Streaming on Prime Video - Rod Bishop recommends GAZER (Ryan J. Sloan, USA, 2024)

Ariella Mastroianni, Ryan J Sloan

Ryan J. Sloan was working as an electrician when he shot Gazer, his first feature during breaks from his day job. 

It took two-and-a-half-years and was entirely financed by Ryan and the lead actress Ariella Mastroianni. They also share the screenplay credit. 

Described by Indiwire as “A truly independent film in every sense of the word”, this gritty 16mm thriller uses a neurologically challenged Frankie (Mastroianni) as the central character in a crime conspiracy set in the industrial decay of New Jersey.

Frankie suffers from deteriorating memory and time distortions caused by dyschronometria - hours may suddenly go by; recollections from the past are constantly changing or forgotten; perceptions of everyday life are always to be doubted; and nothing in the world is stable.

Frankie’s coping mechanism is an old Sony Walkman playing 30-minute tapes to constantly remind her to focus on, and grapple with, her fracturing reality.

Her husband has apparently suicided and her mother-in-law has custody of her young daughter. Frankie loses her job pumping petrol as she’s constantly listening to her tapes: “What do you see? Focus!”. And a new acquaintance Paige (Renee Gagner), who is escaping a domestically violent brother, has offered to pay Frankie $3000 to collect car keys from her old flat. 

But like Frankie’s constantly breaking reality, all with Paige is not as it seems. Frankie finds herself falling into a dangerous, paranoid trap; following and being followed; and realizing those around her are not who they seem.

The audience becomes as disturbed as Frankie. We are not just observers of her plight, but participants in her disarrayed world. Like her, as events unfold in this murder thriller, we are searching to understand her broken reality.

Dyschronometria is related to dementia and it’s the greatest strength of Gazer, alternating us through inabilities to remember; days that suddenly turn into night; lurching memories that can’t be trusted; and the distortions and uncertainties of understanding life.

Director Ryan J. Sloan has made an exemplary first feature here, greatly aided by Ariella Mastroianni’s mesmerizing and wholly convincing performance as Frankie. She literally holds the film together. And this film is always - and quite deliberately - threatening to fall apart.

Gazer often looks and feels like a 1980s psychological thriller, reminiscent of Christopher Nolan’s Following, with touches of Cronenberg’s body horror, and Lynch and De Palma paranoias.

Premiering last year in Director’s Fortnight at Cannes, it seems odd it was bypassed for selection in Un Certain Regard, the Cannes showcase for best first and second features. 

Streaming on Amazon Prime - Peter Hourigan recommends GREEK SALAD and runs through the careers of its showrunner Cédric Klapisch and lead actor Romain Duris

A new series on Amazon Prime has brought me as much pleasure as much else I’ve watched recently – it even had me doing something I’ve never done before. I watched it a second time within a few weeks.

Greek Salad was created by Cédric Klapisch who also directed several of the eight episodes. Klapisch’s wife, Lola Doillon, also directed several episodes and was a major writer for the series.  Klapisch is a director with a solid career, many successful films, with prizes and nominations from many major Film Festivals. Yet, he doesn’t seem to have quite become a “name director”, the kind who attracts scholarly monographs from academic writers. 

But Klapisch has had name recognition for me since I saw his second feature Le Péril Jeune (1993) on SBS quite some years ago. That title makes you think “Yellow peril” (peril jaune) but is in fact the Young Peril (“péril jeune). Just as one of its English titles Good Old Daze  has that double meaning when you hear it said. Péril Jeune featured a 20 year old Romain Duris, who Klapisch discovered in a queue somewhere. Duris has now appeared in many subsequent Klapisch films, often as an erstwhile stand-in for the director himself. 

Romain Duris (3rd from left), Le Péril Jeune

In Le Péril Jeune, Duris plays Tomas. At school, he is rebellious and hedonistic. But several years have passed since his group left school. Now,  it’s his death from a drug overdose that has brought together four of his friends from school to support Sophie who is expecting Tomas’ baby. Their memories of those school days become the film we’re watching. The standout impression is the strength of the friendship that was forged with Tomas and his schoolmates – and Sophie. The group has the warmth and intensity of a family; and it is this ability to create family groups in his films that is a strength of Klapisch’s work. And Tomas was the catalyst. 

In 2002, Klapisch made L’Auberge Espagnole (The Spanish Apartment). This is built around  Xavier, Duris again, a French economics graduate who has gone to Barcelona to study on an Erasmus scholarship. He finishes up flatsharing with a group of other Erasmus scholars, from  a range of West European countries. 

Romain Duris, Cecile de France, The Spanish Apartment

The film has a strong sense of warmth in the relationships between all young people in this  group welds into a family over the course of the year. But it is not a sentimentally portrayed group. There is conflict, friendship, petty disagreements, and mutual support. It feels like this family could last for years, but the reality is that at the end of the year it must dissolve, and they’ll all go on to their own paths in different countries. Although it does look like Xavier and Martine will be getting back together, a relationship disrupted when Tomas took up the Barcelona scholarship.

A few years later, we meet up with Tomas again in Russian Dolls (2005) and some of the friends from the apartment, when they gather in Russia for the wedding of William,  whose sister Wendy was one of those flatsharing students.  Now, the story gets complicated with sisters, flatmates, friends, but  in Klapisch’s world there’s that creation of the kind of circles we know in real life, where people we meet in one circle, may become part of our life in other circles, and circles overlap with circles, like a crazy geometric painting. 

Romain Duris, Audrey Tautou
Russian Dolls

And this continues with Chinese Puzzle, (2013). Duris is again at the centre as Xavier. And there are more characters carried over from the earlier two films. All we need to worry about at the moment is that Xavier’s relationship history has been quite colourful. His original relationship with Martine sometimes becomes rekindled. Now there are two children, Tom and Mia. Tomas is the father, Wendy (yes, from the Spanish Apartment days) is their mother, though Tom and Wendy are no longer a couple, just sometimes fractious friends.  We don’t see much of Tom and Mia. They’re only kids after all, and the adults around them are probably more focused on their own issues. 

A lot of this film takes place in New York, and we’re in a rich, multi-cultural environment around Chinatown.  Don’t worry if my attempts to trace the family relationships over those three films is not very coherent. But we’re now going to meet Tom and Mia as young adults. Now they are characters in their own right and  I’ve shared enough with you as background.

Wikipedia gives us a neat recap to set the situation: 

Siblings Tom and Mia, the children of Xavier and Wendy from L'Auberge Espagnole, move to Athens after inheriting an apartment from their recently-deceased grandfather. Tom intends to sell the apartment and use the proceeds to fund a startup company, but the anti-capitalist Mia has other plans in mind.

Greek Salad  starts with a funeral, and if you’ve seen the earlier films, you will recognise some of the family/families. But essentially, we’re meeting Tom, an independent, international young man with family in France and England, living in New York and looking to start his own Startup company with his trophy girlfriend. Mia has not come to her grandfather’s funeral, staying behind in Athens where everyone believes she’s studying on an Erasmus scholarship like her father had done in Barcelona. 

But when we meet her, she’s quit her studies, and is working with an NGO that’s trying to assist refugees and asylum seekers. And working out of semi-derelict buildings and sometimes squats. The siblings have been left a building in their grandfather’s will and they’re reunited when Tom goes to Athens for inheritance formalities.

Now, the series can unfold its stories. And I’m not going to go through it. That’s for you to enjoy. But I must comment on some of the things I loved about this. One is Klapisch’s ability to create credible worlds for his characters. One aspect of this is the geography., It’s certainly not limited to his native France. (His filmography includes Paris (2008) and Back to Burgundy (2017). And you’ll have noticed the pattern in the earlier films centred around Duris’ character Xavier – Spanish Apartment, ­Russian Dolls, Chinese Puzzle (though here the main setting is New York.)

Tom (Aliocha Schneider) and Mia (Megan Northam) and refugees and
students with whom they share an abandoned apartment building in Athens

Now we’re in Athens. But in Klapisch’s hands, it is not just an exotic location. Of course, it’s Athens and it’s a city of ancient monuments. They’re there, and acknowledged, but as background. Hey, here’s the view of the Acropolis from our balcony – yes, there it is, between those two building in front of us. and it really is a complete city. 

Much of the action takes place down at ground level, areas where the tourists don’t usually go. Here are the streets with all the graffiti, and buildings left derelict apart from the squatters. The bars where students find work. The storylines explore not only interesting family relationships – and they’re inevitably interesting, with that family that’s had Tomas as its father figure over about twenty years. The position of refugees is a crucial element, and we get a glimpse of the enormous variety of people who become refugees.  These are not deadening statistics of people drowning, but real people worried about where their mother is, or concern over the genital mutilation a young woman may face if she’s forced back home.

Tom and Maria with their parents Xavier (Romain Duris)
 and Wendy (Kelly Reilly)

I enjoyed spending time with these wonderful young people. I was interested and involved in the social issues it featured. 

Recommended. 

 

 

 

 

 

 .

 

Streaming on Prime Video - Rod Bishop highly recommends WILDCAT (Trevor Frost, Melissa Lesh, USA, 2022)

Khan the ocelot

There are three stories in this documentary, two you watch on screen and one you don’t.

The first story is between humans and wild animals at a re-wilding station known as Hoja Nueva (New Leaf) deep in the Peruvian Amazon. As such stories go, they don’t come more intense than Wildcat. 

Among the animals being saved for re-integration into the rainforest are two ocelots known as Khan and Keanu. The footage of their relationship with Harry Turner and Samantha Zwicker, as they rear the large cats for release in the wild, certainly challenges the cephalopod from the Oscar-winning My Octopus Teacher (2020). 

Harry Turner and ocelot

The second story is Harry’s disintegrating mental health. A young British veteran from the Afghan war, traumatized by watching children slaughtered, Harry wears his PTSD, his paralysing depression, and his wild suicidal thoughts on his sleeve just below a forearm showing the countless knife scars where he has self-harmed. His relationships to both the ocelots and to the Seattle PhD student Samantha are his only hope for mental-health redemption.

The third story, the one we don’t see, is the astonishing intimacy, trust and empathy in the relationship between Harry and Samantha and the directors Trevor Frost and Melissa Lesh, filmmakers whose previous credits include only a couple of shorts. Their back-story has to sought online: four years of dedication, including six months living rough in the rainforest. Frost, too, suffers from depression and with Lesh back in the USA for emergency brain surgery, he is left alone to film Harry’s final cathartic breakdown. 

Samantha Zwicker

Amazon Studios bought Wildcat for $20 million, prompting Variety to describe it “a staggering sum for a doc of its kind”. But it’s given Harry and Sam and the filmmakers financial security.

 Wildcat was an “Oscar-hopeful” but didn’t make the cut, probably due to the inclusion of the remarkable Indian wildlife documentary about kites in Delhi, All That Breathes. 

Pity. Wildcat is profound, adventurous and ultimately very moving filmmaking. It deserves better. 

 

Streaming on Amazon Prime - 🎥Janice Tong recommends THE ONLY LIVING BOY IN NEW YORK (Marc Webb, USA, 2017)

Kiersey Clemons as Mimi, Callum Turner as Thomas
Among the books and records

This is a film I absolutely loved when I chanced upon it the other night. Somehow we have been unsuspectingly subscribing to Amazon Prime since May…so, we thought we had better put it to good use before we terminated the service. With The Only Living Boy in New York, director Marc Webb returns us to the always fascinating streets of New York City where we are treated with quick fire repartee that I’ve always loved and associated with its people. 

Pierce Brosnan as the father

There’s a tonal signature that ties this film together with films of a certain ilk: it’s populated with characters from a Woody Allen film of the late 80s, with the pace of a Ferrara 0film from the 90s, the enticement of a Sex and the City episode and a could-be companion to the more recent My Salinger Year (2020) - another film that focuses on one of my favourite pastimes, writing.

 

Callum Turner is perfectly cast as young Thomas Webb, a recent college drop-out who has always wanted to be a writer. He’s working in a bookshop, reading and hanging out most of the time, much to the chagrin of his literary agent cum publishing father, the very urbane but not quite three-piece-suit-wearing Ethan (Pierce Brosnan reprising his ‘Ghostwriter’ demeanour). Thomas is secretly (or rather, not-so-secretly) in love with his best friend, Mimi, played by the delightful Kiersey Clemons, who works in a record store and is about to travel abroad (to Croatia) to further her studies, oh, and let’s not forget to mention that they had a one night stand not too long ago and, of course, Ethan now wants to take things a little further. 

Jeff Bridges as W.F.

After she gives him the “I’d rather be friends” speech, Thomas returns to his bedsit and meets W. F., his new neighbour who was literally able to read young Thomas like a book; this scene is terrifically played by Jeff Bridges (who looks a little like David Lynch throughout the film), the good-willed older neighbour who asks a bunch of overly familiar questions. With this rather odd introduction, some uncomfortable prying questions, it ends with W.F. shouting to Thomas’ departing figure to come over “and let your neighbour help you out”...”I’m in apartment 2B!” With the uncanny thought of “to be, or not to be” still ringing in our ears, an unlikely friendship begins. 

 

Further developments ensue, with Thomas encountering his father and his beautiful mistress Johanna (Kate Beckinsale) at a bar one night, and a little fascinated by this interlude, (think Freud’s primal scene) he decides to tail her. At first Mimi tagged along, but before long, Johanna became his obsession.

 

Callum Turner, Jeff Bridges

 

Whilst this is a narrative that is a little clichéd and may have done the circuit a few times; here Webb’s story unfolds charmingly, with the narrative weaving in and out of songs from the 70s. We are treated to a back-story through the lens of Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel to be precise and with some classic Lou Reed, Brubeck, Bill Evans, Charlie Mingus and Hancock thrown in for good measure. I even loved hearing the classic Whiter Shade of Pale, it made me think of that episode of Northern Exposure from many years ago (FTWK). In addition to the treasure trove of songs that take you down memory lane, the story has heart. It was also good to see Cynthia Nixon as Thomas’s mother, Judith, and know now that there’s life after her embodiment of Miranda Hobbes in Sex and the City for 12 years. 

..playing sleuths...

Whilst Webb’s pedigree is from the well-known Spiderman franchise, I thought his stand-out film was in fact a non-spidey film Gifted (2017), made around the same time as this film, and similarly paced as well. Smaller, less grandiose, and more relatable. The escapism comes from being able to walk the streets with its citizens, and having a glimpse of the their lives. 

 

There’s little point in revealing plot advances or it’s denouement. You’ll have to go along for the ride to find out. As a perfect long weekend film to be enjoyed bringing with it a touch of 80s Woody Allen, and a lot of nostalgia for the Big Apple. 

 

The Only Living Boy in New York is currently showing on Amazon Prime.

Streaming on Amazon Prime - Janice Tong reviews THE PAINTER AND THE THIEF /KUNSTNEREN OG TYVEN (Benjamin Ree, US/Norway, 2020)

Bertil and Barbora - during the first meeting when she is 
asked to do his portrait

The visible and the invisible, the seen and unseen. There’s a continuous slippage between the two, because in truth, nothing is as clearcut as we’d like to make it out to be, ever.  

For me, The Painter and the Thief can only be seen a labour of love by director Benjamin Ree, who worked on this film for many years. He is both director and cinematographer. And his use of mixed footages was a clever one. Some of these were retrieved from friends of Barbora’s who had filmed her painting the stolen works; TV reports as well as court transcripts. He was also able to incorporate an actual taped session from the first meeting of Barbora and Bertil during an intermission in court and CCTV footage. All this provided texture to the story. 

 

The interleaving of the two characters, their separateness, as well as the interactions. The film begins with more of a focus on Barbora and the theft, until Bertil opens up.  Ree also wanted to tell his side of the story. That added different dimensions to the overall experience. The final film brings to bear a celluloid fabric that is both palpable, as though we’re located in the centre of Barbora and Bertil’s worlds, as well as cinematic. 

Bertil in the hands and eyes of Barbora

 

Ree’s captivating journey explores what it is that fascinates a person, what attracts a person enough for them to want to get close to another. In the process, we wonder whether this ‘getting closer to’ is ever going to be successful or even possible in the philosophical sense. Think Merleau-Ponty- the intertwining of the subjective and the objective body, where sight is, in and of itself, already coded and therefore ambiguous; the mere act of looking is already an approach to the object. And yet, we are both subject and object; a hand can touch and be touched. I found myself thinking about this question throughout the film: is it possible to reveal what is invisible, in other words, is the disclosure of truth, or an understanding of the other, ever possible? 

 

There are so many revealing moments captured between Czech artist Barbora Kysilkova, the ‘painter’, and Karl-'Bertil' Nordland, the ‘thief’. Those moments are raw as well as rare in a documentary, at times uncomfortable, and yet, completely natural.  The camera did not intrude, we are in Wiseman territory: we are but a fly on the wall, we are in the room with both the painter and the thief. 

The Gallery and window from which the paintings were stolen

 

The one scene that I recall well is when we are treated to Bertil’s voiceover through a montage sequence of their interactions. He says “She sees me very well. But she forgets that I see her too.” It is that moment of relevation, the hand that touches can also be touched. It is not just the painter who sees, but the thief too, sees. Another layer is added; we are not just seeing the surface of things (what is shown on the canvas), in fact, Barbora’s paintings push through the surface to reveal an essence. We know this because we are in the frame when Bertil sees his own portrait for the first time; the shock on his face says it all, his disbelief that someone was able to really ‘get’ him, and not just be his friend, but was able to see past the tattoos and the stigma of being a thief or a ‘bad boy’. 

 

Later there’s a lovely painting Barbora does of his injured hand from a car accident that almost killed him. It reminded her of Christ’s hands. Bertil is also stigmatised by society. We realise that Bertil is fragile and self-destructive rather than dangerous. When he was first asked by Barbora why he stole her paintings, he replied that it was because they’re her “masterpiece”. And you can tell that he has enormous respect for her work because he took the pain of removing the 200 nails that fastened the painting to the frame, (which would have taken a long time during a heist), rather than simply cutting the canvas off the frame as per the usual practice of art thieves. 

 

One of the stolen paintings

Whilst the film starts off with a heist of two of Barbora’s most important paintings (those made when she moved from Berlin to Oslo to begin a new life), and they were stolen in broad daylight from the front display windows of a gallery. The story that follows eclipse the premise. And the arc of Bertil, from being the thief to finally getting out of jail and building a life for himself is interesting and complex. Barbora stayed the painter, or rather, the artist that she is. I also thought much about the multi-dimensional relationship she must have with her partner, Øystein Stene, that remained largely off-screen. 

 

This brilliant film does perform a sleight of hand at the end, but one that I did not mind at all for the engrossing story we are treated to, of two seemingly very different people who are in fact much more alike than we first realised. Through Ree’s lens, these variable traces of differences and similarities, of the seen and unseen, are brought mesmerisingly to life on screen. 

 

The Painter and the Thief  is currently showing on Amazon Prime.