Cinema of 2024: 10 Favourite Films (Sight and Sound ballot)

The full list of individual Top 10s for the Sight and Sound Best Films of 2024 Top 50 is up at the BFI website. You can read the full set of lists here.

My Top 10: 

1. Challengers (Luca Guadagnino, US, Italy)
2. Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard, France, Belgium)
3. All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia, France, India, Netherlands, Luxembourg, US, Italy, Switzerland)
4. When Fall is Coming (François Ozon, France)
5. Perfect Days (Wim Wenders, Japan, Germany)
6. Dahomey (Mati Diop, France, Senegal, Benin, UK)
7. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (Rungano Nyoni, Zambia, UK, Ireland)
8. Pepe (Nelson Carlo De Los Santos Arias, Dominican Republic, France, Namibia, Germany)
9. A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg, Poland, US)
10. Blitz (Steve McQueen, UK, France, US)

 

Sight and Sound (Winter 2024-25)

 

The Winter issue of Sight and Sound is out now, including the Top 50 Films of the Year list. I wrote about Home Alone for the "Endings ..." column in this issue. More about it here.

Interview with Richard Eyre (BFI online)

The interview I did with Richard Eyre is up at BFI online. You can read it here. 

Film Review: Blitz (dir. Steve McQueen, 2024)

 

The two films made by Steve McQueen last year - the 4 hour WWII Amsterdam documentary Occupied City, and Grenfell - were hardcore art-house projects not much seen beyond the festival circuit or the gallery. With Blitz, though, McQueen now returns with a much more mainstream proposition, one that continues Occupied City's exploration of Second World War experience (this time set in the city where McQueen was born rather than the one where he currently lives). But, as McQueen told Sight and Sound with disarming frankness last month, Blitz also seeks to put "bums on seats." 

I hope he succeeds - although, sadly, given that the film is soon to be on Apple TV+ after a short, limited UK theatrical release, those seats are more likely to be sofas at home than ones in cinemas. Photographed by the great Yorick Le Saux, Blitz really deserves the big screen. It's a terrific entertainment in which McQueen draws on varied traditions of British WWII-centred filmmaking - from Humphrey Jennings' Fires Were Started (1943) to John Boorman's Hope and Glory (1987) to Terence Davies (a communal Tube shelter sing-along here is straight out of The Deep Blue Sea [2012]) - while also taking the tradition forward. The film isn't aggressively revisionist and it's definitely not anti-'heritage'; indeed, it's rather old-fashioned in its surface contours. But in placing a biracial protagonist - Elliott Heffernan's  9-year-old George - at the centre, it inevitably broadens the scope of World War II representation - sometimes heavy-handedly, but for the most part affectingly and excitingly.

The plot is a quest narrative in essence: it follows George's attempt to return to his Stepney home after being reluctantly evacuated by his single mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan), a munitions factory worker and  amateur singer. George never reaches the destination of his evacuation: rather, he leaps off the train in the countryside and immediately starts his perilous odyssey back to London. 

George's journey allows Blitz to create a kind of picaresque panorama of WWII Britain that works at both epic and intimate levels. Whether sharing jam sandwiches with a trio of fellow-runaway brothers, bonding with the nice Nigerian blackout warden Ife (Benjamin Clementine, adding some true feeling to a saintly characterisation), or being pressed into criminal service by a gang (Kathy Burke and Stephen Graham in full-on Dickensian mode), George is constantly alerted to the kindness and the cruelty that the war brings out in individuals. 

Flashbacks sketching out elements of the character's past - the racist bullying that he can't  quite tell his family about; the relation between his mother and Grenadian father - are elegantly integrated without inhibiting the momentum of the quest. If the characterisation often seems heightened, then that's in keeping with the child's-eye view the film gives us. There's a 'Boys' Own Adventure' spirit at play here, but McQueen is at his sharpest in the fleeting details George observes: the legs of a Punch & Judy puppeteer; a sexual encounter in the crowded Underground shelter (a space the film uses quite brilliantly throughout, right up to its most harrowing sequence). 

At times Blitz doesn't trust the audience as much as it might. Just like Ellen Kuras' Lee, it also thinks that we need to have what the Blitz was explained to us - although at least here that information comes in the shape of an opening title rather than in thuddingly exposition-heavy dialogue. The film is at its weakest when it most obviously defaults to the binary simplifications of US-influenced contemporary identity-politics. George's Obama-evoking assertion "I am Black!" after his encounter with Ife provides him with a role model means that the film participates in the contemporary marginalisation of mixed as a category. 

Heffernan's excellent performance - a very assured film debut - compensates for the simplification, though, conveying George's tenacity and vulnerability, and a constant, contending sense of connection and set-apartness, with great skill. The young actor creates a lovely, fond family dynamic with Ronan and with Paul Weller (in a belated, effective acting debut as George's grandfather). From the unstressed warmth of these early scenes we understand why the threat of evacuation is particularly traumatic for George. The casting is canny across the board and the film feels fully inhabited, with Leigh Gill a diamond as the firebrand Mickey Davies and Linton Kwesi-Johnson briefly glimpsed as a street-corner poet. Harris Dickinson's role, as a returned soldier with an affection for Rita, seems an afterthought, but the actor brings a likeable spirit to the underwritten part, sweetly dogged and a little bit dopey. 

In its details and textures, Blitz feels convincingly rooted in working-class wartime experience, and from its jolting opening sequence, it captures the confusion, chaos and panic of the bombing in a visceral way that puts the viewer right there. There are simply beautiful moments, too, such as the sequence in which Rita sings a song at a BBC broadcast at the factory (a convincing retro McQueen/Nicholas Britell/Taura Stinson composition titled "Winter Coat"), while the camaraderie between her and  her fellow-workers (Hayley Squires and Sally Messham), and the women's dynamic with their Boss (Joshua McGuire), are perfectly judged. 

The showiest sequence - an elaborate camera swoop around a Café de Paris-esque club - seems overly calculated to make a class point (see the rich people enjoying themselves while the world burns!) but the cut to the aftermath of the bombing of the club is chilling. And McQueen allows himself one avant-garde reference that really works: intermittent inserts of black-and-white images of daisies from Man Ray's Emak-Bakia (1926): an emblem of hope and possibility in the midst of the conflict.

From conversations at London Film Festival, where Blitz premiered last month, it's clear that some viewers found McQueen's film too conventional in its trajectory and wanted it to go darker or weirder. But I think it's a considerable achievement - a rich evocation of our wartime past made with care and love. 

Blitz is in UK cinemas from today.

A Human Link: Piece on Agnieszka Holland at Culture pl

 

I wrote this piece on Agnieszka Holland's work and reputation for Culture.pl.  You can read it here. 

Theatre Review: Look Back in Anger (Almeida)

"Hope deferred makes the heart sick, and many hearts are sick at what they see in England now." (John Osborne, 1959)

Given its (perhaps overinflated) reputation as the play that single-handedly blew the doors of off fusty ol' 50s British theatre and put working-class grievances centre stage, Look Back in Anger is revived with surprising infrequency in the UK. 

Times change, tastes change, and what once looked radical, now - in form at least -  may look tame, since Osborne's play is in essence a static Three Act relationship drama which, apart from the often stinging language delivered by its iconic protagonist, seems not very far removed from the middle-class domestic dramas that the playwright and others of his generation so aggressively critiqued. As Richard Eyre has put it: "However abrasive and excoriating, far from looking back in anger, the play looks back with a fierce, despairing nostalgia."

All of this makes Arti Banerjee’s revival at the Almeida quite welcome - even just as an opportunity to see how the play stands up from a contemporary vantage point. Staged alongside Arnold Wesker's Roots, with which its partially cross cast to form the rather cringingly named "Angry & Young" season (t-shirts available in the foyer!), there's much that doesn't quite work in Banerjee’s production: feeble Expressionist movement flourishes; an unhelpful red carpeted circular set by Naomi Dawson that's too obvious a representation of a domestic hell; and some miscasting. 

But damnit if the power of the play doesn't peek through in the end. That's mostly due to a great performance from Billy Howle (last seen on stage in a more revelatory revival, of Dodie Smith's Dear Octopus at the NT) who, without any sentimentalising, manages to humanise Jimmy in surprising, unexpected ways.

In Tony Richardson's film version of the play, the character's rants as delivered by Richard Burton were effective but felt over-rehearsed. Down to his restlessly twitching toes as Jimmy reads the paper in the opening scene, Howle makes the character's frustration more subtly palpable and demonstrates how it manifests in domestic tyranny. He doesn't stint on conveying Jimmy's cruelty - mostly directed at his wife Alison -  but also shows that to view the character as a "toxic masculinity" exemplar is simply a diminishment. Whether you like the content or not, Jimmy's outbursts against the post-war English scene are often bitingly acute and funny and have a theatrical charge: even if last Friday's audience seemed determined to register their disapproval of the character by responding only with the occasional tut. But Howle's triumph in the role is to reveal Jimmy as at once infantile and insightful, a rebel without a cause who's clearly in pain but also thinks he has a monopoly on it. 

Overall Banerjee's production gets better as it goes along, and some of the sketchier performances start clicking into place as well. As Alison's friend and (apparent) defender, Morfydd Clark lacks the sensual quality that Claire Bloom brought to the part on film but gradually manages to make sense of the character's tricky trajectory  - especially a moral awakening that's powerfully conveyed here.

Playing Alison, Ellora Torchia hits odd notes in most of the earlier scenes. But from the character's touching encounter with her Empire-and-Establishment-representing father (a well-judged Deka Walmsley) onwards the performance begins to find its shape and I wasn't prepared for the depth  of emotion she reaches in the final scene. As a combined portrait of the pain of marriage and the state of a nation, Look Back in Anger reveals itself as a flawed work, but while Banerjee's revival isn't ideal I came away moved in the end. 

Look Back in Anger is at the Almeida until 23 November. Further details here. 

Photos: Marc Brenner

Awake, Arise: A Report on Awakenings (Przebudzenia) - the 13th Retroperspektywy Festival (Łódź, 23/8 - 1/9 2024)

Culminating in the sublime LIVET: Suite for the Earth concert, which brought together performers from Poland, Ukraine, Norway and Bulgaria, last year's Retroperspektywy proved an unforgettable edition of the international theatre festival, which is invariably a highlight of summertime in Łódź. And Retroperspektywy returned this year with a just-concluded edition marking a milestone: the 20th anniversary of its founder, Teatr CHOREA, whose activities encompass workshops with and training of diverse community groups, and, of course, the staging of its own inimitably creative concerts and shows.  

Tomasz Rodowicz... and the CHOREA birthday cake

Based at Fabryka Sztuki in Łódź since 2007, CHOREA's defining feature (or one of them) has been its merging of ancient traditions with practices associated with the 20th century avant garde (taking particular inspiration from the work of Grotowski) and cutting-edge contemporary physical theatre, generating dynamic performances combining song, text, movement, and dance.

The group's ethos has never been one of slavish reconstruction of past models. Rather, CHOREA has been all about exploring how ancient theatre forms can be mobilised to speak to current concerns (and enduring existential ones). As a company they're bridge-builders, alchemists, risk-takers, empowerers, and creators of unique theatrical experiences that attune audiences to the expressive capabilities of the human body and voice, providing a fusion of sensual and intellectual pleasures - also accomplished with a spirit of play.

Exhibition:
Evocations - 20 Years of CHOREA

Under the title "Przebudzenia" ("Awakenings"), this year's edition found CHOREA in a mood both reflective and celebratory. This was evident, for one, in the theme of the festival's accompanying exhibition, "Evocations: 20 Years of CHOREA," curated by Magda Milewski and Janusz Adam Biedrzycki, which presented a narrative of the group's activities accompanied by photos and a well-chosen physical "trace" of each live event through the display of a prop or costume. On Monday and Tuesday there was also the rare opportunity to watch filmed shows from the CHOREA archive.

Ola Shaya opening What's Demeter?

What's more, the opening show of this year's edition, punningly titled What's Demeter?, offered an exhilarating rollercoaster ride through a diverse selection of songs and scenes from CHOREA's performance history - a bit like 2013's "50 Years on Stage" event by the British National Theatre, but much more excitingly done. With artistic supervision by CHOREA co-founder Tomasz Rodowicz and "interventions" by director Łukasz Kos adding a fresh eye, the evening was no mere cobbled together "Greatest Hits" package. 

Elina Toneva and the company in What's Demeter?

Instead, What's Demeter? worked as a profound, playful and cohesive experience in its own right, with a strong flow and meaningful transitions but also loose, improvisatory elements, as artists from the company's past and present took to the stage or joined in and sang from the audience.

Po Ptakach (After the Birds) in What's Demeter?

Highlights were plentiful, from Ola Shaya opening the proceedings in cabaret style to quiz audience members on favourite productions and deliver a number from 2011's The Blue Parrot concert, to Sean Palmer unleashing his gorgeous gritty growl ("CHOREA in the house!") to score Rodowicz and Dorota Porowska's super-sensual pas de deux from 2005's After the Birds (Po Ptakach) - incidentally the first CHOREA performance I saw. 

Ragnarok in What's Demeter?

And even if you had seen some of the featured extracts before you would perforce experience them afresh here, since a major component of the event was the live filming of most of the performances by Kamil Wallace, with the images relayed on a large screen to achieve some startling juxtapositions. 

Particularly overwhelming in this regard was the opening sequence of 2022's Ragnarok. This was already a uniquely haunting spectacle that seems to distill all human suffering and striving, fear and fortitude, as, to the celestial sound of Arvo Pärt's Stabat Mater, the performers slowly make their way across the stage towards the light as a tangled, straining collective. This time, with the variously pained or hopeful faces also presented in close-up on the screen, the piece combined the power of physical theatre with that of silent cinema, and reduced this viewer, for one, to tears.

Joanna Chmielecka in What's Demeter?

On the solo side, Joanna Chmielecka delivered a physical and vocal Bruno Schulz-derived tour de force atop, under and whilst taking the legs off of a table, while Małgorzata Lipczyńska, Anna Maszewska (who is also the festival's indefatigable coordinator), and Julia Jakubowska reassembled for a scene from the latter's witty 2020 feminist fairytale revision Księżniczki (Princesses). 

Dzień Dobry Pinky Mouse! in What's Demeter?

A number from 2021's Dzień Dobry Pinky Mouse! took the already anarchic children's musical to a new level of hilarious mania. And the company's versatility is such that the next moment they could morph into the protagonists of 2015's Derby.Biało.Czerwoni (Derby. Red and White): rapping football fans ready for a ruck.

Maciej Maciaszek in What's Demeter?

Threaded throughout were some soul-stirring interludes of choral singing that spoke to the group's deep roots, while the final section, from 2014's Vidomi - a piece originally developed in collaboration with visually impaired performers - was a delicious last tango in which the audience was invited to the stage to dance, bringing the performance to a perfect, bonding close as we then headed outside to the CHOREA birthday party. The whole evening was an invigorating and inspiring experience. 

Zjem twój dżem

The organisers also took the opportunity in this anniversary year to significantly spotlight the work of CHOREA's Intergenerational Group and its Older and Younger Children's Groups. Among several shows for family audiences, the Older Group presented the endearingly berserk Zjem twój dżem (I'll Eat Your Jam) which brought songs, some film noir spirit and a dose of well-judged social commentary to its tale of food, crime and cross-generational relations set in the Łódź district of Bałuty.

Eden:
A Scenical Fairy Tale in Several Pictures

Made up of participants from ages 16 to 80, the all-female Intergenerational Group presented two shows: Pauza, and Eden: A Scenical Fairy Tale in Several Pictures. Pauza didn't come together for me, but Eden, directed by Biedrzycki, Magdalena Paszkiewicz, and Wiktor Moraczewski, proved a magical experience - something of a companion piece to the same team's also ecologically-minded Rój. Sekretne życie społeczne ("The Hive: Secret Social Life") from 2018. 

Starting with a disarming scene of chat and comedy (look out for the troublesome deckchair), the piece evolved into an ambient evening of physical theatre, one that - through brilliant lighting (green and blue washes turning fiery red), sound, costumes and performances from the 13-strong cast - conveyed the kind of deep care for and attention to nature that Teatr Nowy's witless recent musical adaptation of The Secret Garden sorely lacked. 

Eden:
A Scenical Fairy Tale in Several Pictures

Each different section of Eden was clearly designed and delineated, but the show felt cohesive, and developed a very tender, affirmative tone, with the bodies of the cast eventually becoming the garden plants, blooming by night in a gorgeous final sequence. With audience members given seeds on our way out, the show offered a cleansing and restorative celebration of nature in the feminine. 

Teraz wiesz, jak się czuję

The invited companies this year included Grupa Performatywna Chłopaki, who presented Teraz wiesz, jak się czuję (Now You Know How I Feel), a lively, crowd-pleasing exploration of contemporary Polish masculinity that combined quiet heart-on-sleeve confessional moments with wild elements of stand-up, game show and porn-parody to interrogate social expectations and stereotypes, and point to possibilities of moving beyond them.

Hic Sunt Dracones

The Czech company Teatr Divadlo Continuo provided one of the festival's most startling experiences with Hic Sunt Dracones, directed by Pavel Štourač. This piece probed the darker corners of consciousness and  corporeality, creating some jaw-dropping images of dismemberment and bodily fragmentation, though not without a dose of absurdist black humour that Tim Burton or Terry Gilliam might enjoy, very much operating in the bold surrealist Czech tradition of Jan Švankmajer. The physical panache of the four performers - Sara Bocchini, Kateřina Šobáňová, Granada Gallego and Diana Khwaja - was enhanced by fantastic music and sound performed live by Jakub Štourač.

Magda Kuraś Quintet / Bilgoraj Triptych

Two terrific concerts by female-fronted Polish bands also spoke to the CHOREA ethos of combining tradition with experimentation. With repertoires based on Konin-area melodies and South-Eastern Polish traditions respectively, the Tuleje trio (Gosia Zagajewska,  Wojtek Kurek and Ksawery Wojcinski) and the Magda Kuraś Quintet (featuring Kuraś, Maciej Świniarski, Ziemowit Klimek, Tomasz Chyła, and Kuba Krzanowski) both took folk music in fresh directions, with jazz, rock, art song and improvised elements, to create rich, immersive sounds that felt totally organic. 

Eine Winterreise. A Winter Journey.
Schubert/ Müller/ Baczyński

The festival's final show also centred music, this time from the classical canon. Contrasting with the expansiveness of What's Demeter?,  the Festival closed with an intimate piece for three performers: an interpretation of Schubert's seminal 1827 song-cycle, Winterreise. Eine Winterreise. A Winter Journey. Schubert/ Müller/ Baczyński was co-directed by singer Łukasz Konieczny and dancer/choreographer Boris Randzio who also performed the piece, alongside accomplished pianist Nikolaus Rexroth. 

The performance's innovations included Randzio's danced contribution  - and the incorporation of poems by the great Polish poet Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński, who was killed in the Warsaw Uprising. The use of Baczyński's verse alongside the original Wilhelm Müller poems that Schubert based the work around developed a powerful counter narrative that suggested the building of a Polish-German cultural bridge in the context of the work's themes of alienation, melancholia and mortality.

Summing up CHOREA's achievements at the time of the company's 15th anniversary five years ago, the critic Piotr Olkusz described them as "the wealth of Łódź," crediting the group with forging "a new form of participation in culture and new responsibility for culture. They've slightly changed us." That definition still stands, and Awakenings was another edition of RPS that opened viewers' eyes, ears, minds and hearts to a rich variety of performances and expressions. As CHOREA enters its next decade I continue to wish that the company would push the "international" element of Retroperspektywy further in terms of audiences as well as performances, broadening out to be more accessible to non-Polish speakers and to ensure that their world-class work is more widely seen than ever. Still, as it is, this year's Festival offered some beautiful ways of celebrating CHOREA's past, being in the present, and looking to the future. 

The 2024 Retroperspektywy Festival took place at Fabryka Sztuki in Łódź between 23 August - 1 September.

All performance images by Agnieszka Cytacka fotografia.