Spank's LFF Diary, Saturday 19/10/2024

Reviewed today: Frontin’, Maria, Pepe, The Room Next Door.

11.15am: Maria [trailer]

There’s a disclaimer at the end of the Maria Callas biopic, which assures us that the use of specific brand names in the dialogue is not intended to promote the consumption of alcohol. They don’t seem that fussed about the promotion of Mandrax, though, do they? There’s even a character named after the stuff.

It’s 1977, and Maria Callas (Angelina Jolie) is entering the last week of her life, spending most of it strung out on pills. She hasn’t performed on stage for four and a half years, but is toying with the idea of trying to get her voice back into shape – possibly just for herself, rather than anyone else. Meanwhile, she’s walking the streets of Paris with an imaginary TV reporter in tow (called Mandrax, lol) and hallucinating scenes from her life.

I remember the time a decade ago when The BBG and I shotgunned three of Pablo Larraín’s early Chilean films – Tony Manero, Post Mortem and No – in a single day. We haven’t seen anything he's directed since then, including the other two parts of his loose biopic trilogy (Jackie and Spencer). And you have to ask: what the hell happened? In this case, most of the blame has to go to the script. There are things that Stephen Knight can do really well (I’m still a big fan of what he pulled off with Locke), but whatever he thinks he’s doing with this, he can’t do that. What we’ve got here is just a shopping list of scenes from Callas’ life, with a self-consciously witty line allocated every five minutes to whoever’s speaking at the time.

As a result, Larraín’s storytelling skills are hobbled from the word go. There’s the odd visual flourish – when you’ve got a character who can mentally conjure up a full opera chorus in the middle of Paris, then obviously that’s going to work. But there’s far too little of visual interest going on, and I spent far too much time wondering why he'd given the role of Callas’ singing coach to Tim Key. (He hasn’t: Stephen Ashfield just looks and sounds a lot like him.) And the writing does no favours to Jolie either: in a curiously lifeless performance, she's basically just there in the lead role, with nothing to work with and nothing to justify her diva behaviour throughout.

3.00pm: Pepe [trailer]

It seems to be a feature of this year’s LFF to have films that mash up fact and fiction in ever more confusing ways, and here’s another one. Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias directs the possibly true story of Pepe, who is a) a hippopotamus, b) our narrator and c) dead, making this the Sunset Boulevard of wildlife films.

You could argue that Pepe fits into another genre that's been well represented this festival, because it's a story of migration. It starts in Namibia, where a group of animals are flown out to Colombia to become part of Pablo Escobar's personal hippo collection. The hippos stay in Colombia after Escobar's death, only for one of the largest and meanest animals to take control of the herd and force Pepe out after a fight. Pepe makes his way around the rivers of Colombia looking for a new place to live: and like all refugees the world over, he’s rarely welcomed.

As seems to be the case with a lot of these hybrid pieces, the mix of reality and fiction is the key point of interest, as the viewer's left to work out where the dividing line is between the two. However, it’s more hamfistedly handled here than in some of the other examples of the genre we’ve seen this week. Maybe it's a consequence of having a hippo as a narrator, but the pacing is incredibly slow: having been introduced to Pepe, we have to wait ages for his own story to start, as we ramble through lots of deep background. And then there's a huge chunk of the film where he's effectively an offstage character, and we have to sit through endless dramatised scenes of villagers complaining about the monster in the river that's ruining their fishing.

With some ruthless editing, there's a good 90 minute movie in here that could still keep all of the sidebars and digressions that are part of the fun, just not spending quite so much time on each of them. Two hours, unfortunately, is way beyond what this story deserves.

6.00pm: The Room Next Door [trailer]

You probably know that we tend to avoid the big gala screenings at the LFF: it’s not just the thirty quidness of them, it’s wanting to focus more on films that aren’t guaranteed a cinema release. This felt like an exception worth making to the rule, even though – like Pablo Larraín – I haven’t watched a Pedro Almodóvar film in years. (Mind you, he’s been namechecked here a couple of times this week.) The BBG isn't much of a fan, so it's just me on the red carpet for this one: too late to catch Pedro, but I at least get the chance to take a picture of Julianne Moore from thirty feet away.

Moore plays Ingrid in the film, an author whose most recent book is on the subject of death and how nervous the idea of it makes her. Which makes it all the more awkward when she revives her friendship with Martha (Tilda Swinton) after some time apart. Martha is a war correspondent who’s just been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and she's asking Ingrid to accompany her through the final stages of life, even if that involves breaking some laws.

It may be decades since Almodóvar’s more anarchic and heartless features, but thankfully he’s still incapable of turning a story like this into a simple weepie: there’s too much humour in here, dark or otherwise, to bring the tone down. What we get instead is a clear-eyed overview of the debate over assisted dying, where the two lead actresses are so good that you can see them changing their opinions in their eyes, rather by what they’re saying. Ingrid's initial horror at the idea gradually turning into acceptance: Martha's black wisecracks occasionally slipping as she remembers what she's committed herself to. It's tremendous work from both stars, and Almodóvar provides his usual lush visual setting to show them off at their best.

There are two missteps that stop this from being an unequivocally great film. Firstly, there’s the odd clunky line of dialogue which reminds you that this is Almodóvar’s first full-length script in English – though it has to be said that as the story gains momentum, these become less obvious. More damagingly, what could be possibly described as a bit of stunt casting for a cameo role doesn’t quite work. Then again, it may just be him throwing in the sort of cheeky gag that he used to do in the old days, in which case fair play to him.

9.00pm: Frontin’

Foreshadowing.