NZFFF 2021 Week 1

Police/Night Shift

"Each of us in our own way was broken" is the introduction to Fury Road and it might well apply here. Night Shift gives us four characters, but is really centred around three of them. Deftly employing non-linear story-telling, the core of the film is the expulsion of a man trying to claim asylum in France, having fled persecution and torture from Eastern Europe, but to understand that core we cut about the lives of the officers, their experience of this day before in comes to the point in the film where they are thrown together on an unexpected, late-night shift engaged in transporting the unfortunate, desperate, and un-named man.

As the film progresses, we unpick the difference between the façade that each officer shows us; we are never granted similar access to the man marked for return, and so like the officers we must try to evaluate whether he claims that a return will lead to a painful death are true or not: instead, we are given more understanding of the motivations for each cop and their propensity to believe, to disbelieve, or to ignore that story and their role in delivering him to whatever his fate might be.

Omar Sy was a compelling reason for me to see this film, and he does not disappoint: his abilities seem boundless; he owns this role as surely as he has owned any; it seems he can turn his hand equally to drama, victim, enforcer, comedy, conspirator as easily as he breathes, and he can inhabit any role so perfectly naturally he becomes that character. His ability to shift his mannerisms, his body language - it's so complete that you forget to be delighted, because his cocky cop here is so completely not the actor, nor any trace of, say, Knock or Chocolat.

I highly recommend this film.

Appearances

The first major distraction of this film is its lead: Benjamin Biolay nags at the back of my mind with his resemblence to Benicio Del Toro; the second is that his character is a famous conductor. As such, I am sure the collection of orchestral music that makes up the store is probably selected to comment on the story as it unfolds; alas I don't have the knowledge to recognise their pieces so as to see their relevance to the scene at hand.

The centre of the film, Ève, is a rich French woman, part of a gaggle of a self-styled elite living in Vienna; married to an internationally famous conductor, the film kicks off with her hurrying her mother back to France after a visit, making sure that she does not meet any of he carefully-selected circle; it would not do, one presumes, for them to realise how pedestrain Ève's roots are. Next, we go to a society event, where mock-horrified gossip about one of their number being thrown over by her husband for a younger model. It is, of course, a setup for Ève to discover that her husband is fucking their son's teacher.

What follows is the unfolding of her increasingly - and ultimately breathtakingly - ruthless responses to this, determined to both keep ahold of her husband and place in society, while destroying her rival.

It's a movie of twists and turns, with stalkers and killers coming out of the woodwork in the most unexpected ways. It veers unsettlingly from hysterically funny to terrifying, and as we unwind the story, our impressions are poked and re-shaped: perhaps the only good characters is Ève's mother and son, while aquaintence takes the shine off the ones who seem decent, or burnish the ones who seem less so.

A smart, pointed, and sometime hysterically funny but also bleak film that I would happily watch with someone who hasn't seen it, because it is, overall, a delight.

Antoinette in the Cévennes

I find myself wondering if there's something deeply wrong with parent-teacher relations in the French educational system; for the second time, we have a film where the key plot point is an affair between a father and the teacher of his child.

Whereas Appearances is told primary from the point of view of the wronged wife, this is told from the point of view of the teacher; moreover, it could not be more different in tone, or the characters' journeys. Beginning with a breathtaking sequence when Antoinette (mis-)uses the school performance to have her students help her seranade her lover, she is not merely egotistical, but positively deluded as to how she might be percieved. When her student's father tells her that their plan to spend the school holidays together while his wife and child are dismissed to a remote location have run aground on the wife's insistence on a family hike in the Cévennes, Antoinette decides that she will hire a donkey to take the same trip, hoping to run into them on the way.

Not only is she singularly unequipped for this, being unfamiliar with tramping, donkeys, or the outdoors in general, she is so totally detached from how she might be seen that she cheerily tells the first night's group of hikers that she is in pursuit of this most personally and professionally inappropriate of lovers. One sees a table full of people who are (for the most part) experience a mix of horror and pity as she unfolds her story, giggling away as though she is describing nothing more untoward than farting in church.

La Daronne/The Godmother

A delightful crime caper centred on Isabelle Huppert's Patience, a woman battling with the dementia-driven decline of her egocentric mother, the debts of her long-dead husband, and her reduced circumstances from her well-off childhood. Working as an Arabic translator for the police may not seem thrilling, a compassionate attempt to save the son of a beloved nurse in her mother's hospital pivots into her into drug dealing. Oh, and her partner is the head of the division investigating what happened to a tonne and a half of cannabis resin.

This was solid fun from start to finish.

Sous le ciel d’Alice/Skies of Lebanon

A remarkable film, tracing Alice and her family in Lebanon; opening with the story of her exit from her native Switzerland in favour of Lebanon, the meat of the film is the life she builds in Beirut with her husband Joseph, a rocket scientist whose dream is to put a Lebanese in space - a symbol of the pre-civil war Lebanon and the optimism that surrounded it.

Alice is cut off from her parents and her country of origin; she embraces Lebanon and her new family and friends, building a happy and full life as a mother and artists in a thriving country; as the film moves on, though, disquiting notes appear on the news, in the streets. Soon the distant squabbles of the provinces come to the capital; in-laws move into Alice's apartment as their own houses become less and less safe; rumours fly, family members disappear, and the full force of the disintegration of Alice's beloved country is bought home to her. She endures, desperate to believe that soon, it will get better, angry with those who flee abroad, even as she watches her sister-in-law fight to keep one of her sons from joining the militias.

It is a story which is full of beauty and horror, and told in a restrained way that emphasises the way in which everything is normal, until it isn't. The style of the film is as notable as story: Alice and her familial life are shot in beautiful colours, bright, light, and clear colours as though we are watching something from 50s or 60s Hollywood, as clear and as pretty as Lawrence of Arabia. Contrasted with this, the darker parts of the story are shot with elements of theatre and surrealism, with stage setting and devices: the division of Beirut builds with cuts to a group of men building a sandbag wall on the corner of a street while wearing papier-mache masks; Lebanon itself is a woman dressed as a cyprus tree like a child in a school play; a missing brother is a poster on the street, his wife out searching for him steps into his welcoming arms to become another part of the poster, on a wall of them. It is remarkable, but rather than being a show-off or laboured device, it integrates perfectly into the story-telling.

A brilliant film.

Adieu les Cons/Bye Bye Morons

At once hilarious and bleak: a woman with a fatal illness wants to reconnect with a child who she was pressured into giving up for adoption crosses paths with a suicidal, anti-social civil servant who is being forced out of his workplace after devoting his life to making it better. Forced together and on the run, they are desperate to find and contact her son before she dies.