FilmsMandibles, Gagarine

T e “Flat Beat” fella’s huge housefl y; Cage back on bug-eyed form; a French space oddity and more…

MANDIBLES Only in France could a f lm as utterly outré as Mandibles have them queuing round the block at 8.30am. But then, this was one of the f rst f lms to be released there af er 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 af er his black comedy Deerskin, about a man murderously obsessed with his suede jacket. If anything, this new f lm 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 f y 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 f y-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.

PRISONERS OF THE GHOSTLAND Just when Nicolas Cage seemed brief y to gather his

Starry eyed: Gagarine mixes urban realism with fantasy and adds a dash of sentiment

MANDIBLES

Directedby Quentin Dupieux Starring Grégoire Ludig,Adèle Exarchopoulos OpensSept17 CertTBC 8/10 PRISONERS OF THE GHOSTLAND

Directedby SionSono Starring NicolasCage, SofiaBoutella OpensSept17 CertTBC 6/10 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 f lm is a hugely improbable proposition. It pairs Cage with Sion Sono, the latest in a line of Japanese provocateur f lmmakers – Takeshi Kitano and Takashi Miike among them – who juggle the registers of art, genre and pulp extremism. Known for extreme subject matter and highly artif cial 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 f lm 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 Sof a Boutella, from Gaspar Noé’s Climax). To raise the stakes, Cage must wear a leather suit packed with explosives concentrated at particular delicate points – af ording us the thrill of hearing him bellow “Testicllllllle!” at full operatic intensity.

With production design suggesting a retro-tacky theme park modelled on Duran

REVIEWEDTHISMONTH

GAGARINE

Directedby FannyLiatard, JérémyTrouilh Starring AlseniBathily, LynaKhoudri OpensSept24 CertTBC 7/10 Duran’s “Wild Boys” video, the f lm treats us to choir numbers, nuke-mutated heavies and f ashbacks 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 af er 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 f lmed there while the buildings were dismantled around them, restores the mundane sprawl of concrete and glass to its cosmic roots.

Charismatic newcomer Alseni Bathily

ROSE PLAYS JULIE

Directedby Christine Molloy, JoeLawlor Starring AnnSkelly, OrlaBrady OpensSept17 Cert15 8/10 NEVER GONNA SNOW AGAIN

Directed by Malgorzata Szukowska, Michal Englert Starring Alec Utgoff, Maja Ostaszewska Opens Oct 15 Cert TBC 7/10

plays teenager Youri, from an African immigrant background, named af er the spaceman and besotted with space travel, who decides to stay put when Gagarine’s residents are cleared out. He turns his apartment into a self-contained capsule within a space station – design tricks, craf y cinematography and dazzling aerial shots making the estate, inside and out, resemble a 2001 construction implanted in the suburban landscape. Up-and-coming Lyna Khoudri – soon in Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch – plays Yuri’s Roma friend Diana, with French cinema’s indispensable lord of misrule Denis Lavant presiding over the local junkyard.

Gagarine mixes French urban realism (in the mode of La Haine and the recent Les Misérables) and starry-eyed fantasy – with some of the feelgood sentiment associated with the Amelie school. Despite its occasional emotional obviousness, this is a boldly imaginative, technically dazzling work. Liatard and Trouilh missed out on the limelight last year, with Gagarine selected for the Cannes festival that was cancelled owing to Covid. But it seems a dead cert that we’ll see a lot more of them in future.

ROSE PLAYS JULIE Irish f lmmakers Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor have for some time been one of the most singular forces in UK cinema, under their own names or the collective tag Desperate Optimists. They’re an experimental proposition: their debut feature Helen emerged from their history of community art projects and was made with non-actors, while essay/ documentary Further Beyond was a multi-layered musing on Chilean history, Irish exile and the life story of Lawlor’s mother.

Ostensibly a straighter proposition, Rose Plays Julie is, like Helen, a f ction about a woman searching for her origins and identity. Rose (Ann Skelly) is a young veterinary student who discovers that her birth mother is an actress named Ellen (Orla Brady). What Rose learns from Ellen sends her on a mission – as ‘Julie’, her name before she was adopted – involving a dig with a celebrity archeologist (Aidan Gillen, silkily troubling in his third f lm for the duo). Things slide gradually and uneasily almost into conventional thriller territory, leading to an ending that you could see either as cathartic or downright questionable. But overall, the f lm has the complexity and dark playfulness characteristic of the duo’s work, with a touch of Roeg-esque fragmentation in the telling. As the elusive, shape-shif ing heroine, Skelly – currently in Joss Whedon TV series The Nevers – is extraordinary, a quietly unnerving presence, with only her voiceover internal monologue letting us know for sure what she’s thinking – although perhaps we can’t quite believe that either.

NEVER GONNA SNOW AGAIN For several years, director Małgorzata Szumowska and cinematographer Michael Englert have been the most productive force in Polish cinema, with an unpredictable and cosmopolitan output ranging from Juliette Binoche drama Elles to recent US-set religious-cult drama The Other Lamb. Their latest, Never Gonna Snow Again, is among their most thoroughly Polish but may be the title that really marks their international breakthrough.

Alec Utgof plays Zhenya, a young mystery man from the East – ominously near Chernobyl, in fact – who arrives at a Polish gated community to work as a masseur. He passes from household to household attending to the variously spoiled and disconsolate residents (including eco-conscious widow Ewa, played by Agata Kulesza, from Pawel Pawlikowkski’s Ida and Cold War). Everyone wants something dif erent from the distant, gentle, oddly sexless Zhenya – absolution, calm, some kind of magic. But nuclear exposure seems to have lef him with telekinetic powers, even made him an earthly angel of death.

What’s fascinating is how ambivalent the f lm remains throughout, sustaining a mood of hovering unease as it proceeds in deadpan fashion through its borderline-satirical vignettes – with brief eruptions of outright visual weirdness, like a show-stopping Halloween parade. Meanwhile, Utgof – resembling a baby Patrick Swayze – has the sort of mysteriously absent presence that’s like a magnetic void at the f lm’s centre. Whether you view this as an eco-parable, a satire of an East that’s turned into a version of the bourgeois West, or a mystically tinged existential comedy about human need and folly, this elegantly executed number is Szumowska and Elgart’s most alluring f lm. Assuming the world is still open to the prospect ofleffelddiscoveriesfrom Eastern Europe, this hasthemakingsofagenuine cult success.

Gagarine is an imaginative, technically dazzling work

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