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FILM Rory Kiberd Tom Lordan Michael McDermott Sha
ne O’Reilly David Turpin illustration Shane Cluskey Vita and Virginia Director: Chanya Button Talent: Gemma Arterton, Elizabeth Debicki, Isabella Rossellini Released: 5 July “I heard you on the radio this morning and I just read you latest novel. Why do you think your books sell more than mine?” “Popularity was never a sign of genius” – Virgina Woolf (Elizabeth Debicki) encounters fellow writer Vita Sackville-West (Gemma Arterton) for the first time in Chanya Button’s adaptation of their letters and real-life love affair in the 1920s. Never Look Away Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck Talent: Tom Schilling, Sebastian Koch, Paula Beer Released: 5 July After a calamitous tenure in Hollywood (see 2010’s The Tourist), Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck returns to the scene of his masterstroke The Lives of Others (2006). Working within a similar timeline, Never Look Away is a lengthy romance smothered in a great deal of historical drama with an artist, roughly based on the life of Gerhard Richter, at the heart of it all. Before the Berlin Wall and Cold War backdrop of his college years, the film begins with our budding young painter Kurt Barnert (played later on with blue-eyed purity by Schilling) as a child in Nazi-era Germany. The memory of his young aunt being carted off to an SS sterilization facility, never to be seen again, haunts him. Years later while in a relationship with his wife to be, he will meet the director of said facility, Professor Carl Seeband (played with icy intensity by Sebastian Koch), under very different circumstances. The progression from Barnert’s/Richter’s early years in Dresden to his social realist painting in East Berlin, through a number of failed experiments in Düsseldorf, until he finds his niche is absolutely fascinating. Attention to artistic vision, and sheer determination, is covered in such minute fashion and remains enthralling. The close-ups of shading, the wet and dry brushstrokes and the slight alterations with a stylus as the pictures slowly come together is utterly seductive. Timeframe wise, Never Look Away falls short of documenting Richter’s complete disavowal of everything figurative and photo-realist, and his eventual move into abstract art, which is a pity, but perhaps that’s a story for another film. Between the wonderfully rendered artistic processes and the devastating historical backdrop that shrouds every character in the film, Never Look Away is just that; hard to look away from. Engaging and emotionally affecting, you won’t even notice the three hours go by. SOR Vita Sackville-West (Arterton), an aristocratic novelist, wants to make the brilliant Virginia Woolf (Debicki) her next conquest. The two run in very different circles: Vita is a diplomat’s wife, and, as a result, she needs to maintain their good standing in the eyes of society; Virginia lives with a bunch of bohemian artists in Bloomsbury, who enjoy a liberal approach to marriage and sexuality in general. Despite some initial resistance, it’s not long before Virginia is drawn into Vita’s orbit. Soon she develops an infatuation, which drives her to the edge of sanity, but also provides her with her most creatively fecund period, culminating in Orlando, which is a mock-biography based on Vita. At first glance, this film might come over a little naff. The pulsating electronica score seems anachronistic and camp; gauzy visuals and flourishes of magic realism could be seen as a tad overdone. But really, these slightly squiffy elements are a small price to pay, because this is a movie that risks ridiculousness in bringing the viewer something fresh. If you’re someone who likes films that defy expectations, you’ll likely get swept along. When a film is as stylised as this, critics can jump to accusing it of being style over substance. This has already been the case here, with some claiming it’s all surface. This is patently untrue – there’s more complexity and depth here than most of the overwrought Oscar bait that’s pumped out every year, the film boasting brilliant performances from its leads. Their chemistry generates palpable heat – so much so that you sometimes wish the music would take a breather and stop underscoring everything. Arterton is beguiling as a socialite, who, in spite of her garrulousness, is willing to pivot into deeper matters now and again, and Debicki, as Woolf, exudes an indomitable hauteur one moment, and then birdlike skittishness the next (and unlike Kidman in The Hours, no prosthetic nose is needed to achieve this). Every character has dimensionality. Even when the respective husbands start getting antsy about how all-consuming a love affair it is, their dissent is never caricatured. You can see where they are coming from, with Leonard Woolf coming across particularly well, concerned as he is about what a deleterious effect Virginia’s obsession has on her, and yet conceding that time with Vita can do her some good, overlooking the jealousy this awakens in him. There were certain points when I feared the film would trip into more conventional territory – is Vita’s husband or her forbidding mother (Rosselini) going to become an antagonist, dragging this sensuous movie into rote us-against-theworld territory? Happily, this is not to be. The pain and twists merely come from the two main characters’ inner lives, the shifts in their regard for one another. Women this formidable aren’t about to let society at large stall them in living out the full expression of their feelings. Where the power resides keeps changing, sometimes in the middle of the scene, and it’s all through the dialogue – what the characters do to each other through their words. Novel and idiosyncratic, the film has a charged eroticism, but never loses sight of the practical contingencies of such an open love affair. When all is said and done, you feel stirred up and satisfied, having seen something that is a faithful depiction of a relationship, in all its agony and splendour. A rather intoxicating film that’s very much itself. Sometimes, middling scores on Rotten Tomatoes suggest distinctiveness rather than mediocrity. RK The Dead Don’t Die Director: Jim Jarmusch Talent: Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, Chloë Sevigny, Steve Buscemi, Danny Glover, Iggy Pop, Selena Gomez, Tom Waits Released: 12 July Jim Jarmusch is a talented filmmaker, whose body of work is populated by off-kilter and clever narratives told compellingly through deliberate low-energy performances. In a decades-spanning career Jarmusch’s unique style has produced instant cult classics like 1986’s Down by Law as well as high-art, bittersweet film-festival favourites like 2016’s Paterson. He has something in common with David Lynch, and it’s not just a hairstyle: they each have a taste for an indelibly American sense of ‘cool’, as well as a signature flair for deadpan absurdity. So even though The Dead Don’t Die is an underwhelming and tonally confused film, it retains enough of Jarmusch’s cinematic charm that the experience of viewing is merely forgettable, rather than irritatingly painful. The Dead Don’t Die is a paean for B-movie zombie apocalypse films. The plot is simple and suitably wacky – an experimental fracking procedure at the North Pole causes the planet to spin off its axis, which doesn’t just affect the cycle of night and day, but leads to all kinds of unnatural goings-on such as the dead rising from their graves to eat humans and drink coffee. Throw in three small-town cops played by Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Chloë Sevigny, an alien mothership and Tilda Swinton’s samurai mortician, and you’ve got all the ingredients necessary for a good oldfashioned schlock-fest, a genre mash-up of horror and science fiction in the Ed Woods-school of filmmaking. But good ingredients don’t guarantee a good meal, and the majority of the film is pretty unremarkable. There’s a few laughs and some pitchperfect acting, but that’s it. Jarmusch’s greatest sin is a consistent motif of heavy-handed meta-narrative dialogue. The implicit self-consciousness of the film becomes explicit, and all playfulness is lost. When even the absurdity is drained of meaning, you’ve gone too far. TL 76