Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 9/5/2019)

Noted British director Amma Asante alights upon this little-known aspect of Third Reich life in Where Hands Touch. But, while she examined with intelligence and restraint the prejudice experienced by a mixed-race aristocrat in 18th England in Belle (2013) and avoided overt melodramatics in chronicling the romance between a London clerk and the heir to the throne of Bechuanaland in A United Kingdom (2016), Asante laces an already unlikely scenario with a surfeit of clichés and contrivances that serve only to erode its rapidly diminishing credibility. 

In 1944, the SS arrive in the Rhineland town of Rüdesheim to search the house in which 16 year-old Lenya Schlegel (Amandla Stenberg) lives with her mother, Kerstin (Abbie Cornish), and younger brother, Koen (Tom Sweet). Lenya explains in voiceover that she is biracial, as her mother had slept with a black African soldier in 1928. She is not alone, however, and a special department of the Schutzstaffel had been set up to deal with `Hitler's little problem', as the Führer knew he couldn't treat the 25,000 `Mischlingskinder' in the same way that he dealt with the Jews because of their Aryan mothers. 

In fact, Lenya has never seen another black face and, while she is viewed with suspicion around the neighbourhood, she is largely accepted. But, with her daughter reaching maturity, Kerstin decides to take the family by train to the Treptow district of Berlin, where she hopes Lenya won't stand out so obviously in the crowd. However, the teacher at her new school (Lucy Russell) makes an issue of her colour on the first day and Lenya asks Kerstin about her father when she gets home. Coyly, Kerstin states that he was an African soldier who did his duty and Lenya is hurt when her mother lets slip that she made a mistake in sleeping with him. But her attention is distracted to Koen when he reveals that his teacher had slapped him for sticking up forhis sister by declaring her to be perfect. 

While walking along the street, Lenya sees a column of Jews wearing their yellow stars and carrying their belongings in a slow trudge away from their homes. A Hitler Youth asks why a monkey like Lenya isn't being deported with them and she scurries away. However, she catches the eye of Lutz Weissmuller (George Mackay), an older Hitlerjunge who follows her with a mix of curiosity and attraction. 

Fearful that Lenya will be abducted, Kirsten visits her sister (Natasha Little) and her civil servant husband, Wilhelm Warner (Tom Goodman-Hill), to ask if he can use his influence to get Lenya forged documents proving that she has been sterilised. Lenya listens at the door as her aunt and uncle warn Kerstin that Lenya will be lucky to survive the war. Gunther (Will Attenborough) at the bread shop is kind to her and Lutz feels awful when he knocks Lenya over with his bike and she grazes her cheek. However, he is wary of being too kind to her in public, as his father, Heinz (Christopher Eccleston), is a leading Nazi official, albeit one who regrets not being able to spend much time with his son because of his administrative duties. 

Wilhelm secures Lenya some false papers. But she is reluctant to sign because they declare that she must never reproduce with anyone of German blood, when she insists that she has German blood too. Kerstin tries to explain that she will be forcibly prevented from having children unless she goes along with the pretence and persuades her that she cannot allow the Nazis to change her destiny. The authorities do succeed in disbarring Lenya from school, however, and she is conscripted to work in a factory that just happens to be across the road from Heinz's headquarters. He sees Lutz looking at Lenya before he cycles to her home to check that she has recovered from their collision. 

Gunther is shot in the street by an SS officer and Kerstin chides Leyna for calling him a `good Jew' because such epithets are ugly when he should be remembered as a human being who was worthy of respect. Kerstin has a secret radio and hears on the BBC news that the Allied advance across Europe continues apace and she hopes that she can keep her brood together until Hitler is defeated. However, she is powerless to prevent Koen from joining the Hitler Youth and she reminds him that he will be told things that go against what she has taught him and urges him not to believe the lies. 

Heinz says much the same to Lutz on informing him that an SS officer has noticed him in training and is impressed with his progress. But Heinz has no truck with their gung-ho patriotism, as he served in the Great War and saw friends die for nothing. Consequently, he refuses to let his son be sacrificed for a cause in which he does not believe. 

Seeing Koen lining up for a Hitler Youth march, Leyna wishes she could join in and belong. She tries to slip into the ranks, only to be ordered to move away. Undeterred, she tracks the parade to the woods and hides behind a tree to listen to a patriotic song. As she gazes through the mist, however, she is caught snooping by Lutz. Gauchely, he tells her that she is as beautiful as the black woman on the cover of a jazz record that his father covertly listens to at night. 

He sings a snatch of a song and Lenya cautions him to be careful because he could get into trouble for listening to banned music. Lutz leads her through the woods and they reach the lake in a nearby park. Lenya asks if he has ever been swimming in the dark and he removes his boots to paddle. Looking back, he encourages Lenya to join him and they start splashing each other. When people stare as they walk past, however, Leyna ducks under the water and emerges soaked to the skin when the coast is clear. 

At their next outing, Leyna learns that Lutz's mother died when he was young and that he has no fears about fighting. Indeed, he claims that he could kill a Russian in a heartbeat. He asks about her father and she claims that he fought for the Germans. On getting home, however, Lenya is horrified when Kerstin confides that he was a Senegalese in the French army of occupation. Leyna accuses her mother of making her an enemy of Germany twice over. But Kerstin swears that she loved him and urges Lenya to be careful with Lutz, as Heinz will kill them both all if their clandestine friendship is discovered. 

Despite the warning, when Lenya passes Lutz while walking home with her mother, she fibs that she has forgotten her gloves and rushes off to meet Lutz in a doorway. He warms her hands and they kiss. Such is his devotion that he rubs mud in Koen's mouth when he hears him joking about his sister's skin colour with his Hitler Youth pals during target shooting practice in the woods and Koen tells Leyna that he hates her because she's a girl. 

Soon afterwards, their apartment is raided in the middle of the night during a search for Jewish fugitives. A Gestapo agent sets light to Leyna's birth certificate and Kerstin is only able to save half of it. Meanwhile, Lutz remains determined to do his bit for the Fatherland and argues with Heinz about the validity of the cause. He explains that he is merely following his mother's wishes in seeking to keep him safe and laments that the men on the Eastern Front are dying for a delusion. 

Despite his eagerness to fight, Lutz remains besotted with Lenya and smuggles her back to the house in order to avoid running into the troops searching for the last Jews in Berlin. He shows her a magazine with Billie Holiday on the cover and plays her `Let's Call a Heart a Heart'. They dance after Lutz reveals that he used to hear his father playing the song to remind him of his wife. When Lenya asks Lutz if he thinks that the singer is happy in America, he avers that they hate black people even more than the Germans and think nothing of hanging them from trees.

The pair are disturbed by near-blind furniture maker Fritz Engle banging on the window. Indeed, they are scared into each other's arms and make love. Lenya asks if Lutz had done it before and he insists he has. However, while walking Lenya home after curfew and nearly being caught by a patrol, he admits that it was his first time and gives her the Iron Cross ring that his mother had given him. 

As their Jewish neighbours had been arrested during the round-up, Kerstin is furious with Lenya for taking such reckless risks. While walking to work the next morning, she orders her daughter to stay away from Lutz. However, they bump into an SS guard at the factory gates and his superior orders them to stop. He accuses Kerstin of being a whore who has shamed the nation and gives her the choice of losing her child or submitting to detention. Admonishing Lenya for crying, Kerstin tells her to be strong, as she is led away. 

Unable to face the truth, Lenya tells Koen that their mother has moved away to take up a well-paid job. However, he is not convinced and Lenya receives more bad news when Fritz informs her that Lutz has been sent to the Eastern Front. Realising she's pregnant and that she will no longer be protected by her fake papers, Lenya entrusts Koen to her aunt and heads to work. She becomes frightened when she sees a document check at the gate and betrays another woman running away in order to create a diversion. But she is caught and dispatched to a labour camp. 

Despite being told by a female guard (Hermione Gulliford) that her mother had betrayed her at her conception, Lenya is given a job in the kitchen. She is also befriended by Hermine (Olivia Vinall), who recommends that she ignores the taunts of the bigots in their barracks. When they can't sleep at night, they share treasured moments involving hugs and ice cream. However, Hermine notices that Lenya is pregnant and is fearful for her safety. When Lenya reaches out her hand to catch what look like grey flakes of snow, Hermine tells her about the Jewish camp across the fields and explains that the ash has something to do with the black smoke belches out of the giant chimney. 

Having survived the traumas of the frontline, Lutz arrives at the camp in time to save Lenya from having to undress in the muddy courtyard after a guard suspects her of smuggling food out of the kitchen after she drops a potato into a puddle. As Hermine had bound Lenya's stomach with sacking to prevent her bump from showing, she had promised to steal her a potato to exchange for a new pair of shoes, as hers are falling apart. But Lutz spares her the indignity of exposure and escorts Lenya to her hut before going to see Heinz, who just happens to have been transferred to the camp and has wangled Lutz a commission in the SS to keep him out of harm's way. He agrees that they have fetched up in a sordid place, but reminds his son that it is always preferable to watch others die than dying oneself. 

When he next encounters Lenya, Lutz asks her to walk with him and they find a derelict hut, where he describes his hideous experience in a death camp after being spared active service. He inquires about her family and feels ashamed that she has ended up in such a godforsaken place. Overcoming her misgivings, Lenya sneaks out to keep a nocturnal rendezvous and Lutz wraps her in his great coat. They embrace and he realises that she is carrying his child. 

Meanwhile, the increasingly self-loathing Heinz is under pressure from the Gestapo commander (Michael McKell) to show more zeal. He accuses him of always ducking the big issues and gloatingly taunts him with the news that his friends in Berlin have been arrested for plotting against Hitler. Another soldier presents Heinz with the Iron Cross ring that he had found among the confiscated jewellery and he realises that Lutz must have given it to Leyna. He walks with his son so that they can watch Lenya peeling potatoes and Heniz reminds Lutz that he has a duty to survive. However, Lutz hisses that they are cowards rather than heroes and has to be reminded by his father that soldiers kill ordinary people as well as fellow warriors because war is a sordid business. 

During the night, Hermine has her shoes stolen and she confides in Lenya that she is a Jew, whose family has perished in the camps. She is terrified that she will have endured so much to survive, only to be executed by the SS sadist who does the roll call (Simon Harrison). The next morning, he sees Hermine barefoot and orders Lutz to shoot her. He doesn't have the nerve, however, and the guard kills her himself. Seething with rage, he points his pistol at Lenya. But she throws up on his boots before fainting and Lutz saves her by picking on another woman in the line-up to create a diversion. 

When they next meet, Lenya bemoans the fact that she has only ever wanted to be a German. But nobody has accepted her. Lutz suggests that they run away, but she protests that they won't get anywhere because her face will give them away. He insists that he should be able to get hold of a motorbike and sidecar the next time there's an air raid because there is always chaos when the siren sounds. However, with the Red Army and the Americans closing in, Heinz has been given orders to remove the prisoners from the camp and destroy any incriminating evidence. He is also keen to send Lutz back to Berlin because he knows that any Germans caught in the camps will face reprisals. But Lutz refuses to go. 

Instead, he smuggles some clothing for Leyna to wear during their escape. But he is dragged to an air-raid shelter and is unable to steal the motorbike. The next morning, Lutz learns that the female prisoners are going to march to another camp and he refuses to obey when Heinz orders him to leave in his car. He reveals that Leyna is pregnant, only for Heinz to remind him that Germany will never allow them to be happy and that he has to do what's best for himself. Lutz, however, is determined to find Leyna, But, as he charges around the camp, Heinz shoots him in the back to spare him any future misery. 

Leyna sits beside her beloved's body until a black GI (Tomiwa Edun) picks her up and carries her away. She is taken to a transit camp, where the kindly stranger tries to speak to her in French and urge her to register so that they can start helping her. He calls her `a good German girl' and smiles. As she sits outside one day, Lenya spots Koen and Kerstin in the registration queue and rushes over to them. They are reunited, with the relieved mother embracing the mother-to-be who has repeated her mistake for exactly the same reason - that love is more powerful than hate. 

It should come as no surprise to learn that Asante has been criticised in the United States for daring to suggest that an Afro-German character could harbour anti-Semitic sentiments. She has also been attacked for attempted to depict the human side of a Nazi who is too immature to recognise the contradiction inherent in championing the cause of racial purity and admiring the jazz played by African-American musicians. But where Asante fails here is not in her selection of provocative material, but in her disappointingly novelettish approach to issues that demand to be considered with gravitas and in depth rather than with the kind of Young Adult superficiality for which she has opted. 

Having made such a magnificent start to her directorial career with A Way of Life (2004), Asante is fully entitled to go her own way. But she lacks the courage of her convictions in tip-toeing through the complexities of Lenya's situation. Moreover, she sells her story short by saddling it with so many convolutions, while she does her committed cast few favours by asking them to deliver often overripe dialogue in `Allo `Allo accents. She's not helped, however, by the lacklustre performances of Abbie Cornish and Christopher Eccleston or by the fact that there is precious little chemistry between Amandla Stenberg and George Mackay outside their deeply touching love scene. 

The self-consciously swirling strings of Anne Chmelewsky's mawkishly manipulative score further distance the viewer from the drama, as does the seemingly under-funded production design of Arwel W. Jones, which only feels palpably 1940s during the concentration camp sequences. Veteran cinematographer Remi Adefarasin strives hard to achieve a degree of intimacy and authenticity, but Asante's soft-focus romanticism saps the sincerity of a story that needed telling in our own intolerant times - but with more intensity, ambiguity and nuance and with markedly less cornball coincidence and saccharine contrivance.

A couple of weeks ago, we saw how Paolo Sorrentino used the earthquake at L'Aquila to close Loro, his scathing non-biopic of former Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. Now, CinemaItaliaUK reveals how Pippo Mezzapesa examines the subject in more depth and with more nuance in Il Bene Mio/My Own Good, which has been filmed in the ancient town of Apice in the province of Benevento, which had (until recently) been left empty after its population had fled the terrifying 1980 Irpinia earthquake that claimed 2500 lives and left thousands more injured and destitute.

Elia (Sergio Rubini) is the last remaining resident of Provvidenza, a small hill town that was abandoned shortly after being hit by the earthquake that killed Elio's teacher wife. Maria (Caterina Valente). When Bartolo (Giuseppe Giangregorio) the shepherd is buried beneath some crumbling masonry, Mayor Pasquale (Francesco De Vito)  pleads with Elio to move to the home that has been reserved for him in Nuova Provvidenza. However, he thinks `A52' sounds like a move in a game of Battleships and he refuses to budge. 

He puts on a brave face when his tour guide buddy Gesualdo (Dino Abbrescia) brings a party of Japanese sightseers to the ghost town and even agrees to pose with them in front of a canvas depicting everyday life before the earth moved. But, when Gesualdo suggests they go on their travels like they used to do, Elio declines the invitation because he knows he will never be permitted to return if he ventures outside the town boundaries. 

Elia is particularly protective of the primary school where Maria was trapped and can always tell when the creaks and groans that periodically pierce the silence are coming from the building whose iron gates he keeps locked. Maria's friend, Rita (Teresa Saponangelo), brings Elia his shopping and tries to keep him cheerful. But he doesn't think there is much to smile about, as he keeps his vigil over the deserted town and makes his rounds by lantern light after some motorcyclists speed through the streets for kicks. As Elia trudges through the darkness, a snake slithers through the dust of his dilapidated Eden. 

Spooked by a cat that tries to steal the fish finger he had left on his plate and a pigeon that flies out of the school, Elia becomes convinced that he is not entirely alone. After telling a party of tourists about Maria's obsession with Kevin Costne's Dances With Wolves (1990), he finds a hand print on a window in his house. However, as he knocks himself out in trying to prevent the motorbike gang from stealing a Marian statue from the church, he fails to see Noor (Sonya Mellah) pelting them with stones in order to drive them away. 

When he wakes the next morning, he realises that his wedding ring is missing and bursts into tears when the pew collapses underneath him. Noor watches him from behind a pillar and is grateful when Rita arrives just as she coughs and almost gives herself away. They smoke a cigarette while lying on the church floor to feel the force of gravity pulling on them and Rita recalls how one of the children hiding under their desks during the quake had given her a huge gap-toothed grin. He wonders whether Maria had seen the boy before she died. 

Meanwhile, Noor has slipped into Elia's house to take some clothes from Maria's wardrobe. She falls asleep on the bed and leaves the wedding ring on the pillow before making her escape through a window. The next morning, Elia is disturbed by a newlyweds posing for photographs against the ruins and is furious to discover that Pasquale has started building a wall to seal Provvidenza off from the rest of the world. As Elia's brother-in-law, he warns him to pack up and leave and stop fantasising that he is somehow keeping Maria alive by haunting favourite places like the cinema, where he sits in an aisle seat and hears the dubbed dialogue in his head, as he gazes at space where the screen used to be.

Pasquale organises a procession to escort the statue of Mary out of the town. A band plays behind the townsfolk, while Elia dresses in his best suit and prepares to kill himself by placing a plastic bag over his head. Noor bursts into the bedroom and tears a hole in the bag and he chases after her because she is wearing one of Maria's dresses. Hearing him yelling in the distance, Pasquale rolls his eyes. But Gesualdo manages to calm him down after Noor takes sanctuary in the school. When darkness falls, Elia plonks a chair outside the gates and tells the stranger he can wait as long as it takes for her to show herself. 

He dozes off and bawls at Rita when she refuses to believe that there is anybody else in the town. But his patience is rewarded when Noor creeps out of the school when it starts to rain and collapses on the ground beside his chair. Elia carries her home through the storm and helps her out of her wet dress, as she shivers beneath a blanket. Rummaging through her holdall, he finds a snapshot of her family and surmises that she is a North African migrant. 

When Gesualdo brings a party of Americans, Elio goes to tell him that he has found his interloper, but he catches Noor's eye and pretends to be joking. She pleads with Elia not to turn her over to the police and he squeezes her hand in reassuring her that they are illegals together. He hides her from Rita when she brings supplies and hints once again that she is tired of coming home to an empty house after a day running her café. But Elia changes the subject, as they eat their lunch watching the workmen building Pasquale's wall.  

While Noor sleeps, Elia takes a sledgehammer to the breeze blocks and Pasquale is furious when he sees the damage. Traffic warden Gustavo (Michele Sinisi) is equally put out when Elia tears up an eviction notice because his son died in the school and returning to the scene reminds him of his loss. However, Noor thinks that Elia has called the police to arrest her and she stalks out of the town, only to run into the biker kids. Elia rescues her by teasing their leader about the fact that he used to wear Coke bottle glasses and Noor scuttles after her saviour when he crosses the stone bridge over the river. 

Some time later, Gesualdo comes to wish Elia a happy birthday and they open a bottle of fizz. He shows him the plans he has been working on to relaunch their travel agency with a pilgrimage to Lourdes. But Elia recalls that they were on a trip when the earthquake struck and he continues to blame himself for not being there when Maria needed him. However, when Noor reveals after a spaghetti supper that she is heading to France to reunite with her twin sister, Adila, Elia realises that Gesualdo could smuggle her across the border in his coach. 

While they chat, however, the bully boys arrive and lure Elia outside by cutting the power. The doctor's son he had teased about his glasses gives him a beating and, as she tends to his wounds, Noor suggests that Elia joins her in France. He begins to wonder if she has a point when Pasquale comes to the house to inform Elia that he will have him removed by force unless he leaves under his own steam. 

Waking the next morning to feel Maria lying beside him (even though Noor has wandered in and lain down on the bed), Elia goes for what seems to be a last look around Provvidenza. He reaches the school gates and realises that he can't go. He talks Gesualdo into taking Noor and she looks back through the window, as the coach pulls away. 

Elia returns to the house to make his final preparations and there is no sign of him when Pasquale arrives with Rita, Gustavo and a couple of cops. The mayor enters the house alone and sees that Elia has unlocked the door leading to the upper storey. Venturing up the stairs, he sees shelves stacked with items that Elia has recovered from the rubble and repaired. Among them is the singing fish that used to hang on his own wall and smiles as he pushes the button and it wriggles into life. Rita finds pictures that her class had been drawing on the day of the earthquake, while Gustavo finds his son's skateboard. 

As Elia's former neighbours retrieve their own treasured belongings, Pasquale goes looking for his brother-in-law. But it's Rita who finds him at the school gates. Dressed in his suit, he looks round at people clutching their keepsakes and smiles quietly before pushing open the gate. With a Robert Johnson blues classic playing on the soundtrack, the camera pulls away from Elia, however, to follow Bartolo's flock, which has wandered in to congregate around the spot where its owner had perished. 

Delicately directed by Pippo Mezzapesa and photographed with an evocatively reverential sense of place by Giorgio Giannoccaro, this is a touching treatise on loss, memory and finding ways to cope that leaves one longing to see Mezzapesa's debut feature, Annalisa (2011), a coming-of-age drama set in his native Apulia. In some ways, it shares themes with Simone Spada's Hotel Gagarin (2018), in which a film crew stranded in Armenia make little movie mementos for the locals, while the scene in which the townsfolk are reunited with their possessions has much the same emotional impact as the Kiss montage in Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso (1988). 

Francesco De Vito and Dino Abbrescia make effective contributions as the anti-hero's brother-in-law and best friend, whose determination to move on with their lives suggests that they are as much in denial as Elia himself. Teresa Saponangelo and Sonya Mellah are equally impressive, as they seek to offer Elia a way out of his lonely vigil. But they underestimate both his love for his wife and the guilt he feels at having survived. Always a compelling presence, Sergio Rubini is outstanding, as the fool on the hill, who has taken it upon himself to remember not only those who died, but the lifestyle they had taken for granted. 

Doubtless this will be a painful watch for those in places like L'Aquila, Marche and Amatrice. But Mezzapesa pays sincere tribute to the memory of their victims, while also having a gentle dig at both the mentality of small-town functionaries and Donald Trump, whose wall is satirised, along with his hairstyle and the brand of populism that he inherited from the likes of Berlusconi. However, it's more likely that this is a reference to Domenico Lucano, the mayor of Riace in Calabria, who did much to revitalise his stagnating community by inviting around 450 refugees to settle there - before he came under investigation for shady practices.

By all accounts, director Jamie Adams planned to take a break from film-making when he moved his family to Cornwall and started teaching at the Falmouth University film school. The moment he stepped on to the campus, however, memories of his own college days came flooding back, along with notions about perpetual studenthood as a means of arresting the ageing process and the need to have to face up to reality. 

The resulting feature, Songbird, follows A Wonderful Christmas Time (2014), Wild Honey Pie (2018) and the forthcoming Bittersweet Symphony (2019) in taking its title from a well-known tune. Indeed, at some point along the way, the movie was going to be called Alright Now. While its nomenclature isn't entirely original, it also contains echoes of themes that Adams had previously explored in his folk scene comedy, Benny & Jolene (2014), and the creative retreat saga, Black Mountain Poets (2015). But this is an affable offering that, curiously, has a passing similarity to Liberal Arts (2012), which was written and directed by star Cobie Smulders's fellow How I Met Your Mother alumnus, Josh Radnor.

It might be hard to believe that `What Did We Learn Today' was a Britpop anthem that spent 14 weeks at No.1, as the vocal is flat and the promo video is dismally dull. However, The Filthy Dukes were a massive band and American Joanne Skye (Cobie Smulders) was a massive star. But that was 1998 and the combo that once played Glastonbury is now on the comeback trail at the Mono Club in Weymouth. The prospect of playing to a clutch of disinterested stragglers doesn't appeal to guitarist Pamela (Abbie Murphy), bassist Kelly (Laura Patch) and drummer Tony (Ian Smith) and they quit backstage, prompting Joanne to smash the instruments and break up with manager-boyfriend, Larry (Noel Clarke). 

She makes her way to the sleepy Cornish town of Penderyn, where she has an amusing encounter with a drunk in a local bar who thinks he recognises her before running into her old friend, Sara (Jessice Hynes), who had lost touch after ending a long-term relationship and moving into a caravan. During the course of a drunken evening, Joanne applies to study marine biology at the university where Sara had studied, as she likes eating fish and wants to know more about them. Much to her surprise, she discovers the next day that she has been accepted and rolls up to the campus with Sara to become a student. 

Enjoying being recognised, Joanne poses for numerous selfies before discovering that the man in charge of registration, Pete (Richard Elis), is the loudmouth from the bar and she delights in shaming him into awarding her a place on the course and accommodation in a hall of residence when he realises that Sara had enrolled her under her real surname of Jones. While bouncing around her new room, Joanne meets dorm neighbours Susie (Mandeep Dhillon), Mandy (Emily Atack) and Tara (Holli Dempsey) and teases Susie about the fact that she used to listen to The Filthy Dukes with her dad. 

Tara sniffily invites them to a barbecue on the beach and Joanne and Sara decide to go while stuffing themselves with healthy toppings in the campus pizzeria. Moreover, they persuade Pete to bring some of his friends because Joanne and Sara have a £50 bet on who will get to sleep with a bloke first. For all Tara's airs, they gathering is rather crummy and Sara finds herself chatting to Pete's colleague, Olivia (Daisy Haggard), while Joanne tries to seduce Pete by walking along the tideline at dusk and playing football. When she gets him back to her room, however, he talks so much that she falls asleep while massaging his back and he runs into Tara, Mandy and Susie as he tries to beat a shirtlessly discreet retreat. 

Having sparred with Tara during a testy encounter in the communal Flat 8 kitchen, Joanne goes for a run and is communing with a tree when Pete creeps up to apologise for leaving without saying goodbye. Instinctively, Joanne pivots and kicks the Welshman in the groin and accepts his invitation to lunch to make amends. In the curiously empty canteen, the couple chat awkwardly about Grunge, Britpop, Stuart Rosenberg's Cool Hand Luke (1967) and dead parents before having a food fight. 

By the time Sara catches up with them, they are filling out forms for Joanne to apply for a hardship grant. However, Pete is less than impressed to learn that he had been the subject of a sex bet and he leaves Joanne and Sara to wager on who gets bought the most free drinks in the student union. A `fun time' montage follows that culminates in Sara, Daisy and a student named Hannah (Tara Lee) looking on in embarrassment, as Joanne tries to make up to Pete, only to make things worse by jumping on his back in order to ride him like a cowgirls. As he leaves, Larry appears out of the blue and Pete turns to see him kissing Joanne. However, she humiliates him by getting him to strip naked outside her room and locks him out so that he has to scurry away from the giggling Susie, Tara and Mandy. 

Next day, Pete finds Joanne while she is sitting beneath an old gnarled tree and is relieved when she tells him that Larry is a figure from her past and not her future. He offers to be there for her and she agrees to play Beauty to his Hidden Beast. However, she suggests that they slow things down a bit and remember the Tortoise and the Hare. They walk along the path beside the beach and munch on kebabs, as Pete encourages Joanne to make contact with her estranged father, Griffin (Griffin Dunne), in Seattle. 

Returning to the dorm, Joanne and Pete are playing football in the corridor when Mandy, Susie and Tara ask her advice for a theme for the Flat 8 party. She suggests a 90s bash and jokes that they could become the new Spice Girls and teases Pete when he claims that she could be Pretty Spice. Tara isn't convinced, but Mandy thinks it's a brilliant idea and they shuffle off to make plans, as Sara arrives in high dudgeon because Joanne has been neglecting her. Moreover, she has failed to attend her induction session and Joanne snaps at her when Sara reminds her that she will be sent down unless she starts taking her classes seriously. 

Pete buys Joanne a picture book of Aesop's fable, while she tries to write a song about being the Hare to Pete's Tortoise. When they meet up, she makes him a cup of tea and tells him to be more confident and assertive. He plucks up the courage to criticise her weak tea and she kisses him passionately and barges past Sara and Daisy to drag him off to bed. However, Mandy is already there snogging with Steve (Craig Russell) and suggests they have a foursome. But, while Pete pulls off his shirt and tries to be cool about Joanne flirting with Mandy, he is put off my Steve molesting him and makes his excuses. Realising that she wanted to be alone with Pete and not relive her wild heyday, Joanne asks Mandy and Neil to leave and tells Larry that they are over when he attempts to serenade her from under her window. 

Having struggled to make any headway with her song, Joanne Skypes Griffin and asks him to tell her the story about how he met her mother. He explains that their friends had tried to matchmake them before they met as strangers at a party and realised they were made for each other. Joanne gets tearful and Griffin urges her to come home. But she promises she is doing well and is so over the band breaking up that she is ready to take the next big step in her life. 

While blowing up balloons for the party, Sara tries to cheer Joanne up after Daisy says she has probably scared Pete off. When Joanne reveals that she is quitting to return to the States, Sara reminds her that it isn't easy for hares to become tortoises overnight and encourages her to tell Pete how she feels. Finding no one home, Joanne leaves the message `I'm the Girl' in flour one the pavement and goes to the party. As she is getting ready, she finds the book under the bed with an inscription claiming that anything can happen and she builds the line into a song that she sings to Pete when he comes to the bar. Sara smiles from the dance floor, as she sees her friend kissing her unlikely beau and finding her happy ending.

Improv is a risky business, with even the most accomplished practitioners occasionally enduring those tumbleweed moments. There are plenty of them in this low-budget romcom, as Jamie Adams struggles to draw life lessons or raise many smiles from his sketchily drawn characters. Yet, while she may fall some way short of Natalie Portman's strutting turn in Brady Corbet's Vox Lux, Cobie Smulders strives valiantly to make us believe that she is a rock chick at the crossroads who is so insecure and uncertain that she might just fall for a schlubby everyman like Richard Elis's (ridiculously under-worked in Freshers' Week) university registrar. 

It seems odd that Joanne should only now be facing the prospect of being washed up when she is playing Dorset pubs after once headlining world famous festivals. But there are so many pickable holes in the scenario that there's little to be gained by worrying at them. More problematic is the fact that talented performers like Daisy Haggard, Noel Clarke, Emily Atack and Mandeep Dhillon are saddled with such negligible roles. Jessica Hynes - who is reuniting with Adams after he executive produced her equally implausible directorial debut, The Fight (2018) - is even more wastefully shortchanged, as her character is picked up and discarded whenever Adams needs to move the meandering plot along. 

Yet, for all its flaws (including songs that sound nothing like the Britpop produced by the icons acknowledged in the closing crawl), this eager to please picture just about keeps viewers onside. Newcomer Bet Rourich keeps his camera close to the characters in a bid to disguise the eerie emptiness of what should be a thronging campus, while the trust that Adams places in his ensemble is rewarded with the odd sequence in which concept and execution align. For the most part, however, this feels like a workshop exercise that might have benefitted from a bit more time and money.

Thanks to an unholy tangle of technical issues and legal injunctions, it has taken 47 years for the concert film Amazing Grace to reach the screen. Few will deny, however, that the wait has been worthwhile, as this is a thrilling vérité record of Aretha Franklin's two-night sojourn at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in the Watts district of Los Angeles in January 1972. 

Having started singing gospel music at the age of 14 in her pastor father CL Franklin's Detroit church, Franklin felt the need to return to her roots, as she approached her 30th year. By all accounts, her record label was reluctant to let her make a gospel album, as the suits feared the tracks would get little airplay on cross-over radio stations and that the kids who had bought Franklin's 20 LPs and 11 chart-topping singles would be put off by a dose of old-time religion.   

But Franklin insisted on staging the concert under the musical direction of the Reverend James Cleveland and word reached the front office of Warner Brothers, who sent director Sydney Pollack and a film crew to capture the event for posterity, as concert movies had acquired a certain cachet. In an effort not to disturb Franklin and her fellow performers, however, Pollack decided not to use clapperboards during the shoot, with the result that he was left with several cans of unsynchronised sound and imagery. When it came to edit the material, therefore, it was impossible to achieve an audiovisual match up and, even though the soundtrack album went on to become the biggest-selling release of Franklin's career, the decision was taken to abandon the accompanying documentary.

In 2007, music executive Alan Elliott mortgaged his house to buy the reels that had been gathering dust in the Warner vault. The dying Pollack gave him his blessing and, with the likes of Spike Lee joining the roster of producers, Elliott used the latest digital equipment to lock sound and vision together. Modestly, he only takes a simple `realised by' credit on a picture that would have knocked Blaxploitation back on its heels back in the early 70s. Yet, even though the print was ready to release in 2015, Franklin refused to give her permission for it to be shown, even on the festival circuit. Thus, it is only with her passing on 16 August last year that Elliott has finally been able to present one of the rough-and-ready gems of rockumentary cinema. 

Resplendent in the silver spangled waistcoats worn over their simple black robes, the members of the Southern California Community Choir proclaim they are on the road to glory, as they are led into the church by the Reverend Cleveland. As they take their seats behind the pulpit, the `King of Gospel Music' reminds the sparse congregation that they are about to witness a live recording and that there might be the occasional need to do things again. He also urges them to sound like 2000 to create a vibrant atmosphere. 

Wearing a plain white kaftan and ornate drop earrings, Aretha Franklin walks sedately down a side aisle and takes her place at the piano to open with the Marvin Gaye number, `Wholy Holy'. She is clearly in fine voice and has come to give praise rather than play the soul diva. Indeed, she allows Cleveland to do all of the talking between the numbers and mostly listens demurely, with her eyes lowered and her thoughts focused. 

Cleveland reminds the assembled that Franklin in a preacher's daughter, as he takes over at the piano for `What a Friend We Have in Jesus'. In an effort to provide a little variation, editor Jeff Buchanan starts `How I Got Over' with a rehearsal clip before cutting back to the concert, as Franklin's face becomes beaded with perspiration, as she belts out the lyrics. 

She duets with Cleveland on `Precious Memories', during which he calls on the congregation to raise a hand to show their love for the Lord. He also encourages everyone to shake hands with the person next to them and tell them about their faith in Jesus Christ. It's heady stuff and Franklin raises her hand along with everyone else before greeting conductor, Alexander Hamilton.

The excellence of his choir is very much in evidence in the medley composed of `Precious Lord, Take My Hand and a rejigging of Carole King's `You've Got a Friend' that manages to be both deeply spiritual and musically exhilarating. However, Franklin saves the best for last. After Cleveland reveals that she had tears in her eyes during rehearsals, she produces a truly magnificent rendition of `Amazing Grace' that has the choristers jumping up and shouting their encouragement during a performance of power and poignancy. 

At one point, Cleveland has to step away from the piano to cover his face with a cloth and Hamilton slips seamlessly into his place. But the preacher regains his composure in time to whisk Franklin away from the pulpit while promising the congregation that the second night will be even more remarkable. Strains of George Harrison's `My Sweet Lord' can be heard in the recessional jam played by guitarist Cornell Dupree, bassist Chuck Rainey, organist Kenny Luper, drummer Bernard Purdie and percussionist Poncho Morales, as Franklin departs and the image fades. 

Throughout the first half, Sydney Pollack and his crew have been discreetly visible, while scuttling around the tiny dais to get the best shots of Franklin, Cleveland, the animated choir and the awestruck audience. Scene-setting shots provide a bridge into the second night, which is made a little more stellar by the presence of Rolling Stones Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts, who had taken a break from the Exile on Main Street sessions to sit at the back of the church and marvel at Franklin's brilliance.

Taking the microphone, Cleveland asks how many people have returned for a second night, as word has clearly got round because the congregation has almost doubled in size. They applaud enthusiastically, as Aretha enters wearing a green-patterned kaftan and a chunky gold chain. At various points, she will sport a pair of earrings, but (as in a continuity assistant's nightmare), they come and go as the evening progresses. Once again, she remains modestly detached, as she leaves the talking to Cleveland and concentrates on the task at hand. 

She opens with the spiritual `Mary, Don't You Weep' before Cleveland welcomes fur-bedecked gospel legend Clara Ward to the front pew, along with Aretha's preacher father, Clarence Franklin, who glad hands his way along the aisle in a natty blue suit. His presence seems to unsettle his daughter, who false starts on `Climbing Higher Mountains', which Cleveland dedicates to her father.

Unable to resist, the camera picks out Jagger, as he gets to his feet to clap and sway along to the rocking reprise. The screen splits briefly to show Aretha and Cleveland duetting before what appears to be a mother and daughter come to the front to contribute an impromptu buck-and-wing dance routine. A choir member with a passing resemblance to James Brown also struts his stuff in urging Aretha on, as she improvises at the pulpit. She also claps along vigorously to `Old Landmark', a rousing foot-stomper that once again showcases the excellence of the choir. 

By now, Jagger has edged his way towards the front and he is seen in close-up, as Cleveland asks CL Franklin to say a few words. Aretha smiles quietly, as he praises the choir and the band. But she looks a bit embarrassed, as her father recalls hearing her sing at home when she was six years old. She joined him on the road at 11 and helped people praise the Lord with her voice. Franklin acknowledges the influence of Clara Ward and Mahalia Jackson on Aretha's style and thanks Cleveland for his contribution to fostering her talent. In conclusion, Franklin remembers being asked in a dry cleaner's when Aretha was going to come back to the church and he insists that she has never left it. 

The homily sits a little awkwardly in proceedings and those aware of the subsequent revelations about Franklin's private life will doubtless read much into Aretha's body language. Opinion will also be divided about the way in which Franklin comes forward to mop his daughter's brow, as she sits at the piano for `Never Grow Old', before returning to his seat to exchange wisecracks with his assistant. The sense that the guests are striving to draw focus away from Aretha is confirmed when Pollack scrambles past her to get shots of Clara Ward dancing with her elderly mother. 

Aretha closes her eyes to shut out the distractions on the front row, as she completes the song. But she throws herself into the reprise, as she joins the choir in rousing repetitions of the line `so glad I got religion' that has every single soul on their feet. As the applause dies down, Aretha expresses her thanks before wishing God's blessing on everyone and the night draws to a close. 

With the rawness of the footage adding to `being there' intimacy of Pollacks's shooting style, this is a priceless record of a landmark performance. Backed by the larger-than-life Cleveland, a fine band (drawn from the Atlantic Records session ranks) and an extraordinary choir, Franklin delivers the gospel standards that evidently mean a good deal to her with the sincerity and artistry that set her apart from her contemporaries on the soul, funk and R&B scenes. The personal nature of the project shines through, as Franklin performs for a celestial, as much as for a temporal audience. But there's nothing pompously pious about her set, as she sings to please, as well as preach and praise. 

Sadly, the aggregated delays mean that the documentary won't have the socio-cultural impact that it might well have had in 1972. But any hip-hop fan with a knowledge of musical history will recognise the significance of gospel in the evolution of African-American music and will treasure this as a seminal moment in the career of Aretha Franklin and in the development of black community consciousness in the aftermath of the Civil Rights campaign and the emergence of the Black Panthers. After Tuesday's miracle at Anfield, however, it's a shame there was no room for Aretha's version of `You'll Never Walk Alone', which can be found on the soundtrack album.

Almost two decades ago, the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford hosted a wonderful exhibition entitled, Weegee: Days and Nights in New York. Anyone who delighted in the monochrome images captured by Arthur Fellig will want to catch Andy Dunn's stylish documentary, Last Stop Coney Island: The Life and Photography of Harold Feinstein, as the teenage Brooklynite found himself hobnobbing with the likes of Weegee, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Richard Avedon, W. Eugene Smith, Ansel Adams and Elizabeth Bourke-White as a member of the fabled Photo League. 

The son of a meat wholesaler, Harold Feinstein was born in 1931, with the sound of the Coney Island funfair booming a stone's throw away. At 15, he started taking photographs on the streets around his home with the Rolleiflex camera he had borrowed from an upstairs neighbour. Within three years, he had become the youngest member of the Photo League and had been contacted by Edward Steichen, the photography director at the Museum of Modern Art, about purchasing some of his images for the collection.

An instinctive artist with an easy way with his subjects, Feinstein set out to capture life and soon realised that this meant photographing ordinary people. As Dunn reveals in focusing on the details within the pictures, Feinstein caught the pugnacity of the scruffy kids he found around his own rundown neighbourhood in the 1940s and the unselfconscious revellers on the beach and the Boardwalk at New York's seaside playground. Even when he was drafted to fight in the Korean War, Feinstein continued to record the scene around him, with a distinctive blend of intimacy and intuition. 

Back on Civvy Street, he took shots for the covers of Blue Note albums and contributed regularly to publications like Liberation and Evergreen Review. However, while he was prepared to share gallery space with Garry Winogrand. Feinstein's decision to decline an invitation to contribute to MoMa's epochal 1955 exhibition, `The Family of Man', alienated him from the photographic establishment whose rules he had long been kicking against. Consequently, with his star waning, he accepted a teaching job in Philadelphia, where he rediscovered his love for the form in passing on his expertise and spirit to students of the calibre of Mary Ellen Mark and Mariette Pathy Allen. 

They are among the talking heads Dunn canvasses for their recollections of Feinstein the photographer and the man. He had a dark side, with problems with drink impacting upon his first marriages. But all agree that he was a gentle soul whose eccentricities fed into his work. Dunn first came across him when he spotted a Kickstarter campaign to publish a book of his pictures. Tracking him down to Merrimac, Massachusetts. he was lucky enough to spend time with Feinstein after he suffered a heart attack in his 80s. Moreover, he even persuaded him to return to Coney Island for a shoot that proved anything but a misty-eyed trip down memory lane, as it also revealed how Feinstein had come to master digital technology. 

At a time when mobile phones allow people to point and click at anything that takes their fancy, it's useful to reflect on the dying arts of composing and printing images. Following on from the charming BBC documentary, The Girl From Ipanema: Brazil, Bossa Nova and the Beach (2016), Dunn is clearly fascinated by Feinstein's method, as well as his Dude Lebowski-like personality. But he lingers longest over his photographs and deftly switches between close-ups and wider angles to explore Feinstein's ability to root subjects in their locale. Serving as his own cinematographer and teaming well with editor Lawrence Huck and composer Mike Smith (of Gorillaz fame), Dunn has produced a thoughtfully fond snapshot of a meticulous maverick and the world he saw through his lens.

This column has always welcomed true-life adventure films like Richard Parry's Base, Jennifer Peedom's Mountain (both 2017), Chris Lucas's The Yukon Assignment (2018), and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin's remarkable duo of Meru (2015) and the Oscar-winning Free Solo (2018). For all the vertiginous thrills offered by these documentaries, the emphasis often falls on the human side of heroism and this is very much the case with Robbie Fraser's Final Ascent. Drawing on the archives of pioneering climber Hamish MacInnes, this is not just a celebration of the Scotsman's derring-do. It also chronicles his most challenging mission to recover his memory after enduring a mental health crisis brought on by an acute urinary infection.

As friends Michael Palin, Yvon Chouinard and Chris Bonnington testify in the opening remarks, Hamish MacInnes was a maverick spirit, who did things his way. The fact, therefore, that he was sectioned against his will after being found collapsed outside his Glencoe home was a shattering experience. As was the discovery that he had lost his memory while in confinement. Fortunately, having written around 40 books and made dozens of films during his climbing career, MacInnes was able to piece his life together and he comments on how peculiar it felt to be an outside observer of one's own past. 

While chatting to Mary Marquis on the BBC's First Person Singular programme in 1974, he recalls attempting to climb Everest with Jonny Cunningham after hearing that there was an unclaimed consignment of Swedish food at one of the base camps. Reckoning he could save a considerable amount of money by availing himself of these free supplies, MacInnes set off on a whim, only to discover while in the Himalayas that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had beaten them to the summit. 

Undaunted, MacInnes (who had climbed the Matterhorn at the age of 16) sought other expeditions and, in 1959, he joined soldier Mike Banks in a bid to scale the world's highest unclimbed mountain, Rakaposhi in Pakistan. The party was presumed lost after a difficult ascent and MacInnes reveals that he has been left for dead on a number of occasions. Bonnington suggests they have both been exceedingly lucky and MacInnes doubts that he has been watched over by a benevolent deity. But, while he doesn't put his doughtiness solely down to his own ability, he does claim to possess a sixth sense where danger is concerned and has usually found ways to avoid it. 

Over footage from the BBC's Men Against the Matterhorn (1963), MacInnes recalls how he became expedition cameraman and how he acquired his love of photography from his sisters. Born in Gatehouse of Fleet in 1930, he grew up in an active family and devoured the Wide World magazines that his Great War veteran father left lying around the house. Filled with tales of brave adventure, this publication and Alexandra David-Neel's With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet fired the young Hamish's imagination and he first went climbing with neighbour Bill Hargreaves, who was the local tax inspector. He also joined the famous Creagh Dhu Climbing Club from Glasgow and remembers how the Buddhist meditations he had learned from David-Neel's book helped him survive an eight-hour ordeal in the crevasse in Raven's Gully on Buachaille Etive Mòr that Bonnington would later call The Coffin.

Rather than just being an instinctive mountaineer, MacInnes is also a fine engineer and he devised the first all-metal ice axe. Rummaging around in his basement, he finds an assortment of tools that he had designed and recalls building a car from scratch when he was 17. Yet he had to rediscover these achievements while recuperating from his spell in a specialist unit, where he was diagnosed with delirium bordering on dementia. Reading through his records, he resents being branded a threat to others, but has to concede that he has no idea of how he behaved, as the entire episode has been erased. 

In 1958, MacInnes was part of the first British ascent of the Bonatti Pillar in the French Alps, along with Bonnington and Don Whillans. We see photographs of him covered in blood after being hit on the head by a rock and he recalls suffering blackouts for some time afterwards. Aware how fortunate he had been to be in good hands, he decided on moving to Glencoe to formalise the area mountain rescue unit and became such an expert on the techniques that his International Mountain Rescue Handbook is now used around the world. He also patented a folding stretcher that has also become a basic piece of kit and helped found the Search and Rescue Dog Association and the Avalanche Information Service. 

But accidents do happen and MacInnes recalls losing at least 50 friends to the mountains they had climbed together. Ian Clough was killed by falling ice on Anapurna, while Tom Patey fell while abseiling on The Maiden off the Sutherland coast after using a faulty clip that MacInnes had given him to use as a belt. These recollections prove painful and MacInnes admits he had questioned his own sanity on reading about some of the expeditions he had attempted. However, he is proud of his achievements as a climber and as a film-maker. Among his BBC series was Roraima: The Lost World (1973), which took him to the scene of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, while Everest the Hard Way (1975) demonstrated the box tent that MacInnes had invented. He also worked on Clint Eastwood's The Eiger Sanction (1975) and Fred Zinnemann's Five Days One Summer (1982) 

While in his tiny room at Belford Hospital in Lochaber, MacInnes became very attached to a mountain scene painted by his great niece and credits the sense of freedom it represented with helping him recover. Indeed, one day, it prompted him to climb the fire escape on the outside of the building. As staff searched frantically for him, he made his way upwards and threatened to jump if they tried to stop him. Although his memory of the incident remains hazy, he had no intention of committing suicide. He simply wanted to get to the top and get some fresh air. A closing caption reveals that he had only been up 33 metres. But, for an 84 year-old, it was quite a fear and there is a fond wryness about the claim that MacInnes had made the first solo ascent. 

Neatly edited by Clyde Wallbanks to juxtapose clips from MacInnes's unique archive with shots of the mettlesome octogenarian watching it on a Steenbeck editing desk, this is a fine tribute to its subject's indomitable spirit. Fraser wisely keeps things simple and allows MacInnes to tell his traveller's tales with a mischievous understated modesty that is not only hugely engaging, but also does something of a disservice to the magnitude of MacInnes's accomplishments as both climber and inventor. He is a compelling character and Fraser's admiration is evident, as is that of Palin, Chouinard and Bonnington and it's a shame they are not heard from again after the opening sequence, if only to examine some of the issues relating to MacInnes's sequestration. 

Nevertheless, this works well as a one-man show, as MacInnes is quite prepared to reflect on low points as well as highs. His peevish discussion of his time in Belford is accompanied by some harrowing images of him prowling around his tiny room like a caged animal. But such debasement makes his final (albeit off-camera) climb all the more odds-defyingly audacious and soaringly inspirational.

Dochouse has a proud record of presenting actualities from across a range of social. political, economic and cultural issues. Such are its standards that it always comes as a surprise when something dips below the usual level. But Janus Metz and Sine Plambech's Heartbound: A Different Kind of Love Story doesn't just slip below, it positively plummets. This is all the more disappointing given Metz's excellent work on Armadillo (2010), which followed some Danish troops on a tour of duty in Afghanistan. But, even though he seemed on less certain ground with the tennis biopic, Borg McEnroe (2017), nothing will prepare viewers for the technical and intellectual shoddiness of this study of Thai brides, which follows on from the off-screen couple's TV documentaries, From Thailand to Thy (Love on Delivery) and From Thy to Thailand (Ticket to Paradise). These were made over a decade ago and one is left to wonder how much of the footage on show in Heartbound has been recycled from these films. 

At the centre of this unsavoury survey are Niels Jørgen Molbæk and his wife, Sommai, who met a quarter of a century ago in the Thai sex tourist resort of Pattaya. They have enjoyed a relatively happy marriage and the success of their union prompted Sommai to set up an agency to find brides for her clients in the northern part of Jutland. Knowing how desperate women are to escape the poverty and degradation of their situation in Pattaya, Sommai offers them the opportunity to exchange the risks of sex for money with multiple partners for sex for security with one. 

Among those she has matchmade are her niece, Kae, who was fortunate in the fact that new spouse Kjeld B. Andersen was willing to allow her young son, Mark, to come and live with them. We also meet Kae's sister, Mong, who has found a job at a nearby factory since marrying John Nielsen (whose first wife committed suicide), and Basit, an older woman who has agreed to tie the knot with Frank Andersen, despite being repeatedly beaten by her Thai husband. On travelling to the Isaan region of Thailand, we are also introduced to 23 year-old Saeng, a single mother who is so desperate to haul herself out of abject misery that she is willing to travel 9000 miles to a freezing outpost on the European mainland and hope for the best.

According to Danish law, such arranged unions have to last for seven years, with the resident partner being forced to pay a deposit to the state in order to dissuade people from contracting marriages of convenience. At the end of the probationary period, couples are permitted to divorce with no questions asked. But, even though the procedures have a legal legitimacy, there is something ethically unsettling about the business and Metz and Plambech seem abnegatingly reluctant to delve deeply into its morality. 

While Metz is an established film-maker, anthropologist Plambech also has experience of collaborating with other directors. Indeed, she joined forces with Judith Lansade on Trafficking (2010) which examined the efforts of Denmark's first specialist unit detailed to combat the gangs smuggling women into the country to work as prostitutes. Yet, she seems loathe to stress the similarities with an operation that has brought some 900 Thai women to the Thy region of Jutland. Instead, she and Metz return to see how Kae and Kjeld have been getting along after their initial courtship, while also showing how Saeng drifts apart from her friend Lom in Pattaya after the former decides to do whatever it takes to give her son a better life than she has had. If Saeng had seen able to see how unhappy Mark is, however, she might have had second thoughts. 

As much has changed in the realms of digital technology since Metz and Plambech embarked upon this project, it would be churlish to criticise the quality of Henrik Bohn Ipsen's early visuals. But there's no excuse for the manipulative nature of Uno Helmersson's peculiar score. Moreover, a number of situations appear to have been stage managed, while their readiness to take a detached view of a sordid and desperately sad enterprise is maddening. They have stumbled across a compelling topic, which should have forced audiences to re-examine the fallacies that have grown up around the fairytale weddings myth that prevails in the West. After all, there is a long history of matrimony being a socio-economic rather than purely a romantic arrangement. 

Reading between the lines, it seems clear that few of the Thai brides have found love and that they daren't risk saying anything too negative about their experiences on camera for fear of rocking their boats. But the film-makers opt not to challenge Sommai about the servitude and isolation that awaits so many of her clients once they have plighted their troth. As a consequence, this patchy non-exposé leaves numerous issues unresolved and far too many questions unanswered.