MOVIES
Claire Foy finds herself stalked by an ex in the crazy-good, iphone-shot psychological thriller Unsane—or does she?
Unsane puts us through the iphone ringer; communism manifests in Young Karl Marx; lame Madame a career low for all involved; it’s 1968 all over again In the Intense Now.
UNSANE Starring Claire Foy. Rated 14A
There’s a lot to fear around the world at this 2
particular moment in time, and we’re not just talking spiders and snakes. There’s the ongoing fear of your kids getting shot while they’re attending high school. There’s the newer fear of coming in contact with a deadly Russian nerve agent while you’re out on the town. And there’s the brandspanking-new fear of having a just-built, 950-ton bridge collapse while you’re driving under it.
And now, thanks to the new Steven Soderbergh–directed fright flick Unsane, you can add the universal fear of being unjustly committed to a mental institution to the list.
Claire Foy is perfect as 20-something financial analyst Sawyer Valentini, whom we first meet while she’s getting “what a weirdo” looks from coworkers at the office. Turns out that she has recently arrived in Pennsylvania after fleeing Boston, where she was traumatized by a relentless stalker. She’s trying to make the best of her new environment, but finds it difficult to find friends—or lovers. A Tinder hookup, which she wants to be just a one-night stand, doesn’t even get that far before she imagines the date is her stalker, flips out, and locks herself in the bathroom.
Seeking help for her emotional distress, the strung-out woman visits the Highland Creek Behavioral Center, but when a counsellor there decides that Sawyer “poses a danger to herself and others”, she is forced to stay at the facility for a 24-hour observation. The place is actually running an insurance scam, though, so management is pleased when Sawyer’s frazzled, live-wire persona soon gets her upgraded to a one-week stay. Things don’t get any more promising when she discovers that her old stalker (The Blair Witch Project’s Joshua Leonard) is a nurse on the psychiatric ward. Or is she just imagining that part?
Shot entirely on iphone, the film has a grainy look and realistic vibe that help intensify the spiralling desperation of its ill-fated protagonist. Apart from one dubious scene in a padded cell, Unsane is hugely entertaining and crazy good, one of the best psycho-thrillers I’ve seen in years. That it’s also an indictment of America’s incarceration-for-pay industry and a thumbs-up to the thriving #Metoo movement is just a bonus. > STEVE NEWTON
THE YOUNG KARL MARX Starring August Diehl. In English, French, and German, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable
“You’re the greatest materialist thinker of 2
our times,” a young Friedrich Engels (Stefan Konarske) exclaims to Karl Marx (Inglourious Basterds’ August Diehl) at their first meeting. The latter doesn’t disagree. Still, Marx’s fellow German traveller, in revolution-ripe 1843, can stand up to the future icon’s ego, as we see in this intermittently engaging stroll down the long road to their joint publication of The Communist Manifesto.
If The Young Karl Marx helps reconstruct Engels’s role in the upheavals to follow, it also revisits the place of women in that unruly moment. It elevates Jenny Marx (Phantom Thread costar Vicky Krieps), who gave up Prussian aristocracy to marry the son of a converted Jew, from mere helpmate to active participant, especially regarding Karl’s dodgy networking skills. Engels was the offspring of a wealthy merchant with several English factories—which is why Marx (and his gravesite) ended up in London— and Freddy’s impoverished Irish mate, Mary Burns (Wolf Hall’s Hannah Steele), proves to be a workingclass rabble-rouser in her own right.
We follow these multilingual agitators across Europe, touching down in France and Belgium, with Germany subbing for England. There are some remarkable Industrial Revolution sites, particularly when the film gets to a Manchester textile factory, giving dialectical materialism a literal meaning, as child labour helps spew out reams of coloured fabric. Some now-distant figures of intellectual foment spring to life, in the form of Olivier Gourmet as French anarchist Pierre-joseph Proudhon (self-satisfied) and Alexander Scheer as German firebrand Wilhelm Weitling (a grandstander). But director Raoul Peck is somewhat overwhelmed by the challenge of enlivening both history and the writerly process—of dramatizing footnotes, as it were.
Most intriguing, perhaps, is the foreshadowing of violence built into Marx’s vision of moral purity. The new film is both related to and a slight letdown after Peck’s last movie, I Am Not Your Negro, which elevated revolution to poetry, thanks to fantastic footage of subject James Baldwin. Here, a bland orchestral score underlines a kind of candlelit lifelessness, suddenly awakened in the end credits, which find an electric Bob Dylan singing along with a montage of times that kept achanging. > KEN EISNER
FOXTROT Starring Lior Ashkenazi. In Hebrew, with English subtitles. Rated 14A
In the dance called the fox trot, its famous box 2 step has you end up in the same place you started. That’s the metaphor writer-director Samuel Maoz (previously known for Lebanon) is making about Israel’s peculiarly stuck place in modern history.
It begins and ends inside the spacious Tel Aviv apartment of successful architect Michael Feldman (Footnote’s excellent Lior Ashkenazi) and his younger wife, Daphna (Jellyfish star Sarah Adler). We meet them when a uniformed Israel Defense Forces team arrives, bearing word that their beloved son, Jonathan, has died at some godforsaken outpost in the northern desert. Daphna faints, and Michael is subjected to the soothing ameliorations of soldiers who are too well-practised at delivering bad news.
In fact, the angry dad won’t even accept the solicitations of his dog—and a special shout-out must go to Max, or whoever wrangled the Oscar-worthy mutt. When the body is not produced right away, he begins to wonder what really happened to his son. That’s when the location shifts to the aforementioned nowheresville, with Jonathan (Yonaton Shiray) part of a forlorn crew tasked with guarding a supply route that never sees supplies.
In the surreal segment, never given a definite chronology in relation to the first part, our stillcorporeal corporal spends his time cartooning— some even gets animated later on—when not manning a huge machine gun that’s mostly good for intimidating the few Arabic-speaking drivers unlucky enough to use that remote road. The local camels are not impressed. Largely, the guys are bored, and worried about their sleeping quarters, quickly sinking in the local mud—and not just metaphorically. The weird location’s tension is heightened by one man’s obsession with fixing a massive tube radio that, when adjusted just right, seems to pick up old programs. Say, isn’t that Bela Lugosi reading poetry in the witching hour?
After all that, it’s a small letdown to return to that same Tel Aviv apartment, in which Daphna and Michael, now extra world-weary, talk about a better past, and relate to a college-age daughter (Shira Haas) who doesn’t add that much to the story. The last third is still well-acted and -written, with interesting visual echoes throughout. But its concerns appear somewhat pedestrian compared with the strange dance that began when their doorbell rang. > KEN EISNER
IN THE INTENSE NOW A documentary by João Moreira Salles. In Portuguese and French, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable
When veteran documentarian João Moreira 2
Salles began working on this labour of love, which poignantly captures the elusive spirit of 1968, he couldn’t have known its parallels with 2018 would be quite so striking.
Just last week, Marielle Franco, a gay single mother, minority-rights activist, police critic, and Rio de Janeiro city councillor, was assassinated. Chillingly, this came almost exactly 50 years after a police captain murdered mixed-race student protester Edson Luis in the same city, resulting in massive demonstrations that, in the end, only tightened the military dictatorship’s grip—with results still echoing in today’s even more chaotic Brazil.
The filmmaker himself, now 55 and the elder brother of Walter Salles (of Central Station and Motorcycle Diaries fame), grew up partially in France and was too young to experience the worst upheavals in either country. Earlier this decade, he discovered colour footage their glamorous mother made of her trip to China in 1966. This was at the beginning of Mao’s Cultural Revolution and shortly before youthful excitement morphed into selfcannibalization. He then combed through public and private archives to create a multipanel portrait of ’68 as it unfolded in Paris, Prague, and Rio.
The results are highly subjective, and narrated throughout by the filmmaker, in a soothing, youthful-sounding voice, most interested in the timeless “archive of gestures” contained in the mostly blackand-white footage. The political is always personal, whether he’s capturing the words of a pissed-off female factory worker during a Parisian strike or following the circumlocutions of Daniel Cohn-bendit, the most visible face of the Sorbonne uprising. In France, the student movement was quickly commercialized; the popular graffito “Under paving stones, the beach” was actually the product of two young ad men!
The Russian occupation of Czechoslovakia contained fewer poetic contradictions and a lot more bloodshed. One highlight is Salles’s dissection of two anonymous rolls of film, depicting tanks in the street. Massive protests following the self-immolation of 20-year-old Jan Palach are intercut with the superficially similar, but less grief-stricken, images of the fallout from Edson Luis’s Rio murder, which curiously gets the least screen time and explication. The movie gets away from its maker near the end of two hours plus, with his return to Mom’s China sojourn. And an 1896 snippet from the Lumière brothers is somewhat baffling. But the movie is unique in its ability to put the viewer inside of the mind-frame of an explosive time that seemed so far away—until today. > KEN EISNER
MADAME Starring Rossy de Palma. Rated PG
“No one notices a maid.” That’s the truism 2
laid out in this would-be comedy of manners about money and mistaken identity. But if you wanted to say something about the anonymity of the serving class, why hire Rossy de Palma—by far the most extreme-looking veteran of Pedro Almodóvar’s cartoonish movies—to prove your point?
Still, the tall, Picasso-faced de Palma is here as Maria, a housekeeper (not really a maid, in fact) who runs the rented Parisian villa of American expats Anne and Bob Fredericks. They’re played by Toni Collette and Harvey Keitel; he’s a goofy sitcom dad, and she’s the rich bitch in a nighttime soap—or worried about being rich, anyway, since the Fredericks have financial issues.
When Bob’s floppy-haired and decidedly British son from a previous marriage, Steven (Tom Hughes)—a failed novelist and budding alcoholic—shows up unexpectedly at their swanky dinner party, it puts 13 at the table. The superstitious madam won’t tolerate this, so she picks Maria to make an even number, advising her to not talk or drink too much. Guess how well that goes.
In Paris to facilitate the sale of a rare Caravaggio painting, gentle Irishman David (Michael Smiley) shows an interest in the newly dressed-up “guest”, and Bob spins a yarn about Maria being Spanish royalty. The help has an untapped knowledge of dirty jokes in several languages. This drives David mad with desire, but just makes Anne madder.
In a long dinner sequence notable for its lack of food or basic geography—the camera occasionally pulls back to show us people previously unseen— the visiting Steven is seated next to Bob’s, ahem, “French teacher” (Joséphine de La Baume), whom he suddenly harasses and humiliates. In response, the young woman says and does absolutely nothing.
This is doubly shocking, because this half-baked Cinderella story’s writer-director, with the odd nom de film Amanda Sthers, is herself a young woman, one who presents this behaviour as “cute”. She’s also uninterested in providing the other characters, including de Palma’s, with any contradictory shading or believable back story. A career low for everyone involved, Madame is a condescending, poorly told, and deeply unfunny film that would have been a dud at any point in history. But it feels especially off right now. > KEN EISNER