今月話題の映画

Bitter Christmas

28 August 

Running wild with the metafictional themes that have studded his work since at least the late 1980s, Pedro Almodóvar’s Bitter Christmas is a film about a filmmaker who makes a film about a filmmaker who is writing a film about two women, one of whom may be a filmmaker. Are you still with us? Good, because there’s lots to enjoy for longtime Almodóvar fans in this tangled web of intrigue, which finds the 76-year-old Spanish auteur deep in argument with himself about the merits of his approach.

We open in 2004, when commercial film director Elsa (Barbára Lennie) takes herself to hospital for a terrible migraine with boyfriend Bonifacio (Patrick Criado), a firefighter she met while he was working as a stripper. (We flash back to their meeting in a mesmerising strip scene set to Grace Jones’ I’ve Seen That Face Before.) A former cult filmmaker herself, Elsa starts to sense possibilities for a new movie in the lives of two of her friends, Patricia and Natalia, a bereaved former model and long-suffering wife respectively, and takes off with the latter on a trip to Lanzarote to begin work on a script.

Intercut with these scenes, we are introduced to Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia), another director, who is writing Elsa’s story as a proxy for his own. Both artists run into trouble when their friends get wind of what they’re up to, complaining that their private lives are not fair game as fuel for Elsa and Raul’s creative endeavours. Are the artists simply acting as parasites, profiting from their friends’ pain with no regard to their relationship?

Whether or not Almodóvar locates the heart of a story obscured by dense thickets of metafiction is a point he debates near the end, in a showdown between Raúl and his assistant, Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón). But he does it with such style and total command of his craft – the hospital alone, with its ruthlessly delineated colour schemes, is a set piece in its own right – that the indulgence feels merited. As with all Almodóvar, there’s such a feeling of life, of what it is to be alive, that it can’t help but break through even his most mannered of conceits. Words Alex Denney

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

21 August 

When upcoming filmmaker Kris (a sensational Hannah Einbinder) is tasked with injecting new blood into the long-dead Camp Miasma slasher franchise, it unlocks a Pandora’s box of sexual repression within her. Her assignment becomes even thornier when she enters the inner sanctum of Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the original film’s final girl and a mysterious recluse. The pair’s subsequent bond, both creative and physical, makes for some of the year’s most electric viewing. Witty, erotic and fiercely intelligent, Jane Schoenbrun’s follow-up to I Saw the TV Glow is both a sharp and sensual love story and a thoughtful treatise on the feedback loop that exists between cinema and our bodies. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma further cements Schoenbrun as one of the 2020s’ most original and vital filmmakers. Words Patrick Sproull

Love Me Tender

7 August 

Constance Debré lit a fuse under French bourgeois society with her acclaimed trilogy of autofictional works, narrating her struggle for liberated selfhood through a years-long battle for custody of her son. Adapting the second book in the series, Love Me Tender sees Vicky Krieps play Clémence, a lawyer-turned-writer whose estranged husband Laurent (Antoine Reinartz) tries to bar her from seeing her son, incensed by the news that she has begun seeing women. Like its source text, the film casts excruciating light on the misogyny and homophobia inherent in the French legal system, dragging Clémence through the pits of despair as she is forced to defend herself from accusations of incest and paedophilia. Director Anna Cazenave Cambet does some great work balancing the tenderness of Clémence’s scenes with her son and the white heat of her sexual encounters, but the real draw here is Krieps, imperious as a complex protagonist who turns her grief into an unexpected source of strength. Words Alex Denney

Bouchra

7 August 

Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki had a cult hit with 2 Lizards, a melancholy web comedy about the longueurs of life during the first Covid lockdown. They return here with Bouchra, which retains the sharp hipster dialogue of the series while deepening its themes into a story of missed family connections and cultural longing. Bouchra (Bennani) is a Moroccan canid in New York who begins work on a semi-autobiographical film exploring her sexual identity, and the strain it puts on her family relationships back home in Casablanca. While researching the story, she calls up her mum to ask about a coming-out letter she sent some years ago, to which she never replied. The conversations that ensue – lifted verbatim from Bennani’s own calls to her mother and rerecorded for the film – help snap Bouchra out of a creative funk, and unlock feelings she’s spent years fighting down. Deftly weaving elements of autofiction and documentary into the story, it’s a sparky and ultimately moving debut making use of an eccentric but oddly cinematic animation style. Words Alex Denney

A Child of My Own

13 August

When Eleonor “Ale” Alejandra Marín Mendoza was told by doctors she’d miscarried for the third time, she made the extraordinary decision to fake her own pregnancy. Changing her diet to put on weight, she fools friends and family with surprising ease into thinking it’s real, striking a deal with a pregnant mum who doesn’t want her own baby to bring it up as her own. Except … does she? Maite Alberdi’s tricksy docufictional hybrid opens on a casting call for her own film, auditioning actresses for the role of Ale before recruiting Ana Celeste and dramatising the story from Ale’s own point of view. But when Ale takes the baby and is arrested by police we are thrown abruptly into the real world, where Ale is serving a 13-year prison sentence for child kidnapping and the woman whose baby she took, Mayra, denies that any such deal was made. Swapping true-crime kitsch for a fascinating exploration of cultural misogyny and our bone-deep need for stories to help us make sense of the world, Alberdi’s film is a profoundly empathetic look at the societal pressures that drove its protagonist to such astonishing lengths. Words Alex Denney

Bitter Christmas

28 August 

Running wild with the metafictional themes that have studded his work since at least the late 1980s, Pedro Almodóvar’s Bitter Christmas is a film about a filmmaker who makes a film about a filmmaker who is writing a film about two women, one of whom may be a filmmaker. Are you still with us? Good, because there’s lots to enjoy for longtime Almodóvar fans in this tangled web of intrigue, which finds the 76-year-old Spanish auteur deep in argument with himself about the merits of his approach.

We open in 2004, when commercial film director Elsa (Barbára Lennie) takes herself to hospital for a terrible migraine with boyfriend Bonifacio (Patrick Criado), a firefighter she met while he was working as a stripper. (We flash back to their meeting in a mesmerising strip scene set to Grace Jones’ I’ve Seen That Face Before.) A former cult filmmaker herself, Elsa starts to sense possibilities for a new movie in the lives of two of her friends, Patricia and Natalia, a bereaved former model and long-suffering wife respectively, and takes off with the latter on a trip to Lanzarote to begin work on a script.

Intercut with these scenes, we are introduced to Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia), another director, who is writing Elsa’s story as a proxy for his own. Both artists run into trouble when their friends get wind of what they’re up to, complaining that their private lives are not fair game as fuel for Elsa and Raul’s creative endeavours. Are the artists simply acting as parasites, profiting from their friends’ pain with no regard to their relationship?

Whether or not Almodóvar locates the heart of a story obscured by dense thickets of metafiction is a point he debates near the end, in a showdown between Raúl and his assistant, Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón). But he does it with such style and total command of his craft – the hospital alone, with its ruthlessly delineated colour schemes, is a set piece in its own right – that the indulgence feels merited. As with all Almodóvar, there’s such a feeling of life, of what it is to be alive, that it can’t help but break through even his most mannered of conceits. Words Alex Denney

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

21 August 

When upcoming filmmaker Kris (a sensational Hannah Einbinder) is tasked with injecting new blood into the long-dead Camp Miasma slasher franchise, it unlocks a Pandora’s box of sexual repression within her. Her assignment becomes even thornier when she enters the inner sanctum of Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the original film’s final girl and a mysterious recluse. The pair’s subsequent bond, both creative and physical, makes for some of the year’s most electric viewing. Witty, erotic and fiercely intelligent, Jane Schoenbrun’s follow-up to I Saw the TV Glow is both a sharp and sensual love story and a thoughtful treatise on the feedback loop that exists between cinema and our bodies. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma further cements Schoenbrun as one of the 2020s’ most original and vital filmmakers. Words Patrick Sproull

Love Me Tender

7 August 

Constance Debré lit a fuse under French bourgeois society with her acclaimed trilogy of autofictional works, narrating her struggle for liberated selfhood through a years-long battle for custody of her son. Adapting the second book in the series, Love Me Tender sees Vicky Krieps play Clémence, a lawyer-turned-writer whose estranged husband Laurent (Antoine Reinartz) tries to bar her from seeing her son, incensed by the news that she has begun seeing women. Like its source text, the film casts excruciating light on the misogyny and homophobia inherent in the French legal system, dragging Clémence through the pits of despair as she is forced to defend herself from accusations of incest and paedophilia. Director Anna Cazenave Cambet does some great work balancing the tenderness of Clémence’s scenes with her son and the white heat of her sexual encounters, but the real draw here is Krieps, imperious as a complex protagonist who turns her grief into an unexpected source of strength. Words Alex Denney

Bouchra

7 August 

Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki had a cult hit with 2 Lizards, a melancholy web comedy about the longueurs of life during the first Covid lockdown. They return here with Bouchra, which retains the sharp hipster dialogue of the series while deepening its themes into a story of missed family connections and cultural longing. Bouchra (Bennani) is a Moroccan canid in New York who begins work on a semi-autobiographical film exploring her sexual identity, and the strain it puts on her family relationships back home in Casablanca. While researching the story, she calls up her mum to ask about a coming-out letter she sent some years ago, to which she never replied. The conversations that ensue – lifted verbatim from Bennani’s own calls to her mother and rerecorded for the film – help snap Bouchra out of a creative funk, and unlock feelings she’s spent years fighting down. Deftly weaving elements of autofiction and documentary into the story, it’s a sparky and ultimately moving debut making use of an eccentric but oddly cinematic animation style. Words Alex Denney

A Child of My Own

13 August

When Eleonor “Ale” Alejandra Marín Mendoza was told by doctors she’d miscarried for the third time, she made the extraordinary decision to fake her own pregnancy. Changing her diet to put on weight, she fools friends and family with surprising ease into thinking it’s real, striking a deal with a pregnant mum who doesn’t want her own baby to bring it up as her own. Except … does she? Maite Alberdi’s tricksy docufictional hybrid opens on a casting call for her own film, auditioning actresses for the role of Ale before recruiting Ana Celeste and dramatising the story from Ale’s own point of view. But when Ale takes the baby and is arrested by police we are thrown abruptly into the real world, where Ale is serving a 13-year prison sentence for child kidnapping and the woman whose baby she took, Mayra, denies that any such deal was made. Swapping true-crime kitsch for a fascinating exploration of cultural misogyny and our bone-deep need for stories to help us make sense of the world, Alberdi’s film is a profoundly empathetic look at the societal pressures that drove its protagonist to such astonishing lengths. Words Alex Denney