Category: REVIEWS

Strange Heaven is an emotional and engaging piece of filmmaking looking at the family unit from the perspective of a 7 year old. What should be a family’s heaven in a new country with boundless possibilities turns into hell for the couple and a strange heaven for their child.

Strange Heaven tells the story of a Polish family that emigrate to Sweden and the various ways in which they struggle to adapt to their new surroundings. The couple’s precocious 7 year daughter Ula (Barbara Kubiak) adapts effortless to Swedish and picks up the language with ease in stark contrast to her mother. However, a lie and a lack of appreciation of its impact sets in motion a dramatic series of events including the removal of Ula to live with foster parents and her parents decision to do everything and anything in order to reunite the family unit.

This film, Strange Heaven, is evocative of the 2012 film The Hunt written by Thomas Vinterberg with the central character played by Mads Mikkelsen. In that an innocent lie turns one man’s life upside down. Here, the little girl’s lie turns everyone’s world upside down. What is clever about Strange Heaven is the central core and the emotional intelligence of the film is squarely at the level of a 7 year old. One scene beautifully illustrates this when she is given the opportunity to confess but because she has always wanted a dog which her new foster has so she decides to remain silent.

The writer/director Dariusz Gajewski directs this film with great ease and it slowly draws you in. There are times when the film could do with certain characters developed especially the social worker as she comes across as a caricature – the embodiment of the big bad State. However on the whole this is a refreshingly different take on the impact of a lie told by a child whilst deftly avoids demonising the child.

Strange Heaven was shown as part of New Polish Cinema in the Kinoteka Polish Film Festival 7 to 28 April 2016.

By Last Caress.

The Divide, the latest movie by British documentarian Katharine Round, tells the tale of economic disparity in modern day US and UK, where the top 0.1% owns as much wealth as the bottom 90%.

The narrative within The Divide travels across the Atlantic to see how broad economic shifts have shaped not only our physical circumstances but also the way we think and what we believe in. It reveals, piece by piece, the forces that have undermined our economic foundations, and led to a dramatic transfer of wealth to the very top.

The Divide weaves together the stories of seven people, each striving for a better life: Wall Street psychologist Alden has never been busier as his clients battle personal breakdowns in droves; Leah from Oak Grove in Richmond, Virginia just wants to make it through the day – if the stress from her job at KFC doesn’t kill her, rising crime in the neighbourhood might. Permanently anxious Janet in Louisiana can’t even afford comfort food without using her credit cards; Rochelle in Newcastle, UK wishes her job as a carer wasn’t looked down on so much; Jen in Sacramento, California doesn’t even talk to her neighbours in the upscale gated-community she lives in – they’ve made it clear to her she isn’t “their kind”.

Initially influenced by the book The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Divide takes a different approach to the book in that it doesn’t present us with easily referenced supporting statistics with regard to western economic disparity. We simply bare witness to the trials and tribulations of Alden, Leah, Rochelle and co. as they go about the business of trying to get whatever it is they feel they want, or need, out of life. This organic approach – a frequently warm and humorous one, it has to be said, despite the serious subject matter – leads us to wonder not so much about whether or not there’s a divide – that much is indisputable – but rather, why such a divide at all, when one’s position on the financial spectrum brings its own crises, no matter where on that spectrum one is?

Documentaries are almost always at their strongest when they’re not preaching from on high or telling a tale from only one perspective; in this regard The Divide packs a real punch, and comes highly recommended.

THE DIVIDE is in cinemas from 22 April and nationwide on 31^st May  http://thedividedocumentary.com/

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By Last Caress.

A Girl and Her Gun, a seventeen-minute short written by Bristolian Paul Holbrook and co-directed by Holbrook and Sam Dawe, is a stylistic marriage of British kitchen-sink urban drama to the Spaghetti Western, to which A Girl and Her Gun is also a love letter.

An un-named twelve year-old girl (credited here simply as “The Girl”) visits her comatose father in hospital. He’s a guest at Her Majesty’s Pleasure and he’s been badly beaten for some reason whilst inside. It doesn’t look good for him. The Girl is unkempt and ragged because her chav mother Carol (Laura Bayston) and Carol’s new squeeze Clive (Joe Sims, Broadchurch) couldn’t give a good f*ck about her; indeed, they seem to see her as nought but an irritant, inconveniencing their own self-centred pursuits (screwing as loudly as they can in the next room, dry-humping unapologetically on the couch in front of The Girl). As a result, The Girl is bullied at school, as well as at home. Her only respite, it seems, is in the Spaghetti Western movies she watches avidly, when her mum isn’t ordering her to “Turn that sh*t off,” of course. However, tragic circumstances soon place The Girl in possession of a loaded revolver. Will she take her lead from the violent Italian horse operas which constitute her only friends in the world?

I’ll have to admit to a bit of bias here: In another internet incarnation away from battleroyalewithcheese, I moderate on the forums at The Spaghetti Western Database, the most comprehensive source of information for spaghetti westerns in the world. So, since spaghettis are clearly a big love of mine, it comes then as no surprise that I would fall madly in love with a short feature which so fervently portrays its subject matter in the style of a spaghetti western, from the camera angles and close-ups to the sparse dialogue to the superb spag-inspired score by Simone Cilio. Hell, A Girl and her Gun even succeeds in making the decidedly mediocre Diamante Lobo aka God’s Gun (Parolini, 1976) – the spaghetti western The Girl is seen watching – look cool.

If I was making a lazy comparison I would call A Girl and Her Gun a mash-up of Shane Meadows versus Sergio Leone, but it would be a comparison meant with love. With strong performances from Laura Bayston and Joe Sims but especially from the fantastic Matilda Randall in an almost wordless performance as The Girl, A Girl and her Gun comes highly recommended by this gringo. I would love to see Messrs. Holbrook and Dawe tackle a real Eurowestern at some stage.

Monet to Matisse (2016)

When I arrived in Paris as a 19 year old, one of the first things I did was go and visit Claude Monet’s house and garden situated at Giverny, 45 miles west of Paris. It was a hot day in July and despite the crowds it was possible to find a cool quiet corner and sit amongst the swaying blocks of vivid flowers, under a weeping willow listening to the bees while contemplating the lilies on the pond, and the paintings that Monet produced in response to the garden that he created.

James Priest, head gardener at Giverny, speaks of Monet’s garden as one that shakes you up, the colours both contrast and combine to provide the opposite of the tasteful English garden. Monet, influenced by 19^th century English garden designers and particularly William Robinson, experimented with exotic flowers and the wildness at Giverny is a sign of this, allowing plants to express themselves in a natural way, in contrast to the formal French style of gardening of the same period. Tom Coward, head gardener at William Robinson’s former home, Gravetye Manor, Sussex, evokes with warmth and enthusiasm the pleasure of a garden, the choice of shape and colour and the vision.  Interestingly, the creation of these beautiful gardens coincided with the availability of new hybrids, dahlias for example, as well as exotic seeds provided by travelling purveyors, which Monet used profusely, much to the consternation of some of his suspicious neighbours. As well as Monet’s garden, Bickerstaff’s film takes us on a tour of the magnificent gardens of other artists.

The exhibition of the same name, which features throughout the film, has managed to gather an astounding collection of paintings from all over the world including work by Pissarro, Tissot, Renoir, Van Gogh, Liebermann, Klimt and Sorolla amongst many others.

David Bickerstaff has created both a beautiful and engaging film with the lush images being the key. They perfectly capture the experience of visiting these gardens. The film is many things: an inspirational lesson in gardening, an introduction to the modernism in 19^th century art as well as an excellent companion to the exhibition currently at the Royal Academy of Art.

PAINTING THE MODERN GARDEN: Monet to Matisse opens in cinemas nationally, today.

William Robinson’s house Gravetye Manor, is now a hotel and restaurant, with its magnificent garden restored by Tom Coward: http://www.gravetyemanor.co.uk/manor/garden

The Hackney Picturehouse will be hosting a special screening of the film on April 18 at 18h15: https://www.picturehouses.com/cinema/Hackney_Picturehouse/film/exhibition-on-screen-painting-the-modern-garden

You have until April 20 to see the exhibition at the Royal Academy: https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/painting-modern-garden-monet-matisse

www.exhibitiononscreen.com