L’Immensita (2022)

You only wear makeup if you’re going out or you’ve been crying. Rome in the 1970s, Clara (Penelope Cruz) is a nonconformist Spanish expatriate trapped in a loveless marriage to Felice (Vincenzo Amato) an unfaithful and abusive businessman, with whom she has three children: twelve-year old Adriana aka Adri (Luana Giuliani), Gino (Patrizio Francioni) and Diana (Maria Chiara Goretti). Adriana experiences gender dysphoria. Adriana rejects girlhood and instead identifies as a boy, wearing boys’ clothes and adopting the masculine name Andrea. One day, Andrea befriends Sara (Penelope Nieto Conti), a Romani girl who knows him as a boy. Upon a shared sense of being outsiders, Andrea and Clara grow closer. During the summer holidays Clara and the children go to a villa with her sisters- and mother-in-law (Alvia Reale) and all the young cousins. Adri is the ringleader when they explore a well and gets everyone into trouble, confronting Clara and taunting her into hitting her. After fantasising that a church service becomes a variety performance like the black and white TV shows she watches with Clara, Adri witnesses her father’s very young mistress Maria (India Santella) arriving at their apartment and she hears the woman declare that she is pregnant with Felice’s illegitimate child. Clara finally falls apart … You and Dad made me wrong. Is it too late to say that Cruz has come into her own and is a towering acting force in world cinema? She’s a powerhouse here yet her performance is not overwhelming – she shares the screen with a very cool kid who frankly could easily be male or female – and this is written so carefully that we understand Clara’s understanding of an eccentric child who declares she is the offspring of an alien and wants to spend her life in the sky. It only becomes problematic when Adri befriends and deceives Sara in the guise of ‘Andrea’ and becomes embroiled in a tentative pre-pubescent romance. Thankfully a deus ex machina prevents it from becoming the devastating betrayal that is threatened. The underlying tensions in the marriage are not openly discussed, they’re introduced subtly because almost everything here is from the children’s perspective as they try to navigate a wonderful mother and a distant disciplinarian father who makes her sad. Clara dresses in bright colours and pops off the screen whereas Adri is forced to wear white like the other girls in the Catholic school where the boys were black surplices. When Clara is hassled by guys following them on the street Adri protest to Clara, You are too beautiful. I am ugly. Both are outsiders, they have that in common. There is a remarkable balancing act performed here – the troubles of both mother and daughter are never overstated, both are fragile yet when Clara can no longer even talk about the cuckolding and the prospect of her husband’s bastard offspring, Adri bangs at the door of the bathroom where Clara has locked herself in and shouts, We’re the kids! You’re the grown up! It is the admission that Clara can’t cope after putting on the show of shows for her children. When she wants to play with the kids it’s Adri who tells her she can’t. Then, of course, Felice takes charge and does to Clara what all husbands do when they’re found out. Immaculately staged and performed, this is a joy for anyone interested in Italian interiors circa 1972 with wonderful use of space and light, geometric patterns and amazing wallpaper in a developing suburb that if it were in an American movie would become a location for poltergeists. Everything is heightened by the marvellous costume design by Massimo Cantini Parrini and the performances of contemporary singers, including the title song and Adriano Celentano’s nonsense song Prisencolinensinainciusol. Above all, this is a beguiling family drama about people and a place in transition and sensibly offers no easy answers. Directed by Emanuele Crialese, who co-wrote the semi-autobiographical screenplay with Francesca Manieri and Vittorio Moroni. Inside everything another thing is always hiding

Sammy Going South (1963)

Aka A Boy Ten Feet Tall. We’re not going south. Port Said, Egypt during the 1956 Suez Crisis. Ten-year old English boy Sammy Hartland (Fergus McClelland) lives with his ex-pat parents. When they are killed in a bombing while Sammy is playing by the canal, he flees the city in the ensuing panic. He sets out to reach his only living relative, Aunt Jane (Zena Walker) his mother’s sister whom he has never met and who lives 5,000 miles to the south in Durban, South Africa, the other end of the continent. Along his journey Sammy encounters a colourful array of characters. His first guide is an Arab peddler (Zia Mohyeddin) who takes him over the mountains and dies in a freak accident when a stone explodes in a fire and ruins his eyes. Sammy is then rescued in Luxor by wealthy tourist Gloria van Imhoff (Constance Cummings) who pays Spyros Dracandopoulos (Paul Stassino) to find him when Sammy runs off and takes a ferry along the Nile. He encounters a gruff old hunter and diamond smuggler, Cocky Wainwright (Edward G. Robinson) whose life is subsequently saved by the boy after Sammy shoots dead a leopard the old man is hunting. The news is out that the boy is missing and being sought. When the police search for Sammy, he pretends he never wanted him for anything except the money being offered as a reward for finding him. Then they arrest the old man, who has been a fugitive for years … Jumpin’ Jehosophat, don’t you think I’ve got eyes in my head?! Perhaps it’s a moot point as to whether director Alexander Mackendrick can be classed an auteur given the variability of his output and this is probably categorised at the lesser end of his films which included the masterpieces Sweet Smell of Success and The Ladykillers. This portrait of childhood is tough yet engaging, somewhere in the sphere of the later A High Wind in Jamaica yet very much moving to its own beat. This boy is tough, wary, diffident, trusting, smart, scared and engaging and newcomer McClelland is given a lot to do with a cast of different characters, most of whom appear to want something from him. He is basically worth a reward and he puts together his own worth. It starts when he loses his parents after he’s been playing down at the Suez Canal – we are placed in the major news event of the late 50s by dint of radio bulletins – and then narrowly avoids a beating by an Egyptian teenager. What follows is an amazing travelogue and his path is traced from Port Said to Luxor, the White Nile, the Sudan and finally Durban, all in different vehicles from donkeys and taxis to a ferry and a missed train and even a plane ride. The wallet he carries is from the rascal who gains his trust with the line, Don’t be frightened. I’m not Egyptian. I’m Syrian. I’m pro-British! That tallies with what was on the verge of being done to him on the streets of Port Said. When the man dies horrifically (we see his death from the child’s point of view) Sammy is smart enough to liberate his wallet which Gloria then finds and Spyros figures out it was stolen when he sees the photo of a sexpot tucked away in it. Adapted from the W. H. Canaway novel by Denis Cannan, this gains traction from the intertitles – starting in December 1956 and finishing March 1957, lending it a realism. But this is not a kid who spreads sweetness and light despite the blond hair and blue eyes – he’s tough as old boots and seems to leave disaster in his wake. When he is presented with the dead leopard’s offspring and Cocky tells the preternatual crack shot he just killed the animal’s mother there is genuine anguish in his eyes at putting the beautiful creature in the same situation as his own – that of an orphan. The moment passes - then he wears her skin – just like Tarzan, he declares. He gets over things but he has to do it on his own terms. The relationship with Cocky is that of a son and a father but Lem (Harry H. Corbett) tells Cocky if he wanted to do that he should have thought of it twenty years earlier. Cocky knows this boy’s heart and he lets him go with a lie which Sammy realises later on. Perhaps this isn’t a classic exactly but it’s determinedly unsentimental, relentlessly pitting this singleminded child on a path towards individuation and experience, come what may. Beautifully shot on location in Kenya (with some second unit shots done clandestinely in Egypt) in CinemaScope and Eastmancolor by the venerable Erwin Hillier, this received its premiere before Queen Elizabeth II 18th March 1963. He has to be left alone

Lost Girls & Love Hotels (2020)

Will you take me to a love hotel? Margaret (Alexandra Daddario) is an expatriate American working in Tokyo, Japan at a Japanese flight academy during the day teaching prospective flight attendants how to pronounce English. She spends her nights getting drunk with fellow expatriates Ines (Carice van Houten) and Liam (Andrew Rothney) and seeks out submissive sexual encounters with random men in the city’s numerous love hotels where people can rent rooms for a couple of hours of sex. Her nightly misadventures cause her to show up to work in a daze and dishevelled, drawing the concern of her instructor Nakamura (Misuzu Kanno). One day, Margaret crosses paths with a Yakuza enforcer named Kazu (Takehiro Hira) and the two begin a relationship. Margaret is at first taken aback by Kazu’s revelation that he is about to get married, but she gives into him when he admits that his marriage is more out of duty than love. Margaret confides to Kazu that she does not have a family and that she came to Japan to be alone. Sometimes being alone is not about other people. On the day of graduation for Margaret’s students at the flight academy, Kazu asks Margaret to spend the entire day with him in Kyoto. Initially reluctant, Margaret agrees when he says he will not get another day and they take the train. He brings her to the Kiyomizu-dera temple and shows her the “Buddha’s womb”, a stone illuminated at the end of a pitch-black tunnel. Kazu explains the symbolism of being reborn reaching the stone and brought Margaret there hoping to help her let go of her trauma, but Margaret seems unaffected. On the train ride back to Tokyo, Kazu leaves the train while Margaret is asleep, leaving her despondent and desperate to find him when she wakes up. She finds that she has been let go from her job and replaced for skipping graduation. She spirals down further when Ines reveals to her that she is leaving Japan. Following numerous thankless sexual encounters, Margaret finally spots Kazu with his family by chance one day and follows him into a love hotel. Kazu reprimands Margaret for following him, telling her nothing can happen between them. When Margaret insists that she loves him, they have sex one more time before he sends her away, leaving him saddened and conflicted. When Margaret returns to her apartment to find an eviction notice, she desperately takes a job as a bar hostess for drunken businessmen … All those days that came and went, little did I know that it was life. The setting if not the precise set-up is familiar: we are reminded of Hiroshima, mon amour, Lost in Translation and even those William Holden films Love is a Many Splendored Thing and The World of Suzie Wong but this is the low-income, low-rent subsistence version of expat life. After the tragic romance we are then catapulted into being reminded of real-life culture clash casualties like Lucie Blackman, the English victim of a serial killer after an easy slide into something akin to prostitution as a ‘bar hostess’: the penultimate scene-sequence shocks, when we suddenly remember the opening scene and what triggers this cascade of recollections in flashback. This adaptation by Catherine Hanrahan of her own 2006 novel skirts and limns all of the above – the seductive anonymity of brief drunken one-night stands, of nobody knowing who you are or why you’re here, of guilt-free emotionless encounters. Until. Until. Love. Yet it’s love with belts and S&M and it’s the only way Margaret can be turned on. The seen-it-all world weariness of Ines, the sweet need for romance in Liam, the principled violence of Kazu, the conscience of Nakamura, all stand as polarising dynamics in Margaret’s world which lurches from one unknown to another until she and Kazu change each other. I want to know your mind.Their epigrams and aphorisms contain a world of knowledge gained from pain. The shocking violence of the conclusion is offscreen. That’s of a piece with the concealment running both their lives, including this relationship. Daddario is fine as the protagonist – it’s an exposing performance in an expertly constructed psychological thriller masquerading as a romance. Hira is most persuasive as the man who must make a sacrifice, in his own way. They are both reborn as a consequence of meeting each other. It’s a fascinating tale. Directed by William Olsson. Every time you look you remember what you’ve done