The Week in Cinema: 20/05 -- 26/05

-- a selection of short-form reviews of the films I have watched this week --

Knock Down the House (dir. Rachel Lears, 2019) 

✭✭✭✩✩

Fly-on-the-wall documentary Knock Down the House easefully navigates the rising careers of four, blooming Democrats – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (of New York, 14^thdistrict), Amy Vilela (of Nevada), Cori Bush (of Missouri) and Paula Jean Swearengin (of West Virginia). It is a fascinating, female response to Trump-era politics, reassuring trust in a fighting, future spirit. Lears tracks the progress of each candidate – their individual traits, motivations and growing public forums – trading between the intimate (one-to-one interviews, glancing into bathroom rituals) and the distant (often peering from the back of a stage). It is foremost reportage, an unbiased stance without any need to resist the opinions of its quartet; nonetheless, it is hard not feel that it is yet another example of a brand of documentary filmmaking that is becoming increasingly familiar, or perhaps fashionable, to the current, tele-oriented age of viewership. Knock Down The House is excellent and emotive, but its documentation feels superficial, unopinionated and just a little flat.

F For Fake, “Vérités et Mensonges” (dir. Orson Welles, 1974)

✭✭✭✭✩

“Ladies and gentlemen, by way of introduction, this is a film about trickery and fraud, about lies,” intones Orson Welles, so commencing the sparkling and intelligent charm of his penultimate work. Welles playfully traces the nature of illusion, stepping between figures such as Elmyr de Hory (a highly-prosperous art forger) and Clifford Irving (the notorious forger of Howard Hughes’ diary), before landing on the story of Picasso’s ‘22-piece muse’, Kodar – luminously performed by Oja Kodar. Considered the precursor to modern film editing, the creative geography of F For Fake is at once essayistic and again improvisational, a somewhat autobiographical pastiche of film and its visual construction. One wonders how Welles could have ever made another film afterwards; not unlike what Finnegans Wake represented to James Joyce – the act of reinvention pushed to its farthest limit – we see the artist moving beyond their work, perhaps for the first time, unable to respond to their medium in the same way again. Welles ends the picture by reporting: ‘art, [Picasso] said, is a lie — a lie that makes us realize the truth. To th[is] memory […] I offer my apologies and wish you all, true and false, a very pleasant good evening’, a poignant, cinematic gesture of valediction.

Gerry (dir. Gus Van Sant, 2002) 

✭✭✭✭✭

Somewhere, in a remote, unnamed location marked only “Wilderness Trail”, two young boys called Gerry, respectively, wander across a desert and get lost, unable to recover their way in the vast, minimalist infinite of their landscape. (review continues in separate piece)

That Obscure Object of Desire, “Cet obscure objet du désir” (dir. Luis Buñuel, 1977) 

✭✭✭✭✩

Over the course of a train journey from Seville to Paris, an ageing, French philanthropist recollects the various scenes of his ill-fated love affair with the virtuous, siren-like ‘Conchita’ – interchangeably played by Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina, a unique balance of personality temperatures – despite not being aware of her presence aboard the train itself. Unknowingly, it would be Buñuel’s final, directorial effort, completing career-long preoccupations with sexuality, the dynamics between masculinity and femininity, as well his explosive, surrealist roots. Look once, and you see a film about two quarrelling people; look twice, and you quickly slip into the imagination of a genius.

Paranoid Park (dir. Gus Van Sant, 2007) 

✭✭✭✩✩

Van Sant’s follow up to his ‘death-trilogy’ – Gerry, Elephant and Last Days – harnesses the same cinematic grammar and tropes of childhood, only now weaker in its deliverance onto the screen. Paranoid Park evolves as a metonym for the death of a security guard, (whose killing is revealed late into the film) and the subsequent disorientation felt by Alex, its skateboarding-protagonist. ‘No one’s ever really ready for Paranoid Park,’ one character tells us, a place where ‘dead bodies [are reportedly] buried […] under the cement’. Such mythology is poised against that of its ordinariness, straightforward scenes of skateboarding indulged with half-blurred, slow-motion effect, often accompanied by a Terrence Malick-esque voiceover. Near to the end, Alex is persuaded by a friend, Macy, to write a letter detailing the events of the story – the epistolary material is destroyed, however, leaving the film open, indecisive and lacking the final, emotional punch.

Last Days (dir. Gus Van Sant, 2005)

✭✭✭✭✭

If asked to consider an equivalent to Last Days– a loose interpretation of the final days of Kurt Cobain – I would be drawn to Jack Kerouac’s novel Big Sur, mapping the spiritual collapse of its worn-out, alcoholic protagonist, or, alternately, the melancholic fragility of Jeff Buckley’s first album, Grace. Last Days is also a response to unhappiness, one that we cannot help but find ourselves drawn to – not unlike the public response to Cobain’s suicide itself (in the years since, you can now purchase clothing with his suicide note printed on the front). Newly-escaped from rehab, the character/alter-ego of Blake roams freely in the rooms and nearby woods of a country house, either mock-shooting the sleeping guests with a shotgun, playing the guitar, or crashing through the quiet outdoors in his depressed solitude. In an early scene, Blake watches a high-speed train travel past him, perfectly capturing how out of sync he is from the rest of the world, or, perhaps, the indifference felt toward him by a world so close – such as those who crash and have sex in the rooms of the house. Van Sant crafts a portrait of the fading colours of youth, a life emptied out in front of us.

The Last Waltz (dir. Martin Scorsese, 1978)

✭✭✭✭✩

Scorsese meticulously crafts the “farewell concert appearance” of ‘The Band’, performed on November 25, 1976, with a plethora of additional musicians and guests. Close-up to medium shots are poised against the infrequent long shot, whilst interspersed with interview footage – studio segments, smoky reminiscences from members of the ‘The Band’, or the odd game of pool – the dynamic cadence of the stage softened, mourned perhaps, by the reality of their diminished collective. Lead guitarist Robbie Robertson, considering whether the concert is a beginning or an end, settles on: “the beginning of the beginning of the end of the beginning.” Elegiac and rhapsodic.

Gerry, dir. Gus Van Sant [2002] review

Gerry (dir. Gus Van Sant, 2002)

✭✭✭✭✭

Somewhere, in a remote, unnamed location marked only “Wilderness Trail”, two young men called Gerry, respectively, wander across a desert and get lost, unable to recover their way in the minimalist infinite of their landscape.

Not unlike the dazzling Elephant – the picture Van Sant would subsequently direct, winning the Palm d’Or at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival – Gerry is also a story about modern, Americana youth, the simple banalities of existing in a world full of safety nets, cushioned truths that state no matter what you do in life it will always be okay in the end. Each film appears to suggest that our engagements with mass media (video games, television) or toward everyday living (our privilege of water, food and shelter) are overly abused and underacknowledged. Nondescript intrigue inspires the brutal, Columbine-esque shooting at the heart of Elephant, whereas in Gerry – a film whose plot is borne by a comparable, numbed outlook – the motivation to do something different is abstracted even farther. “Well, how far is the thing?” one Gerry asks another, at the onset. “We're halfway there,” the other replies. If they are both thinking of the same, abstracted ‘thing’, or if they even know what it is, the film never let us in on it. It seems to request that our trust must lie in the journeying rather than any knowledge of what it is headed toward. Thomas Malory once expressed a similar view: ‘we shall now seek that which we shall not find’.

Gerry begins with two male characters (played by Casey Affleck and Matt Damon: also close friends in real life) driving along a blacktop road for a significant period; the former Gerry makes a turn, before parking the car in a dirty area of land. Intimate silence is dusted with the glacial, piano composition ‘Spielgel im spielgel’ [trans. ‘mirror[s] in the mirror’], by Avro Pärt, a pensive melody that gradually unfolds as it is being played (its structure based on an alternating rising and falling of the same crotchet triads). Together with the dramatic cinematography of Harris Savides, the soundscape appears to respond to, and influence, the images that fill the screen. Abandoning the trail to satisfy their own, personal quest – “let’s go this way, man. Everything’s gonna lead to the same place” – the two set off on a fresh route, strolling first, then sprinting, before finally (and this is what constitutes the majority of the film) attempting to retrace their steps to the vehicle. One mountain gives way to another, animal tracks to sand, and slowly the mission of redemption gives way to a fruitless defeat. I was reminded – whilst watching these desert wanderings – of the Tintin volume The Crab with the Golden Claws, where both Tintin and Captain Haddock, having crashed their aeroplane into the Sahara Desert, are obliged to trek a somewhat endless route in order to survive. It is hopeless, but we are able to laugh in our knowledge that they will (several pages later) eventually find help. Gerry, on the other hand, does not promise anything of the sort, even if mirages are glimpsed occasionally, the subject of their endlessness being the primary focus.

‘Gerry’ is the name given to each boy (or so we are to presume), as well as being a verb and adjective – “there were so many gerrys along the way” […] “we were going east […] which is a total gerry”, the term jargon for ‘fuck-up’ – leaving the two of them, ironically, somewhat anonymous. In so many ways, just as with Elephant, is the cited influence of video-game Tomb Raider present – or any interactive, action-adventure franchise. Van Sant seeks to imitate the first-person perspective(s) of tracking a figure from a distance; the film takes this idea further, illustrating their regenerative abilities, as evident when one of the two successfully jumps off a large rock without any injury to their health. To anyone who has ever played video games, moreover, Gerry registers a third similarity: the experience of seeing how far you can push a character in the digital map of their world, walking to the very limits of the map itself. Just as the temporality of the film traffics between day and night quicker than in real life, so do the men wander through it with a similar, non-human strength (until the end, of course) that seems lifted from the coding of any, digital avatar. Again: we are lulled into accepting this as reality, whilst conscious of it not being rational.

Inspirations are drawn, quite evidently, from the cinema of Hungarian director Béla Tarr, in particular from that of his magnus opus, Sátántangó, 1994. I remember a friend of mine (who owned it on DVD) making up a guideline for the best way to consume it; it went along the lines of: “I would only watch it on a rainy day, or if I were depressed […] and of course in one sitting.” Gerry does not require the same level of commitment, nor does it – despite being stylised to a European, arthouse aesthetic – carry the same, melancholic weight of the former. Tarr takes hours to drift across landscapes, one-shot takes that well exceed the standards of cinematic grammar, a congruent movement of real-time acting and real-time watching, almost as if welcoming one to look at the other, bemused by the same, interminable duration. Sátántangó is only loosely gestured at in the desert of Van Sant’s picture, its miserabilist strategy here substituted for movement, longing and the human experience. 

Gerry is a strange and outstanding feat of contemporary cinema. In essence, it is a film based on the concept of a universe that does not care for the lives it entertains, its camera watching the movements of two boys from afar, silent, and doing little to suggest any chance of survival. Van Sant summons a typically Beckettian image – as if taken from Waiting for Godot or Act Without Words, moving within absurdist scenery – but reinstates it within the mystic, unfading lines of an American landscape. It is tragedy and it is also comedy, but it tells a story of something far more poignant and untenable. “I’m leaving”, speaks one Gerry, lying flat on the desert floor. And so must the audience surrender themselves to the same, miraculous unknown.

The Week in Cinema: 13/05 -- 19/05

-- a selection of short-form reviews of the films I have watched this week --

Dumplin’ (dir. Anne Fletcher, 2018) 

✭✭✩✩✩
Uplifted by the wistful music of country-lyricist Dolly Parton, director Anne Fletcher achieves a warm and often-hilarious story of early womanhood, despite sitting within a reliably comfortable genre. Haunted by the inspiring, childhood memory of her deceased Aunt Lucy, Willowdean “Dumplin” Dickson rises above expectation to compete in the state pageant contest, defying the prejudices of her zealotic mother, Jennifer Anniston (whose performance, as with We’re the Millers, does exhibit a growing versatility). Hokey and self-flattering, it is nonetheless a picture that will leave you grinning. 

The Magnificent Ambersons (dir. Orson Welles, 1942)

✭✭✭✭✭
Off the back of Citizen Kane, Orson Welles' second feature is an adaptation of the nostalgia-imbued The Magnificent Ambersons, now a rightful classic of American cinema. Looking to turn-of-the-century Indianapolis as its scene, the once magnificent Ambersons are now seen in their decline – as much in affluence as their legacy (characterised by the indolent, manipulative George Minafer) – unable to keep above the rising wave of industrialism and fresh social perspectives. It is a chapter of American life magically captured by Welles’ inventive and inimitable approach to filmmaking, a kind of boldness that cannot be found elsewhere. 

Flores (dir. Jorge Jácome, 2017)

✭✭✭✩✩
Two meditative, young soldiers lead us through the sub-tropic, indigo wilderness of the Azores, a Portuguese island whose infestation of hydrangeas (albeit a common flower) has dramatically forced the entire population to exit. As if dreamt from The Day of the Triffids, or maybe trimmed from Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, Jácome contemplates local identity and territorial belonging alongside the resistance of its flower population to be contained. Highly thoughtful.

The Other Side of the Wind (dir. Orson Welles, 2018)

✭✭✭✩✩
Orson Welles is vulnerable in The Other Side of the Wind. Intended as a Hollywood comeback – after years of studio exile, floating between European financiers – the project is of significant value, envisioned as a critique of the sweeping “American New Wave” and the wreckage of its classical, formalist past. (Welles never completed the picture, at least not in his own lifetime, leaving behind nearly 100 hours of footage and a workprint consisting of assemblies and a few edited scenes.) It is a film occupied by filmmaking – its two-hour length focused on that ‘making’ itself, neither growing nor unravelling – whilst transmitted across 8, 16 and 35mm formats, colour and monochrome. Welles’ narrative recollects the events leading up to the death of ageing film-director Jake Hannaford (“the Ernest Hemingway of the cinema”), whose final picture – an unfinished, experimental arthouse – is intended to revive his ailing career, but instead points to his own, drunken disillusion. The Other Side of the Wind is chaotic, unfocused, a portrait of the artist who is slowly receding into the twilight zone.

They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead (dir. Morgan Neville, 2018)

✭✭✩✩✩
Half a reflective counterpart to the making of The Other Side of the Wind, half a misconceived elegy, Neville’s documentary serves as parrot to the trials and tribulations of Orson Welles’ career – only glancing at the details of production, most of which are edited so as to appear more frenetic or loose than they actually were. Sporadically narrated by Alan Cummings – whose British accent is peculiarly offkey against the American of Welles and his crew – the documentary flits between nice-sounding phrases and offcuts from the picture itself, compiling little more than a nostalgic memory fest. It is a documentary whose presence – unlike Burden of Dreams to Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, or Lost in La Mancha to Terry Gilliam’s Don Quixote – sits deep in the shadow of its source material. 

The Stranger (dir. Orson Welles, 1946)

✭✭✭✩✩
Continuing an in-depth foray into the works of Orson Welles is The Stranger, a tense, crime noir that he would later claim to be his least favourite of all his works. It is a genre picture, delivered with signature flair and intrigue; uniquely, it was the first Hollywood picture to present documentary footage of the Holocaust (its appearance in the film is stark, yet oddly adrift from the crisp, manufactured nature of the film itself). It is very entertaining and skilful, but provokes nothing more than what it sets out to do – delivery a good story.

Lost in La Mancha (dir. Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, 2002)

✭✭✭✭✭
Terry Gilliam’s newly completed The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is documented here as one long, protracted wheeze of exasperation and torment. Having already accomplished several of his most enduring legacies – including Brazil, Twelve Monkeys and The Fisher King – Gilliam arrived in Spain in August, 2000, to shoot the script of “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” (which had already been in preparation for over ten years). At the onset to production, an ominous lull is radiated from amongst the crew and actors – the situation is not terrible by any means, but neither is it perfect. Smiles quickly fade as the days trickle: unrehearsed extras, the deafening-roar of F-16 jets, in addition to devastating weather conditions and the injury of its leading star, Jean Rochefort, slowly paralyse any chance of its delivery onto the screen. Gilliam is the conductor to an orchestra that is slowly drifting out of key, crumbling before his very eyes. It is a fascinating examination of the top-heavy grandeur of believing in a dream (one that, however bad it may be, is restored by our foreknowledge of its eventually completion in 2018). 

The Week in Cinema: 06/05 -- 12/05

-- a selection of short-form reviews of the films I have watched this week --

Sicario: Day of the Soldado (dir. Stefano Sollima, 2018)

✭✭✭✭✩
“You got to do what you got to do,” reminds Alejandro Gillick (stoically acted by Benicio del Toro), a former Mexican hitman now enlisted as CIA hitman. It is difficult not to feel spellbound by the brutal strength of Stefano Sollima’s follow-up to the 2015 border-epic Sicario, albeit with the sore absence of Emily Blunt. Multiple suicide bombings in a Kansas City grocery store incite US government forces to forge inter-gang conflict between the Mexico drug cartels, the suspicion laid directly at their feet. It devolves – unsurprisingly – into a darker web of fierce politics, Gillick left in the Mexican wilderness to return the daughter of kidnapped, top-gang boss, Isabel Reyes, back to US soil. It is a film not soaked with masculine power, as similar additions to the genre happen to indulge, but instead intelligent, visceral and alike to the visions of modern warfare in the work of Kathryn Bigelow. A needless sequel? That is for the audience to decide.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeois (dir. Luis Buñuel, 1972)                           

✭✭✭✭✭
Buñuel claimed that the final word in the title, bourgeois, only came to him during post production revisions, and yet it is one that is impossible to imagine outside of the surrealist picture. Condensed into a sequence of failed dinner-party gatherings, Buñuel is fascinated by any disruption to the tradition and its high-minded conceits – a ritual of fragile rules – inventing myriads of excuses to see elegances flail, politeness stumble, and the relentless pursuits of his upper-class sextet readjust themselves. Satiric, outrageous.

High Life (dir. Claire Denis, 2018)

✭✭✭✭✭
In a recent interview for A24, Claire Denis recalled a story of how – on the set of Paris,Texas, as assistant-director to Wim Wenders – she endangered her life wading the Rio Grande: “I am a good swimmer but the [river] […] is much stronger than I am.” High Life, her newest drama, engages with a similar, undaunted current, only here curated by the strength of its direction – an elliptical space tale of convict youths and their scientific harvest. Robert Pattinson plays Monte, the sole member of a ship headed toward a blackhole, who is also contracted as mother and father to a young, crying child. Denis slowly peels flashbacks, whilst the child grows up: we learn of the crew (headed by the dark witch, Juliette Binoche) and their one-way recruitment into outer space, slaves to the practise of artificial insemination, non-consensual sex, and the violent, narcotic desires of one another. Corridors recall the tomb-like polish of Tarkovsky’s Solaris, whilst the faux-Edenic garden reminded me considerably of Douglas Trumbull’s eco-biodomes in Silent Running, slipping between the touchstone of natural biology and that of concrete, bruising politics. It is a landscape for renewed anarchy, unintentionally, where the need to exert individual purpose gradually ruins the safety and orientation of inmate to inmate – the leaking fluids of the “sex box” (for the usage of those onboard) is quickly swept into real, sexual violence, whilst falsified reports only heighten the fever of those who wish to ensure a continued existence for mankind itself. High Lifeis a film of no conceivable freedoms – even in limitless space, memories of the past continue their haunt (the ships of dogs, scarred walls), bodies perpetually adrift, and the child herself (Willow; perhaps a reference to the broken lyric in Othello)an inheritor of such taboo – where the problem of existence is not ourselves, but how we interact with one another, understanding our faults against others. It is an extraordinary piece of filmmaking, highly unsettling and of enigmatic delivery.

The Week in Cinema: 29/04 -- 05/05

-- a selection of short-form reviews of the films I have watched this week --

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief (dir. Alex Gibney, 2015)

✭✭✭✭✩
Hollywood dreams are toppled on their back in Alex Gibney’s incredible expose, Going Clear, adapted from Lawrence Wright’s book of the same name. Scientology is the subject, here, its history traced across a selection of ex-members – figures such as Paul Haggis, Mark Rathbun, Mike Rinder and Sylvia “Spanky” Taylor – former Scientologists whose lives were indelibly touched by its sustained campaign of wrath and exploitation. Gibney looks to Errol Morris for certain, stylised sequences – the dramatization of cleaning of a toilet, a unique example – whilst collaging interviews, radio and television from individuals such as Travolta to Cruise (both of whom declined to be interviewed in the present). Even if, as the church has since defamed, it is as valid at the 2014 “Rape on Campus” article, it is an objectively horrific tale of cult madness and its perpetuation into the modern day, the film possessing a spellbound intensity as its narrative unfolds.

Tristana (dir. Luis Buñuel, 1970)

✭✭✭✭✩
Tristana is gorgeous, confident filmmaking – a beautiful, adopted woman (Catherine Deneuve) discovers her voice whilst vexed by the pursuits of her benefactor, Don Lope – with an ending that left me completely uneased. Powers switch hands as dream-like images play out, with subconscious desires witnessed in the smallest of moments. Indomitable.

The Myth of the American Sleepover (dir. David Robert Mitchell, 2010)

✭✭✭✩✩
Unusual, unhappy-go-lucky adolescents move across the American landscape of David Robert Mitchell’s tender, debut feature. Sleepovers – a wonderful metonym for that which passes you by, unnoticed – are drifted between, interrupted or abandoned throughout, spaces of community that (for the purposes of the film, moreover) illustrate the figures who are searching for more, beyond the bedroom playground. Mitchell’s film is not original, but nor does it claim to be – not dissimilar to the spine of George Lucas’ iconic American Graffiti, love is laboured for, and lost, with adventure held in the exotic chimeras of staying up too late, nocturnal antics, or drinking alcohol with friends in the rain. It is troubling that so much of what ruined Under the Silver Lake – the latest feature from the director – is foreshadowed here, women yet again subject to a peeping-tom, voyeuristic camera, sunny smiles almost always leading to some form of unclothing. It is hard not to find pieces of nostalgic wonder scattered throughout, even if the whole is weaker than the sum of its parts.

Easy A (dir. Will Gluck, 2010)

✭✭✩✩✩
Gluck’s Californian restaging of Nathaniel Hawthorn’s puritan-set novel, The Scarlet-Letter A Romance, is far more entertaining than its 1973 adaptation by Wim Wenders, but its comedic foundation is neither funny (maybe a little) or that original. Emma Stones shines, of course, quipped with wonderful phrases – ‘Are you really that repulsed by lady parts? What do you think I have down there? A gnome?’ – that trickle into her fantastic mania of Birdman and The Favourite. It is brash and bold, but it doesn’t really do anything that interesting or go anywhere that new.

The Week in Cinema: 22/03 -- 28/03

-- a selection of short-form reviews of the films I have watched this week --

Eighth Grade (dir. Bo Burnham, 2018)

✭✭✭✭✩
Commenting on ‘The Smiths’ song There Is A Light That Never Goes Out, Russell Brand imagined Morrisey’s romantic ode as a tragedy of the boy staring at his bedroom ceiling and feeling the weight of the world upon his shoulders. Eighth Grade – the first directorial endeavour from Bo Burnham –continues in a similar rhythm, adolescent struggles now projected into the contemporary age of social media – the networks of YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat the only platforms in which to find connection or familiarity. As if sister to the online devastations in Jason Reitman’s wonderful Men, Women & Children, Burnham confidently navigates the presence of Kayla Day (played by Elsie Fisher) through her production of vlogs – the sole viewer being her friend, Gabe – and her mute, shunting figure in the school corridors.Eighth Grade is one of the most soulful and endearing features to be released this year, brimming with laughter, ache and the frustrations of growing into the world. A unique, sweet and intelligent portrait of growth. 

La double vie de Véronique “The Double Life of Veronique” (dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1991)

✭✭✭✭✭
Achieving another pearl in the small oeuvre of acclaimed writer-director Krzysztof Kieslowski, The Double Life of Veronique is a spellbinding feast of colour and feeling, a cosmic odyssey through the cities of Kraków and Paris. Irène Jacob – later reimagined in the troubled, female souls of the Three Colours trilogy – moves through the picture as both Weronika, a Polish choir soprano, and her seeming double, Véronique, a French music teacher. Two lives that are somehow one, their stories are shown to brush and echo – each woman falls in love, following intrigue and choice – but also resist, their lives asymmetrical (in running-time, as well as romantic allure) and destined for greater definition outside of their own twinning. Elusive storytelling is pathed in the highly-stylised, ethereal lens of Kieslowski’s world, the camera at once the vision of two women falling through life and then again our own. Images haunt and instil life in a film that respires with beauty.

La fille inconnue “The Unknown Girl” (dir. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2016) 

✭✭✩✩✩
Adèle Haenel is the prime subject of what constitutes a disinterested, bored thriller about moral responsibility and ethnic marginality. After being informed of her own, indirect guilt in denying an immigrant access to the surgery – later found dead at the dockside, her skull fractured – hard-working doctor, Jenny David, leads her own quest into uncovering what truly happened. Haunted by what could have been, David slips into the guise of the Inspector who Calls, seeking truth and clarity in the urban backdrop of France. An aqua-marine colour pallet brings nothing fresh to this tiresome feature.