BFI Flare: Respect Your Elders

 "Hey, old lady!" is not a greeting I have heard, but it surfaces several times in the delightful Korean dramedy Manok (dir/writer Yu-jin Lee). The titular character is not even all that old, perhaps mid 40s, but the teens she encounters in her small home town are not especially deferential. Having moved back from Seoul where she owned a queer bar, she is finding her feet but her every move is thwarted by her vengeful ex-husband, who is the town chief or mayor. When she realises how controlling he is, she vows to run against him. 

At times hilarious and then sad, Manok is a special film, brimming with wonderful performances, absurd set pieces (a rap battle in a police station comes to mind), and a timely message about people overcoming their differences to realise what they have in common. Manok's interactions with her ex's gender non-conforming child allow her to realise that the youth of today perhaps don't have it easier, as she thought. I thought a plot line might develop in which she pursued an old love, but this was a red herring. Never mind. Perhaps there will be a sequel. 

In the short Shoobs, an awkward teen attending a house party is shadowed by a mysterious older figure who offers her advice in pursuing the object of her affections. It gradually emerges who this fashion doppelganger is... An intriguing premise with a cryptic ending, it looks at how people get caught up in what might have been. 

Manok trailer

BFI Flare: I'm Your Venus

 What a heartbreaker this doc is. Directed by Kimberly Reed, I'm Your Venus is a sensitive and devastating reopening of old wounds in the name of healing as it revisits the 1988 murder of Venus Xtravaganza who was featured in Paris Is Burning. 

Quite incredibly, some 30 years later, Venus's brothers join forces with the House of Xtravaganza to seek answers from the police and find ways to honour her legacy. Reed's camera finds its way into legal conferences, council meetings and the ballroom scene as the various protagonists raise awkward and painful questions about the dead woman's life and death. 

In particular it is painful to watch the brothers wrangle with their own feelings of guilt over how they treated their sister 40 years ago. Clearly, mistakes were made and they are only really put on the spot by a member of the House who knew Venus. Still, it is gratifying to watch them try to be good allies and honour her by changing her legal name and preserving her childhood home. 

I had so many questions, mostly to do with what investigation was actually done by the police in 1988 and why the family knew so little of developments. But one doc can only do so much. 

This is a teary but necessary watch. 

BFI Flare: Familial Demands

I must admit that The Wedding Banquet was being remade, I was sceptical. Why? I wondered, go back to a film from the 1990s? Ang Lee's breakthrough film has now been remade with one of the original screenwriters and a new director, Andrew Ahn, with the setting moved to Seattle. 

Bowen Yang is familiar to audiences as a comedic actor on SNL and as the GBF in films, but here he is handed a weighty role as a commitment-phobe drifting into his 30s and living in a friend's garage with his boyfriend Min (Han Gi-Chan). Lily Gladstone and Kelly Marie Tran are the couple who live in the main house, which is owned by Gladstone's character Lee. As the film unfolds, decisions must be made and life choices embraced, with the pressure of Min's grandmother pushing him to take over the family business while he wants to pursue his art. 

Once grandma arrives, things really pick up, with some delightful farce, including a frantic de-gaying of the house and a cringy Korean wedding ceremony. Gladstone, best known for her dramatic roles, is not a natural comic but has some great moments. But the film is really stolen by the two matriarchs, Angela's mother (Joan Chen) and Youn Yuh-jung as Min's grandma. It's laugh out loud and also moving. A delight. 

We Are Faheem and Karun is billed as Kashmir's first LGBT film and is a dreamy, thoughtful drama of forbidden love between a military man guarding a checkpoint and a local resident. As the two, Faheem and Karun, exchange grins and pieces of fruit, one wonders where this budding romance will go. In amongst the pressures brought by well-intentioned parents and a hotheaded brother, there are also flashes of humour. Viewers would greatly benefit from understanding the Kashmiri conflict and the cultural and religious differences in play. But one can glean the barriers facing the two would-be lovers and appreciate the quiet moments they share, against the gorgeous backdrop of the mountains. 

The Wedding Banquet trailer

Time Travel Is Dangerous!

 A British indie sci-fi mock doc, TTID! reaches for the stars and flies high if unsteadily over the roof tops, as Ruth and Megan discover a time machine and use it to restock their vintage shop in Muswell Hill. What could possibly go wrong?

Directed by Chris Reading and written by Reading and the Shakespeare Sisters, the film is narrated by a typically acerbic Stephen Fry and features the requisite shaky camera work and whip pans typical of documentaries. Ruth Syratt offers a hangdog performance as Ruth while Megan Stevenson is more expressive as Megan. The sound dipped at various points, perhaps as a nod to the documentary method and sometimes swallowed the dialogue but the two actors have good chemistry.  

There is also a host of Easter eggs for those with the energy to look for them, in the form of actors popping up from Buffy, The Witches and The School for Good and Evil. Plus Brian Blessed as an octopus, and, dear lord, Johnny Vegas as an angry robot. I know some find Vegas hilarious, but every time he appears on screen, he seems to suck the life out of every scene he is in. Jane Horrocks appears in a very odd steampunk sequence shouting a lot and I actually did not recognise her.

Truth be told, the pacing and tone of the film are all over the place. When the cast are trying to sort out the issues of time travel it is a lot of fun, but the more serious scenes feel out of place. 

So, yeah, time travel is a bit of a bumpy ride. 

Time Travel Is Dangerous! is on UK release from 28 March. 

Trailer

Barrelstout's Women's Day Picture Show

 The DIY filmmaking duo of Bev Zalcock and Sara Chambers has been collaborating for a few decades now, producing underground cinema drawing on Eisenstein, Deren and a host of others. On Friday they presented a selection of their work at Birkbeck Cinema. 

I had not been to Birkbeck for some years, probably pre-Covid for an earlier Barrelstout night. It was very odd to be out after dark and around lots of people. I am still being cautious, so I sat at the back and looked down on the audience, many of whom also appear in the films.

 While I have seen a lot of their work, several films were new to me, including two world premieres. While Bev favours Super 8, Sara is more in the digital realm, so the films are often a mixture of media. Suzi and Brandi in Needlepoint featured old S8 of two friends, which Bev had worked with a needle. Very hands-on. SLAGS, on the other hand, was composed of still photos of friends and the Kent town of Sandgate, which presumably were all digital. Those were the two new films.

Of the older ones Andi Andi was also new to me, featuring a femme biker cooking in full leather, and I recognised Diamanda Galas on the soundtrack. Diamanda was a total shock to me when I first heard her in the 1980s, thanks to a goth friend. At some point I played one of her records at the wrong speed and quite liked the effect. In any case, it was good to hear her soundtracking frustrated lesbian desire played out in the domestic sphere. 

Humour tends to run through Barrelstout's films and their punny titles reflect this. Among the films not shown were Oh, Odessa! and Mad, Bad and Barking, but these may come back at some point. There was a mention of re-editing some of the older films, which was intriguing.

Well worth a journey out on a Friday night and I also got to see some lovely spring flowers in the gardens around Bloomsbury.

Oh My Goodness!

 This one is a lot of fun. Nuns + cycling is the combo we didn't know we needed and this farce from director Laurent Tirard provides a marvellous cheerfully blasphemous confection. 

St Benedicts convent somewhere in rural France gets involved in a local cycling race hoping to use the prize money to bolster the funding for an old people's home. But only one of the sisters, trainee Gwendoline, shows any aptitude on a bike. Then a crew of rival nuns turn up and things get ugly.... 

Well, as ugly as a comedy about cycling nuns can get. The two mothers superior turn out to be old frenemies and concoct various schemes to do each other down. It is great fun watching nuns be devious and I did laugh out loud several times. For one brief moment it looks like the two trainees might run off but the mothers get it together and nobody goes to hell. Phew.

Trailer 

Oh My Goodness! (Juste Ciel) opens in the UK on 14 March. 

Die Alone

The stark title of this film by writer-director Lowell Dean really does not do it any favours. A futuristic dystopian thriller, Die Alone drops the viewer into a global environmental crisis in which human beings are being attacked by some kind of virus that turns them into plant zombies. At first the filmmaker seems to be drawing some kind of parallels with Covid, as newspaper articles speak of riots and resistance.

But then the film goes off in another direction. A young man called Ethan stumbles from his car and searches for his girlfriend Emma. A woman called Mae (Carrie-Ann Moss) takes him in and looks after him. As he gets in a number of scrapes, his amnesia prevents him from remembering those around him. Mae seems to be some kind of survivalist who carries a gun and has to keep her cranky generator running. Very few human beings are left after the plant attacks but there is one skeleton called Myrtle that hovers in the background.

Suffice to say Ethan and Mae are linked in some way and there is a massive twist toward the end.

Preposterously intriguing or intriguingly preposterous, Die Alone tries to be a sci-fi thriller and love story and perhaps also a warning of the damage human beings are wreaking to the planet. The zombie angle is not really pursued to any satisfaction. Why do they attack some things and not others. What happens to the people turned into plants? Do they decay and die or live forever? Who was Myrtle? I wish the film had filled in some of these details as the premise is solid. But it does rather let itself down. Great to see Carrie-Ann Moss being a badass but something is missing. Not so much Die Alone as To Die or Not to Die.

Trailer

Die Alone will be available on Home Entertainment from 10th March 2025