Thursday, October 17, 2024

The Apprentice's most effective takedown of Donald Trump is how unremarkable it makes him seem. This may render Ali Abbasi's portrait of the early days of the former president and current presidential candidate a little monotonous, but it makes its point succinctly. A direct line is drawn from Richard Nixon, with his "I'm not a crook" address, to attorney Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), and on to Trump (Sebastian Stan), who he both represented and mentored in the early Seventies.

Cohn had made a comfortable spot for himself in some of the most infamous chapters of modern American history. A (reportedly) closeted gay man, he was Senator Joseph McCarthy's fiercest ally during the "Lavender Scare", which claimed homosexuality to be as un-American an ideal as communism, and drove countless government workers out of work and towards ruin.

Read the full review here. 

Out this week: 

DreamWorks Animation goes Miyazaki with the The Wild Robot (****), Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong take on Donald Trump's villain origin story in The Apprentice (***), and Naomi Scott puts in a hell of a turn as a woman going through hell in horror sequel Smile 2 (****).  

Written by Clarisse Loughrey

DreamWorks Animation has put Shrek, Kung Fu Panda, and the rest of its merchandise fodder on the back-burner for a moment to chase after the verdant fantasies of Studio Ghibli legend Hayao Miyazaki. Their adaptation of Peter Brown's 2016 novel The Wild Robot is a beautiful little union between the Hollywood mainstream and the wider animation scene beyond. It preserves DreamWorks's broad, direct appeals to sentimentality while weaving in a little more of the thematic maturity and subtlety you might see over at Ghibli or Ireland's Cartoon Saloon.

Rozzum Unit 7134 (Lupita Nyong'o) crash-lands on an uninhabited island, only to find herself at an existential loss when none of its critter population will accept her assistance. It's all she was built to do. But, after a terrible accident leaves runt Brightbill (Kit Connor) as the sole survivor of his goose family, Rozzum, or "Roz", starts to rewrite her programming in order to pursue the ultimate act of service – parenthood.

A story of a cross-species adoptive family is familiar territory for director Chris Sanders, behind Disney's Lilo & Stitch, as well as DreamWorks's How to Train Your Dragon and The Croods. But he mastered the archetype right out of the gate, and has since maintained his ability to leave his audiences a blubbering mess. The Wild Robot is no different. He's found some capable partners in emotional crime here, not only in Kris Bowers's score, which always swells at the right moment, but in the way Nyong'o's voice work starts in the perky realm of Siri and Alexa, before melting into pure, human tenderness.

It's a packed voice cast, with contributions from Catherine O'Hara, Matt Berry, Bill Nighy, Stephanie Hsu, Ving Rhames, and Mark Hamill. Particularly striking is Pedro Pascal's performance as fox Fink, a wily loner who sheds his predator instincts to become an uncle to the little gosling, allowing for an affecting mixture of the actor's natural mischief and cracked-voice vulnerability.

Read the full review here. 

A document of where I've gone and the things I've seen 

Sunday, 13 October
A double bill of two excellent films at the London Film Festival today: DreamWorks Animation's The Wild Robot, which made me laugh and then cry, and Jesse Eisenberg's A Real Pain, which made me laugh and then cry in an entirely different way. 

Monday, 14 September

I caught The Apprentice and the excellent, surprisingly nuanced, documentary portrait Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story at the festival. 

Tuesday, 15 October

I attended the world premiere of Netflix's Joy, a charming if slight look at the development of IVF, with stars Thomasin McKenzie, James Norton, and Bill Nighy in attendance. 

Sebastian Stan stars as Donald Trump in 'The Apprentice' 

There is an unexpected brutality to Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face. Released in 1960, just before Hitchcock's Psycho, it too revels in suggestion and suspense. There are no cheap thrills to be found within its elegant, austere frames. It's uncompromising in its glacial pace. But then comes the film's infamous surgery scene – here the camera never breaks its gaze, nor is there any music to distract from what's happening on screen. A scalpel cuts into flesh, tracing a crimson line across a young woman's face. When the blood starts to drip down her neck, a hand reaches out with cotton gauze and coolly mops it up. It's an emotionless scene, but that in itself feels chilling. When the scalpel's work is done, the woman's face is delicately lifted from her body and transported off screen.

These horrors are just as visceral today as they were 60 years ago. It's a surprise Franju was ever able to get away with it. He worked in perpetual fear of the censors. "I was told, 'No sacrilege because of the Spanish market, no nudes because of the Italian market, no blood because of the French market and no martyrised animals because of the English market,'" he later described. The Germans bristled, too, at depictions of mad scientists, since it evoked the era of Nazi medical experiments.

But these were all the ingredients of Jean Redon's book Eyes Without a Face, which Franju adapted for the big screen. Renowned surgeon Dr Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) is racked with guilt. He's responsible for the auto accident that left his daughter Christiane (Édith Scob) severely disfigured. And so his accomplice (The Third Man's Alida Valli) stalks and drugs young women, bringing them back to the surgeon's lair so that he can attempt to transplant their faces on to Christiane – and thus restore her former beauty.

France didn't have a reputation for horror cinema then. But producer Jules Borkon had seen how ravenously the country's audiences had consumed British fare like The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Horror of Dracula (1958). He hired Franju to take on the genre, though he wasn't the most obvious candidate. A co-founder of the Cinémathèque Française, one of the largest film-related archives in the world, he was primarily a documentarian. His film Le Sang des Bêtes, much like Eyes Without a Face's surgery scene, recorded the daily bloodshed of a Parisian slaughterhouse with clinical detachment.

Franju thought his film possessed "a quieter mood than horror... more internal, more penetrating. It's horror in homeopathic doses". He looked instead to the French tradition of the fantastique, which blends science fiction, horror, and fantasy. It was a genre beloved by surrealists – take, for example, Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast (1946). Eyes Without a Face has moments of strange, disconcerting beauty. Christiane wanders the halls like a high-fashion ghost, wrapped in air-light Givenchy. She wears a mask to hide away the scars – a ghostly white, but otherwise perfect replica of her former features. Its stiffness makes her look like a statue slowly creaking to life. Behind it, Scob's eyes are wide and desperate.

Christiane is victim, monster, and (eventual) victor. Eyes Without a Face offers the rare example of a story where the atypical doesn't have to be punished and destroyed by the final reel. Instead, Franju prods at ideas of beauty and identity. After the accident, the world treats Christiane like she's dead. But, when she's given another woman's face, she feels like a stranger to herself. The film may have preceded the popularisation of plastic surgery, but its themes are now only more provocative.

Audiences at the time, however, were blindsided by the film's gruesomeness – however brief. Although the European censors gave it a pass, there were reports the surgery scene caused quite the kerfuffle among cinema-goers. A screening at the Edinburgh Film Festival saw seven audience members faint. "Now I know why Scotsmen wear skirts," quipped Franju. But it's since proved a source of great inspiration for artists and filmmakers. John Carpenter based Michael Myers' mask on the one worn by Christiane. Pedro Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In (2011) is an obvious homage, while the film provided the title of Billy Idol's first top 10 hit in the US. It's no surprise: once seen, it's hard to scrub away the image of Christiane and her spectral visage.

5th August 1949: Angela Lansbury with her trousseau.

(Photo by Frank Lilley/Express/Getty Images)

This month, I'll be revisiting the quarantine film club that started all of this and picking out some of my favourite entries. Next, it's Brian De Palma's Blow Out. 

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