Film Review

Ocean’s Eight

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Review by © Jane Freebury

Ever since Clooney and Pitt stepped up for a rat pack romp in Vegas it’s been clear that all you need to do at an Ocean’s movie is sit back and relax and let it wash over you. There’s nothing deep and meaningful, it’s just a fun bubble.

The panache that director Steven Soderbergh brings to the Ocean’s franchise seems to me to hark back to the good old days when Hollywood was full of fizz and sparkle, and that was enough to draw the crowds in. This is a filmmaker who makes smart and thoughtful movies, like Traffic and Che parts 1 and 2 for goodness sake, but he also likes to have his time out. The Ocean’s series is drunk on its dizzying sleight-of-hand and reflects our fantasies back to us.

No way can we say that we don’t know what to expect from Ocean’s Eight, except that the significant difference, no secret, is the team joining forces for one big, bad heist is 100 percent female. Footnote: exploits are no longer in Soderbergh’s hands either.

Not a token male in sight? Well, there was, but Claude Becker (Richard Armitage) is in a world of trouble now that Debbie Ocean, Danny’s kid sister played with steely resolve by Sandra Bullock, is out of the prison cell he consigned her to by dobbing her in to save his skin.

The girls have their sights on $150 million worth of necklace—diamonds and white gold—not a panther-like single stunner, but a Cartier necklace fit for a maharajah. Diamonds were once a girl’s best friend – just ask Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell – and they still are, but the context is different. While each blonde and brunette bombshell in Howard Hawks’ effervescent Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was after a husband, the motivation here is getting back at Claude, the jerk. It’s a slick touch too that the necklace actually once belonged to a man, an Indian prince.

Debbie has had more than five long years in prison to stew and to refine a plan for a major heist. The plan is to lift a whopping diamond necklace from the neck of celebrity actress Daphne Kluger (Anne Hathaway) at the Met Gala, of all places.

It evolves as a minutely detailed, baroque plot indeed, as Debbie and her bestie, Lou (Cate Blanchett, looking sharp in pant suits), and the rest of the team bring their individual skills to bear on its execution.

Rihanna’s rasta hacker and Awkwafina’s street grifter make their mark but among all the great talent. However, it’s Anne Hathaway who is able to make the most of her role as the celebrity-hungry model, on whose neck the jewellery is to hang and from which it is to be taken.

Piece by piece, the plan falls into place. Debbie’s gang operate like clockwork until the heist attracts another participant in a surprise turn of events. The follow-on might well be the best part of the movie.

A bit more fizz and bounce wouldn’t have gone astray, overall. A dramatic near-miss or a slip-up or two would have helped, but director and co-writer Gary Ross and team let these opportunities pass by. On with the show!

In more ostentatious and less liberated times, Monroe’s Lorelei believed a big diamond ring, a girl’s best friend. Insurance against misfortune.

In Ocean’s Eight, the sheer scale of the loot could pose a problem but the gang shows how diamonds today can still, with a little know how and a lot of teamwork, be any girl’s best friend.

3.5 Stars

Also published at the Canberra Critics Circle

Aurore

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          Review by © Jane Freebury

You’re never too old to start again. If life starts unravelling, it’s what the baby boomers want to hear: there’s a new dawn.

As played by Agnes Jaoui, Aurore is as voluptuous and as statuesque as the Roman goddess of dawn, after all, though I think the original French title, I Got Life!, has the edge. Her husband has recently deserted her for a new arrangement, so she has to make a go of it again, at work and in love.

Despite the disadvantages of being a single woman in France at the age of 50 or so, Aurore puts a brave, possibly even heroic, face on it and manages her life well with a positive attitude. I’ve found statistics that show France doesn’t do too badly on gender equality in comparison to its European neighbours, so perhaps things won’t be too hard for her, after all.

Aurore’s biggest problem seems to be her hot flushes. A ruefully funny one for women, and Aurore is beset with them, at home and out and even while asleep. It has to be said that the bravest thing about this gentle comedy directed by Blandine Lenoir, is its subtext: menopause.

Like every mother, Aurore is concerned for her daughters, Marina (Sarah Suco) and Lucie (Lou Roy-Lecollinet). The elder one has just become pregnant, and though she is around 30, she is a bit of a worry, while the boyfriend of her younger daughter doesn’t exactly fill mum with confidence. But there you go. Quoi faire?

Aurore’s best friend Mano (Pascale Arbillot), who works in real estate, has some dirty tricks up her sleeve for men she reckons deserve the treatment. When the two friends are at a café together, Mano spies an older man with a young woman who she reckons must be his lover. Mano leaps up and accosts them, throws her ring at him and stalks off. She didn’t even know him.

Nina Simone’s song lends the film a bit of backbone, but also hints at what it might have been

Aurore, however, doesn’t go in for payback and seems on peaceful and decent terms with just about everyone, former husband included.

She is comfortable enough with herself to go to a school reunion, even at this delicate time. There she encounters the man she was with before she married, and the film’s incipient spirit of independence, fierce or otherwise, veers towards mature-age romance.

The voice of Nina Simone singing the song that gave Aurore its French title, I Got Life!, lends the film a bit of backbone, but it also hints at what it might have been. Aurore has little to do with the sentiments expressed in Simone’s songs such as ‘Feeling Good’ or ‘Ain’t Got No, I Got Life’.

Does Aurore really make a new start? You can be the judge of that, but don’t expect too much from this easy-going and mildly funny comedy.

3 Stars

Also published at the Canberra Critics Circle

Tully

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Review by © Jane Freebury

Somehow or other, the South African-American actress Charlize Theron is able to switch between the most intimate of stories, like this one, Tully, and action adventure and make it work. As the one-armed road warrior in Mad Max: Fury Road, she nailed Imperator Furiosa with a steely performance while here she seems just like a woman feels after a new baby and a string of sleepless nights.

In a daring career move in her twenties, Theron took up the role of a serial killer in the film Monster (2003). It was a memorable performance as she negotiated the character, a former prostitute convicted of killing six men and executed for her crimes. She didn’t look good either, even though you might think it impossible of Theron.

This actress is clearly someone who loves a challenge and is able to live in the skin of her character—quite an asset. In Jason Reitman’s new film she is Marlo, a mother in her early forties who has just had her third child. To get into character she had put on weight again, as she did in Monster.

New baby Mia is adorable but demanding. Marlo is also coping with a son with behavioural problems and an unintentionally inattentive husband, Drew (Ron Livingstone). She is on leave from work in human resources—where she says, ruefully, her English literature degree got her—and there’s not much to go back to work for either.

Her wealthy brother, Craig (Mark Duplass) and his wife seem to be on top of it all. So well organised are they, they have no difficulty in combining stylish dinner parties with family life. As a baby shower gift, he offers to pay for a night nanny, and it isn’t long before Marlo caves in and makes the call.

Night-time nanny Tully (Mackenzie Davis) also seems supremely in control of her life. She is everything Marlo is not. Single, slim, carefree, responsible only to herself.

Annoyingly upbeat, as played by Davis. Then again she underlines how new mothers, left wondering what happened to their bodies and when they will ever again sleep through the night, can perceive  themselves in a constant round of menial tasks.

This is another film from a director who has specialised in stories that dissect contemporary life choices and responsibilities, and it is very welcome.

Memorable characters Reitman has offered us are corporate downsizer (George Clooney) who comes face-to-face with his solitary existence in Up in the Air and pregnant teenager (Ellen Page) in Juno, who will go to term but won’t keep the baby. While Clooney’s character finds himself marooned as the result of life choices, young Juno manages to get through it all, and move on.

Although Tully explores the dilemma that many women have to confront as mothers, the narrative in the film falls short. It is frustrating, because the exposition is so authentic and promising, and is the work of screenwriter Diablo Cody, Reitman’s frequent collaborator.

The sequence where the two women go out together to experience Marlo’s old haunts in Bushwick when she was single, opens up a new dimension, but the narrative stalls. Both Juno and Up in the Air have a similarly modest running time, but they offer more complexity with more satisfying results.

The film’s imaginative fugue ends up being rather internalist. This is also its charm, but Tully would have benefited from more heft and with one or two other characters who were more layered too.

Rated M, 96 minutes

3.5 Stars

Also published at the Canberra Critics Circle

Breath

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Review by © Jane Freebury

Surfing makes for elegant and beautiful spectator sport, as those of us who stick to land know only too well.

Ever since I lived on the coast south of Sydney I have thought that surfing was out of this world but that it needed patient dedication and a kind of insanity to pursue. Day in, day out, the surfers were there, floating in a heaving expanse of blue or grey as they waited for the big one.

Communicating the visceral experience of surfing is one of Breath’s triumphs, pitching us into deep water to show what the struggle to survive in another world can feel like. Early scenes are in still water, with Pikelet (Samson Coulter) and Loonie (Ben Spence) exploring a river, but soon transition to the ocean beaches in the Great Southern region of Australia.

Water cinematography by Rick Rifici brings the experience home with beautiful and enthralling vision, above and below the surface.

In the remote corner of the continent where they are growing up, there’s not much for these two teenage friends to do. They can go to the beach, ride around on their battered bikes, or they get up to no good spooking truck drivers on the highway.

On a trip to the coast they encounter a hardcore surfer, Sando (Simon Baker, who is also director), who gives them rides to and from the beach in his – yes, you guessed it – Kombi van. He and his wife, Eva (Elizabeth Debicki) can help out by letting them leave their gear at his house. It saves them the trouble of cycling to the water with their heavy fibreglass boards under one arm while negotiating the road with the other.

It turns out that Sando, a laconic, unfettered 70s man, has a bit of history. His reputation in the surfing world is on the record on old magazine covers, catching waves from Mexico to Indonesia. If he wasn’t already a surfer to look up to, he certainly is now, though hardly the best role model.

Sando opens a window to a world that neither of the boys knew existed. The treacherous offshore breaks, the remote beach patrolled by a great white shark, and the wide world beckoning from across the sea. There is the strange world of adults, their losses and coping mechanisms and their various addictions.

When Sando and Loonie head overseas together on a surfing holiday, the void throws Pikelet into a relationship with Eva who limps from an injury that has put an end to her career as an extreme ski jumper. It opens a window on yet another space, dark and dangerous, and is another occasion when boundaries are crossed. It’s not just the sex.

This is not the first occasion that Simon Baker has directed. He has drawn naturalistic performances from his two untested leads, and he makes a very convincing Sando. Winton has also invested much of himself invested in this journey.

I hesitate to describe Breath as a coming-of-age film, but there is no getting away from its place in this popular local genre. However, it is in very good company, and among the best. Appearances and labels can be deceptive, anyway.

A film about surfing and surfer culture may not appear to speak to people who grew up in the inner city, or who have only lived on the land, or who think of the 1970s as a kind of dark ages.

There is nothing routine about this visually superb treatment of the subject that explores the liminal moment when young people choose their direction. And, it is of course based on the novel of Tim Winton, who also worked with Baker and Gerard Lee (Top of the Lake, Sweetie) on the screenplay.

Breath may not touch everyone, but it would be a pity if that were so. It is about so much more than blokes on boards.

Rated M, 115 minutes

4 Stars

Also published at the Canberra Critics Circle

 

 

Gurrumul

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Reviewed by © Jane Freebury

A few days before Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu passed away last year at the age of 46, he agreed to the release of this tribute to his life and work. It now arrives on screen just the way it was when last seen by the musician in July.

It is a beautiful documentary about a remarkable Indigenous man who sang, in his own language, songs that spoke to people the world over. Blind from birth, he had a gift for the universality of music, with a voice that seemed to touch people where they live.

His aunt, Susan Dhangal Gurruwiwi, who provides occasional insights over the course of the film, has observed that Gurrumul moved us deeply, often to tears, by simply showing us who he was.

Not long after Gurrumul’s death, his clan elders in East Arnhem Land also agreed to approve the film’s release. Yolngu lore forbids the name, image and voice of the deceased to remain in the public domain, so to be viewed it was an imperative to have the sign-off from the custodians of culture.

On this occasion, an important exception was made to Yolngu lore, and we are the lucky beneficiaries.

Sensitively paced and with an occasional fade out – a reminder of Gurrumul’s sightless world – this documentary is both subtle and intense.

Prior to taking on the project, director Paul Damien Williams had been working in remote Indigenous communities in the north of Australia for 30 years. It is impossible to imagine that such an organic and empathetic film could have been the result of any fly-in, fly-out arrangement.

There is priceless footage of the musician backstage while on tour overseas, either clowning around with people he felt close to, revealing his wit and mischievous sense of humour, or holding back during an interview that made him uncomfortable.

A trove of intimate moments from Gurrumul’s childhood and youth arrived one day during production, in a box of reels of Super 8 mm and Super 16 mm. The director was able to weave scenes from home movies into the tapestry of Gurrumul’s life as well.

And the filmmakers were permitted to shoot during the funerals of Gurrumul’s parents, who each died while production was underway.

Before his solo career, Gurrumul was a member of the exuberant Top End band Yothu Yindi, when a young double bassist out of Melbourne, Michael Hohnen, noticed the ‘quiet genius’ playing in the background. Hohnen would become Gurrumul’s musical collaborator. With Mark Grose, he subsequently formed the Skinnyfish Music record label in Darwin to work in partnership with Indigenous communities, help preserve their music and take it to the outside world.

Throughout the film there are many scenes of Hohnen and Gurrumul together and it is touching to see how close the bond had become between the two of them over the years. Hohnen and Gurrumul were considered wawa, the Gumatj word for brother.

Despite his beautiful, soaring voice, and mastery of keyboards, drums, didgeridoo and guitar, Gurrumul did not at first see the point in pursuing his own career. Family and community and maintaining culture at home among the Galiwin’ku community on Elcho Island were all that mattered, but eventually, he recognised the value of sharing his Yolngu culture and taking it to the world.

While Gurrumul’s voice was soaring, transcendent and unique, he was also his own man, someone who on occasion declined to meet celebrity expectations, the singing sensation who didn’t show up for his big American tour. He went home instead, to his island paradise home to attend his nephew’s initiation.

A left-hander who played a right-handed guitar upside down, a performer on the international stage who did a duet for French television but had little idea who his singing partner was. It was Sting.

It is difficult to imagine that a documentary like this could have been made about Gurrumul without deep understanding and mutual trust. It stands as a fine tribute to the man and his music, and is testament to the blackfella and balanda (whitefella) relationships that have made it happen.

Rated PG, 97 minutes

4 Stars

Also published at the Canberra Critics Circle

The Party

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Review by © Jane Freebury

The Party brings a bunch of people together in the comfortable middle-class environs of London, at the home of Janet, Kristin Scott Thomas in the role, and her husband Bill, a more than usually lugubrious Timothy Spall. Everyone has a secret to divulge.

Each character represents a segment of the influential elite. There’s someone from financial services, there’s a politician, there are two academics, and there’s a wellness coach and on-trend chef.

Bill has a droll routine as he puts records on the turntable, then announces that he has a terminal illness. That is bad enough, but hey, there is more in store yet for Janet.

The posh environs in London today may be more polite than Hornsby, Sydney, in the late 1960s when the notorious election night classic, Don’s Party, is set. But it isn’t the restraint that makes The Party fall short. It simply doesn’t gel.

Although not about to celebrate a change of government, it still looks ahead to the prospect of political change. Sometime down the track when the newly created shadow minister for health, (Scott Thomas), and her colleagues are voted into government.

Some cross-cutting between scenes looks great in the trailer, but deft promotional editing has elided the gaps and awkward pauses. The party goers, supposed to get really mad at each other, barely connect. Instead, they lounge around or stand stiffly stating their positions, firing their lines off into the undergrowth.

Someone gets slapped, another brandishes a gun, but it doesn’t for engagement make, and prospects for good argument turn in a damp squib. Talk about atomised.

There is every reason why the ‘polite party to skewer the middle classes’ formula has held up well over time, but hard as the actors try, it doesn’t work here. Given too little to do, they are defeated at every turn, even the mouthy Patricia Clarkson character, Janet’s old friend April. Cillian Murphy as a disturbed banker, Emily Mortimer as a pregnant chef in a same-sex marriage, and Bruno Ganz spouting new age banalities fare no better.

Mercifully short at 71 minutes, and filmed in artful black and white, The Party could have been a deliciously cynical demolition job on the types it portrays but Bill as DJ produces one of its few pleasures—a great playlist includes tracks from Bo Diddley and John Coltrane.

Writer-director Sally Potter has had a knack for surprising us. She teamed up with Tilda Swinton to wow us all with time travel and gender switching in Orlando in the early 1990s, then followed up with a romantic Tango Lesson in which she herself starred as student of the dance.

The Party, on the other hand, needed more work, not by the actors on set but by the writer before they got the call. It seems dashed off, an addendum to the 2015 British election during which it was written, and why it earned four stars in so many reviews is a mystery to me.

It’s clear what Potter had in mind, but when top actors can’t make it work, our gaze shifts to the filmmaker.

MA15+, 71 minutes

2 Stars

Also published at the Canberra Critics Circle

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

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Review by © Jane Freebury

As the filmmaker behind every second person’s favourite comedy, Four Weddings and a Funeral, the director Mike Newell has had a bit to live up to since 1994. This, his latest film, is in similar vein to that modern classic with a trans-Atlantic romance, an ill-matched couple, and a cosy sense of Englishness.

Initially, I hadn’t found the sound of it enticing, but when it began I was quickly won round by the lead character, the medley of endearing personalities, the old-fashioned charm, and the production polish. And once we move from London in the aftermath of WWII to the stone cottages and plunging cliffs of the Channel Islands, it looks beautiful too—with Devon and Cornwall standing in for Guernsey.

For those who have not read the book (of the same title), I can report that it involves a spirited young woman who earns an excellent living from her writing. No food stamps for Juliet (Lily James). She finds some of the fashions irresistible – who wouldn’t? – and she makes enough to afford a fine apartment too, but she rents a modest room in a boarding house instead. At the moment it is a sea of red roses sent by her boyfriend, a smooth American, Mark (Glen Powell).

Otherwise, she is alone, having lost her parents during the war, and tends  to follow her heart and instincts, rather than those of her business-oriented friend and publisher, Sidney (Matthew Goode). She is on the point of dropping the silly nom de plume, Izzy Bickerstaff, with which she became famous, and doing something serious.

James and a brace of the actors besides her have appeared in television on Downton Abbey, not everyone’s cup of tea. If this is a selling point it is lost on me and maybe others, but the performances (from Penelope Wilton and Jessica Brown Findlay, etc) are spot on.

As is Dutch actor Michiel Huisman – who others may know through TV’s astonishing Game of Thrones – the pig farmer, Dawsey, who writes to Juliet asking for help finding titles for his book club. It prompts her to visit.

Juliet’s welcome on Guernsey is uneven. The postmaster’s grandson is pleased to see her, but others—especially her landlady and the matriarch of the bookclub, Amelia (Wilton)—border on rudeness, and cannot bring themselves to welcome this stranger, however honourable her motives, into the insular community.

Such accomplished escapism with characters to care about has never hurt anyone

In flashbacks early on, the film explains how it came by its incongruous title, and asks for our indulgence. The idea of a bookclub apparently came in a moment of desperation when a group of islanders were surprised by a Nazi patrol while making food deliveries during curfew.

The Nazis occupied the Channel Islands, a British protectorate, from 1940-45, or for most of the war. To explain themselves, on the spot, the miscreants invent the idea of a bookclub and name it after the spud pie one of their number is carrying. Surely it wasn’t necessary to burden the film with it too.

And yet, despite this handicap and some risky nostalgia for an idealised past, Newell’s film has a winning combination of easy charm, lively characters and romance to more than make up for it.

A subplot involving a young German doctor stationed on Guernsey underlines the generosity and humanity of this sweet tale. It may be a confection, but a slice of such accomplished escapism with characters to care about has never hurt anyone.

3.5 Stars

Also published at the Canberra Critics Circle

The Death of Stalin

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Review by © Jane Freebury

Rated MA15+, 1 hour 47 minutes

4.5 Stars

With not much to do one evening, the staff at Radio Moscow only have to adjust the audio settings and enjoy a Mozart concerto while watching the beautiful pianist (Olga Kurylenko).

Then the phone rings. It’s Chairman Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin), calling to say his guard are on their way to pick up a recording of the live performance that is on air. Recording, what recording?

Knowing Stalin the way they do, it’s a mad scramble to set things right. The audience is stopped from leaving, and passers-by are press-ganged to fill in for those who did.

The musicians take their places again, but who will replace the conductor, who happened to knock himself out when he tripped over a fire bucket? All the other good conductors are in the gulag or otherwise disappeared.

One is found, eventually. He arrives in pyjamas and dressing gown, convinced he has been rounded up to be shot like numerous neighbours in his apartment building who, as it happened, were being carted off when he answered a knock at the door.

For the unprepared, this farcical political satire based on historical fact about one of the 20th century’s most barbarous regimes, could be a queasy cocktail. Unless you are prepared to go along with a feature length lampoon of a preposterous, vicious clique that once ran the USSR. The Death of Stalin is set in 1953.

Stalin receives his newly pressed recording, but tucked inside the sleeve is an unwelcome surprise which gives him such a turn that he has a stroke. This isn’t discovered until the next morning, the guards at his door too cowed to investigate the thump they heard as he hit the floor. The position of Russian leader is up for grabs.

As the great man lies prone, dead or dying, it’s over to the inner circle to try to work out succession. Seems there’s no plan.

It could be the dim, lugubrious party deputy, Gyorgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor), Moscow party head, a toey Nikita Krushchev (Steve Buscemi, complete with New York accent), head of the secret police, Lavrentiy Beria (Shakespearian actor Simon Russell Beale) – or foreign secretary, Vyacheslav Molotov (Michael Palin), though he has only just been added to a list to be eliminated.

Now they can emerge from their sycophantic obedience and show their true colours. When Stalin finally dies, it’s game on.

Not one of these acclaimed actors has been required to speak with a Russian accent, though each of them surely could without any effort. It helps to set the tone for this wonderful absurdist political farce from Scottish director and co-writer, Armando Iannucci (In the Loop).

The humour owes much to the great British comedic tradition, and yet the original source material is French. The graphic comic book of the same name on which it is based, is due for release in English.

Two of Stalin’s progeny, Svetlana (Andrea Riseborough) and Vasily (Rupert Friend), also try to take charge of the situation to hilarious effect, but too little of the old man has rubbed off for either of them to have any impact.

The medals strung across the chest of field marshal Georgy Zhukov (Jason Isaacs), on the other hand, really do mean something, and he ensures that a baleful chapter in Russian history is put to an end.

This is brilliant, wicked, eviscerating entertainment—a comedy of terrors, indeed.  In throwing a spotlight on the perversity and cruelty of Stalin’s regime, Iannucci shows no restraint as he lampoons each of his targets mercilessly.

A recent ban on this film in Russia is a delicious footnote. On our current understanding of the skills on hand in that country, we trust that The Death of Stalin may still be doing the rounds, circulating as an illegal file.

Also published at the Canberra Critics Circle and broadcast on ArtSound FM 92.7

Mary Magdalene

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Review by © Jane Freebury

She was canonised a saint centuries ago, but it seems that the in-fighting among Christians over Mary Magdalene, the only female disciple, has continued. Who was she? A fallen woman or a steadfast virgin?

The new film from Garth Davis, who directed Lion with such restraint and empathy, wants to set the record straight about the kind of gal she really was. It’s admirable, though I’m not sure I understand why any ongoing controversy should be resolved. She could have been one of life’s contradictions, for all we know.

The reputation of Mary Magdalene may not be sorted anytime soon, but I do like the way this film explores the woman she might have been. What her life was like before Jesus came along, what she wanted for herself and why she left her family behind.

The other thing I found intriguing – as a non-religious person interested in ideas – was the depiction of how a religion, any religion, might begin. Slowly, hesitantly, as a form of social resistance perhaps like any movement.

Life is harsh in 33 BC. Mary helps out when a woman gives birth, and she and her sisters haul in fishing nets heavy with the day’s catch.

However, an unusual lack of filial duty marks her out as a rebel who will not follow the path that her father and brothers have determined for her. She refuses to marry and chooses instead to follow a man called Jesus who is in the area. As the man of the people with a low-key but revolutionary message, Joaquin Phoenix is surprisingly plausible.

More interesting is the take on Judas Iscariot, audaciously depicted as personable and attractive, and just another impatient young man who wants Jesus to get on with the revolution

Davis’ film is set in the beautiful, stark, bare bones of southern Italy. The Australian cinematographer Greig Fraser, who worked so impressively on films like Bright Star and Zero Dark Thirty, was behind the camera. The otherworldly score is the work of the (late) Icelandic composer, Johan Johannsson and the cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir.

The film’s attention to period detail also helps make for an immersive experience. It takes you back in time to the shores of the Sea of Galilee and the city of Jerusalem, and the lives of ordinary people under the Romans. It offers its own kind of social realism.

Unfortunately the film lets itself down in trying to establish why Mary joins the disciples following Jesus. We get instead a number of vague, dreamy sequences of her descending into the blue depths as though her baptism was a rehearsal for oblivion.

And the conversations that she has with Jesus aren’t particularly persuasive support for her actions either. She could be simply be seen as a girl who didn’t like the man her family had chosen for her to marry. There could have been so much more to this.

Much more interesting is the film’s take on the figure of Judas Iscariot, who is audaciously depicted as personable and attractive, and just another impatient young man who wants Jesus to get on with the revolution. The French actor of Algerian descent, Tahar Rahim, with an open, smiling face incapable of dissimilitude, shapes a character who is bound for disappointment when the kind of revolution Jesus has in mind becomes clear.

Sometimes trance-like, cultish and surely not what the filmmakers intended

Rahim, by the way, emerged on the scene of the international film industry as a petty criminal caught up in inmate politics in prison in A Prophet, a powerful film directed by Jacques Audiard.

The black English actor, Chiwetel Ejiofor, is also memorable at the disciple Peter. A small part.

After two hours of screen time, there is not enough to know about Mary Magdalene. The alabaster serenity of Rooney Mara as the main character reveals so little of her motivations that watching her story unfold is sometimes like taking part in a waking dream. Sometimes trance-like, cultish and surely not what the filmmakers intended.

Actually, screenwriters Helena Edmundson and Philippa Goslet, have, while undertaking to write one story, written another. Mary Magdalene isn’t especially about its stated subject, who is still just the witness, but about how a religion or a movement might be born.

Despite wanting to reveal more of the true nature of Mary Magdalene, the film offers a low-key study of Christianity in its early days, and why Jesus was eliminated as a dissident.

From the paintings of the masters like Rubens and El Greco to the blockbusters based on the writing of novelist Dan Brown, it is clear Magdalene has intrigued artists and writers for centuries. Surely the curiosity over her true nature will continue. She was a woman in a man’s world, after all.

Rated M, 2 hours

3 Stars

Also published at the Canberra Critics Circle, and broadcast on ArtSound FM 92.7

In the Fade

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Review by © Jane Freebury

One of the earliest films by the Turkish-German director Fatih Akin was called Head-On, released in 2004. It was tough and compelling, pulling audiences into the intense orbit of its star-crossed lovers who were trapped as only people caught between two cultures can understand. I was transfixed and have continued to look out for his work ever since.

Head-On is easily confused with the Australian film of the same name, Ana Kokkinos’ film of 1998 with Alex Dimitriadis as a troubled young Greek-Australian. By fascinating coincidence, both films explore life in the cross-cultural space, and are somewhat similar in tone.

Besides this latest film, In the Fade, Germany’s entry in this year’s foreign language Oscar, Akin’s most high profile film so far would be The Edge of Heaven, a drama detailing the complicated life in Germany of people of Turkish descent. Parallel worlds, you would say.

From his base in Hamburg, where he was born and raised, it is natural that Akin should have these concerns. His perspective is not always dark. He created a good-natured, neighbourhood diner party out of his 2009 film, Soul Kitchen, but In the Fade does return with pessimism to vexed cross-cultural issues that concern us all.

It is played out across the finely chiselled features of blonde German actress Diane Kruger. Her face is the canvas on which the drama is performed after her husband of Turkish descent, Nuri (played by Numan Acar), and their little son Rocco are the victims of a bombing targetting the family business. Katja’s face fills the frame as the tragedy takes hold.

As she waits for confirmation, police take toothbrushes away from their family home to determine IDs, then return, within hours of the crime, with their questions. Katja’s parents and in-laws and friends in attendance are against the insensitive timing of this interrogation but she allows it. Why? Is it because her instincts tell her straightaway who the perpetrators are?

Katja remembers a young woman she spoke to outside her husband’s office minutes before the attack. She was parking her bicycle. It was new, but she wasn’t securing it. Strange, Katja thought, and the hunch is sound. When the matter goes to court, with her lawyer friend Danilo (Denis Moschitto) handling the case for her, things do not pan out as they should.

The evidence incriminating the young neo-Nazi couple who are arrested and charged with the crime appears to be reasonably sound, but the court proceedings take a perverse turn that pulls you up short. Clearly, the film intends to show how someone might feel and act when the system appears to be stacked against them.

Moreover, the reactions of her own mother and mother-in-law have already revealed a telling lack of empathy for Katja’s predicament. Though she does have the support of close friends, including Danilo in court – and maybe even some possibilities waiting in the wings?

Increasingly, however, and despite signs that there is hope the case can be reviewed and there are possibilities for renewal, she seems to grow more and more desperately – and scarily – alone.

Katja does give the impression of being something of a rebel. The drugs, the plentiful tattoos, including the tattoo of her circle of commitment. And there is the strong suggestion that neither her parents nor Nuri’s truly approved of the match.

In the Fade is told in three chapters. To begin with it is raining, continuously, heavily, like a tropical downpour, until the sky clears on Katja’s trip to Greece, when blazing sun appears like a bold horizontal wipe in the editing. The relentless clarity of the bright Mediterranean sunshine could bring on renewal, or a different kind of clarity altogether.

Taking its title from the song by an American hard rock band, Queens of the Stone Age, apparently, In the Fade is a perilous journey of the soul. It makes me wonder what the late German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who also consistently explored the plight of marginalised people, would make of the politics of Germany today.

It is a tough film, graced with a fine performance by Kruger, but the emotional authenticity that she portrays, doesn’t seem explained by the arc her character travels, particularly the surprising events in the courtroom that drive her to the final act.

In the Fade is a portrait of despair, well told with a powerful central performance, but such an inexorable journey that we are desperate to come up for air after the final frames.

Rated MA15+, 1 hr 46 mins

3 Stars

Also published at the Canberra Critics Circle, and broadcast on ArtSound FM 92.7