(Reviews of The Summer With Carmen; Papa; and Cottontail)
THE SUMMER WITH CARMEN.
According to his film festival biography, `Zacharias Mavroeidis studied architecture in Thessaloniki, theatre in Madrid, screenwriting in Cuba, and directing in Athens.' Since making his feature bow with The Guide (2010), he has completed Across Her Body (2018) and Defunct (2019). But The Summer With Carmen is his first picture to secure a UK-wide release.
A caption outlines The Golden Rules of Screenwriting: `Every movie has three Acts'; `Every movie has a hero', `Every hero has a goal', and `Every hero changes in pursuit of his goal'. These are of interest to Demosthenes (Yorgos Tsiantoulos) and Nikitas (Andreas Nikopoulos), as they lounge on a nudist beach in Athens while trying to decide on a subject for the screenplay that they have been invited to write by a French producer seeking to fund a low-budget indie for gay audiences. Seeing a little dog on the beach, Demosthenes suggests that they base the story on their own brush with a cute pooch two years earlier.
Demosthenes had just split up with Panos (Nikolaos Mihas) after four years. When they bump into each other during Athens Pride, Demosthenes is shocked to see that Panos has acquired a small dog named Carmen. Nikitas wants to turn a play they had once written, entitled Sissies, into a film script and, because he's through with romance, Demosthenes agrees. However, he has to pull out of an agreed getaway to work on the text when his mother, Keti (Roubini Vasilakopoulou), informs him that his homophobic father is ill.
Demosthenes has also started seeing Thymios (Vasilis Tsigristaris), even though he can't get Panos out of his head. Indeed, he agrees to babysit Carmen as a favour and Nikitas is amused when they run into Thymios and his huge hound, Rocky, while walking Carmen and Demosthenes tries to bluff that he is a devoted owner. But wind up taking Carmen in after she poops on Panos's bed and Keti warns her son that he is too flighty to be a good owner.
Thymios is disappointed when Demosthenes admits that he's not Carmen's owner and this prompts him to fetch her bed and blanket, even though Panos has reconsidered taking Carmen to the pound. Back on the beach, as they discuss their screenplay, Nikitas and Demosthenes disagree over whether this should be a major plot point in their script. Anxious that he is going to miss his deadline and lose his chance to make a movie (as Xavier Dolan had directed four by his age), Nikitas nixes Demosthenes's idea to turn the scenario into a musical - although not before we've had a `Habanera' interlude featuring a drag queen (Aria Di Vine) and the other sunbathers on the rocks overlooking the sea (which becomes the scene of a Busby Berkeley aquacade).
Nikitas reads Demosthenes a speech about his unhappy childhood and wants to incorporate more about his own experience into the screenplay. But Demosthenes is more fixated on elements involving Carmen and how she started whining for food at the table and developed a soft spot for his mother, who had gone from considering her dirty to hugging her in the kitchen. Demosthenes is also angry with Panos for going on holiday with another man and leaving him to look after Carmen. When Nikitas reminds him that he now owns the dog, Demosthenes sulks and feels even worse when Nikitas suggests that they stop collaborating, as it's not working out because Demosthenes is more interested in sex than the film.
Shortly afterwards, Keti calls to say that his father has died and Demosthenes is embarrassed by Panos's display of emotion at the graveside. However, he is so pleased to see Nikitas (who has returned to Athens from holiday) that he hugs him warmly, to the dismay of the Orthodox priest conducting the service. Nikitas goes to Demosthenes flat to shower and is hurt when he spends the night with Panos and is clutching Carmen. He tells his friend that he can't go on being sidelined whenever he gets a better off and refuses all protestations that he can change because he has promised and failed so many times before.
Unable to leave a howling Carmen when he returns to work, Demosthenes cries as he cuddles her inside the door to his apartment. But he knows he can't keep her and entrusts her to Keti, who is eager to dote on her. She is also ready to ask her son about his relationship with Panos. But, when he's late for a date at the cinema, Demosthenes slips out of the auditorium when he sees Panos sitting alone at the front. He meets Nikitas at the beach and they hug when he asks if he can help with the script, even though he can't guarantee that he'll change (in spite of his best intentions). As they wander home, they agree that they should take it to Hollywood and get Timothée Chalamet to play Nikitas, Chris Hemsworth for Demosthenes, and Andrew Garfield for Panos.
Closing captions outline the lessons of the film: `There are straight people who don't look it'; `Every mother has been embarrassed for her child'; `Reality is not always realistic'; `We are all sad little sissies'; `Self-knowledge is a convenient self-deception'; and `Bisexuals are real'. As the credits roll, the other sunbathers drift away at dusk. Demosthenes and Nikitas remain on the rocks. They get up for a pee and the former suggests that they make a meta-movie, with them both recalling the events of the summer with Carmen between flashbacks. Nikitas thinks this is an inspired idea.
Ending on a note of knowing irony, this is a fascinating insight into the creative process. Influenced by the structures of classical Greek comedy, as well as the likes of Pedro Almodóvar, Roy Andersson, and the Coen brothers, Mavroeidis and co-scenarist Fondas Chalatsis also explore the unreliability of memory and the extent to which proximity distorts perspective, with their playful, but profound analysis being leavened with plentiful full frontal nudity, vigorous love-making, poignant affection, and a wistful acceptance of the unpredictable nature of people and events.
Editor Livia Neroutsopoulou keeps the themes and the shifting timeframes together with graceful tact. Accompanied by Ted Regklis's mood-shifting score, Thodoros Mihopoulos's images of the shimmering sea and the burning rocks are similarly neatly contrasted with the cool interiors designed by Aliki Kouvaka. Katerina Zoura's costumes for the pinky-blue-haired Nikitas are also adept. But he's done something of a disservice by a screenplay that seems less interested in him that Demosthenes, although this could be a reflection of Nikitas's self-abnegatory approach to his own story. He's certainly the more empathetic character and is played with considerable delicacy by Andreas Labropoulos.
Yorgos Tsiantoulas is also effective as the self-obsessed Demosthenes, who is difficult to like, but easy to understand. Roubini Vasilakopoulou also steals scenes as the mother who wants the best for her son without being under any illusions about his shortcomings. Her scenes with Carmen, will linger long. But Nala, the chihuahua cross with the doleful eyes, surely deserves a film of her own.
PAPA.
In July 2010, 15 year-old Kan Ka-leung murdered his mother, Lam Lin-kam, and younger sister, Kan Chung-yue, in the Tsuen Wan district of Hong Kong. As film critic-turned-director Philip Yung hailed from the neighbourhood, he was hired to write a screenplay about the Heung Wo Street Murder on the strength of his breakthrough feature, Port of Call (2015). The project never came to fruition, but Yung remained haunted by the figure of Kan Fuk-kui, the father of the killer, who had been working in his Fan Fan Ho Restaurant when the crime was committed in the family apartment over the road. Consequently, Yung has now dramatised an ambitiously non-linear version of the bereft man's story in Papa.
As Nin Yuen (Sean Lau) takes the chairs off the tables at the start of another day in his 24-hour cha chaan teng restaurant, police are combing the apartment opposite, where wife Yin (Jo Koo) and daughter Grace (Lainey Hung) have been murdered with a meat cleaver by his 15 year-old son, Ming (Dylan So). Delivery boys and other shop owners are surprised to see him, but he keeps his head down and goes about his business, even slipping off to the market to buy some fish to share with Carnation, the white cat who had been rescued from a window ledge as a kitten by Grace.
Unable to face coming to work, Nin sells the business to a waiter who had been with him since he owned a butcher's shop. He thinks back to when the kids were younger, but wishes he had been better at communicating his love for them and had found a happier balance between working to provide for them and devoting time to them. Nin feels a similar pang in court, as Ming calmly explains that he is passionate about the environment and had killed his mother and sister because voices in his head had told him to reduce the numbers sapping the planet's resources.
Ming is diagnosed as schizophrenic and Nin pleads with Dr Lee (Helen Tam) to take good care of him, as he has no intention of giving up on the boy. He visits whenever he can and
lets him know that he has made a Mother's Day offering in his name. He spends the day with his own mother (Chan Lai-wun) and tries to pretend that Yin and Grace didn't come to avoid making the house too full. But she knows what has happened and admits that she was wrong when she had questioned whether Yin (who was a waitress and several years younger) would make a good wife.
Nin's mind drifts back to the day Ming was born and the nurses gave them a frame of his footprints for good luck. He had pictures taken on his new camera and did the same when Grace was born. Now, he is selecting a coffin for her and being told off for asking if she could share a casket with her mother because she's so young. As he pushes the button to send her coffin forward (after a full funeral service that he overwhelmed him), Nin offers his daughter a word of reassurance and he had harked back to meeting Yin and how quickly she had made up her mind to marry him (in spite of opposition from both sides). A chaste nocturnal kiss through a mosquito net at her mother's place in the country had typified their romance and Yin had got tearful when Nin proposed on the bus home. Rather than have a big wedding, they had settled for a small civil ceremony and had gone to a karaoke bar in the small hours to settle their nerves.
Affection and anguish compete on Nin's face as he remembers. But he holds it together, as he knows he has to stay strong in order to help Ming through his own ordeal. One of the ways he tries to aid them is through letters he types on the computer from Grace (who stands beside him, as she had done when she had taught him how to use the PC). He also tries to befriend a boy with autism he had seen playing up at the GP surgery and he wonders whether things might have been different if he had paid more attention to Ming's behavioural traits.
Feeling lonely, Nin calls a massage advert he sees in the paper. However, the girl leaves as soon as he pays up front and he is so ashamed of himself when the booking clerk mocks him that he smashes the phone and weeps angry tears for having betrayed the intimacy he had enjoyed with Yin and for allowing himself to be conned. But his shame serves as a release valve for the grief he has been repressing.
Ming had been cross when Grace had persuaded her father into letting her keep Carnation, as he feels it's cruel to confine animals. But, when the kitten sneaks through a window, it's Ming who rescues her and he winds up taking care of her when Grace gets bored. At therapy sessions with Dr Lee, Ming complains about Nin being distant and he regrets not paying closer attention to Ming when he had restless nights and always seemed so sullen at mealtimes. As a consequence, Ming refuses to co-operate with a pardon application that would enable his father to visit more often. During a counselling session, Dr Lee asks why Ming wanted to kill his family (and Nin asks why he didn't attack him) and he admits it was because nobody ever listened to him.
Nin recalls buying Ming a new bike and running beside him as he got used to riding it. But he was never good at listening to instructions and Nin also remembers when Ming started to help out at the restaurant how his refusal to pack delivery bags as waiter Salty (Yeung Wai Lun) had taught him had led to a string of complaints about the food. He had tried to explain that the boss's son had additional responsibility, but Ming was in no mood to listen. Similarly, when Nin is called to the correctional facility after Ming has had to be cuffed to a bed for his own protection, he blanks his father and refuses to explain himself or apologise.
On a trip to see his grandmother, Ming had carried Carnation in a bag and she had been amused by how attached he was to her. On the bus, Ming had asked Nin for a multifunctional phone for his birthday, only for his father to say gadgets with more gizmos are bound to go wrong. He had offered to buy him a camera instead, but Ming had refused. When he butchered his mother and sister, he had hurried to nearby Riviera Park and removed the gloves he had worn and called 999 on his new phone in order to hand himself in. While on a family holiday, Yin had spotted the phone and warned Ming not to flaunt it because it would upset his father. She had given him some cash to seal the deal and he had been disappointed that she had not sided with him and simply told his father the truth.
Nin thinks back to the moment the police came to the restaurant and a female inspector had broken the news in the back of a squad car. Revisiting the spot, he remembers how he and Yin had always looked out of the windows to catch each other when the other was working and he had enjoyed making her laugh by doing silly dances in the street.
When brother-in-law Keung (Law Wing-cheung) takes him to a hostess bar on a work trip, Nin shies away from the girls and finds himself in a karaoke room. He chooses a song he had sung with Yin and the memories flood back and he rushes out to the bathroom to compose himself. It's now 2013 (two decades after they had first met) and Ming is still under supervision after four years. Nin attends a hearing with Dr Lee and a judge (John Shum) and asks for Ming to be released into his custody, as he is now retired and can keep a 24/7 eye on him. The judge commends his dedication as a father, but insists that Ming has not made sufficient progress to leave his psychiatric hospital and Nin apologises for being a nuisance and shuffles away from the facility counting to contain his temper, as he had taught Ming to do.
Shortly afterwards, Nin receives a letter from Ming, in which he apologises for what he's done. He wishes he could write to Yin and Grace, too, and Nin is proud of him for his courage. Wandering into the kitchen, he imagines getting a hug from Grace, who urges him to take care of himself. Visitin on his son's 18th birthday, Nin brings some books for him to read, but he stops him short when he asks if he can discuss the night of the murder. Nin recalls waving the pair goodbye after a family supper that had gone well until Ming had felt ignored during a jokey chat about Mr Bean. He had stayed in the office playing computer games and had only returned later. Nin presses his fingers against the partition glass and Ming reciprocates, as he tells his father instead about the dream in which he had seen Yin and Grace, but not spoken to them.
After several years, Ming (Edan Lui) is released. Nin cooks lunch and watches as his son re-familiaries himself with the apartment. As they eat, Ming's eye falls on a photo of the family at the beach and he's puzzled how they are all in it. Smiling, Nin reminds him that the camera had a timer so he could set it on a tripod. They all looked so happy, with Nin's smile being the biggest.
Although there is always so much going on in every corner of the frame in this assured evocation of daily life in a bustling Hong Kong street, it's the tonal control that makes this so compelling and poignant. Much of this is down to Philip Yung's writing and direction, as he presents events as a series of impressions and memories fleeting through the mind of a man whose world has fallen apart. He is played with acute sensitivity by Sean Lau, who contrasts simple pleasure with unimaginable pain with a sense that Nin never feels himself entitled to the former and doesn't deserve the latter, even though he knows he put work first and could never quite find the right way to convey his love for his wife and kids.
But the manner in which Nin's stillness and stoicism are presented within a non-stop environment is deftly achieved by cinematographer Chin Ting-chang, whose use of the 4:3 aspect ratio and a narrow depth-of-field allows Yung to blur what's happening around Nin and present him as a man detached, a crestfallen figure in isolation. Ding Ke's score does much to underline Nin's emotional shifts. But it's Jojo Shek's fluid editing that enables Yung's non-linear screenplay to follow a mundane moment with a magical memory or a crushing recognition of loss with an optimistic realisation that the only way life can go on for Nin is through a reconnection with Ming.
The support playing is also spot on, with Lau and Jo Koo making a sweet couple who are capable of naked passion, as well as quaint gestures. Lainey Hung neatly shifts from daddy's girl to brother's bane, while Dylan So shows the introverted Ming's frustrations and saving graces while barely changing expression. A word for the cat, too, as Carnation seems to know who needs a little consolation. So many films seek to explore grief and guilt, but Yung finds the key to coping with both emotions in the redemptive power of love.
COTTONTAIL.
Among the many shorts and TV episodes that Patrick Dickinson directed before his debut feature is Mr Rabbit (2013), the story of a Japanese father and son in Los Angeles falling out over the best way to care for a wife/mother living with Alzheimer's. This scenario has been woven into Cottentail, a flashbacking road movie that has its moments of poignancy without ever being particularly compelling or convincing.
On the day of his wife's funeral, Kenzaburo (Lily Franky) visits the market to look at an octopus in a fishmonger's tank. Realising he doesn't have the money to afford it, he goes to his favourite sushi restaurant and recalls the blind date between his younger self (Kosei Kudo) and Akiko (Yuri Tsunematsu). They were both nervous, but bonded over the Peter Rabbit pendant that reminded her of the childhood time she had spent in the Lake District with her beloved father.
Kenzaburo had gone on to become a novelist and had been so wrapped up in his work that he hadn't always been an available father for his son, Toshi (Ryô Nishikido). Akiko (Tae Kimura) had tried not to take sides. But, when she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's she had been unable to prevent them arguing over her treatment and Kenzaburo had come to resent the fact that she continued to recognise Toshi, even though he was her principal carer.
At the temple, the abbot hands Kenzaburo a note from Akiko, in which she asks him to scatter her ashes on Lake Windermere. She apologises for imposing on him, but he is happy to fulfil her request and is only frustrated that Toshi insists on coming along with his wife, Satsuki (Rin Takanashi), and their young daughter, Emi.
Impatient at having to wait in a London hotel for a train north, Kenzaburo takes his granddaughter for a three-hour trip to the park, while her parents are searching for somewhere to eat. Miffed at being lectured by his son, Kenzaburo grabs his bag and boards the first train he sees at the busy station. Unfortunately, as he learns from Olivia (Isy Suttie) and her hen party pals, the service is heading to York and Kenzaburo finds himself stuck in a station at closing time.
Spotting a porter riding off on a bicycle, Kenzaburo grabs an unlocked bike and wobbles off along a country lane as darkness sets in. A storm brews and he is forced to take shelter in the woods for the night. Next morning, he approaches a farm, where he is given a cautious welcome by John (Ciarán Hinds) and his daughter, Mary (Aoife Hinds).
Having recently lost her mother, she sympathises with Kenzaburo, who has decent English because he used to teach it to pay the bills between books. She shows him the spot where she had scattered her mother's ashes on the river and teaches him how to dunk biscuits in tea. As she wants to help the stranger on his way, John agrees to drive Kenzaburo to the Lake District, even though he isn't convinced that they'll be able to find the spot on the postcard that Akiko had treasured since her youth.
She had been scared after receiving her diagnosis and Kenzaburo regrets not having been more reassuring. He also wishes he had done things differently with Toshi and is relieved when he catches up with him at Windermere. They hire a car and drive around the lake searching for the spot in the photo. But they have no luck and Kenzaburo drops the tea caddy containing the ashes when he struggles with Toshi in the rain, having jumped out of the car in the middle of nowhere in the dark because he's convinced their close.
Eventually, they reach their destination and father and son wade into the water to sprinkle Akiko's ashes. Making the moment even more special, Emi spots a wild rabbit in the long grass and, remembering how Akiko had asked him how to pronounce the word on their first date, Kenzaburo happily joins his family on the hillside overlooking the lake.
Gently rambling and full of valuable little life lessons (notably on the notion of being a burden while suffering the indignities of incapacity), this is a genial picture that never quite attains the levels of significance to which it aspires. Editor Andrew Jadavji capably accommodates the flashbacks, while cinematographer Mark Wolf's contrasts between the views of Tokyo and the Lakes are neatly counterpointed by a Stefan Gregory score that drives home the emotional tone. Yet nothing feels momentous, as Kenzaburo achieves his goal and rebuilds bridges without too much physical or emotional discomfort.
Lily Franky cuts a quixotic figure who seems to have little in common with the diffident Kosei Kudo, whose rapport with Yuri Tsunematsu is rather charming. Franky and Tae Kimura touchingly convey how romance reconfigures itself over time. But the father-son tensions are too formulaic and Toshi is too obviously sketched for Ryô Nishikido to do much more than pout in annoyance and Franky to stare in rheumily morose despair.
Ciarán and Aoife Hinds have little to do in passing support and it's hard to believe that Ralph Fiennes and Jessie Buckley were once pencilled in for the roles of the taciturn farmer and his kindly daughter. Timothy Spall was sold short in similar fashion in Gillies MacKinnon's The Last Bus (2021). But, at least he got to meet a few more people en route and endured a tad more difficulty in performing his final duty.
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