Streaming on SBS on Demand from 12 November - Rod Bishop welcomes the final season of BABYLON BERLIN (Season 5, Henk Handloegten, Tom Tykwer, Achim von Borries, Germany, 2026)

Early in this final season, set in 1933, editor-in-chief Gustav Haymann at the Tempo newspaper is trying to decide between layout options for a front-page story on Adolf Hitler.

He’s conflicted: “I also have an advance review of The Testament of Dr Mabuse.”

The investigative journalist Samuel Katelbach pipes up: “A masterpiece. Fritz Lang. Rudolf Klein-Rogge. Definitely front-page material.”

It’s another nod to Fritz Lang from the Babylon Berlin showrunners, and also an indication of how art in Weimar Germany could hold its own in a severely turbulent political landscape. Much later in the series, during the burning of the Reichstag, the enigmatic Anno Schmidt makes this observation about the Weimar years: 

“Even 100 years from now people will be amazed at what we have accomplished in a few years after the war. The achievements of science and medicine, of psychology and pharmacology, of film and literature, women’s rights, the freedom of the arts and the press, free speech and constructive debate and last, but not least, the unwavering stance against war.”

For Germany’s most expensive and successful television series, currently broadcast in 140 territories, this final season spans five weeks from 28 January to 5 March in 1933. Its focus details Hitler’s ascension to power as Reich Chancellor, and dramatizes the events leading to the Fuhrer’s destruction of his incriminating medical records from the First World War.

Caught in a British mustard gas attack during the final days of the war, Hitler claimed to have lost his sight. In Mein Kempf, he wrote his will power alone restored his sight, motivated by his sense of destiny to make Germany great again.

 

His diagnosis, however, was actually hysterical amblyopia or psychosomatic/hysterical blindness, not physical blindness. In 1933, as Reich Chancellor, Hitler ordered the erasure of these medical records, and then ordered the Gestapo to murder any patients or doctors with direct knowledge of them.

This season is anchored as usual by Charlotte Ritter, the working-class flapper, secretary and former prostitute who becomes the first woman detective on Berlin’s police force; and by her lover, Inspector Gereon Rath, a WWI veteran whose shellshocked affliction from that war plays a significant role in this final series.

Weimar-era song and dance have been brilliant throughout, and this time the 1920 queer anthem Das Lila Lied (The Lavender Song) with a chorus “We’re just different from the others” is raucously sung at a cross-dressing Berlin nightclub, including tables laden with gay SA officers. 

Co-showrunner Thomas Tykwer composed much of the incidental music, but also the theme song To Ashes, To Dust sung in this season in a Parisian nightclub by contemporary French chanteuse Zaho de Sagazan. 

It’s taken 13 years to produce, with near 50 hours of screen time and never faulted in its absorbing execution. Some have compared it with watching Weimar paintings come to life. It does waver a bit, however, in the concluding episode, when it inexplicably shifts from its customary rousing realism to a poorly fictionalized assassination attempt on Hitler, and a Reichstag fire sequence more suited to the gothic melodrama of Lang’s Die Nibelungen. 

It’s small potatoes, however, in the context of Babylon Berlin’s greatest achievement – the creation of a believable Weimar world where scientific experimentation, avant-garde art, film, literature, theatre, music, architecture, fashion, drugs and sexual liberation somehow flourished, despite ruinous economic conditions, and an incendiary political caldron of communists, socialists, democrats, and fascists. 

And the seizing of power by one of history’s greatest monsters.

Babylon Berlin in Concert (2023), mostly in German with no English subtitles can be found here

A Travel Hint and a recipe - Airline omelettes and a lesson from MIDNIGHT DINER

Kaoru Kobayashi as the chef in Midnight Diner

When travelling, at least when travelling in your old age when you can afford smart hotels with giant buffets, airline lounges, indeed airline travel, my advice is never choose or accept anything which is described as an omelette.

You will find something shaped like an omelette, even coloured like an omelette, basically yellow, but it never tastes like an omelette should - a slightly firm exterior and an interior that is slightly, just on the edge of liquid. 

Omelettes that have gone through the hell of preparation for a buffet or a heated (re-heated?) airline breakfast, taste nothing like that. They are hard and unyielding of any flavour to savour.

The best omelette I have tasted, and I dont profess to have tasted every possible method or combination, was first demonstrated at the end of an episode of Midnight Diner when the chef simply about an ounce of butter into a medium heat frying pan with a flat bottom about eight inches wide and steeply curved sides. When the butter had melted he simply broke two eggs onto the butter and stirred vigorously with a table fork for about twenty seconds before  turning one side over onto the other with a spatula and after about another twenty seconds flipping it over again. Some tiny shade of brown appeared on the ridge. it was ready. 

If you want add cheese, smoked salmon or diced chicken add it just before you use the spatula.

Streaming on SBS On Demand - Barrie Pattison stumbles across REALITY (Tina Satter, USA, 2023)

 

Sydney Sweeney as Reality Winner, Reality

Reality is very much a movie of the moment. It features rising star Sydney Sweeney (of the Jeans Commercial furore) and puts her up as a Trump era whistle blower. 

The twenty five year old real life subject, who is genuinely named Reality Winner, was ex-military,  working as N.S.A. translator because of her Farsi and Pashto language skills (we never do find out about that) while waiting for her military deployment. 

We watch as FBI agents arrive on her suburban tract home lawn, producing a search warrant.  The exchange is subtly unnatural,  with her taking it all calmly and their questioning casual. Agent Marchánt Davis jokes about having  three guns in the house being like his own home. They load her groceries into the fridge and help round up her pets but they are quick to keep her from handling her cell phone and make a point of calling in someone so she is never alone with one of them. It builds menace.

The team get down to work in the empty back room - “if you want to sit on the floor.”  The spectre of Edward Snowden hovers. Josh Hamilton’s agent re-assures “I don’t think you’re a big bad master spy.” Gradually incriminating detail is worked into the exchanges (the leaked document was folded once) while she denies the suggestion that she took documents off her business premises - classified information which may be of value to the enemy.

The film works up interest as an exact transcription of the interrogation recordings. I hate to think of the billable hours studio legal put in on checking. It comes complete with action to match noises-off and jump cuts and pixel splash to account for redacted material or switch offs. First feature writer-director Tina Satter had already staged this as a theatre piece. The minimalist form is opened out by glimpses of the Augusta Georgia neighbourhood where Sweeny/Reality Winter waits for her proposed active service - electric wiring poles, fenced yards, bare streets whose residents probably drive there from their day jobs. The final pull back from the red tile roofs is a resonant comment. This calm gets to be disrupted by jagged news clip montages that flash the James Comey dismissal, Fox News, Bill Maher.  We sense world events funnelling down into this unremarkable location.

The film’s laid-back approach doesn’t hide where their sympathies lie and, with minimal help from makeup and costuming, Sweeney is faced with the most demanding role of her beginner career. She aces the vulnerable, conflicted, winning, and finally justified (Senate Hearing) character. Equalling this one will now be her challenge.

The film certainly deserves more than being buried in the SBS schedule. Though I spend more time than I like breaking that down each week, I only chanced on Reality because it came on after Adam Elliot’s endearing Mary & Max. Close call.

******************************

For an earlier report by Rod Bishop following the film's screening at the 2023 Sydney Film Festival click here

STREAMING ON SBS 0N-DEMAND - Barrie Pattison discovers AMERICAN PASTORAL (Ewen McGregor, USA, 2016)

Hannah Nordberg, Ewen McGregor
American Pastoral

SBS are currently fielding American Pastoral, (expires on August 31) a 2016 adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize winning Philip Roth novel, apparently the only film directed by Ewan McGregor, young Obi-Wan Kanobi in person. I was vaguely aware of it, though the film has mysteriously vanished from McGregor’s IMDB credits. This one was a prestige undertaking with a substantial budget and celebrity participants and it came loaded down with SIGNIFICANCE. Well OK.

What we ended up with was yet another imitation Gatsby, an attempt to document the failure of the American Dream, complete with foreground repeats of the Stars & Stripes fluttering in the breeze. It’s even got David Straithairn doing a Nick Carraway character. We start with him voice-overing a passage from Roth’s novel about his college reunion and pondering the fate of golden boy football hero McGregor, who inherited his father’s glove business and married glamorous Miss New Jersey Jennifer Connelly… and we forget about David for most of the picture.

There are problems with the achiever couple’s stuttering, then-teen daughter 12 year old Hannah Nordberg, manifesting incestuous rivalry with mom for McGregor. However she is radicalised by seeing the self-immolating Vietnamese monk on sixties TV and starts calling the cop supervising the Newark Curfew a pig and shouting solidarity slogans at black pedestrians. McGregor hangs a “We employ Negros” banner out of the company’s second-floor window. Rioters in the street put a bullet through it. Well, perplexed by this and, about the time the locals give him a plaque for his progressive attitude, Ewen finds things going pear-shaped and the daughter, now played as a star turn by Dakota Fanning, gets onto the F.B.I’s most wanted list. Ewen berates ineffectual agent Mark Hildreth  for tapping his phone.

Sexy Valorie Curry turns up, shifting from caressing one of the factory-tailored gloves to going explicit, coming on for Ewen (everyone wants to make it with him in this picture), in with demanding four-figure sums in small bills to pass on to Dakota, now a Weatherman undercover. Curry is given the shock value sex material, the explicit hotel encounter. She does get the run in with McGregor, just round the corner from the cycle cop both need to avoid. The film would have benefited from more of this elliptical handling.

The passages which do work occur in this section - Bombing victim widow Samantha Mathis’ resonant meeting with McGregor and Connelly, comparing the personal damage both their families have sustained and Ewen’s violent confrontation with assured therapist Molly Parker, whose treatment of Dakota he sees as responsible. The two actresses seem to be the only ones who have assimilated the complexity of the characters the film hands out. But there’s more - too much more.

They’ve put in time and effort in setting up plot elements that never deliver - cow-loving  Connelly guilty of her privileged life, a strong willed Catholic facing off with Jewish patriarch Peter Reigert (Local Hero) over religious education,  Mc Gregor’s fetishising the leather of his dying luxury trade, fruitless pursuit and Strathairn back at the trophy case.

Roth adaptations like Ernest Lehman’s Portnoy’s Complaint and Larry Peerce’s Goodbye Columbus are the work of people whose other films show them immersed in the American scene. Australia’s Phil Noyce bailed on this one. It would be nice to know the story there. That left rookie director, Scots leading man McGregor, facing a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and knowing that its devotees would regard any changes as desecration. It would have taken steely-willed control to jettison the padding here. 

Instead, we get best traditional A feature craft - cameraman Martin Ruhe (The Americans & pop clips) offering glowing rural scenics contrasting with the grim city (“Do you walk this way every night?”), Alexander Desplat’s tasteful unobtrusive scoring and Melissa Kent’s traditional editing, with a top dollar cast in Lindsay Ann McKay’s costumes carefully derived from the Sears Catalogues of the day.

Inevitably, Hollywood’s take on Vietnam protest dominates. Think back to The Soldier Who Declared Peace, The Strawberry Statement and particularly A Small Circle of Friends, add in Hair, not discreditable attempts to put “counter culture” up front, even if seeing Robert Kramer’s 1970  “underground” Ice shades those.

Now I’ve always homed in on “trangressive” film entertainment - well savvy transgressive film entertainment - Boris Karloff, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Sergio Corbucci, Dario Argento,  Alex de Iglesia. You could add in Adam Sandler.  Leave Luis Buñuel, John Waters and Pedro Almodovar to the Art Industry. If you are up to speed on that comparison, you will understand why American Pastoral never made it into the collective memory and has to be retrieved from an Australian "ethnic TV" channel. I found it curiously discouraging.

Watch the Trailer 

Streaming on SBS On Demand - Rod Bishop recommends MY BRILLIANT FRIEND Season 4 (Saverio Costanzo, Laura Bispuri, Daniele Luchetti, Alice Rohrwacher, Italy, 2024)

 

Irene Maiorino as Lila; Alba Rohrwacher as Lenù, My Brilliant Friend, series 4

 

When Elena Ferrante published the fourth and final novel of her Neapolitan Quartet in 2014, the “Index of Characters” at the beginning of the book contained 54 names.

Using this list helped put names to faces during the first three seasons of My Brilliant Friend. For this fourth season, it’s essential. 

Irene Maiorino as Lila; Alba Rohrwacher as Lenù, 
My Brilliant Friend, series 4

Even though season four starts exactly where season three ended, Ferrante’s central characters, the life-long friends Lenù (Elena) and Lila, have been recast with two new actors in their roles.

And they’re not the only ones. Nino, Lenù’s lover at the end of season three and the start of season four is also recast. Described as a “fake feminist ally”, Nino is also a past lover of Lila and the only visual similarity between the Nino of previous seasons and this one, is his oversized eyewear.

Also recast are Lenù’s husband Pietro, and Pietro’s sister; and two of Lenù’s former lovers, Antonio and Franco.

It’s bold and it’s risky, and social media posts suggest not always successful with devoted viewers. The showrunner might legitimately argue it was unavoidable: the timeframe of this fourth novel spans 32 years and it’s better to make the changes in episode one instead of an abrupt change later in the series. CGI and prosthetic make-up aging for seven or more characters may not have been a financial option. Or a successful one.

The rest of the packaging is unchanged. An adaptation of what The New York Times called the ‘best fiction of the 21^st Century’, the writing is a faithful, nuanced, unsentimental, exploration of female friendship over six decades. The production values are state of the art and every episode is immersive, seductive and complex.

As many have pointed out, it covers motherhood, nostalgia, desire, misogyny, political violence (communists and fascists), sorrow, anger, shame, duty, radical feminism and class. 

The Guardian calls it: “impeccably stylish…television at its best”.

Author and journalist Taffy Brodesser-Akner asks: “Why is it not widely acknowledged to be the best show on television?”

I’ve got no idea.

On SBS and streaming on SBS On Demand - Barrie Pattison enjoys NO KIDS/SIN HIJOS (Ariel Winograd, Spain, 2015)

The agreeable production line entertainment features that were the backbone of movie-going most of my life have all but vanished. I watched The Fall Guy for which a couple of name stars in a comedy-crime piece wasn’t enough. They had to add-in takes where the camera follows a character up four flights before dropping them down a lift well, dialogue about split screen that was done in split screen, Sydney Harbour locations, multi rolling cars and setting the lead on fire. 

I came home wanting a break from all this overkill and the TV put up SBS doing something called No Kids, which turned out to be Sin Hijos, a nine year old Spanish movie with the immensely watchable Maribel Verdú and Diego Peretti, anticipating director Ariel Winograd’s line of polished, agreeable romcoms, the 2022 Hoy se arregla el mundo /Today We Fix the World, 2020’s El robo del siglo / The Heist Of The Century, and the much re-treaded 2017 Mamá se fue de viaje / 10 Days Without Mum. I find that No Kids also was re-made in 2020.

 

No Kids has that cycle’s nice mean streak. Hangdog Perretti now shares the custody of his nine year old daughter Guadalupe Manen, juggling that with running Cabau’s Music Store, the inherited family business, when who should walk into the shop but his decade cherished crush Maribel, who doesn’t remember him. She’s irresistible. When she proves multi-lingual, he asks which she speaks and she says “Many – badly, like the Pope.” There’s only one problem. She hates children – a demo in the park where a baby bursts out crying on seeing Maribel but beams at Peretti. Frantic exertions follow, converting his flat into an economically furnished bachelor pad when she visits and back when Manen comes home. Diego passes the kid off as his sister by a long-lived dad. At one stage, Peretti is stuck on a pier collecting a ship load of keyboards and desperately tries to find someone in the family who can pick up his daughter from music practice, finally only left with Maribel. He rushes home and his first question is “Did you kill her?” In the nicest passage. Manen figures it out and starts running the operation.

 

Diego Peretti, Maribel Verdú Sin Hijos/No Kids 

Winograd’s act is juxtaposing his comedians with children. Characteristically in 10 Days Without Mum, his daughter warns dad Perretti (again) that if he fires the so nice baby sitter, she’ll learn to drive and run him over.

 

No Kids is nicely developed – Perretti’s ex-wife’s kung fu instructor new husband is glimpsed in the background showing Bruce Lee moves to brother Martín Piroyansky, the runaway white rabbit in the park is the link back to Diego’s magician father and particularly we get the school concert where Maribel sees Peretti accompany Menen’s song on guitar. His “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to lose you” is as much reality as one of these can handle. The piece has built enough good will to carry it past the inescapable feel-good ending.

 

Bright coloured good living settings – the apartment glass balcony – sustain the mood and the leads couldn’t be better. Weathered Perretti is a welcome departure from the conventional romantic hero. It’s a big deal when he shaves his permanent stubble to impress the winning Verdú. I think that the enjoyment of watching Winograd’s films is in no small measure that they are a reminder of the fading concept of movies as an agreeable way to spend time rather than gather record first day takings, demonstrate refined taste or signal sympathy with the underprivileged. I recommend hunting this one down in SBS’s repeats or on demand.

Streaming on SBS on Demand - Rod Bishop is underwhelmed by THIS TOWN (Steven Knight, UK, 2024)

Jordan Bolger, Levi Brown, This Town

The copious, eclectic credits amassed by British screenwriter Steven Knight makes for interesting reading.

There’s an Oscar nomination early in his career for Dirty Pretty Things, directed by Stephen Frears; there’s his television hit as a co-creator of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?; there’s a brutal London crime families tale for David Cronenberg in Eastern Promises; there’s Locke, a film set entirely in a car driven by Tom Hardy, written and directed by Knight; dockside shipping tussles in the early 1800s in Taboo, co-created with Tom Hardy and Chips Hardy; Kristen Stewart as Lady Di in Spencer; two badly received ‘re-imaginings’ of Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol and Great Expectations); the Birmingham crime gangs in six seasons of Peaky Blinders; the berserk British soldiers in the North Africa campaign against Rommel in the awful SAS Rogue Heroes; the misjudged World War II romance between a blind French girl and a German soldier in All The Light We Cannot See. 

And now, This Town, set in Birmingham and Coventry in the Midlands during the Thatcher era and backgrounded by a predominately ska, reggae and two-tone soundtrack.

Knight’s credit list is not unlike his compatriot, the equally prolific Jack Thorne, who has written 26 times for television (excluding multiple seasons) and 12 feature films since 2006. Knight has written 21 times for television (excluding multiple seasons) and 18 feature films since 1990.

It’s industrial-scale screen writing with no hint of writer’s block, but the sheer output of material suggests it is likely to be uneven.

So, it is with This Town. There are plenty of moments reminiscent of Peaky Blinders, but Knight has a lot to cram in – the IRA, Thatcher, racism, skinheads, hard-drugs, soft drugs, alcohol, romance, reggae, dub, virginity, ska, two-tone, poetry, Christianity, skinheads and the formation of a band. He just can’t keep it all together.

While the lack of coherence is annoying, the sheer scale of his undertaking is often admirable.  What grates, however, is when the writing smacks of being a first draft. The central character, for instance, is the mixed-race Dante who creates song lyrics from his poetry. Apparently written by Kae Tempest, the poetry is terrible: “The words come and land in my skull like a flock of pigeons on a tower block.”

Dante’s band Fuck The Factory - with music written by producer Dan Carey - slowly comes together through the six episodes, finally closing the series with their first live gig. Their music is not only as unimpressive as the poetry, but it doesn’t sound remotely like the rest of the great music on the soundtrack – The Selector, The Beat, Stiff Little Fingers, Siouxsie and The Banshees, The Specials, Prince Buster, Jimmy Cliff, Bob Marley, UB40, Jackie Wilson, Blondie, Tom Jones, Talking Heads etc. 

This soundtrack is beautifully selected and originates from a specific time and place, but like the writing, can also abruptly veer off course. For instance, why does a demo version of Rock & Roll by The Velvet Underground from 1970 suddenly pop up? Great song, but 1970 New York is a long way from the reggae, ska and two-tone of Birmingham and Coventry in the early 1980s.

Michelle Dockery

Among the supporting cast, there is one show-stopping performance from Michelle Dockery (Lady Mary from Downton Abbey) playing an alcoholic mother who crashes her own mother’s funeral to sing a solo version of Over The Rainbow.

This Town occasionally has moments when it touches that rainbow. Pity there are so few of them.

Streaming on Netflix and on SBS on Demand - Two takes on Irish crime - BODKIN (Jez Scharf showrunner) and BLUE LIGHTS (Series 2 - Declan

It seems a bit like the Irish crime producers are doing to the Brits  what the New Zealanders do with us more generally...make better films I mean... So is the sample too small and the fact that there's been no new series of The Line of Duty for awhile tipped the balance towards Ireland as the primary place for "Brit" TV crime. Hard to know. There was Boat  and Wolf of course but still, small though the contribution may be when you look over the the total output of Brit TV crime in 2023  the Irish seem to have a knack for the stuff. It's probably all traced back to the DNA whereby in the sinews of real Irish crime was the activity of the IRA in robbing banks to finance itself.  Maybe it dealt in drugs too. Whatever, all over Ireland, if you believe Blue Lights and to a lesser extent Bodkin, crime is rampant. In fact the Belfast of Blue Lights  is a hot bed of Loyalist gangs nowadays more interested in fighting for control of the drug trade than defending the Crown.  

All this of course just follows on from the work of Peter McKenna (Not the VFL footballer but I wont go into that again) which I breathlessly admired a year or so back when I  wrote about his series Hidden Assets and Kin. The latter especially had a sense of Shakespearean downfall about its gang leaders and their trusted offspring, their lieutenants and the powerful women who pulled their strings. It also had two of the most ferocious villains you'll ever come across - the successive heads of the Kinsella gang played by Ciaran Hinds and Francis Magee.

Blue Lights  created by Declan Lawn, Adam Patterson and Louise Gallagher, is much more a descendant of  Z Cars and The Bill. Series one tossed us into a police  station where a handful of rookie cops, all with a backstory that had to be explained, start policing the mean streets of Belfast. The lines between the old cops and the young were clear. The old cops knew much, in one case too much, and the young cops knew bugger all. Of the four young cops in series one, one has dropped out and become a lawyer with a cause that has to be the most slow burning element of series two. 

By series two, now on SBS on Demand if you can stand the ads for Chemist Warehouse, or elsewhere if you look around, the back stories are given and a couple of new cops are introduced, both of them appearing to be dodgy in ways that only get explained later. The new cops are there because drug crime and drug dealing has got out of control and two Loyalist gangs are at war with each other. Into this steps an ex-military man whose sister runs a bar which pays protection money to one of the gangs. The  veteran, who saw and did terrible things in Afghanistan, isn't going to take it anymore. ..Enough said...

Will Forte, Siobhan Cullen, Robyn Cara, Bodkin

Bodkin, screening on Netflix is a much smarter bit of film-making, much less formulaic if you dont regard the crime,  the corrupt police, mysterious disappearances and cold case investigations as part of a formula I guess. A Guardian-type journalist is under the pump for a story she has written exposing crime in high places which has led to the death of her whistleblower. Her editor decides she needs to cool off so sends her back to her homeland Ireland to investigate a cold case involving mysterious disappearances. Somehow or other an American podcaster and his enthusiastic assistant  are also investigating the case and the contrast couldn't be clearer. 

The journo is abrupt, crash through or crash and the podcaster is full of handwringing political correctness about what he should and shouldn't be doing. It has a drollery to it that's irresistible. The credits may shock you. I know nothing about the writer/showrunner Jez Scharf but I have heard of two of the many Executive Producers, Barack and Michelle Obama and the director of the first two eps Nash Edgerton. How a boy from Sydney get picked up to direct two eps of an Irish TV series is a mystery but I guess that's how the worldwide network of agents and producers works these days. 

On SBS and streaming on SBS On Demand - Barrie Pattison welcomes BLESSED MADNESS (Carlo Verdone, Italy, 2016) and asks for more Verdone please.

Carlo Verdone, Blessed Madness

Carlo Verdone is one of those Italian star comics who occupy a large slice of that nation's cinema without us getting to them because of the subtitle barrier. Like many of his peers and, despite enormous popularity on his home turf, he is kind of peripheral to our experience of the movies. Now seventy, his whole life has been involved with film, growing up in the family of of a pioneer Cinema Academic and graduating from the Centro Sperimentale. He has a bit part in La Luna but we’ll forgive him for that. 

I’ve been on Verdone’s case for forty years now, taking every opportunity to watch him and I have a small pile of his DVDs on my Italian shelf but I still don’t have a clear knowledge of his career or his development. He’s less well defined than Adriano Celantano or his mentor Alberto Sordi.

SBS played a nice ‘scope copy of Verdone’s 2018 Benedetta follia /Blessed Madness, which he directed, in their current cycle of Italian movies. It's now on SBS on demand where it will be for the next couple of months. It is a welcome up-date on his activities, a handsomely filmed Verdone vehicle, where our senior citizen lead suddenly finds himself adrift when wife of decades Lucrezia Lante della Rovere (Quantum of Silence) leaves him for the woman shop assistant from his Catholic Regalia store – jokes about fitting the Cardinal who has put on too much weight for his scarlet robe. We’ve been here before with Pupi Avati’s so nice 2003 Il cuore altrove.

Ilenia Pastorelli, Carlo Verdone, Blessed Madness

Carlo’s filled the store vacancy with a trainee nun but she can’t start for a month. At this point skimpily dressed twenty something Ilenia Pastorelli shows up desperate for work and, when Carlo has to leave the shop for a moment, she impresses him by managing to sell the life size Mother Teresa he’s been trying to shift for years. Ilenia gets to fill the temporary vacancy. 

The formula comic situation asserts with her doing the free spirit thing, embarrassing him with his severe customers and making him question the habits of a lifetime, her connecting him to dating Apps that introduce him to a succession of dingbat prospects that end up with him at the hospital. That’s where he encounters winning nurse Maria Pia Calzone, with whom his efforts to partner are subverted by farcical complications – an auto correcting cell ‘phone that sends a licentious message, gross complications from an  app dinner gone wrong and the calamitous reappearance of the wife. 

"...life-size Mother Theresa..."

It also turns out that Ilenia’s chaotic life is contagious. The biker punk club associates, pursuing her for debts run up by an old flame, intrude into the store where top dollar ecclesiastic paraphernalia is in the showcases. She faces a future of pole dancing, Vergogna again. (we get to see her show stopper performance). When Carlo is wiped out, Ilenia’s party girl friends slip him a smiley face yellow ecstasy pill, triggering a psychedelic Luca Tommassini choreographed dream fantasy, with our hero limbo surrounded by digital dancers. We find that, despite his ultra respectable life style, he still treasures the classic motorbike from his youth and he is reproached about his misery by his de-aged biker self in the mirror. 

Blessed Madness turns out to be an agreeable, original Verdone vehicle. It coasts on the skills of the cast, great production and, believe it or not, charm which is surprising when one of the highlights offers one of our hero's dinner dates getting a vibrating cell ‘phone stuck in her vagina. The surgeon hands it back advising Carlo he has three missed calls. 

A situation where SBS set about filling in the gaps in our knowledge of Carlo Verdone would be welcome. A Cinémathèque where he figured regularly would be even better but let’s not ask for the moon.

Streaming on SBS On Demand - DARK WINDS (Series One created by Graham Roland, Showrunner: Vince Calandra, Director: Chris Eyre)

Tony Hillerman wrote eighteen novels featuring one or both of the Navajo policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. I confess to having read just one. Hillerman's is one  of those dozens of regional voices in American fiction writing authentic tales of people way outside what was the first mainstream of crime fiction in New York and Los Angeles or just anonymous 'big cities". My own favourite is Carl Hiaasen  who writes very funny crime stories about crime and corruption in Florida. 

Hillerman died in 2008 and since then his daughter Anne (so Wikipedia tells me) has continued to issue novels devoted to the two policemen. She has brought to the front and centre Jim Chee's wife, Officer Bernadette Manuelito. In the TV series Dark Winds Jim and Bernadette meet for the first time and romance ensues despite her prickly solitary character. "Never had a man in your trailer huh?". She prefers to devote her attention to her horses, one of which eventually plays a key role in the final scenes of the series. I'm digressing.

Joe Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon)

There are two key violent events in Dark Winds. At the opening there is a violent bank robbery involving a helicopter and the shooting deaths of three armed guards by masked men. Then an old Native American appears at the door of a motel room seeking treatment from what used to be called at least a medicine woman. He's let in by the woman's grand daughter. Not much later the police are called to investigate the death of the old man and the grand daughter. The twoi stories intertwine throughout and Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal Police is on the case. His assistant is Bernadette Manuelito and shortly thereafter they are joined by fresh faced young policeman Jim Chee. Lurking around the edges is FBI Agent Whitover played as a cop in a suit by Noah Emmerich, last seen playing an FBI Agent in six seasons or so of The Americans. 

Jim Chee (Kiowa Gordon)

Whitover's base of operations is a hotel resort on the edge of Monument Valley and early on we get a bit of cinephilia when we learn its the place where the movie stars stayed when John Ford came out there to make his Cavalry Trilogy among others. There's a bit more when we see a moment from Hawks' Red River on a small black and white TV.

A tug of war between police agencies starts. Joe is the entree into the Native American community and its exotic customs and spiritual beliefs. This is dealt with quite extensively. As well there's a lot of back story to explain his various relationships. Chief among that element is the loss of Joe's son in what is regarded as a mining accident, at least at first. Whitover is concerned to catch the bank robbers. Joe wants to find out who murdered the old man and literally scared the granddaughter to death. Each has their reasons though Whitover's  main motivation takes until ep six to be revealed.

Bernadette Manuelito (Jessica Matten)

The most poignant moment comes at the end of ep four. Joe sits alone at his dining table. He's alienated from his wife, his two assistants, Whitover, the local native American community...everybody....a  man whose heritage, morality, desire to do his job and the circumstances of his marriage and his wife's care for another young woman have all combined into solitary despair.

Dark Winds Is played by, written by and filmed by Native Americans we are told...and its very very good indeed. It has an authentic feel rarely achieved and you have to give credit to those who got it done so well. Credit also to SBS on Demand for buying it, though you could say that about dozens of their programs when you think about it....

Next up Series Two.

Streaming on SBS On Demand (with lots of advertisements) - Rod Bishop finds enthralling viewing in THE NIGHT LOGAN WOKE UP (Xavier Dolan, Canada, 2022)

Xavier Dolan as Elliot, The Night Logan Woke Up

Last month, there were reports from Europe suggesting Xavier Dolan was retiring as a filmmaker. 

Dolan, the wunderkind of Cannes at 19 years of age and a multihyphenate auteur with eight feature films and one television miniseries all completed by his 34^th birthday, first signaled his retirement in the Journal de Montreal on 20 November 2022: “I don’t really want to do this job anymore. I’m tired”. He talked of building a house in the country, spending time with friends and making commercials.

Early in June this year Dolan told Le Pais in Spain:

“I don’t feel like committing two years to a project that barely anyone sees. I put too much passion into it to have these disappointments. It makes me wonder if my filmmaking is bad and I know it’s not”.

In July, he bickered with Spain’s El Mundo and their interview with him titled “Art is useless and dedicating oneself to cinema is a waste of time”. Dolan apparently claimed he was misrepresented. The website World of Reel reported this disagreement between Dolan and El Mundo and it triggered a backlash from their readers:

“Stop giving this nobody crybaby a platform.”

“Xavier Dolan thinks anyone gives a shit he’s retiring, who does he think he is?”

“He is a clown.”

“God, he’s insufferable both with his films, and his whole demeanor outside of them…”

“…a classic narcissist…”

“…full of himself…”

“…precious little bitch…”

“Is there a more stereotypical insufferable queer in existence than him?”

All reminiscent of the vitriol from some in the Cannes Press Room in 2016 when Dolan’s It’s Only The End of the World won the Grand Prix.

For their part, on 8 July, El Mundo then released audio of 4 minutes of their reporter’s interview with Dolan. He talks eloquently about climate change; widespread political and social intolerance; and meaningless filmmaking. An excerpt:

“What am I exactly? Am I an employee? A servant? Am I someone who dances in front of the King? To distract them from what’s happening outside their window?”

The full text of the 4 minutes is available if you click here and is transcribed below. 

Some believe Dolan will not retire and call his current mood “just part of the show”. They think this depressed Millennial auteur will get over the poor reception of his last two films and he will soon be in pre-production once again. 

An adaptation of a play, the premise of his 2016 drama It’s Only The End of the World, is a 34-year-old gay playwright who returns home to his family after an absence of 12 years to tell them he is dying, presumably of AIDS. But the emotional dysfunctionality of the family members, their neuroses and their angry shouting is so consuming and insistent, the playwright eventually leaves not having found the right moment to tell them of his prognosis.

 0

Chantal (Magalie Lépine Blondeau), Denis (Éric Bruneau),
Maddy (Anne Dorval) and Elliot (Xavier Dolan). 

This five-part television series, The Night Logan Woke Up - also from a play - has many similarities to his Grand Prix winner at Cannes. Set in 1991 and 2019, Elliot (Xavier Dolan) is let out of rehab to join his siblings Denis (Éric Bruneau) and Julian (Patrick Hivon) and Julian’s wife Chantal (Magalie Lépine-Blondeau). They are in vigil at the bedside of their dying mother Madeleine (Anne Dorval). 

When her body is transferred to a mortuary, a sister Mireille (Julie LeBreton) re-appears after an absence of 25 years, intent on embalming their mother. The series then explores the traumatic past and present of the children, their chronic dysfunctionality, their shouting exchanges and the mysterious role of childhood friend Logan Goodyear in their frequently explosive family squabbles.

Mireille (Julie Le Breton)

There’s one riotous family dinner. Although shorter than the one in the second series of The Bear, it does share the same sensibilities. People locked together around a table (unable to escape because this is “Family” and family is to be valued above all else), but in the end resorting to insults, ridicule, sarcasm, contempt and derision.

Dolan’s direction is as tight and occasionally flamboyant as ever, but here, across nearly five hours he can almost leisurely unpeel even more layers to his characters than available in the feature film format.

If you’re not an admirer of his work, The Night Logan Woke Up is most unlikely to change your opinion. But for those transfixed by this director’s grip and his penetrating insights into all the damage inflicted by families, and in particular by parents who fix their children at a certain age and treat them that way no matter who they have grown up to be, then this is enthralling viewing.

If nothing else you can look at the wallpaper. Québécois must have the world’s worst taste in wallpaper. 

 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Transcript of four minutes of Dolan’s interview with El Mundo on 3 July 2023. He spoke in English.

“When I look at the world, suddenly making films is unimportant. It’s very, very small. I guess a little bit meaningless. Like I told you before, it’s making me feel like it’s irrelevant. It is a very privileged thing to be working right now in this industry and not realise that the world is burning while we’re still making stories about the world burning. But not really doing anything about it.

I think our problem is inaction. We’re an individualistic society and we just really don’t care. In a world that’s supposed to have literacy and education, but people are mis-educated and misinformed and you have all these anti-vaccines, anti-immigration, anti-LGBTQ+, people who inflate their intolerance in the same bigger, more vast, larger intolerance of anything different. And so, it’s funny to see all these people converge towards the same mass of anti-everything. 

So, it’s just us against them and I find that to be worrying because what that means to me is insurrection and civil wars…that’s why amazing films seem so disconnected. 

What am I exactly? Am I an employee? A servant? Am I someone who dances in front of the King? To distract them from what’s happening outside their window. I’m sure people need stories more than ever to find [inaudible] from reality. But making stories costs money. It takes time. And I don’t have that money and that time anymore. You know I’m re-injecting my [salaries?] in these films forever. 

And some people keep telling me: ‘You need to make something small. Something that doesn’t cost anything, so that people will understand you’re still able to make something for nothing.’ Why would I make something for nothing? Why wouldn’t we make something with great sets where people are actually paid to do their work. Why wouldn’t I write a story with wind and rain and snow so that it’s visually attractive? Why wouldn’t I dress people with textured costumes and looks? Why wouldn’t I write something with detail and detail means money and needs time and research? Why would I write something for nothing to prove what? That I can still make something for nothing? That I’m cheap labour? 

I don’t think we have time. If you think we have time, you are misreading the situation we are in right now in the world. You think we’re in a good place right now? You think we have time? I don’t think we have time…I wish I had time. I feel very young, but I don’t think I have time.”

Streaming on Stan and SBS On Demand - Janice Tong (re)discovers THE ASSASSIN (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan, 2015) + THE EXCEPTION (Jesper W Nielsen, Denmark, 2020)

"...beauty and aesthetics of the highest order...",
The Assassin

I have been a little remiss in writing about films in 2022, the year of supposed harmony (it’s turned out to be chaos really). Watching the world burn and drown simultaneously, I found that I’ve not had the heart for it. 

 

But art, music, literature, poetry and of course, cinema, have a profound role to play in shaping thought; inspiring beauty; giving the soul nourishment. At times it seemed that these traces, our humanness, had been abandoned in the face of an unfolding horror-field. It becomes impossible to switch on the TV, at the prescribed hour at 6:30pm. Just in time for tea. We have no stomach for it, our dinner, that is.

 

Let us travel back to an age of the mythic, where wuxia is a way of life. Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s oblique take on a classic seventh century fiction, Pei Xing’s Nie Yinniang is a slow burn; at once cinematically enigmatic and aesthetically stylised. There is little action in this wuxia pian. Whilst I haven’t read the text, the elliptical narrative would indicate that this was a loose and artistic retelling, rather than a faithful book-to-screen adaptation. Anyone who knows Hou’s cinema, would be familiar with his masterpiece A City of Sadness(1989), a meditative filmic elegy to the city of Taiwan and The Flowers of Shanghai (1998), my personal favourite – a languid film much like Bertrand Bonello’s House of Tolerance (2011). Hou’s focus is the flower houses of Shanghai in the 1880s versus Bonello’s nineteenth century Parisian take on the same subject.

 

In The Assassin, one can feel the same meditative languidness as Flowers; Mark Ping Lee’s cinematography is choreographic, lilting – like that of a sultry, brooding dance for one. The camera hides between billowing fabrics, between foliages, between the seen and the unseen; it sways like it’s yielding to the gentle breaths of Zephyrous. Set in the eighth century during the last years of the Tang Dynasty, which is at the summit of this dynasty’s art and culture; one should expect no less than beauty and aesthetics of the highest order in this film. 

Shu Qi plays Nie Yinniang, The Assassin

 

The wonderful Shu Qi plays the eponymous assassin Nie Yinniang, taken away to be trained when she was only 10 years old. She is the daughter of a general, who, years later, is sent on assassination assignments by her mentor, Jiaxin, a nun (in Chinese terms, she is actually a ‘holy person’ and not strictly in the sense of a ‘nun’ as Western culture understands) living in seclusion in the mountains (where the scenery is pristine and glorious to behold). In one of these assignments, Nie was to kill a corrupt general, but she weakened at the last moment and was unable to carry out her duty.  The target was holding his infant son. Nie returns to Jiaxin, but she has broken the assassin’s code and as punishment she is sent to Weibo in northern China to take the life of her cousin Tian Ji'an, to whom she was once betrothed – their union was meant as a seal for peace between two regions.

 

The film premiered at Cannes to critical acclaim (its legend written by none other than Manohla Dargis who described the screening to have been in ‘rapturous silence’ and ended with ‘thunderous applause’ – it won Hou the Best Director award. But many critics found the narrative to be intoxicating but frustratingly confounding in its narrative. To me, they seem to be saying that there is the most ravishing foreplay, but without the action that gets you off. I would like to return to the idea of dance – and ask whose eyes is this dance for? The answer is simply, it is for us, the audience, and as such, we are complicit in creating the film’s mysterious heart. 

"...ravishing foreplay, but without the action..."
The Assassin

 

This is not a story of connections, predestined or serendipitous, nor is it a story of contemplative lovers, like the last pairing between Chang Chen (here as the cousin Tian Ji'an) and Shu Qi – they were mesmeric in Three Times (2005). This film is also not a reinvention of the genre like Wong Kai-wai’s masterful and equally poetical Ashes of Time (1994). Hou films beauty, the costumes, the scenery and its compassionate heart is a must for those wanting a quiet moment’s solace, if only to enter into a dream during these tumultuous times.

 

The Exception was shown at the  Scandi Film Festival a couple of years ago, but I missed its theatrical screening at the time, so I was glad to have found it on Stan the other night. Do not confuse this small but incredibly thoughtful and tightly woven film with The Exception (2016) with Lily James and Christopher Plummer. No, The Exception I’m referring to is with Lene Maria Christensen, you would know her from Susanne Bier’s Brothers (2004) and Pernille Fischer Christensen’s En Famille (2010), Magnus Krepper (most recently seen in When the Dust Settles) and Danica Curcic (most recently seen in The Chestnut Man). If none of these names are familiar, the film also stars Sidse Babett Knudsen who is a household name these days, especially after the success of Borgen (the new series is on Netflix incidentally), not to mention 1864 (my favourite TV series, ever) and films like the blockbuster Tom Hanks vehicle Inferno or Peter Strickland’s The Duke of Burgundy. There’s also a small part for Johanne Louise Schmidt who plays the PM in the latest season of Borgen.

 

Anne-Lise (Sidse Babette Knudsen) - isolated by the others

Seen simply, Nielsen’s The Exception is a story about bullying, when a collective gangs up on another, for no apparent reason but just ‘because’ they can. Knudsen’s Anne-Lise is at the centre of the group’s insidious attacks; small jibes, the accumulation of uncomfortable moments, deliberate neglect, and a simmering and hurtful undercurrent of disdain. I’m sure we’ve all felt this at one time or another, by not-so-nice colleagues or ‘pretend friends’. 

Bullying is insidious- the collective from left Amanda Collin (Marlene),
Knudsen (Anne-Lise), Danica Curcic (Iben)
and Lene Maria Christensen (Camilla)

This thriller slowly unravels and Nielsen cleverly uses Iben’s (Curcic) piece on The Psychology of Evil to set up ideas (or perhaps to provide a more profound view of these behaviours) as he slowly unpicks the backstory of this ensemble. Seen in layers, their everyday lives are too complex for each other to grasp even a reasonable understanding of it. What lies under the surface, literally surfaces; but Nielsen makes a good point that it is impossible to grasp another’s pain when you are not in their skins.

 

The psychology of evil is not so much in question here, it exists, pure and simple; but it is its ubiquitousness and its rhizomatic behaviour that is brought to bear – the thin red line that separates survival and bloodlust, what mitigates one act from another. Wherefore our bloodline, our vessel to salvation?

 

The Assassin is currently showing on SBS on Demand and The Exception is currently showing on Stan.