Last Moment of Clarity review – neo-noir in double trouble
Brothers Colin and James Krisel and/or actor Zach Avery must be either very well financed or ridiculously persuasive because they’ve managed to pull together a supporting cast and budget for this debut thriller that far exceeds what the script seems to warrant. At heart, Last Moment of Clarity is a slight, imaginatively thin B-movie which doesn’t so much as allude to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Vertigo as outright steal from them brazenly, ending up with a limp neonoir that unfolds in the streets of Paris and classy apartments in Los Angeles. There are cameos from Brian Cox and Udo Kier, both great scenestealing actors with many virtues other than accent mimicry, judging by the bizarre Scots-French mashup Cox tries out here that is only a hair’s breadth better than Kier’s eastern EuropeanGerman gangster stylings.
In any case, each of them appears only fleetingly; the bulk of the running time features Avery as a schlubby guy from New York named Sam who is hiding out in Paris. Sam mooches about the streets and works for bar owner Cox, all the while mourning the loss of his girlfriend, Georgia (Samara Weaving), who died at the hands of some lesser gangsters who work for Kier’s character, for reasons only gradually revealed. When he sees an actor named Lauren in a movie who looks just like Georgia, he becomes convinced that the two women are one and the same, and flies to La La Land to find out.
Enter Kat, played by the mesmeric Carly Chaikin, who ends up palling up with Sam, giving Chaikin a chance to play another variation on the manic pixie dream girl type she played in Mr Robot. The script is full of such daft coincidences you keep expecting there will be a clever twist to explain – but no, it really is that lazily written. At least the cinematography (by Andrew Wheeler) has atmosphere and the Parisian shots are pretty.
• Available from 8 March on digital formats.
Slick, efficient, precise. Watching Rishi Sunak in his budget campaign video, I am reminded of Daniel Craig as James Bond. Not in the way he moves, with an invisible, Christ-like halo around him, nor in the way he gesticulates Blairishly as John Barry-like music swells in the background, pressing us to grab the nearest union jack and wear it like a cardigan. No, it is the way Sunak dresses, like a hired assassin planning a quick clean-up after his latest mission. There is a simplicity and, appropriately, an economy to his sartorial choices that seem wildly oppositional to how Conservatives have been dressing. Sunak is here to Get The Job Done.
The era of the casually chaotic dress code of Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings – like members of the
Acid Ramblers scene who have had too much home-brewed cider – has ended. In its place has emerged a style that weaponises a soft, casual dressing style. We will call it hedge-fund haute couture. The cornerstone of this image is a crisp, slim-fit, brilliantly white shirt that clings to the chest, giving the slight hint of pectoral muscles. Occasionally, the sleeves of the shirt are rolled up with algorithmic symmetry. The Oxford shoes are always flawlessly polished. The ties, which pop with a primary colour, are on the skinny side. It is a pencil-thin look, the sartorial version of an equals sign, which semaphores safety and level-headedness.
This look is cleverly constructed. Sunak has made himself a brand, a logo that we won’t forget. Even when he diverts from the core style (with a Barbour jacket, an unfussy hoodie or, in the video, a crew-neck jumper), he doesn’t stray far from his USP of dependable stalwart. He is always well groomed, with a Clooney-ish sweep of hair and an overmoisturised face that would surely squeak like a rubber toy if you touched it.
That said, it is hard not to groan when reading the titles given to Sunak, such as the problematic and confusing phrase “maharaja of the Dales”. Locating Sunak in the language of the British empire reduces him to an illustration on the wall of an Indian restaurant.
Perhaps Sunak does not have the luxury of dressing as bumbling Eton mess? It is the dichotomy of being, as a person of colour, hypervisible yet invisible within the image you are presenting.