Revenge is a dish best served only once
In 2014, Antoine Fuqua and Denzel Washington released a perfectly serviceable thriller based on a 1980s TV show. In The Equalizer, Washington played Robert McCall, a former CIA Special Ops agent who’s living quietly off the grid in Boston when the casual brutality of a Russian pimp inspires him to take revenge. This will be his calling: to violently avenge the criminally-oppressed, and as
The Equalizer 2 opens, he’s really warming to the task.
After wasting a train-carriage load of Turkish hoodlums in order to liberate a kidnapped child, McCall returns to the US to rescue a talented young black artist from the clutches of a street drug gang. But Robert must set all these pressing concerns aside when his oldest friend and CIA mentor is found murdered in a Belgian hotel.
A kind of quietly spoken, heavily armed messiah, Robert McCall was made almost credible in the first film thanks to Washington’s sublimely unaffected acting. The Equalizer was no classic, but seems so next to this hacked together effort, which after a sober enough start quickly descends into by-the-numbers B-movie drudgery. How you get on with The Eyes of Orson Welles will depend on your tolerance for its maker’s iconoclastic flourishes. Belfastborn film critic and documentarist Mark Cousins made his name on the BBC in the 90s, coolly deconstructing contemporary cinema in his trademark soporific drawl. He’s gone on to make quirky but original documentaries, and in this one he reassesses Orson Welles through the prism of his sketches and drawings.
The great man drew obsessively throughout his life, and Cousins was granted access to his sketches by Welles’ daughter, Beatrice. He uses them as a springboard to explore the recurring patterns in Orson’s work, the overwhelming visual power of his films, and the warring contradictions in his imperious personality. Distractingly, Cousins keeps buttonholing Welles (dead now for 30-odd years) in his voiceover, purring “Look, Orson…” and “Guess what, Orson…”. This is massively irritating, especially early on, but The Eyes of Orson Welles is worth persevering with because for all his mannerisms, Cousins knows what he’s on about, chooses film segments with great insight, and finds plausible ways of re-reading Welles’ life and work.
Paraguayan film-maker Marcelo Martinessi’s The Heiresses charts the unravelling fortunes of two elderly gay women who’ve been insulated until now from life’s hard lessons in a well-heeled Ascension suburb. But when Chiquita (Marguerita Irun) is sent to an open women’s prison for tax fraud, her gentler and more retiring partner Chela (Ana Brun) is forced to cope alone.
Money is tight for the proudly upper class Chela, but things look up when she starts driving other posh ladies to card games for a fee, and her life takes an unexpected turn when a languidly sensual younger woman called Angy (Ana Ivanova) takes a shine to her. Dense and complex as a good novel, The Heiresses is bolstered by fine acting, especially from the two leads, stage actresses here making their screen debuts. They make it look easy.
And finally, a word about The Guardians, Xavier Beauvois’s handsome epic set in a western French village during the Great War. While the men are away fighting and dying in the Flanders mud, the community’s women till and sow the rich soil abandoned by their brothers and husbands. The formidable matriarch Hortense (Nathalie Baye) turns out to be rather good at it, modernising antique methods on her family farm with the help of two tough young women.
Meanwhile, the men return on occasional furloughs, contradicting party line patriotism with their bitter accounts of a pointless, horrific war. It’s a fine film, thoughtful, nuanced and beautifully photographed.