(Reviews of On Falling; Ernest Cole: Lost and Found; I Am Martin Parr; and Giants of La Mancha)
ON FALLING.
Having made an impression on the festival circuit with the shorts, Monday (2017), Red Hill (2019), and The Shift (2020), Porto-born, Edinburgh-based Laura Carreira makes an impressive feature bow with On Falling. Very much influenced by recent strains of British social realism, the film has been produced by Jack Thomas-O'Brien for Sixteen Films, the company formed in 2002 by his mother, Rebecca O'Brien, and her longtime motion picture partner, Ken Loach.
Aurora (Joana Santos) is a picker at the warehouse of a vast online retailer in an unnamed Scottish town. She searches the shelves for objects prompted by a handheld bar-code device that starts beeping if she takes too long to find things. But she is good at her job, even if she is actively looking for something else. Flatmate Vera (Inês Vaz) gives her lifts in return for a share of the petrol money, but they don't spend much time together, as they crash in their rooms and watch stuff on their phones.
In the canteen one day, Aurora strikes up a conversation with Alec (Jake McGarry) about their shared hobby of doing the laundry. But she's soon whisked off for another shift and the rare moment of human contact is ended. Another comes when Polish van driver, Kris (Piotr Sikora), moves into her digs and he chats with her and Teresa (Itxaso Moreno) about the `ghost' with a sweet tooth who steals from the kitchen cupboards.
Having been invited to take a chocolate bar from a box in the supervisor's office for being a top picker, Aurora discovers over lunch that Alec has killed himself. The man who breaks the news thinks it's bad form to let your flatmates find the body and claims he'd have the courtesy to jump off a bridge. Aurora is shocked by the conversation and can only pick at her food. As pennies are tight, she can only afford a sandwich for supper, which she wraps in cling film when Kris invites her to the pub with his mates. There's an awkward moment when she rests her head on his shoulder and she ends the night tending to a drunken woman who has passed out in the toilets.
Making toast, Aurora drops her phone and has to pay £99 to get it repaired. While in the shower, the electricity goes off and she creeps into her room because she had forgotten to top up the meter and Kris offers to do it, while Teresa curses Aurora for letting the side down. Huddled in her robe, she feels alone and a long way from home because everything that could go wrong is doing. Next morning, she slips out before anyone can see her to collect her phone and spends the day wandering.
When she goes to a café for some chips, she has her peace disturbed by a hen party that squeezes into her table. One woman chats to her about a holiday in Portugal, but her friends distract her and Aurora is left to finish her food crammed into a corner.
When she gets a job interview, Aurora asks for a day off for a doctor's appointment, only to be told that she needs to plan ahead for time off. Back on the floor, she overhears a guide telling those on a tour of the warehouse that goods are stored in a way that turns picking into a treasure hunt. She watches a child on the tour take something off a shelf and sees the box bouncing on the conveyor belt - but no one goes to fetch it because it's not their job.
During a break, she chats to an African man whose new boss is giving him a hard time and they joke about the weather. Alone at the flat, Aurora thanks Kris for bailing her out over the meter and tries to wangle another invitation to the pub, but it doesn't come. Feeling hungry, she sneaks into the kitchen and steals a chocolate bar from one of the cupboards. Next morning, Vera tells her that she's got a job in Portugal and tries to reassure her that she will also get her big break soon. But Aurora isn't so sure, as not only is she losing a compatriot, but she's also going to have to pay bus fares to work.
On the floor, she switches a label on an item to mess up a delivery and crunches crisps in the break room while workmates discuss a TV series that has got them all hooked. While on her rounds, she's passively aggressively asked by a supervisor if there's a reason why her rate has slipped during this session before she spends part of the afternoon taking a random drug test.
Management host a thank you session with cupcakes and urge staff to donate to a marine biology charity that reflects company attitudes towards sustainability. There's a muted response from staff and Aurora takes three cakes to eat alone in the washroom. However, she lingers in the kitchen at home and gets an invitation to share supper with Kris and his friend, Yulia (Karyna Khymchuk). She tells them about her social care interview and they toast her chances.
Phoning in sick, Aurora buys a box of cakes and has a free eyeshadow demonstration from a young woman who suggests a colour to help her look smart for the interview. Aurora luxuriates in the attention and the feel on the brush on her skin. But she also warms to the friendly chatter of the sales girl and is feeling good about herself when she meets the interviewer. She's welcoming and tries to make it easy for Aurora to talk about herself. But she has been so ground down by the dehumanising regime that she can't think of anything to say about herself and fibs that she has just been to the Bahamas. Apologising for being a bit disorientated because of her period, she buries her head in her hands when the middle-aged woman gives her a second to compose herself.
At dusk, a park-keeper finds Aurora unconscious on a hill. He covers her with his coat and calls for help. When she wakes, she sits up and squeezes his arm in gratitude before striding off. Reporting for work next day, she finds the conveyor is down and joins workmates of various backgrounds in a game of keepy uppy with a plastic football and, just for a moment, things don't feel so bad.
Designed to create a pang of conscience in anyone who shops at the world's biggest bazaar, this sobering treatise on the human cost of unfettered consumerism carefully accrues details relating to the degrading and destabilising of a Portuguese woman who becomes so inured and isolated by her daily regime that she almost forgets how to interact with colleagues and flatmates. Mercifully, Laura Carreira resists the gauche politicising and sentimental melodramatising that made Ken Loach's later films so frustrating, as she keeps Karl Kürten's camera so close to the exceptional Joana Santos that she seems hemmed in and hesitant, whether she's scouring the narrow avenues of shelving, picking at her food the canteen, or loitering in the kitchen on the off-chance of some inter-personal contact.
As Carreira denies us any backstory, we have no idea how Aurora came to find herself in Scotland or how she occupied her time before the warehouse sapped her individuality and vitality. She doesn't always help herself with some of her choices, but her capitulation during the interview that could deliver her from a living nightmare reveals how demoralised she has become because of the banal drudgery and sinister surveillance within the workplace and the suspicion and superficiality of her existence within shared accommodation.
Yet Santos gives little away, as Aurora adopts a mask-like placidity in a bid to project the impression that she retains a semblance of control over any aspect of her life. She works with efficiency, only being thrown when she finds a doll crying in its box on the shelf. But she never seems at ease with others, whether she's trying to escape from the nattering security guard who seems oblivious to the fact she's on the clock, seeking to make a good impression on decent sorts like Alec and Kris, or being disconcerted by the kindness of strangers like the hen party reveller, the make-up girl, and the interviewer.
Without soapboxing in the manner of Chloé Zhao's Nomadland (2020), Carreira nails our complacent acquiescence in gig economics and cellphone cocooning. Only the interlude in the park rings false, as she studiously avoids migrant miserabilism or apportioning too much blame to the jobsworths who monitor work rates, dole out sugary rewards, and administer drug tests. But she also resists taking aim at the absentee fat cats who rake in the cash from their soulless enterprises. Instead, she coerces viewers into re-assessing their own role in an endless cycle of Pavlovian acquisition that brings far less satisfaction than the algorithmically targeted pop-ups on our treacherously calculating and conniving devices would have us believe.
ERNEST COLE: LOST AND FOUND.
Having profiled Congolese politician Patrice Lamumba (Lamumba, 1991) and American writer James Baldwin (I Am Not Your Negro, 2016), Haitian film-maker Raoul Peck turns his focus on a pioneering South Africn photographer in Ernest Cole: Lost and Found. Coming off the back of his Peabody Award win for the damning HBO series on European colonialism, Exterminate All the Brutes (2021), this confirms the 71 year-old Peck as one of the most significant docu-makers of our time.
As he explains in a letter to the Norwegian immigration board, Ernest Cole was born in Eersterust, near Pretoria on 21 March 1940. He came to New York to publish House of Bondage (1967), a book of photographs exposing the pernicious nature of the Apartheid regime. However, after 26 months of photographing similar misery and injustice, he has decided to seek pastures new because his passport is about to expire and he does not want to become stateless.
An interview made for Rune Hassner's Bilder för Miljoner (1969) has Cole speaking about his decisions to leave school early and decide to become a photographer after seeing Henri Cartier-Bresson's The People of Moscow (1955). As a witness to the Sharpville Massacre in 1960, Cole knew his pictures of daily life in the townships could never be published in his homeland. Having watched the family home being bulldozed because Eersterust was regarded as a `black spot' that had to be eradicate in the cause of white urban expansionism, Cole started recording the everyday exclusions (`South Africa is a land of signs') and provocations. He records people being stopped to present the passbooks that can be confiscated at whim and shows the indifference of the whites to such searches and the immunity they have to treat Africans in any way they choose.
Some of his most telling images focus on gold miners and female house servants, who are left to raise the children who will later come to treat them with contempt. We see the odd white cop treating the Africans on their beat as human beings. But the country jails the likes of Nelson Mandela to uphold a policy Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd calls `good neighbourliness'. Unable to bear the restrictions and the repression of being `Bantu', Cole left South Africa on 19 May 1966 having searched in vain for role models and reasons to be cheerful in a state in which banishment camps like Frenchdale so deprive Black citizens of their dignity and hope that being back in Johannesburg felt like freedom.
Cole struggled to find work until Verwoerd was assassinated and then he found fame after publishing his book. But the shock of freedom took its toll on many Black South Africans, as they sought to equate how African Americans in the Civil Rights era were treated by their white compatriots. He was fascinated by mixed race couples and gay men and women openly holding hands and kissing on the street, as these simple acts were crimes back home. Yet, the majority of the 60,000 pictures Cole took during this time went unseen, as no one wanted to confront the import of what he had seen.
Feeling like an outsider in the Deep South, Cole was struck by the similarities between Apartheid and Jim Crow legislation. But he also felt safer in South Africa than he did in the United States and recalls the backlash after he told a New York Times reporter about his surprise at the prevalence of racism in the country. In the voiceover taken from Cole's writings, he admits that his passion might not have informed the photos, as he was not sure this was his fight. But he was also aware that he was a 27 year-old in a foreign land with the burden of his recent past on his shoulders.
South African mentor Jürgen Schadeberg came to visit in New York and was dismayed by how isolated and depressed Cole had become. When they went to a restaurant together, Cole felt like he was back in South Africa because of the stares tipped with the `tranquil violence of privilege'. Criticised by white American colleagues for lacking edge, Cole responded that when he turns the camera on white America he sees nothing and his pictures of Black society reflect a South African experience they know nothing about. He declares that he observes rather than judges. Sometimes he is amazed, other times appalled. But he is always struck by the fact that the images could just have easily been taken in big cities in South Africa because nowhere was really free in 1968.
With his passport about to expire, Cole got a visa for Sweden and spent a few months in Stockholm, here he was befriended by film-maker Rune Hassner, who helped him curate an exhibition. But he didn't stay long and returned to New York, where his Ford Foundation grant was not extended and he began to feel crushed by the pace of life and the fact that he always seemed to have extra hurdles to negotiate no matter what he did. On social security, Cole spent time at the Riverside Church dormitory in Harlem and waited for the Ford people to process the applications that would enable him to work. All the while, events in South Africa, such as the Soweto Uprising and the murder of Steve Biko, take a toll on his mental health. He stopped taking pictures and became homeless.
Homesick, but banned from returning, Cole continued to eke out an existence. When F.W. De Klerk changed his mind about Apartheid, Cole recorded what a cosy privilege it was to admit error without consequence. Over footage of Truth and Reconciliation hearings, he describes how he contemplated suicide and fought shy of the help of friends who had recognised him at Pennsylvania Station. Magnum photographer Rashid Lombard had taken shots of him and Cole took one in reciprocation - his first image in eight years. He felt like an old man and wasn't in the mood to discuss what had happened to him in the interim.
Eight days after Mandela walked free, Cole died of pancreatic cancer on 19 February 1990. He was 49 years old and his mother travelled to be at his bedside. She returned his ashes for burial in South Africa and Cole faded into history. Then, in 2016, nephew Leslie Matlaisane received an email from a Swedish bank announcing that it had negatives of 60,000 of Cole's photographs in three safety-deposit boxes. The bank was not willing to divulge how the cache came to be there and the Hasselblad Foundation has since claimed the rights to 504 images. But the bulk were repatriated and is now in the possession of the University of the Witwatersrand. The artistry of the pictures is undeniable. Their value is incalculable.
With LaKeith Stanfield speaking for Cole, this documentary has been carefully compiled to ensure the emphasis falls on the photographs taken in South Africa and the USA. Archival material has been cannily intercut by editor Alexandra Strauss to capture the socio-political mood in the two countries and provide some historical context, while Alexei Aigui's score offers subtle cultural and emotional undercurrents. Drawing on Cole's writings and testimonials from friends and family, Raoul Peck drops in biographical details, as he reveals how Cole was allowed to slip between the cracks as both a man and as a photographer.
Although he doesn't make a particularly good job of integrating the Stockholm mystery, Peck recognises the similarity between Cole's photo-realist activism and James Baldwin's writing and detects in each streaks of melancholic self-doubt and a fearless determination to expose the truth. The men were contemporaries and campaigned on similar issues, but they don't appear to have crossed paths (and the same seems true of singer-songwriter Miriam Makeba), which is a shame because Cole needed a confidant to help him negotiate life in New York. Given how long Cole spent suffering the fate of the exile, Peck should perhaps have also included a potted history of US race relations to complement his précis of South Africa's evolution in the decades after Cole's departure - as it is still a long way away from its own truth and reconciliation stage.
I AM MARTIN PARR.
Photographer Martin Parr divides opinion. Some consider his pictures of the working-class at leisure to be incisively satirical, while others claim they are patronising and cruel. As the founder and creative director of The Anonymous Project, Lee Shulman is well placed to add his twopenn'orth to the debate. But, despite the odd adept pastiche in revisiting favourite haunts, I Am Martin Parr will do little to shift entrenched positions, either way.
Born in Epsom in 1952, Martin Parr took his first photo in the cold winter of 1963 and was encouraged in his interest by his grandfather. Both parents were keen birdwatchers and he adapted their style of patient observation to remain alert when seeking subjects by positioning himself at the centre of promising situations. Wife Susie Parr is amused that he tends to go unseen when he is so tall with a large camera around his neck.
As we see Parr pottering with the aid of a wheeled walking frame, American photographers Bruce Gilbert and Harry Gruyaert and curator Tracy Marshall agree with Susie that Parr's early monochrome work had a social realist feel that revealed the gift for engaged detachment that would become his trademark. Gallery director Clémentine de la Féronnière picks out a series of clapped out Morris Minors in Ireland, while photographer Mimi Mollica notes that the black and white work is full of clues as to the photographer Parr would become when colour became the norm in the 1980s.
Parr himself revisits Steep Lane Chapel and the Hebden Bridge Picture House to relive some classic poses. But he never regretted moving into colour after returning from a spell in Ireland and discovering the beach at New Brighton on the Wirral. He enjoys the fact one can spend a day searching for an image that never comes and concedes that it's impossible to take the perfect picture.
Photographer François Hébel and musician Mark Bedford praise the work in The Last Resort (1983-85) for its wit, warmth, and documentary acuity. Parr himself claims he was always trying to tell a story rather than simply capturing a moment and that there was always a degree of class critique and political satire in his work during the Thatcher years.
Not everyone admired his efforts, however, as his attempts to join Magnum were frustrated by the divisiveness of his approach, as some felt his cynicism went against the agency's humanist reputation. Photographer Ravi Pujara and artist Grayson Perry put this rift down to snobbery and Parr suggests on a trip to the Tower Ballroom in Blackpool that he's not taken too seriously because he specialises in people at leisure. There are no war zones or scenes of catastrophe in books like The Cost of Living (1987-89) and Common Sense (1995-99), but there is plenty of insight into human nature and the foibles of the British character.
As Parr goes looking for choice subjects over Coronation weekend, he claims to be patriotic and egalitarian, as he'll pop any bubble and celebrate any quirk. David Walliams and Grayson Perry defend him on charges of cruelty by averring that academe is biased against humour because `art' has to capture the serious rather than the eccentric. Having gatecrashed a street party, he drops into a British Asian community centre and takes a few more snaps and gets his face painted, as Perry rails against the swooshy-haired blandness of the posh.
Protesting that he never patronises, Parr declares that he simply records what is there before him and that he never sets out to make anybody look anything other than they are. Susie jokes about making holiday plans (she swims, he doesn't) before we see shots taken at various foreign landmarks, as well as scenes of duty free grabbing on ferries, as Parr parodies consumer culture and the rise of easy shopping. Noting that fast food is more photogenic and revealing than haut cuisine, he points out how products never resemble packaging images and laments that our greed for cheap gratification is going to destroy the planet.
As the talking heads deny that Parr is taking the mickey because he is highlighting universal truths, we learn that he has upped his work ethic since surviving cancer and that he devotes more time to the Bristol-based foundation that helps documentary photographers, while also housing his collections of such ephemera as Saddam Hussein watches. Enjoying the attention of a signing session in Paris, Parr admits that there has been the odd dud in his book portfolio. But he has kept striving and needs to keep working, if only to reassure us that it's okay that not everything in life is beautiful.
Running just over an hour, this is a succinct snapshot that would have benefited significantly from the presence of some naysayers. While it avoids cornball references to artists like Donald McGill and Beryl Cook and such shutterbugs as Vivian Maier and Diane Arbus, too much of the back-slapping boosterism is superficial, while we learn absolutely nothing about Parr's contemporaries and how his work differs from theirs. Furthermore, there is no contextualising of the material to help viewers appreciate the barriers he was striving to break down (with both his monochrome and colour output) and how his status has changed over time, as social realism in its literary, artistic, and cinematic forms has come and gone in and out of fashion.
Despite commending his eye and vigilance, the speakers offer little insight into Parr's technique or his rapport with papped or posed targets, while the focus on his subject matter over the years is very narrow. This is understandable given the brevity of Shulman's profile. but surely he could have managed another 20 minutes, given that there are so many questions left unasked, let alone answered. Nevertheless, Maxime Kathari's cinematography merits mention, as it pays homage to Parr's way of seeing with an affection that often feels absent from his own work.
GIANTS OF LA MANCHA.
What is it about film adaptations of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote? Since Georges Méliès inevitably led the way with La Toile d'araignée merveilleuse (1908), there have been several made under the original title. The most significant interpretations were directed by Ferdinand Zecca and Lucien Nonguet (1903), Maurice Elvey (1923), G.W. Pabst (1933), Rafael Gil (1947) and Grigori Kozintsev (1957). But Orson Welles's failure to complete his take between 1957-69 put a sort of curse on the story, which struck Terry Gilliam, as Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe recorded in their documentary, Lost in La Mancha (2002).
As the same duo revealed in He Dreams of Giants (2019), Gilliam finally succeeded in releasing The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018). But the reviews were as lukewarm as they had been for Arthur Hiller's musical, Man of La Mancha (1972), Peter Yates's mini-series, Don Quixote (2000), and Ah Gan's 3-D reboot, Don Quixote (2010). Indeed, only the Spanish duo of Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón's Don Quixote, Knight Errant (2002) and Albert Serra's Honor of the Knights (2008) have found favour.
What chance, therefore, of Gonzalo Gutiérrez pulling off the trick with Giants of La Mancha? He's not the first animator to take a tilt at the text, as José María Blay and Arturo Moreno's Garbancito de la Mancha (1945), Vlado Kristl's Don Kihot (1961), and José Pozo's Donkey Xote (2007) have come before him. But the scale of the task facing him is made clear by the fact that Disney has abandoned attempts to turn the material into a short (1940, 1941, 1946) and a feature (1951, 2001, 2012, 2016) on seven occasions over the last 85 years. Perhaps that's why he's opted for a storyline that has only the most tangential connection to the 1605 novel.
After pop-up book pages are used to help 11 year-old Alphonso Quixote (Micke Moreno) explain his antecedents, he spies a storm monster threatening his village in La Mancha and he causes chaos as he hurtle down a mountain to reassure his neighbours that he has the situation under control. As the windmill sail he accidentally detached bounces behind him causing untold damage, it's evident why the locals have branded Alphonso a dreamer. Even pals Pancho Panza (Matthew Moreno) and Victoria (Cassie Glow) accept he's on the eccentric side, as he thinks the windmills are giants and that he is being followed everywhere by three white rabbits.
As global warming has made life tough, lots of people are leaving to move to Carrascoland, a development owned by the sleazily scheming Carrasco (Tom Harris). He is particularly keen to get hold of the house in which Alfonso lives with his mother (Jennifer Moule) and father (Bradley Krupsaw), who always speaks in rhymes. They are worried by their son's talent for trouble, but conveniently go into town so he can head for the hills with Victoria (an eyepatched tomboy on whom he has a crush) and Pancho (who has been told he is moving to Carrascoland tomorrow).
Having foiled Carrasco's attempt to kidnap Alfonso, the trio make it across a rickety bridge out of harm's way. Alfonso plans to get into the face of the storm monster and set off Pancho's firework collection in its face. But his parents are worried about him being in the forest and his father joins Pancho's dad (Mattew Wray), in a flying ship, while the mothers keep their feet on the ground.
This proves wise, as Alfonso accidentally shoots down the airship with a firework and Carrasco rescues the Quixote and Panza and takes them to his lair, where he explains that he has used the inventions that Dan has created to power windmills to destroy vast areas of woodland and generate the storms that have driven their neighbours away. As the fathers watch on CCTV, as Alfonso and Victoria are sucked towards a giant wood-chipper, Carrasco presents them with a contract to sign.
Vowing to be friends forever, Alfonso and Pancho fall out almost immediately, when they see the former's father with Carrasco on the roof of his hideout. Pancho thinks they're in cahoots, but he has actually been abducted while creating a diversion for Panza to sabotage the machinery. Just as Pancho is in full sulk, Carrasco plucks him from the forest with a giant digger, only for Alfonso and a small army of chickens to invade the compound and free Pancho so that he lands in the flying ship that Victoria (who can fix anything) has mended.
Carrasco sends up a storm that makes it unsafe to stay on the boat and Alfonso grabs a kiss before giving Victoria and Pancho the only two working parachutes. Pancho comes flying back for him, however, and punctures the balloon so they can crash land. Meanwhile, the dads escape on a motorbike and sidecar and instruct the mums to stop the villagers leaving because the climate crisis they are fleeing is a con.
He careers about the hillsides in an arachnopod that uses its claws to smash a windmill. Alfonso reassures everyone that the giants will save the day and Pancho takes this to mean switch the windmill batteries to full power and the sails blow the spider-pod over a cliff. Alfonso tries to save Carrasco and is rescued in mid-air by a parachuting Victoria. As everyone celebrates, with Carrasco behind bars, Alfonso's rabbits disappear and he poses for photographs with Pancho and Victoria. However, the latter is sent to an orphanage by her aunt and uncle and Alfonso gulps down the tears as he reads her farewell letter. But Pancho blocks the car on the bridge out of town and the three friends cycle into the sunset (with the giants and the rabbits waving them off).
Where to start with this noisily annoying farrago? How about the dismal heavy metal and disco songs that stud the action? Or the risible rhymes spouted by Señor Quixote? What about the banal storyline and the half-hearted references to global warming and the depopulation of small Spanish villages? How about the awkward sentimentality of the tweenage pash between Alfonso and Victoria, whose efforts to show boys and girls being equally heroic are negated by the afterthought role that the mothers play in confounding Carrasco?
Then there's the blandness of the character design and the brashness of the voiceover work. It's amusing to note the similarity between Carrasco and General Francisco Franco, while the giants and the bunnies bring a little quirkiness to proceedings that are too often hijacked by the inventions that screenwriters Carlos Kotkin and Pablo Biondi summon up whenever they paint themselves into a narrative corner in what can only be described as a crass cross between steampunk anime and a crash-bang video game.
The idea of tailoring Don Quixote for younger viewers is essentially sound, as the codes by which the eccentric knight lives have an enduring value. Even making the principals descendants of Cervantes's characters had merit so that kids can more readily identify with them. But the clumsiness of the storytelling and the reliance on harum scarum escapade will make this a bore for most kids and a chore for all accompanying adults.
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