The dark side of the moon landing, Nic Cage goes feral, Gaspar Noé’s danse macabre…
F
irst mAn The story of how Neil Armstrong rose among the ranks of test pilots to become the face of the space race seems a natural enough fit for director Damien Chazelle, who made his name with Whiplash, the study of a jazz drummer almost driven to self-destruction by his perfectionist instincts. But what’s surprising about Chazelle’s fourth feature is the approach: after the dizzying Technicolor excesses of his Oscar hit
La La Land, First Man is a film that stubbornly rejects nostalgia. Instead, it almost appears to be an unpicking of the myth-making that goes on in American cinema, climaxing with a moon landing that is surprisingly bleak in its telling. Clearly influenced by The Right
Stuff – book and film – First Man is a film about men with ambition, but nothing about this is glamorised. Up until the final blast-off the air is thick with morbidity, a theme placed upfront and central in the first half hour, when Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) and his wife, Janet (Claire Foy), lose their infant daughter in the early ’60s. After that, for the best part of the decade he becomes part of a small circle of astronauts who give their lives in service, which leaves even the audience – like the US taxpayer at the time, as well as Gil Scott-Heron, whose indignant proto-rap poem “Whitey On The Moon” gets a slightly anachronistic airing – wondering if all this sacrifice was worth it. Gosling’s blankness can be irritating, but it pays out in the end. Alone with his thoughts in the Sea Of Tranquillity, Armstrong evokes a dark but rather eloquent truth: the future is built on the graves of the past.
doGmAn Italy’s Matteo Garrone broke out onto the international film circuit with 2008’s crime drama
Gomorrah, a sprawling, downand-dirty exposé of mob activity in Naples. It heralded the arrival of an important new voice in the genre, but Garrone seemed to lose interest almost immediately, following with a strange satire of modern media
(Reality, 2012) and the Gilliam-esque period fantasy Tale Of Tales (2015). Thankfully, Dogman sees him returning to the underworld, with a gritty two-hander built on a pair of powerful, opposing performances.
Marcello (Marcello Fonte) is the “dogman” of the title: the word is written large on the sign that adorns his dingy dog-grooming business in a seaside town that has clearly seen better days. Marcello has a secret sideline, dealing cocaine to the locals, which is how he comes to be involved with Simone (Edoardo Pesce), a former boxer who has just come out of prison. Simone is a forceful presence with no respect for the rules of law or, worse, the honour codes of the street. Terrified of him, Marcello continues to deal to him even though Simone maxed out his credit long ago and has no intention of ever paying.
This bizarre co-dependent relationship reaches crisis point when Simone brings Marcello in on a burglary, expecting his friend to take the rap if anything goes wrong. Which is where Marcello draws the line – but how to do it? Garrone exploits the tension perfectly as the weedy Marcello gets drawn further into Simone’s gaudy, sub-GoodFellas life, laughing nervously at his jokes between snorting lines and slamming shots in seedy strip bars. His rebellion, when it finally comes, is just as riveting: a wretched David and Goliath showdown that surely can’t end well for Marcello. Or can it?
Dogman keeps its audience guessing to the very end, an exquisite study of simmering human savagery.
mAndY If Wong Kar-wai suddenly ditched his addiction to lush, stately dreamscapes and decided to make trashy, ultra-violent action-horrorfantasy flicks, the results might look something like Mandy, a nightmarish mood piece that pushes its star further than he’s ever gone before. And that said star is the one and only Nicolas Cage should tell you even more about Panos Cosmatos’s cinematic oddity, the follow-up to the equally out-there sci-fi story
Beyond The Black Rainbow. Pulsing with electronic noise and bathed in diffused neon colours, it obliterates the line between arthouse and exploitation, unfolding with an abstract intensity that just seems to keep getting crazier and crazier.
It’s a story of two halves; in the first, Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) becomes the focus of fascination for a band of occult outlaws, who see her gothic Black Sabbath T-shirt as a sign. In the second, Mandy’s husband, Red (Cage), goes out looking for them, leaving a trail of devastation. Cage outdoes himself here, fighting these shadowy
enemies with drug-fuelled tenacity, notably in a blood-soaked double-chainsaw fight for survival.
So is it for Cage completists only? Well, yes and no. The actor’s usual schtick – furious laughter and insane grimacing – is turned up to 11 here, drowning out even Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call –
New Orleans and leaving Face/Off in the dust. But Cosmatos has a real eye for atmosphere, creating a vision that goes much deeper than first glance suggests. Yes, it feeds explicitly on the late-’70s films of John Carpenter, but Mandy is much more than stylish homage. Ultimately, it feels like a visit to another world – like the vision of hell in Phantasm, another ’70s touchstone – and in this world of formulaic, production-line franchise films, its commitment to the twin pursuits of perversity and madness is admirable.
THE LITTLE STRANGER Lenny Abrahamson has quietly been building up an interesting and diverse body of work recently, following the (very) loose Frank Sidebottom biopic Frank with Oscar hit
Room, a grim tale of rape and abduction. His ability to pull off tricky feats of that kind – like casting Michael Fassbender in Frank and having him wear a papier-maché head throughout – suggests that this creepy piece of gothica should be well within his capabilities. Somehow, though, The Little
Stranger never takes off, to the extent that one starts to wonder if its ghost-story trappings are part of an elaborate misdirect.
Domhnall Gleeson plays Faraday, a local doctor summoned to a grand mansion belonging to the Ayres family. Faraday remembers the house in its heyday and is shocked by its crumbling interiors and threadbare carpets. Nevertheless, he is attracted to the plain-speaking Caroline (Ruth Wilson), a bright young woman whose independence was cut short when her mother (Charlotte Rampling) brought her home to care for her badly scarred war veteran brother Roderick (Will Poulter).
As Faraday gets more involved with the Ayres, he is witness to a string of bizarre occurrences, which seem to start when the usually docile family dog savages a little girl in the middle of a cocktail party. Roderick mutters about strange forces, shortly before burning down his bedroom in a drunken haze. Could it be the doing of Caroline’s little sister, Susan, who died in childhood? It’s a question that fades maddeningly in and out of focus, to the point that it sometimes seems moot to care or even consider it a possibility. The open ending might be even more frustrating, however, depending on how
Climax is like a musical version of Lou Reed’s Berlin album
much – or, more importantly, how little – of your interest you’ve decided to invest in it.
CLIMAX The promotional material for Gaspar Noé’s latest cinematic outrage attempts to prepare you for the worst: “You despised I Stand Alone, you hated Irreversible, you loathed Enter The Void, you cursed Love – now try Climax.” Certainly, it’s strong meat, but, to the French provocateur’s dismay, his latest is probably his best and most assured film to date. It would be hard to call it enjoyable, but as sheer spectacle it delivers, a disorientating vision of hell that drips with invention and energy, constantly challenging and changing.
It begins with an overhead shot of a body crawling through snow, leaving a trail of blood. The music, the first of a stunningly well compiled and used soundtrack, is Gary Numan’s version of Satie’s “Trois Gymnopedies”, which used to sound twee but here sounds awesome, like Riz Ortolani’s haunting theme to 1980 gorefest
Cannibal Holocaust. There immediately follows a stunning dance routine, as a group of street dancers vogue, crunk and whack their way through an interpretation of Cerrone’s Supernature. Then we wind back, to what looks like Noé’s old TV set, as the dancers audition on video (the setting is the ’90s, since this is allegedly a true story), telling the camera, and us, their backstories.
Music is a constant throughout this extraordinary film, pounding in the background as the dancers relax after the performance. What they don’t know, however, is that someone has slipped LSD into the sangría, and the effect is sheer carnage. Inviting the dancers to articulate their bad-trip terror through their bodies, Noé creates a scene of primal horror that is hard to shake, as the music becomes more sinister and ever more relentless. Like a musical version of Lou Reed’s Berlin album – complete with the harrowing shrieks of children – it’s an explosive sensory overload that will stay in the bloodstream for a lot longer than drugs.