MOSTLY BRITISH - San Francisco February 6-13, 2025

[Chris Knipp]

MOSTLY BRITISH, SAN FRANCISCO February 6-13, 2025

List of films:

AMERICAN STAR (Gonzalo López-Gallego. 2024)
An aging hit man on his last job uses a forced delay to enjoy the beautiful setting and meet people.

COTTONTAIL (Patrick Dickinson 2023)
In this moving, poignant film, a widower and his estranged son travel from Japan to England to fulfill his late wife’s wish of scattering her ashes at a place she loved as a child.

FALLING INTO PLACE (Aylin Tezel 2024)
In her filmmaking debut German actress Aylin Tezel directs herself as Kira, a German artist living in London who meets Ian (“Bridgerton’s” Chris Fulton), a struggling musician, at a local pub on a winter vacation on the Isle of Skye, but their love connection is delayed to the end of the film.

[Chris Knipp]

IAN MCSHANE IN AMERICAN STAR

GONZALO LÓPEZ-GALLEGO: AMERICAN STAR (2024)

A low-jkeyed, scenic hit man story

Matt Zoller Seitz indicatres in his RogerEbert.com review that he likes American Star. He finds Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands where the action tkes place to be not just an easy scenic background but "gobsmackingly gorgeous," and he sees a magical rapport between director López-Gallego and his 81-year-old but wonderfully preserved star Ian McShane, who plays an aging hit man called Wilson settling in to do a last job. He thinks McShane, whose character talks little, has a gift for making thoughts and feelings clearly readable in his face. This enthusiastic view provides an attractive angle on the film but perhaps a minority one.

I found McShane's face rather impassive, though that's not necessarily a bad thing. He and his role here is compared by Seitz to Alain Delon or Clint Eastwood, both of whose acting skills have been questioned by those insensitive to the value of a stoney face in film noir. These men are mysterious mimes. That's what they do. It's fine. There just has to be something good happening around them.

American Star is the name of a wrecked vessel that a woman called Gloria (Nora Arnezeder), a bartender who befriends him, takes Wilson to see in an odd cove reachable only by foot. Since Gloria, whose enthusiasm for Wilson seems unconvincing, is apparently also the woman Wilson saw when scoping out the modernist pad of his assigned mark who hasn't shown up yet, you might be forgiven for suspecting she is going to try to bump Wilson off in this remote place.

It's not quite sure how we should take Gloria. Her mother (played by Fanny Ardant, no less) tells Wilson her daughter likes to rescue scrap metal. So obviously Wilson, a traumatized veteran of the Falklands, embodied by the suave McShane, is Gloria's latest American Star.

Like Delon in parts of Jean-PIerre Melville's LLe Samouraï, Wilson moves around the island as if in a pantomime. He comes to town, rents a car, checks into a luxuy hotel, drinks and enjoys bar entertainment. (His wood-lined hotel room, though nice, as no match for Delon's Le Samouraï pad.) He examines photos of his intended victim and visits his empty villa. His dark suit is impeccable even though not the sporting gear usual on the island.

Wilson meets two others and keeps running into them. One, more just for entertaimint and to show us our protagonist's human side, is Max (Oscar Coleman), a boy with big hair and a British accent who is Wilson's neighbor in the hotel, ignored by his squabbling parents at first. Wilson playfully takes Max under his wing, discussing why he doesn't swim and encouraging him to consider a military career as a paratrooper such as he once had. The other guy is a young man called Ryan (Adam Nagaitis of Yann Demanges' 71), the tall, bold son of a military comrade of Wilson's, who is hateable and yet sort of likeable. Apparently he too is a hitman.

Maybe this screenplay is interesting and mysterious or maybe it's just sketchy. We don't need to know more about Max. He's just a kid. But just as we don't know what Olivia's intentions are, or whether her character is faking enthusiasm or the actress is just overdoing it, we don't know if Ryan is friend or foe and don't know if he's there to supervise Wilson's kill or kill him when he has carried it out.

Ben Kenigsberg's review for The New York Times says it's more interesting than a mere summary implies, and "the director, Gonzalo López-Gallego, can sustain a solid slow burn."Still," he warns, "neither McShane nor the scenery can take the rust off the basic scenario." What he means is the theme of a waiting, one-last-time hit man.

That is probably the prevailing view, since the critcs haven't been enthusiastic about Americnan STar. It's worth listening to how Seitz defends his more positive take. He says McShane is "of the sixties (and the seventies)," meaning he sticks mostly to projects with characters "who aren’t coded exclusively as good or bad, and in which the storytelling leaves space for viewers to contemplate or argue about what was meant or intended." That certailnly fits here. But I just didn't feel there was enough to American Star. The violence comes all at the end and almost cdould be part of another movie. I'd have liked the inertia to have an ugly underbelly, as I described in Michel Franco's slightly weird Sundown, starring Tim Roth. Josh Kupecki of the Austin Chronicle called Sundown "O. Henry by way of Michael Haneke." It's got economy, surprise, and a memorably nasty edge. American Star could have used those qualities.

American Star, 107 mins., In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. Viewed for its inclusion in the SF Indiefest Feb/ 2025. Metacritic rating: 66%.

[Chris Knipp]

RYO NISHIKIDO, LILY FRANKY IN COTTONTAIL

PATRICK DICKINSON: COTTONTAIL (2023)

Lily Franky plays a Japanese widower whose sentimental journey to England’s Lake Windermere brings about a reconciliation with his son

English director Patrick Dickinson presents a Japaese tale in an English setting that begins in Japan. The main character is Kenzaburo, played by the Koreeda regular Lily Franky. As a young man he is played briefly by hearthrob Kosei Kudo. We see the bashful, over-modest young man meet Akiko (Yuri Tsunematsu, later Tae Kimura) at a bar because she wants him to teach her English to appreciate the Beatrix Potter Peter Rabbit books she associates with a halcyon time in England with her mother and father as a child.

Most of the focus is on the present time when Akiko has died and her wish was for her ashes to be scattered at Lake Windermere. Kenzaburo, a frustrated writer who seemed to live in his own world much of the time, has become estranged from his son Toshi (TV actor Ryô Nishikido), who has a wife, Satsuki (Rin Takanashi) and daughter, little Emi (Hanii Hashimoto). Flashbacks show when Akiko and Kenzaburo confront Akiko's diagnosis of Alzheimer's. We learn that she recorded her wish about Lake Windermere before the disease had progressed too far for her to do that. We see that Toshi often tried to help, but Kenzaburo often rejected his help.

In the wake of Akiko's demise Kenzaburo is drinking and smoking and fumbling about. A memorable early scene shows him stealing special fish for a birthday celebration. It's a very good scene, but we really don't know what's going on at this point. On the other hand, though we are always with Kenzaburo, we don't realuy get to know him. The great Lily Franky is excellent in Kenzaburo's various sad scenes of strugling and trying to carry on - even, or especially, when he gets lost by himself in the English countryside in the first phase of the scattering-the-ashes project. Eventually a flashback takes us to the terrible time of Akiko's last days.

Kenzaburo's sad little odyssey gettiing quite lost in the Englishcountryside occurs because he insists on going from London to Lake Windermere by himself and Toshi unwisely agrees. He takes a train in the wrong direction, then nicks a bicycle and rides off into the country, winding up at a farm house (there is a horse) over a hundred miles from Windermere. The family he meets there happens to be famous Irish actor Ciarán Hinds and his actual daughter, Aoife Hinds, who is herself part ASian: her mother is Vietnamese-born French actress Hélène Patarot. They're called John and Mary.

John and Mary, who by coincidence have not long ago lost their own mother and wife, take Kenzaburo in and give him a bath, food, clean clothes, and lots of tea. They actually take him to Lake Winermere. This bridge passage revives Kenzaburo and pushes him to reach out to his son. John convinces "Ken" he should call Toshi, who conveniently appears with Satsuki and Emi nd a rental car, to share in the task of trying to match up Akiko's old snapshot with a section of the lake where she wants her ashes to be deposited. In the end, they wind up at a smaller tarn wurrounded by trees and seem to find the exact spot.

Allan Hunter, who reviewed this film for Screen Daily comments that the film "while understanted and full of grace, also lacks bite." The portrait of the couple winds up lacking detailabout their actual lives between the first date and the onset of dementia. It's not very clear who Kenzaburo was, what his life was like. Nonetheless, Lily Franky is great. and is wonderful in certain scenes. What delicacy and sweetness he has! In retrospect Kosei Kudo was a good choice to play his younger self. With a focus on bereavement due to Alzhaimer's and the involvement of actors as fine as Lily Franky and Cierán Hinds the film can't fail to be touching. But in the end this winds up seeming indeed like an expanded short film, which it is. Despite its wealth of incident and longer (but still compact) run time, and the very emotional and beautiful final sequences, Dickinson's screenplay doesn't delve deeply into his characters.

The film apparently grows out of Mr. Rabbit , a 24-minute film Dickinson made in 2013 about, also concerning a wife called Akiko with Alhaimer's being cared for by her husband, but they are Japanese Americans living in Los Angeles.

Cottontail, 94 mins., debuted at Vancouver Oct. 2023, showing later in that month at Rome, where it won the Best First Film award. Also shown at Balgrade, Istanbul and Sydney. Screened for this review as part of Mostly British, Feb. 2025 in San Francisco.

[Chris Knipp]

AYLIN TEZEL: FALLING INTO PLACE (2023)

Unfinished business delays a love affair

This is a romantic drama - not a rom com; there's not much to laugh about - that takes place partly on the Isle of Skye and partly in London. Skye is wild, barren and dramatic, and London is, well, London. This is the actress Aylin Tezel's ambitious debut as a writer and director in which she also stars as the talented, moody Kira, a 30-something aspiring German set designer living in London who also paints. This is about her romance with a struggling musician called Ian ("Bridgerton’s" Chris Fulton), whom she meets on Skye at a local pub. Or rather they eye each other there, and then have an energetic, playful, borderline nutty affair starting outside the pub aftrer closing time. And this may launch a love for life, but it's delayed for most of the film while they tend to personal unfinshed business.

The way Kira and Ian act that morning isn't the way I've ever seen people act; or maybe I've just forgotten how pent up, drunk 30-somethings act when they're attractged to each other. It's acting; it's vivacious. They race each other. They try to out-jump each other; things like that. It's all at Ian's instigation. But we get the point: they're wildly attracted to each other, and not just sexually. Eventually they do have sex., but this isn't an erotic study.

Kira is on a winter vacation. She has chosen to escape from damp, chilly London by going to cold, windy, snowy Skye. She has just broken up with her Irish boyfriend, called Aidan (Rory Fleck Byrne). Ian grew up on Skye and has problems with his family. His father (Michael Carter) is aging and unwell, but when Ian comes to see him he literally stays only five minutes. Ian also is estranged from his grown sister Annie (Anna Russell-Martin), who has had serious emotional problems.

The first thrity-five minutes are devoted to Kira and Ian. Most of the rest is devoted to their separately sorting things out. In the last five minutes or so, in London, they get back together and admit that they have been thinking of each other all along. Tezel's main interest is in the couple's problems and their glamorous confusion. Yes glamorous. They're good looking, they're artists; thre's a lot of drama. During their "meet cute," over a cup of coffee, Ian reveals he has a girlfriend.

Ian's "finding himself" includes some harsh talks with Emily (Alexandra Dowling), this girlfriend, who insists he can't function until he deals with Annie. He screws up his courage and visits Annie, repeatedly, at at a sanatorium. He also becomes attentive to his father, even bathing him (always a good scene in a film). Kira, back in London, is even busier. She lands what is her first official job as a set designer, though her work was already known. Now she tries to get Aidan back, clearly a bad, even ridiculous, idea. Tezel doesn't mind showing Kira as both foolish and neurotic. She also makes Ian both unstable and childish. He was playful and fun with KIra, but with Emily he's nasty.

It might seem that Kira and Ian make a good match only becaue theu're both a mess. They can get by with bad, unsettled, immature behavior on the strength of having enough left of their youth to be able to spend all night drinking and smoking and still look fresh. While in real life we might want to give both of them a wide birth, they provide lively scenes.

This reminded me of Joachim Trier's 2021 The Worst Person in the World (NYFF 2021), about a young woman who indulges in lots of bad behavior and keeps changing her mind about what she wants to do. This is the third in Trier's trilogy about young people. But his protagonist is brilliant and so is the trilogy and it's made clear in the film that she's behaving badly.

Tezel gives Ian and Kira a lot of slack and doesn't seem to want to judge them. Ian's foolishness that charms Kira at first just seems unstable to me. He is nonetheless presented as bravely seeking self development. Kira's agonizing over Aidan makes her behave totally very neurotically. She gets offered the job of designing theater sets and even though she keeps not showing up for meetings, the director insists she's the one he wants. Then, in her spare time somehow (what does she live on?) Kira puts together a collection of paintings a posh gallery chooses to show.

There's a lot of music, including dancing to Elvis' "Falling in Love with You" at a gallery opening featuring paintings by Kira, including a big portrait (from memory no doubt) of Ian. Allan Hunter in his Hamburg Screen Daily review says the songs "almost tip the film into being a musical drama along the lines of John Carney’s Once (2007). I on the other hand was reminded of films of neurotic complicatioh like The Eight Mountains and Broken Circle Breakdown, which unlike Trier, I also didn't like. But people do like them, and while she resorts to some implausible story devices (like Ian's just turning up at the gallery and recognizing the huge portrait of him) and I don't like being asked to regard wild, drunken behavior as all part of a meet cute, and (as Hunter says) so much of the focus is on the two principals that the other characters remain sketchy, Tezel repeatedly makes her character appealing, and has created a turbulent double world of Skye and London that lingers in the mind.

Falling Into Place, 113 mins., debuted Oct. 3, 2023 at Hamburg (reviewed there by Allan Hunter for Screen Daily; showed also in the UK Jun. 2024 at Raindance (London).

[Chris Knipp]

CIARÁN CASSIDY: HOUSEWIFE OF THE YEAR (2024)

Celebration of Irish women, or exposure of rampant sexism?

A documentary about Ireland's "Housewife of the Year" TV compeition, which was a big deal until well into the Nineties. It reflects Ireland's retro attitdes toward the role of women and the dominance of the Cathoic Chiurch, which forbade contraception - that is, any kind that is reliable. I hesitate to recommend it to my Irish woman friend because she might find it too depressing, and I can't recommend it to others because the look of the film is drab and repetitive and the structure is meandering. But it provides valuable lore for anyone studying Irish social history or the history of women's rights and the changing concept of the family in the twentieth-century West.

The director see things a bit differently. Here is his statement about the film:

"Our film is a love letter to a generation of Irish women. Over the last number of years, we have had the great privilege of meeting and getting to know an incredible group of women and we are honoured to bring their stories to cinemas across Ireland and the UK with Wildcard who share our passion and enthusiasm for this project." Director, Ciaran Cassidy

The reference to Magdalene Laundries in Ireland - which were de facto workhouse prisons in which unwed mothers were confined as punishment, is briefly mentioned by one woman who spent a time confined in one of them. This notice passes by a bit too quickly, presented for a British or even strictly Irish audience who know better what it is. Americans don't know much about them, and there should be a full documentary about them and this topic, touched on for a while in this film, of the treatment of teen pregnancies and unwed mothers, one of the starkest signs of the subjugation of women and the dominance of the Church in Ireland. From a Wikipedia article: "In 1993, unmarked graves of 155 women were uncovered in the convent grounds of one of the laundries." Thereis room here for another version of the human exploitation, abuse, and murder touched on in the potentially Oscar-nominated current film, Nickel Boys and the recent documentary Sugarcane.

[Chris Knipp]

LUCY LAWLESS: NEVER LOOK AWAY (2024)

From a review by New York Movie Guru (Avi Offer):

Never Look Away is an engrossing, inspirational and empowering warts-and-all documentary biopic on Margaret Moth, the first female news camera operator in New Zealand who went on to work for CNN. Director Lucy Lawless combines archival footage, photographs and interviews with CNN's Christiane Amanpour and Moth's ex-boyfriends. She's lucky to have such an interesting subject because Moth comes across as brave, fearless, wild and a bit mysterious which makes her all the more intriguing. Despite suffering a severe facial disfigurement from gunfire while filming the war in Sarajevo, Moth went back to work with her video camera, but it wasn't the same because it was hard for her to communicate. Never Look Away, much like its title, remains unflinching in the details of Moth's injuries and how they affected her psychologically and emotionally. Fortunately, the film isn't merely a series of dry talking heads. The interviews with her ex-boyfriends are very revealing and insightful, and the images that Moth captures of the war are quite harrowing and unflinching. She, as well as all war photojournalists, are an essential part of the quest for truth, justice and, above all, democracy in a world with many dysfunctional democracies. In many ways, she's the equivalent of a soldier. At a running time of 1 hour and 25 minutes, Never Look Away opens at IFC Center via Greenwich Entertainment. It would be an interesting double feature with Lee [in which Kate Winslet stars as American photographer Lee Miller].

Number of times I checked my watch: 1

[Chris Knipp]

IMOGEN POOTS INROSE'S WAR


Irish Spotlight

JOE LAWLOR, CHRISTINE MOLLOY: ROSE'S WAR (2023)

Imogen Poots stars as an English heiress who turned IRA terrorist and masterrminded a major art theft

Rose Dugdale, here played by Imogen Poots, was a real person who brought three cohorts to her family manse disguised as a redheaded French woman and led a huge art heist. Her father was a millionaire who was an underwriter for Lloyds of london, who owned extensive properties. While this film focuses on a major art theft by the IRA, it works skillfully on differemt times and levels, recreatig the mood of Seventies political radicalism, though it may work better in the retrospect or the rewatch than first viewing because its complexity keeps things, and its protagonist, at one remove from us.

A real art theft is involved. In 1974, Rose Dugdale and three IRA accomplices stole 19 paintings from Russborough House in County Wicklow. The paintings included a priceless Vermeer, Woman Writing a Letter, With her Maid , Rubens' Venus Supplicating Jupiter, and works by Velázquez, ainsborough and Goya. The iclusion of a Vermeer and Rose's willingness to destroy all the works if authorities decline to pay the demanded £500,000 ransom is deeply shocking.

Peter Bradshaw's positive Guardian review headlines this as a "vivid, intense biopic" with the subtitle describing it as "a cool, low-keyed drama." That's because it is both, as the IRA life was. Imogen Poots, who specializes in playing posh girls, has what is called a "coiled intensity." She's meant to be about to explode all the time, and one of her accomplices all the more so, but her commitment equips her with tight reins. As a non-Irish aly, she has to be twice as relable. She is a neophyte, untried in the ways, but she has about her the self-importance of other Seventies violent radicals we have seen in films. For her formation we see Rose at a 1972 London squat whose occupants oppose the British government. She is opposed to capitalism; to the class system she knows benefits her.

The film flips back and forth between Rose and her Irish team in their biggest heist operation (the helicopter hijacking and attempted bombing only reported), and moments of tranquility when they're remembering it and planning more. These in turn are iintercut with moments from Rose's girlhood as Rose in her complicated present fragmentarily remembers them.

Rose's associates are the elder Dominic (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor), Martin (Lewis Brophy), who's a hotheaded kid, and Eddie (Jack Meade), by whom she gets pregnant. We see her interacting in a lethal manner with a poor man called Donal (Dermot Crowley) who has the misfortune of guessing that she's suspicious. Incidentally we learn that shewas at Oxford and did a master's degree on Wiittgenstein. For the art theft Rose feigns a French accent, which trips her up later.

A better film for depicting the everyday yoke of IRA cruelty and brutality during the Troubles (set in the early Eighties) is Luke Hanlon's The Troubles: a Dublin Story, which I reviewed a year ago. But this newer film with its focus on a posh girl's would-be exploits resembles films depicting the most violent radical tendencies of Europe in the Seventies, like The Baader Meinhoff Complex (2008) and Marco Bellocchio's Good Morning, Night, (2003) showing the Aldo Moro kidnapping from the insider viewpoint of the kidnappers trapped in their suicidal commitments. Imogen Poots creates a haunting aura as Rose. There is an interview with the real Rose in mature years with Irish televison that shows her to be less attractive but apparently more straightforward, more confident.

The Irish filmmaking duo Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor have been directing films together for nearly two decades, with their creative partnership The Desperate Optimists (also the name of their production company) beginning in theatre in 1992. During this time they have co-directed six features, the most recent of which being Rose's War (original title Baltimore).

Rose's War/Baltimore (original title), 98 mins., debuted Sept. 1, 2023 at Telluride, also showing at London BFI Oct., US internet and UK and Ireland theatrical releases Mar. 2024. Screened for this review for SF Motly British 2025. Showtime:
Sunday February 9, 2025 - 4:30 pm