One last job in deepest Ukraine; a coming-ofage tale in harrowing reverse; Norwegian hipsters skewered…
PAMFIR It’s a miracle that Dmytro SukholytkyySobchuk’s debut feature exists at all. When the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, the lm was still in production and the sound designer had to brave shelling to transfer the footage abroad so the lm could be completed.
But regardless of its production or context, Pamr is one of the great debuts of 2023, an eerie, brutal but compassionate tale of power, corruption and love. Oleskandr Yatsentyuk is magnicently hangdog (there’s something of Bernard Hill’s Yosser Hughes) as Leonid, known to everyone as Pamr (the local word for rock), an ex-smuggler with a legendary shady past, who has made a fresh start as a well digger in Poland. He returns to his family home in a misty, muddy village in Bukovina, in the Carpathian forests of western Ukraine, for the Malanka new year festival – a pagan costume ritual, where people dress up as the creatures they really wish to be.
Despite his best eorts, his past life begins to reclaim him. When his son inadvertently burns down the local church to persuade him to stay, Pamr gets dragged into one last smuggling job for the local despot, with calamitous consequences.
Sukholytkyy-sobchuk comes from Bukovina and has previously made documentaries about the culture of the region. Accordingly, the lm has an incredibly rich sense of place – from the quagmire of the farm to the fairytale beauty of the forests, against an ongoing tension between the church and pagan traditions. But it’s also a strikingly modern, frequently hilarious, impeccably composed piece of gangster cinema. The combination is thrilling, something like Tarkovsky remaking The Wild Bunch, and a creative victory for Ukrainian cinema.
LOVE ACCORDING TO DALVA Cinema is awash with coming-of-age stories, tales of young men and women clumsily, charmingly negotiating the passage through adolescence into adulthood. Love According To Dalva tells the same story in reverse. When we meet Dalva, she’s being wrenched from her lover in a dawn raid. As she recovers from her ordeal in a detention centre, we see her carefully reapply her makeup, pin up her hair, straighten her dress. “I’m not a girl, I’m a woman!” she deantly declares to her captors.
But this “woman” is only 12, and her lover was her father, who had kidnapped her and fashioned her into his fantasy. Dalva is the searingly powerful story of a girl slowly learning to shed the accoutrements of her grooming and nd her way back to the childhood that was stolen from her.
Director Emmanuelle Nicot previously worked as a casting director and she has assembled a sensational group of actors. Zelda Samson is astonishing as a young girl slowly emerging from years of conditioning, but no less are compelling are Alexis Manenti as her youth worker, struggling to remain compassionate and keep his patience, and Fanta Guirassy as Saima, the room-mate at the youth shelter who befriends Dalva and introduces her to the charms of being a stroppy teenager. Though the subject matter is profoundly harrowing, this is a terrically sensitive and humane lm – at times like a 15-certicate Tracy Beaker – about the possibility of recovery and autonomy.
SICK OF MYSELF. Following The Worst Person In The World and Triangle Of Sadness, Sick Of Myself is Scandinavian cinema’s latest and most savage skewering of modern narcissism. Signe and Thomas are a couple of Oslo hipsters – he an up-and-coming artist, fashioning stolen furniture into absurd installations, while she is a barista, becoming more and more envious of her partner’s gathering acclaim. At the launch party for his rst big exhibition, she fakes a peanut allergy reaction to try and claw back some attention for herself. This turns out to be the rst step on a slippery slope that leads her into the world of black
market Russian pharmaceuticals, grotesque physical disgurement, human interest media celebrity and a nascent career as an inuencer and fashion model.
Director Kristoer Borgli is no stranger to the high end of advertising – last year his short lm commissioned to sell Hypebeast Adidas sneakers was rejected for being “too disturbing” – and Sick Of Myself has the feel of a Nathan Barley biting the hand that has fed him. But Thorp’s central performance, as a young woman so desperate for attention that she can only bring herself to climax by fantasising about the guestlist at her funeral, is relentlessly compelling, bringing perverse humanity to this merciless parable.
ONE FINE MORNING Last seen by moviegoers playing a Proustian psychiatrist/james Bond’s babymama in No Time To Die, and as a celebrity performance surgeon in David Cronenberg’s
Crimes Of The Future, Léa Seydoux dials things down a notch in Mia Hansen-løve’s latest meditation on love and obligation, but nevertheless delivers her nest performance yet.
She plays Sandra, a widowed Parisian mum and translator, bringing up her daughter and trying to nd a care home for her dad (Pascal Greggory) who has a neuro-degenerative disorder that is slowly dissolving his identity. She nds some respite in a passionate dalliance with an old friend, astrochemist Clément, who in the way of French men, can’t seem to quite leave his wife. In précis it sounds nothing special, but Hansen-løve is slowly shaping up to be a modern-day Rohmer, paying loving attention to quotidian travails, and One Fine Morning might be her The Green Ray –a delicate, philosophical hymn to the diligent pursuit of happiness.
LAKELANDS The Irish lm renaissance continues apace with Lakelands, the latest big-screen story of smalltown lives of quiet desperation and hard-won wisdom. Éanna Hardwicke certainly has the chops to follow Paul Mescal into Hollywood, delivering a thoughtful, compelling turn as Cian, a young man growing up in the Irish midlands, working on his dad’s farm, starring in the local Gaelic football team, and letting o steam on Saturday nights out in the clubs of downtown Cavan.
At times Lakelands risks coming across as a public information lm on the dangers of concussion. Cian gets beaten up in a Saturdaynight brawl and struggles to return to his Jack the Lad lifestyle, until an old ame returns from university in England to set him straight on the need to recuperate. But there’s enough charm in the cast (Gary Lydon excels as the no-bullshit coach), that Lakelands ends up feeling like a worthy Irish sequel to the classic high school football movie Friday Night Lights.
It’s something like Tarkovsky remaking The Wild Bunch