The “Flat Beat” fella’s huge housefly; Cage back on bug-eyed form; a French space oddity and more…
M
ANDIBLES Only in France could a film as utterly outré as Mandibles have them queuing round the block at 8.30am. But then, this was one of the first films to be released there after the Covid shutdown, where people were clearly in the mood for something wild. Writer-director Quentin Dupieux – once better known as techno musician Mr Oizo –certainly has form when it comes to crowd-pulling cult entertainment. Mandibles follows closely after his black comedy Deerskin, about a man murderously obsessed with his suede jacket. If anything, this new film is loopier than its predecessor – yet somehow gentler. too. Grégoire Ludig and David Marsais play two slow-witted ageing slackers living in the South of France who believe they are onto a sure thing when they’re employed to undertake a mysterious errand. But when they discover a giant fly in the boot of a car, they recklessly ditch their original mission to pursue a rather longer shot at wealth – hoping to train the insect, which they fondly name Dominique. Preposterous and sometimes wince-inducing consequences follow – but Dupieux manages to skirt the obvious. Any lesser comic mind would have gone for vomitous fly-related gags in the Cronenberg line. Instead, more slyly, Dupieux lands his heroes among some young holidaymakers, including Agnès, who only speaks by yelling at the top of her voice. As Agnès, Adèle Exarchopoulos – from Cannes Palme d’Or winner Blue Is The Warmest Colour – is the latest French art-house regular to sign up for Dupieux’s funkier mode of cinema, while leads Ludig and Marsais are famous in France as a TV duo – but familiarity with them is absolutely not required. Think of Mandibles as Buñuel’s Bill And Ted: it’s a genuine chef d’oeuvre of le cinéma stupide.
Starry eyed: Gagarine mixes urban realism with fantasy and adds a dash of sentiment
PRISONERS OF THE GHOSTLAND Just when Nicolas Cage seemed briefly to gather his
wits and get sensible in the relatively lowkey Pig, he revs his inner actorly chainsaw up to 11 once again. Even Cage has called Prisoners Of The Ghostland the wildest thing he’s made – and just on paper, the film is a hugely improbable proposition. It pairs Cage with Sion Sono, the latest in a line of Japanese provocateur filmmakers – Takeshi Kitano and Takashi Miike among them – who juggle the registers of art, genre and pulp extremism. Known for extreme subject matter and highly artificial visuals, Sono – directing a script by Aaron Hendry and Reza Sixo Safai – here explores his own version of American post-apocalypse fantasy. Mixing futurism, horror and cod-western, the film stars Cage as a captured bank robber sent on a mission by the ‘Governor’ (Bill Moseley), the stetsoned overlord of shanty settlement ‘Samurai Town’, to retrieve his missing granddaughter (actor-dancer Sofia Boutella, from Gaspar Noé’s Climax). To raise the stakes, Cage must wear a leather suit packed with explosives concentrated at particular delicate points – affording us the thrill of hearing him bellow “Testicllllllle!” at full operatic intensity. With production design suggesting a retro-tacky theme park modelled on Duran
Duran’s “Wild Boys” video, the film treats us to choir numbers, nuke-mutated heavies and flashbacks in screaming primary colours, with a silently scowling Boutella eventually getting her own high-kicking action moment. There’s clearly Social Studies dissertation material here on a Japanese auteur recycling pop Americana to his own purposes – although conceivably Sono is just taking the paycheck and having a load of fun at the material’s expense. Cage matches him by providing all the bug-eyed, teeth-baring maximalism you’d expect. GAGARINE ‘Gagarine’ is a real place, or was. Called after pioneering Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, it was the name of a high-rise housing estate on the outskirts of Paris, inaugurated in 1963 at the height of French Communism. By the time the project was demolished in 2019, the utopian dream had long faded – but French writing-directing team Fanny Liotard and Jérémy Trouilh saw an opportunity to make their feature debut. Gagarine, which they filmed there while the buildings were dismantled around them, restores the mundane sprawl of concrete and glass to its cosmic roots. Charismatic newcomer Alseni Bathily
REVIEWED THIS MONTH MANDIBLES
Directedby Quentin Dupieux Starring Grégoire Ludig, Adèle Exarchopoulos Opens Sept 17 Cert TBC
8/10
106 • UNCUT • NOVEMBER 2021
PRISONERS OF THE GHOSTLAND Directedby Sion Sono Starring Nicolas Cage, Sofia Boutella Opens Sept 17 Cert TBC
6/10
GAGARINE
Directedby Fanny Liatard, Jérémy Trouilh Starring Alseni Bathily, Lyna Khoudri Opens Sept 24 Cert TBC
7/10
ROSE PLAYS JULIE
Directedby Christine Molloy, Joe Lawlor Starring Ann Skelly, Orla Brady Opens Sept 17 Cert 15
8/10
NEVER GONNA SNOW AGAIN Directed by Malgorzata Szukowska, Michal Englert Starring Alec Utgoff, Maja Ostaszewska Opens Oct 15 Cert TBC
7/10
