The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Memory plays the cruellest of roles
THE ROADS NOT TAKEN (15) **
DEMENTIA is a cruel, heartless thief. It robs victims of their sense of identity and dignity while simultaneously stealing precious final moments from family and friends, who stare into the eyes of the people they love and are met with confusion and abject fear rather than warmth and recognition.
London-born filmmaker Sally Potter OBE has a deep, personal connection to the syndrome.
She nursed her younger brother Nic, a musician and composer who was a bass guitarist for rock group Van der Graaf Generator, when he displayed early-onset dementia until his death from pneumonia in 2013 aged 61.
The filmmaker’s experience drip-feeds into the eddying emotions of The Roads Not Taken, an intentionally disorienting drama about the relationship between a daughter and her scholarly father, who is slowly being consumed by the choking fog of dementia.
Curiously, writer-director Potter keeps us perpetually at arm’s lengths from the characters and their anguish, offering us fragmented glimpses at a sunbathed past and colour-bleached present that fail to coalesce into a richly detailed study of a broken family at tipping point.
Potter’s most personal film may be her most frustratingly impersonal in its artful execution. Molly (Elle Fanning) races across New York City in a taxi to spend the day with her father Leo (Javier Bardem) and shepherd him to appointments with a dentist and an optician. The middle-aged patriarch is trapped for extended periods inside the prison of his mind and fails to answer the door to his nurse Xenia (Branka Katic). When Molly finally gains access to the cramped apartment, which is located beside elevated subway train tracks, she remains a stranger to dishevelled and discombobulated Leo.
With considerable patience and effort, Molly and Leo make both appointments and an unwelcome trip to the ER, where acid-tongued ex-wife Rita (Laura Linney) makes a brief appearance.
“Why does everyone refer to Dad as ‘he’, as if he’s not here?” despairs Molly.
“Well, is he?” coldly responds
Rita, compelling her crestfallen daughter to contemplate the harsh reality of the situation.
Meanwhile, Leo leafs through pages of his memory scrapbook, recalling emotionally bruising times with his first love Dolores (Salma Hayek) and a chance encounter with a pretty tourist called Anni (Milena Tscharntke).
The Roads Not Taken shuffles between polished slivers of Leo’s past and present without any profound sense of purpose.
Fanning and Bardem are mesmerising, including one beautifully crafted interlude in a bathroom that mines soothing humour from distress.
Potter stubbornly refuses to take the well-trodden path to our hearts, preferring a more circuitous route that only leads to frustration on and off screen.
SAVAGE (18) ****
100 mins
THE families we make are sometimes healthier and more supportive than the ones we are born into.
Writer-director Sam Kelly delivers that harsh lesson with teeth bared in the unflinchingly brutal drama Savage.
Divided into three bleak and blood-spattered chapters – childhood (1965), adolescence (1972) and adulthood (1989) – Kelly’s film exposes the fraternal bonds and toxic masculinity of New Zealand gang culture with repeated gut punches.
Savage is informed by true stories of gang culture on the North Island, where the dispossessed and alienated – some products of the care system – find camaraderie and a sense of belonging in the cultural and economic divide between neighbouring white and Maori communities.
Jake Ryan and John Tui are well matched as battle-scarred brothers in gang warfare, whose reign may be coming to an end after almost 25 years.
DAMON SMITH
the keeper who tended to Fingal the poorly penguin.
The programme was no stranger to anthropomorphism, but on the whole the narration, a lovely job by Gail Porter, kept matters fairly restrained. On the subject of feeding the wildlife, Nadiya Bakes (BBC2, Wednesday) must generate quite the fight among crews to get the gig on her show. As we saw in the programme, Nadiya serves up her yummy creations to the camera operators and sound techies, and the ones who don’t drop them – buttercream fingers – are in for a treat. Nadiya came across as an all round good wee spud, here making a return to her first culinary love, baking. And
I’m not just saying that in the hope she’ll send me one of her blueberry and lavender scone pizzas. Well, only if you are passing the post office, Nads ...