The Antenna

Sludge Dread

The Antenna (aka Bina)
Directed by Orcun Behram
2019 Turkey
London Film Festival 2019 screening Friday 4th October

Wow. This was only my second film of this year’s London Film Festival and it’s truly astonishing.

The Antenna is a Turkish, dystopian sci-fi horror movie set in the, presumably, fairly near future. The film mostly follows the antics of Mehmet, a night watchman and maintenance man for a block of flats in a compellingly Orwellian society, as played by Ihsan Önal. However, Mehmet has had some trouble sleeping of late and the looks of Önal in the role really help convey this exhaustion in the character. The make up on him is wonderful, with the huge bags under his eyes giving him an almost cartoonish appearance and a somewhat humorous disposition as he tries to cope with the challenges of one day of watching the building... under the watchful eye of his manager who also lives in the same apartment block and who has heard that Mehmet keeps dozing off on the job.

However, all is not well because today is the day the state have chosen to have one of their new satellite antennae attached to this particular block, so that the residents can see... you get the feeling it is entirely compulsory viewing... the latest propaganda machine at work. The first sign that anything is wrong is when the guy doing the installation falls from the roof with both a sickening thud and good comic timing as Mehmet is looking out the window of his cupboard of an office. He goes to investigate but finds nothing amiss except some black, sludgy stuff leaking from the newly installed kit on the roof. Is this something to do, perhaps, with the black sludge oozing through the walls of one of the tenant’s bathroom? As Mehmet begins to investigate the ensuing oddities, which start off almost as Kafkaesque surrealism before going ‘the full Lovecraft’ as people receive the sludgy transmission into their basic DNA, the deaths start coming too. Is Mehmet the unlikely hero who can save the day or is this weird mix of bureaucratic nightmare coupled with eldritch, Chthuhian horror something which is unstoppable?

Well, obviously I’m not going to tell you but I will say that this film was an absolute joy to watch and, within the first ten minutes, it struck me just why I was responding to it the way I did. Or rather, the nostalgic rush I was getting from it?

That is to say... this movie felt like something straight out of the 1980s. Seriously, you remember when, in the mid 1980s (apologies to younger readers here), you stayed up late past your bedtime to watch something on either Channel 4 or BBC2 and ended up discovering something which completely compelled you to keep watching without understanding why? This film felt just like that. It felt like the first viewing of an early David Lynch movie like Eraserhead, mixed together with something like David Cronenberg’s Videodrome with, just a dash, of government satire thrown in for good measure. I mean, it was that good.

The film is slow paced but... and somehow this works... the director takes these slow paced scenes and cuts them up into sections. So, for example, a very early scene in the film where Mehmet is walking to work reminded me of the scene early on in Eraserhead of Jack Nance walking along the industrial estate in one, long, uncut static shot. Except, here, the director managed to maintain that same atmosphere with lots of cuts and angle changes. And this is something he does all the way through the movie.

As when, in the scene introducing us to Mehmet as he gets up from his bed and irons his clothing. It’s quite meticulously paced but, instead of showing his tiny, cramped space where he performs all these actions in one static shot... which is all we need to get the layout of his quarters in our head... the director shows us the interior from almost every conceivable angle during the sequence. And even though some of the people and objects placed in the frame on the widescreen of the film tend to jump about and jar using this technique, the director seems to ‘get away with it’ quite well in the edit and it rarely pops you out of the action. This must have been a hard film to cut together actually but... yeah, it’s a bit of a masterpiece.

Another thing he does often is hold a shot with a character or object in sharp focus while the main action is taking place in a different part of the screen in the blurred areas. He does this a couple of times and... I’m not quite sure why, truth be told... but it seems to work out really well for him so, no complaints here.

Also, a nice touch is that when a death comes, the director tends to linger on it for a while, showing the real trauma involved. There was one character who I was not expecting to die, to be honest, right in the end sections of the movie. I was certainly expecting the character to live, due to an interaction this person has with Mehmet earlier in the movie but, when death comes and the character is stabbed... after the assailant has walked off scene, the director stays with the victim for quite a while to focus on the ragged and constantly diminishing breathing of the person who has been assaulted. This touch of reality in an otherwise absurd and increasingly incomprehensible, surrealistic nightmare environment is an interesting choice and, perhaps, it’s what gives the film its sense of gravitas towards the end.

The Antenna looks great, is well acted, has some great special effects and some truly ‘low key but effective’ human hybrid creature design. Given my limited experience of Turkish movies, I wasn’t expecting anything near this good from them and it was certainly an eye opener for me. This one may well be my ‘film of the festival’ and I really hope this one gets some kind of commercial, US or UK physical release because I really want to grab this one on Blu Ray when I can. An awesome film of authoritative oppression mixed in with demonic, or possibly alien, collaboration where the stakes are extremely high... this one will haunt you long after it finishes. I must try and catch this astonishing celluloid mystery again at some point soon. Absolute brilliance.

The Queen Of Fear

Fear Fresher

The Queen Of Fear
(aka La Reina Del Miedo)
2018 Argentina/Denmark
Directed by Valeria Bertuccelli & Fabiana Tiscornia
Screened at the London Film Festival Wednesday 10th October 2018.

The Queen Of Fear is the first of my very slim selection of films to see at this year’s London Film Festival and it was a bit of a quickie choice for me. That is to say, a good friend of mine was flying in for a few days, she’d never been to the LFF before and, of the movies which were showing at times we could manage, this is the one I thought looked the most interesting (of those not already sold out). As it is, it might well be the best thing I see at the 2018 Festival, it turns out.

The film explores a week or so in the life of a famous actress called Robertina, as she tries to deal with a one woman show she is writing and starring in, while trying to juggle certain other things in her life and maintain her sanity in a lifestyle of people who demand her time and attention and while she’s also working through her paranoia and fear associated with various sections of her life. As a nice parallel to that, The Queen Of Fear is not only written by and starring Valeria Bertuccelli as the main protagonist and focus of the film... she’s also co-directed it, thus making the movie a kind of counterpart to certain plot elements as her character's life plays out.

Robertina is, as the title of the movie suggests, a woman who carries her daily fears with her like a shroud and keeps her anxieties locked up inside her all the time while she tries to portray a kindly and helpful person at ease with her surroundings. There are a fair few things which are cumulatively adding to her anxieties... primarily the fact that she is not present (and doesn’t even have the content figured out yet) for the rehearsals of her one woman show as she is trying to deal with an old friend called Lisandro, played here by Diego Velazquez, who is probably going to be dying of cancer any time now and who she is trying to help in person in Denmark, when she should be figuring out the form and content of her show in Argentina. Added to this we have mysterious power outages in her home which may (or may not) be caused by some kind of stalker, we have her deliberately irritating and histrionic maid not getting on with her other household staff and we have a recent husband who has just, ‘probably’ (as far as she can tell) left her life after a few weeks/months of marriage and who is also just at the periphery of her day to day.

Actually, it’s the power cuts which provide the strongest visual metaphor of Robertina’s constant flight into fear and it’s with one of these that the movie opens with... and returns to... time and time again, before bringing a resolution, of sorts, in the final scene. It’s also an interesting opening which clearly shows the striking visual design of the film, which is evident in almost every scene. Bertuccelli has a quite obvious penchant for building her shots up from vertical and horizontal lines and this first set of interior shots demonstrates it in no uncertain terms. Like many directors in the past, she uses these patterns to split and redefine the visual planes on her screen and this is particularly evident in the shot where, after spending some time with her ‘ex’ husband who she catches in her house one night, she frames both characters in a small, vertical rectangle in the centre of the screen from inside the house, looking out as they are talking outside by his car.

And did I mention that she has a very white house?

A white house of primarily vertical lines which are prominent when she walks through it, often dressed in pale colours or white herself, like a fortress of light to protect her from the sometimes less perfectly composed but still fairly anemic colouring of the outside world as she moves her cautious way through it. Even her dog, Jimmy, is completely white, it seems, to enhance the effect.

My favourite part of the movie, which made me laugh out loud for a second, was when the heightened sense of vertical and horizontal lines are completely overplayed in one scene and, judging by the carefree nature of the film, this is a deliberate moment of toying with the audience on a visual level. It’s a short sequence where Robertina is seen in  a medium shot in foreground wearing a cream and white top consisting of sections of both vertical and horizontal slabs and, as the camera is tracking her, she passes by a zebra crossing of white vertical lines and the collision of the large, looming road surface with her costume seemed like movie makers having fun with the mise en scène to show the audience that they are quite aware of the elaborate, possibly overwrought but certainly charming frame designs they are running with here. Which is fine by me... like I said, I laughed out loud (which is fairly unusual for me, I guess).

This heightened sense of artifice is ably aided by a central and dominant, tour de force performance by Valeria Bertuccelli which is both very funny but also extremely emotionally charged and moving at times, especially in the wonderful relationship she has with her dying friend Lisandro... Velazquez is just amazing here too and I’d happily watch a movie just of the two of them talking in a room for a couple of hours. The on-screen chemistry and the way Lisandro kind of takes care of her when it should be the other way around, even as it’s made clear to the audience that, despite her intentions, she’s not the best or most attentive of friends to those of her who she chooses to call as such, is just brilliant.

Another brilliant thing about this movie is when the rug is pulled out from under the audience toward the end. When we see the opening of her first (and possibly last) performance of the play which she has been trying and mostly failing to commit her time to, we have a moment when we think the downward spiral of the events of the last few days has finally gotten to her and finished the character off for good. Instead, audience expectations are nicely and cleverly upended when we find out her character is a lot stronger than we thought in the most brilliant way... but I don’t want to give it away to readers of this review so I won’t elaborate here.

What I will say, though, is the film has a heightened sense of drama in certain key sequences due to the way the score by composer Vicentico is written and spotted. And by spotted I mean the all important way in which sections of a motion picture are chosen to either be accompanied by an underscore (or song)... or not. Jerry Goldsmith, for example, was an absolute master of spotting movies in preliminary discussions with his directors, often going with a ‘less is more’ kind of approach to the project at hand which wasn’t always a fashionable stance. However, this movie demonstrates how useful these kinds of decisions can be because the music on this is very sparse with only certain key moments running with underscore (or at least that’s what it felt like to me). Of course, in contrast to the absence of the score in certain parts of the movie, the emotion for the moments where music is brought into play means that it heightens the mood required for the viewing and decoding of the sounds and images in these sections, where the most important events may have seemed a little less potent without it. This film is a good example of how spotting and scoring can make or break a project, I reckon.

So there you have it. The Queen Of Fear is an absolutely stunning, emotionally charged good time at the movies and I have no idea, like a lot of these things that get screened at these kinds of festivals, whether this will be getting any future kind of English friendly release either here in the UK or in the US. I know if it gets a Blu Ray release it’s one I’d definitely pick up to watch again and I can only hope various key distributors are looking at something like this for the near future. A true gem of a movie and a good start for me to this year’s London Film Festival.

Ginger And Rosa

Sally Potter And 
The Goblet Of Ire 

Ginger And Rosa 2012 
UK/Denmark/Canada/Croatia 
Directed by Sally Potter
Playing at UK cinemas soon

The first time I saw a movie directed by Sally Potter was back in 1992 when her debut feature Orlando played at my local cinema... cinema, now, sadly deceased. It was also the last time I’d seen a movie directed by Sally Potter up until the debut of her new feature, Ginger And Rosa, at this year's London Film Festival.

There’s no real reason why I’ve kept clear of Potter’s work since then... I liked Orlando well enough, although the score seemed to be in some places, almost “fake Nyman”, it’s just that she’s never really been a blip on my radar with any of her work since her debut. A brief glance at her filmography on the International Movie Database informs me that I haven’t been particularly staying out of her way on purpose... it’s just that she’s made only five features, including this one, so I’m not going to blame myself for this. Even if she is known for being a woman of some substance when it comes to making films and also, I would personally like to add to that, seeing her smallish “quality not quantity” output... perhaps the female equivalent of Stanley Kubrik when it comes to getting exactly what she wants on screen. Although, of course, Stanley would never have been able to actually shoot the thing in 5 weeks, as this one was... something she revealed in the Q&A after the premiere.

What I’m trying to say here is this... I’ve not seen Orlando since it came out at the cinema and I don’t know this lady’s work so well, so if there are any stylistic similarities between her new movie and any other of her works... well, I’m sorry, but I won’t be able to point them out to you.

What I can point out to you, however, is that this is a particularly well made and gripping film. Telling the story of two young girls in their adolescence who were born on the same day around the time of the Hiroshima bombing, quite literally one bed apart from each other, the film then takes us straight to 1963, where the move stays to weave a tale of the two inseperable girls of the two mothers who were also inseperable in their hospital beds when they had them.

The backdrop of the film is the CND marches of the time, with the threat of the Cuban Missile Crisis heightening the anxiety of the characters who inhabit this world of the early sixties, as it would have done to the director herself, growing up as a teenager around this time. Some people at the screening seemed to have jumped on this and assumed the film was actually about that... but of course it’s not. It’s a very personal film for the director, I would guess, and she uses these events and emotions to push the boundaries of her fiction and allow her to explore the relationship between the two girls, played absolutely brilliantly by Elle Fanning and Alice Englert (as Ginger and Rosa respectively) and the gamut of their trials and tribulations (and even betrayal) as the two girls react to their loved ones, in particular Ginger’s father (as played by Alessandro Nivola, who reminded me a lot of Daniel Day Lewis’ performance in The Unbearable Lightness Of Being in this role).

I don’t want to give away too much about the way this story goes but I will say that, while the title and relationship of the girls is very strong and would suggest a more even approach to the way the girls experience this period of their adolescence, it is actually Ginger who takes centre stage, as she is the one who seems to be going through the most traumatic time.

The two actresses do an excellent job and they are similarly aided by Christina Hendricks as Ginger’s mother (I have to say the only thing I remember her from was the two episodes of Firefly when she played Saffron... but she’s still the beautiful creature she was in that show and doesn’t look old enough to be playing anybody’s mother) and some very well known thesps such as Oliver Platt, Timothy Spall and, particularly, Annette Benign, who I can honestly say I’ve never really liked all that much but who absolutely shines in the role she is given in this movie. Good job, lady!

The soundtrack is interesting, using an ecclectic batch of needledrop pieces which reflect the conflicting styles of current hits of the time with jazz standards which represent Ginger’s dad and his particular lifestyle choices. I noticed an article in Sight and Sound magazine just recently referred to the film's soundtrack as being absolutely non-diegitc, but that’s actually not true. I noticed that there were a few scenes where the songs from the previous scene’s on-screen source were continuing well into another shot which wouldn’t support that particular source... so it’s definitely not, strictly, non-diegetic. It’s not particularly unusual and I’m surprised the reviewer didn’t pick up on that. There are lots of films that use this technique, of a piece of source music transforming into background music, but only a handful, that I can think of, where diegetic cues are then transformed into music which is non-diegetic in nature. Off the top of my head... the long tracking shot preamble around the rooftop in Dario Argento’s Tenebrae and the opening pre-credits sequence of Luc Besson’s Subway (if I’m remembering that second movie’s opening correctly... it’s been a few decades since I saw it).

The movie is absolutely riveting, the first 20 minutes or so especially fast paced and building speedy momentum as it goes. The camerawork seemed, to me, to be mostly (if not totally) handheld, even in some of the scenes which at first appeared to be static, and I guess if you’re on-board with a five week shoot, you have to sacrifice something in the mix to get the film shot? What that does do, of course, is allow the director to really focus on the actors and I would say she really gets great performances out of the people in this movie. I can’t say enough of how good the two leads are either. Both come from families who are no stranger to showbusiness... Elle Fanning is the younger sister of Dakota Fanning and Alice Englert is the daughter of famous director Jane Campion. So no wonder they acquit themselves so brilliantly here... I’m guessing it’s in the blood.

All in all, a quite serious film, dealing with characters at an age when everything seems so traumatic but also capturing the sense of naiveté that makes it so. It’s not something I’d watch again for entertainment purposes, but I will say that it’s definitely worth a look once, if even to see how well Potter throws her camera around... so to speak. A definite recommendation on a wonderful, quite enchanting piece of film-making. Enjoy.