Category: REVIEWS

The Song of Sway Lake. I can certainly say that I’ve not seen a film like this is a while. The story, or what I could make of the concept is that a lake in eastern USA was once owned by a man, Sway. A music collector, he once held a record, what he referred to as a perfect record. Now that he is dead, and the lake turned into a tourist attraction, his grandson returns with his Russian friend to the old house on the lake to find said record. However, the arrival of other family members and an attractive young woman, and with all the activity on the lake, complicate their plan.

Off the bat I will say that The Song of Sway Lake is a visually gorgeous film. The cinematography and editing are without flaw. It all makes for a realistic and yet surreal story set on a beautiful lake. The wilderness and cabin sets are used to exceptional effect. You do feel like this would be a lovely place to visit for a nice holiday away from the stresses of life. There is clearly passion to this story from director and co-writer Ari Gold, so there is an energy to the film as well, keeping a relatively slow story going at an even pace. It was also nice to hear the voice of First Blood actor Brian Dennehy in a narrating role as the dead relative who owned the record to begin with.

Unfortunately The Song of Sway Lake commits one of the biggest film sins of any film, but in particular a drama – it could not hold my interest. I don’t mind slow, deliberate dramas, granted they don’t normal find themselves amongst my favourites, but this was tough to focus on. An issue here being that the film lacked focus. I don’t just mean through the plot, which was a little hard to follow. The hunt for the record is claimed to be the main plot of the story, but it feels like a subplot. Sadly, as does the return of the family, the grandmothers hidden agenda, the problems they have with the Russian friend stealing from them and the blossoming love story also feel like subplots. I wasn’t getting a grip on the stakes.

Yet stylistically it’s unfocused too. For the most part it feels fairly realistic, and yet there is a moment where our lead, Ollie, pretends to shoot a cupid arrow at a young woman and she gets an actual wound in her shoulder. These surreal moments unfortunately stood out as a distraction. The opening of the film is a couple swimming naked in the lake, graphic full-frontal nudity on screen and a sombre piano number playing as the scene plays out. It’s bizarre and somewhat striking, but that does not set up the tone of the film to follow.

Other than that I wasn’t fond of the somewhat repetitive score that played out throughout the film at random intervals. The acting wasn’t good either. Ollie comes across as a whiner at times and a complete blank slate at others. The Russian friend, Nicholai, is clearly someone who isn’t Russian putting on a very silly accent. Everyone else just plays it deadpanned and without enough passion to really hold our attentions. I don’t know if this is a performance or a directorial or a script issue.

I didn’t take to The Song of Sway Lake. It is not without merit and I would recommend it to those with a keen eye for visuals or with an interest in cinematography or editing. Otherwise, I’m not sure who I’d recommend this to. It’s to basic and slow for it to appeal to those who like their films surreal, and it’s a little to dream like to appeal to those looking for a romantic drama. It’s not a film I hate, not at all, but it’s also not one I will remember.

Mother

A mother’s worst nightmare is played out with a minimalist cast and location in this gripping short film. The film follows Marta, a single mum who’s son has gone on holiday with his father. Whilst Marta has her mother around for a visit, she gets a phone call from her son who is alone on a beach. The following minutes of the film are heart wrenching.

The acting from Spanish television heavyweights Marta Nieto and Blanca Apilanez is so natural that the film could almost be a fly-on-the-wall documentary. What director Rodrigo Sorogoyen does with such a minimalist cast, location and idea packs a powerful punch. I can imagine this film will draw a few comparisons to Aldomavar’s Julieta, as it deals with generational anxiety. It also shows that if you have a great, low-buget idea that Oscar glory is in sight! 

Marguerite

Actress turned director Marianna Farley delivers a delicate LGBTQ film with Marguerite. Canadian acting royalty Béatrice Picard is Marguerite, a lonely woman who is suffering from illness in her age. She has a friendship with her caseworker Rachel (Sandra Bisson) who, when she reveals she is in a gay relationship, inspires Marguerite to dig in to her past. This film highlights how sexual repression and societal judgement can effect someone for a life time and also the importance of friendship.

It is also very realistic in its portrayal of a care worker-patient relationship. To be personal, this actually reminded me of when my own grandmother was living at home alone. Surrounded by memories with few people to share them with. Despite Marguerite’s physical pains, the largest of them is emotional. A beautiful film and a big pay on the back for Farley for not only representing a smaller section of the LGBTQ community, but also showing that stories are not just for the young!

By Fergus Henderson. “Love has limits” proclaims Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz). “It should not” replies Queen Anne (Olivia Coleman). This playful aside, early on in Yorgos Lanthimos’ new film The Favourite, sets the tone for the rest of its crazed, raging runtime.

Anne and Sarah are secret lovers, encroached upon by Sarah’s fallen cousin Abigail (Emma Stone), their affair set against the lonely echoing halls of a never-ending royal palace. Queen Anne, nominally presiding over England at the beginning of the 18^th century, is lost to the world, motivated only be the intimacy and guidance of Sarah. After taking in Abigail, estranged now from her abusive family, their love will be tested, and its limits found.

Meanwhile, the war with France seethes invisibly in the background, relayed to a bewildered, emotionally untethered Anne by a series of made up fops who exist as comedic oddities on the film’s fringes. Anne herself is beset by gout, wheeled about in an hilariously decorated wheelchair, clearly emotionally decimated by the loss of her many children. We find her, as established by Coleman, at a point of profound emotional alienation and having ceded all power to Sarah who, early on in the film, accidentally introduces herself as the queen to a parliamentary group.

Anne’s desperate state only increases as a love triangle quickly arises, spiralling into power plays and plotting. This, along with the trials of saving face before her court whilst advising it on a war she barely comprehends, pushes her further inward and into suicidal depression. Despite how the enfolding love triangle between them all appears to give Anne some long lost power, it can only last so long, for Abigail has her own motivations. 

Director Lanthimos keeps the film’s atmosphere elevated to an ambiently hysterical pitch at all times, aided by cinematographer Robbie Ryan’s swooping camera and ghoulishly distortive wide angled lenses, enveloping us in this isolated world of Stuart era royalty. He delights, somewhat cruelly, in the utter strangeness of his subject matter. 

One need only look at his past films to see how all-encompassing his preoccupation with the unpredictable, volatile nature of our internal lives is. His filmography seems, up till now, to have charted a course straight into the scariest parts of this alienated humanity – from the unknowable freaks and fantasists of 2005’s Kinetta (a film I could only recommend to completists) through to 2017’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer, which pitted an unstoppable Greek myth against the immoveable object of a doctor’s will to have his way.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYb-wkehT1g

There is something a little different going on here. The Favourite marks a distinct left-turn.

Gone, largely, are the arch and insular performances of his earlier films, replaced now by the awe-inspiring emotional acrobatics of its three leads, all of whom out-manoeuver a script that could have stiffened and anaesthetised them (as has been the case with previous Lanthimos stars.) Make no mistake, of course, tonally this film knows what it is: the verbal sabre rattling one might expect of such a period piece abounds, and the inherently funny spectacle of self-important people in silly outfits remains a constant. Likewise it takes a dim view on our pretensions to authority and hierarchy. 

Now, however, Lanthimos contends with the weighty power of Olivia Colman, who provides us with a forceful, embattled performance for the ages. She is simply out of control in this film, hobbling, lunging, falling, vomiting, screaming. She is sometimes still, rendered inert by her psychic pain and the indignity of being wheelchair bound. She is sometimes salacious and soliciting, pitting Sarah and Abigail against each other with wounded glee. At times she is petulant and childlike, lost amongst the rabbits she keeps as surrogates for her seventeen dead children. 

Weisz and Stone are impressively strong and vengeful, respectively, but this is Coleman’s film, and she is stunning.

Whereas with his previous films Lanthimos seemed to wallow in the cynical, indulging an almost nihilistic view of human behaviour, using his absurdism to hold you at arm’s length, here he seems incapable of preventing his leads from bringing humanity to the film. Their very presence in a shot enlivens it. One suspects that this is the point of the film: these societally repressed women possess a boundless power and interiority the likes of which is never even guessed at by the preening, posturing men who strut ineffectually around the plot’s periphery. They simply have to live in their own, necessarily secret world. 

Perhaps this is why, with women at the centre of his film for the first time, The Favourite pulses with an energy that far surpasses his previous work. 

As with his other films, the cinematography seems focused on making people look small and odd, capturing them in long takes from a distance and forcing us to see their activities as something alien and furtive. It can only be down to the sheer liveliness of the film’s energy that this tactic never becomes clinical or cruel. We are now privy to anachronistically contemporary dance sequences, slow motion duck races, tense mud-bath showdowns, scenes of long-shot visual comedy indebted to director Jacques Tati. There is even a character listed in the credits as ‘Nude Pomegranate Tory.’ 

The Favourite, lit with natural light, is a sensuous thing to behold, somewhere between the baroque compositions of Barry Lyndon and the raw power of a Pasolini film. It is simply much more vital, and much less punishing, than anything he has done before. This is finally a Yorgos Lanthimos film with nothing withheld, one whose absurdism seems generous and egalitarian. One you can really enjoy.

There remains plenty of darkness to be seen and felt. You will still leave with the distinct feeling that Lanthimos finds torment in the callousness and excess of the world. You will feel thoroughly odd throughout. The audience I was in was tangibly disturbed by the searching, hallucinatory note that the film ends on. But you will also finally get the sense that Lanthimos, like someone awakening from a nightmare, is starting to see the light. 

Eva Kaukai and Manon Chamberland practice the Inuk art of throat singing in their small village of Kangirsuk. Their mesmerizing voices carry through the four seasons of their Arctic land. The art of throat singing is musically pleasing and creatively diverse, with various forms belonging to cultures the world over. Eva and Manon were taught the tradition from their grandparents and it is something that every girl in their village has learned. There’s a healthy dose of youthful whimsy in this short feature.

The girls create a rhythmic, vocal sound that seemingly canters and cascades over the gorgeous, frozen landscapes. The aerial shots whip across the icy northern reaches of Quebec and from a bird’s eye view we spot children playing in the village, hunters with a caribou and rolling, rocky terrain. As a celebration of life in this remote community, Throat Singing in Kangirsuk is a momentary snapshot.

A fleeting glance that offers something mesmerising and audibly unfamiliar in the best sense. The tone will not be for everyone, and the drone shots are something that many will be nonplussed by, in an age where everybody and their grandma has one, but I found this short to be an exuberant work of filmmaking.