Thursday, November 14, 2024

Emilia Pérez commands attention. It's a frontrunner for Best Picture at the Oscars, a florid Spanish-language musical by French auteur Jacques Audiard in which a besuited Zoe Saldaña, spot lit, charges around a charity dinner. She crawls over tables, straddles the monied elite and pulls at their neckties. It's a fantasy sequence, an expression of her revulsion towards the hypocrisy in the room. It's filled with diners there to honour the missing and murdered of Mexico, the victims of the cartels, all while pocketing bribes and offering favours to those responsible. "All these people talk," she hisses, "now they're going to pay."

Audiard tends towards that kind of direct, intense sentiment in his films – whether it's the sudden shocks of violence that erupt in the French prison of A Prophet (2009), or Marion Cotillard as a whale trainer recovering from a double leg amputation in Rust and Bone (2012), retracing the movements of her show routine set to Katy Perry's "Firework". But the effort doesn't always hit its mark, and Emilia Pérez is impassioned but featherweight.

Read the full review here. 

Out this week: 

Ridley Scott returns in all his glory for Gladiator II (****), while Netflix's musical awards frontrunner Emilia Pérez (**) disappoints. 

Meanwhile, Netflix is sending to cinemas the well-acted and well-meaning, if thematically basic, retelling of the history of IVF, Joy (***), while the holidays have come early with Christmas Eve in Miller's Point (****), which has the delicate and tactile feel of a memory come alive. 

Written by Clarisse Loughrey

The older Ridley Scott gets, the less he cares about habits and expectations. There are only stories, and the thrills they elicit in his audience. How lucky we are to have that bravura. Gladiator, released in 2000 and currently at the bow of a miniature revival of the classical epic, was a relatively sombre and serious work. It threw grit in history's eye.

Gladiator II is equal in scale and spectacle, and weighted with metaphor, but it's also shot through with the kind of wry, absurdist slant that's come to dominate Scott's work of the last decade and a half, from Napoleon to Alien: Covenant. At times, Gladiator II is pure camp. To insist that it shouldn't be is to hold on too tightly to the dour expectations of the 21st-century blockbuster.

It has a modern outlook but provides a throwback, too, to the genre's florid history – a flirtatious Claudette Colbert marinating in her milk bath in 1932's The Sign of the Cross, or a pouting Peter Ustinov as Emperor Nero lounging about in silks and velvets in 1951's Quo Vadis. This time, they've put sharks in the Colosseum.

In one corner, we have Paul Mescal's Lucius Verus, son of Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) and our deceased hero Maximus Decimus Meridius (Russell Crowe). The grandson of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, he is rightful heir to the Roman empire, but was sent into exile as a boy in order to save him from murderous hands. The throne was instead claimed by dual emperors and brothers Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger), as petulant and debauched as Joaquin Phoenix's Commodus.

Read the full review here. 

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

Monday, 11 November
I spoke to some of the cast of the upcoming spin-off series Dune: Prophecy, in which Emily Watson and Olivia Williams star as a pair of sisters carving out a path for the witch-like clan of Bene Gesserit truthsayers. 

Tuesday, 12 November 

I caught Elizabeth Sankey's documentary Witches, out next week, which beautifully intertwines her experiences of postnatal depression with the cultural legacy of the witch and the material reality of those persecuted during the witchcraft trials. 

Wednesday, 13 October

It's a little early to be watching it, in my humble opinion, but Christmas Eve in Miller's Point was still lovely. 

Olivia Williams in 'Dune: Prophecy' 

Cameron Diaz's Malkina ends The Counselor by telling us what she deems most pitiful about the human race. "Nothing is crueler than a coward," she says, as well as, "Our faintness of heart has driven us to the edge of ruin." She's a monster like the rest of the characters (minus one or two) in Ridley Scott's mounting of Cormac McCarthy's sole film screenplay – an embittered salute to the careless greed that will be the death of us all. Yet, in that moment, she's right on the money.

Malkina is less woman, more Fury on the loose. And nothing quite captures the fear she instils in men than when her current boyfriend, nightclub owner Reiner (Javier Bardem), timorously describes to the film's gobsmacked protagonist (Michael Fassbender, only ever referred to as "counselor") an incident in which she climbed onto the windshield of his Ferrari and rubbed herself to completion, like "one of those bottom-feeders you see going up the side of the aquarium sucking its way up the glass". Both men talk incessantly about women, but it's so much in the abstract that you have to wonder if it's really about the pleasures of sex or merely the hunger and the want of it. Malkina wields that pleasure like a threat. It terrifies them.

I've loved Scott's work over the last two decades. It's frequently divisive, and sometimes the brush feels broad to the point of carelessness, but every time I step back, I'm struck by the bigger picture he's built across works as disparate as The Counselor, Gladiator II, Napoleon, or Prometheus. His current style mixes the absurd and the deeply nihilistic, in ways that are timely, strange, and deeply compelling.

Reiner and the counselor have struck deals that tether them to Mexico's cartels. But the scent of money is in the air, and their privilege has cursed them with a confidence that they can remain pure and untouched. It's a brand of cowardice we see all too often in our automated, capitalist world. People live thinking they're entirely detached from the consequences of their actions. But even the rich who kill the planet and the economy will one day have nothing left to leech off of, and Reiner and his smooth-talking lawyer friend will eventually have to shake the hands stained with blood. "Life is not going to take you back," the counselor is warned, when it's all too late for him. "You are the world you have created."

Veronica Lake getting her hair done at an hairdresser, US, 1954.

(Photo by Graphic House/Getty Images)

101 Films are releasing The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) and Slumber Party Massacre II (1987) in the UK on 4K UHD and Blu-ray for the first time on 18 November, so I'll be revisiting the first film. 

Don't forget to complete your registration

We've noticed that you still have not completed your registration to The Independent. Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism. It allows us to better understand our readers and tailor your experience.

By registering, you'll also gain access to a range of exclusive benefits, including:

Unlock these benefits by completing your registration today. 

INDYBEST / BEST BUYS

The Independent proudly partners with Refuge and the National Domestic Abuse Helpline: 0808 2000 247

Join the conversation or follow us

Download the free Independent app

Please do not reply directly to this email

You are currently registered to receive The Independent's film newsletter.

To unsubscribe from The Independent's film newsletter, or to manage your email preferences please click here.

This e-mail was sent by Independent Digital News and Media Ltd, 14-18 Finsbury Square, London EC2A 1AH. Registered in England and Wales with company number 07320345

Read our privacy policy and cookie policy