Bizarre but brilliantly funny lessons in LOVE
CO-PRODUCED by Cate Blanchett and starring Jessie Buckley and Riz Ahmed, Fingernails is a deliberately weird film set in a recognisable but alternative recent past. Here, amid the reassuring familiarity of landlines, midweek dinner parties and spiral perms, one thing stands out as distinctly unusual: there is now a reliable test for love.
Pass it and you can look forward to years, possibly even a lifetime, of smug coupledom. Fail and, well, you won’t be turned into an animal as in Yorgos Lanthimos’s notably similar 2015 film, The Lobster, but your relationship will almost certainly collapse under the strain.
Anna (Buckley) and her husband (Jeremy Allen White) have passed the test and seem to live as a happy couple.
But Anna, in particular appears uncertain, and rather than take up another teaching job when it’s offered secretly opts to become an assistant instructor at The Love
Institute, where hopeful couples are prepared for the test.
Among the lessons she helps to conduct are singing songs to each other in French (it’s more erotic, apparently), staring longingly at each other underwater, and detecting a chosen partner by smell alone in a room full of strangers where you are blindfolded and everyone is stripped to their underwear. See what I mean about weird? But it’s funny too.
For some, the resemblance to The Lobster will be too much, especially as this is directed by Lanthimos’s former colleague and fellow Greek film-maker, Christos Nikou. But Fingernails is less odd and more accessible, and Buckley and Ahmed, who plays her institute colleague, Amir, are rather good together.
As for the mysterious test? Well, the clue’s in the title and it’ll have you squirming.
In this country Diana Nyad is barely known, but in America she’s famous as the former longdistance swimmer who went on to become a writer and journalist but then went back to marathon swimming at the age of 60.
Her aim is to succeed where she failed more than 30 years earlier, in swimming the 110 shark and jellyfish-infested miles from Cuba to Florida. It’s a great story, although her multiple attempts do make Nyad too long. But Annette Bening is sensationally good as the intense and often downright unlikeable swimmer, and Jodie Foster is every bit her match as best friend and coach, Bonnie Stoll.
How To Have Sex, which more accurately should be called How Not To Have Sex, may start out resembling a female version of The Inbetweeners Movie, as we watch three teenage girls shrieking their way through a post-GCSE holiday in Greece.
But just when you think you’ve had enough of drinking games, endless changes of outfits and cheesy chat-up lines, the mood changes and you begin to see why Molly Manning Walker’s debut feature picked up a big prize at Cannes and has been causing a stir ever since.
It’s an important film, but with the subject of consent at its heart, it’s a tough watch. Mia McKenna Bruce and Shaun Thomas are excellent in central roles.
Gabriel Byrne gives one of his best performances for years in Dance First, a film charting the life and loves of the Irish playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969 and is best known these days as the writer of Waiting For Godot.
Shot mainly in black and white, it has a cleverly constructed screenplay by Neil Forsyth, is beautifully directed by James Marsh (The Theory Of Everything) and features terrific performances from the likes of Aidan Gillen, Bronagh Gallagher and Sandrine Bonnaire.
And, unlike the famously frustrating Waiting For Godot, things actually happen. Fabulous.
‘As for the mysterious test? Well the clue is in the title and it’ll have you squirming’
‘It’s an important film, but with consent at its heart, it is a tough watch’