The Great Escaper, Cabrini, Imaginary, Let the Dance Begin and How to Have Sex are in cinemas this weekend
Watching ‘national treasure’ Michael Caine twinkle his way through the crowd-pleasing The Great Escaper, I was minded to go back to a review I wrote of another of his films about England, Harry Brown, which came out in 2010. We thought Caine was on his last legs then, at the age of 74.
Harry Brown was a nasty, reactionary piece of work about a pensioner who becomes a vigilante on the streets of his council estate. At the time I wrote:
Making the ineffectual detective (Emily Mortimer) female just accentuates the reactionary attitudes on display – it’s anti-feminist as well as anti-progressive. This shouldn’t be surprising territory for Caine who once abandoned Britain when he decided that he didn’t enjoy paying the tax that made things like police forces and education systems possible.
It was a good performance in an ugly film, but now he’s put in an even better performance in a much nicer film. A much more thoughtful film.
It’s based on the true story of Bernard Jordan, the 89-year-old Navy veteran who – after missing the deadline for the official D‑Day 70th anniversary celebrations – decides to make his own way across the channel anyway and pay his respects.
Caine pulls out all the stops here. He is a cheeky chappie around the staff and a lonely and frightened old man on the ferry. And then, when he gets to France, he is a grieving and traumatised old soldier. It’s tremendous work and he’s clearly taking his own masterclass advice about how to work from the eyes first.
But he’s not the only one giving a lesson. John Standing as the toff who takes Bernard under his wing, has a moment that made the audience at my screening gasp – that’s why films with audiences are still the best – and Glenda Jackson takes a role that could easily have been a single note but imbues it with some of the fierceness she showed in both her early performances and her political career.
For all the jingoistic context, and the suppressed grief, this is a love story and a moving one at that.
Coincidentally opening in the same week as The Great Escaper is Let the Dance Begin, an Argentine film that might as well be the same story. An ageing man takes a long journey in order to settle something in himself and make peace with his past. This version of the story chooses a fairly ridiculous path but ends up in roughly the same place.
A star tango dancer (Darío Grandinetti) now has a successful acting career in Madrid but is called home when his former partner (Mercedes Morán) passes away suddenly. (You may notice from the fact that the deceased dancer has a leading actor’s name attached that there’s a bigger story that has not yet been revealed.)
In fact, it takes a long time – with a few dead ends – to get to a truth that you may have already guessed. In a Kombi full of secrets, our power tango couple and their musical accompanist (Jorge Marrale) head into the beautiful mountains of Mendoza to tie up the loose ends of their lives.
Not being a catholic – or any faith at all to speak of – the story of Francesca Cabrini, the first United States saint, was entirely new to me. After nearly two and a half hours of the film Cabrini, I am much better informed so – on that basis alone – job done.
A recovering consumptive with a powerful belief that she must do as much as possible for the downtrodden in the little time she presumes she had left, she has become the patron saint of immigrants but could just as easily be the patron saint of stubbornness.
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Sent by the pope to New York in the late 19th century, against all odds she builds an orphanage for the children of poor Italian migrants, and then a hospital, eventually constructing the largest network of charitable institutions in the world. Why the richest religion in the world would make it so hard for her by insisting that she raise all her own funds and then restricting who she was allowed to solicit from, is hinted at but not deeply investigated.
The film is worthy but ponderous, as you might expect for a film that has been authorised by the current Cabrini organisation and paid for largely by donors. However, there is some uplift to be found there, if that is what you are in the mood for.
Imaginary is a new horror off the Blumhouse production line, M rated for a change so it’s like a horror film with the audience’s training wheels still on. It’s not gory or particularly bloody, and there’s only one curse word, but there’s enough to disturb you that I wouldn’t be in any hurry to show it to kids.
The overly-tangled plot is about children’s book author Jess (DeWanda Wise) who moves her new partner and stepchildren into the family home when her father goes into care. She hasn’t lived there since some kind of traumatic experience when she was only five saw her sent to live with her grandmother.
But she can’t remember what that was, so it must be all good now, right?
Youngest stepchild Alice (Pyper Braun) finds a battered old teddy bear in the basement and names it Chauncey. Chauncey becomes the lonely girl’s best friend but Chauncey has an agenda of his own.
Writers Greg Erb, Jason Oremland and Jeff Wadlow (also director) manage to tie off all their loose ends, which I find impressive in itself but the film is sold out by the formula.
How to Have Sex is a provocative title and the film is a challenging watch.
Three teenage schoolfriends (only Year 12?) are on holiday to celebrate the end of their exams. At a resort in Crete, they can let their hair down and party as hard as they like and, for a few days they can pretend to be the adults that they aren’t quite yet.
The only topics appear to booze and sex, with the occasional hungover moment of introspection as they realise that their grown-up paths are likely to diverge.
You’d hope, wouldn’t you, that these resorts would be relatively safe places. You know? Guard rails and lifeguards. But this isn’t a boozy version of Butlins, this is the wild west and one of the girls, Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce) soon finds herself out of her depth.
The main point of Molly Manning Walker’s film is about the reality of ‘consent’ in this modern world and how young people on all sides often don’t understand it until it’s too late, but it’s also about how young people are under pressure to grow up too fast.
It’s pressure from ‘society’ (whatever that is), but it’s also pressure from each other and from that toxic sludge that’s poisoning our brains, social media.
Manning Walker has made a film that has an urgency about the discussions it wants to provoke. It’s trite to say it but, yes, it should be taught in schools. Or something like it should be.
Editor’s note
There were a couple of major streaming premieres this week but the volume of cinema releases defeated me, I’m sorry. If those films win a thumbs up from me, they’ll go into the “Something to watch” schedule as soon as I can get them in.
