SECOND SCREEN
Sidney Poitier starred in Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner as long ago as 1967 but the world does not appear to have moved on much since then, judging by the astonishing US box-office performance of Get Out (15A)
It cost just $4.5m to make, has already taken more than $110m in the US and yet confronts exactly the same scenario as Poitier and his costar Katharine Houghton did all those years ago – the white young woman taking her new black boyfriend home to meet her supposedly liberal parents.
But after playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a different sort of film. For a start, it’s produced by Jason Blum, king of low-budget horror, and from the moment Rose (Allison Williams) and her boyfriend Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) reach her parents’ plantationstyle home, we know all is not as it should be.
Her father (Bradley Whitford) can’t wait to tell Chris he’d have ‘voted for Obama for a third time’ if he could, both the cook and the gardener are black, and the door to the basement is firmly locked.
The film is at its best when it lampoons what white folk say when confronted by an unexpected black man, which is what happens when friends and family arrive for a party the next day. The retired golfer is keen to tell Chris ‘I do know Tiger’, and a wellpreserved wife just wants to squeeze his muscles and asks: ‘Is it true… is it… better?’ I was slightly disappointed as the pace slows, we discover what’s really going on, and the hitherto impressive actorturned-debut-director Jordan Peele lurches close to the Wayans brothers’ Scary Movie territory. But for fans of commercial horror who like films that amuse and make a point, this will take a lot of beating. Roundly booed at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper (15A) could have an unexpected commercial life thanks to its combination of clothes, ghosts and Kristen Stewart. She plays Maureen, a personal shopper and part-time medium – who is stuck in Paris waiting for her brother to send a message. He died three months ago and they had a deal. ‘Whoever died first,’ she explains, ‘would send the other some kind of sign.’ This confused production gets bogged down in diver- sions about art and an endless text conversation between Maureen and an unseen stalker. One minute it’s all a bit Ghostbusters, the next it’s all a bit fetishistic and voyeuristic. Stewart takes it all very seriously, but she can’t stop this all being a long-winded mess. The Iranian film-maker Asghar Farhadi secured the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film for 2011’s A Separation but his latest, The Salesman (12A) isn’t quite in that class. When their Tehran apartment building threatens to collapse, a couple are forced to look for somewhere to live. So when a friend offers them a place, it seems ideal. But then the wife, Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti, left), is attacked while taking a shower and their lives start to unravel. The performances are splendid, but this feels like a thriller being given art-house treatment, with the story unfolding very, very slowly.