REVIEW: 20,000 Days on Earth (dir. Iain Forsyth, Jane Pollard)

Cast: Nick Cave, Warren Ellis, Ray Winstone, Kylie Minogue, Blixa Bargeld

“You’ve dreamed yourself to the outside, and nothing can bring you back in.” Nick Cave

Sometime during your mid-fifties you will wake up on your 20,000th day on Earth. For most of us, it will pass without celebration or ignominy; one of so many days that skip gaily past as we stare on blankly, our backs turned against the future. But Nick Cave is not like most of us. In fact it’s hard to believe he has allowed a single day of his life to escape so casually unappreciated. In a career spanning four decades he has poked and prodded himself to breaking point, and shaped his discoveries into an endless torrent of melodious grumbling. That he took the occasion of his 20,000th day on Earth to open himself up to his own life and art is a great blessing. That he invited Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard to document the event is a great relief.

’20,000 Days on Earth’ follows Cave during the recording of his latest LP, ‘Push the Sky Away’. Footage of his band recording in the French countryside is interspersed with scenes from his daily life on the south coast of England: lunch with long-term collaborator and friend Warren Ellis, a few hours helping his archivists sort through the myriad scrapbooks and photo albums of his life, and so on. Devoid of any particular moment - an announcement of retirement perhaps, or a world tour - the film provides a snapshot of Cave that feels all the more intimate and truthful for its arbitrariness. It feels more like the stitched together outtakes of a ‘Nick Cave’ documentary: all the moments between the clapper’s snaps, the quiet reflective meanderings, the anecdotes and naughty stories. It is unabashed and unreserved. It has a sort of sentimental, playful similarity to his friend Jim Jarmusch’s ‘Broken Flowers’: a man wakes up one day, and for no particular reason decides to come to terms with his past.

Clearly, Forsyth and Pollard have discovered that the only way to really understand Nick Cave is on his own terms and in his own time. An early section of the film sees Cave sitting with a man who we may assume to be a therapist; surely an excellent opportunity to get beneath the skin of one of modern music’s most provocative practitioners? No. Watching somebody of Nick Cave’s intelligence and creativity undergo psychoanalysis is almost laughable, he is so utterly in touch with his memories and feelings and the effect that various moments have had on his life. When asked to recall the first time he ever saw the nude female form, he describes “a girl with a white face” who was his first kiss, and who had a “profound effect” on his childhood, leading him to occasionally dress in women’s clothing to feel closer to her. When asked to describe his father, he recalls the moment, “my father took me aside and read the first chapter of Lolita to me.” All these memories are too fortunate, too complete, too perfectly ‘pre-artisic’.

But then we cut to footage of Cave recording the piano and vocals for ‘Give Us a Kiss’, and we are reminded that everything we will ever know about this man comes from his music. His art is his memories. This stunning, quiet, solitary piano piece performed in a studio, alone, tells us more about Cave than any number of hours searching through his archives. “Give us a kiss. One little sip sip sip, before you slip, slip, slip.”

Aside from the aural bliss of the studio footage, it’s in the moments when Cave is having fun with his memories that the film really comes to life. Listening to Cave and Ellis discuss the Meltdown festival that he curated, and invited Nina Simone to headline, is fascinating, intimate, and often hysterical. At an early point in the film he recalls how Simone wandered on stage, hunched and menacing, and left her gum on the piano. He brings the memory up with Ellis later at lunch, and Ellis casually mentions that he kept that gum, and still has it somewhere in the house. It is a rare treat to hear these two impassioned veterans discussing the music that has affected them. It’s a rumination on what music has been, leaving open the question of what it is now, and could become.

And then there are the ghostly apparitions that appear beside Cave in his car as he roams the outskirts of a grey and dreary Brighton. Ray Winstone, Kylie Minogue, and Blixa Bargeld all join Cave at various junctures (or junctions?) to help him relive past successes and failures. These are moments divorced from any real time or place: more musical and dream-like than factual. They are eerie, hazy, half recollections; all the more powerful for their lack of veracity. They fit comfortably into our growing, elliptical understanding of Nick Cave. To quote the man himself during one of these car journeys, “Who knows their own story? It only becomes a story when we tell it.”

With Minogue he discusses what a live show should be; insisting on the artist’s need to elicit a mixture of terror and awe, because on stage you can’t have one without the other. This final conversation gives way to a truly ecstatic finale: a beautifully shot, climactic live performance of ‘Push the Sky Away’ that Forsyth and Pollard match cut with old archive footage from throughout Cave’s career. It is a deeply affecting technique: all of these Nick Caves crashing into one another, none of them old or wrong, none of them honed or perfect. It is an astonishing, breathtaking execution of a filmed live performance. All these various machinations and appearances of a fascinating, unknowable man.

REVIEW: Obvious Child (dir. Gillian Robespierre)

Cast: Jenny Slate, Jake Lacy, Gaby Hoffmann,  Gabe Liedman, David Cross

Donna Stern’s life seems to be falling apart around her. On the same day her Brooklyn bookstore ‘UNOPPRESSIVE, NON-IMPERIALIST  BARGAIN BOOKS’ is forced to close down, she discovers that her boyfriend has been cheating on her with her best friend. But while most twentysomethings in her position would “literally die” because they “actually can’t right now”, Donna is driven forward by a meek but powerful urge: to collect all her trauma and project it into the one thing that gives her life meaning… her comedy. After a disastrous stint at her local comedy club, she wakes up from a one night stand to discover that she is pregnant, and the earliest date she can have an abortion is two weeks hence - on Valentine’s Day. Her “three bad things” now dispensed with, Donna’s struggle to overcome and understand this new angle on life makes for a charming story of young adulthood in Brooklyn - the borough of obvious children.

Gillian Robespierre’s debut feature feels, unsurprisingly, a lot like a film made by comedians. It is filled with flittering moments of observational comedy - quick one-liners and self-fulfilling gags. But beneath the clinical, sarcastic wit, there is a depth to her treatment of the story that builds gradually into a poignant, mature understanding of her central characters and the world they inhabit. Between and beneath the frenetic bursts of comedy, there is a very real, charming warmth to this film.

Jenny Slate is the perfect muse for Robespierre: brash and confident without, detached almost; but her wit cannot cover the vulnerable, yearning young woman within. She has an almost avian quality: strong but light, an angular face with deep brown eyes. Her every sentence seems to push you away but really she’s begging you to stay. She's frankly anything but an obvious child.

In the end Donna’s trials are not so insurmountable. She has perhaps the two most caring besties in the world in Nellie and Joey (her gay comedian roomie who needs to play Verdi in the bathroom because of his “shy bowels”). And Max - the one night stand - turns out to be a winner. He’s “so Christian, he’s a Christmas tree. He, like, knows Santa”. Schooled in a barn in Vermont, he’s the sort of guy who brings flowers to an abortion clinic (because... it’s still Valentines Day!) He’s a welcome interlude in a life filled with unfulfilled plans, unfinished chores, pushy, successful mothers, and lecherous comedy club owners. Untainted by the ruthless frisson of Brooklyn life, he knows only honesty and kindness. In the end, even Donna’s pushy matriarch proves to be a loving and understanding mother.

But the film, as with it’s titular character, is not trying to make a big deal of its issues. It’s trying to be open and honest about them. In the days following Robin Williams’ sad passing, it’s consoling to be reminded of the transformative power of comedy, not just for the viewers, but for those who enact it because it is the only way for them to make sense of their lives. The way Patch Adams wished to treat mortality, this film manages to treat everyday life, “with a certain amount of humanity and dignity, and decency, and God forbid, maybe even humour.”

REVIEW: Catch Me Daddy (dir. Daniel & Matthew Wolfe)

Cast: Sameena Jabeen Ahmed, Conor McCarron, Gary Lewis, Wasim Zakir, Anwar Hussain, Barry Nunney, Shoby Kaman, Adnan Hussain, Ali Ahmad, Kate Dickie, Nichola Burley

“The crystal in men's heads
Blackened and fell to pieces.
The valleys went out.
The moorland broke loose.”
Ted Hughes, Heptonstall Old Church

Laila (Ahmed), a British-Pakistani girl, and her white boyfriend Aaron (McCarron), live a life of solitude on a caravan park in the Yorkshire moors. It is a life of forced isolation, overshadowed by the fear of being discovered by Laila’s family, who would stop at nothing to recover their wayward daughter. The money Laila earns sweeping hair at a local salon is spent carefully on vitals and codeine. It is a melancholy, peaceful existence, slipping past in opioid numbness, scored by old Patti Smith records. And it is about to be torn apart…

Barry (Nunney) and Tony (Lewis) are ex-bouncers turned hired goons - a role the aggressive Barry relishes more than his introspective elder, whose role is to drive and not ask too many questions. Junaid (Hussain) and his gang of Asian teen thugs - including Laila’s brother Zaheer (Ahmad) - are friends of the family who will stop at nothing to return Laila to her father (Zakir). The gangs converge on a roadside service station and head off in two cars, arriving in Laila’s town under cover of darkness.

Little more need be said of the plot for Daniel Wolfe’s blistering, brutal debut, Catch Me Daddy. It is a disarmingly simple story – existing at some rugged intersection between Bruno Dumont’s sullen existential meanderings, and Sam Peckinpah’s unwavering genre classics of the 1970s. Wolfe – exhibiting a patience rarely seen in debut features – is in no rush to tell his story, allowing characters and landscapes to establish themselves individually before they collapse in on themselves later in the film.

It is an isolating and intriguing approach that gives the story space to breathe. Award-winning cinematographer Robbie Ryan’s camera is left to float unhindered across the craggy, undulating, timeless moors; through dustbowl towns of angular, fired-brick estates and stuccoed terraces draped in St George's flags; and amongst the glum, time-worn faces of these people, left alone in the moors, waiting to be swallowed whole by history.

Wolfe then wraps this loose-knit tapestry around a hard-boiled, simple chase narrative. The result is an intensely absorbing, painful, and truly unique portrayal of love on the run.

This approach also establishes an important sense of boredom: the rhythmic, plodding monotony of the gang’s task feels all the more brutal when freed from the easy excitement of a ‘chase movie’. With nothing but time on their hands, the various gang members become an unwitting source of gallows humour: telling each other of their dreams, play fighting in car parks, performing impressions and caricatures, and showing off pictures of pet parrots.

There is a flowing, observant humanism to the way Wolfe portrays these murderous criminals. These are not career gangsters - they are often clumsy and inept in their task - they are simply men who have become hardened and infected by the harsh world they inhabit. One match cut takes us from inside Barry and Tony’s car - where they are listening to old Tim Buckley records and discussing acupuncture - to the inside of Junaid’s car where they’re smoking weed and blasting Trap music. It’s this odd charm that makes their sudden bursts of horrific brutality all the more real, unavoidable, and unsettling.

There is a natural flow and rhetoric to the imagery of the film. Our victims - Laila and Aaron - are always indoors, always in the light, always encased by windows and nestled together like chicks. Their adversaries exist almost exclusively outdoors - in their cars, yearning, searching, like wolves sniffing in the darkness. This dichotomy holds more or less true up until the climactic moment when Barry lies in wait in the shadows outside a brightly lit convenience store, waiting for Aaron to leave. From this moment on, our victims are quite literally dragged out of their nest and forced to run for their lives.

From here, the film becomes a truly nightmarish vision. The disorientating darkness of the moors seems to play with the very foundations of time and space. Distances contract - one moment the pursuers are whole towns away, and then suddenly they’re right on our tails again. In such darkness, sound becomes our primary guide: the rustle of gorse whipping past and the sound of gurgling streams feels primal and strangled when combined with the unearthly din of Matthew Wolfe and Daniel Thomas Freeman’s primordial score. This overpowering chaos is interrupted only by flashes of torchlight and the screams of names and obscenities in the night. It is an intense and impressive section of the film that perhaps plays into Wolfe’s technical acuity as a renowned music promo director.

People looking for a film held together by action-packed, ‘tent pole’ moments may be disappointed, but they’d do well to consider how expertly the film fulfils the needs of a genre film without relying on the tropes of a genre film. Wolfe and his brother are clearly studious film enthusiasts, and the story leads us expertly through the beats of a chase narrative; but when we arrive at those important moments, they are given no extra attention. In this film murders, bar brawls, and car crashes are no more important than the long rides that connected them. It is a harsh and alienating vision, and one that Ellroy might be proud of.

The performances blend perfectly into Wolfe’s vision – in part due to his decision to cast non-actors from the region in which the film is set. With the exception of Gary Lewis, every member of the gang is a non-actor relying on Wolfe’s direction to bring his character to life. The whole is more important than any individual performance here. The characters are part of the landscape; the landscape is one of the characters.

Sameena Jabeen Ahmed’s first performance on camera is one that many more experienced actresses will weep over this festival season. Guided by two superb professional performances from Conor McCarron and Wasim Zakir, she has created an absorbing, surly, reluctant child in Laila. Wolfe’s singular vision of hopeless destruction finds its muse in this charming and powerful young actress. Her performance in the film’s final moments will exhaust the most reluctant of viewers. Her strength will pull out what is left of your breath like a vacuum, and leave you stumbling for the exits in need of respite.

REVIEW: The Two Faces of January (dir. Hossein Amini)

Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Oscar Isaac, Kirtsen Dunst,

Athens, 1962. Chester MacFarland (Mortensen) and his wife Colette (Dunst) are taking a tour of the Parthenon. You’d be forgiven for thinking they are on their honeymoon, such is the giddiness of their ardour. But beneath his glamorous and hearty exterior, Chester is clearly a man who can’t let his guard down. And so it is that he becomes distracted by a young man who has been watching them intently throughout their visit to the site. The young man is Rydal (Isaac). a New Jersey ex-pat who looks every bit the Mediterranean Lothario, he earns his keep leading impressionable female college students around the ruins of the Parthenon. Rydal is intrigued by this handsome gentleman who reminds him, uncomfortably, of his recently deceased father; and he quickly becomes besotted by Colette.

And so, when he arrives at the MacFarland’s hotel room to return a lost bracelet, and finds Chester dragging the lifeless corpse of an American gangster into a hotel room, he makes the life-threatening mistake of offering to help the couple to escape. This being the Sixties, and their being in Greece, nothing happens as quickly as the trio might have hoped. Thus the stage is set for a slow, tense, emotionally embroiled escape from the authorities, and exile on the island of Crete.

Hossein Amini’s first feature is loyal and unswerving crime fiction from start to finish. At times it is a masterclass in the genre: a densely layered, patient exploration of three lives fraying as they struggle against one another, and against their own urges and longings. But at other times it becomes the victim of its own loyalty: safely played, predictable, too calm when it should be shocking, too melodramatic when it should be muted. Moments that, played quietly, might have had more strength, get lost in flatulent camerawork and a score that pays more heed to Carol Reed than it does to its own characters needs.

The setting plays to its own strengths (making modern day Athens and Crete look like 1960’s Athens and Crete requires almost no work) but the costumes are impeccable, and without a change of clothes between our three protagonists, they become a bedraggled and threadbare reflection of the characters’ internal struggles.

The performances are virtually faultless. Kirtsen Dunst is the charmed American girl, startled by riches, done up like Ingrid Bergman but faltering under the disguise. Viggo Mortensen is the grey-eyed, watery criminal whose life could have turned out so differently if it weren’t for the cowardly greed that grips him. He’s a white-collar criminal, way out of his depth, and he’s made the fool’s mistake of actually falling in love with his wife on the lam.

But the star of this film is without doubt Oscar Isaac as the brooding Rydal: a young man who is no less on the run than the MacFarlands. On the run from his family, from his dead father, from the vast chasm of his own empty future. His is perhaps the most convincing character trajectory of the film: from a sullen man child living off sorority girl handouts, to a towering, ferocious presence hellbent on revenge. The film is worth watching just to see his performance grow through the final third: as misery, grief, and hate fuse together in a tumultuous, hopeless climax.