lowthorpe has a background in directing documentaries and in television film (The Other Boleyn Girl) and episodes of popular series (The Crown and Call the Midwife).

It’s an all-girl show, in front of the camera and behind it. And it’s a really good story that makes its points with sharp writing, spirited performances and a light touch.

First published in the Canberra Times on 27 November 2020

In the Name of the Land

3 Stars

M, 103 minutes

Review by © Jane Freebury

French farmers sure know how to stage a media event. In recent times, they have let sheep loose at the Louvre, dumped tonnes of pumpkins and manure at the doors of government buildings. A recent demo saw a battalion of tractors from around the country descend on Paris to protest about falling prices and the EU common agricultural policy.

The French agricultural community seems to be able to make its voice heard, however In the Name of the Land is the story of an individual farmer who kept his worries to himself.

a proud and self-reliant individual who felt driven to battle on alone

It’s the heartfelt story of Pierre Jarjeau (played by the popular Guillaume Canet) a devoted husband and father of two, who loved the land but the farming life got the better of him. Canet, not instantly recognisable in a wig with a bald patch, has rarely been better in the role of a proud and self-reliant individual who felt driven to battle on alone.

In the Name of the Land is written and directed by Edouard Bergeon, the son and grandson of farmers. He quit the land to become a photojournalist, though he has in a sense returned with a feature film that is based on the story of his own father and his travails with the family farm.

In the late 1970s, Pierre had recently returned from several years in the US. Spending his time among cattle ranchers who ran herds of 10,000 head in the wide open, sparsely populated spaces of Wyoming.

Pierre reclaims his sweetheart, Claire (Veerle Baetens), and takes over the family farm, Grands Bois, undertaking to buy it from his father, Jacques (Rufus), a steely-eyed, implacable old autocrat, as hard as his son was gentle and loving. When Pierre was signing on the dotted line committing to the purchase, why was I having a sense of déjà vu?

French rural dramas sometimes speak of quiet desperation and read like Greek tragedy

Ah yes. It took me back to a film in 2011, another devastating portrait of rural life, You Will Be My Son. That film was about a winemaker (Niels Arestrup in the role) who also made his son’s life hell and selected the son of his steward to take over the business.

From time to time, a gothic strain emerges in French rural dramas, like the recent Bloody Milk, that speaks of quiet desperation and reads like Greek tragedy.

With its big country canvas and optimistic opening mood, In the Name of the Land starts out rather like a Western. Whether riding his BMW motorbike or striding through the rich earth of his fields, Pierre seems like a man with a future.

The confidence is offset by a slight but growing sense of dread. Whether it is the risk of injury through careless use of machinery, or the chance that Pierre’s teenage son Thomas (Anthony Bajon) has an accident while tearing through the countryside on his new mountain bike. When disaster does arrive, it seems inevitable from the start.

Despite his innate cockiness, it seems Pierre is in over his head, heavily invested in yet another new scheme to pull him through. Whether it’s goats or chickens, each bold new business plan seems to fall short of the objective.

As Pierre becomes a chain-smoker with blood pressure going through the roof, and impossible for his family to deal with, a palpable sense of impending disaster is taking hold of the narrative.

When Pierre pays his father a visit, a rare event since the old man became a widower, Jacques never thinks to suspend loan repayments or offer support. All he can say is ‘work is the only cure’.

Jacques was farming in the early days of the EU common agricultural policy, when there was less competition, and less regulation. His son was a dedicated and competent farmer like him, but more inclined to be entrepreneurial and accept more risk.

What exactly made for different career outcomes for the two men is never entirely clear. More backstory would have helped this intimate, sad tale.

In the Name of the Land did big business at the French box office last year, but with audiences outside the cities. It suggests that empathy for the rural sector among city folk in France may still have a way to go.

First published in the Canberra Times on 29 November 2020

Monsoon

M, 85 minutes

3 Stars

Review by © Jane Freebury

The personal histories of two of the key creatives behind Monsoon, writer-director Hong Khaou and lead actor Henry Golding, make them uniquely qualified to tell this story. Monsoon explores displacement and cultural homelessness, a growing problem in the world today.

Both the filmmaker and the lead performer in this quiet, understated story of homecoming were uprooted from their homes in Asia when under 10 years of age. Golding, of mixed cultural heritage, moved from Malaysia to Surrey as a young kid. Khaou, of Cambodian origin, fled the Khmer Rouge with his family and lived in Vietnam before migrating to Britain.

Monsoon is their story of a young British man, Kit (Golding, the sleek, cool dude from Crazy Rich Asians) who returns to his homeland, Vietnam, only to find himself a tourist in the land of his birth, a stranger in a strange land. It is his first visit since he left, over 30 years ago.

Kit’s family fled Vietnam after the war. Most refugee families who had made it to Hong Kong opted to settle in places like Canada and Australia, but his parents chose England. Why so? He remembers that his mother had admired the Queen, because she seemed nice and polite, and it must therefore follow that the rest of England was too.

Now at last, after quitting his job in digital animation, he will return. There is a specific task to perform. The box he carries with him contains his mother’s ashes. His brother, who is bringing their father’s ashes, will join him soon. Before Henry (Lam Vissay) and wife and young family arrive, Kit is free to roam and explore on his own for a while.

Anyone who has visited Vietnam, and that goes for the 350,000-plus Australians who would visit Vietnam each year, will be familiar with the sights. The swirling swarms of motorcycles, the lively streets, the contrast of old Vietnam with the new. But Kit has booked a room in a high-rise hotel in Saigon so characterless he has to buy a couple of plants at the market to keep him company.

In the scene where a young staffer tells Kit about the hotel amenities in French-accented English, Kit responds in his British version. Two young ethnic Vietnamese speaking to each other in English is kinda droll.

During his visit to the southern capital, Kit connects with an old childhood friend, Lee (David Tran) for whom he has bought simple gifts, including a water filter bottle for which Lee has absolutely no need.

If the gaffe appears to drive a wedge between the two young men it doesn’t explain the uncomfortable, wary look on Lee’s face. Although this is eventually explained, I found aspects of performance in Monsoon rather stilted overall.

Monsoon is most at east with its travelogue sequences. In the attention to ambience in the long takes in widescreen of the cityscapes of Saigon and Hanoi, in which Kit cuts a solitary figure in the frame.

On a gay hook-up, Kit meets a lanky American, Lewis (Parker Sawyers), the son of a Vietnam vet. It transpires, that the young Black American is on an intense emotional journey of his own. He has inherited the guilt of a father who served three tours during the ‘American War’, and although nevertheless accepted as a Yank, his nationality does have a downside.

Lewis is in Vietnam for pragmatic and hard-nosed business reasons. On one level, he is there to capitalize on ‘cheap labour’ and ‘contribute to an expanding economy’, but he also takes an interest in the culture. After their one-night stand, Kit and Lewis unexpectedly meet each other again on an art tour.

The tour guide, Linh (Molly Harris), has her own backstory, and it adds another dimension to the fractured lines of the jigsaw that is modern Vietnam. Her parents want her to take over the family business making traditional lotus tea. She cannot see the sense in such a laborious process for a beverage that only old people drink.

In very different ways, Kit, Lewis, and Linh feel the weight of history and expectation that they have inherited in modern Vietnam.

It makes for quite an interesting journey, though Monsoon is studied and sombre. I missed the vitality and go-ahead energy of the vibrant Vietnamese people.

First published in the Canberra Times on 22 November 2020

Hillbilly Elegy

Gutsy female lead performances lift all boats in this tale of backwoods America that is both vilified and embraced by a polarised public

M, 116 minutes

4 Stars

Review by © Jane Freebury

Hillbilly Elegy, the book about growing up among white working-class communities in the Appalachians, was published in 2016. It was the year that Donald Trump became US President, a disruptive event if ever there was one.

Read avidly by a public searching for answers that helped explain the success of Trumpism, it became a New York Times bestseller. And it gave its author, J. D. Vance, profile as a social commentator, explaining Americans to themselves.

How could someone like Trump occupy the highest office in the land? Perhaps the autobiography of a man like Vance who came to have a foot in both camps, establishment and anti-establishment, could make some sense of it.

He eventually left the hill country of Kentucky for the hallowed halls of Yale and then joined the financial services industry in LA, but he was an unusual case.

His family home was in Middletown, Kentucky. J. D. was the son of a single mother who took heroin, stole meds from the hospital where she worked as a nurse, and unsurprisingly couldn’t hold a job. Eventually his grandmother took over primary care, and against the odds he finished high school and took a law degree.

The narrative is simply structured, moving backwards and forwards between J. D’s teenage and young adult selves, played by Owen Asztalos and Gabriel Basso, respectively.

Scenes of young J. D. growing up with his sister Lindsay (Haley Bennett) in their utterly chaotic household, is intercut with his older self, moving away from Middleton and building a new life with his supportive girlfriend and wife-to-be, former law school classmate, Usha, played by Freida Pinto (Slumdog Millionaire).

Bent and bewigged, Glenn Close is almost unrecognizable as family matriarch Mamaw, J. D.’s maternal grandmother. As tough as old boots, with a ciggie permanently planted between her lips, Mamaw understands that she has to act to save her grandson.

One day, she just marches in, announcing she is taking J. D. away. His mother, her daughter Beverley (Amy Adams), was doing such a terrible job.

Basso, as the older version of J. D., has a more conventional and less challenging part to play than the actor who plays his younger self.

As the young J. D. Vance, Owen Asztalos articulates the complexity of his love-hate relationship with his mother. Bev was a woman who dragged him from one live-in relationship to the next, substituted his urine specimen sample for her own when she had been on drugs, and thought nothing of making a spectacle of herself in the street while she was having a meltdown. Family violence remained an ongoing tradition.

Volatile and quick-tempered, Beverley is also acutely aware of the opportunities that she has missed out on. Adams gives a remarkable performance here.

Curiously, Hillbilly Elegy is as much the story of J. D. as the story of his mother Beverley, who couldn’t realise her own promise as dux of her school year. J. D. is dangerously close to convincing himself, until Mamaw steps in, that his mother’s grades got her nowhere, so why should he make any effort?

Director Ron Howard, a versatile filmmaker across a range of genre, has a long list of acting credits among his body of work. His unobtrusive directorial style allows scope for actors to do what they do, as they have here in Hillbilly Elegy.

Howard has form in bringing out the best in his actors in films such as A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13 and Cinderella Man, too. I think one of his underrated triumphs is the film Rush about the rivalry between Formula One drivers played by Chris Hemsworth and Daniel Bruhl.

Hillbilly Elegy has the familiar clean style and high production values that I associate with Howard.

The score composed by Hans Zimmer, in collaboration with David Fleming, is more subtle than the usual from Zimmer. And French director of cinematography, Maryse Alberti, has struck a balance between the need for intimacy and wider statement.

Upward mobility in the US, is not like it used to be and if the American dream still works well for some, it certainly doesn’t for others.

This is ultimately a family drama, and the remarkable, inspiring tale of a young man, seriously disadvantaged as a complete establishment outsider, who manages to do good.

First published in the Canberra Times on  14 November 2020

Featured image: Superb performances from Glenn Close and Amy Adams in Hillbilly Elegy. Courtesy Netflix

The Comeback Trail

 

M, 105 minutes

2 Stars

Review by © Jane Freebury

It would be fun to know the insider gags that went into this remake of a film from 1982. It is, among other things, a comedic take on how the entertainment business can work at the murkier end of the scale.

A shonky producer in hock to the mob, is trying hard to avoid a shallow grave. He hatches a plan to sabotage the sets on his next film so his old lead actor has a fatal accident while doing his stunts. That way he gets a big insurance payout that will cover his debts.

Max (Robert De Niro) Barber’s most recent film, something about an order of lewd nuns, was such a flop that he must find $350,000 to repay his financiers as quickly as he can. Mafia boss, Morgan Freeman as Reggie Fontaine, is expecting results and the money owed returned to him, asap.

Reggie may be a movie buff who likes to trade film trivia with Max on classics like Touch of Evil and Psycho, but he has no time for anything that distracts him when debts remain unpaid.

The lengthy narrative set-up is a drawn-out affair with excruciating close-ups of De Niro mugging furiously to overcome the shortcomings in the script. In deerstalker cap, long grey curls and glasses, De Niro looks and behaves like a frenetic Woody Allen.

After Max has hatched his fiendish plan, he sets off with his nephew and fellow producer, Walter Creason (Zach Braff), to hunt for a suitable star. Max has not confided his evil covert plan to the young man.

Casting takes them to an aged care home full of retired actors. Max and Walter find themselves spoilt for choice as antique performers line up to show them they can still do the thing that they were in demand for 40 years ago.

When they are trying to escape, Max and Walter accidentally break into the room occupied by aging Western actor Duke Montana (Tommy Lee Jones), and interrupt him playing Russian roulette with his pistol.

It’s a relief when Jones appears on screen. At last De Niro will have to share the space with someone else.

De Niro has been just right in some comedies like Analyze This and Analyze That, Meet the Parents and the Silver Linings Playbook, but has also been dreadful in others. His performance here in The Comeback Trail is best forgotten.

The comedy does get a fillip with Jones on screen, though not until he is in character. As the Duke – apologies John Wayne – he is a star of Western movies who no one wants to use anymore. Although Duke is the genuine article as a cowboy who does all his own stunts, no one wants to hire him.

The studios just don’t make Westerns anymore. This is historically correct. The Comeback Trail is set in the 1970s.

Against all the odds, Duke survives a fall from his horse. He gets thrown to the ground when Butterscotch stops shy of a jump over flaming covered wagons. On another occasion, his trusty golden lasso gets him out of a deep canyon as a bridge that Max has had sabotaged, collapses. These moments are funny, but the screenplay written by director George Gallo and Josh Posner is pretty pedestrian.

The idea of a slip of a girl directing Max’s ‘rootin tootin shootin’ Western is a contemporary touch. Megan, played by Kate Katzman, looks like she could be a walkover, but when she gets on set, in shorts and cute tops, she is the epitome of the decisive director.

Megan knows what she wants and she knows her stuff too. No doubt she’s a product of film school. She stands her ground. The wagons should look naturalistic and the star needs to be backlit to enhance his mythic status.

Zach Braff and Robert De Niro in The Comeback Trail

I have not seen the first Comeback Trail, in which Buster Crabbe, a former Olympian swimmer and superhero actor, performed his last role, as Duke Montana. It was directed by Harry Hurwitz, a minor director of the time.

It’s my hunch that the original was marginally more rewarding because expectations would have been lower without big name stars who agreed, for some reason or another, to take part in this remake.

First published in the Canberra Times on 15 November 2020

Brazen Hussies

M, 93 minutes

5 Stars

Review by ©  Jane Freebury

 

 

Brilliantly put together, this important doco tells a story about social justice for women that’s a likely eye-opener for millenials

When a couple of women chained themselves to the footrails in a Brisbane bar in 1965, it was a sign that something new was afoot. It was at the time illegal to serve alcohol to females in a public bar.

Women could order a soft drink or sit in their husband’s car and drink a beer, but it was illegal for them to join male customers for a drink inside. Unbelievable.

The men at the bar had their say that day, and the state justice minister had his: the women would ‘get over’ it. Although the media also trivialised the serious intent behind the protest, it was an early defining moment for the women’s liberation movement in Australia.

A decade of campaigns, feminist publications and consciousness raising groups later, International Women’s Year activities were receiving generous funding from the Commonwealth. And, with the appointment of Elizabeth Reid in 1973, Australia became the first country in the world with a female advisor to the government on women’s affairs.

The decade of dramatic change, 1965 to 1975, is framed by writer-director Catherine Dwyer in this outstanding documentary, her first feature. Brazen Hussies is a great story and a terrific achievement, amusing, insightful and entertaining.

An impressive crew of creatives, including editor Rose Jones, collaborated with the filmmaker in production. Producers of note, Sue Maslin and Philippa Campey, were also on board.

After working on She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry of 2014, Mary Dore’s doco history of the women’s movement in the US, Dwyer was drawn to tell the story of second wave feminism in this country. An untold story. It would be for the record, and it would show young women of today the social change that their mothers and grandmothers witnessed during their lifetime.

their young selves, clear-eyed and articulate, fired up and driving things forward

After some scene-setting of movie clips from Hollywood movies with the familiar idealised image of the housewives in the 1950s, Brazen Hussies roars into life.

There are lively and compelling interviews with twenty five or so women, including Elizabeth Reid herself, who experienced those heady times and share unique insights. It is fascinating seeing vision of their young selves, clear-eyed and articulate, fired up and driving things forward.

Former union activist, Zelda D’Aprano, recalls how she chained herself to the doors of the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission in protest over the inadequacy of its equal pay ruling. In 1969 it was just the beginning.

Writer and columnist, Anne Summers, recalls how as a graduate new to the ABC, she earned less than the male trainees with high school qualifications.

Jurist Pat O’Shane, the first Indigenous graduate in Australia, discusses how Indigenous women responded to the movement. A complicated story.

Eva Cox, Martha Ansara, Jeni Thornley, Margot Nash, Gillian Leahy, Barbara Creed, Suzanne Bellamy also appear. It is no surprise that many of these activist women went on to careers in journalism, media, filmmaking, academia, law and politics.

There is also a brief archival footage of my late mother, Julia Freebury, who campaigned for abortion law reform. Abortion was illegal then, only married women could access the pill and there was no pension support for single mothers.

many young women became converts to feminism, just ‘like that’

Another chapter in the history of the women’s movement was the beginnings of developments in gay liberation. With the anti-war movement in top gear, 1965-75 was a time of such incredible foment.

In 1970 a slight young female student stepped up to speak at a moratorium demonstration on the front lawn at Sydney University. She and fellow Labor Club women were fed up with being held back, expected to do the menial tasks and never allowed a platform to speak. At the response of young men in the crowd to her inflammatory speech, many young women became converts to feminism, just ‘like that’.

The reaction of those young men to the women’s movement, especially young men of the Left, is shocking. Were they only waiting for ‘the revolution’, not interested in social justice for women?

So much has been achieved since then. Women don’t have to leave the public service when they marry, they can take out a loan on their own to buy property, and can stand at the bar and order beer instead of soft drink. And ASIO won’t open a dossier on them if they go out and burn their bra.

Cheers, and goodbye to all that!

First published in the Canberra Times on 6 November 2020

Images courtesy State Library of NSW

Idiot Prayer – Nick Cave Alone at Alexandra Palace

Singer-songwriter Nick Cave gives his all in a one-man concert, a soaring performance in a cavern of silence

 

M, 118 minutes

4 Stars

Review by © Jane Freebury

One man, one voice, a solo piano in the middle of a vast, empty space is the last word in simplicity. It might herald a new era for the performance of music in these times of Covid too.

Nick Cave Alone at Alexandra Palace was originally sold as a one-off digital event, screened live in July this year to a ticketed virtual audience. Now called Idiot Prayer, the concert recording has become a movie, shifting from virtual gig to cinema. It certainly passes muster as an immersive and compelling audio-visual experience.

shifts between intimate gesture and soaring performance

In essence it is Cave’s performance, unaccompanied, of a selection of some of the best ballads from his repertoire. The one-man concert over nearly two hours shifts between intimate gesture and soaring performance.

Without introduction he walks into frame. A distinctive lanky figure in a Gucci suit, making his way through London’s Alexandra Palace. Along silent hallways and down empty stairs, to a waiting grand piano.

Not one footfall can be heard on this short journey but on the soundtrack we listen to the spoken lyrics of Spinning Song. It was released with The Bad Seeds last year on the album Ghosteen, their 17th studio album.

The remaining 21 songs for this two-hour set are performed in Cave’s familiar baritone voice, accompanied by his lush piano. They catalogue a lifetime of emotions. Love and pain, despair and regret, anger and jubilation, and everything in between.

For me, someone with only a casual acquaintance with Cave’s work, the concert is an overview of his creative range. Fans who know his work inside out may encounter something fresh or at least rarely heard. Euthanasia and the titular Idiot Prayer, get a live debut.

Naturally enough, I have got to know the ‘prince of darkness’ through the movies.

He wrote the screenplay for John Hillcoat’s The Proposition, a dark Australian western set in the outback that I admired a lot. Cave and his frequent collaborator Warren Ellis, composed the haunting soundtrack, as they did subsequently for Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

Cave had a cameo performance in The Assassination of Jesse James as a balladeer performing in a saloon. And he was also in the cast and one of the co-writers of Hillcoat’s first notable feature, a tough prison drama, Ghosts…of the Civil Dead, released back in the bicentennial year, 1988.

But it was in 20,000 Days of Earth that I enjoyed Cave the most. He was  playing himself in a scripted documentary about someone called Nick Cave who had reached the 55 year/20,000 day milestone.

to show is not necessarily to reveal, and the most interesting artistic personalities are full of contradiction

Made some time before the tragic death of his 14-year-old son, it reveals an intensely private artist with a deep need to connect nonetheless with fans. To show is not necessarily to reveal.  The most interesting artistic personalities are full of contradictions.

Cave cuts a solitary figure in the frame throughout Idiot Prayer. The fourth wall is broken briefly with a high-angle shot that captures a cameraman nearby, but he is gone in the next frame from the same angle, slipped out of sight.

It’s a deliberate insert, of course. Probably a playful reminder that Nick did have company during the shoot. Cinematographer Robbie Ryan, recently nominated for an Oscar for his work on The Favourite, was there of course, moving his cameras around from front and side to back and crane above, and back again.

Cave doesn’t speak a word throughout, preferring to let his music speak for him. There is a little laugh after ‘… (Are you) The one that I’ve been waiting for?’ A private joke?

Into My Arms, after all these years still a favourite track of mine, is performed around midway. Cave has nominated it as one of the songs he is most proud of having written, but it is given no special treatment here. Far From Me, Black Hair and a number of other songs from the album some regard as his best, The Boatman’s Call, from 2011, also feature.

Idiot Prayer is a solemn affair, but rewarding and moving. A performer without the goods as a singer-songwriter could not possibly stay the course, holding the audience over two hours with so little else going on. Pared-down, Cave shows he has talent in spades.

First published in the Canberra Times on 6 November 2020

The  Mystery of Henri Pick

 

M, 101 minutes

4 Stars

Review by © Jane Freebury

 

 

smart and entertaining drama that takes an influential book critic to the provinces to dissect a snooty literary establishment

 

It’s no spoiler to reveal that before he was a best-selling author, Henri Pick was a pizza chef at a restaurant in a small town in Brittany. There was nothing mysterious about him at all. Until he died, leaving behind a wife, a daughter and grandson, some disappointed customers perhaps, and an unpublished novel that became a literary sensation.

Two years after his death he was a celebrity author with a brilliant, best-selling romantic novel to his name, but who knew he was a writer? Pick was obviously in no position to explain.

The manuscript was discovered by a young editor from Paris, Daphne Despero (Alice Isaaz), while she was rummaging around a bookstore in Crozon. Curiously, the store also housed a collection of unpublished manuscripts, a salon des refuses for manuscripts that had over the years been rejected by publishers.

a doyen so influential in publishing circles his reviews strike terror in the heart of new authors

Henri Pick’s novel, The Last Hours of a Love Story, goes ballistic with the reading public and the literary establishment. It confirms Daphne’s promise as an up-and-coming editor.

The author’s widow and daughter are invited to take part in a TV chat show about books. The host is literary critic Jean-Michel Rouche (Fabrice Luchini), a doyen so influential in publishing circles his reviews strike terror in the heart of new authors, like Daphne’s boyfriend Fred Koskas (Bastien Bouillon).

Rouche can barely contain his scepticism about the book’s authorship, and he reveals a lofty disdain for his two guests who he perceives as country bumpkins. He is rude to them and they walk out during the live broadcast. It sets in train Rouche’s quest to prove himself right about his hunch that Henri Pick was no author.

How could Pick have written a masterpiece, a one of a kind, a love story that ranges from scenes of sensual lovemaking to allusions to the great Romantic writer Alexander Pushkin? How could such a novel be the work of a pizza chef, an outsider to the cultural establishment who lived at Finistere, for heaven’s sake, at the end of the world? Rouche wants the literal truth when others seem prepared to let it go.

After the fiasco on air, things fall apart for him in rapid succession. His wife informs him that night that they are separating, and the next day he is fired, by text, from his job as book show host.

Let’s face it, Luchini’s Rouch is not the most engaging character. But he is an interesting one and there’s fun to be had as he gets his just desserts. As French character actors go, Fabrice Luchini is not a particular favourite of mine but he is absolutely right for this role. Just as his character Rouche is ripe for a kick in the pants.

Suddenly finding himself at a loose end, he heads off to the Finistere region of Brittany to snoop around and follow up on his hunch that there is something fishy is going on. The plot has certainly thickened. He has learned that Pick must have been fluent in Russian.

He drops in on Pick’s widow, Madeleine (Josiane Stoleru), trying to ingratiate himself with her, but she soon shows him the door, tossing the gift bouquet out after him.

Rouche has a bit more luck with Madeleine’s daughter. Josephine (Camille Cottin). She goes toe to toe with him, contesting his preconceptions about people who live at ‘the end of the world’. Her vast collection of books would probably rival his.

On Rouche’s crusade to uncover the true Henri Pick, the good people of Brittany lead him a merry dance with many false leads and narrative twists. The intricate plot runs like clockwork until the big reveal. It’s a shame the ending is a bit clunky, however the full, earnest explanation often is.

Henri Pick (Fabrice Luchini) following his hunch in Finistere

Based on a novel of the same name by award-winning author David Foenkinos, this arch French comedy was developed for the screen by Remi Bezancon, who has directed, and Vanessa Portal.

This is whip-smart comedy that celebrates the old-fashioned virtues of the murder mystery, without the murder. The Mystery of Henry Pick is a pacey whodunnit with great writing, brisk edits and an engaging original score by Laurent  Perez del Mar that sets the tone. A sparkling, wordy film, having a sly dig at the literary establishment.

First published in the Canberra Times on 1 November 2020

Main image: Fabrice Luchini in The Mystery of Henri Pick. Both images courtesy UniFrance

Rams

A different take on the eccentric Icelandic drama that makes more of community, the challenging environment and laconic Aussie humour

PG, 119 minutes

4 Stars

Review by © Jane Freebury

Before the camera even begins to roll, feuding sheep farmers as woolly and muddle-headed as their flocks is funny in itself. The original version of this film is about a pair of curmudgeonly brothers who continue to behave like a pair of twits who haven’t spoken for 40 years, until events conspire to bring them together.

That was in 2015. Rams, written and directed by Grimur Hakonarson, benefitted greatly from a crush that audiences have been having with things Nordic, and Iceland’s reputation as a land of fire and ice, the home of Bjork and Sigur Ros, an exotic subarctic outpost of distinct Nordic culture.

This is the English-language version, directed by Jeremy Sims, whose last film was Last Cab to Darwin. It was a frequent runner up to the original Icelandic version of Rams when they were competing on the international film awards circuit together.

a different take is the only decent excuse for a remake of a movie that was pretty good in the first place

Hakonarson’s Rams made off with Un Certain Regard, the award at the Cannes festival that prizes innovative and daring, unusual styles and non-traditional storytelling. It did well at the box office too.

Sims was offered the option of the English-language remake. Working with the screenplay by Jules Duncan, he has taken the story and turned it into an Australian bush saga. A different take is the only decent excuse for a remake of a movie that was pretty good in the first place. It is self-described as ‘based’ on the Hakonarson original.

The Aussie screenwriter, Duncan, has followed a similar trajectory to Hakonarson’s work but has taken events in a significantly different direction and changed the grim ending. There is a much lighter tone, a gentler humour and a narrative that includes wider community.

And there are several significant women, including Asher Keddie as a local woman widowed in a recent bushfire.

The role of the vet is given a boost. Kat, a newly arrival from Dorset, England, is played here by a feisty Miranda Richardson in a plum red bob.

This introduces a love interest. Kat has a thing for the less unreasonable brother, Colin Grimurson, played by Sam Neill. Though it’s too bad for her that he is totally focussed on his small flock. An exotic heritage breed. No garden variety merinos here and no time for girls. Farming is a full-time job.

Brother Les, played by Michael Caton, is the hopeless alcoholic, a miserable bastard if ever there was one. But he does have some luck with his prize rams, pipping his brother at the post in the local show when a ‘hindquarter muscle’ the deciding factor between two magnificent specimens.

As brothers on the land, Neill and Caton, look remarkably similar types to the characters played by Sigurour Sigurjonsson and Theodor Juliusson, who are both well-known Icelandic actors. A cleanly shaven Sigurjonsson, was the lead in another recent Icelandic film, A White, White Day.

Neill and Caton each bring with them similar reserves of goodwill from decades on screen in popular film and television. Caton, of course, had a key role in one of the most popular Australian comedies ever, The Castle of 1997. He is great at both the killer glare, and at being delivered legless to the hospital in a tractor scoop.

After a slow, sometimes uneven first half, the film sets up a strong and engaging, sometimes moving, second.

it should go down well in the bush, and urban types may just have to live with their characterisations

As things get going, the film makes a very positive virtue of community and the laconic local humour, but Australians everywhere will relate to the existential challenges that the environment presents. The cycle of extremes has a very active role here. Bushfires, dangerous levels of smoke, devastating drought and communicable disease that have to be brought under control.

It all seems so much more relevant than when production wrapped late in 2018.

The city-bush divide is played for all its worth with some heavy-handed pub humour and a fair bit of bureaucracy and ‘useless bloody Pommie’ bashing. The Fed professionals are exemplified by Leon Ford in a thankless role as an insensitive bureaucrat who has to have things done by-the-book. Departments of agriculture may never look the same.

Rams should go down very well in the bush. Urban types may just have to live with their characterisations but all local audiences will warm to this timeless story of two brothers at loggerheads.

First published in the Canberra Times on 31 October 2020

Honest Thief

Another throwback to old-fashioned action hero for Neeson, who would have done better to send this well-worn character up

M, 98 minutes

2 Stars

Review by © Jane Freebury

A film title with a contradiction in terms like this suggests we could be up for a fun ride. It stars Liam Neeson, a decent man behind the hunky screen presence and sonorous voice if ever there was one, so where are we going with this?

If it’s proposing that stealing from banks can be okay, it might get a tick because of recent revelations about the malpractices in the Australian banking system.

The idea of righting wrong by robbing banks is as old as a Ned Kelly or other folk heroes doing good when those in power were doing bad, by robbing the rich to give to the poor.

The honest thief in question, Tom, Liam Neeson in the role, is a former US Marine. A veteran of recent, drawn-out campaigns in sandy theatres of war a long way from home. He seems to feel he has little to show for it.

Worse still, he has felt really betrayed by the system that has denied his aging father the pension he deserved.

Honest Thief opens with a short montage of the robberies he has conducted over recent years. Breaking in is not as slick as the online fraud we have become accustomed to watching. What you might have been expecting in the digital era, right?

the ‘in-and-out bandit’, a throwback to old-fashioned action

No, this former military demolitions expert is using the expertise he gained in the Middle East to blow open safes and strong room doors. Noisy explosions are more attuned to the values of the good, old-fashioned action genre, after all.

Tom has earned the rather old-fashioned moniker of the ‘In and Out Bandit’. The script is the work of writers Steve Allrich and Mark Williams, who also directed. This nickname and some other aspects of their writing is unintentionally funny.

‘I’m the In-and-Out Bandit. I want to turn myself in’, Tom announces solemnly in a phone call to the FBI. The Feds have no idea of his identity, he has been a solo operator, and there are still no suspects for the many break-ins that Tom has made over many years. Just another unlikely aspect to the backstory.

Tom has become a changed man since a flirtation with a receptionist, Annie (Kate Walsh) at a storage and truck rental company where he is a customer. He is now a man in love and he wants to change his life. A year quickly passes, an intertitle announcement, and the relationship has deepened to the point where they are about to move in together.

The FBI doesn’t react to Tom’s announcement, and he has to hold the line a while. That’s amusing too. The bureau is obviously used to hoax callers or to members of the public with nothing to gain from being honest about themselves.

Tom has the full proceeds of crime, $9 stolen millions, untouched (‘It wasn’t about the money’) and wants to cut a deal with the authorities. Unluckily for him, he finds himself dealing with two corrupt FBI agents, Nivens (Jai Courtney) and Hall (Anthony Ramos).

To his credit, Agent Hall is initially shocked by his colleague’s escalating violence. Somehow or other, Ramos, known for a recent lead role in the massively successful stage production, Hamilton, has strayed into this action flick.

Not only do the pair steal his stash, they stitch him up with the cold-blooded murder of another FBI colleague (Robert Carrick). He shows up in the right place at the wrong time.

a good man wronged, the place where Neeson’s characters prefer to be

Following on from this pivotal scene, in which he and Agent Nivens get into a fight and fall out of a second floor window together, Tom is on the run. A good man wronged. The place where Neeson’s characters prefer to be of late.

All this is very unjust treatment for a bank robber who wants to retire and return all his ill-gotten gains. It engenders feelings of outrage over mistreatment that are part of the essential backstory to any character who becomes a vigilante, as Neeson frequently has been in the Taken films and similar over the last decade.

This Mark Williams’ movie is storytelling by numbers. Routine and underwhelming. The filmmakers probably hoped that Neeson would lend their work some gravitas. The veteran actor’s time would have been better spent sending up his action hero persona instead.

First published in the Canberra Times on 24 October 2020

I Am Greta

Greta Thunberg and the school strike for climate. Courtesy Hulu

M, 97 minutes

4 Stars

Review by © Jane Freebury

It was a tip-off that got him started. When filmmaker Nathan Grossman heard that a schoolgirl was campaigning for climate action outside the Swedish Parliament, he went along to take a look.

Fifteen-year-old Greta Thunberg had set up camp on the footpath with her handmade sign ‘School Strike for Climate’. In her regulation shirt and jeans and with her long plaits, she did not necessarily look the tough campaigner but she would eventually demonstrate an amazing ability to cut through.

She had an armoury of facts and figures to support her protest and was fully prepared to engage anyone who wanted to hear more. Or wanted to take her on.

both character study and document on the rise of teenage climate activism

An elderly woman asked why she wasn’t in school. Greta retorted that there was no point in going to school if there was no future for her generation. The world’s leaders were ignoring the climate crisis.

Grossman could see how things might get interesting. Greta’s father Svante, an actor, was nearby and he allowed the filmmaker to begin recording. The start was impromptu, but the filmmaker eventually acquired funding so he could work on the project full-time.

In the year that followed, Greta became, of course, a celebrity who made speeches and met world leaders. A controversial figure who famously chose to sail the Atlantic rather than fly across it, so she could take up an invitation to speak at the UN Climate Action Summit in NYC in September 2019.

Grossman’s doco is by turns intimate and inspiring. While it documents the rise of teenage climate activism that Greta Thunberg spearheaded across the globe, it is at the same time a character study.

We observe Greta take the stage and speak unscripted in front of thousands of supporters, but not before she has quarrelled with her father. He simply wants her to eat something healthy, like a banana, or to forget about perfecting her speech.

I Am Greta is a blend of private and public moments, some of it guided by voiceover. Greta confides quite freely that she has little interest in socialising, has no time for small talk, and has been beset with anxiety and depression since she was very young. When she had heard that the world was facing a new mass extinction, and that there was little or no time left to bend the emission curve.

She stopped flying, and stopped eating meat years ago. She was doing her bit, and had convinced her family, including her mother, an opera singer with an international career, to do theirs too.

There are several scenes, briefly sketched, that hint at the impact of Greta’s personality and activism on the Thunberg family.

Svante appears to have a significant presence in his elder daughter’s life, as chaperone on her travels and a full-time companion-carer. As is now well known, Greta has Asperger’s, but he confides that she also has OCD and selective mutism that has caused her in the past to stop communicating for many months on end.

the responses to Greta from world leaders are either memorable or shocking

There is a hint of these traits, those aspects of her personality that some political opponents have cruelly and immorally used against her in ad hominem attacks.

Greta Thunberg, a schoolgirl on strike. Courtesy Hulu

The responses to Greta from world leaders compiled here in montage are either memorable, or they are shocking.

Arnie Schwarzenegger declares himself early as a fan of someone who acts rather than complains. Pope Francis and the UN Secretary General are also encouraging.

A meeting is arranged for her with a slightly bemused President Macron who can’t disguise his surprise that he is the first leader she has met. No, she hadn’t even met the Prime Minister of her own country.

This delightful episode is followed by clips of other responses. Vladimir Putin imparts his views, as does Donald Trump, and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro. On this occasion, the Russian president’s observations seem more temperate than some.

Various media personalities, including Alan Jones and Andrew Bolt, also have their say on Greta Thunberg, and it reflects so badly on them. They are taking aim at a girl who is barely 17 y o.

I Am Greta is a fascinating portrait of an angry young climate justice activist who calls out the global inertia in climate policy for what it is.

First published by the Canberra Times on 17 October 2020

Rebecca

Old fashioned glamour, ritzy locations and handsome leads, but the latest Rebecca is a tame adaptation of a gaslight classic

M, 121 minutes

3 Stars

Review by © Jane Freebury

For anyone longing for a dash of old-fashioned movie glamour, the courtship in Monte Carlo that kicks off Rebecca is just the place to start. There are racy drives along the Corniche, risqué picnics in secluded coves, and meandering walks through lush gardens that cling to the cliffs.

There are also elegant 1930s fashions and cars, and lots of old-fashioned crane shots to take in the view.

Vertiginous cliffs feature, signifying risk and vulnerability. And they are even more striking when the location moves to Cornwall. The film is a visual feast.

Rebecca is a remake of the Alfred Hitchcock classic of the same name that won the best film Oscar in 1940. With Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine and Judith Anderson in the lead roles, it was the director’s first Hollywood feature.

There is, almost inevitably in any text influenced by Hitchcock, a vulnerable blonde. Lily James (Mama Mia: Here We Go Again, and Baby Driver) steps into the role of potential victim here.

Since it was published in 1938, the Daphne du Maurier Gothic novel on which the film is based has never been out of print. It is a psycho-drama of passion, lust and jealousy, themes that never date. Every new generation needs its Rebecca re-envisaged.

James’ character, who is nameless until she marries and becomes a Mrs, has arrived in the luxe resort with her employer, Mrs Van Hopper (Ann Dowd). She is the older woman’s paid companion.

James plays a girl who is well read, can sketch and drive a car. Not an everyday skill in the 1930s when Rebecca is set. But she is poor, a sin in those days, and not terribly welcome in the ruling class.

Critically, she is without parents or other family. As a woman alone in the world, she is prey to the worst of the worst kind of rogue and villain.

The two women are staying at a ritzy hotel, the type of place that attracts anyone who is anybody, like wealthy English widowers who don’t seem to know what to do with themselves. Since his wife drowned in a boating accident a year ago, Maxim de Winter (Armie Hammer) has found little to keep himself amused, until an awkward, self-conscious English girl (Lily James) appears.

There is a whirlwind romance and the new Mrs de Winter is carried off to the remote pile in Cornwall that her husband calls home, Manderley.

It is classic entrapment. Mrs de Winter’s creeping self-doubt spirals as the mansion’s small army of servants sideline their new boss and show how inadequate she is for the role she finds herself in.

Audiences new to the Rebecca story might expect Max de Winter to be the source of danger. Du Maurier’s Rebecca was born into the same era as the original  ‘gaslight’ book and film, after all.

But no. Threats to the new Mrs de Winter emanate from the grave. She doesn’t believe in ghosts, but she is spooked by the black hair of her dead rival that’s still entangled in a hairbrush. By the elegant copperplate ‘R’ on objects scattered around, a sure sign that nothing of what she seems to own, can or ever will belong to her.

As head of the household staff, Mrs Danvers – Kristin Scott Thomas icy tough in the role – leads the charge, humiliating and undermining her new mistress. Danvers even gets her to think of throwing herself out the window.

It is ‘Danny’, loyal to her dead mistress to the end, who is the arch manipulator, and the bitter rival. With her minimalist acting style, Scott Thomas is very effective as the housekeeper, though I would have thought her character was ripe for some re-interpretation in the early 21st century.

This classic tale of female insecurity and jealousy has been directed by Ben Wheatley, from a screenplay written by Jane Goldman, Joe Shrapnel, and Anna Waterhouse.

It’s a traditional but unadventurous adaptation. The murder that didn’t make it into the film in 1940 is there but it is surprising that it has not had a tweak so it speaks more directly to our times.

It’s hard not to wonder why Wheatley, who is a critically acclaimed British indie director, didn’t give today’s audiences more to think about in his Rebecca. Didn’t the production’s financial backers allow him the scope to do so? Some surprises wouldn’t have been too big a risk.

First published in the Canberra Times on 18 October 2020. Also broadcast on ArtSound FM 92.7 

Feature image: Armie Hammer and Lily James in Rebecca. Courtesy Netflix

The Leadership

M, 97 minutes

3 Stars

Review by © Jane Freebury

Taking a group of professional women on a three-week cruise combined with a leadership workshop was an inspired idea. No doubt about it. The trip to the exquisite, endangered wilderness of Antarctica would be a reminder of what science was fighting for.

The journey would offer a fundamental reset for the participants who had been selected from the fields of science, engineering, technology, mathematics (STEM) and medicine.

It was designed to help them become the sort of the leaders they ‘hoped to be’, honing the skills necessary for contributing to meaningful and necessary policy change around the world.

Course leader, Fabian Dattner, had lofty hopes that were even underpinned by a great quote from poet T S Eliot. The prominent businesswoman, leadership consultant, and self-described dreamer, has a background in corporate consultancy.

No doubt the women participating who paid $30,000 each for the trip, had high hopes too. In 2016, they were the first tranche of a program that is now established and ongoing.

The opportunity to film this maiden voyage burgeoning with possibilities fell to Australian documentary filmmaker, Ili Baré. The writer and director was to make a record of the inaugural event aboard the Argentine-based icebreaker, Ushuaia.

Multi-award winning photographer Peter de Vries was also on board. His location vision would be interspersed with cinematography from director of photography, Dale Cochran, who covered the group interaction.

I was all set to go too, up for virtual adventure, when at one of the early group sessions, Dattner upbraided the late arrivals.  The public ticking off for professional women and the manner in which it was done is uncomfortable viewing. Where were we headed?

As the plot thickens, the images of pristine snowbound wilderness are unspeakably beautiful. High-angle drone shots as the Ushuaia ploughs through the ocean were magnificent, but the images of life beyond the events onboard are ultimately, inevitably, too few.

The small representative group that writer-director Baré has selected to be the film’s focus include a wildlife population modeller, an environmental scientist, a climate change activist, a soil scientist, a krill biologist and a science communicator. We learn of their particular workplace issues, and get a sense of their career journey before and beyond the film timeframe.

participants urged to allow transformational change to propel them forward

From time to time, there are intertitles with juicy facts such as female participation in STEM careers after having children. The global gender pay gap, the percentage of publications in female-driven scientific research, and more confirm the inequities for women in their particular fields.

One of the participants reported her experience of sexual assault when she was the only female among 40 men at an isolated site. A disturbing percentage of the women reported sexual harassment, even assault, in the field.

Dattner’s leadership style and philosophy begin to come into question during these sessions. At her insistence, the women should delve into themselves in order to let go of stuff that had been ‘holding back’ their careers, and allow for the ‘transformational change’ that could propel them forward.

the wonder of the wilderness failed to divert from difficulties on board

Some of the participants pointed out there were other ways of looking at structural inequality in their chosen fields. It was not just up to them to fix things. Some of Dattner’s responses to their criticisms are startling.

It becomes painfully clear that Dattner’s mentoring style and conceptual approach do not sit well with the women in science. By the time the cruise has reached the seas around Paulet Island, she was being seriously challenged.

Through the portholes, whales could be seen breaching the sea surface and penguins were tumbling into the water as the Ushuaia travelled past, but the wonder of it all failed to divert from the difficulties on board.

As a strategy facilitator observes, the leader did not have the capacity to manage what had come up. A clinical psychologist was installed for subsequent cruises.

This maiden voyage of the Homeward Bound project was certainly not an unqualified success. But it grew an international network and that is definitely a positive outcome.

At a time when leadership is on everyone’s mind, when the contrast between different styles couldn’t be more stark, there is growing interest in observing women in leadership roles.

It’s a pity this doco, though released at a timely moment, does not tackle the really big issues that are involved.

First published in the Canberra Times on 10 October 2020

The Trial of the Chicago 7

MA15+, 129 minutes

5 Stars

Review by © Jane Freebury

This is a wildly ambitious film, compact and fast-paced over two hours. If wordy and a touch self-important, it is brilliantly written and performed, and the result is riveting.

It could easily have been a television miniseries. The backstory, for a start, is immense.

protesters singled out by a corrupt justice system to be taught a lesson

It’s about events that took place in 1968, at the National Democratic Convention in Chicago, as the anti-war movement gathered momentum. A group of men who were leaders of various groups of protesters were singled out by a corrupt justice system to be taught a lesson.

Early in the year, the draft call had doubled and the country was reeling from the daily death count. The 1968 Democratic Convention in August was a magnet for anti-Vietnam protesters of all stripes.

Chicago battened down, refusing permission for protest in its precincts, except for a space in one of the city parks. The police were out in force, 12,000 of them, the National Guard and others too.

History remembers the ‘seven’, but there were originally eight men on trial: Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, John Froines, Lee Weiner and Bobby Seale. The seven were represented by William Kunstler, played by the wonderful British actor, Mark Rylance.

Seale (Yaya Abdul-Mateen II), a co-founder of the Black Panthers, who was  unrepresented, was subjected to particular humiliation in court, gagged and handcuffed at the judge’s orders. Then the case against him was made separate, and charges against him, and Froines and Weiner were later dropped.

As a result of the riots that took place, these leaders of protesters who had bussed into Chicago were charged with ‘conspiracy to cross State lines in order to incite violence’. The trial before Justice Hoffman (Frank Langella) lasted six months, and his courtroom became a stage for the contest of ideas between Left and Right.

The prosecution was in trouble from the start. The charges that were brought against the group of men were not clearly indictable.

Then a key question emerged. Who had started the riots in the first place? The focus turned to the police.

Writer-director Aaron Sorkin (the writer behind The West Wing and The Social Network) has managed somehow to wrangle the unwieldy details and present a coherent, tight narrative flipping between flashbacks to the protests and the courtroom setting presided over by Hoffman.

His screenplay was ready to shoot in 2007, with Steven Spielberg to direct, but production stalled. It was revived in 2018, at the halfway point of Trump’s presidency. The producers sensed the time was right and greenlighted the project.

And Sorkin, having shown what he could do as a director on Molly’s Game, would direct.

Sacha Baron Cohen was the only actor initially cast who was still attached to the project from 2007. Good thing too. His character Abbie Hoffman, a founding member of the Yippies and closely associated with Flower Power movement, is one of the most interesting.

It is good to see that the creator of the inimitable Borat and Ali G demonstrate that his range extends to characters who might melt into everyday society.

Tom Hayden, Eddie Redmayne in the role, a co-founder of Students for a Democratic Society, was a different breed of social activist altogether. He went on to serve in electoral politics, but is perhaps best known for once being married to Jane Fonda.

It is a tad disappointing that some of the more of the more theatrical aspects of the actual trial are left out. Those performances that contributed to the occasion dubbed the ‘Academy Awards’ for protest movements.

it’s a reminder that the US has been there before

‘Cultural witnesses’ who attended the trial, like Arlo Guthrie and Norman Mailer, don’t get a showing, though beat poet Allen Ginsberg does make a brief appearance. Perhaps Sorkin thought there were distractions enough from his serious intent.

For lots of reasons, many of them bad but some good, 1968 in the US is a year to remember. The Smithsonian calls it ‘the year that shattered America’.

The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and the beginning of Richard Nixon’s presidency were low points. But the civil rights movement swelled, and the tide turned against continuing the war in Vietnam.

This terrific film is a  reminder, a half century on, that however divided and partisan the US looks now, it has been there before.

First published in the Canberra Times on 3 October 2020. Broadcast on ArtSound FM 92.7

Feature image: For Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong) democracy had its place in the classroom. Courtesy Netflix