Movie marathon lite

I teach in Bordeaux on Thursday mornings so took the opportunity for a movie splurge. 

Sur un Fil, directeur Reda Kateb

This French film starts off being about an acrobat who falls from a height. She has few other opportunities to earn money so she asks one of the Circus clowns how else she could earn some and he says she should come with him to the local hospital she’s just spent months in. It’s a sweet film about clowns for kids undergoing end-of-life care or in for cancer operations and is handled sweetly, but not in a mawkish fashion. 4/5

Flow (the cat who wasn’t scared of water), Giants Zilbalodis

A wordless animal adventure in a changing world. The scene opens with an abandoned human world. There are buildings and infrastructure, but no humans and a cat is running from a pack of dogs and deer. What unfolds has much the same narrative arc as The Wild Robot, but doesn’t require jokes or dialogue and so makes a beautiful counterpoint to the film that followed, which is brilliant in its own right. 4/5

The Wild Robot, Chris Sanders

I’ve already said how much I love this film and reading it on the big screen allows you to spot things that weren’t obvious the first time around, like how reduced humans are on the planet or whether the island that the story takes place on is actually a chunk of whatever is left of California after the earthquake that everyone knows is coming at some point. 5/5

L’histoire de Souleymane (Souleymane’s Story), Boris Lojkine

Shot with a Steadicam largely locked on Souleymane’s back as he rides about Paris making deliveries on an account that’s not his (he has no papers so he can’t get a job), we follow our titular hero as he gets up at 0630, books his next night in a shelter, and goes to work until the bus to the shelter at 2200. All the while, he’s trying to pay the fixer for fake paperwork for his interview at immigration where he’ll recite a fictitious story to try and get him in. It’s a gripping tale, well told and the central performance by Abou Sangaré is mesmerising. He won the best actor prize at Cannes this year and it was well-deserved and made all the more amazing because Abou is not a trained actor and was himself an illegal immigrant (perhaps there was little acting). He lucked into the job because he was hunting for work (Emmanuel Macron has now made him a French citizen). It’s a tough tale of precarity and the humanity of people running services for people such as Souleymane. It’s only in the final scene when we learn why he is in France and the end of the film comes as a surprise. It’s also notable that for a French film, there’s a lot of subtitling mainly because while the main language in Guinée, where Souleymane is from, is French, some 20 other languages are spoken there. This is a film to show bigots and racists, perhaps in the same way that Alex is forced to watch in A Clockwork Orange. 5/5 (oh, and I want Souleymane’s phone. It is never shown charging over two days!)

Smile 2, Parker Finn

As I said before, this is top-notch horror. Yes, most of the jump scares are easy to see coming, but there are a few that really catch you out and the story is too reminiscent of Fallen. Overall this film works extremely well and Lewis Fregoli’s death is particularly memorable. 4/5

A cracking 11 hours of films, hehe.