This Oscar contender will make your heart soar
There will be stiff competition in the documentary category at next month’s Oscars. Films about vulcanologists, Ukrainian orphans, Putin opponent Alexei Navalny, and photographer Nan Goldin’s crusade against the Sackler family are on the shortlist with a rare and beautiful study from India. With subtlety and restraint, All That Breathes (Sky Documentaries) portrays two brothers who have made it their life’s work to care for Delhi’s wounded and ailing black kites.
Put like that, it hardly sounds like a frontrunner. It doesn’t trade in charisma and big wow moments, nor does it overtly tug at the heart strings. Instead Shaunak Sen’s film builds, layer upon layer, a story of quiet, selfless heroism couched as a plea for humanity to budge up and make room for other species, even the rats we see marauding in the opening images. “Man is the loneliest animal,” says one of the brothers, “trapped by speciesistic difference. It’s like a jail.”
Nadeem and Saud, it emerges in an obliquely constructed set of tableaux, are running a cottage hospital for wounded kites who fall out of the sky. Those polluted skies are crowded, especially over the largest rubbish tip on the planet which, without thousands of scavenging urbanised kites, would tower even higher.
The basement hospital, with a recovery ward on the roof, is also the cluttered and humble home to Saud’s family. The street frequently floods. In overheard snatches of news we hear the city broil with political fervour, much of it directed against Muslims. The brothers fear expulsion.
Eventually, because the film has to have an ending, one of them voluntarily goes abroad to study and it’s implied, a little bogusly, that the telepathic link between the brothers has been cut. But this is to suggest the film has a plot. It’s more of a feature-length appeal, framed as an arthouse meditation with slow tracking shots across their ramshackle premises and extreme close-ups of Delhi’s insect-infested puddles.
The photography of the birds is a world away from what we’re used to in natural history films. There’s no anthropomorphising, no sentimentalising, no commentary other than from the brothers. These birds are utterly other, while their rescuers represent the best of us. “Your work is truly noble,” says their meat supplier. Their reward will probably be in Heaven, though Sundance and Cannes have already conferred gongs. If, against the odds, the Academy does so too, it will be richly deserved. Jasper Rees
Penn Badgley: crazy name, crazy guy. You (Netflix), the glossy thriller series he produces and stars in, is even crazier. It’s soapy, schlocky and preposterously plotted. The hammy dialogue verges on self-parody. Yet by sheer force of charisma and a salesman’s chutzpah, Badgley somehow makes it addictively watchable. This daft drama is played with such a straight face that it becomes wildly entertaining.
As this fourth series begins, serial killer Joe Goldberg (Badgley) has fled California, where he killed his wife, burned down their house and left his infant son with a neighbour. As you do. Worryingly for us Britons, he’s moved to London, masquerading as a literature professor. This cunning disguise involves wearing tweed jackets and occasionally quoting Edgar Allen Poe.
He’s soon sucked into a clique of “aristo-brat” socialites, reminiscent of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. Or, indeed Badgley’s previous show, Gossip Girl. Numbed by drink and drugs, these nepo-babies are spoilt, snobbish and downright insufferable. A murderer dubbed “the ‘Eat the Rich’ killer” starts bumping them off and Joe finds himself framed by an unknown foe who knows his true identity and past crimes. The hunter becomes the hunted in a self-referential whodunit packed with plot twists and tense set pieces.
The action unfolds in a Richard Curtis-fied version of London: the way that Joe can turn a corner in east London and suddenly be in Piccadilly will give geographical pedants conniptions. But barbed wit means You gets away with such implausibilities and the odd tasteless flourish. The UK setting also means home-grown actors joining the cast, among them Charlotte Ritchie (Ghosts, Call the Midwife) and craggy veteran Sean Pertwee, growling Cockney-isms.
This 10-part season drops in two halves. Five episodes stream from today, followed by five more (including Badgley’s directorial debut) on March 9. I don’t usually agree with the notion of “guilty pleasures” but if they do exist, this ludicrously enjoyable romp is certainly one. Michael Hogan
All That Breathes ★★★★ You ★★★