Film Reviews

TILDA SWINTON: HUMAN ANTENNA L ooking back over the notes I scribbled in the dim light of a Memoria preview screening, I see that the past me left a half-baked play on words, “Steely Danish”, to amuse myself in the future. I must have been riffing on the appearance of an unnamed jazz ensemble, captured during an extended jam session that occupied somewhere between two and 20 minutes of this hypnotic picture. That I can’t quite remember is befitting. As the title implies, Memoria is a transcendental meditation on time and place, especially its fluidity, and the plasticity of memory.

Written and directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives), the film stars Tilda Swinton as Jessica, a Scottish woman working in Colombia, who hears a big bang and starts to feel off-kilter. Is she hallucinating? Travelling through time? Am I better off setting Western narrative expectations aside and feeling this film, rather than thinking it? Like Weerasethakul, I’ll leave those questions floating, open-ended.

Memoria is the filmmaker’s first work made outside of Thailand, and eerie Swinton is pitch perfect as a human antenna crossing streams with a procession of confounding folks. The film premiered at Cannes in 2021, taking home the Jury Prize, and will hit cinemas here on 7 April. It’s also the subject of a gorgeous art book from Fireflies Press, co-founded by The Big Issue’s former film editor, Annabel Brady-Brown, if you’re keen for further reading. AK

CARBON: THE UNAUTHORISED BIOGRAPHY

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This science documentary seeks to rewrite the story that gave carbon its dirty name. Featuring an esteemed roundup of experts and the personification of Carbon “herself” – voiced by Succession’s Sarah Snook – this accessible account details the many ways in which we rely on carbon to live, as much as we dread its role in the climate crisis. Unfortunately, the valuable core points are somewhat cheapened by the anthropomorphised carbon gimmick, whose contradictory persona swings from relatable sister to scorned deity as the film’s tone demands. While a rigorous educational tool, Carbon winds up chasing shallow emotional investment, muddying any political intent, despite its mobilising final sequence. Though one brief standout scene highlights the intergenerational caretaking relationships of Indigenous peoples to the land, one can’t help wishing the film spent more time considering cultural, attitudinal or natural solutions – anything beyond the technological. TIIA KELLY

NOWHERE SPECIAL

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With little time and money left to get his affairs in order, John (James Norton, Grantchester) desperately seeks a foster home for his three-year-old son, Michael (Daniel Lamont), while keeping the child in the dark about his terminal illness. John’s been given mere months to live but has to plan ahead an entire lifetime: each tender moment between John and Michael could be a scarring memory later in his son’s life. Deliberately quiet and meditative, like writer-director Uberto Pasolini’s previous film Still Life (2013), Nowhere Specialis an exhibit of melancholy composed of small interactions between father and son. Norton plays each moment with the frankness of a blue-collar worker, counterbalanced by his son’s adorable innocence. Few things are as precious to John as that innocence, which fades away as his own condition worsens. What makes Nowhere Special special is its disarming honesty, never forcefully tugging at heartstrings but instead telling it how it is, coming to terms with the fact that no feeling is final. BRUCE KOUSSABA

THE BAD GUYS

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There’s a hollow, manufactured charm to The Bad Guys, a children’s film so misguided in its attempts to be cool that it begins with an extended homage to Pulp Fiction. Based on the popular book series by Australian Aaron Blabey, the film follows a team of animal crooks who, after a failed heist, pretend to rehabilitate themselves into upstanding citizens. Slick conman Mr Wolf (Sam Rockwell) leads the cast of anthropomorphised antiheroes – including a snake, piranha and tarantula – who are more misunderstood than malicious: would you believe that, under his villainous exterior, there’s a heart of gold? The film never escapes from the influence of Shrek and Zootopia, nor does it manage to be much fun. Unforgivably, it fails to deliver the simple pleasures of a good heist, breezing through a slew of capers each more convoluted and unconvincing than the last. At the heart of The Bad Guys is a message that trash can be turned into treasure. If only the film itself could be redeemed. JAMIE TRAM