An awful man in a seedy saga – but it’s worth sticking with
Red Rocket Cert: 18, 2hrs 10mins ★★★★★ Sideshow
Cert: 15, 1hr 34mins ★★★★★ Master Cheng Cert: PG, 1hr 54mins ★★★★★
From the moment he shouts his name through the rickety front door – ‘It’s Mikey’ – there’s something about the central character in Sean Baker’s seedy new film, Red Rocket, that sets your teeth on edge. It doesn’t take long to find out why.
Turns out Mikey is a fading adult film star who’s had to leave California in a violent hurry and returns – bruised and penniless – to his no-hope home town in Texas, seeking sanctuary with his estranged wife and drug-damaged mother-in-law. Almost inevitably, they’re not the slightest bit pleased to see him.
Mikey – extremely well played by Simon Rex, who himself had a youthful flirtation with the porn industry – still has his good looks and a hustler’s machine-gun charm, but when they fail to convince local employers he quickly reverts to type – selling drugs and becoming obsessed with the pretty salesgirl at the local doughnut store. Might the improbably named Strawberry (Suzanna Son) be his way back into the porn industry? Mikey thinks so, despite the fact the she is only 17.
What follows is a distinctly unedifying story, with the much older man – Mikey must be the wrong side of 40 – out to exploit a starstruck under-age girl both for profit and sexual gratification. But festival favourite Baker – his previous films include Tangerine and The Florida Project – leavens the mix with dark humour, a memorable moment of pathos and echoes of Midnight Cowboy and Boogie Nights, making it worth hanging around to discover whether this ghastly man gets his moral comeuppance in the end.
There are some films where you end up simply marvelling that they ever got made, and Sideshow is one of them. I mean, the moment someone said: ‘We’ve got Les Dennis playing a washed-up stage psychic whose theatre digs get broken into by two incompetent burglars’, weren’t there loud alarm bells going off?
Yes, the Liverpool-born comedian has a long history of occasional acting but he’s hardly known for it…
Sadly, the end result is even worse than expected, hampered by an unpleasantly dated script, a lack of cinematic vision and poor performances all round. It gets one star for the music.
Pleasant surprise of the week is Master Cheng, and even that has a slightly uncomfortable relationship with ethnic stereotyping. But it is Finnish; maybe they see things differently over there.
Set in the forests of the country’s remote north, the familiar-feeling story begins when a handsome Chinese man steps off a bus with his unhappy son. He’s looking for someone – ‘Fongtron’ – but none of the locals has heard of anyone by that name.
Sirkka (Anna-Maija Tuokko) the pretty but unhappy owner of the local diner, takes pity on him and puts him up. Only to discover that he cooks like a dream. It turns out that Cheng (Pak Hon Chu) is a brilliant Chinese chef.
If you liked Chocolat or Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman, you’ll enjoy this. Although it will make you desperately hungry.