You couldn’t find three more different films than those in this dispatch, which examines a trio of works in the Director’s Fortnight. Each hails from a different country (England, France, and Chile) and is about several different classes. Only one could be classified as a crowd-pleaser; the others defy definition. And yet, when taken together, these films about a friend group maturing into their 30s, a Romanian immigrant working in France, and a rural woman diving for algae—do show the many ways life can be arrested by outside forces, even when characters are trying their best to change from within.
I’m not sure why Clio Barnard’s “I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning” snuck up on me. Barnard’s social realist works, from “The Arbor” to “Ali & Ava,” are all so thematically grounded yet stylistically enrapturing that I should’ve expected more from her latest, which moves with the easy propulsiveness of her best work.
Adapted from Keiran Goddard’s novel of the same name, Barnard’s keen, modernist take on kitchen-sink realism concerns a close-knit group of friends from Birmingham, England. In the film’s opening, these pals are celebrating the 30th birthday of the rambunctious Oli (Jay Lycurgo). At a club, they party by kicking back lagers, snorting coke, and nearly getting into bust-ups. As the house music thrums, Barnard slows the action down to the speed of a heavy dream. A dancing Oli’s blissed-out face looks up at the camera, peering through beams of club lighting. Barnard and her editor, Maya Maffioli, cut between Oli’s blank, delightful visage and footage of the demolition of council flats, creating a striking visual distillation of how these working-class characters feel as though they’re living through a moment that’ll require all involved to remake themselves.
See, they’re all experiencing that moment when the person you hoped you’d become meets the reality of the person you are. Oli’s friends Shiv (Lola Petticrew) and Patrick (Anthony Boyle) have two daughters. Rian (Joe Cole), a well-off businessman building an apartment complex under the watchful eye of his construction manager buddy Conor (Daryl McCormack), who’s expecting a child, is best friends with Patrick. Each is in places they didn’t expect to be: Rian self-consciously lives in a high-rise in London; Patrick went to university for economics but is a courier; Conor is a violent alcoholic; Oli sells drugs. As Conor works on building the new flats, each friend learns a revelation about one another or themselves that reworks their party-hard attitude.
Barnard tracks the passage of their time through the aforementioned cross-cutting to demolitions and the time-lapse CCTV footage of Conor’s building construction. Through these visual motifs, she also interrogates the widening income gap, the broken socioeconomic contract between the government and its citizens, and the lack of public housing. Most importantly, Barnard pulls affecting performances from her talented ensemble, giving them the space to express jubilant feelings, like Oli adopting a dog named Lola, who helps him turn his life around, and bleak tragedies. The freedom she endows her actors with is why their performances never cross into maudlin territory, as you might expect in a film built on formative lessons.
Instead, “I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning,” a work of tremendous vitality, hope and community, is a beguiling and earnest reflection of the pleasure of discovering that life slow down at thirty. It’s just beginning.
Radu Jude’s “Diary of a Chambermaid” sees the director in its sweetest, most optimistic register. An adaptation of Octave Mirbeau’s same-titled novel, which itself was cinematically rendered by Jean Renoir in 1967, Luis Buñuel in 1964, and Benoît Jacquot in 2015, the film retools several components of its source material. For one, the chambermaid, or nanny in this case, is re-imagined as Gianina (Ana Dumitrascu), a young Romanian woman working for the rich French couple Pierre (a pitch-perfect Vincent Macaigne) and Marguerite Donnadieu (Mélanie Thierry). Gianina toils night and day, not only cleaning the Donnadieus’ home but also caring for their bratty child, earning just enough to send to her daughter and mother in Romania.
“Diary of a Chambermaid,” fascinatingly, is also two different adaptations of Mirbeau’s novel in one film. Though Jude does display his usual love of profanity, the director plays the filmic version surprisingly straightforward. That subtly belies the keen observations he makes about our connection with technology as a mode for digital communication and entertainment. Gianina, for instance, routinely video chats with her daughter in Romania, allowing her to stay in touch despite the vast distance between them. Conversely, she’ll use the same technology for stupid videos, like filming the Donnadieus’ child taking a soccer ball to the face.
Jude juxtaposes these clever critiques with a ribald version of the novel, which happens when Marguerite pushes Gianina to take part in a lewd theatrical adaptation (which is probably the style many expected Jude would espouse when he announced he’d be adapting the novel).
Interestingly, Jude polishes both of these versions to a high sheen. His past films, like “Bad Luck Banging or Looney Porn,” “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World,” and “Dracula,” have often employed guerrilla filmmaking, AI, archival footage, and documentary techniques to fashion biting commentaries on capitalism, cancel culture, and the pandemic. “Diary of a Chambermaid,” in terms of style and tone, is probably closer to his more modest works, such as “Kontinental ‘25.”
Which isn’t to say that Jude is losing his edge. This is instead an example of the filmmaker’s wide tonal and aesthetic range, showing that he’s far more than a trickster. Here, he’s still poking fun at the kind of bourgeois sensibility that causes Pierre and Marguerite to believe, whether consciously or unconsciously, that Gianina’s emotional needs come second to their vacationing pleasure, or for Pierre to call upon Gianina at a dinner party to explain to his conservative friends what’s happening to Ukraine against Russia. And yet, Gianina is not defined solely by her financial relationship with the wealthy; she rebels and talks smack about them, using her language to define herself.
In Jude’s hands, the phrase “well-meaning” is, consequently, an anti-capitalist poison pill that says that basic empathy by the wealthy toward those under their employment is beyond their comprehension. “Diary of a Chambermaid,” therefore, ends on a bittersweet note whose nimbleness fully encapsulates why Radu Jude is among our great filmmakers.
Dominga Sotomayor’s “La Perra,” a film about buried memories and past regrets, had me until it didn’t. Brandishing an assured opaqueness and, for a time, a grounded vulnerability, the narrative is the spell that sits on a foamy wave.
The magic begins when fishermen in a motorboat discover a dog paddling in the sea. They’re not sure where it came from or where it’s going. Flashback to several months prior, and the stern Silvia (Manuela Oyarzún), a local fishmonger’s wife who also plunges in the sea in search of algae to sell, happens upon three puppies who’ve been abandoned. She takes one of them and names her Lola. With Lola, Silvia’s cold exterior melts as she snuggles in her chair with the dog, watching singing competitions.
Lola, however, is a free spirit who wants to explore the Chilean coast they call home. Following a New Year’s firework display that Silvia and her husband, Mario (David Gaete), watch with their friends on the roof of an abandoned, brutalist cliffside home that Silvia maintains for unknown owners, Lola goes missing, prompting Silvia to look back on a life-altering event from her childhood. Sotomayor unhurriedly moves through place and time, using the rural setting to critique class disparity and the downfall of Silvia’s fortunes.
Consequently, despite the dreamlike lacquer that envelopes this evocatively shot film, there’s also a social realist element whose unsteady output comes into tension with the fancifulness on display. Indeed, Sotomayor is just as willing to show us the world through Lola eyes via POV shots as she is at instilling a cave with a mystical element. The rhythms of this shoreline, from its rolling, hilly paths to its verdant meadows, therefore, breathe with life through the director’s artful lens.
So much of “La Perra” is so patient and trusting of the audience that its later reach for low-hanging melodramatic fruit is frustrating. I’m not totally against seeing fictionalized violence against animals on screen. In the right hands, those moments can be quite revealing of the morality, culture, and emotions of the people inhabiting a space, and I believe here that Sotomayor is grasping at the latter to make a significant judgment of her character. Which, once again, isn’t a non-starter for me. But using animal violence as a method for a human to process their own trauma, even if such harshness is inspired by unspeakable triggers, is already walking on shaky ground. Using wish fulfillment to paper over the character’s said decision, however, feels less than honest.
Maybe that hopefulness is actually masquerading as bleakness, an actualization of a love lost through carelessness that can never be regained. And maybe that ambiguous finale is brave in itself, a further sign of the director’s real trust in an observant audience. I just can’t personally make that logical and emotional leap, which, if I’m being uncharitable, could very well be a failure on a film that does have unbreakable sympathy for a hopelessly troubled woman but rarely gives her the chance to express herself through her voice. Instead, she is mute to the world around her and forever defined by her bourgeois counterpart, as though their presence or lack thereof is the only way her life can have meaning. Then again, much like Silvia’s own unprocessed trauma, it could be me who’s incapable of granting grace. Either way, Sotomayor is committed to the anguish she explores.
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