Spank's LFF Diary, Monday 14/10/2024

Reviewed today: Emilia Pérez, Endurance, Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story.

2.40pm: Emilia Pérez [official site]

Rita (Zoe Saldaña) is a Mexico City lawyer who’s getting a bit fed up with defending scumbags in court, and is looking for an opportunity to do more with her life. She gets it in the form of crime boss Juan "Manitas" Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón), who gives her an unexpected job to do: because the man from Del Monte, he say he wants to become a woman. Manitas is looking for someone who can make all the arrangements secretly without his colleagues, his enemies or even his family finding out. Rita finds a clinic prepared to do the snip, and moves his wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and their kids out to Switzerland where they won’t be found. Rita is paid handsomely for the job, and assumes that’ll be the end of it. But four years later she’s introduced over dinner to Emilia Pérez, and discovers it’s not over at all.

It's easy to feel a bit overwhelmed after being hit with the full force of Emilia Pérez on the big screen - that's no reason for you to make do with watching it on Netflix when it opens there in November, though. For me, the closest point of comparison is the early films of Pedro Almodóvar, back when he made deliciously overheated and brightly coloured melodramas full of outrageous twists, usually driven by gender nonconformity. It’s a bit of a shame that Pedro’s a Serious Artist now who wouldn’t consider doing something like this, and certainly wouldn’t consider doing it as a musical.

Yeah, you heard. Though the emotional hairpin bends of the story are so volcanic, it comes as no surprise to learn that writer/director Jacques Audiard originally conceived this as an opera. The songs are by Camille, former singer with Nouvelle Vague, previously mentioned in these pages in the context of my Pick Of The Year 2008 compilation because I'm so cool and that. They come in a wide range of styles, from simple recitative to full-on karaoke banger, and they take Audiard's story to the next level just like musical songs are supposed to do. And they've also got a playful sense of fun, because everybody wants to hear the word 'vaginoplasty' in a song, don't they? Certainly in terms of musicals made by French auteurs, this hangs together a lot better than Leos Carax' Annette from a few years ago.

None of this would be in the least bit believable without the cast, who keep everything grounded no matter how fanciful the story or the songs get. Gascón, Saldaña and Gomez each give it their all, and you can see why the Cannes festival gave their Best Actress award jointly to them and Adriana Paz (who plays Emilia's partner Epifanía). Although you can't shake off the suspicion that they went for a shared award because giving Best Actress to a trans woman on her own could lead to a bit of a stink in the current climate. Anyway, right now I think that so far this is the LFF film I'll be recommending to people back at work, which is probably a bit more acceptable than that one about the monk walking slowly across Washington that was my favourite until now.

6.00pm: Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story [official site]

It's not an official category at the LFF, but maybe it should be: Films Shown At The BFI IMAX Which Wouldn't Be Seen There At Any Other Time Of Year. This counts as one, though you can kind of see the logic behind it – it's a film about the star of the first comic book blockbuster, so it should go in the cinema where all the comic book blockbusters go. However, no film in the MCU so far has had as much home movie footage in it as this one, and the camera shake and VHS grain burn your eyes out when they're blown up to the size of seven double-decker buses and you’re in row G. Still, it’s much better than the last thing I saw in this room, which was Megalopolis.

You’ve seen the title, you know the story. Reeve is a young actor working in off-Broadway theatre, whose career takes off after a screen test in London leads to him getting the lead in Superman. (His off-Broadway co-star William Hurt immediately accuses him of selling out.). He takes the role, and he’s great. He plays it three more times with diminishing returns, then gets in some more theatre and film work that shows what else he's capable of doing. And then in 1995, a horse riding accent leaves him paralysed from the neck down, and he has to completely rethink his life.

Despite the big DC logo at the start, this is a small British indie production by Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui, which has been given a crack at worldwide theatrical distribution by the nice people at DC Studios (notably the current studio head James Gunn). The film's notable for not making the mistake that I made in the previous paragraph, which is telling the story in strict chronological order and make the whole second half a downer compared with the first half. Instead, there's some smart cross-cutting between the two parts of the story, allowing them to comment on each other, and mirroring Reeve's own attitude of not wanting to think of his life in terms of what happened before or after the fall. There's also some very pretty animation from Passion Pictures used for the transitions, which is a lot more pleasing to look at in IMAX than those fuzzy home movies.

The home movies make an important point, though: Reeve was very much a family man, and it’s his family - wife Dana and his three kids - who are his prime support network for the last ten years of his life. Generally avoiding sentimentality except for the moments where it can’t possibly be avoided, the film's at its sharpest when it looks at his work as a disabled rights activist: he knew that the image of Superman in a wheelchair was a powerful one, and he used it to ensure other people in his situation got the care they needed. Even his one misstep in that role - a commercial that looked forward to a cure by using CGI to show him walking again - had a simple and passionate idea behind it. "There's no such thing as false hope. There's just hope." It's a film that leaves you keenly aware that we’re all just one slip away from a similar situation to his.

8.50pm: Endurance [official site]

This is another documentary where we already know the ending in advance. Two endings, if you’ve been paying attention. In 1914, just as war was breaking out, Ernest Shackleton led an expedition south to be the first to cross Antarctica on foot. His crew sailed there on the ship Endurance, only to find themselves trapped in frozen ice before they could reach the coast. They had to abandon the ship and let it sink, and the story of Shackleton’s subsequent journey back home is the stuff of legend.

In the decades since then, Endurance has become the most famous shipwreck as yet undiscovered. In  2022 a team of scientists goes out in search of it, their route based around a single approximate map reference in one of the original crew's diaries. Their first problem? The risk of their own ship getting trapped in frozen ice...

Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin and Natalie Hewit have made this documentary for National Geographic, and presumably there's a degree of populist slickness that they're contractually obliged to deliver. The Shackleton expedition was famously filmed by Frank Hurley, with the footage being assembled into the groundbreaking documentary South: Hurley's work is a large part of the new film, but they've chosen to colourise it, so that modern audiences can enjoy it too or something. It's a bit iffy, but not as iffy as their decision to use AI to recreate the voices of the crew members reading from their diaries. Surely hiring half a dozen guys with nice voices would have been less morally suspect and just as effective, not to mention a damn sight cheaper? (I'll allow them the additional sequences they've recreated with actors.)

The thing is, the Shackleton portion of the film doesn't need fancy digital gimmicks to make it engaging, because it's a magnificent story in its own right: full of battles against the elements, heroic feats, and good old-fashioned British Spunk. You could argue that by comparison, the 2022 expedition - conducted entirely with remote-controlled probes - loses out because none of its crew get so much as their feet wet. But here the directors repeat what they did with Shackleton's team, only this time without the enhancements - treating the crew of S.A. Agulhas II as characters, and allowing us to discover their individual quirks as the expedition proceeds. We end up as invested in their quest as they are: the images we get to see in the final reel mean so much more as a result.