Six Inches of Soil and Last Summer are in cinemas, His Three Daughters and Woman of the Hour are streaming on Netflix
Last Friday on RNZ Nights, Emile and I talked about the challenge of being a critic with the sheer volume of content that is out there to be consumed – over 18,000 titles on Netflix alone. It is simply not feasible to be across it all.
And even respected recommenders like me can be paralysed by choice. My own TV watchlist is over 270 titles, with more added every week, and when I ask the editor-in-chief what she’d like to watch next she replies with, “something you can write about” which is not as helpful as it sounds.
And when you have weeks like the last one – where my social life reemerged briefly in the shape of a dinner out with an old friend on Thursday night and a Saturday afternoon catch-up with two more old friends – keeping up with new releases can fall by the wayside.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that there’s no review of Smile 2 or My Favourite Cake (cinemas) or Brothers (Prime Video) and why one of this week’s new releases is actually a few weeks old.
Let’s start with the most urgent. The soil in which we grow most of our food is so degraded – so denuded of nutrients – that some experts estimate there are only 60 harvests left. We’ve known for centuries how to keep soil healthy – crop rotation has been around for as long as organised cultivation – but industrial farming has decided that it knows better than Mother Nature and chooses chemical fertilisers and pest control instead.
Monocultures are bad. We see this in New Zealand where the gold rush to dairy farming has led to toxic waterways, erosion and the destruction of wetlands (among other negative externalities). The herd mentality in action.
In the British documentary, Six Inches of Soil, three idealistic but inexperienced young farmers demonstrate their commitment to regenerative farming – the science-based version of what our ancestors already knew – and attempt to marry their environmental credentials with that dirty word “profit”.
Full of clear examples of the benefits that regenerative agriculture has on ecosystems and communities, the film is as inspirational as you would expect, even if the Aotearoa farming scene isn’t very much like the British one. They take hedgerows (whatever they are) very seriously, for a start, and also their version of Groundswell aren’t a bunch of astroturfing climate deniers.
The great New Zealand journalist Rod Oram could often be found beating the drum for regenerative farming and the film reminded me of how much we lost when that heart attack took him at such a criminally early age.
I also wondered whether we’d have a healthier attitude towards soil if it wasn’t such a dirty word – something to be washed off or washed away.
French director Catherine Breillat has a reputation for pushing boundaries but, while the subject matter of her latest film Last Summer appears to be quite confronting, the presentation is fairly restrained – classical even.
Léa Drucker plays Anne, a successful Parisian lawyer, used to getting her own way, but also feeling a little constrained by middle-class (and middle-age) expectation. Her husband’s 17-year-old son from an earlier marriage, Théo (Samuel Kircher), comes to live with them after getting into trouble once too often.
Anne attempts to connect with this strange new person – she is curious about his tattoos – and this turns into flirtation and eventually something more, a physical relationship.
Breillat presents this in a matter-of-fact way, two attractive people are always at risk of becoming attracted to each other after all, but the subtext is similar to some of her previous films. Sexual attraction can lead people to make utterly unwise choices and, also, that even the most benign intimate relationships can be dangerously unbalanced.
The content below was originally paywalled.
Théo’s teenage petulance when the relationship is broken off becomes much more understandable when he’s confronted by Anne’s desperate dishonesty. And Anne’s robust defence mechanisms become believable when she discovers evidence of his attempted manipulation.
Last Summer is a strong drama and isn’t as exploitative as you (or I) might have suspected.
One of the best dramas around at the moment dropped quietly on Netflix a few weeks ago, a year after premiering at the Toronto Film Festival.
In Azazel Jacobs’ His Three Daughters, Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne and Elizabeth Olsen have gathered at the apartment of their dying father – to witness and ease his final days.
Rachel (Lyonne) lives in the apartment and has been caring for him full-time while maintaining a prodigious weed habit and making a living through sports betting. Katie (Coon) also lives in New York and would like everyone to think that she’s the only one being practical, but she’s really just as much in denial as the rest of them. And the youngest, Christina (Olsen), lives many miles away with a family that everyone thinks is much more functional than the one that she left all those years ago.
Over a few days, they bicker and make up and then fight and make up, finally realising that the assumptions they’ve made about each other have little grounding in reality.
It’s funny, often teeth-grindingly authentic, and supremely well acted.
Also from TIFF last year and also straight to Netflix, Woman of the Hour is actress and singer Anna Kendrick’s debut feature and it has the feel of something that has had too much crammed into it – more than the slender structure can support at any rate.
Kendrick plays Sheryl, a struggling actress in 1970s Hollywood, persuaded that an appearance on the hit TV show The Dating Game will provide some much needed visibility (after all, it worked for Sally Field, she is told).
What nobody knows is that bachelor number three is a psychopathic serial killer (Daniel Zovatto) and that a win in the game will serve up his next victim. It sounds a bit far-fetched but is, in fact, based on the truth. The notorious Rodney Alcala did appear on The Dating Game and it gave him the nickname that all these monsters seem to need.
Because the premise is so thin that the script by Ian McDonald is padded with plenty of prurient backstory about Alcala and inflates Sheryl’s role in his apprehension.
Tonally a bit wayward, Woman of the Hour is tough to recommend, especially when you consider how many other options y’all have.
