LFF 2019 Day 6 – Official Secrets | An Easy Girl | I am (Not) a Monster

Day 6 was a mixed bag at the festival until I was pulled out of my cinematic malaise by Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian, director of I am (Not) a Monster. She greeted delegates at the screening of her documentary and presented each of us with a double vinyl imprint of the film. Explaining that she was trying alternative ways to get people to turn up and see independent films, and new ways to distribute them, I lost all the cynicism that had built up in me earlier in the day.

Onto some cynicism…

Official Secrets

Keira Knightley stars in the true story of Katharine Gun; a former GCHQ operative who leaked a classified memo about the USA’s attempt at manipulating a UN vote on whether a war with Iraq would be legal. Gun acted in the hopes that she would prevent a war and instead opened her and her husband up to the threat of imprisonment and deportation. And as for stopping the war…

Official Secrets is a great education into why Tony B-Liar is considered a war criminal (by some) and why Ellen DeGeneres chatting to George W. Bush is such a sensitive topic this week. The film lays out the role of GCHQ, the way the war with Iraq was launched, and all manner of political details that I was ignorant of at the time. A documentary could have delivered the same info but people are more likely to listen if Keira Knightley is doing the talking.

Sadly the film is little more than educational. Everything else about the film is purely functional. The dialogue efficiently delivers exposition with every line but without any flavour or personality. Alongside Knightley is a plethora of Britain’s finest; Matt Smith, Ralph Fiennes, Rhys Ifans, and Matthew Goode amongst others all turn up briefly to play their part but for all the big names there are no characters.

Official Secrets is a solid drama retelling some of our recent history with clarity. For cinematic artistry you might want to look elsewhere.

An Easy Girl

Naïma (Mina Farid) is a 16 year-old growing up in Cannes. Her summer was supposed to be spent working in the kitchen at a nearby hotel and helping her BFF prepare for an audition but that all goes out the window when her cousin arrives in town. Sofia (Zahia Dehar) is a revelation for Naïma; she is confident, free from worry about the opinion of others, and rarely seen in an outfit that is opaque.

After catching the eye of a yacht owner (Nuno Lopes) and his right-hand man (Benoît Magimel) both woman and girl are indulged with fine dining and boating excursions. The cost of their luxurious lifestyle is paid for at night by Sofia while Naïma watches on in adolescent awe.

Nobody in An Easy Girl reacts with surprise to this mutually beneficial arrangement. The supporting cast are more likely to roll their eyes than widen them at the sight of young Sofia descending to the lower deck of the yacht with an impatient older man following behind her. What makes this subject matter a bold choice for a film is that one of the world’s best known film festivals takes place at Cannes and is infamous for having a secondary industry in “yachting”. Give that a Google.

Add to this the fact that actress Zahia Dehar brings along her own Google-worthy underage prostitution scandal and An Easy Girl becomes a document of a world that exists in parallel to our own.

Naïma is the heart of the film and our eyes in the world. At a point in her life where she is trying to determine her future she is tempted to embrace the potentially glamorous lifestlyle of the cousin she idolises. Meanwhile the mundane life she has briefly left behind lies waiting patiently for her back on shore.

With sharp dialogue and sun drenched visuals writer-director invites you to look upon Sofia and decide for yourself, is she “an object or a work of art?”.

I am (Not) a Monster

After being ambushed by director and central figure Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian at the start of the screening we were then treated to 90 minutes of her ambushing various figures around the world. Ben Hayoun-Stépanian is a woman on a mission. She wants to speak to experts about her philosophical hero Hannah Arendt and find the origin of knowledge so that she can pack it in her suitcase and take it back to her students at the tuition free college The University of the Underground.

The resulting documentary is made up of a broad cast of characters all extolling what they believe knowledge to be, where it comes from, and what it is worth. She meets figures including the Lord mayor of Sheffield, a member of Pussy Riot, Noam Chomsky, and a Japanese robotics expert. Each bring their own eccentricities and perspective on the world and can’t help but be swept up in the human whirlwind running the show.

I am (Not) a Monster is a celebration of the active pursuit of knowledge, of debate and discussion, and is a madcap journey around the world in the company of a passionate modern-day Socrates.

I knew very little of Hannah Arendt going into this film and if I am honest I am none the wiser. What I did get from the documentary was an exhilarating time spent with smart thinkers who offered up their philosophies to be accepted or denied.

A bracing documentary about the origins of knowledge.

The Imitation Game – LFF Review

The world’s sweetheart Benedict Cumberbatch stars as Alan Turing, the man who cracked the German Enigma code and generally did clever things with computers before computers existed. Set during the Second World War at code-cracking HQ Bletchley Park The Imitation Game follows Turing from his recruitment through to the cracking of Enigma with flashes back to his childhood and forwards to a glimpse at his struggles after the war. The film has the solid, slightly predictable, feel of a classic British period drama despite coming from an American screenwriter (Graham Moore) and Norwegian director (Morten Tyldum). It is 2014’s answer to The King’s Speech and Saving Mr Banks and as such feels a little safe and familiar.

On first glance The Imitation Game is a thoroughly enjoyable film. In fact it is a thoroughly enjoyable film but on closer inspection could have been so much better. Cumberbatch is of course brilliant in the role of the socially awkward closeted genius (nobody mention Sherlock please) and the supporting cast of Keira Knightley, Charles Dance, Mark Strong, and many others each give their best dramatic performances with plenty of humour thrown in. The acting is solid and the script allows for plenty of laughs in a film about a tedious solution to a life threatening problem. The Imitation Game even managed to make the problem of Enigma and its ultimate solution almost comprehensible. Certainly comprehensible enough for those of us watching to have a grasp on the issue and know how badly they were doing at solving it.

On the surface The Imitation Game is a fine British film, the sort to garner applause at a press screening and generate some Oscar buzz. Scratching beneath the surface however reveals a film that is far from perfect.

What lets The Imitation Game down is that it focusses so much on just one aspect of both the work at Bletchley Park and the life of Alan Turing. Bletchley Park was not done and dusted the minute Enigma was cracked. As the film briefly mentions there were years after cracking the code during which Turing and his team had to decide which of the decoded attacks they could avert and which they had to let happen for fear of revealing to the Germans that Enigma was no longer secure. This moral maze of weighing up human lives using statistics would have been fascinating to watch and made for a tricky test for the character of Turing but after a quick mention The Imitation Game skips on. It’s hard to understand why so much time was dedicated to a short period in Turing’s life. Cracking Enigma may have ended the war but it certainly wasn’t an immediate victory. When a film focusses on an event that finishes years before the war ends it removes any real sense of triumph as we are no longer with the characters when the enemy finally surrenders. The war is won in the blink of an eye and this climax is decidedly anticlimactic.

As for the life of Alan Turing the film does detail the messy and unfair ending to his life but I did not feel that enough was made of the appalling way he was treated by the government in the final years of his life. By the end of the film Alan Turing the man, rather than Alan Turing the code breaking machine, still remained a mystery to me. The Imitation Game shows a lot of Turing’s actions but fails to uncover what was going on inside his head. Turing’s was clearly a light of triumph and suffering but only a snapshot of the latter was afforded the audience.

The tragic personal life of Alan Turing and the triumphant decoding of Enigma make for strange bedfellows as they are presented in The Imitation Game. The two strands of the film, that of an enemy being outsmarted and of a genius being abused by a government, don’t quite tie together and as one crescendos the other nosedives leaving the audience unsure what emotion to feel. Alan Turing definitely has a story to be told and The Imitation Game is an admirable attempt at telling it but not complete.

A fine British film, by an American and a Norwegian, that will do very well at the box office and please most that go to see it. But sadly a film that feels like a missed opportunity. The press conference after the screening was filled with anger at how Turing was treated but this aspect of his life was too much of a footnote in the film itself.

You will enjoy it, just don’t over think it too much. I clearly have.

The Imitation Game has a UK release date of 14th November 2014 and screens at the London Film Festival on the 9th and 10th of October 2014.

Below is a photo from the press conference, click to make a little too big. The main takeaway from the conference would be some advice from Benedict Cumberbatch; if you are intrigued by the character of Alan Turing then do not stop with this film. Read everything you can about Turing as The Imitation Game is only the start.

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World – Film Review

At the start of Seeking a Friend for the End of the World we learn that the last attempt to stop an asteroid from colliding with the Earth has failed and human life has just three weeks left in existence. Dodge (Steve Carell) hears the news on his car radio and moments later his wife runs from the car, not wanting to spend what is left of her life with our bland lead. Dodge is an uncomplicated man of habit and continues to turn up to his day job in spite of the impending apocalypse. Following a few minor plot points Dodge is embarking on a road trip to track down his childhood sweetheart with his young free-spirited neighbour Penny (Keira Knightley) with hilarious and moving consequences.

For a Steve Carell comedy the humour is for the most part quite genuine and understated. Towards the start the comedy threatens to become too broad but never quite breaches and throughout Carell is playing the straight man rather than rolling out another “wacky character”. I much prefer it this way round. With Carell playing a real human type it is a lot easier to buy into the emotional story at the heart of this plot.

Refreshingly the apocalypse takes a back seat for a change. As we join the story after all attempts to avert disaster have been abandoned we don’t ever need to spend time in a NASA control room or in the President’s Oval Office instead focussing on characters and their individual reactions to the end of the world. It’s all about emotions and human relationships and more specifically the last blossoming friendship between repressed Dodge and hippy hipster Penny.

Knightley as Penny is also playing a strangely endearing character much less removed from reality than her roles can sometimes seem. The film completely manipulated me and had me falling for Penny over the course of an hour and a half. Seeking a Friend deploys the now classic trope of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl with Knightley’s Penny performing the thankless task of bringing Dodge out of his shell and being a hipster’s dream woman. The poor girl has an obsession with vinyl records and suffers from adorable hypersomnia. I’d criticise the film more for this if I weren’t so damned attracted to Manic Pixie Dream Girls.

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World is a pitch perfect comedy. The humour for the most part was quite subtle with Steve Carell reigning himself in nicely and even the broader moments were genuinely funny and were within the tone of the film. Keira Knightley is fantastic and for a change you can see why someone would fall for her so quickly. The film is also really touching, demonstrating in the most literal sense that if you love something, let it go. I laughed, I cried, and I can’t wait to see it again.

P.S. There’s also an adorable dog called Sorry, but he doesn’t really do much.

Not at the Oscars – Never Let Me Go

There was a time when everyone seemed to be excited about Never Let Me Go, but that was a while ago and felt like it ended long before the film actually came out. Maybe if the film had opened in the UK first it could have gained some support before tackling the US. Instead it flopped in the US and then continued to flounder in the UK market.

With no real excitement any more and not much attention the studio seems to have given up on this little treasure. Without an Oscar campaign, something that is depressingly vital for award success, the film that opened the London Film Festival has no Oscar nominations to speak of. Hell, it didn’t even make the Baftas.

Beautiful direction, careful writing and stand-out performances all go ignored. Andrew Garfield and Carey Mulligan are heart breaking and Keira Knightley is surprisingly good in her unsympathetic role. The film unfolds slowly and manages to not gives itself away in the opening act. Surely something in here deserves a little recognition?

Even a nomination for all the heavy knitwear would have been enough.

Never Let Me Go – Review

Never Let Me Go is science fiction to its core and yet mostly consists of beautiful people in heavy knitwear in old houses. Because while there is indeed a fictional piece of science involved, the focus is on humans, emotions and violin music playing in the background.

In short the film follows Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield through their time at an unusual boarding school and through early adulthood as they discover themselves and the real world. Never Let Me Go is sad, beautiful and questions the nature of souls and the ethics of… something I won’t reveal. The film slowly unveils its plot and I’m not going to ruin that here.

All you need to know that this is not a cheery film, but it is gorgeous and features everyone’s favourite Spiderman. Knightley haters will even find themselves with little to complain about. Amazing to think this was made in just a few weeks for £15 million, long life Film4.

Never Let Me Go shares a similar plot to a certain Michael Bay film, but handles the issue in a distinctively British way which reminded me of a specific bit of Eddie Izzard material. Trust me after watching the film you’ll need a laugh.

Never Let Me Go is on general release 21st January 2011.

Star Wars in 3D

Sigh. The inevitable has happened and Star Wars will be completely re-released in cinemas in 3D. George Lucas the original tinkerer strikes again.

Phantom Menace will be released in 2012. In 3D. Yep, that’ll help. Simon pegg has summed up my feelings well:

On a different note, it’s odd to think that eleven years ago I could be easily convinced that Keira Knightly was Natalie Portman.