(Reviews of Memoir of a Snail; and To an Unknown Land)
MEMOIR OF A SNAIL.
This has been a blissful winter for fans of stop-motion animation. While everyone was anticipating the Christmas debut of Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham's Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, the BFI London Film Festival was awardig its Best Feature prize to Adam Elliot's Memoir of a Snail. Following on from the Oscar-winning short, Harvie Krumpet (2004), and the Australian's debut feature, Mary and Max (2009), this beguiling claymation rite of passage now arrives in UK cinemas and reveals in each CGI-free frame why Elliot is known as `The Crown Prince of Plasticine'.
When the wheezing Pinky (Jacki Weaver)
dies with the last words, `the potatoes', foster daughter Grace Prudence Pudel (Sarah Snook) feels so bereft that she releases her beloved snail collection. As Sylvia slowly slithers away towards Pinky's Pity Pit, Grace looks back on her life. Father Percy (Dominique Pinon) used to say that `childhood was like being drunk. Everyone remembers what you did except you.' But Grace recalls everything from sharing a womb with her twin, Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee), to the night he gave blood for a transfusion on the day of the operation on her cleft lip.
As mother Annie had died giving birth to them in 1972, Grace (Charlotte Belsey) and Gilbert (Mason Litsos) were raised by Percy, a Parisian street juggler who had followed Annie Down Under and been left paraplegic by a careless driver. Grace had taken over her mother's snail collection, although she had given Gilbert the ring she had kept in a jewellery box that played `Alouette'. While Grace was a glass half-full/silver linings person, Gilbert was Holden Caulfield, James Dean, and Charlie Brown rolled into one. Invariably seeing the bad in people, he got into fights with the bullies who teased his sister at school.
When not home reading or watching The Two Ronnies, Grace was delighting in the right-angles in her well-ordered bedroom. She befriended a homeless man named James (Eric Bana), who had been defrocked as a magistrate for masturbating in court. He had given Grace her first live snail and Gilbert had rescued its mate from a busy main road in their Melbourne neighbourhood. They had a family and Sylvia (who was named after Annie's favourite author) was Grace's favourite because her shell swirl ran `opposite to the others'.
Gilbert was obsessed with fire and magic and wanted to emulate Percy by becoming a street performer in Paris. He bought tricks from Bert's magic shop and spent to long playing with fire that Grace could only remember him smelling of matches. When a sparkler trick went wrong, the siblings got forearm scars that formed a smiling face when placed together and this made them feel closer than ever.
Percy was pleased that his son wanted to follow in his footsteps and Grace recalls happy days with her father, who had taken to drink after his accident. He also developed sleep apnea and they had clapped to wake him up during the daytime. When not knitting Grace a beanie with snail eyes wobbling on the top, Percy showed them the films he had made as a stop-motion animator and his daughter vowed to emulate him when she grew up. She had fond memories of a trip to the rollercoaster at Luna Park that enabled Percy to escape the confines of his battered body, but she knew he was often sad and even felt wistful when they had singsongs to Annie's musical box.
When Percy died, his ashes were placed in his jelly bean jar for the day his kids could scatter him off the big dipper. However, as they had no relations and no one would adopt weird twins, Gilbert and Grace were packed off to foster parents in Perth and Canberra. Ian and Narelle (both Paul Capsis) were accountants for a company that made traffic lights and were big into self-help books. Grace liked getting weekly certificates to boost her confidence, but feigned asthma attacks to avoid playing netball with Ian and Narelle, who were often absent because they were keen swingers.
While Grace got used to living in Australia's safest city, Gilbert found it tough going with fundamentalist fruit farmers Ruth (Magda Szubanski) and Owen Appleby (Bernie Clifford) and their sons, Wayne, Dwayne, Shayne, and Ben (Davey Thompson). The latter liked Gilbert's rebellious streak and they sat together in a pew in the homemade chapel, where Owen preached and Ruth kept a beady eye on her boys. In his letters to his sister, Gilbert surmised that Ruth liked her budgies more than her children and vowed to rescue Grace at the first opportunity.
Five years passed and Grace (who kept reading despite being unhappy at school) started volunteering at the local library, erasing rude drawings made by naughty boys. It was here she had befriended the short-sighted Pinky, who had been putting books into a rubbish bin instead of the returns chute. She had lost a finger to an overhead fan while table-dancing in Barcelona and Grace had come to love her eccentricity and kindness. During an amazing life, Pinky had danced in an erotic schnitzel bar named `Schnitz`n'Tits', had made love to John Denver in a helicopter, and played table tennis with Fidel Castro. She had also outlived two husbands, Hector (who fell on a knife pointing out of the dishwasher) and Bill (Nick Cave), a postman who had written love notes on her mail before being eaten by a crocodile. Pinky had responded to each loss with the word, `bugger', and pressed on into old age on a regimen of ginger wine and coffee enemas.
Smelling like ginger and secondhand shops, Pinky collected unearned sporting trophies and careered around town in Bill's old mail van. She kept her savings in an old tin and dotted the house with post-its because of her poor memory. Scared of Alzheimer's, she had taken up tap dancing in her eighties and tried to stay busy, although she was inevitably fired from her short-held jobs. This, however, left Mondays free to visit the elderly and hold their hands (and slip them a hash gingerbread figure). A keen gardener, Pinky had wanted her ashes to nourish her vegetable patch, which shared the garden with her homemade crazy golf course. With Ian and Norelle often on nudis cruises, Grace spent more time with Pinky and even let her talk her into having a perm. Her friendship eased the pain, but Grace became a compulsive collector of all things snail and started comfort eating on Chiko Rolls.
Meanwhile, Gilbert was having a terrible time. Ruth had forced him to start eating meat again and forbidden him any fire-starting paraphernalia. When Owen had baptised him, Gilbert had put his ulcer tablets in his pockets and they had foamed in the baptismal trough. He had refused to swallow the sedatives that Ruth had slipped into his food and responded to the hypocrisy of Owen's secret drinking by releasing the farm pig and Ruth's budgies. In his letters, he had tried to remain upbeat, but Grace had suspected that her brother was hiding things from her.
She takes to hiding away after her foster parents moved to a Swedish nudist colony. When not at the library or helping Pinky with her OAP-hand-holding charity, Grace tended Ian and Narelle's fecund guinea pigs and added shoplifting and binge-eating to her list of hobbies. Gaining weight brought her to the attention of Ken (Tony Armstrong), a neighbour with a leaf-blower who repaired microwaves for a living. He set up a milkshake station in the kitchen and treated Grace to lots of sausages and she lost her virginity shortly after he had proposed to her in ketchup letters.
Besotted with Ken (even though he was infertile), Grace is grateful to him for sending Gilbert his air fare so he could give her away at the altar. The day before the wedding, however, she gets a letter from Ruth, in which she announces that Gilbert had perished in a fire after he had torched the chapel after she had tried to use electro-shock treatment to purge him and Ben of their gayness after she had caught them kissing.
In her despair, Grace had been caught stealing a snail pencil sharpener and she had realised that she had frittered money she might have saved for a plane ticket on knick-knacks. It was then that she discovered Ken's scrapbook and the fat fetish that had prompted him to feed her. Pinky had moved in to help Grace recover, but she was diagnosed with dementia and had rapidly deteriorated before her demise. Alone and baffled by the reference to `the potatoes', Grace scatters Pinky's ashes on the Pity-Pit and sees the signs for each crop in the plot.
Under the spuds, Grace finds Pinky's biscuit tin, which contains cash and a letter urging her to escape from her self-imposed restrictions and start looking forwards rather than back. Reminding her that snails never return to their trails, Pinky reminds Grace of her the good points that she'll need to cope with what life has to throw at her. Armed with this advice, Grace faces her court date and finds James on the bench being reminded of a kind girl who had helped him through a crisis. Free to go, Grace enrols at film school and the premiere of her autobiographical film (narrated by Edna Everage) brings about a reunion with Gilbert, who hadn't died in the fire after all.
Content to be together, the siblings read books and fulfil Percy's final wish at Luna Park. The house seems sparsely furnished. But, as the credits roll, we see Grace's snail memorabilia and are left to wonder if she's kept it all anyway, especially as Sylvia's offspring are now in residence in the veg patch.
Profiles are at a premium in Adam Elliot films, as he tends to have his familiar-looking characters face the camera. There are no facial expressions to work with, but the ping-pong eyes somehow speak volumes, as do the small details that clutter the interior and exterior settings. But it's the narration that does the heavy lifting here, as Sarah Snook relishes the quotidian lyricism of Elliot's screenplay, which is often more amusing when it's describing the downbeat than the feel-good.
Jacki Weaver contributes the other standout voiceover, with her impeccably timed curses pocking action that finds telling to be an equally valid means of film-making as showing. Elliot's colour palate is always on the restrained side, but his sense of place is spot on, with the Appleby farm feeling like something from a Bush horror in contrast to the eccentric enchantment of Pinky's cabinet of curiosities. The shifting moods are also reinforced by Elena Kats-Chernin's deft chamber score and the inflections of soprano Jane Sheldon.
Alighting on everything from religious fanatics to adipophiles, Elliot refuses to shelter the audience from the seedier sides of life. But his insights into mental health issues, social anxieties, and loneliness in childhood and old age are highly moving, as are the asides on accepting people for who they are and respecting that everyone has their reasons. The fondness shown for books is also an attractive feature of a story that was inspired by the bric-a-brac left behind by Elliot's late mother and cries out to be double-billed with Dean Fleischer Camp's Marcel the Shell With Shoes On (2021). Prepared to spend eight years on the right project, Elliot is clearly not one to be rushed. But we can only hope we don't have to wait until 2039 for his next clayographical excursion, as some of us will be pushing Pinky's age by then.
TO AN UNKNOWN LAND.
Born in Dubai to Palestinian parents and raised in both a refugee camp in Lebanon and the Danish town of Helsingør, Mahdi Fleifel studied film at the National Film and Television School. Following the documentary, A World Not Ours (2012), he made a series of shorts, including the acclaimed A Drowning Man (2017), before making his feature bow with To a Land Unknown. Set in modern-day Athens, but owing much to the 1970s films of Sidney Lumet, Brian De Palma, and Martin Scorsese, this tense neo-realist thriller has its tone set by an opening caption quoting the academic, Edward Said: `In a way, it's sort of the fate of Palestinians, not to end up where they started, but somewhere unexpected and far away.'
Stranded in Athens in the hope of reaching Germany, twentysomething cousins Chatila (Mahmood Bakri) and Reda (Aram Sabbah) live in a squat and snatch handbags from unsuspecting women in leafy square in order to raise the money for the fake documents promised them by people smuggler, Marwan (Monzer Rayahneh). As they are fellow Palestians, he cuts them some slack when they are late with payment and they pass his name on to 13 year-old Malik (Mohammad Alsurafa) after the spot him picking an orange from a tree in the square.
Malik is hoping to get to his aunt in Italy and Chatila thinks he might be useful in helping them pull a scam. However, he is worried that Reda will lapse back into his heroin habit and isn't sure he can trust him, which puts extra pressure on him as wife Nabila is stuck in a refugee camp and being told by her brothers that Chatila is a time-waster. When he discovers that Reda has stolen the money he has hidden in a crevice in the roof, Chatila is furious and throws him out of the room. However, he turns some tricks in the park to earn part of the sum and Chatila allows him back in their room just in time to field a phone call from Reda's concerned mother.
Finding a purpose in taking care of Malik, Reda cheers up after his fix comedown and sense of shame at having gay sex. They steal some trainers to pay for lunch and Reda (who has a tattoo of the outline of Palestine on his torso) explains how the camp in Lebanon felt like a prison, so they left to take their chances. If they get to Germany, they'll open a café and Nabila can cook, while he does odd jobs. He shrugs, as he admits he'll do anything to make it work. Working on the same principle, Chatila cheats on his wife to help set up a scam to get money out of Malik's aunt in order to persuade local alcoholic, Tatiana (Angeliki Papoulia), to escort Malik on a flight to Italy so they can bypass the smugglers and make enough for their own documents.
Accepting their insistence that they are just helping a stranded kid, Marwan helps them with ID for Malik and Tatiana, who has an eleventh hour wobble before Chatila reassures her that everything will go smoothly, even though she and Malik don't have a common language. However, it's the cousins who suffer, as they can't contact anyone and don't know if the trip has gone wrong or if they've been duped. They stay at Tatiana's place and Chatila forces Reda into finding clients in the park to pay Marwan what they owe.
For a while, Chatila is despondent. But he realises that a middleman has got involved with the deal and has blocked his calls to Tatiana and Malik. So, he persuades Marwan that he has found a safe route out and asks him to co-sponsor a trip by three Syrian refugees so that he and Reda can set up the scam, seize the cash, and be on the plane to Germany before Marwan realises he's been duped. Against his better judgement, he agrees to enlist the help of Reda's dealer, Abu Love (Mouataz Alshaltouh), and buddy Yasser (Mohammad Ghassan) to drive the truck with the Syrians aboard. As they need cash and want to leave Greece themselves, they agree without asking too many questions.
With their help, Chatila has the Syrians bound and gagged and hidden in Tatiana's bedroom. As they bide their time, Abu Love quotes Mahmoud Darwish's poem about the Arab psyche, `Praise For the High Shadow'. Chatila warns him not to bring any drugs to the hideout and goes to get the cash from Marwan after leaving Yasser to beat the delivery password out of the hapless Syrians. Reda feels bad about this and laments that he's become a bad person exploiting people who are as desperate as he is. So, when Abu Love turns up with some heroin, he can't resist, even though Chatila has told him to stay calm and focussed.
Waking to find his cousin in a coma in the locked bathroom, Chatila kicks down the door and tries to wake him in the bath. Yasser helps haul him to the street and they flag down a bus to get them to the hospital. Chatila tells Reda his favourite story about the café in Germany, but there's no light as they enter a long, dark tunnel.
Cross John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men with Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Aftenoon (1975) and you'll get the gist of this taut and often traumatic insight into the lot of the migrant trapped in no man's land. Working from stories that Fleifel had heard during his own wanderings, co-scenarists Fyzal Boulifa and Jason McColgan are also clearly au fait with John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy (1969), as Reda is forced to prostitute himself to make back the money he has frittered on the drugs that feel like they will claim him from the moment they are first mentioned. This aspect of the script veers towards melodrama at times and feels more formulaic than Chatila's need to betray his wife in order to lure Tatiana into the Malik ruse.
This is neatly done, with the sudden breakdown in communication highlighting how helpless the pair are in a foreign land with no one to rely upon. But the climactic scam lacks a sense of jeopardy, as the Syrian hostages suffer no ill effects from their captivity and Marwan proves far too easy to outsmart for a supposedly all-seeing fixer. Nevertheless, Fleifel retains an aura of authenticity, as he and cinematographer Thodoris Mihopoulos avoid postcard views and keep the 16mm camera close to the cousins, as they lurch from one tight spot to another.
Mahmood Bakri and Aram Sabbah impress as Chatila and Reda, who had not seen much of each other since childhood before becoming travelling companions. Bakri makes a fine George to Sabbah's Lennie, as humanity and opportunity come into conflict as they seek ways to work a system in which the odds and the fates are stacked against them. Angeliki Papoulia is also excellent, as the lonely Athenian who turns out not to be a hapless victim after all. Mohammad Alsurafa also does well as Malik, particularly in the scene in which they try to flog the trainers to Yasser, which some have shrewdly compared to the byplay between Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Coogan in The Kid (1921), which also ended `somewhere unexpected and far away'.
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