Sparrows - taking a bad turn in small-town Iceland

Sparrows

This review contains spoilers about upsetting topics towards the end of the film.

Sometimes you’re enjoying a film and then a scene doesn’t work, but overall you still have a positive reflection of the film. Unfortunately Sparrows wasn’t one of these films.

For 80% or more of the film, it was really excellent and then there was one misjudged scene but it was starting to win me back. Unfortunately, the concluding sequences were so spectacularly misjudged that there was no way back.  Using extreme sexual violence against a young woman as a plot point for character development for a male character is rarely acceptable. The way in which Sparrows does this is in the most awful, insensitive and risible way, coming out of nowhere, and leaving me disgusted with how it is resolved. This comes after a scene earlier in the film where the lead character appears to be sexually assaulted and which left me uncomfortable, but which the film could almost cope with. But someone should have stopped the final sequence. Whatever vague point the film seems to be trying to make about young people being out of their depth and corrupted by their surroundings could have been made in a dozen other ways, without resorting to where the story goes.

Leading up to this, there was much that was good about the film. It was beautifully shot and was a really interesting take on a troubled father – son relationship. The character development of both was interesting up to that point and the performances were good. The sense of place of small-town, isolated Iceland came out really well, especially teenage boredom in such a setting. What a shame that this was all thrown away, presumably because of some senseless desire to shock the audience rather than by being true to the characters and the film.

A Flag Without a Country - dreaming of the future while the present holds you back

This unusual documentary is an interesting tale of Kurdish celebrity, mixing doc footage, scripted scenes and reconstructions of past events.  It cuts between the life of pilot Nuriman and singer Helan (aka Helly Luv), recently returned to Kurdistan from Finland where her family fled during her childhood.

It’s a charming film, and a different take to what you might expect to a film about a place looking after thousands of refugees and with the fight against ISIS creeping into view as the film progresses. But instead of focussing on the dark and tragic, the message here is of unusual characters seeking achieve their dreams and serve their people by inspiring them against the odds.

The best sections are undoubtedly those about indefatigable pilot Nuriman, whose determination and geniality stop their being anything laughable about his slightly madcap schemes – this is a man who first gained fame in Kurdistan by building a homemade plane and being a self-taught pilot, in order to fly to visit a long lost love in Iran during the Iran-Iraq war – and surviving! His spirits are a little lower after a plane crash during an election stunt, but he is determined to inspire refugee kids by building another plane with them and teaching them the basics of being a pilot. His journey is wonderfully and affectionately told.

The mixture of recreated scenes and documentary worked slightly less well on the scenes about singer Helan, as they had a bit of reality TV feel rather than the more sincere tone of a documentary and the contrast between her current showbiz life and the harshness of her childhood sometimes jarred rather than strengthening the power of each story by providing contrast to each other. It might not have helped that her story opens with her scavenging and borrowing AK47s, a lion and some Kurdish refugee children from Syria. It turned to be for a music video, but it was a very unnerving start! But Helan also shows an indefatigable spirit and it is hard not to warm to her eventually.

This is a film trying to show the power of the belief of a people without their own state through two very individual characters and maybe occasionally overdid the national pride rather than being fully objective. But it is understandable give the context of the film as the consequences of the conflict in Syria and the rest of Iraq spill over into Kurdistan and the Peshmerga organise to fight back. All in all this is a different and interesting look at Kurdistan and a portrait of a place growing in confidence and success just before calamity starts to seep through its borders.

Slash - coming of age can be a very out there experience

Slash is an amiable coming-of-age movie that captures teenage confusion and alienation really convincingly.  Two disaffected teens, Neil and Julia, share a secret hobby – writing fan and slash fiction. For Neil this has been entirely private, Julia is immersed in the online world and when she discovers Neil’s writing, convinces him to join in as well.

The film has all the elements you want from this type of film – it’s fun and funny, takes it’s leads emotional confusion seriously without ever being indulgent or po-faced. And of course there is a loud mouthed, sarky best mate and comically unhelpful parents. Ok that’s not the most original thing to have in a coming-of-age drama, but I’m not complaining – sometimes things are near-mandatory in a genre for a reason! It has just the right amount of affection for sci-fi and fan fiction without undue reverence.  It feels like we’re laughing with the main characters rather than at them, but of course with the odd eye-roll for some pretentious extremes.  It also realises that online communities can be more important for a lot of people – teenagers and adults – without forgetting that there is still a real, offline life to be lived as well and one in which there can be real consequences.

There are really good central performances, particularly from Hannah Marks as Julia. If I had one criticism, it felt that Julia was occasionally relegated to Neil’s cheerleader by the script, which the performance and character development done by Marks didn’t deserve. It would have been really great if these characters could have been joint protagonists to a greater extent, rather than Julia being the foot on the accelerator for Neil’s story. But this is just a minor quibble to a very enjoyable witty and emotionally realistic film.

Go Home - digging up the unsettling ghosts of childhood wartime trauma

Go Home is the story of Nada’s return to her grandparents’ in Lebanon after the war drove her family to France.  The house is long abandoned and misused by the neighbourhoods and tensions from the war still run deep in the present.

Go Home is a psychodrama that is focused on Nada’s conflicted feelings and suppressed memories about her childhood during the war. She is clearly traumatised without fully understanding why. She wants to restore the house to restore her grandfather’s legacy but also can’t really remember him enough to know what she is fighting for. The film has some interesting ideas about memory, forgiveness and legacy, particularly in the context of when terrible things have happened and have never really been resolved.

I liked the way that the film approached this psychological trauma by using horror tropes. The wintry spookiness and chillingly neglected home, combined with a clever use of sound led to an intense and unsettling atmosphere in which the drama plays out for much of the film. The fragmented flashbacks of Nada’s childhood act as ghosts slowly revealing the mystery at the centre of the film.

What lets the film down slightly is a bit of lack of context for why Nada has decided to come back now and why she had decided now is the time the house and her family’s reputation must be restored – it isn’t clear whether this is a random decision on a trip to Lebanon or if other things have driven here. The lack of context makes Nada a slightly alienating character rather than understandable or relatable. She is so determined to carry on against her family’s wishes and active rejection by the local community.  It sometimes seems she is only motivated by stubbornness (or because the plot of the film needs her to) than a clear motivation to be so determined in the face of such strong opposition.

Still, the film brings to life well how hard it can be to leave the past behind and how the actions of one generation can impact the next and the film is genuinely unsettling at times. It is a shame that in not developing Nada as a character further that it didn’t quite deliver the emotional punch that it needed to. 

Parched - the funny, frank and moving lives of a wonderful group of Indian women

One of the best films I have seen at this year’s Edinburgh Film Festival is Parched, a story of women in a conservative village in rural Rajasthan. Parched is funny and moving, frank and frightening.  It is brilliantly and beautifully directed by Leena Yadav with stunning, heartbreaking and hilarious performances.

Although a deeply affecting and often genuinely shocking story of women’s oppression, it is also vibrant and life-affirming. Yadav has also managed to make this story feel both universal and very specific to a single place, somewhere whose traditions, customs and social structures are meaningfully brought to life.

Like Sand Storm, the film is partly about the clash between the new and traditional. It shares that film’s authenticity, which is probably because both films were constructed from real stories related to the film makers and told unflinchingly and sympathetically, never making the characters stereotyped or victims but genuine heroines of their own stories, regardless of their choices.

For all the beauty of the film, and warmth and wit of the script, this is above all a film marked by three stunning central performances.  Radhika Apte brings out Lajjo’s bottomless warmth and determination to find happiness. Her joys are infections and her sorrows deeply impactful. Bijli might have been some ‘tart with a heart’ cliché in the hands of a less sensitive story teller but the film refuses to go there. Instead Surveen Chawla brings her to life as fearless and brittle, showing someone who makes the most of the limited choices and agency that she has and someone who refuses to ever give up ownership of her own life, however dark and frightening it gets.

But even beyond these two excellent performances, Tannishtha Chatterjee stands out. She came up with the original concept for the film whilst talking to women in a similar village while on location for another film. Perhaps this connection adds to the amazing depth and passion of her performance. Chatterjee brings to life the tug between tradition and duty, between modern ideas and empowerment. She creates in Rani an endless fascinating and moving character, who the audience is utterly tied to, even when she’s acting in a less sympathetic manner to her new daughter-in-law.  It is an utterly convincing and believable performance and she is the film’s heart and soul, with the most moving journey of all.

There are many things that make Parched a joy – the humour, the insight, the emotion, the gorgeous cinematography, the confident and convincing storytelling. But above all it contains a trio of wonderful performances that deserve to be widely seen.

Sand Storm - how do you choose between freedom and damaging family duty?

Sand Storm is an excellent and interesting depiction of family life in a community I knew next to nothing about – a Bedouin village in Israel, starting to become more integrated with the modern world and facing challenges adapting to this.

The film focuses on student Layla, who has a somewhat stormy relationship with her traditionalist mother and a deteriorating one with the father who allows her to go to college and is teaching her to drive, but whose limited progressivism doesn’t run too deep as he has also just married a second wife.  Layla’s determination to be in control of her own life, and her misjudgement of each parent’s views will go on to cause a storm within the family and a huge dilemma for Layla with her beloved younger sisters possible collateral damage.

The characters of Layla and her mother Jalila are really well developed. It is not at all clear how they will react to any situation but the choice they make is always believable and feels true to the character.  Both these lead actors pitch their performances superbly and one of the fantastic choices that director Elite Zexer makes is allowing the actors to have several wordless exchanges, understanding that sometimes things are more powerful if not said out loud.

In the Q&A following the film, Zexer describes how she gathered the story from her long friendships with Bedouin families, over ten or so years. Although an outsider, she is clearly passionate about the status of Bedouin families and villages, and this connection helps the audience be immersed in this family’s life. She brings out the characters without judgement and in a way that doesn’t feel like she is treating them like some exotic other, but someone’s whose internal world she is familiar with. She is particularly good at drawing out the impact on a closer relationship with the modern world and the turmoil that brings to tradition and social structures, particularly when it comes to the place of women.

In researching what films to see at this year’s festival, I came across a review praising this film but noting that the reviewer felt they’d already seen this story because there had been a few films about women in conservative Middle Eastern societies recently. I suspect that the number of women in conservative Middle Eastern societies isn’t that different to the number of white men in the US, and I’m pretty sure we’ve had more than a few films about them in the last few years, many with roughly the same story and roughly the same setting. But anyway, enough of the snark! One of the great things about Sand Storm and Elite Zexer’s storytelling is that this feels like a story I haven’t seen before, with characters who were new to me. There are millions of different stories about women in that and every other region waiting to be told. Sand Storm was a wonderful character drama, that was gripping and beautiful, funny and sad, and that’s what matters about it. It was a fascinating insight into a world I didn’t know about and, in Layla, a character as vital and interesting as any you’ll find in most films.

Mother - a twisted and darkly comic small town mystery

Like The Homecoming, my first film at EIFF 2016, this is a comedy drama with an unusual central story, although the humour here is much dryer and darker and the setting is Estonia.

It is confidently written and told with a brilliant central performance from Tiina Malberg that holds the film together. And amidst the deliberate absurdist tone, the film makers are careful to make the characters, their faults, and flaws, and motivations realistic rather than extreme and exaggerated.

The central story is that Elsa is caring at home for her comatose son Lauri, with no help from her insensitive husband, cleaning obsessively and making endless cups of coffee for the stream of visitors who come to see Lauri, including his hungover doctor and a small town police officer more at home looking for stolen jumpers. It soon emerges that Lauri is in the coma because of a mysterious shooting and his life savings are missing.

The film takes place almost entirely in the family home, and the director uses this location really well to emphasise and as a stand in for both the claustrophobia of a small town and Elsa’s feeling of being trapped by circumstance. Malberg is excellent in capturing all of Elsa’s complicated feelings, her frustration and concern, her passion and her greed, all with a real dry and subtle comic undertone.

The filmmakers use the repetitive structure of the home visits really well to gradually reveal more and more of the mystery of the shooting and the missing money, taking a cynical view of human nature and maintaining the black humour throughout.

Perhaps with a bigger budget, the film could have set up the backstory more and weaved even more of a web, giving us a few more glimpses of life outside the family home. However, this film is really effective story-telling and the stripped down feel gives the film a real individuality. It is focused, deliciously dark and a very enjoyable film.

The Homecoming - amusing family misadventures in Iceland

I almost picked ‘The Homecoming’ on the tagline alone – ‘The best Icelandic incest comedy ever’. It certainly sounded like bold film-making. It turned out the story line isn’t quite as alarming as that sounds (although still occasionally uncomfortable) – Gunni discovers his son’s new girlfriend is the daughter he abandoned before she was born.  It is also more of a comedy-drama than pure comedy – though it does have its very funny moments, including three of the most progressively awkward dinner table scenes you will ever see.  The last one in particular was an impressive mix of dramatic tension, farce and family drama.

The acting is excellent, particularly from the actors playing the parents.  Hilmar Jonsson brings out a Dad lost in his own life and is the crucial part of the film. Although a little hypocritical and all the mistakes of the film are of his own making, he just about keeps Gunni sympathetic and stops the farce becoming losing too much credibility.  Harpa Arnardóttir as mum Herdis is a fantastic mixture of brittle and optimistic, providing excellent support to the main character.

The tonal shifts between comedy and drama are generally handled pretty well, including within scenes, without feeling forced.  Maybe on occasion the emotional impact doesn’t land as hard as it could as the scene has up to now been played for laughs.  However, as well as being hysterically funny at times, it is a real drama - the mistakes that the characters do have real life and hard hitting emotional consequences.

If I had one criticism, it would be that the film took a little while to get going and, although I appreciate this is partly for scene setting and to establish Gunni and Herdis in their wider world, I wasn’t sure that delaying the meat of the story added as much as it could. Once Gunni’s spiral of deceit starts though, this is an enjoyable, funny and sometimes moving film.