Parky At the Pictures (15/8/2025)

(Reviews of The Kingdom; and Heidi: Rescue of the Lynx)

THE KINGDOM.

Two very different sides of Corsica emerge in Jean-François Richet's One Wild Moment (2015) and Catherine Corsini's A Homecoming (2023) and in Thierry de Piretti's A Violent Life (2017) and Stéphane Demoustier's Borgo (2023). Or do they? Even when cameras linger on the more picturesque aspects of island life, it's seemingly impossible to escape the shadow cast by organised crime. This is very much the case in Julien Colonna's feature bow, The Kingdom, which considers the cost of the wealth and power accrued by clan caïds who can never afford to be anything less than vigilant.

Fifteen year-old Lesia (Ghjuvanna Benedetti) lives with her aunt in a quiet part of rural Corsica in 1995. She accompanies the menfolk of the Savelli clan on a boar hunt and is given the honour of eviscerating the prey, which she undertakes with barely a flinch. However, she would rather be canoodling with the handsome Fabien (Pierre-Loup Salasca) and she is somewhat peeved to be told that she has been summoned by her father.

Pierre-Paul (Saveriu Santucci) is forever having to lie low in safe houses, as he is being targeted by rival gang leaders, the police, and nationalist political groups. Lesia adores him, but dislikes having her wings clipped and listens sulkily when her father explains the rules of her visit, which includes keeping away from the phone in case the lines have been tapped. Lesia is teased by her godfather, Joseph (Thomas Bronzini), about behaving herself. But the car bomb murder of a prominent politician with ties to Pierre-Paul has made everyone twitchy and Lesia feels picked on when Pierre-Paul ticks her off for not paying attention to her line when they go boat fishing together. She tries to tell him about a method of catching fish using a glass bowl, but he scolds her for believing such nonsense.

Still fuming when Pierre-Paul and his cohorts go out for a meeting, Lesia ignores the phone rule and calls Fabien. When he's not in, she calls her aunt and lies about using a payphone. Shortly afterwards, however, Joseph is killed in an ambush and Lesia confesses to Pierre-Paul that she broke the rules. He reassures her that she is not to blame before entrusting her to bodyguards, Sté (Anthony Morganti) and Santu (Andrea Cossu) when he goes into hiding. But she follows them to his safe room and Pierre-Paul is furious with his henchmen for being so careless.

They don't learn, however, as Lesia slips away when they go to the morgue to pay their respects to Joseph and Lesia is horrifed when she sees the extent of his injuries on the slab. As punishment, she is ordered to help Sté and Santu dig up the weapons that have been hidden near a remote tree in the countryside. Eventually, however, she is allowed to rejoin her father, who is cloistered in a house near the sea. She swims with him and enjoys a rare moment of carefree fun. But Pierre-Paul becomes preoccupied again when he receives information that a car seen near Joseph's ambush had been rented by Charles Serra (Cyrille Hertel), who is the son-in-law of bigwig Marchini (Patrick Médioni). Pierre-Paul sends Sté to spook Serra at the café where he has his morning coffee and gauge his reaction to the Savellis being on to him. When he betrays guilt, Pierre-Paul dispatches Sté and Santu to gun him down in a motorbike hit.

As this operation gets underway, Pierre-Paul takes Lesia boar hunting in the forest. She misses her shot and blames the rifle when her father knows she had aimed wide. Having prayed over Sté and Santu while they slept, Lesia is hugely relieved when they return safely. But the cops raid the hideout and Pierre-Paul and Lesia manage to escape in a boat tied to the jetty. Under cover of darkness, they come ashore and seek sanctuary with Marianne (Marie Murcia), an old family friend, who tells Lesia that she looks very much her mother. Feeling she can trust her, the teenager confides that she doesn't really like hunting and only does it to spend time with her dad.

Marianne keeps Lesia occupied while Pierre-Paul keeps an eye on the news headlines (as he doesn't seem to have his own intelligence gatherers) and plans his attack on Marchini. He trims his bushy beard and wears a long-haired wig, while Lesia is told to cut her hair and dye it blonde. They set off in a camper van and finds a spot in a site with a huge pool. Over dinner, Lesia asks Pierre-Paul why he is never home for long and he explains that he had vowed not to rest until he had killed everyone who had been involved in his father's murder. Vengeance had taken longer than expected, however, and he had been forced to decamp to Venezuela with Lesia's mother. Their 13 years together had been the happiest of his life, especially as their little accident had turned out to be such a remarkable person. But family duty must always take precedence over personal happiness and he had returned to Corsica to complete his mission.

Leaving Lesia to sleep the following morning, Pierre-Paul joins his oppos to infiltrate Marchini's villa complex and shoot him down. Aware that he is being watched at the campsite, he can't understand why Santu hasn't come to collect them. Bundling Lesia into the van, he flees for the hills to stay in the old family home with Mimi (Francesca Desideri). She reads his fortune and warns that someone in lingering on his path and she can't see his face. Mimi also tells him that he won't be able to take care of Lesia for much longer.

Deciding to send his daughter back to his sister, Pierre-Paul takes Lesia for a final day's hike into the woods. They come to a waterfall, where they swim. But Lesia has brought a glass bowl to prove the efficacy of her fishing method and Pierre-Paul is delighted when she proves him wrong and he urges her never to lose her spirit. As they drive home, however, they are ambushed on a remote road and Lesia recognises Santu's eyes through his crash helmet and vows to make him pay for both his treachery and the moment of weakness that prompted him to spare her, as she lay bleeding on the backseat.

Some time later, when Santu arrives at the hospital with a giant teddy bear for his newborn child, Lesia shoots him with her hunting rifle from a hidden vantage point. She agrees to let her clansmen finish the turf war, while she goes to stay with Marianne, well away from Ajaccio and potential trouble.

A striking performance from Corsican first-timer Ghjuvanna Benedetti dominates this riveting rite of passage. In her early twenties when the film was made, Benedetti looks a little too mature to be a naive daddy's girl. But she able registers the conflicting emotions, as Lesia begins to discover the truth about Pierre-Paul and his companions and the danger she faces from their actions. Although she has fine chemistry with the coiled Saveriu Santucci, it's the sequences in which Benedetti watches, listens, and computes that prove the most intriguing, as Lesia tries to fathom the grim realities of her situation.

In addition to a sequence depicting a disturbing nightmare that causes Lesia to wet the bed, Benedetti also has a couple of nice scenes with Thomas Bronzini's Joseph, in which he still treats her like his little goddaughter of old, and with Andrea Cossu's Santu, as he times her holding her breath underwater like the big brother she has never had. But too many of the clan members are left as ciphers, as Colonna and co-scenarist Jeanne Herry exploit Lesia's ignorance to avoid having to go into any depth about how the clan network operates and how its clashes with nationalist political groups. All the audience is required to know is that a loving father has a dark side and an even darker past that places her in danger.

Also making his screen debut, the brooding Santucci poignantly conveys the anguish of an absentee father who knows that staying away is his best way of helping his daughter. However, he also nails Pierre-Paul's utter ruthlessness in conducting clan business or confronting his foes. Yet it's his loyalty that proves his undoing, as he seems to devote little time to rooting out the quisling in the camp and his demise seems pathetically passive for someone of his status. Or was he merely guilty of letting his guard down while trying to ensure that his daughter could take away a happy memory?

Whether capturing the Corsican landscape, conveying the claustrophobic ambience within the various hideaways, or revealing Lesia's limited perspective, Antoine Cormier's cinematography is exemplary. Louise de Bouc Berger's production design is also spot on, with even the more lavish interiors reinforcing that Pierre-Paul is incarcerated without being behind bars. Audrey Ismaël's score is deftly evocative and complements the matter-of-fact steadiness of Colonna's direction, as the mood shifts from ennui to fury, regret to recrimination, and confusion to comprehension. It will be fascinating to see what Colonna does next and whether Benedetti and Santucci ever act again.

HEIDI: RESCUE OF THE LYNX.

Published 15 years before the first cinema show, Johanna Spyri's novel about an orphan going to live in the mountains with her grumpy orphan has inspired numerous films. The latest, Toby Schwarz and Aizea Roca Berridi's Heidi: Rescue of the Lynx, borrows the characters to tell an original story. But it does so in a thoughtful 3-D animated way that should please grown-ups and young children alike.

Heidi (Lilly Graffam) lives in the Swiss Alps with Grandpa (Tom Zahner). He is a stern taskmaster and steers clear of the nearby village of Dörfli because of an old feud. However, Heidi has an idyllic existence and she is rushing off to tell goatherd pal Peter (Leonardo Lucero) that she has been invited to join her friend Clara (Lily Held) on a Baltic Coast holiday when she sees a stranger chugging past in a steam-powered contraption.

Heidi discovers that he is Herr Schnaittinger (Michael McCown), who has convinced the mayor (Phil Lewis) that a sawmill will improve village life enormously. He needs the residents to sign a petition and, when a mother lynx tries to catch a hen to feed its three cubs, Schnaittinger promises to catch the predator in order to curry favour with the locals.

Although excited by the prospect of seeing Clara again, Heidi postpones the trip after she springs an injured lynx cub from a trap and smuggles it into her attic room to nurse it. Grandpa rumbles her sneaking food to feed Pepper and reminds his granddaughter that wild animals should not be kept as pets. However, he agrees to let her heal Pepper's paw and a montage follows of Heidi, Peter, and Joseph the St Bernard dog playing with Pepper in the upland pasture.

Unfortunately, when Schnaittinger calls on Grandpa to coax him into signing the petition, he sees Pepper hiding behind the front door and cackles menacingly, as he knows the people of Dörfli will react badly to the outcast depriving them of prosperity.

Realising that Pepper is in danger, Heidi decides to return him to his mother and Peter reluctantly joins her on the trek into the high forest. They have to shelter in a cave when a storm brews and Heidi notices that the soil is unstable because all of the trees had been cut down. She spots a ruined sawmill and fears that Schnaittinger will despoil the other side of the mountain if he builds a replacement. Rescuing Pepper's mother and siblings from the mill, Heidi and Peter tell Grandpa about Schnaittinger's plan when he comes looking for them.

In Grandpa's absence, however, Schnaittinger breaks into the chalet and steals a silver tinderbox, which he leaves in the local church, where it is found by workmen repairing the tower that was damaged in a fire many villagers believe was started by Grandpa. He tells Heidi that the tower was hit by lightning, but no one believes him when he comes to Dörfli after releasing the lynxes into a safe habitat.

The mayor has Grandpa arrested, only for Heidi to break him out of jail because Schnaittinger has hired some hunters to kill the lynx family. The villagers are shocked when Peter's mother, Bridget (Andrea Dewell), reveals that her young daughter had seen Schnaittinger with the tinderbox and his nefarious reputation is confirmed by Clara's father, Herr Sesemann (Mike McAlpine), when they come to help Heidi protect the environment.

Sesemann agrees to pay for the church repairs so that life can return to normal, which it does after Grandpa stops Schnaittinger from shooting the lynxes and he is accepted back into the fold. Everyone celebrates by yodelling and dancing the Schuhplattler to the music played on Alpine horns and a hexenscheit zither.

The closing celebration will remind those of a certain age of the six o'clock dance that ended the working day at Cresswell's Biscuit Factory in Chigley (1969). It's rather patronising in a well-meaningly clichéd kind of way and allows Schwarz and Berridi to duck the issue of Grandpa's ostracisation and why nobody had heard of Schnaittinger when he had clearly decimated the landscape and ruined the residents of the neighbouring village who had gone along with his heinous capitalist enterprise.

This fond memory of Gordon Murray's glorious stop-motion children's series may cloud the judgement slightly. But the Alpine scenery is appealingly vertiginous and verdant, while the steam train and Schnaittinger's bone-rattling conveyance bring a nice touch of period nostalgia. The character design is similarly thoughtful - with Pepper being cute without being overly Disneyfied - while the translated dialogue largely avoids modern idiom and encourages modulated delivery from a capable voice cast.

Most significantly, there are no video-game-style crash-bang sequences. as they would have detracted from the message that there are some places in our precious world where so-called progress represents a ruinous intrusion for the flora and fauna that inhabit them. Interestingly, the film also notes that there are two types of capitalist, with Sesemann's benevolent brand being deftly commended while the grasping Schnaittinger is roundly denounced. This is Switzerland after all. Nevertheless, Heidi has it right when she declares, with charming naivete, `it's better to be good than rich'.