Lost in the lab
The director and cast of Radioactive do their best with a clunky script, while Japanese master Hirokazu Kore-eda out Frenches the French with his light comedy-of-manners, The Truth
Dogs Don’t Wear Pants proceeds like an artier, kinkier riff on the 1990 Brat Pack horror film Flatliners
Radioactive ✪✪✪ (12A)
The Truth (PG)
✪✪✪✪
Dogs Don’t Wear Pants (18)
✪✪✪
There’s a curious clash of styles in Radioactive,
Persepolis director Marjane Satrapi’s biopic about two-time Nobelwinning scientist Marie Curie, whose discovery of radiation changed our understanding of the world forever and whose subsequent life, marriage and death were inextricably bound up with her work. Serviced with a terrible explain-all script from prolific British screenwriter Jack Thorne (it plays like something he knocked off while penning his equally rubbish screenplay for last year’s Victorian science caper
The Aeronauts), Satrapi’s film nevertheless makes a valiant effort to remain true to the pioneering spirit of its subject by finding inventive, expressionistic ways to visualise both Madame Curie’s discoveries and the impact they had on the world. As Marie and Pierre Curie, Rosamund Pike and Sam Riley may have to chew over clunkily on-thenose dialogue as these two brilliant minds – she’s a no-nonsense chemist battling patriarchal indifference and desperately in need of a lab to continue her work; he’s a well-funded physicist with microscopes to spare – come together and gradually fall
in love, but the way Satrapi fills the screen with shimmering light during one romantic encounter in the countryside says more about the explosive passion underlying their professional and romantic lives than all the metaphor-loaded lines Thorne’s script feeds them. Indeed, all through the film Satrapi finds little visual grace notes that bring the background radiation of the universe into the frame to symbolise how Curie’s work illuminated our understanding of said universe. Likewise, the way she visualises the flash-forwards to Hiroshima, Chernobyl and the myriad medical advances that now form part of her legacy lift the film out of the cradle-tothe-grave predictability that Thorne’s screenplay (adapted from Lauren Redniss’s acclaimed and much more abstract graphic novel of the same name) keeps pushing it in.
Working for the first time outside his native Japan, modern filmmaking master Hirokazu Kore-eda
(Shoplifters, Our Little Sister) returns once more to the theme of families and the dysfunctions that bind them in The Truth, a delectable spin on the French bourgeois comedy that outfrenches the French. Zeroing in on a veteran movie star called Fabienne Dangeville (played with mischievous glee by Catherine Deneuve), the film revolves around the personal fallout from the imminent publication of her memoir, which threatens to exacerbate her already fractious relationship with her long-suffering daughter Lumir (an ultra-chic Juliette Binoche) who’s visiting from
New York with her actor husband, Hank (Ethan Hawke), and their daughter Charlotte (Clémentine Grenier). What’s brilliant here – aside from that cast – is that Koreeda doesn’t default to serious drama to unpick their dynamic. Building the film around the production of a sci-fi movie that Fabienne is in the process of making, he draws parallels instead between the absurdity of film production and the absurdity of family life, finding rich humour in the way the illusory nature of both has a habit of revealing what really matters.
As meet-cutes go, the one that occurs in Finnish oddity Dogs Don’t
Wear Pants, between a widowed heart surgeon called Juha (Pekka Strang) and a dominatrix called Mona (Krista Kosonen), takes some beating. Setting the off-kilter tone with a dreamy prologue in which the film’s protagonist, Juha, almost dies trying to save his drowning wife while on holiday with their young daughter, director JP Valkeapää ramps up the strangeness by having the disconnected Juha stumble into the neon-red lair of the aforementioned Mona while accompanying his nowteenage daughter Elli (Ilona Huhta) on a birthday outing to get her a tongue stud from the body piercing parlour that operates upstairs. Alarm bells should already be ringing at the inappropriateness of Juha’s parenting choices here, but things get worse upon snooping around Mona’s dungeon and discovering very quickly that her talents for auto-erotic asphyxiation can bring him closer to his dead wife, whom he sees during this first oxygendeprived moment of reverie floating towards him in a watery limbo. Thenceforth the film proceeds like an artier, kinkier riff on the 1990 Brat Pack horror film Flatliners, with Juha submitting dog-like to Mona’s high-heeled, whip-wielding ways in an effort to coerce her into pushing him ever-closer to death. The psychological explanation for Juha’s new-found obsession doesn’t go much deeper than its rather obvious connection to his suppressed grief, which is a little disappointing – as
is the film’s disinterest in exploring Juha’s increasingly strained relationship with his daughter, a plot-line the film quickly jettisons before resolving it far too neatly. Instead, Valkeapää focuses mostly on the downward spiralling Juha’s obsession with Mona, whose own sadistic proclivities the film takes gruesome pleasure in depicting, perhaps as a way of appealing to a certain strain of masochistic arthouse movie lover who gets off on the sensorial punishment doled out by filmmakers such as Gasper
Noe, Lars von Trier and Michael Haneke. For all the film’s fingernailand-teeth-pulling unpleasantness, though, Valkeapää isn’t quite in that league and while there’s no denying the film is visually striking and features committed performances from Kosonen and Strang (the latter in danger of being typecast following this and his lead turn in the 2017 biopic Tom of Finland), its thirdact shift into a weirdly upbeat black comedy about a middle-aged man finding his Bdsm-themed bliss feels a little unearned. ■