I’m Still Here, Tinā, Bird, Neneh Superstar and The Monkey are in cinemas.
In the opening sequences of Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here we see an upper-middle class Rio family enjoying the best that life has to offer. They have a house on the beach, in the shadow of Sugarloaf Mountain. Father Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello) is a former politician and now a prosperous architectural engineer. He’s building the family a bigger, more modern house where each of the five children can have a room of their own.
It’s 1970 and Brazil is ruled by a military dictatorship, but a decent, hardworking family like the Paiva’s shouldn’t have anything to worry about, especially as Rubens has left his political career far behind.
Except that he hasn’t and – like a lot of educated and progressive Brazilians – he is secretly doing what he can to support the struggling resistance movement. The rest of the family is unaware of the messages being passed among the various happy houseguests, until the police arrive unexpectedly to take him away for questioning.
So begins a decades-long nightmare for the rest of the family, led by matriarch Eunice (Fernanda Torres), as they try and discover the truth about Rubens’ disappearance and build some kind of a life for those who are left behind.
Director Walter Salles (possibly best-known for his terrific adaptation of The Motorcycle Diaries twenty years ago) has created a soft-spoken masterpiece here. Every aspect of the cinematic craft is first-rate and it all goes to support a portrait of a family that could have ended up histrionic but instead is full of astute observations and perfectly calibrated characters.
It’s hard not to watch I’m Still Here through the lens of current events. In the film we see how it is that many people find it easy to support authoritarianism (especially if it is a path out of poverty), but also it makes the risks of resistance abundantly clear. Like Paul Lynch’s novel about a possible rise of fascism in Ireland, Prophet Song, I’m Still Here is reminding us that this absolutely can happen here or anywhere but that dictatorship also sows the seeds of its own destruction.
Tinā is a crowd pleasing local film that takes as a starting point the deadly Christchurch earthquake that occurred fourteen years ago, almost to the day. For many in the city, the trauma of that event is impossible to escape, but Miki Magasiva’s film (co-written with Mario Gaoa) suggests that, for some people at least, art and community can be a way through it.
Anapela Polataivao plays dedicated teacher Mareta whose daughter is killed in the terrible collapse of the CTV building. Three years later, still all-but paralysed by grief, Mareta is offered a relieving job at a prestigious local college and rediscovers her calling as both a teacher and choir master – music is what will heal her and gifted but heartbroken singer Sophie (Antonia Robinson).
Tinā is a film of moments, many of which land but probably just as many fall flat. The grounding in the real life tragedy of post-quake Christchurch isn’t matched by the almost fantasy portrayal of the education system and the heavy-handed approach to social issues. Questions of class and race are drawn with a very broad brush, especially the character of Deputy Principal Wadsworth (Jamie Irvine) whose cartoon bigotry feels plucked from a much less subtle film.
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There’s also far too much plot. Everyone’s story seems to have overwhelming stakes and it weighs the film down. The moments where the film truly takes flight are during the songs. It’s hard not to get swept up in the emotion of those voices and arrangements.
It’s hard to know quite what to make of Andrea Arnold’s Bird, a modern-day Dickensian fable about a young girl (Nykiya Adams) befriended by an odd stranger who calls himself Bird and is looking for his family.
I say Dickensian because the film is set in the port of Gravesend in Kent, not far from where Dickens lived in the last years of his life, and where Pip in Great Expectations famously meets the escaped convict Magwitch and helps him find passage to Hamburg. Bird is played by the brilliantly idiosyncratic German actor Franz Rogowski (Transit) and his character is doing something like the return journey.
While I appreciated the magical realism of Bird – and the portrait of a child’s imagination slowly coming to life – I was less enamoured of the gritty poverty-porn of the situation she comes from. Unlike earlier films of Arnold’s – Fish Tank (2009) is a similar story of a teenage girl and a mysterious stranger – I’m not convinced that the balancing act of basic believability has been brought off.
Contemporary French cinema remains obsessed with the question of what constitutes authentic French-ness. It used to be the contest between the bourgeois city-dwellers and the salt-of-the-earth rural folk – is one more genuinely French than the other?
Now the spotlight is on France’s migrant communities. Can they become truly French and what would that look like if they did? Just in the last couple of years we’ve had films asking: can a young North African man from the foster homes of Paris become a prizewinning pastry chef? Can two sisters from an Algerian immigrant family make it in the rarefied world of classical music? And now, in Neneh Superstar, will a 12-year-old Black girl with an affinity for hip-hop be allowed to succeed at the most prestigious ballet school in Paris.
All of those kids were from the “projects”, the high rises in the inner-city suburbs, and all of them have to overcome prejudice from authorities and classmates and answer the question over and over again, “do I fit in?”
Ramzi Ben Sliman’s film has moments that are as heavy-handed as similar scenes in Tinā, but the dancing isn’t as uplifting as the singing. There’s also a clunky analogy between the director of the school’s unwillingness to see Neneh’s potential and her actual inability to see a plate glass door right in front of her. The best thing in the film is young Oumy Bruni Garrel as the feisty and determined Neneh.
While the gory aesthetic of Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey remains not to my taste, I was surprised at how sentimental and – amazingly – emotionally satisfying it ended up. Perhaps we can put that down to the Stephen King source material, a short story about a demonic clockwork drumming monkey with the power to kill people in the most bizarre and unexpected ways possible whenever someone turns the key to wind it up.
Twin brothers Hal and Bill (as adults played by Theo James) inherit the creature from the father who abandoned them, learning that death is inevitable and arbitrary (as well as messy) along the way. While I ended up liking the finished film more than I did while I was actually watching it, I’m sorry to say that it simply isn’t as funny as it thinks it is.
