It's tempting to view each film in which a Mexican character displays dignity and fortitude in the face of extremis as a shot across the bows of President Donald Trump. Following Alfonso Cuarón's Golden Lion- and Oscar-winning period drama, Roma, Lila Avilés's The Chambermaid comes up to date similarly to examine the limited options facing women who are exploited in menial roles. Taking its inspiration from Sophie Calle's photographic tome, L'Hôtel, this deceptively passive picture is so keenly observant that it feels much more authentic than Cuarón's moving, but over-praised monochrome melodrama, as the focus falls firmly on the anonymous cleaner rather than on those she serves.
Opening the blinds in a room in the InterContinental Presidente Hotel in Mexico City, 24 year-old Evelia (Gabriela Cartol) sighs as she surveys the mess left by the guest. As she makes a start on tidying up, she finds a balding man lying motionless on the floor beside the bed and is relieved when he struggles to his feet. She asks if he would like her to come back, but he can't bring himself to speak to her and uses hand gestures to get her to leave. Eve has set her heart on a job on the 42nd Floor and is excited when supervisor Nachita (Clementina Guadarrama) informs her that there is a vacancy and that one of the bosses has been impressed by her work.
Having a discreet nose around the next room she cleans, Eve pockets an item she finds in the bin and hands a phone charger to Elizabeth (Elizabeth Sotelo), the hotel housekeeper. She asks about a red dress that she had found a while back and is assured that she is first on the list if nobody claims it. Lunching on a bag of popcorn, Eve stares out of the window of an empty room before Nachita sends her to deliver some toiletries to a man named Morales (Antonio Vega), who is a VIP client. He already has a bathroom full of freebies and barely acknowledges Eve's existence, as he files his nails while watching TV in a bathrobe.
Using an internal phone line to check up on her four year-old son, Ruben, Eve pops down to the uniform laundry window and meets Tita (Marisol Villaruel), who is standing in for her ailing sister. She tries to sell Eve some plastic food containers and gives her a sample bottle of hand lotion, but she doesn't have the spare cash to buy anything.
Next day, Skinny (Federico Tello) asks Eve to do him a favour and look in on Romina (Agustina Quinzi), an Argentinian guest who needs a maid to keep an eye on her baby while she takes a shower. She chatters away about boys having an obsession with their bits, as Eve cradles the infant and agrees to help out for the remainder of Romina's stay, as she kisses her on the cheek and promises her a generous tip.
Keen to make something of herself, Eve signs up for the workplace classes given by Raul (Alex Uribe Villaruel), where she is befriended by the older Miriam, who prefers the nickname Minitoy (Teresa Sánchez). She is impressed that Eve works on the 21st floor when she is only on 16 and offers to help out whenever she can before trying to sell her a UFO toy at a bargain price. Something of a joker, Minitoy tries to talk to Eve in the canteen and goofs around in class. But Eve feels out of her depth and dashes to the bathroom when Raul offers to lend her Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull and she has to confess that she has never read a book before.
Summoned back to give Morales more amenities, Eve gets interrupted during a call from a corridor phone by a female guest noisily filling an ice bucket. When she gets a moment's peace, therefore, she perches on the end of a bed to read the book that Raul gave her. However, she doesn't realise that her period has started and she stains the white duvet cover and has to ask Minitoy to help her clean it. In return, she gets Eve to clean a room that looks like a bomb hit it and she is too indebted to complain. Indeed, she even agrees to subject herself to the electric shock device that Minitoy carries in her bag and they get the giggles when Eve proves able to withstand a considerable charge before she eventually shouts out.
As Romina is taken with Eve's way with her young son, she suggests moving to Buenos Aires and becoming their maid. She says she will pay well and that her husband will be thrilled to hire her. Tempted by the prospect, Eve goes about her work with a spring in her step and is grateful when Minitoy offers to help with a couple of rooms when she falls behind. However, Nachita ticks her off for leaving damp patches in a bathroom and reminds her how strict the management was when she first started at the hotel. Eve is crushed because it's the first mistake she has made and Nachita reassures her that everything will be okay.
Feeling better, Eve goes to her class with Raul, who commends her for answering a maths question and declares that she is coming out of her shell. As it's the Sabbath, Eve has to push the lift buttons for a Jewish guest and she smiles at him as they wait in the corridor. When she returns to Room 1802, Eve discovers that Romina has checked out without leaving a note and she fights to hide her disappointment.
Throwing caution to the wind, when she bumps into Spider (José Manuel Ramirez Gloria), the window cleaner who has been flirting with her from his rig outside the hotel, she sits down on the bed and strips down to her underwear before lying back to masturbate. Afterwards, she struggles to contain her sense of revulsion and calls her friend Maguitos to speak to Ruben. She is behind with her child-minding payments, but hopes to be able to make up the arrears if she gets promoted to the 42nd Floor. But Maguitos isn't amused when Eve misses the last bus after staying behind to help Minitoy and has to sleep in a cupboard overnight.
Waking late the next morning, she rushes to class to learn from Perla (Perla Matias) that the union has closed it down. Suddenly feeling tired, Eve barely hears the lift attendant (Elvia Rosales Zarate) talking to her and hardly notices Spider across the canteen. She perks up when Elizabeth calls to tell her that the red dress is hers. As she waits in the corridor, however, she notices that Minitoy has been given the 42nd Floor and she scuttles past in smart clothes, as Nachita shows her into her office. Seething, Eve goes into the laundry and thrashes the red dress against the pile of white bags before storming in to ask Elizabeth why she was overlooked. She reassures her that another opportunity will soon arise. But, as Eve wanders around one of the luxurious penthouse rooms on 42 (complete with its own pool), it's easy to see why she wanted the post so much.
She goes on to the roof and gazes up at the sky. But life has to go on and she agrees to trade the dress with another maid and makes Tita's day by purchasing a large plastic tub and a thermos flask. Taking the lift with two French girls who talk over her, Eve walks across the lobby and out through the revolving doors - so we can see her off the premises for the first time in the entire film.
Rarely out of her drab grey uniform, Gabriela Cartol's Eve is much closer in spirit to Catalina Saavedra in Sebastían Silva's The Maid (2009) than Vicky Krieps in Ingo Haeb's The Chambermaid Lynn, Anaïs Demoustier in Pascale Ferran's Bird People (both 2014) or even the Oscar-nominated Yalitza Aparicio in Roma. Yet, while she appears to be an innocent who is duped into helping Minitoy steal her prized job from under her nose, it should be remembered that Eve is behind in her payments to her child minder and was all ready to quit the hotel if she had been offered a position in Argentina. Ultimately, she becomes a victim, as she loses out on all fronts. Even the adult education classes that have been so good for her confidence are cancelled by the union that is supposed to be on her side. But the debuting Avilés and co-scenarist Juan Carlos Márquez astutely leave us guessing whether Eve is walking away for good or simply heading home to regroup and bide her time until the next chance comes.
On screen for almost the entire picture, Cartol is superb as the unassuming, but resolutely enigmatic titular character, whose reason for coveting the red dress remains as shrouded as the motivation to strip off for the voyeuristic window cleaner. She is ably supported by an admirable ensemble from which Teresa Sánchez stands out as the deceptively chummy, but ruthlessly ambitious Minitoy, whose larkish banter contrasts with the self-obsessed prattling of Agustina Quizni's yummy mummy, whose bafflement that she should take public transport to a bargain market when she can hail a cab sums up the chasm between the staff and guests as tellingly as Antonio Vega's fixation with gratis toiletries.
Around the turn of the century, Thai cinema was all the rage in Britain. Subsequently, it has fallen out of favour, with only arthouse darling Apichatpong Weerasethakul being guaranteed a release outside the festival circuit. It's to be hoped that Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit's Die Tomorrow rekindles UK interest, even if it's as part of an intriguing double bill with Rehana Rose's Dead Good. But, while Nawapol caught the imagination with the playful formalism of 36 (2012) and Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy (2013), this blend of news-based dramatic vignette and vox popped opinion struggles to gel into anything significant.
After a caption informs us that the mayfly has the shortest lifespan of any creature, we cut to what seems to be phone footage of a small girl bawling in the back of a car, as her father tells her that there's no escaping death. More captions reveal that on 24 May 2017, a young woman was killed by a truck after leaving the hotel room she was sharing with three friends prior to their graduations ceremony. It was 2:50 am and she had gone to buy beer because they had run out. Suddenly, we're looking at a boxy frame, as the tipsy quartet of Jaa (Patcha Poonpiriya), Yok (Morakot Liu), Som (Chutimon Chuengcharoensukying) and Prae (Chonnikan Netjui) read their horoscopes in a magazine and discuss their hopes for the future.
Dissatisfied with the printed versions, they decide to rewrite their fates, with Yok wanting to settle in America (if Donald Trump will let her), while Som dreams of becoming the Thai Anna Wintour. Prae hopes to have kids, while Jaa jokes from behind a face mask of selling rare trees online. It's then that they realise they are out of booze and they debate who should go on a beer run. But we don't get to learn who was chosen. Instead, we get a wide shot of the room, as the hotel chambermaid collects the rubbish.
A caption reveals that two humans die every second. This means that 120 die per minute, 7200 an hour and 172,800 each day. A timecode counter appears in the top left corner of the screen to show how many people will die in the time it takes the audience to watch this film. As lottery balls bounce in extreme close-up, we learn that a business died in his sleep at the stock exchange on 11 June 2012 and wasn't found for five hours. On 15 January 2016, hundreds perished in coastal Portugal when Hurricane Alex struck. At the same time, Thailand had balmy weather and the radio forecaster wishes people a pleasant day.
A small boy is asked if he would like to know if he was going to die tomorrow, but he would rather carry on as normal without having the prospect of death hovering over him. Following a montage of seemingly random photographs (which relate to a woman's stay in the United States), Am (Koramit Vajarasthira) returns home after a prolonged absence and struggles to get her surly brother (Sirat Intarachote) to pose for a picture on the roof of their house in a rundown part of Bangkok.
Curious to know why Am has suddenly come home, the brother quizzes her about her job and boyfriend. She tells him that she has brought him the record player he wanted, but he says he needed it two years ago and isn't bothered now. The siblings take the washing off the line and Am notices the rickety telegraph poles in the street below. In a further effort to reconnect, she suggests going to their favourite restaurant for fried oysters. Her brother doesn't want to know, although he agrees to let her borrow his motorbike the next day. Unfortunately, a caption reveals that a woman on a motorcycle was killed by a falling pylon on 6 August 2013. Just moments before, a taxi driver had seen her park the bike to take a snapshot of a puppy in the street.
The brother meanders into a wider shot of the rooftop and sits on the same bench to light a cigarette. In audio, we hear a man speculate about whether a woman he knew had planned her death. However, he admits that her sudden loss changed his life and he never misses the opportunity to tell loved ones how he feels about them, in case they also pass on before he sees them again.
Over aerial footage of a runway, we hear a young boy telling an inquisitor that suffering is much worse than dying, as one keeps feeling the ill effects of the former while the latter ends everything. A caption reveals that a flight from Bangkok to the USA disappeared on 22 April 2014. Among those lost was a young man (Sunny Suwanmethanont) who had spent the previous day with his girlfriend (Rattanrat Eertaweekul). She is awaiting a donor for a heart transplant and casually remarks that she is going to die before he does. He wishes she would stop being so morbid and protests that normal people don't talk about death so much. Nevertheless, he reminds her not to give up hope as a suitable someone might pass away at any moment.
As she clips his toenails (while wearing a nasal cannula), the girlfriend chides him for not using the expensive lotion she had bought him for his cracked heel. She also ticks him off for forgetting to pack his passport and wonders how he will cope without her during his week-long stay in the States. He admits he will miss her and jokes that she will have to come back as a ghost to watch over him. He slips out to wash his feet and she settles in a chair so that he can give her a neck massage. Dozing off, she fails to hear her boyfriend excuse himself and wakes to find herself alone. Suddenly confronted with the loneliness she will have to endure while he's away and the prospect of her potentially imminent demise, she starts to cry.
Shown in the cam-phone framing, a 102 year-old man named Prem recalls the loss of his wife and son and wishes he had died before them so that he could have been spared the pain of living without them. He admits to being scared of being heartbroken, but he urges young people to live to the full so that they have things to be proud of when they look back. Intercut with his reflections are shots of clouds taken from an aeroplane window, as captions reveal that famous Thai-Spanish actress Farida `Fari' Fernandez was hit by a car overshooting a bend on 17 February 2015 after she had got out of her own vehicle to help the victim of a motorbike accident.
We cut away to a film set, where May (Jarinporn Joonkiat) nibbles on some snacks while waiting to be called to perform. Everyone around her is looking at clips of Fari's accident or checking with friends to see find someone who matches her rare blood type. May sheds a few tears and has to have her make-up touched up, as she is being proposed as Fari's replacement in a commercial. She wanders towards the back of the set to make a phone call behind a stuffed lioness and she can barely contain her excitement that she is going to achieve the ambition of a lifetime. As the screen whites out, we jump to the set, where May gives three renditions of the spiel promoting a brand of face cream. At the end of each, she beams into the lens.
A table detailing the `lethality' of common causes of death follows a clip of a small boy confiding that he had Googled whether it hurt to die and had been reassured by Reddit that it's not too painful. We cut away to a man seemingly preparing to jump from a high-rise balcony before a caption reveals that a man named Mark had posted on Facebook the last text message that Teng had sent him before leaping to his death on 4 September 2016. In it, the suicide thanked his friends and apologised for being so selfish in reaching the conclusion `not to bother anymore'. He assures everyone that they had done their best to be kind to him, but he felt too weak to cope with the modern world and could only summon the courage to leave it behind.
Switching again to the phone-cam aspect ratio, we see Lek (Violette Wautier) ignore a phone message from Teng (Yosawat Sitiwong), who promptly starts banging on her door. He promises to leave if Lek says she loves him. However, she can't bring herself to do so and calls her next-door neighbour (Kanyapak Wuttara) to check that Teng has gone. They meet on the walkway outside their flats, where Lek insists she has no regrets about denying Teng's request, even though he keeps threatening to kill himself. Playing with an electric shock device, the friend hopes Lek can live with the consequences of her actions. But they don't take Teng's ultimatum seriously and head off together, gossiping about karaoke.
Over footage of the Challenger Space Shuttle exploding, we hear a woman claiming that she's too tired of life to want to be reincarnated and have to go through it all again. Cutting from black, we see an elderly musician (Kom Chauncheun) lying on a tatami mat in a white vest, with his head resting on a cushion in the lap of his daughter (Puangsoi Aksornsawang). She massages his shaved scalp and complains that she's bored with nothing to do. Her father reminds her that being free is a blessing, as she props his head on another pillow and leaves him to sleep. The camera pulls away slowly from the static close-up and reaches the courtyard beyond the open patio doors before a caption reveals that an ageing musician died in such a way in Chumphon Province on 30 November 2016.
In closing, Thamrongrattanarit returns to Prem the centurion, who can't understand how he has managed to live so long. He has no fear of death, as he is simply fulfilling a destiny that is being controlled by a higher being. Sipping on water as he splutters, the frail old man seems content with his lot. Yet we see him celebrating his 104th birthday with his family before cutting away to the girl with heart problem, who is reading in a room free of medical equipment. As the scene fades, we visit the casualty counter for a last time, as it stops at 8442. However, the film continues beyond this, as still life shots of simple flower arrangements decorate the closing credits.
Shooting in single takes to replicate snatched smartphone slices of life, Thamrongrattanarit raises some pretty basic existential questions about death without offering any answers (because there aren't any that we know of) or many speculations. Each vignette is dotted with telltale details and the odd red herring, but none of them are exactly revelatory or riveting and few outside Thailand will be familiar with the actual deaths drawn from the news headlines.
The performances are fine, while Phairot Siriwath's production design and Niramon Ross's camerawork enable Thamrongrattanarit to achieve the faux sense of intimacy that is deftly counterpointed by the phantom tinkling of the piano score by Tongta and Pokpong Jitdee. For all its reassurances about the ineluctable nature of time and the mundanity of death, however, this sincere, if superficial experimental exercise offers little solace or insight.
It's been a while since Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton co-directed DOA (1988) and Super Mario Brothers (1993) and even longer since they made pioneering pop promos for their Cucumber Studios company and teamed with George Stone to create the 1980s cyberpunk icon, Max Headroom. It comes as something of a surprise, therefore, to find Jankel calling the shots on Tell It to the Bees, an adaptation of a 2009 Fiona Shaw novel that was published the same year that Jankel took a break from commercials and Channel 4's Live From Abbey Road to make her solo feature bow with a tele-take on David Almond's Skellig. But what is most puzzling about this novelettish lesbian saga set in 1950s Scotland is that sibling scribes Henrietta and Jessica Ashworth have produced such a conventional scenario after having worked on such outré TV shows as Fresh Meat (2013) and Killing Eve (2019).
Ever since husband Robert (Emun Elliott) returned from the war with an undiagnosed case of post-traumatic shock, Lydia Weekes (Holliday Grainger) has worked in a mill in the small Scottish town of Dunlaw to raise her 10 year-old son, Charlie (Gregor Selkirk). He is fond of his older cousin, Anne Stock (Lauren Lyle), although her widowed mother, Pam (Kate Dickie), has little time for Lydia, as she believes the Englishwoman trapped her brother into marriage by deliberately getting pregnant.
Although Charlie has a Scottish accent, the Mancunian Lydia is regarded as an outsider and, when he gets hurt in a playground fight while defending her honour, Anne takes him to see Dr Jean Markham (Anna Paquin). She has just returned to the village to take over her late father's practice and offers to show Charlie the beehives he had kept in the garden. He likes the idea that bees can be persuaded to stay in a particular colony if you share your secrets and he confides that his mother is unhappy and needs cheering up.
Lydia disapproves of the doctor lending her son a copy of Heidi, however, and storms round to complain. She laughs when she realises she is wearing odd shoes and accepts a cup of tea, while Charlie pays a visit to the hives. Grateful to have someone to talk to, Lydia shares her woes without knowing that Jean is also looked down upon by her neighbours, as she had caused a minor scandal for kissing another girl when she was 15. Not everyone has a long memory, however, and several local women seem pleased to have a female doctor to discuss complaints that they had concealed from her father.
Anxious to avoid having to marry her widowed solicitor friend, Jim (Steven Robertson), and distressed by the death of a small girl whose mother had barred her on remembering her teenage indiscretion, Jean offers Lydia the post of live-in housekeeper after she loses her job at the mill and is evicted in the same afternoon. Upset by seeing his father canoodling on the street with Irene (Rebecca Hanssen) and Lydia being pawed by a stranger in the pub, Charlie is happy to see his mother smile again. Writing in the notebook that Jean gives him, he keeps a record of activity around the hive and becomes convinced that the bees are having a beneficial effect on their lives.
He is most impressed when Jean swims out into the lake to rescue his toy yacht and is hugely grateful when she buys him a bicycle. Charlie repays the deed by inviting Jean to dance with him and Lydia, but Jean is tentative when they get into ballroom hold, as she doesn't want to spoil things or risk gossip. Pam delights in informing Lydia about Jean's past, but the disclosure only intrigues her and they come close to kissing after Jean blows some bees off Lydia's neck when she is gardening. However, when Robert calls at the house to warn Lydia that he could get her and Charlie back any time he likes, she succumbs to her urges and tumbles into bed with Jean.
The next morning, Jean recalls how her romance with a classmate came to light after Rose (Tori Burgess) was raped by some boys who caught them together. She had been sent away to school and had moved around to avoid her secrets being revealed. But she feels ready to settle down and thinks she can do good in the town that disowned her. For once, Charlie doesn't overhear this conversation. However, he does see Anne having sex in the woods with her mixed-race boyfriend, George (Leo Hoyte-Egan). He also sees his mother playing footsie with Jean under the table when Jim comes to lunch and eavesdrops when the lawyer reminds Jean that she is playing a dangerous game, as same-sex liaisons are illegal and Robert would be able to claim custody of his son if the affair ever became public knowledge.
Angry with his father for punching a hole in the roof of one of the hives, Charlie has no desire to live with him. But when he blunders in on Jean and Lydia together, he is furious with his mother for withholding the truth and runs away to Robert, who threatens Lydia that he will call the police if she tries to see the boy again. The bees swarm away from the hive, while Jean's patients stay away from the surgery. Moreover, Pam discovers that Anne is pregnant and arranges for her to have a backstreet abortion to spare the family the shame of having an interracial child out of wedlock.
With Jean and Lydia contemplating emigrating to Canada in the hope that Robert will let them take Charlie, the boy comes rushing back to the house when Anne starts haemorrhaging and Jean dashes off to do her duty. While Lydia tries to explain to Charlie that some things need to be kept secret, Robert comes to find him and Lydia locks them in her room to protect the boy. Seething with rage, Robert attempts to rape her, but Charlie unleashes the bees, who fly through the open window and attack Robert, while leaving Lydia unscathed. She makes her escape and joins Charlie in the garden to watch the bees perform a nocturnal dance, as Robert beats a glowering retreat.
By contrast, Pam is whimperingly grateful to Jean for saving Anne's life and asks if she will keep an eye on her while she recovers. The quiet, but determined nod means that Jean won't be able to follow Lydia and Charlie to Canada and he susses as much while saying goodbye to the bees. The women kiss on the platform, but Jean refuses to be afraid any longer and returns to find a full surgery. The Weekes aren't the only ones to leave, as Anne and George also head for the anonymity and acceptance of pastures new. Scribbling in his notebook, Charlie knows what Jean had meant to his mother and how she had helped set her free in the same way he does with a bee that is crawling up the compartment window, as the steam engine chugs away.
Faint echoes of William Wyler's 1961 adaptation of Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour and Terence Davies's 2015 take on Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song (2015) can be heard throughout this earnest, but over-eager and over-egged interpretation of a novel by the York-based Fiona Shaw rather than the Irish actress of the same name. Credit to Jankel and the Ashworths for trying to address so many issues with a contemporary relevance. But their blunt discussion of homophobia, parochialism, the status of women and domestic violence is no more sophisticated than the gauche eco gushing about life ending if the bees die. Moreover, by changing the book's denouement, the trio managed to upset the author, who has dismissed the bittersweet platform kiss as `a straight person's finale'.
Dusting off the Scottish accent she had used as an 11 year-old to snare an Oscar in Jane Campion's The Piano (1993), New Zealander Anna Paquin is admirably buttoned-up as the doctor prepared to put her patients before her passion. But Holliday Grainger struggles with the more difficult task of conveying Lydia's sexual awakening, although she is scarcely helped by the sketchiness of the characterisation and penny dreadfulness of her timely transformation. Indeed, the action descends into melodrama far too often for it to retain its plausibility, especially during the last act when all that's missing, as the digital bees mass for a magic-realist swoop, is someone rushing in to announce there's trouble at t'mill. Even the dependably stoic Kate Dickie seems a bit nonplussed by it all, although young Gregor Selkirk manages to rise above it all as the wide-eyed innocent who allows his hurt feelings to get the better of his common sense.
Clearly working with a restricted budget, production designer Andy Harris conveys something of the dourness of a Scottish working community still in the depths of postwar Austerity. Cinematographer Bartosz Nalazek's lighting reinforces the sense of drabness, as several key scenes take place at night or in dreich weather. More nuanced is the colouring of Ali Mitchell's costumes and the cadences of Claire M. Singer's score. But, while Jankel's directorial style feels markedly more mature than it was a quarter of a century ago, she replicates many of Isobel Coixet's contextual and tonal misjudgements in adapting Penelope Fitzgerald's 1950s small-town saga, The Bookshop (2017).
Leeds-born Harry Wootliff has made a solid start to her directorial career with the shorts Nits (2004), Trip (2008) and I Don't Care (2010). Now, she makes an even more impressive feature debut with Only You, a modern love story that begins with a meet cute before quickly plunging back into real life to explore the strain that trying for a baby can place on a seemingly idyllic relationship. Elements of the backstory are left floating, while the third act meanders in its search for an ending. But Wootliff does enough to suggest that she is destined to join the likes of Andrea Arnold, Lynne Ramsay, Gillian Wearing, Carol Morley and Clio Barnard in bolstering British realist cinema's female perspective.
While at a New Year party in Glasgow, Elena Aldana (Laia Costa) resists the efforts of her friend Carly (Lisa McGrillis) to matchmake her with her older brother. In trying to hail a taxi, she gets into an argument with Jake Wilson (Josh O'Connor), who insists on sharing the cab. He reveals that he has been DJing and tells the driver to pull over when Elena feels sick. Despite her protestations, he walks her home and she fibs that she's almost his age when he discloses that he is 26. While she's in the bathroom, he digs Elvis Costello's `I Want You' out of her musician father's vinyl collection and their playful dance soon leads to passionate kissing.
After she bundles him out the next morning, Elena doesn't expect to hear from Jake again. But he calls her at work, stays the night again and agrees to move in with her that weekend. Carly is taken aback by the speed with which things are moving, as Jake is doing a PhD in marine biology and is yet to learn that Elena is really 35. When they collect his belongings from his shared flat, Elena realises that he has been sleeping with one of his flatmates, who makes her annoyance at his treachery very clear. But they quickly establish a cosy routine, as she looks through his photograph album and she reveals that her father had been a philanderer, while his parents had been blissfully happy until his mother died. Such is their closeness that Jake is unfazed when Elena finally comes clean about her age and even jokingly calls her `Mrs Robinson' in a reference to Mike Nichols's The Graduate (1967). Indeed, when he sees her cradling a baby when he meets her friends, he suggests they start a family because they are made for each other.
When they make love without a condom for the first time, Elena is moved when Jake professes his love and a montage follows her checking diary dates at work and building up the expectation to discover whether she's pregnant. She hides her disappointment when they visit Jake's father, Andrew (Peter Wight), who lives alone in the country. He enjoys showing her around the grounds and Jake is confident that they have succeeded in making a baby when he takes her to his old room (where he has to stoop to stop his head from hitting the ceiling).
Feeling broody after a night out with a pregnant Carly and her pals, Elena tries to seduce Jake, who is feeling tired after a long day. He fails to perform and complains that having sex every time Elena ovulates is beginning to seem mechanical. She is concerned that there's something wrong and they undergo tests. The consultant (Anita Vettesse) reassures Elena that a teenage abortion won't affect her fertility, but does suggest that they apply for IVF treatment to take some of the pressure off trying to conceive. In the car park, Jake opines that it's hardly a romantic way to have a child and Elena accuses him of being immature for believing that life always works out perfectly.
She wonders why they ever became an item and is still feeling fragile when Jake tries to patch things up back at the flat. He reminds her that they have six more attempts before the IVF date and she is touched by his confidence. But, as Christmas comes and goes with no luck, Elena grows nervous about starting the course. Realising she is scared of needles, Jake jollies her along and even injects himself to make her feel better. However, the need to medicate while at work and the marks appearing on her belly increase the pressure she feels to make a success of the treatment. She's relieved when the follicle tests prove positive and the first embryo is implanted.
As Jake passes a viva voce examination to confirm his doctorate, Elena starts to feel nauseated in the mornings. They try to remain calm, but she is charmed when he gives her his mother's ring, even though he insists he is not proposing. She reads aloud an online timeline for the first few days of a pregnancy and comes to believe that they are finally going to become parents. Naturally, she is crushed when the indicator reads `not pregnant' and Jake can only cradle her, as he can't think of anything to say. However, they bicker over the directions when they go to the christening of Carly's baby and Elena accuses Jake of being rude when he prefers to walk in the garden rather than chat to her friends. On the way home, he stops in the middle of nowhere to relieve himself and suggests in the dappled sunshine that they forget about babies and start enjoying their lives again.
A montage of partying and coupling follows, but Elena begins to feel broody again after seeing the downstairs neighbours playing with their son in the garden. She confides in Carly that she won't feel complete unless she becomes a mother and wonders whether she is being punished for being a bad person. Elena mentions that they are considering taking out a loan to pay for a private consultation and, while nursing her own baby, Carly reminds her that there are worse things in life than not being a parent.
The consultant advises against pursuing expensive treatment, as Elena only has a 5% chance of conceiving. Jake is furious with him for being so blunt and suggests borrowing money from his father to go elsewhere. Catching him sobbing after taking a shower, Elena tries to console him. But, when Carly asks her to be her maid of honour and asks when she is going to tie the knot, Elena admits that she doesn't know if they have a long-term future, as the baby issue has placed an enormous strain on them and dented their individual self-confidence. Moreover, she is in agony from missing a child she has never had.
As Jake has been away working, Elena takes the next pregnancy test without him and he is disappointed in her for making this about herself when they are supposed to be a couple. He goes to the pub alone and returns to play the Elvis Costello track to recreate their first night together. Elena is not in the mood, however, and suggests that they should split up because she has failed to give him the baby he wants. Jake implores her not to push the issue, as he loves her and wants them to get back to how things were before. But she goads him into criticising her and, when she screams at him to leave, he vows never to return once he sets foot through the door.
Elena serves as maid of honour at Carly's wedding and her brother, Shane (Stuart Martin), reveals that he has left his pregnant girlfriend because he wasn't ready for the commitment. During the reception, Carly's father makes a speech about relationships needing to be re-born and Elena claps politely, while holding back the tears. She puts a brave face on things, but misses Jake so much that she invites him to meet for coffee. He has been couch-surfing, but is now living with his father and Elena gets teary at the mention of his name. But, while she hopes they can be a family again, Jake is adamant that he meant what he said when he gave her an ultimatum and he leaves her alone in the café.
Returning home, Jake rakes leaves in the garden. But Andrew suggests that he follows his heart and recognises that every couple has highs and lows. Despite what he chooses to believe, his parents had their rows. They simply had them in loud whispers in the kitchen after he had gone to bed. Heeding the advice, Jake meets Elena in an autumnal park and they smile as their fingers touch. As the credits roll to the Chromatics version of `Blue Moon', Jake and Elena rediscover each other in a slow, smoochy dance that suggests the realise, at last, that having each other will have to be enough.
Following their impressive turns in Sebastian Schipper's Victoria (2015) and Francis Lee's God's Own Country (2017), Laia Costa and Joseph O'Connor form an affecting partnership in this thoughtfully written and deftly directed drama, which explores what happens when a couple's chemistry is undermined by their biology. It might have been nice to learn more about Elena's background to explain what the Catalan is doing in a picturesque, but rather underused Glasgow - as Carlos Marques-Marcet did much more effectively with Natalia Tena's character in Anchor and Hope (2017) - while neither Elena nor Jake seem to have much of a life outside their apartment. This makes sense, bearing in mind the all-consuming desire to conceive a child. But it makes Jake and Elena slightly two-dimensional, while their failure at any point to consider adoption leaves lots of unanswered questions about their motives for wanting to become parents.
As this is primarily a study of the strains that conception places upon a romance, Wootliff chronicles the IVF process as forensically as Jason Barker did in the 2018 documentary, A Deal With the Universe. But the medical profession is given rather a rough ride, with the private consultant's bedside manner particularly leaving a lot to be required. However, such brusqueness affirms how alone the couple are in their endeavour and how little shared experience they have to fall back on to get them through the stress and heartache.
This sense of isolation is reinforced by Andy Drummond's production design and the frequency with which cinematographer Shabier Kirchner captures the pair in intimate close-ups in confined spaces. However, the audience's investment is in Elena and Jake as a couple and Wootliff and editor Tim Fulford expose how little we know about them as people in allowing the pace to slacken when they are apart. Of course, this reflects how they must be feeling at being alone again. But, with Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch's score emphasising its mawkish quality, the denouement feels a touch contrived, even though it makes no guarantee of a happy ever after, as the lovers have a lot of learning and growing up to do if they are to overcome their disappointments and scarcely addressed differences.
Avian animation has come a long way since Jim Crow, Fats, Deacon, Dopey, and Specks made their racially dubious contribution to Dumbo (1941). Obviously, Walt Disney went some way to atoning with Donald Duck, while Walter Lantz created Woody Woodpecker and the Warner cartoon department came up with Daffy Duck, Tweety and Foghorn Leghorn. Among the more memorable feathered friends to appear in recent times are Rocky the Rooster in Chicken Run (2000), the eponymous pigeon in Valiant (2005), Mumble the penguin in Happy Feet (2006), Blu the macaw in Rio (2011), Kai the falcon in Zambezia (2012) and Reggie and Jake the turkeys in Free Birds (2013). And, of course, there are Red, Chuck, Bomb and their pals from Angry Birds (2016), who can be seen in the innovatively titled Angry Birds 2 later this summer.
Pipping them to the post, however, is Christian Haas and Andrea Block's Birds of a Feather, which follows such recent Euro-animations as Toby Genkel and Reza Memari's A Stork's Journey (2017) and Árni Ásgeirsson and Gunnar Karlsson's Flying the Nest (2018) in using the differences between the species and the need to fly south for the winter as a means of explaining the ongoing migrant crisis to young audiences. Also known as Manou the Swift, this is the first feature to be produced by Luxx Studios and Haas and Block hatched their idea during a 2007 sailing holiday, after strong winds had caused them to spend two days in Nice, where they witnessed the seagulls gliding on the wind and the swifts performing their acrobatic dance on the rocks opposite the Colline du Château waterfall.
Separated from his swift parents after rats attack their clifftop nest above the Côte d'Azur, Manou (Josh Keaton) spots seagulls Yves (Willem Dafoe) and Blanche (Kate Winslet) perching on an outcrop and is delighted when they adopt him. He prefers bugs to seafood, but learns to adapt and is soon getting to know his baby brother, Luc (Mike Kelly). Yves warns them to stay away from the market in Nice, as it's a dangerous place, as Parcival the guineafowl discovers after he manages to escape from a wooden cage and has to shelter from the rain beneath a Castle Hill graveyard monument topped by an essorant stone eagle.
Parcival watches as Manou finds flying and swimming difficult and Yves despairs of him when he seems more interested in a firefly than learning how to navigate by the stars. He also has trouble pulling fish out of the sea and has to be rescued by his father. much to the amusement of the cocky Françoise (Julie Nathanson). But, just as Manou begins to think he will never graduate from Sailing School, he is taught to flap not glide by fellow swifts, Yusuf (Nathan North) and Poncho (Arif S. Kinchen), who take him on a food-stealing raid on the marketplace and introduce him to their sister, Kalifa (Cassandra Steen). Excited by his newfound skills, Manou boasts that he can fight off rats and Kalifa seems impressed.
Blanche is cross with Yves for ticking off Manou in front of the other gulls and he explains that he is only trying to toughen him up before they have to fly south. Luc suggests that Manou can prove himself by winning the annual race around the rocks and Parcival and the swifts cheer him on, as he zips between the branches in the trees and darts through the windows of ruined buildings on the headland in order to stay ahead of the ultra-competitive Françoise. She tries some dirty tricks to sabotage him along the way, but Manou stays on tracks, as they career along Nice's narrow streets and head back towards the coastline. With Blanche and Yves watching proudly, Manou comes home first and is rewarded by taking his father's place on the nightwatch over some precious eggs.
Unfortunately, Manou is unable to fight off a trio of rats and, much to Blanche and Luc's chagrin, Yves is powerless to prevent him from being cast out the colony. He offers to give Parcival flying lessons in return for board and lodgings in the cemetery, but winds up in living in the rock niche next door to Kalifa, who teaches him about catching worms and grooming for tics. She also introduces him to flying in formation in order to perform the swift dance and serenades him with a shell saxophone and a song about flying high in the charmingly illuminated folly abutting the Restaurant de la Reserve overlooking the Baie des Anges.
The next day, Manou and the swifts rescue Luc from a rat attack in a Nice side street and he urges him to return to the colony in time to fly south. But Manou is still smarting from being exiled and Luc tells Yves that he intends staying behind with his brother rather than let him feel abandoned. So, when Parcival spots the rats stealing eggs and Manou tracks them down to a wine cellar in the Old Town, Luc helps them by pulling the corks out of the caskets to flood the room so that the rats flee and the swifts are able to gather up the lost eggs in a fishing net.
While Parcival uses his big feet to dropkick rodents into the rising tide of red wine, Luc and the swifts return the eggs to the community. However, such is the traditional antipathy between swifts and gulls that some of the birds refuse to thank Luc and Kalifa vows to ignore them until they mend their ways. As she shelters at Parcival's place (which he has now filled with colourful bric-a-brac from the beach), she detects a storm brewing and urges Manou to warn the seagulls to postpone their take off for Africa.
Meanwhile, the swifts need Manou to help with a baby gull that has hatched in their midst and he only agrees to assist them if they help him convince the gulls to postpone their migration. Despite having misjudged conditions before (and been lucky to survive), Yves ignores their advice and is grateful when Manou and Kalifa lead the flight to safety by heading through the eye of the tempest to the fluffy white clouds above. However, as Luc had damaged his wing during the showdown with the rats, Manu has to dip back down to help Françoise guide him upwards and all agree that birds are better off when they co-operate. As if to reinforce the moral of the story, it ends with Parcival and the baby gull he has adopted giving some sandpipers lessons in how to dodge the incoming tide.
Often visually stunning, if a touch predictable in its storytelling, this should get the summer holidays off to a good start for those lucky enough to see it. The Niçois scenery and landmarks are cleverly integrated, while the decision to keep humans on the periphery seems wise. The younger members of the vocal cast get a bit shouty in places and it's easy to see why they're called a squabble of seagulls and a scream of swifts. But the presence of Willem Dafoe and Kate Winslet brings a touch of class to proceedings, even though their characters have less to do once Manou falls under Kalifa's spell.
The themes are sensibly handled, although more preamble time might have been spent outlining the rivalry between the gulls and the swifts and the reasons why the former have traditional French names, while the latter's have a Maghrebi ring. Similarly, the role of the rats is a bit problematic, as they are depicted as silent predators targeting respectable communities while contributing nothing in return. Given how rodentine symbolism has been used in cinema before, Block and co-scenarist Axel Melzener are rather on eggshells here (as it were), even though their intentions are clearly nothing but honourable.
The big set-pieces have a video game feel to them, as though Haas and Block felt the need to pander to kids with short attention spans. But they are proficiently edited by Dennis Lutz and Dirk Stoppe and scored with propulsive energy by Frank Schreiber and Steffen Wick. Indeed, the entire picture benefits from the thought and care that Block and Haas have put into it in the dozen years since their unscheduled sojourn fired their imaginations and suggested a way to shape young minds without hectoring or preaching.
Documentary provocateur Nick Broomfield has enjoyed mixed fortunes with such musical excursions as Kurt & Courtney (1998), Biggie & Tupac (2002) and Whitney: Can I Be Me (2017). However, he has a personal stake in Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love, a chronicle of the relationship between troubadour poet Leonard Cohen and muse Marianne Ihlen, as Broomfield became the Norwegian's lover after meeting her on the Greek island of Hydra. This isn't the first profile of Cohen, as it comes after Donald Brittain and Don Owen's Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr Leonard Cohen (1965), Tony Palmer's Bird on a Wire (1974), Harry Rasky's The Song of Leonard Cohen (1980) and Lian Lunson's Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man (2005). But, while it provides a satisfactory introduction to the Canadian's music and lifestyle, it proves more reticent where the love of his life is concerned.
Although they hadn't been in touch for a while, Leonard Cohen sent Marianne Ihlen a touching note when he heard that she was dying of leukaemia in the autumn of 2016. We hear the missive being read by her friend, Jan Christian Mollestad, as it's intercut with Cohen introducing `So Long, Marianne' at the 1970 Isle of Wight festival. He admits to having mispronounced her name (as there is a stress on the final `e'), while she confides that she had never really liked the song, as it had foreshadowed the end of their relationship.
Leonard and Marianne had met on the Greek island of Hydra in 1960 after he had used some literary prize money to travel and the famously bohemian Johnston family had taken him in. In voiceover, Nick Broomfield recalls meeting Marianne on the same island eight years later and becoming one of her lovers. Although the romance had been brief, he continues to owe her a considerable debt, as she had encouraged him to make films.
Cohen had been born in Westmount, Montreal in 1934 and childhood friend Nancy Bacal recalls how keen they had been to get away from their achingly conservative neighbourhood. Photos suggest that they remained close down the years, as they shared a reluctance to conform. Ihlen was also running away, albeit with her son, Axel, from an unhappy marriage to novelist Axel Jensen. She recalls meeting Cohen on Hydra and the thrill that went through her body when he first spoke to her in a shop. As she didn't consider herself beautiful and he didn't rate his own looks, they felt they made a good match and Mollestad concurs that they brought out the best in each other.
Frustrated by the creative process, Jensen often resorted to a violence and Leonard helped Marianne get over him. According to friend Jeffrey Brown, he virtually became Axel's surrogate father. Marianne's biographer, Helle Goldman, speaks fondly of growing up in the bohemian community presided over by Australian novelist George Johnston and his writer wife Charmian Clift, while Richard Vick recalls visiting the island on Broomfield's recommendation and staying for 14 years. Nobody had much money and the amenities were pretty basic, but all agree that the artistic lifestyle was idyllic.
Feeling insecure in his creativity, however, Cohen insisted on spending half the year in Montreal with his mentor, Irving Layton. His wife of 20 years, Aviva, recalls their bond and suggests that their shared Jewishness was an important factor. Cohen was from a wealthy family and was well educated, even though he had lost his father while still young and Aviva Layton wonders if her husband had slept with Cohen's eccentric Russian mother, Masha. Aviva declares that all good writers need a bit of oedipal insanity to help them along and Bacall confides that Cohen loved women and fed off their positive energy when they responded to his advances.
Marianne had doted on Leonard while he worked on his 1966 novel, Beautiful Losers, which Vick recalls he had written outdoors in frenzied bursts of creativity. However, the book was slaughtered by the critics and Cohen was in something of a funk when folk singer Judy Collins heard him perform `Suzanne' and coerced him into guesting on her tour. During the show, Cohen got into such a flap that he burst into tears and only returned to the stage after Collins had promised to sing with him. He always felt he had an awful voice, but the number was well received and female audience members were entranced by his looks and gravelly charm. Marianne had mixed feelings about his success, however, and once told Collins that she had ruined her life by transforming Cohen into a singer.
After one of his prolonged absences, Leonard had asked Marianne to move to Montreal and Aviva suggests that this was a disastrous mistake, as he wanted to make the gesture without living out the reality. Marianne admits that she had been ready to end things when he had called, as she didn't like being left alone on Hydra. Broomfield joined her when she took eight year-old Axel to Summerhill School in Suffolk, but he was miserable there and we see several of the almost daily postcards in which he had protested his loneliness. For a while, Marianne lived with Broomfield in Kentish Town and became a muse to Julie Felix, who would introduce Cohen to UK TV viewers in 1968. Broomfield interviews the 80 year-old American, who reveals that Marianne was a very nurturing character. She also avers that Cohen was a feminist who couldn't wait for women to take over the world.
John Simon, who produced the 1967 debut album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, agrees that there was a female element to his work and explains how he had asked his girlfriend of the time to provide counterpointing vocals to echo this aspect of the lyrics. Ihlen recalls how Cohen had disliked the ballyhoo that went with success, but admits that he had rarely talked about the celebrity side of his life, as it wasn't any of her business. Perhaps this is just as well, as guitarist Ron Cornelius jokes that Cohen revelled in the opportunities his fame brought him and discloses that he had helped him write `Chelsea Hotel' about his affair with Janis Joplin.
Cornelius also remembers Cohen starting to give concerts at mental health facilities after Masha was hospitalised for depression and he started to suffer his own bouts. Initially, the guitarist had felt it was a terrible idea, but he cme to the impact that the music had on the patients - although one chaps shouted them into silence and Cohen left the stage to hug him. At one show, he explained how he had come to write `So Long, Marianne' after they had been living together for eight years. He had realised that he was only spending a matter of weeks with her rather than months and the audience laughs nervously, as Cohen declares that he still lives with her for a couple of days each year. So much for Leonard the feminist.
Aviva claims that poets and artists can never be tamed and Marianne admits that she wished she could have put Cohen in a cage to keep him for herself. As road manager Billy Donovan jokes about the procession of women that used to visit Cohen's hotel bedroom, we see the Canadian charmer trying to escape the gaze of a camera while chatting up a woman who is flirting with him at a reception. He acknowledges that he became obsessed with conquest, while Marianne reveals that his infidelities made her miserable to the point of contemplating suicide. Aviva confides that Marianne had abortions because she knew Leonard didn't want children. As he rejoices in an interview about having lived through the era of Free Love, she gets tearful while recalling that she had reluctantly reached the decision that things had to end.
While seeking a new direction, Ihlen had visited the student Broomfield in Cardiff and urged him to make a documentary about slum clearance near his dockside digs. He recalls the kids flocking around her because she was so empathetic. But she was unhappy, even though Cohen had written `Bird on a Wire' with her when electricity had finally reached Hydra. Brown recalls Axel having to grow up quickly because life within the expat community was so unconventional. Moreover, as Marianne sought consolatory lovers, Axel was excluded and Brown laments that she wasn't always a great mother and cites this as a reason that Axel spent much of his life in institutions. Goldman says her own parents split up when she was still young and we hear how the Johnston family fell apart after leaving the island, as the struggle of reality and the effect of drink and drugs drove several members to early deaths and/or suicide.
Longtime resident George Slater says he loved it on Hydra and insists that Cohen thrived there. But he had the gift for seeming to fit wherever he went and women flocked to him. He also started doing a lot of drugs and Cornelius recalls the madness of the Isle of Wight event when the stage caught fire just before they went on. Yet, the spaced-out Cohen was in his element and wondered if Marianne was in the audience to share the experience. By the time her image adorned the back of the sleeve for the 1969 album, Songs From a Room, however, she was finding it increasingly hard to communicate with Cohen and became ever more aware of the gulf developing between them.
Both Cornelius and Donovan tell druggy tales in which LSD features heavily. Brown claims it was slipped in his drink when he was a kid and remembers mules staggering off down Hydra's steep, narrow streets after cruelly being fed acid. Cornelius recalls taking a needle prick of Desert Dust and being wasted for 14 hours. He swears that they took it 23 days in a row and much of one tour was conducted under its influence. Out of respect for his heritage, Cohen tried to stay clean in Jerusalem and apologised to the audience for playing so badly. Indeed, he even offered to refund their money. But, having come off stage, Cohen had shaved without soap and felt so much better that he went back out and finished the show.
According to Judy Scott, Cohen started seeing artist Suzanne Elrod in Montreal while he was still living with Marianne on Hydra. Aviva Layton sneers that Elrod was a scheming woman who knew what she had to do to keep Cohen and always felt that he was like an insect trapped in a spider's web. Cornelius suggests that Cohen was always chasing something without ever quite knowing what it was and that this endless quest led to deep depressions. But John Lissauer - who produced the album New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974) - believes that Cohen accepted these downswings, as quasi-depressed women of a certain age identified with him and he was forever being thanked for helping guide them out of their crises. Lissauer also reveals that Cohen was a funny man, but descended into darkness when he wrote and performed.
While they were working on the Songs for Rebecca project in the mid-1970s, Cohen decided to take a short break on Hydra. But Lissauer didn't hear from him again for seven years, because Marty Machat had cut a deal for Cohen to work with Phil Spector (whom he also represented) on Death of a Ladies' Man (1977). In retrospect, Cohen reveals that he had hated the sessions, as Spector was a gun-toting maniac, while his family life was becoming increasingly strained. In an effort to atone, Cohen contacted Lissauer and asked him to produce his next album, Various Positions (1984), which contained the anthemic `Hallelujah'. They both thought it was a masterpiece, but Columbia hated it and Machat told Lissauer that he was finished and tossed his contract in the bin. Thus, while the song went on to become the highlight of every Cohen concert and be recorded by 300 other artists, Lissauer didn't get any royalties because his contract had never been signed.
Meanwhile, Marianne had left Hydra and returned to Oslo. Goldman reveals that she became a secretary, married a Norwegian man named Jan and became stepmother to his children in a cosily dull existence. Broomfield goes back to Hydra and finds it's become the playground of the rich. The author of 30 self-published books, Don Lowe still lives there and uses candles and a well rather than electricity and running water. He got closer to Marianne in her later years and says Cohen's shadow remained over her. She divorced and remarried Jan and seemed to find a sort of contentment. Cohen sought his in the Mount Baldy Zen Centre between 1994-99, during which time manager Kelley Lynch stole $6 million and he had to leave the Buddhist monastery in order to make his living on the road. It was during this period that Cohen became cool and he felt better adjusted to revel in the adulation.
Marianne accepted front-row tickets to the 2009 Oslo show and we see her singing along with her former lover. Mollestadt recalls her contacting him to let him know that she was dying and asked him to tell Cohen, With her permission, Mollestadt brought a camera to her hospital bedside and recorded her reaction as she listened to Leonard's message about his eternal gratitude and being just behind her. She thought it was beautiful and Mollestadt believes that these were the words she had waited a lifetime to hear. Cohen himself died three months later in Los Angeles on 7 November 2016.
While the title suggests that this is supposed to be a joint portrait, much of the focus falls on the more famous partner in a relationship that exposed the best and the worst of Leonard Cohen's personality. As a friend of Marianne's, Broomfield is wholly entitled to take her side. But he also seems to shield her and Axel by gently pushing them into the margins while he concentrates on the more colourful aspects of Cohen's post-Hydra career. It would be interesting to know more about Ihlen's life in Oslo. especially as her biographer is on hand to provide some discreet insights. Instead, we get some rather tiresome `what happens on tour' anecdotes about Cohen's appetite for drugs and women, which actually do little to enhance his reputation.
For once restricting his own appearances, Broomfield makes haunting use of Leonard and Marianne's voices to put a personal spin on the rather perfunctory meld of archive footage and talking-head revelation. Yet he never gets inside the couple's minds and hearts, as he flits between their island circle and Cohen's extramural commitments and hedonistic betrayals. It might also have been nice to hear a bit more of such pivotal songs as `So Long, Marianne' and `Bird on a Wire'. But we learn more about `Suzanne' and `Hallelujah', which have nothing to do with the romance under scrutiny. Slickly assembled, this casts a pleasantly nostalgic glow. But it hardly sheds new light.
It's tempting to view each film in which a Mexican character displays dignity and fortitude in the face of extremis as a shot across the bows of President Donald Trump. Following Alfonso Cuarón's Golden Lion- and Oscar-winning period drama, Roma, Lila Avilés's The Chambermaid comes up to date similarly to examine the limited options facing women who are exploited in menial roles. Taking its inspiration from Sophie Calle's photographic tome, L'Hôtel, this deceptively passive picture is so keenly observant that it feels much more authentic than Cuarón's moving, but over-praised monochrome melodrama, as the focus falls firmly on the anonymous cleaner rather than on those she serves.
Opening the blinds in a room in the InterContinental Presidente Hotel in Mexico City, 24 year-old Evelia (Gabriela Cartol) sighs as she surveys the mess left by the guest. As she makes a start on tidying up, she finds a balding man lying motionless on the floor beside the bed and is relieved when he struggles to his feet. She asks if he would like her to come back, but he can't bring himself to speak to her and uses hand gestures to get her to leave. Eve has set her heart on a job on the 42nd Floor and is excited when supervisor Nachita (Clementina Guadarrama) informs her that there is a vacancy and that one of the bosses has been impressed by her work.
Having a discreet nose around the next room she cleans, Eve pockets an item she finds in the bin and hands a phone charger to Elizabeth (Elizabeth Sotelo), the hotel housekeeper. She asks about a red dress that she had found a while back and is assured that she is first on the list if nobody claims it. Lunching on a bag of popcorn, Eve stares out of the window of an empty room before Nachita sends her to deliver some toiletries to a man named Morales (Antonio Vega), who is a VIP client. He already has a bathroom full of freebies and barely acknowledges Eve's existence, as he files his nails while watching TV in a bathrobe.
Using an internal phone line to check up on her four year-old son, Ruben, Eve pops down to the uniform laundry window and meets Tita (Marisol Villaruel), who is standing in for her ailing sister. She tries to sell Eve some plastic food containers and gives her a sample bottle of hand lotion, but she doesn't have the spare cash to buy anything.
Next day, Skinny (Federico Tello) asks Eve to do him a favour and look in on Romina (Agustina Quinzi), an Argentinian guest who needs a maid to keep an eye on her baby while she takes a shower. She chatters away about boys having an obsession with their bits, as Eve cradles the infant and agrees to help out for the remainder of Romina's stay, as she kisses her on the cheek and promises her a generous tip.
Keen to make something of herself, Eve signs up for the workplace classes given by Raul (Alex Uribe Villaruel), where she is befriended by the older Miriam, who prefers the nickname Minitoy (Teresa Sánchez). She is impressed that Eve works on the 21st floor when she is only on 16 and offers to help out whenever she can before trying to sell her a UFO toy at a bargain price. Something of a joker, Minitoy tries to talk to Eve in the canteen and goofs around in class. But Eve feels out of her depth and dashes to the bathroom when Raul offers to lend her Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull and she has to confess that she has never read a book before.
Summoned back to give Morales more amenities, Eve gets interrupted during a call from a corridor phone by a female guest noisily filling an ice bucket. When she gets a moment's peace, therefore, she perches on the end of a bed to read the book that Raul gave her. However, she doesn't realise that her period has started and she stains the white duvet cover and has to ask Minitoy to help her clean it. In return, she gets Eve to clean a room that looks like a bomb hit it and she is too indebted to complain. Indeed, she even agrees to subject herself to the electric shock device that Minitoy carries in her bag and they get the giggles when Eve proves able to withstand a considerable charge before she eventually shouts out.
As Romina is taken with Eve's way with her young son, she suggests moving to Buenos Aires and becoming their maid. She says she will pay well and that her husband will be thrilled to hire her. Tempted by the prospect, Eve goes about her work with a spring in her step and is grateful when Minitoy offers to help with a couple of rooms when she falls behind. However, Nachita ticks her off for leaving damp patches in a bathroom and reminds her how strict the management was when she first started at the hotel. Eve is crushed because it's the first mistake she has made and Nachita reassures her that everything will be okay.
Feeling better, Eve goes to her class with Raul, who commends her for answering a maths question and declares that she is coming out of her shell. As it's the Sabbath, Eve has to push the lift buttons for a Jewish guest and she smiles at him as they wait in the corridor. When she returns to Room 1802, Eve discovers that Romina has checked out without leaving a note and she fights to hide her disappointment.
Throwing caution to the wind, when she bumps into Spider (José Manuel Ramirez Gloria), the window cleaner who has been flirting with her from his rig outside the hotel, she sits down on the bed and strips down to her underwear before lying back to masturbate. Afterwards, she struggles to contain her sense of revulsion and calls her friend Maguitos to speak to Ruben. She is behind with her child-minding payments, but hopes to be able to make up the arrears if she gets promoted to the 42nd Floor. But Maguitos isn't amused when Eve misses the last bus after staying behind to help Minitoy and has to sleep in a cupboard overnight.
Waking late the next morning, she rushes to class to learn from Perla (Perla Matias) that the union has closed it down. Suddenly feeling tired, Eve barely hears the lift attendant (Elvia Rosales Zarate) talking to her and hardly notices Spider across the canteen. She perks up when Elizabeth calls to tell her that the red dress is hers. As she waits in the corridor, however, she notices that Minitoy has been given the 42nd Floor and she scuttles past in smart clothes, as Nachita shows her into her office. Seething, Eve goes into the laundry and thrashes the red dress against the pile of white bags before storming in to ask Elizabeth why she was overlooked. She reassures her that another opportunity will soon arise. But, as Eve wanders around one of the luxurious penthouse rooms on 42 (complete with its own pool), it's easy to see why she wanted the post so much.
She goes on to the roof and gazes up at the sky. But life has to go on and she agrees to trade the dress with another maid and makes Tita's day by purchasing a large plastic tub and a thermos flask. Taking the lift with two French girls who talk over her, Eve walks across the lobby and out through the revolving doors - so we can see her off the premises for the first time in the entire film.
Rarely out of her drab grey uniform, Gabriela Cartol's Eve is much closer in spirit to Catalina Saavedra in Sebastían Silva's The Maid (2009) than Vicky Krieps in Ingo Haeb's The Chambermaid Lynn, Anaïs Demoustier in Pascale Ferran's Bird People (both 2014) or even the Oscar-nominated Yalitza Aparicio in Roma. Yet, while she appears to be an innocent who is duped into helping Minitoy steal her prized job from under her nose, it should be remembered that Eve is behind in her payments to her child minder and was all ready to quit the hotel if she had been offered a position in Argentina. Ultimately, she becomes a victim, as she loses out on all fronts. Even the adult education classes that have been so good for her confidence are cancelled by the union that is supposed to be on her side. But the debuting Avilés and co-scenarist Juan Carlos Márquez astutely leave us guessing whether Eve is walking away for good or simply heading home to regroup and bide her time until the next chance comes.
On screen for almost the entire picture, Cartol is superb as the unassuming, but resolutely enigmatic titular character, whose reason for coveting the red dress remains as shrouded as the motivation to strip off for the voyeuristic window cleaner. She is ably supported by an admirable ensemble from which Teresa Sánchez stands out as the deceptively chummy, but ruthlessly ambitious Minitoy, whose larkish banter contrasts with the self-obsessed prattling of Agustina Quizni's yummy mummy, whose bafflement that she should take public transport to a bargain market when she can hail a cab sums up the chasm between the staff and guests as tellingly as Antonio Vega's fixation with gratis toiletries.
Around the turn of the century, Thai cinema was all the rage in Britain. Subsequently, it has fallen out of favour, with only arthouse darling Apichatpong Weerasethakul being guaranteed a release outside the festival circuit. It's to be hoped that Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit's Die Tomorrow rekindles UK interest, even if it's as part of an intriguing double bill with Rehana Rose's Dead Good. But, while Nawapol caught the imagination with the playful formalism of 36 (2012) and Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy (2013), this blend of news-based dramatic vignette and vox popped opinion struggles to gel into anything significant.
After a caption informs us that the mayfly has the shortest lifespan of any creature, we cut to what seems to be phone footage of a small girl bawling in the back of a car, as her father tells her that there's no escaping death. More captions reveal that on 24 May 2017, a young woman was killed by a truck after leaving the hotel room she was sharing with three friends prior to their graduations ceremony. It was 2:50 am and she had gone to buy beer because they had run out. Suddenly, we're looking at a boxy frame, as the tipsy quartet of Jaa (Patcha Poonpiriya), Yok (Morakot Liu), Som (Chutimon Chuengcharoensukying) and Prae (Chonnikan Netjui) read their horoscopes in a magazine and discuss their hopes for the future.
Dissatisfied with the printed versions, they decide to rewrite their fates, with Yok wanting to settle in America (if Donald Trump will let her), while Som dreams of becoming the Thai Anna Wintour. Prae hopes to have kids, while Jaa jokes from behind a face mask of selling rare trees online. It's then that they realise they are out of booze and they debate who should go on a beer run. But we don't get to learn who was chosen. Instead, we get a wide shot of the room, as the hotel chambermaid collects the rubbish.
A caption reveals that two humans die every second. This means that 120 die per minute, 7200 an hour and 172,800 each day. A timecode counter appears in the top left corner of the screen to show how many people will die in the time it takes the audience to watch this film. As lottery balls bounce in extreme close-up, we learn that a business died in his sleep at the stock exchange on 11 June 2012 and wasn't found for five hours. On 15 January 2016, hundreds perished in coastal Portugal when Hurricane Alex struck. At the same time, Thailand had balmy weather and the radio forecaster wishes people a pleasant day.
A small boy is asked if he would like to know if he was going to die tomorrow, but he would rather carry on as normal without having the prospect of death hovering over him. Following a montage of seemingly random photographs (which relate to a woman's stay in the United States), Am (Koramit Vajarasthira) returns home after a prolonged absence and struggles to get her surly brother (Sirat Intarachote) to pose for a picture on the roof of their house in a rundown part of Bangkok.
Curious to know why Am has suddenly come home, the brother quizzes her about her job and boyfriend. She tells him that she has brought him the record player he wanted, but he says he needed it two years ago and isn't bothered now. The siblings take the washing off the line and Am notices the rickety telegraph poles in the street below. In a further effort to reconnect, she suggests going to their favourite restaurant for fried oysters. Her brother doesn't want to know, although he agrees to let her borrow his motorbike the next day. Unfortunately, a caption reveals that a woman on a motorcycle was killed by a falling pylon on 6 August 2013. Just moments before, a taxi driver had seen her park the bike to take a snapshot of a puppy in the street.
The brother meanders into a wider shot of the rooftop and sits on the same bench to light a cigarette. In audio, we hear a man speculate about whether a woman he knew had planned her death. However, he admits that her sudden loss changed his life and he never misses the opportunity to tell loved ones how he feels about them, in case they also pass on before he sees them again.
Over aerial footage of a runway, we hear a young boy telling an inquisitor that suffering is much worse than dying, as one keeps feeling the ill effects of the former while the latter ends everything. A caption reveals that a flight from Bangkok to the USA disappeared on 22 April 2014. Among those lost was a young man (Sunny Suwanmethanont) who had spent the previous day with his girlfriend (Rattanrat Eertaweekul). She is awaiting a donor for a heart transplant and casually remarks that she is going to die before he does. He wishes she would stop being so morbid and protests that normal people don't talk about death so much. Nevertheless, he reminds her not to give up hope as a suitable someone might pass away at any moment.
As she clips his toenails (while wearing a nasal cannula), the girlfriend chides him for not using the expensive lotion she had bought him for his cracked heel. She also ticks him off for forgetting to pack his passport and wonders how he will cope without her during his week-long stay in the States. He admits he will miss her and jokes that she will have to come back as a ghost to watch over him. He slips out to wash his feet and she settles in a chair so that he can give her a neck massage. Dozing off, she fails to hear her boyfriend excuse himself and wakes to find herself alone. Suddenly confronted with the loneliness she will have to endure while he's away and the prospect of her potentially imminent demise, she starts to cry.
Shown in the cam-phone framing, a 102 year-old man named Prem recalls the loss of his wife and son and wishes he had died before them so that he could have been spared the pain of living without them. He admits to being scared of being heartbroken, but he urges young people to live to the full so that they have things to be proud of when they look back. Intercut with his reflections are shots of clouds taken from an aeroplane window, as captions reveal that famous Thai-Spanish actress Farida `Fari' Fernandez was hit by a car overshooting a bend on 17 February 2015 after she had got out of her own vehicle to help the victim of a motorbike accident.
We cut away to a film set, where May (Jarinporn Joonkiat) nibbles on some snacks while waiting to be called to perform. Everyone around her is looking at clips of Fari's accident or checking with friends to see find someone who matches her rare blood type. May sheds a few tears and has to have her make-up touched up, as she is being proposed as Fari's replacement in a commercial. She wanders towards the back of the set to make a phone call behind a stuffed lioness and she can barely contain her excitement that she is going to achieve the ambition of a lifetime. As the screen whites out, we jump to the set, where May gives three renditions of the spiel promoting a brand of face cream. At the end of each, she beams into the lens.
A table detailing the `lethality' of common causes of death follows a clip of a small boy confiding that he had Googled whether it hurt to die and had been reassured by Reddit that it's not too painful. We cut away to a man seemingly preparing to jump from a high-rise balcony before a caption reveals that a man named Mark had posted on Facebook the last text message that Teng had sent him before leaping to his death on 4 September 2016. In it, the suicide thanked his friends and apologised for being so selfish in reaching the conclusion `not to bother anymore'. He assures everyone that they had done their best to be kind to him, but he felt too weak to cope with the modern world and could only summon the courage to leave it behind.
Switching again to the phone-cam aspect ratio, we see Lek (Violette Wautier) ignore a phone message from Teng (Yosawat Sitiwong), who promptly starts banging on her door. He promises to leave if Lek says she loves him. However, she can't bring herself to do so and calls her next-door neighbour (Kanyapak Wuttara) to check that Teng has gone. They meet on the walkway outside their flats, where Lek insists she has no regrets about denying Teng's request, even though he keeps threatening to kill himself. Playing with an electric shock device, the friend hopes Lek can live with the consequences of her actions. But they don't take Teng's ultimatum seriously and head off together, gossiping about karaoke.
Over footage of the Challenger Space Shuttle exploding, we hear a woman claiming that she's too tired of life to want to be reincarnated and have to go through it all again. Cutting from black, we see an elderly musician (Kom Chauncheun) lying on a tatami mat in a white vest, with his head resting on a cushion in the lap of his daughter (Puangsoi Aksornsawang). She massages his shaved scalp and complains that she's bored with nothing to do. Her father reminds her that being free is a blessing, as she props his head on another pillow and leaves him to sleep. The camera pulls away slowly from the static close-up and reaches the courtyard beyond the open patio doors before a caption reveals that an ageing musician died in such a way in Chumphon Province on 30 November 2016.
In closing, Thamrongrattanarit returns to Prem the centurion, who can't understand how he has managed to live so long. He has no fear of death, as he is simply fulfilling a destiny that is being controlled by a higher being. Sipping on water as he splutters, the frail old man seems content with his lot. Yet we see him celebrating his 104th birthday with his family before cutting away to the girl with heart problem, who is reading in a room free of medical equipment. As the scene fades, we visit the casualty counter for a last time, as it stops at 8442. However, the film continues beyond this, as still life shots of simple flower arrangements decorate the closing credits.
Shooting in single takes to replicate snatched smartphone slices of life, Thamrongrattanarit raises some pretty basic existential questions about death without offering any answers (because there aren't any that we know of) or many speculations. Each vignette is dotted with telltale details and the odd red herring, but none of them are exactly revelatory or riveting and few outside Thailand will be familiar with the actual deaths drawn from the news headlines.
The performances are fine, while Phairot Siriwath's production design and Niramon Ross's camerawork enable Thamrongrattanarit to achieve the faux sense of intimacy that is deftly counterpointed by the phantom tinkling of the piano score by Tongta and Pokpong Jitdee. For all its reassurances about the ineluctable nature of time and the mundanity of death, however, this sincere, if superficial experimental exercise offers little solace or insight.
It's been a while since Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton co-directed DOA (1988) and Super Mario Brothers (1993) and even longer since they made pioneering pop promos for their Cucumber Studios company and teamed with George Stone to create the 1980s cyberpunk icon, Max Headroom. It comes as something of a surprise, therefore, to find Jankel calling the shots on Tell It to the Bees, an adaptation of a 2009 Fiona Shaw novel that was published the same year that Jankel took a break from commercials and Channel 4's Live From Abbey Road to make her solo feature bow with a tele-take on David Almond's Skellig. But what is most puzzling about this novelettish lesbian saga set in 1950s Scotland is that sibling scribes Henrietta and Jessica Ashworth have produced such a conventional scenario after having worked on such outré TV shows as Fresh Meat (2013) and Killing Eve (2019).
Ever since husband Robert (Emun Elliott) returned from the war with an undiagnosed case of post-traumatic shock, Lydia Weekes (Holliday Grainger) has worked in a mill in the small Scottish town of Dunlaw to raise her 10 year-old son, Charlie (Gregor Selkirk). He is fond of his older cousin, Anne Stock (Lauren Lyle), although her widowed mother, Pam (Kate Dickie), has little time for Lydia, as she believes the Englishwoman trapped her brother into marriage by deliberately getting pregnant.
Although Charlie has a Scottish accent, the Mancunian Lydia is regarded as an outsider and, when he gets hurt in a playground fight while defending her honour, Anne takes him to see Dr Jean Markham (Anna Paquin). She has just returned to the village to take over her late father's practice and offers to show Charlie the beehives he had kept in the garden. He likes the idea that bees can be persuaded to stay in a particular colony if you share your secrets and he confides that his mother is unhappy and needs cheering up.
Lydia disapproves of the doctor lending her son a copy of Heidi, however, and storms round to complain. She laughs when she realises she is wearing odd shoes and accepts a cup of tea, while Charlie pays a visit to the hives. Grateful to have someone to talk to, Lydia shares her woes without knowing that Jean is also looked down upon by her neighbours, as she had caused a minor scandal for kissing another girl when she was 15. Not everyone has a long memory, however, and several local women seem pleased to have a female doctor to discuss complaints that they had concealed from her father.
Anxious to avoid having to marry her widowed solicitor friend, Jim (Steven Robertson), and distressed by the death of a small girl whose mother had barred her on remembering her teenage indiscretion, Jean offers Lydia the post of live-in housekeeper after she loses her job at the mill and is evicted in the same afternoon. Upset by seeing his father canoodling on the street with Irene (Rebecca Hanssen) and Lydia being pawed by a stranger in the pub, Charlie is happy to see his mother smile again. Writing in the notebook that Jean gives him, he keeps a record of activity around the hive and becomes convinced that the bees are having a beneficial effect on their lives.
He is most impressed when Jean swims out into the lake to rescue his toy yacht and is hugely grateful when she buys him a bicycle. Charlie repays the deed by inviting Jean to dance with him and Lydia, but Jean is tentative when they get into ballroom hold, as she doesn't want to spoil things or risk gossip. Pam delights in informing Lydia about Jean's past, but the disclosure only intrigues her and they come close to kissing after Jean blows some bees off Lydia's neck when she is gardening. However, when Robert calls at the house to warn Lydia that he could get her and Charlie back any time he likes, she succumbs to her urges and tumbles into bed with Jean.
The next morning, Jean recalls how her romance with a classmate came to light after Rose (Tori Burgess) was raped by some boys who caught them together. She had been sent away to school and had moved around to avoid her secrets being revealed. But she feels ready to settle down and thinks she can do good in the town that disowned her. For once, Charlie doesn't overhear this conversation. However, he does see Anne having sex in the woods with her mixed-race boyfriend, George (Leo Hoyte-Egan). He also sees his mother playing footsie with Jean under the table when Jim comes to lunch and eavesdrops when the lawyer reminds Jean that she is playing a dangerous game, as same-sex liaisons are illegal and Robert would be able to claim custody of his son if the affair ever became public knowledge.
Angry with his father for punching a hole in the roof of one of the hives, Charlie has no desire to live with him. But when he blunders in on Jean and Lydia together, he is furious with his mother for withholding the truth and runs away to Robert, who threatens Lydia that he will call the police if she tries to see the boy again. The bees swarm away from the hive, while Jean's patients stay away from the surgery. Moreover, Pam discovers that Anne is pregnant and arranges for her to have a backstreet abortion to spare the family the shame of having an interracial child out of wedlock.
With Jean and Lydia contemplating emigrating to Canada in the hope that Robert will let them take Charlie, the boy comes rushing back to the house when Anne starts haemorrhaging and Jean dashes off to do her duty. While Lydia tries to explain to Charlie that some things need to be kept secret, Robert comes to find him and Lydia locks them in her room to protect the boy. Seething with rage, Robert attempts to rape her, but Charlie unleashes the bees, who fly through the open window and attack Robert, while leaving Lydia unscathed. She makes her escape and joins Charlie in the garden to watch the bees perform a nocturnal dance, as Robert beats a glowering retreat.
By contrast, Pam is whimperingly grateful to Jean for saving Anne's life and asks if she will keep an eye on her while she recovers. The quiet, but determined nod means that Jean won't be able to follow Lydia and Charlie to Canada and he susses as much while saying goodbye to the bees. The women kiss on the platform, but Jean refuses to be afraid any longer and returns to find a full surgery. The Weekes aren't the only ones to leave, as Anne and George also head for the anonymity and acceptance of pastures new. Scribbling in his notebook, Charlie knows what Jean had meant to his mother and how she had helped set her free in the same way he does with a bee that is crawling up the compartment window, as the steam engine chugs away.
Faint echoes of William Wyler's 1961 adaptation of Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour and Terence Davies's 2015 take on Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song (2015) can be heard throughout this earnest, but over-eager and over-egged interpretation of a novel by the York-based Fiona Shaw rather than the Irish actress of the same name. Credit to Jankel and the Ashworths for trying to address so many issues with a contemporary relevance. But their blunt discussion of homophobia, parochialism, the status of women and domestic violence is no more sophisticated than the gauche eco gushing about life ending if the bees die. Moreover, by changing the book's denouement, the trio managed to upset the author, who has dismissed the bittersweet platform kiss as `a straight person's finale'.
Dusting off the Scottish accent she had used as an 11 year-old to snare an Oscar in Jane Campion's The Piano (1993), New Zealander Anna Paquin is admirably buttoned-up as the doctor prepared to put her patients before her passion. But Holliday Grainger struggles with the more difficult task of conveying Lydia's sexual awakening, although she is scarcely helped by the sketchiness of the characterisation and penny dreadfulness of her timely transformation. Indeed, the action descends into melodrama far too often for it to retain its plausibility, especially during the last act when all that's missing, as the digital bees mass for a magic-realist swoop, is someone rushing in to announce there's trouble at t'mill. Even the dependably stoic Kate Dickie seems a bit nonplussed by it all, although young Gregor Selkirk manages to rise above it all as the wide-eyed innocent who allows his hurt feelings to get the better of his common sense.
Clearly working with a restricted budget, production designer Andy Harris conveys something of the dourness of a Scottish working community still in the depths of postwar Austerity. Cinematographer Bartosz Nalazek's lighting reinforces the sense of drabness, as several key scenes take place at night or in dreich weather. More nuanced is the colouring of Ali Mitchell's costumes and the cadences of Claire M. Singer's score. But, while Jankel's directorial style feels markedly more mature than it was a quarter of a century ago, she replicates many of Isobel Coixet's contextual and tonal misjudgements in adapting Penelope Fitzgerald's 1950s small-town saga, The Bookshop (2017).
Leeds-born Harry Wootliff has made a solid start to her directorial career with the shorts Nits (2004), Trip (2008) and I Don't Care (2010). Now, she makes an even more impressive feature debut with Only You, a modern love story that begins with a meet cute before quickly plunging back into real life to explore the strain that trying for a baby can place on a seemingly idyllic relationship. Elements of the backstory are left floating, while the third act meanders in its search for an ending. But Wootliff does enough to suggest that she is destined to join the likes of Andrea Arnold, Lynne Ramsay, Gillian Wearing, Carol Morley and Clio Barnard in bolstering British realist cinema's female perspective.
While at a New Year party in Glasgow, Elena Aldana (Laia Costa) resists the efforts of her friend Carly (Lisa McGrillis) to matchmake her with her older brother. In trying to hail a taxi, she gets into an argument with Jake Wilson (Josh O'Connor), who insists on sharing the cab. He reveals that he has been DJing and tells the driver to pull over when Elena feels sick. Despite her protestations, he walks her home and she fibs that she's almost his age when he discloses that he is 26. While she's in the bathroom, he digs Elvis Costello's `I Want You' out of her musician father's vinyl collection and their playful dance soon leads to passionate kissing.
After she bundles him out the next morning, Elena doesn't expect to hear from Jake again. But he calls her at work, stays the night again and agrees to move in with her that weekend. Carly is taken aback by the speed with which things are moving, as Jake is doing a PhD in marine biology and is yet to learn that Elena is really 35. When they collect his belongings from his shared flat, Elena realises that he has been sleeping with one of his flatmates, who makes her annoyance at his treachery very clear. But they quickly establish a cosy routine, as she looks through his photograph album and she reveals that her father had been a philanderer, while his parents had been blissfully happy until his mother died. Such is their closeness that Jake is unfazed when Elena finally comes clean about her age and even jokingly calls her `Mrs Robinson' in a reference to Mike Nichols's The Graduate (1967). Indeed, when he sees her cradling a baby when he meets her friends, he suggests they start a family because they are made for each other.
When they make love without a condom for the first time, Elena is moved when Jake professes his love and a montage follows her checking diary dates at work and building up the expectation to discover whether she's pregnant. She hides her disappointment when they visit Jake's father, Andrew (Peter Wight), who lives alone in the country. He enjoys showing her around the grounds and Jake is confident that they have succeeded in making a baby when he takes her to his old room (where he has to stoop to stop his head from hitting the ceiling).
Feeling broody after a night out with a pregnant Carly and her pals, Elena tries to seduce Jake, who is feeling tired after a long day. He fails to perform and complains that having sex every time Elena ovulates is beginning to seem mechanical. She is concerned that there's something wrong and they undergo tests. The consultant (Anita Vettesse) reassures Elena that a teenage abortion won't affect her fertility, but does suggest that they apply for IVF treatment to take some of the pressure off trying to conceive. In the car park, Jake opines that it's hardly a romantic way to have a child and Elena accuses him of being immature for believing that life always works out perfectly.
She wonders why they ever became an item and is still feeling fragile when Jake tries to patch things up back at the flat. He reminds her that they have six more attempts before the IVF date and she is touched by his confidence. But, as Christmas comes and goes with no luck, Elena grows nervous about starting the course. Realising she is scared of needles, Jake jollies her along and even injects himself to make her feel better. However, the need to medicate while at work and the marks appearing on her belly increase the pressure she feels to make a success of the treatment. She's relieved when the follicle tests prove positive and the first embryo is implanted.
As Jake passes a viva voce examination to confirm his doctorate, Elena starts to feel nauseated in the mornings. They try to remain calm, but she is charmed when he gives her his mother's ring, even though he insists he is not proposing. She reads aloud an online timeline for the first few days of a pregnancy and comes to believe that they are finally going to become parents. Naturally, she is crushed when the indicator reads `not pregnant' and Jake can only cradle her, as he can't think of anything to say. However, they bicker over the directions when they go to the christening of Carly's baby and Elena accuses Jake of being rude when he prefers to walk in the garden rather than chat to her friends. On the way home, he stops in the middle of nowhere to relieve himself and suggests in the dappled sunshine that they forget about babies and start enjoying their lives again.
A montage of partying and coupling follows, but Elena begins to feel broody again after seeing the downstairs neighbours playing with their son in the garden. She confides in Carly that she won't feel complete unless she becomes a mother and wonders whether she is being punished for being a bad person. Elena mentions that they are considering taking out a loan to pay for a private consultation and, while nursing her own baby, Carly reminds her that there are worse things in life than not being a parent.
The consultant advises against pursuing expensive treatment, as Elena only has a 5% chance of conceiving. Jake is furious with him for being so blunt and suggests borrowing money from his father to go elsewhere. Catching him sobbing after taking a shower, Elena tries to console him. But, when Carly asks her to be her maid of honour and asks when she is going to tie the knot, Elena admits that she doesn't know if they have a long-term future, as the baby issue has placed an enormous strain on them and dented their individual self-confidence. Moreover, she is in agony from missing a child she has never had.
As Jake has been away working, Elena takes the next pregnancy test without him and he is disappointed in her for making this about herself when they are supposed to be a couple. He goes to the pub alone and returns to play the Elvis Costello track to recreate their first night together. Elena is not in the mood, however, and suggests that they should split up because she has failed to give him the baby he wants. Jake implores her not to push the issue, as he loves her and wants them to get back to how things were before. But she goads him into criticising her and, when she screams at him to leave, he vows never to return once he sets foot through the door.
Elena serves as maid of honour at Carly's wedding and her brother, Shane (Stuart Martin), reveals that he has left his pregnant girlfriend because he wasn't ready for the commitment. During the reception, Carly's father makes a speech about relationships needing to be re-born and Elena claps politely, while holding back the tears. She puts a brave face on things, but misses Jake so much that she invites him to meet for coffee. He has been couch-surfing, but is now living with his father and Elena gets teary at the mention of his name. But, while she hopes they can be a family again, Jake is adamant that he meant what he said when he gave her an ultimatum and he leaves her alone in the café.
Returning home, Jake rakes leaves in the garden. But Andrew suggests that he follows his heart and recognises that every couple has highs and lows. Despite what he chooses to believe, his parents had their rows. They simply had them in loud whispers in the kitchen after he had gone to bed. Heeding the advice, Jake meets Elena in an autumnal park and they smile as their fingers touch. As the credits roll to the Chromatics version of `Blue Moon', Jake and Elena rediscover each other in a slow, smoochy dance that suggests the realise, at last, that having each other will have to be enough.
Following their impressive turns in Sebastian Schipper's Victoria (2015) and Francis Lee's God's Own Country (2017), Laia Costa and Joseph O'Connor form an affecting partnership in this thoughtfully written and deftly directed drama, which explores what happens when a couple's chemistry is undermined by their biology. It might have been nice to learn more about Elena's background to explain what the Catalan is doing in a picturesque, but rather underused Glasgow - as Carlos Marques-Marcet did much more effectively with Natalia Tena's character in Anchor and Hope (2017) - while neither Elena nor Jake seem to have much of a life outside their apartment. This makes sense, bearing in mind the all-consuming desire to conceive a child. But it makes Jake and Elena slightly two-dimensional, while their failure at any point to consider adoption leaves lots of unanswered questions about their motives for wanting to become parents.
As this is primarily a study of the strains that conception places upon a romance, Wootliff chronicles the IVF process as forensically as Jason Barker did in the 2018 documentary, A Deal With the Universe. But the medical profession is given rather a rough ride, with the private consultant's bedside manner particularly leaving a lot to be required. However, such brusqueness affirms how alone the couple are in their endeavour and how little shared experience they have to fall back on to get them through the stress and heartache.
This sense of isolation is reinforced by Andy Drummond's production design and the frequency with which cinematographer Shabier Kirchner captures the pair in intimate close-ups in confined spaces. However, the audience's investment is in Elena and Jake as a couple and Wootliff and editor Tim Fulford expose how little we know about them as people in allowing the pace to slacken when they are apart. Of course, this reflects how they must be feeling at being alone again. But, with Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch's score emphasising its mawkish quality, the denouement feels a touch contrived, even though it makes no guarantee of a happy ever after, as the lovers have a lot of learning and growing up to do if they are to overcome their disappointments and scarcely addressed differences.
Avian animation has come a long way since Jim Crow, Fats, Deacon, Dopey, and Specks made their racially dubious contribution to Dumbo (1941). Obviously, Walt Disney went some way to atoning with Donald Duck, while Walter Lantz created Woody Woodpecker and the Warner cartoon department came up with Daffy Duck, Tweety and Foghorn Leghorn. Among the more memorable feathered friends to appear in recent times are Rocky the Rooster in Chicken Run (2000), the eponymous pigeon in Valiant (2005), Mumble the penguin in Happy Feet (2006), Blu the macaw in Rio (2011), Kai the falcon in Zambezia (2012) and Reggie and Jake the turkeys in Free Birds (2013). And, of course, there are Red, Chuck, Bomb and their pals from Angry Birds (2016), who can be seen in the innovatively titled Angry Birds 2 later this summer.
Pipping them to the post, however, is Christian Haas and Andrea Block's Birds of a Feather, which follows such recent Euro-animations as Toby Genkel and Reza Memari's A Stork's Journey (2017) and Árni Ásgeirsson and Gunnar Karlsson's Flying the Nest (2018) in using the differences between the species and the need to fly south for the winter as a means of explaining the ongoing migrant crisis to young audiences. Also known as Manou the Swift, this is the first feature to be produced by Luxx Studios and Haas and Block hatched their idea during a 2007 sailing holiday, after strong winds had caused them to spend two days in Nice, where they witnessed the seagulls gliding on the wind and the swifts performing their acrobatic dance on the rocks opposite the Colline du Château waterfall.
Separated from his swift parents after rats attack their clifftop nest above the Côte d'Azur, Manou (Josh Keaton) spots seagulls Yves (Willem Dafoe) and Blanche (Kate Winslet) perching on an outcrop and is delighted when they adopt him. He prefers bugs to seafood, but learns to adapt and is soon getting to know his baby brother, Luc (Mike Kelly). Yves warns them to stay away from the market in Nice, as it's a dangerous place, as Parcival the guineafowl discovers after he manages to escape from a wooden cage and has to shelter from the rain beneath a Castle Hill graveyard monument topped by an essorant stone eagle.
Parcival watches as Manou finds flying and swimming difficult and Yves despairs of him when he seems more interested in a firefly than learning how to navigate by the stars. He also has trouble pulling fish out of the sea and has to be rescued by his father. much to the amusement of the cocky Françoise (Julie Nathanson). But, just as Manou begins to think he will never graduate from Sailing School, he is taught to flap not glide by fellow swifts, Yusuf (Nathan North) and Poncho (Arif S. Kinchen), who take him on a food-stealing raid on the marketplace and introduce him to their sister, Kalifa (Cassandra Steen). Excited by his newfound skills, Manou boasts that he can fight off rats and Kalifa seems impressed.
Blanche is cross with Yves for ticking off Manou in front of the other gulls and he explains that he is only trying to toughen him up before they have to fly south. Luc suggests that Manou can prove himself by winning the annual race around the rocks and Parcival and the swifts cheer him on, as he zips between the branches in the trees and darts through the windows of ruined buildings on the headland in order to stay ahead of the ultra-competitive Françoise. She tries some dirty tricks to sabotage him along the way, but Manou stays on tracks, as they career along Nice's narrow streets and head back towards the coastline. With Blanche and Yves watching proudly, Manou comes home first and is rewarded by taking his father's place on the nightwatch over some precious eggs.
Unfortunately, Manou is unable to fight off a trio of rats and, much to Blanche and Luc's chagrin, Yves is powerless to prevent him from being cast out the colony. He offers to give Parcival flying lessons in return for board and lodgings in the cemetery, but winds up in living in the rock niche next door to Kalifa, who teaches him about catching worms and grooming for tics. She also introduces him to flying in formation in order to perform the swift dance and serenades him with a shell saxophone and a song about flying high in the charmingly illuminated folly abutting the Restaurant de la Reserve overlooking the Baie des Anges.
The next day, Manou and the swifts rescue Luc from a rat attack in a Nice side street and he urges him to return to the colony in time to fly south. But Manou is still smarting from being exiled and Luc tells Yves that he intends staying behind with his brother rather than let him feel abandoned. So, when Parcival spots the rats stealing eggs and Manou tracks them down to a wine cellar in the Old Town, Luc helps them by pulling the corks out of the caskets to flood the room so that the rats flee and the swifts are able to gather up the lost eggs in a fishing net.
While Parcival uses his big feet to dropkick rodents into the rising tide of red wine, Luc and the swifts return the eggs to the community. However, such is the traditional antipathy between swifts and gulls that some of the birds refuse to thank Luc and Kalifa vows to ignore them until they mend their ways. As she shelters at Parcival's place (which he has now filled with colourful bric-a-brac from the beach), she detects a storm brewing and urges Manou to warn the seagulls to postpone their take off for Africa.
Meanwhile, the swifts need Manou to help with a baby gull that has hatched in their midst and he only agrees to assist them if they help him convince the gulls to postpone their migration. Despite having misjudged conditions before (and been lucky to survive), Yves ignores their advice and is grateful when Manou and Kalifa lead the flight to safety by heading through the eye of the tempest to the fluffy white clouds above. However, as Luc had damaged his wing during the showdown with the rats, Manu has to dip back down to help Françoise guide him upwards and all agree that birds are better off when they co-operate. As if to reinforce the moral of the story, it ends with Parcival and the baby gull he has adopted giving some sandpipers lessons in how to dodge the incoming tide.
Often visually stunning, if a touch predictable in its storytelling, this should get the summer holidays off to a good start for those lucky enough to see it. The Niçois scenery and landmarks are cleverly integrated, while the decision to keep humans on the periphery seems wise. The younger members of the vocal cast get a bit shouty in places and it's easy to see why they're called a squabble of seagulls and a scream of swifts. But the presence of Willem Dafoe and Kate Winslet brings a touch of class to proceedings, even though their characters have less to do once Manou falls under Kalifa's spell.
The themes are sensibly handled, although more preamble time might have been spent outlining the rivalry between the gulls and the swifts and the reasons why the former have traditional French names, while the latter's have a Maghrebi ring. Similarly, the role of the rats is a bit problematic, as they are depicted as silent predators targeting respectable communities while contributing nothing in return. Given how rodentine symbolism has been used in cinema before, Block and co-scenarist Axel Melzener are rather on eggshells here (as it were), even though their intentions are clearly nothing but honourable.
The big set-pieces have a video game feel to them, as though Haas and Block felt the need to pander to kids with short attention spans. But they are proficiently edited by Dennis Lutz and Dirk Stoppe and scored with propulsive energy by Frank Schreiber and Steffen Wick. Indeed, the entire picture benefits from the thought and care that Block and Haas have put into it in the dozen years since their unscheduled sojourn fired their imaginations and suggested a way to shape young minds without hectoring or preaching.
Documentary provocateur Nick Broomfield has enjoyed mixed fortunes with such musical excursions as Kurt & Courtney (1998), Biggie & Tupac (2002) and Whitney: Can I Be Me (2017). However, he has a personal stake in Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love, a chronicle of the relationship between troubadour poet Leonard Cohen and muse Marianne Ihlen, as Broomfield became the Norwegian's lover after meeting her on the Greek island of Hydra. This isn't the first profile of Cohen, as it comes after Donald Brittain and Don Owen's Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr Leonard Cohen (1965), Tony Palmer's Bird on a Wire (1974), Harry Rasky's The Song of Leonard Cohen (1980) and Lian Lunson's Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man (2005). But, while it provides a satisfactory introduction to the Canadian's music and lifestyle, it proves more reticent where the love of his life is concerned.
Although they hadn't been in touch for a while, Leonard Cohen sent Marianne Ihlen a touching note when he heard that she was dying of leukaemia in the autumn of 2016. We hear the missive being read by her friend, Jan Christian Mollestad, as it's intercut with Cohen introducing `So Long, Marianne' at the 1970 Isle of Wight festival. He admits to having mispronounced her name (as there is a stress on the final `e'), while she confides that she had never really liked the song, as it had foreshadowed the end of their relationship.
Leonard and Marianne had met on the Greek island of Hydra in 1960 after he had used some literary prize money to travel and the famously bohemian Johnston family had taken him in. In voiceover, Nick Broomfield recalls meeting Marianne on the same island eight years later and becoming one of her lovers. Although the romance had been brief, he continues to owe her a considerable debt, as she had encouraged him to make films.
Cohen had been born in Westmount, Montreal in 1934 and childhood friend Nancy Bacal recalls how keen they had been to get away from their achingly conservative neighbourhood. Photos suggest that they remained close down the years, as they shared a reluctance to conform. Ihlen was also running away, albeit with her son, Axel, from an unhappy marriage to novelist Axel Jensen. She recalls meeting Cohen on Hydra and the thrill that went through her body when he first spoke to her in a shop. As she didn't consider herself beautiful and he didn't rate his own looks, they felt they made a good match and Mollestad concurs that they brought out the best in each other.
Frustrated by the creative process, Jensen often resorted to a violence and Leonard helped Marianne get over him. According to friend Jeffrey Brown, he virtually became Axel's surrogate father. Marianne's biographer, Helle Goldman, speaks fondly of growing up in the bohemian community presided over by Australian novelist George Johnston and his writer wife Charmian Clift, while Richard Vick recalls visiting the island on Broomfield's recommendation and staying for 14 years. Nobody had much money and the amenities were pretty basic, but all agree that the artistic lifestyle was idyllic.
Feeling insecure in his creativity, however, Cohen insisted on spending half the year in Montreal with his mentor, Irving Layton. His wife of 20 years, Aviva, recalls their bond and suggests that their shared Jewishness was an important factor. Cohen was from a wealthy family and was well educated, even though he had lost his father while still young and Aviva Layton wonders if her husband had slept with Cohen's eccentric Russian mother, Masha. Aviva declares that all good writers need a bit of oedipal insanity to help them along and Bacall confides that Cohen loved women and fed off their positive energy when they responded to his advances.
Marianne had doted on Leonard while he worked on his 1966 novel, Beautiful Losers, which Vick recalls he had written outdoors in frenzied bursts of creativity. However, the book was slaughtered by the critics and Cohen was in something of a funk when folk singer Judy Collins heard him perform `Suzanne' and coerced him into guesting on her tour. During the show, Cohen got into such a flap that he burst into tears and only returned to the stage after Collins had promised to sing with him. He always felt he had an awful voice, but the number was well received and female audience members were entranced by his looks and gravelly charm. Marianne had mixed feelings about his success, however, and once told Collins that she had ruined her life by transforming Cohen into a singer.
After one of his prolonged absences, Leonard had asked Marianne to move to Montreal and Aviva suggests that this was a disastrous mistake, as he wanted to make the gesture without living out the reality. Marianne admits that she had been ready to end things when he had called, as she didn't like being left alone on Hydra. Broomfield joined her when she took eight year-old Axel to Summerhill School in Suffolk, but he was miserable there and we see several of the almost daily postcards in which he had protested his loneliness. For a while, Marianne lived with Broomfield in Kentish Town and became a muse to Julie Felix, who would introduce Cohen to UK TV viewers in 1968. Broomfield interviews the 80 year-old American, who reveals that Marianne was a very nurturing character. She also avers that Cohen was a feminist who couldn't wait for women to take over the world.
John Simon, who produced the 1967 debut album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, agrees that there was a female element to his work and explains how he had asked his girlfriend of the time to provide counterpointing vocals to echo this aspect of the lyrics. Ihlen recalls how Cohen had disliked the ballyhoo that went with success, but admits that he had rarely talked about the celebrity side of his life, as it wasn't any of her business. Perhaps this is just as well, as guitarist Ron Cornelius jokes that Cohen revelled in the opportunities his fame brought him and discloses that he had helped him write `Chelsea Hotel' about his affair with Janis Joplin.
Cornelius also remembers Cohen starting to give concerts at mental health facilities after Masha was hospitalised for depression and he started to suffer his own bouts. Initially, the guitarist had felt it was a terrible idea, but he cme to the impact that the music had on the patients - although one chaps shouted them into silence and Cohen left the stage to hug him. At one show, he explained how he had come to write `So Long, Marianne' after they had been living together for eight years. He had realised that he was only spending a matter of weeks with her rather than months and the audience laughs nervously, as Cohen declares that he still lives with her for a couple of days each year. So much for Leonard the feminist.
Aviva claims that poets and artists can never be tamed and Marianne admits that she wished she could have put Cohen in a cage to keep him for herself. As road manager Billy Donovan jokes about the procession of women that used to visit Cohen's hotel bedroom, we see the Canadian charmer trying to escape the gaze of a camera while chatting up a woman who is flirting with him at a reception. He acknowledges that he became obsessed with conquest, while Marianne reveals that his infidelities made her miserable to the point of contemplating suicide. Aviva confides that Marianne had abortions because she knew Leonard didn't want children. As he rejoices in an interview about having lived through the era of Free Love, she gets tearful while recalling that she had reluctantly reached the decision that things had to end.
While seeking a new direction, Ihlen had visited the student Broomfield in Cardiff and urged him to make a documentary about slum clearance near his dockside digs. He recalls the kids flocking around her because she was so empathetic. But she was unhappy, even though Cohen had written `Bird on a Wire' with her when electricity had finally reached Hydra. Brown recalls Axel having to grow up quickly because life within the expat community was so unconventional. Moreover, as Marianne sought consolatory lovers, Axel was excluded and Brown laments that she wasn't always a great mother and cites this as a reason that Axel spent much of his life in institutions. Goldman says her own parents split up when she was still young and we hear how the Johnston family fell apart after leaving the island, as the struggle of reality and the effect of drink and drugs drove several members to early deaths and/or suicide.
Longtime resident George Slater says he loved it on Hydra and insists that Cohen thrived there. But he had the gift for seeming to fit wherever he went and women flocked to him. He also started doing a lot of drugs and Cornelius recalls the madness of the Isle of Wight event when the stage caught fire just before they went on. Yet, the spaced-out Cohen was in his element and wondered if Marianne was in the audience to share the experience. By the time her image adorned the back of the sleeve for the 1969 album, Songs From a Room, however, she was finding it increasingly hard to communicate with Cohen and became ever more aware of the gulf developing between them.
Both Cornelius and Donovan tell druggy tales in which LSD features heavily. Brown claims it was slipped in his drink when he was a kid and remembers mules staggering off down Hydra's steep, narrow streets after cruelly being fed acid. Cornelius recalls taking a needle prick of Desert Dust and being wasted for 14 hours. He swears that they took it 23 days in a row and much of one tour was conducted under its influence. Out of respect for his heritage, Cohen tried to stay clean in Jerusalem and apologised to the audience for playing so badly. Indeed, he even offered to refund their money. But, having come off stage, Cohen had shaved without soap and felt so much better that he went back out and finished the show.
According to Judy Scott, Cohen started seeing artist Suzanne Elrod in Montreal while he was still living with Marianne on Hydra. Aviva Layton sneers that Elrod was a scheming woman who knew what she had to do to keep Cohen and always felt that he was like an insect trapped in a spider's web. Cornelius suggests that Cohen was always chasing something without ever quite knowing what it was and that this endless quest led to deep depressions. But John Lissauer - who produced the album New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974) - believes that Cohen accepted these downswings, as quasi-depressed women of a certain age identified with him and he was forever being thanked for helping guide them out of their crises. Lissauer also reveals that Cohen was a funny man, but descended into darkness when he wrote and performed.
While they were working on the Songs for Rebecca project in the mid-1970s, Cohen decided to take a short break on Hydra. But Lissauer didn't hear from him again for seven years, because Marty Machat had cut a deal for Cohen to work with Phil Spector (whom he also represented) on Death of a Ladies' Man (1977). In retrospect, Cohen reveals that he had hated the sessions, as Spector was a gun-toting maniac, while his family life was becoming increasingly strained. In an effort to atone, Cohen contacted Lissauer and asked him to produce his next album, Various Positions (1984), which contained the anthemic `Hallelujah'. They both thought it was a masterpiece, but Columbia hated it and Machat told Lissauer that he was finished and tossed his contract in the bin. Thus, while the song went on to become the highlight of every Cohen concert and be recorded by 300 other artists, Lissauer didn't get any royalties because his contract had never been signed.
Meanwhile, Marianne had left Hydra and returned to Oslo. Goldman reveals that she became a secretary, married a Norwegian man named Jan and became stepmother to his children in a cosily dull existence. Broomfield goes back to Hydra and finds it's become the playground of the rich. The author of 30 self-published books, Don Lowe still lives there and uses candles and a well rather than electricity and running water. He got closer to Marianne in her later years and says Cohen's shadow remained over her. She divorced and remarried Jan and seemed to find a sort of contentment. Cohen sought his in the Mount Baldy Zen Centre between 1994-99, during which time manager Kelley Lynch stole $6 million and he had to leave the Buddhist monastery in order to make his living on the road. It was during this period that Cohen became cool and he felt better adjusted to revel in the adulation.
Marianne accepted front-row tickets to the 2009 Oslo show and we see her singing along with her former lover. Mollestadt recalls her contacting him to let him know that she was dying and asked him to tell Cohen, With her permission, Mollestadt brought a camera to her hospital bedside and recorded her reaction as she listened to Leonard's message about his eternal gratitude and being just behind her. She thought it was beautiful and Mollestadt believes that these were the words she had waited a lifetime to hear. Cohen himself died three months later in Los Angeles on 7 November 2016.
While the title suggests that this is supposed to be a joint portrait, much of the focus falls on the more famous partner in a relationship that exposed the best and the worst of Leonard Cohen's personality. As a friend of Marianne's, Broomfield is wholly entitled to take her side. But he also seems to shield her and Axel by gently pushing them into the margins while he concentrates on the more colourful aspects of Cohen's post-Hydra career. It would be interesting to know more about Ihlen's life in Oslo. especially as her biographer is on hand to provide some discreet insights. Instead, we get some rather tiresome `what happens on tour' anecdotes about Cohen's appetite for drugs and women, which actually do little to enhance his reputation.
For once restricting his own appearances, Broomfield makes haunting use of Leonard and Marianne's voices to put a personal spin on the rather perfunctory meld of archive footage and talking-head revelation. Yet he never gets inside the couple's minds and hearts, as he flits between their island circle and Cohen's extramural commitments and hedonistic betrayals. It might also have been nice to hear a bit more of such pivotal songs as `So Long, Marianne' and `Bird on a Wire'. But we learn more about `Suzanne' and `Hallelujah', which have nothing to do with the romance under scrutiny. Slickly assembled, this casts a pleasantly nostalgic glow. But it hardly sheds new light.
Despite managing to miss both the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots on 28 June 1969 and the annual Pride marches on 6 July, Ashley Joiner's Are You Proud? still provides a timely reminder of the journey that LGBTQ+ activism has been on since the passage of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act and the distance it still has to travel. Inspired to make the film by the memory of the mother of a former partner questioning his knowledge of gay history, Joiner has set out to celebrate the achievements of a long-repressed community and to castigate it for a lack of inclusivity that has raised some discomfiting issues about the wider movement's make-up and priorities.
Taking a largely chronological approach, the documentary opens with Second World War veteran George Montague confessing to being dismayed that he was a `brown hatter' and that he had to live a lie by marrying a woman who accepted his homosexuality. A clip from a BBC programme about what the French called `la maladie anglaise' presages Sir John Wolfenden's declaration that private homosexual acts between consenting adult males over the age of 21 should be decriminalised. Andrew Lumsden, from the Gay Liberation Front, recalls the role played over five years by Anthony Wright of the Homosexual Law Reform Society, who used the pseudonym Antony Grey because his mother was terrified of his true identity leaking out.
GLF members Stuart Feather and Theodore York Walker Brown outline the terms of the Sexual Offences Act and note that its terms did not apply to Scotland and Northern Ireland. Moreover, they clam that arrests for gross indecency rose fivefold, as the police sought revenge on the gay community and Stonewall's Michael Cashman concurs that cops often lured suspects into soliciting and importuning, with a pretty pair operating around Earl's Court being known as `the Beverly Sisters'.
Gay Liberation started in New York in 1969 after police harassment at the Stonewall Inn following the death of Judy Garland led to an outbreak of violent protest. The British branch was formed by London School of Economics students Bob Mellors and Aubrey Walter, who are fondly remembered for their courage by GLF members Simon Watney and Nettie Pollard. Stonewall's Lisa Power recalls the sense of release that many gays and lesbians experienced as they were finally able to be themselves. Then, at Antony Grey's suggestion, GLF held a candlelit demonstration at Highbury Fields against police harassment on 27 November 1970 and Lumsden proudly avers that this was the moment that the torch was passed from the 1950s to the future.
As we see old home movies of a gathering in a park, Lumsden and Brown reflect on the first Pride march, from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square, on 1 July 1972. Veterans of the procession recall the police presence, the curiosity of passers-by and the euphoric feeling that the straight world had been confronted with the notion of being `out and proud'. Even then, however, there were cracks in the united front. Feather exposes the resistance that drag queens felt from the younger brigade, while Brown condemns the racism that kept many black gays away and Pollard denounces the sexism endured by the lesbian membership. Watney agrees that GLF was imperfect and ill-equipped to tackle a range of issues. But it gave people the confidence to start gay newspapers and book publishers, helplines like the Lesbian and Gay Switchboard and the Pride marches (of which there are now over 140 across the UK, more than in any other European country).
Pride in London's Michael Salter-Church reveals how rapidly numbers have increased on the annual parade, while Alison Camps explains how every effort has been made to ensure it remains a free event, even though it costs about £800,000 to stage. As we hear about the diverse causes represented at an average march, Greg Owens of I Want It PrEP Now and Dan Glass from Queer Tours of London note that awareness of so many causes needs to be raised within the LGBTQ+ community and beyond. However, the latter is vocal in his condemnation of Pride having been hijacked by big corporations, who exploit it to seem right-on, while cynically seeking some free publicity.
Veteran campaigner Peter Tatchell doesn't necessarily blame the organising committee for the commercialisation of Pride, as he is conscious of a growing fragmentation caused by minority groups promoting their own causes rather than rallying behind a common goal, such as challenging the Muslim world's attitude towards same-sex liaisons. On the same march, however, was Usmann Rana from LGBT Against Islamophobia and human rights activist Jason Jones worries that equality of marriage and adoption rights has tilted the balance too far in the direction of heteronormative concerns and lifestyle choices. Activist Sarah MacGuire and YouTuber Riyadh Khalaf suggest that young people and those on the margins don't always have their voices heard.
Jacob V. Joyce talks about the workshops offered by Queer Picnic, while Fox Fisher extols the work being done by Trans Pride Brighton to challenge the cisgender hegemony and promote non-binary acceptance. Deacon Joy Everingham from Kent & Christ Church University claims that LGB people have a problem with the Trans community because their focus is on gender not sexuality and they feel threatened because same-sex attraction can only exist in a binary understanding of the spectrum. But Chryssy Hunter from Opening Doors London suggests that there are also Trans hierarchies and hopes that education and debate can promote greater understanding and tolerance and the movement can truly echo the words of Stonewall pioneer Marsha P. Johnson, `No pride for some of us without liberation for all of us.'
As the focus switches to UK Black Pride, drag performer Son of a Tutu states that a democracy's strength rests on its treatment of minorities and he insists that there is a need for a separate celebration. Phyll Opoku-Gyimah agrees that BAME people felt marginalised at mainstream events and wanted a platform to proclaim their own difference and diversity. Artist Isaac Julien concurs that there is a white supremacy in UK culture and Son of a Tutu loves the fact that millennials call people out for cultural appropriation. However, Femi Otitoju of the Challenge Consultancy thinks it's a shame that there is a reluctance to address race issues more honestly and Opoku-Gyimah calls for greater appreciation of intersectionality and a recognition that people have multifaceted identities.
Dan Glass notes how easily well-meaning groups can step into the shoes of the oppressor and that it's essential that the LGBTQ+ community accept that all struggles are inter-related. Riyadh Khalaf echoes this need to life each other up rather than drag each other down and Maria Exall from the TUC LGBT Committee emphasises the need for solidarity. Gethin Roberts reminds us of the efforts made by Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners during the 1984-85 strike. As we see archive footage of the interaction between the two communities, Roberts reveals that the National Union of Mineworkers sent representatives to Pride in 1985 and campaigned at the Labour Party Conference the following year to pass a resolution committing the socialist movement to LGBT equality.
During the HIV/AIDS crisis, the NUM did important work in supporting the sick and their families at a time when the disease bore a terrifying stigma. Ted Brown recalls not telling his loved ones when he was diagnosed as HIV+ and former Eastenders actor Michael Cashman pays tribute to the friend he spotted on a hospital visit who had kept his status secret. He despises the way in which families reclaimed sons to sanitise them and rob them of their identity and history, while Jason Jones laments the death of gay romance, as HIV/AIDS made sex the predominating factor in any burgeoning relationship.
Labour MP Chris Smith regrets that there has been a fight about two diseases, with the stigma proving as dangerous as a the virus. Author Matthew Todd recalls the demonisation by the right-wing press and many contributors agree that the community largely helped itself through groups like OutRage! and ACT UP. The latter took its inspiration from the New York branch, while the former was co-founded by Simon Watney, who wanted the diseases itself and the impact it was having to be at the forefront of the campaign. Pride also played a crucial role in promoting safe sex and encouraging openness and in showing heteronormative society that the LGBT community was taking care of itself and was no longer willing to accept stigmatisation.
Yet, as Cashman notes, Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government sought to introduce Section 28 in May 1988 to prevent lessons about homosexuality at school at the very moment when education needed to play an active role in countering prejudice and fear. Dismissing same-sex couples as participating in `pretend' partnerships, the reactionary legislation still makes Watney fume to this day and Jennie Lazenby of Lesbian Strength and Sue Sanders from Schools Out reflect on how the attempt to silence gay men and lesbian women made many more militant in their defence of the right to have any kind of family unit they chose. We see a clip of Ian McKellen speaking for Stonewall against what Cashman rightly declares was an attempted act of censorship.
Stonewall was formed to prevent such laws being passed in the future and Cashman explains that it tended to lobby while Tatchell's Outrage! took direct action and the pincer movement drove conservative and church representatives to the negotiating table. It was the newly devolved Scottish Parliament that repealed Section 28 in June 2000, although another three years were to pass before England and Wales followed suit. Khalaf curses the fact that a generation of LGBTQ+ kids had no appropriate sex education and the link is also made with the rise of homophobia, as the subject of equality was never discussed
On 12 June 2016, Omar Mateen went on the rampage in Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida and killed 49 people. We see a terrifying clip of phone footage from what was the largest single person shooting in US history and learn from a news report that the gunman called 911 to pledge allegiance to ISIS. Some 36 hours later, 20,000 attended a vigil in Soho. Son of a Tutu notes the show of force and unity at this event and calmly states that the LGBTQ+ community will never be forced back into the closet and needs to remember that they are all fighting for a common cause. But, while lots of the contributors enthuse about the response demonstrating how the disparate groupings need each other, Tatchell points out that Orlando received disproportionate media coverage to similar slayings in developing countries and suggests that this represents a form of racism at work within the LGBTQ+ ranks.
Carlos Maurizio of Latinx repeats a speech he made at a separate vigil about a refusal to allow the racial identity of the victims of Orlando to be whitewashed by an Islamophobic focus on the terrorist nature of the atrocity. Jason Jones picks this up and reveals that 73 million LGBTQ+ people live under regimes that criminalise them. He also reminds us that Britain exported such homophobic attitudes across three-quarters of the planet in the days of empire and over half of the 72 states that still outlaw homosexuality are former British colonies. Paul Dillane of the Kaleidoscope Trust echoes the view that this country has a duty to right past wrongs. although Tatchell warns against neo-colonial finger-wagging and says the emphasis should be on support not antagonism.
Yet Dan Glass highlights the fact that a lot of the people fleeing persecution in such countries are turned away by the UK after risking their lives crossing the Mediterranean. Antonia Bright from Movement for Justice speaks along these lines at Peckham Pride, which was set up to draw attention to the connection between the LGBTQ+ struggle and the migrant crisis. Donna Riddington from ACT UP Women takes pride in the grassroots response, while Joseph Kasirye and Stephen Agyemang, who are respectively from Uganda and Ghana, speak about the courage it takes to approach the Home Office and file for residency on the grounds of sexual persecution, as there is a culture of doubt to be overcome among civil servants whose job is to keep immigration down rather than protect endangered individuals.
Jamaican and Russian refugees PJ Samuels and Dmitry Spodobaev describe the restrictive conditions within detention centres and question how committed the UK government is to LGBTQ+ rights when they make token representation to foreign regimes while locking up oppressed individuals seeking asylum. As Spodobaev claims that British people have little concept of what freedom means, as captions expose that 75% of LGBTQ+ asylum claimants are rejected and ordered to return to their country of origin.
Mare Tralla from ACT UP Women questions whether Pride is doing enough in these cases and wonders whether having a party is the right way to bring serious issues of discrimination, hatred and violence to a wider audience. Indeed, in 2017, Movement for Justice By Any Means Necessary and other campaigning groups delayed the start of the Pride in London and they continue to demand that Pride is re-politicised and starts campaigning against the UK's treatment of LGBTQ+ refugees and asylum seekers. A closing montage is accompanied by an inspiring speech by Samuels about hearing voices from both past and present calling for unity and equality to change the world once and for all.
While this provides a solid introduction to the fight for LGBTQ+ rights in this country, it probably says as much about generational difference as it does about cisgender ones. Many of the veterans of the Gay Liberation Front and the founding of Pride talk about the need to negotiate and persuade. But, such is the impatience and stridency of the social media mindset that debate appears to play less of a part than diatribe in challenging oppositional viewpoints. This makes modern LGBTQ+ activism fit for purpose, but it doesn't necessarily make for easy relations between the different sections of a continuously evolving and diversifying community and Joiner should be lauded for placing these contradictions and conflicts at the forefront of a documentary that consistently compels the viewer to reassess what might once have seemed on-message opinions and standpoints.
All of the contributors speak with passion and cogency and it's to be hoped that this laudably inclusive and equitable film finds a small-screen audience so that it can reach those who might not be able to see it in a cinema. Curiously, however, Joiner follows a number of factualities on this theme by saying next to nothing about bisexuality and how it fits into the LGBTQ+ scheme of things (if that term still does justice to the multitude of groupings huddling under its umbrella). Given the emergence of Internet intolerance, it's important that the entire community adopts a united front and it's to be hoped that Joiner sparks some much-needed conversations because the rise of hate crimes in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum means that battles once thought won may have to be fought all over again.
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