A Separation

This is one of the best films I've seen recently. It starts with a straightforward situation. A wife leaves her husband and he, left with the eleven-year-old daughter, and having an elderly father to look after, engages a housekeeper.

From this simple beginning the plot just thickens and thickens. The people in it don't seem like actors, they seem like real people. It is as though one is staying in the husband's flat and all these events break out around one.

The film is Iranian and it is set among middle class people in Iran. Some commentators have remarked that it is about the religious and class structure in Iran. Of course we see these things, but really it is about people like US, and the sort of strife we can all run into. We have religious and class structures here, don't forget, and other bizarre ways of doing things that are particular to us, just as they do in Iran.

The film was directed by Asghar Farhadi, and the eleven-year-old daughter of the couple is played by Farhadi's daughter. She looks a little more that eleven years old, but she is amazing and moving.

The Big Picture

This is an enjoyable and entertaining page-turner of a film based on a page-turning novel by Douglas Kennedy. It stars the charismatic Romain Duris (of The Beat That My Heart Skipped) who plays a frustrated photographer and successful but dissatisfied lawyer, Paul Exben, who accidentally kills his wife's lover and runs away on a life-changing odyssey. All sorts of things happen to him, which the film struggles to fit in.

The film get bogged down with some unecessary plot at the beginning about the legal practice he works for,  involving Catherine Deneuve . But I excuse this as a way of working Deneuve into the film for obvious reasons. Once the film gets under way it is fine.

I was bowled over by Duris in The Beat That My Heart Skipped and I don't ever expect him to find a part or director who suit his as well as that did, but here he is fine.

Blue Valentine

This is a film about the disintegration of a marriage for no particular reason. It tells the story of Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams), of how they met and fell in love, got married and had a daughter. Then Cindy fell out of love and there was no turning back.

Dean is sincere and very much in love with Cindy, yet she is fed up with it all and can't go on. We don't really see what it is that turns Cindy against Dean. OK. he smokes and drinks a bit, but they don't seem to be the reasons. In fact we don't see the reasons.

Gosling and Williams are very good. The present Dean is hardly recognizable, with his little beard and moustache, as the young Dean.

The latter part of the film takes place in a bizarre and cheesy hotel where they've gone to have a good time, and they fetch up in strange futuristic suite with blue light (hence maybe the title of the film).

This is a good quality indie film that left me a little unsatisfied.

Beginners

This film, directed and written by Mike Mills, is his second feature film, the first being Thumbsucker in 2007.

The film tells the story of Oliver, played by Ewan McGregor, who is learning to live with his recently widowed father, Hal, played by Christopher Plumber, who has revealed himself to be homosexual after many years of marriage and has now come out and found a boyfriend who is much younger than him. Hal is diagnosed with cancer and oliver becomes his carer. Oliver drifts into a relationship with French Anna (Melanie Laurent) and, just as they drifted together, they drift apart.

McGregor, Plumber and Laurent are excellent.

One leaves the cinema knowing that one has seen a good and interesting film and wondering 'what was all that about?' and 'what really was going on in that film?' Why is Oliver at a loose end and vaguely dissatisfied? Why can't he make an enduring relationship? Is he latently a homosexual like his father?

I urge any reader to see Beginners.

Sarah's Key

This is a middle-of-the-road film about the dreadful treatment of Jews in Paris in 1942. It may contribute to awareness in France and elsewhere of events that are still not adequately addressed.

The story combines two narratives and is set in the present as a journalist, Julia, played by Kristin Scott Thomas, tries to discover the history of a flat in Paris owned by her husband's family, which was confiscated from a Jewish family. These two narratives, one, in the present, is a trivial romance narrative about Julia's marriage and the other, told in flashback, relates some of the most dreadful events in the history of humanity. Of course combining two such contrasting stories cannot work successfully, as several critics have commented.

Kristin Scott Thomas is excellent in her part and the film inevitably has several very moving moments in relating these terrible and shameful events, but it is nevertheless related with too many ponderous and cliched cinematic moments.

The Light Thief

This film is from Kyrgyzstan and it gives the viewer a bit of an overview of how the society there works and fits together. The story is quite successful in combining the personal and political planes of society.

The story relates some shenanigans about a 'little man', an electrician who, in Robin Hood style, arranges for poor people to be connected illicitly to the electricity supply, and a slick wheeler-dealer who wants to muscle in in the politics of the village. All this is related charmingly but without subtlety.  The little guy is modest and unemployed and he has a nice wife who believes in him. the wheeler-dealer, the film's baddy, sucks him into affairs that have a tragic end. We first see the baddy, wearing sunglasses, brandishing a fist-full of money to gamble on some sport involving fighting animals. He is immediately labelled as a baddy by the sunglasses and the money that he is brandishing.

This is an enjoyable film.