Friday reviews: 13 October 2023

Anatomy of a Fall, Strange Way of Life and Expend4bles are in cinemas and Fair Play is on Netflix

As I men­tioned yes­ter­day, the arrival of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour movie this week­end sent all the oth­er block­busters run­ning for the hills with only a couple of feisty Indies provid­ing some altern­at­ive cinema options.

Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or win­ning courtroom mys­tery Anatomy of a Fall opened the New Zealand International Film Festival earli­er this year and I admit to being some­what mys­ti­fied by all the plaudits the film was receiving.

The cent­ral per­form­ance, from Toni Erdmann’s Sandra Hüller, is astound­ing as a woman sim­ul­tan­eously griev­ing the loss of her hus­band and on tri­al for his murder.

The premise – did a fam­ous author murder her hus­band or was it sui­cide? – is intriguing.

The ebb and flow of the invest­ig­at­ori­al French crim­in­al justice sys­tem which seems to be a vehicle for bul­ly­ing and wit­ness intim­id­a­tion as much as a search for truth is ali­en to those of us used to a dif­fer­ent tra­di­tion (pro­sec­utors must do a class in eye-rolling as part of their leg­al studies). 

There’s a cent­ral flash­back scene which as power­ful as any­thing I’ve seen this year, but its pres­ence in the story – i.e. the reas­on why the audi­ence and the oth­er char­ac­ters know about it – feels like a stretch. This is true of so many ele­ments. Plot twists and char­ac­ter notes are man­oeuvred into place to fit the themes rather than the themes emer­ging organ­ic­ally from the char­ac­ters and story.

Those themes are nev­er not inter­est­ing, how­ever. The extent to which artists excav­ate their per­son­al rela­tion­ships for mater­i­al is a top­ic for which Hüller’s char­ac­ter is on tri­al as much as for the death of her hus­band, as is the ques­tion of what hap­pens to a rela­tion­ship when one part­ner becomes not­ably more suc­cess­ful than the oth­er. On that sub­ject, there’s more below.

There’s a long and illus­tri­ous pre­ced­ent for great dir­ect­ors shil­ling for cor­por­ates but at the same time mak­ing some­thing uniquely them – Wes Anderson’s Castello Cavalcanti for Prada in 2013 and Come Together for H&M in 2016, Martin Scorsese’s The Audition for the Studio City casino in Macau – but Almodóvar’s Strange Way of Life is next level.

Commissioned by fash­ion label Saint Laurent and design­er Anthony Vaccarello, the 30-minute film – short­er than my bus ride to the cinema – the film man­ages to show­case the designer’s tal­ents while still being an Almodóvar film and a rel­at­ively tra­di­tion­al Western at the same time.

Shot in Spain on the museum-piece sets left over from Sergio Leone’s spa­ghetti Westerns, the film actu­ally pays homage to an earli­er tra­di­tion and a dif­fer­ent gen­er­a­tion of stars – the tacit­urnity and world wear­i­ness of Gary Cooper and Randolph Scott.

Pedro Pascal plays Silva, rid­ing into town to vis­it Sheriff Jake (Ethan Hawke) who he hasn’t seen for 25 years. They have a romantic his­tory, these two, but there’s some­thing else at stake now. Jake is about to go after Silva’s gun­sling­ing son for a bru­tal murder. Silva wants to stop him.

Beautifully played, shot, recor­ded and – yes – cos­tumed, Strange Way of Life is a won­der­ful oddity. If you are con­cerned about going out for only 30-minutes of cinema, the screen­ing also includes a half-hour inter­view with Almodóvar where he talks about his influ­ences and where he thinks the story would go next.

Expend4bles? More like Unconscion4ble. Inexcus4ble. Irrit4ble.

The sol­it­ary pleas­ure is the dis­cov­ery that one of the screen­writers is called Tad Daggerhart.

Chloe Domont’s Fair Play is set in the high stakes and high pres­sure world of high fin­ance. Emily (Bridgerton’s Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (Solo’s Alden Ehrenreich) are lowly ana­lysts at an invest­ment bank run by a bully named Campbell (the great Eddie Marsan).

It’s a bru­tal world with little mar­gin for error but a big upside for those that are lucky enough to roll the dice at the right time. Emily and Luke are also play­ing a risky game by being in love and liv­ing togeth­er des­pite that being a ser­i­ously career-limiting breach of com­pany rules.

When Emily is pro­moted and Luke has to report to her his fra­gile mas­culin­ity comes under increas­ing pres­sure, but she’s not equipped for this change either.

The script requires them both to lack the kind of matur­ity that would allow them to eas­ily sort this out, lead­ing to some fairly implaus­ible set-piece moments and an increas­ing ten­sion between them that even­tu­ally blows up in their faces.

Self-consciously bookended by two scenes in pub­lic rest rooms – where the couple are undis­turbed for sev­er­al long minutes des­pite them being at parties full of people drink­ing – and the second of those seems to betray an almost Promising Young Woman level of anger and frus­tra­tion on the part of the film­maker rather than any­thing that’s jus­ti­fied by the pre­vi­ous events of the story.

The con­text also feels like a fantasy ver­sion of the world of New York invest­ment bank­ing rather than one that’s groun­ded in real­ity – act­ors spout­ing busi­ness jar­gon like Star Trek act­ors talk­ing about “warp coils” and “dilith­i­um crystals”.

And did I read this right? The caller ID on Emily’s phone for her own moth­er is “Em’s Mom”. Really?

Of interest only to me, pos­sibly, is that des­pite being set in NYC, Fair Play was actu­ally shot in Serbia. I won­der wheth­er their tax pay­ers com­plain about sub­sid­ising Netflix like ours do.

Further reading

The oth­er day I got a sur­prise com­mis­sion from the BBC to write an art­icle about the Australian Outback as a hor­ror loc­a­tion to coin­cide with the release of Kitty Green’s The Royal Hotel (itself inspired by Hotel Coolgardie which I wrote about here last week):

The Royal Hotel is part of a long Australian tra­di­tion of “out­back hor­ror”, even as Green has talked about set­ting out to sub­vert some of the gen­re’s tropes. Just over 50 years ago, it took two inter­na­tion­al dir­ect­ors to really show audi­ences the dark­er side of the Australian out­back for the first time. Before 1971, it had been por­trayed as rel­at­ively benign, the epi­tome of essen­tial Australianness and the source of the nation­al char­ac­ter – inhab­ited by happy-go-lucky bushrangers, cap­able and adapt­able easy-going “dig­gers” – aka army vet­er­ans who lived and worked on the land – and love­able lar­rikin rogues with a healthy dis­taste for author­ity. The land­scape lent itself to Australian-style west­erns (1946’s The Overlanders), colo­ni­al his­tor­ies (1949’s Eureka Stockade) or rur­al melo­dra­mas like The Sundowners (1960).

But in 1971, the out­back ceased to be simply a loc­a­tion: it became a char­ac­ter in its own right.

Thanks to F&S sub­scriber DD of Auckland for his con­tri­bu­tion to that article.