Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 116: Sun Apr 26

Bait (Jenkin, 2019): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 12pm

This is a 35mm presentation, part of Mark Jenkin's Cornish Trilogy which is being screened at BFI Southbank. The film screening will be preceded by an intro by writer-director Mark Jenkin, and actors Edward Rowe and Mary Woodvine.

Time Out review:
It may look like it was made on a shoestring 50 years ago, but this abrasive seaside parable is a quietly thrilling piece of filmmaking. Using old 16mm cameras, scratchy black-and-white stock and a handful of coastal locations, Cornish writer-director Mark Jenkin has conjured up something truly arresting: a debut film rooted in local traditions, with a dark humour and an atmosphere that’s as brooding as its Atlantic backdrop. Filmed mostly in unblinking close-ups, its central character is scowling Cornish fisherman Martin (Edward Rowe). He’s a fundamentally good-hearted man who nurses a bundle of unexpressed grudges over the flood of new money into his fishing village. His equally gruff brother (Giles King) uses their dad’s old trawler to take tourists on pleasure cruises, while the family’s quayside home has been sold to the kind of well-heeled urbanites Martin so resents. To add insult to injury, they’ve installed a porthole. ‘Bait’ is a story of gentrification and class friction that builds and builds, searching for the release that inevitably comes. But it has deeper currents too, as Jenkin explores the day-to-day slog of maintaining a generations-old way of life – you’ll learn a lot about lobster potting – and the near-spiritual pain of being prised, like a barnacle off a rock, from your place in life by forces beyond your control. He’s abetted in that by a wonderfully human performance from Rowe, all bruised pride and righteous fury. It’s clear where Jenkin’s sympathies lie, and one or two of the middle-class characters tiptoe towards caricature, but ‘Bait’ never feels polemical or didactic: it’s more of a quiet lament than a shaking fist. It feels almost like a modern-day sea shanty. Let its hypnotic rhythms wash over you.
Phil de Semleyen

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 115: Sat Apr 25

Manhattan Murder Mystery (Allen, 1993): David Lean Cinema, 2pm

This is a 35mm presentation.

Time Out review:
Like the Bob Hope movies which it alludes to, Manhattan Murder Mystery is as light and brazenly generic as Woody Allen's early work. As a result, it is both unusually insubstantial, and, at least in the second half, extremely funny. Hope-like in his panicky cowardice, Larry worries not only about the feelings of his wife Carol (Diane Keaton, refreshing) for his old friend Ted (Alan Alda), but about her determination to investigate the death of a neighbour. At first, Larry thinks Carol is fantasising, but then he starts to witness strange events. Cue to a fast, ramshackle, thrill comedy as entertaining as it is removed from the realities of contemporary New York. A movie inspired by movie escapism. Minor, but surprisingly, almost defiantly upbeat.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 114: Fri Apr 24

Orlando (Potter, 1992): Rio Cinema, 6.30pm

This is a 35mm presentation. There will be a Q&A with writer, director and Rio Cinema patron Sally Potter herself, to be hosted by curator and author of many books including The Cinema of Sally Potter, So Mayer.

Time Out review:
Virginia Woolf's 1928 modernist novel, but the joy is that the film comes over simply: a beautiful historical pageant of 400 years of English history, full of visual and aural pleasures, sly jokes, thought-provoking insights, emotional truths - and romance. It begins at the opulent court of Virgin Queen Elizabeth (Quentin Crisp), where the male immortal Orlando receives favour and an estate; and thence follows his quest for love in 50-year jumps through the Civil War, the early colonial period, the effete literary salons of 1750 (by which time Orlando is a woman), the Victorian era of property, and finally a 20th century postscript added by Sallly Potter. The fine, stylised performances from an idiosyncratic international cast are admirably headed by Swinton's magnificent Orlando, who acts as the film's complicitous eyes and ears; and there's little to fault in Alexei Rodionov's cinematography, which renders the scenes with rare sensitivity. It's a critical work - in the sense that it comments wryly on such things as representations of English history, sexuality/androgyny and class - but made in the spirit of a love poem to both Woolf and the England that made us.
Wally Hammond

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 113: Thu Apr 23

Lianna (Sayles, 1983): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.15pm

This is a 35mm screening from Lost Reels. The presentation will include an online Q&A discussion with filmmaking legend John Sayles and his producer and partner Maggie Renzi.

Time Out review:
John Sayles is spokesman for his generation, the babies of the post-war boom who made love and fought their wars within themselves. Their growing pains came late: Lianna (Linda Griffiths) is thirty, married and the mother of two, when she falls in love with Ruth (Jane Hallaren), her night-school teacher. Sayles sympathetically maps the hurricane-like effects of this on Lianna's life - thrown out by her philandering husband, cold-shouldered by her straight friends, stormy scenes with her lover - his sparkling dialogue illuminating every aspect of Lianna's sexuality with a zeal that is almost proselytising. The love scenes are infused with a tender erotic glow that deepens the shadows around the titillation of Personal Best, and the comedy in Lianna's post-coital glee as she cruises other women and announces herself as gay to people in launderettes is irresistible. A gem, rough-hewn by Sayles and polished to perfection in peerless performances.

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 112: Wed Apr 22

Bad Timing (Roeg, 1980): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6pm

This film is part of the intriguing 'Cinema and Sound' programme curated by Mark Jenkin. Here are the full details of the season and here is the directo's introduction to the movie:
'When it comes to the creative use of sound, I could have picked any Nicholas Roeg movie as a key influence. Bad Timing is the film that most clearly, simply and effectively illustrates the potential of sound to confound the expectations of the viewer, and to open up the creative potential of the form in the starkest way.'

As with a number of movies by director Nicolas Roeg the producers did not know or, possibly, like what they had on their hands here and this was poorly distributed at the time.

It isn't surprising the film suffered indifferent attention from the studio and puzzlement from the critics on release as this is a disturbing and complicated work. Labyrinthine plotting; cross-cutting; masculinity crisis and dazzling camerawork - all the touches associated with Roeg are here. If you like the Roeg oeuvre you are in for a treat. The ending stayed with me for quite some time. Here's an essay by the excellent Richard Combs on the movie.

Time Out review:
One of Nicolas Roeg's most complex and elusive movies, building a thousand-piece jigsaw from its apparently simple story of a consuming passion between two Americans in Vienna. Seen in flashback through the prism of the girl's attempted suicide, their affair expands into a labyrinthine enquiry on memory and guilt as Theresa Russell's cold psychoanalyst lover (Art Garfunkel) himself falls victim to the cooler and crueller investigations of the detective assigned to her case (Harvey Keitel in visionary form as the policeman turned father-confessor). But where Don't Look Now sustained its Gothic intensity with human intimacy, this film seems a case-example of how more could have been achieved with less editing, less ingenuity, less even of the bravura intelligence with which Roeg at one point matches Freud with Stalin as guilt-ridden spymasters.
Don Macpherson

Here (and above) is the trailer.

 

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 111: Tue Apr 21

TwentyFourSeven (Meadows, 1997): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6.15pm

This screening will feature a Q&A with director Shane Meadows (work permitting). It is part of the season devoted to boxing films at BFI Southbank. You can find all the details here.

Time Out review:
Those who have seen Shane Meadows' camcorder gem Smalltime will already know the young writer/director is one of Britain's most promising talents. This, his first full length feature, lives up to expectations splendidly. Though it's never quite as funny as the earlier movie, and the bigger (£1.5m) budget has resulted in more conventional characterisation and plotting, the extra polish comes with no significant drop in energy, flair or invention. Darcy (Bob Hoskins) decides to inject a sense of community and purpose into the disaffected youth of a Nottingham suburb by reopening a club. While determination and a canny ability to win over most people he meets results in camaraderie and a modicum of sporting success, resentment, cynicism and even violence are so deeply ingrained in certain locals that the club is never entirely without enemies. What lifts the film beyond the constraints of this potentially corny story is Meadows' engagingly blend of authentic naturalism, robust rapscallion humour, jaunty editing and off-the-cuff lyricism.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 110: Mon Apr 20

The Razor's Edge (Saab, 1985): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.10pm

A unique example of activist experimental cinema on the survival of people during a time of occupation, thanks to the power of art, this film is preceded by a pre-recorded intro by Mathilde Rouxel, co-founder of the Association Jocelyne Saab.

New York Film Festival review:
“I’ve invented places, as if by making a work of fiction about them, I could preserve them,” the Lebanese war correspondent–turned–filmmaker Jocelyne Saab said of her interest in fiction. Her 1985 drama The Razor’s Edge takes place during the Lebanese Civil War and centers on the bond formed between Karim (Jacques Weber), a fortysomething painter, and Samar (Hala Bassam), a teenager who grew up during the war (Juliet Berto has a small but striking role as Karim’s friend). Underneath the character-driven narrative is another story, that of a place. Saab started her career as a journalist working for French television and her reporter’s eye deftly captures the destruction of war-torn Beirut and the disparate but vibrant people wandering through its rubble and ruins. Screenwriter Gérard Brach (The Tenant, Identification of a Woman) worked on the final version of the script, and the result, juxtaposing the creation of art with violence, is an arresting meditation on humanity’s struggle in the face of unthinkable horror.

Here (and above) is the trailer.