VINCERE is a must see, best film currently on release. Italian language historical drama about the spurned first wife of a young Benito Mussolini.
In the heady days before World War 1 Ida and Benito are revolutionaries and lovers. They marry, she has a baby boy - Benitito. During the war they lose contact. The War splits the European working class movement, into Communists, Social Democrats, and Nationalists. The latter develop into Fascists. The rest is history.
Ida bumps into Benito, fast rising in Italian politics, and is horrified to find he has a new wife and more children. Mussolini is equally horrified. Ida and Benitito are a political embarrassment and a threat to his rise and that of his party. They must be got out of the way. Enter Blackshirts, corrupt officials, oppressive psychiatrists and enveloping nuns.
As mother and son are separated what follows is a heart-rending tragedy, but stands as an homage to the endurance of the human spirit. Ida's and her son's respective struggles against an engulfing power which demands they deny reality can be read as a metaphor for Italy, and Europe, under totalitarianism.
Go and see it. Took me a while to get over the fact that the young Mussolni appears to be played by a cross between Groucho Marx and Michael Corleone at his angriest. But it's wonderful.
THE KILLER INSIDE ME, or "The Violent Film" as my friend called it who was not planning to see it. That reflects an unfortunate trend in the reviewing which has emphasised the violence in the film and especially that against women.
But much of this attention has seriously misrepresented the film. It is not in any way misogynistic. 50% of the victims of the central character are male. Equal Opportunities psychopathy if you will. Most of the screentime does not involve violence. And in act is slow and lyrical, with high visual production values. Imagine LA Confidential set amid the Texan desert and filmed by Terrence Malick.
It is precisely this languid feeling which sets up the shocking nature of the violence. Those episodes are, as anyone in Cumbria will tell you, a sudden and brutal interruption into the normality of rural life. IN the lead role Casey Affleck portrays just that. His Deputy Sheriff, mocked for not even carrying a gun, appears hyper normal, in a rather boring, nerdy way. The typical "quite loner" in a "tight-knit community". A quasi-Freudian backstory establishes, as with so many violent men, motivations around the very oppoaite of domineering machismo.
Hence the reviews do not reflect characterised throughout with ceaseless, brutal violence. This is not an action movie. Suddenly and without warning we find ourselves watching what is, indeed, one of the most distressing look-away sequences I have ever seen. This sequence is overwhelmingly responsible for the accusations of gratuitous and misogynistic violence. For unusually, the camera remains relentlessly on the victim's face, in close up, as they are bludgeoned. No cutaways to the killer, or to blood spattering on a wall.
An alternative reading to this sequence can suggest two things. First that we are being forced into the position of the killer. Seeing the victim's face gives us his point of view. That makes us extremely uncomfortable, as we all wish to deny our own potential for aggression and violence. Secondly, and via the suddenness of the violence, we are forced to face up to the reality of domestic violence. Thus we are in that long-running debate about the nature of violence in film. The argument that if we are to have violence in films it ought to be realistic. Otherwise film-makers are accused of dishonesty, even of minimising it.
Hence a dilemma for filmmakers. Omit domestic violence as a subject and they will be accused of ignoring a huge and serious social problem and the most acute manifestation of men's oppression of women. Include it in the script but do not show it on screen, or show it in sanitised form, and they will be
accused of inadequately representing its' full evil.
Darling of British art cinema Michael Winterbottom has taken the third option and pushed the envelope. Extreme domestic violence is hard to face up to. The victim's disintegrating face is equally hard to look at. I initially looked away then forced myself to watch, to honour the honesty and daring of the filmmakers. It was not fun. But then murder is not fun, whereas in thousands of popular movies it is treated as fun or at the least as not a big deal. If you are going to see a film about a killer this year, this is it.
THE HAPPIEST GIRL IN THE WORLD
Second best film out at the moment. A gentle, wry, observation comedy from Romania.
Mum, Dad and teenage daughter Delia are hicks from the sticks on the way to Bucharest. Delia is miserable, hence the irony of the title. Arriving in the big city she exclaims "There are just so many of them - people!"
This clash between rural Romania, expressive of the old days of Communism, and the brash, modern, increasingly Western city culture of the capital lies at the heart of the film.
For Delia is here to film a TV commercial for orange juice, having won a car in a competition organised by the manufacturers. To get the car she has to do the ad. Which puts her and her embarrasing rube parents into the alien world of capitalists, advertising agencies, film crews, and all-round commercialism. Will they sink or swim? Mayhem ensues.
Conflict are everywhere. Mum and Dad appear to hate each other. Delia seems to hate them both. She wants to keep the car, while Dad is fixing up a buyer even while she is filming the ad. Another metaphor for changing Romania. Dad needs the money to solve the family's financial problems and invest in a new capitalist enterprise, a guest house.
Andreea Bosneag is superb as the unremittingly unhappy adolescent, tubby, spotty, awkward, unreasonable, tearful. Parents of teenage children will both love and hate her. Yet by the end of the film we admire her strength and determination. Perhaps a third and final social metaphor, as she stands up to the harassment of Mum, Dad, the make-uo lady, the bitchy ad agency woman, the director, the client . . .
FOUR LIONS
A tragedy. Chris Morris is a comedy genius. How did he make this rubbish? How did this script get the money to be made? It is just not funny. In an audience of 20, one man laughed at intervals throughout and one woman laughed several times in the final few minutes. The other 18 of us? Not a titter.
The set up must have looked promising. Morris as the creative behind it. Timely and yet controversial subject matter as four home-grown British Moslems plan a suicide attack on the London Marathon.
But it is just not funny. And there is not enough going on until the final minutes to work as drama. The characters and and their motivations are unbelievable. A rare strength is Riz Ahmed's strong performance as leader Omar, constantly frustrated by the incompetence of his fellow jihadis. But not strong enough to raise this dire production.
Miss it at all costs.
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