UK Film Review Forum

"Past Lives" (Prince Charles Cinema) Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), two deeply connected childhood friends, are wrest apart after Nora's.family emigrates from South Korea. Two decades later, they're reunited in New York for one fateful week as they confront notions of destiny, love, and the choices that make a life, in this heartrending modern romance.   The film, at once strikingly intimate and bracing in its scope, is broken into three parts spanning countries and decades: first with Nora (Moon Seung-ah) as a young girl in Korea, developing an early bond with her best friend, Hae Sung (Leem Seung-min), before she immigrates with her family to Toronto; then, following Nora in her early 20s as she reconnects virtually with Hae Sung; and finally, more than a decade later, when Hae Sung visits Nora, now a playwright married to an author, Arthur (John Magaro), in New York. The film has the instincts and control of an artist with a precise vision of the story's every conflicted, emotional note. The triptych that tracks Nora over the years is, in the most basic sense, about the different parts of her past. But in the film's breadth, sketching out the long arc of her relationships with Hae Sung and Arthur, and the memorable moment when they all eventually come together, the film constructs a deeply resonant and warmly generous meditation on the trajectory of a life. It's about, on a very simple level, what it's like to exist as a person. Or what it's like to choose a life that you live. More specifically, what that choice means for Nora, and what happens when the other choice, her phantom life in a sense, is suddenly staring at her through a computer screen, or across a park in New York City. It's so unfair, the devastating thing about us as people, the fact that we only have one life.   The simple, poignant tragedy in the film is also its animating idea: that choosing one life means losing another. There's a piece of yourself that you leave behind in the place you left, who like Nora, emigrated from Korea at the age of 12 for Toronto, before moving again to New York in her 20s. The moment, and the meaning and history filled in that gaze, bears a striking resemblance to the moment in "Past Lives", when Nora and Hae Sung finally see each other, in person, for the first time in years. It's like seeing a reflection of yourself from a different time. Hae Sung a hologram of a totally different existence, what could have been. The connection that Nora develops, first as a child, then over online messages and Skype sessions in her 20er, and revisits in-person later in life is, structurally, a carbon copy of what happened in Hae Sung's life. For her, the experience, one that is at some level universal for anyone who has simply moved into, say, another city or another phase of life, is especially disorienting and wistful, imbued by a distinctly diasporic longing as an immigrant who left behind her country, culture, and language at a formative age. You're not just seeing this person as they're, but you're seeing them as you remember them, which is in childhood. Nora, in other words, is her own person, rather than an idea sketched out by the binary of which man she chooses.   She's so certain about what she wants. And yet, as Nora's worlds collide between these two men, the third act eventually returns us to the bar scene that opens the film, with renewed context, if also a new, uneasy tension. There aren't any villains. But there are people who are filled with pride and people who are jealous and envious and angry, but they've to fight through those emotions. It would be a mistake, though, to read this dynamic as an early scene of a melodramatic love triangle. If "Past Lives" is a film about adults trying their best to behave like adults, no dramatic professions of love, no teary-eyed fights, no villains, this isn't to say it isn't a film that deals in sweeping emotional sentiment. One person can hold this much love, for her husband, for her childhood first love, and for herself, that's sacred. As for Arthur and Hae Sung, it's about these two men who know her, When Nora talks in her sleep, Arthur tells her at one point, she speaks in Korean, stepping into a version of herself only in her dreams. If Arthur can never know that part of Nora, there's a different, more alienating sense of absence for Nora and Hae Sung. He's here to sort of lift the veil and see that that little girl is gone. Then, Nora goes back, left to right, in the direction from which she came. She will stand there for a moment, and then she's gonna go back home, and every step is going to be a walk towards the future from the past.   You find yourself sitting at a bar sandwiched between two men from vastly different parts of your life. One is your husband, the other you childhood sweetheart. These two men love you in different ways, in two different languages and two different cultures. And you're the only reason why these two men are even talking to each other. There's something almost sci-fi about it. You feel like somebody who can transcend culture and time and space and language. It would be a mistake, though, to read this dynamic as an early scene of a melodramatic love triangle. Instead, The film turns this seed of experience into a quietly gutting film, concerned with something far more emotionally complex, the parts of a self that we lose as we become the people we're, and the ways our lives are shaped by those we love. And yet, the film is just as deeply emotional about the cosmic forces that shape our lives: if there's a bone-deep mourning over past selves, there's also the beauty in human connection, in the fact that a woman can find herself sitting with two surreally disparate parts of her lives, as if bending the rules of time and space. If there are 50 people in the room, you've 50 different reasons each of them have cried, and 50 different ways they’ve seen themselves. In all those ways of watching the film, there's actually no wrong answer, except for the one where you don't feel connected at all.   Written by Gregory Mann

"Ferrari"     It's the summer of 1957. Behind the spectacle of Formula 1, ex-racer Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) is in crisis. Bankruptcy threatens the factory he and his wife, Laura (Penelope Cruz), built from nothing ten years earlier. Their volatile marriage has been battered by the loss of their son, Dino, a year earlier. Ferrari struggles to acknowledge his son Piero (Giuseppe Festinese) with Lina Lardi (Shai lens Woodley). Meanwhile, his drivers’ passion to win pushes them to the edge as they launch into the treacherous 1,000-mile race across Italy, the Mille Miglia.   Passion, ambition, power, the characteristics of Enzo Ferrari racecars came from within the man himself. From the beginning, they began to dominate the competition and fire imaginations worldwide. Born in Modena, Italy, the former racecar driver and team manager formed his own company in 1947. Built with almost no funding, Ferrari’s first car in its sixth race won the Rome Grand Prix. By 1957 the world’s greatest racers were vying for seats in Ferrari’s. Enzo and his wife, Laura, re-invested heavily in the racing division. As a result, by 1957 insolvency was stalking the factory. Meanwhile the tragic death of their only son, Dino, to mluscular dystrophy in 1956 has further shaken their rocky marriage. Dino was their center and future; now gone. Both grieve differently over the devastating loss. Meanwhile, Piero Lardi, Enzo’s son born in 1945 from his liaison with Linda Lardi, now seeks the acknowledgment of his father. Together they constitute a second family of which Laura is unaware until it’s revealed. As crises and revelations converge, Ferrari wagers all on winning one race, the supremely dangerous 1,000-mile race across open roads called the Mille Miglia.   We all know it’s our deadly passion, our terrible joy. But if you get into one of Ferrari cars, and no one is forcing you to take that seat, you get in to win. Enzo Ferrari is one of the most famous, yet inscrutable and complex men of the 20th century. “Ferrari” moves behind the inscrutable image of the iconic Enzo Ferrari. Based on Brock Yates 1991 book 'Enzo Ferrari: The Man, The Car, The Races, The Machine', the film is a character study. There's no equilibrium in his life, and that’s the whole point of Enzo Ferrari, because that’s more like the way life actually is. Ferrari was precise and logical; rational in everything to do with his factory and race team. In the rest of his life he was impulsive, defensive, libidinous, chaotic. The story is not a typical biopic. It seizes on the four months of Enzo Ferrari’s life, in 1957, when all the conflicts and fortunes, the drama of his and Laura and Lina’s lives come into focus. All the hurdles he faced in the mid-1950s, when motorsports was becoming a glamorous, international phenomenon. There's further duality in Ferrari’s life; his wife, Laura, was a woman hardened by struggle, grief, petrified love, and from being a woman involved in a business dominated by men.   An early deal with Ferrari meant that Laura is a 50/50 partner in the Ferrari factory, which became even more complicated when the couple’s personal life became messy and cold, and Laura’s savvy business instincts emerged as one of the few avenues of control she had. The power Laura had over the Ferrari company would anger Enzo, and yet, when his engineering staff once threatened to quit if Laura continued to make production visits at the factory, Enzo fired all of them, the world’s greatest automotive engineers, on the spot, immediately, out of solidarity with Laura. Still, Laura is invested in Enzo’s success and the Ferrari team’s wins on the track. Meanwhile, Enzo met, Lina Lardi, whom he had met in a factory his native Modena, Italy, during World War II, anchored his life. When their son Piero was born in 1945, Lina raised him in Castelvetro. She was a post-war Italian single mother focused on what was right for her child despite his being born out of wedlock at a moment in history, and in a country, that didn’t accept divorce. It's about providing a safe space for her son to feel like he belonged in a world that, during that time, especially in Catholic Italy, told anyone under those circumstances that they didn’t belong.   If Enzo Ferrari’s life was bifurcated into chaos and control, his life with Lina Lardi was a cause for one while embodying a desire for the other. When their affair began during the Second World War, Lardi had been working at a coachbuilding factory in Modena, and as Prime Minister Benito Mussolini’s fascist policies and World War II ravaged Italy, Ferrari and Lardi’s relationship grew. In the disarray of post-war Italy and the hardships that followed, Lardi raised their son, Piero. Lina is a woman at the crossroads of two lives that existed outside of her own, and she was a bit helpless in that situation; all Lina could do was show support and love for her son and the man that she loved. In Lina’s most forthright moment in the film, she confronts Enzo on his hesitancy to acknowledge Piero with his last name (due to Laura’s legal maneuvers and Italian cultural considerations, Piero was not able to be acknowledged as a member of the Ferrari family until after Laura’s death in 1978). The complexities and emotions involved were tumultuous, but Lina’s view is that what matters most is what’s best for Piero, and that has loved by Enzo as his son.   The difficulty of having two families, and two homes, one filled with grief over the loss of a son who hadn’t lived past the age of 24, the other focused on making a 12-year-old boy’s life free from pain and want, crashes into Enzo Ferrari’s pursuit of engineering perfection. He sees all too clearly the risk of losing all he’s built, either to companies like Fiat and Ford who were looking to buy him out, or through personal issues that threatened to overtake his life’s work. In 1957, Ferrari was going broke; the company’s passenger car sales had dwindled as competitors began breaking his cars speed records, making it harder to secure funding. All of that fueled Ferrari’s competitive nature even more. Ferrari would take a huge gamble with the fortunes of his company by entering the 1957 Mille Miglia, the famous 1,000-mile, open-road endurance race through Italy that had begun in 1927. Thirty years after its inaugural race, it was about to collide with a form of blind ambition Ferrari isn’t ready to be accountable for. His aim, going into this dangerous race, is to put together a multigenerational, flashy driving team that would attract financing to keep the Ferrari factory in business, and which would allow Ferrari to maintain control. But the cost would be high.   Moving to the racetrack, chief among the team of drivers surrounding Enzo Ferrari would be Alfonso de Portago (Gabriel Leone), whose horrific crash in the final stretch of Italy’s Mille Miglia, which killed de Portago and nine spectators, would for decades overshadow the legacy of the race and be part of the reason it ended in 1957. Eugenio Castellotti (Marino Franchitti) dies while attempting to reclaim Ferrari’s speed record from Maserati. Sound is also crucial in the de Portago crash sequence. At the moment of impact, the sound almost disappears, leaving a dull, closed-ear vibe to the sounds that follow. The concept is to have the impact noises as the car is plowing into the pole and through the crowd diminish over time. Piero began working with his father in the late 1960s and collaborated with the company’s Formula One teams, as well as in the concept and production process, and other aspects of production. When Enzo Ferrari died in 1988, Piero inherited his father’s stake in the company. Piero served as president of the Ferrari company until 2015.   There's the world of Enzo’s more intimate, domestic life, at home with Laura or in the countryside with Lina, and then there's the world of racing. The former would be a more classically composed aesthetic, while the latter would be filled with visceral, dynamic energy often through handheld camerawork. Italian Renaissance painting is so informed by architecture and the natural light that Italian architecture of that period lends to a space. It’s all this single-source, directional lighting from the windows. As for the color palette, the yellows, oranges, pale greens and terracotta/ochre hues of Northern Italy set the template. The concept is to slash through that palette with the bright, primary red of the cars, signifying aggression and energy in the face of the more austere aesthetic elsewhere in the film. The cars are kinetic, they’re full of agitation. The film wants to show the experience of what it's to drive one of those cars and to be in a tense race, trying to master the forces. It's, by design, a counterpoint to the formality of the dramatic, dialogue-filled scenes. There are incredibly powerful human moments, then we’re roaring around Italy with drivers flirting with death. In so many places around the world, it’s still a very similar situation, working from the shadows and not being acknowledged for what they do, not being valued. It’s as if youve mild chronic pain, only it’s emotional, but it's important for us to see that represented in many ways, but especially physically. Life is asymmetrical. Life is messy. Life is filled with chaos.   Written by Gregory Mann  

“Poor Things”     “Poor Things” in the fantastical evolution of Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a young woman brought back to life from the brink of death by the brilliant and unorthodox daring scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Under Baxter’s protection, Bella is eager to learn. Hungry for the worldliness she's lacking, Bella runs off with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a slick and debauched lawyer, on a whirlwind adventure across the continents. Free from the prejudices of her times, Bella grows steadfast in her purpose to stand for equality and liberation.   At the beginning of the film, Bella is a prisoner in the house and wears very Victorian looking blouses, but never a complete outfit. Bella doesn’t have any shame or trauma, or even a backstory. She's not raised by a society that's putting these confines on women. Bella draws things from the men she meets, from the women she meets, from the environment she's in, from what she's eating. Her character has never been told that there’s anything wrong with enjoying sex or the freedom to do whatever she wants when she wants. She's like a sponge. From being trapped at home, she goes to Lisbon on a romantic voyage with her lover. On the ship, she's met with a constant desire to escape. Then Alexandria are her younger years, where she sees the world as a messed-up place. Paris is her exploration of sexuality, where she pushes herself as far as she can before she returns home. Bella’s representation of woman sexuality is more in line with today’s landscape rather than thirty years ago. She's able to explore sex without feelings of guilt, which makes her a modern heroine. It feels like an unlocking and acceptance of what it's to be a woman and to be brave and free. Socially, you're so wired to think, ‘do people like me? She's not thinking about that.   Alongside themes of sexuality and social constraints comes the exploration of the male character's need to control Bella. Dr. Godwin Baxter is a brilliant, traumatized scientist, and a lonely man who wants to push his science and his art as far as it can go without a care for society’s rules. Baxter has his own journey as well. He starts out trying to possess her in a way, to parent her in the only way he's learned through his father. But you see that he kind of matures through his interaction with her. And eventually he comes to understand that he needs to let go and let her experience the world, and he's really supportive. Baxter also comes from an experiment, and he’s quite literally scarred by what his father has done to him. When Baxter brings Bella back to life, she becomes more than just an experiment to him, their relationship is not easily defined. Baxter hasn’t loved before, but he accidentally loves Bella, cares for her deeply and sees something of himself in her. There's an intelligence, curiosity and aliveness in Bella that he maybe wishes he could explore in himself. They're father and daughter, scientist and experiment, and even soul mates in a way, though not in a romantic or exploitative way. It’s not a simple relationship to categorize. The dynamic is being worked out over the course of the film through Bella’s discoveries. At a certain point, Baxter realizes she has to go out into the world, but he’s selfish and needs to go to a higher love.   Their relationship reaches a crisis point when Bella decides to leave home with Duncan Wedderburn. Duncan embodies toxic masculinity. He’s controlling, insecure and has a deep alpha male mentality. When Bella decides to leave London with Duncan Wedderburn and travel to Lisbon, she leaves with the mind and outlook of a young girl. Lisbon is her first time out in the world, and she wants to consume and experience everything, revealing in all the possibilities it has to offer. The danger with Duncan is that he just come across as a cad. As a ladies man who has been with many women, when he unexpectedly falls in love with Bella, it ultimately destroys him. She’s the perfect woman for him if he would just let her be herself. She’s rebellious, she’s game, and she makes him feel something, but his need to control kills the relationship. Under every raging narcissist is a really broken, vulnerable person, and Bella just cracks him open.   A bittersweet catalyst in Baxter and Bella’s relation's hip is the introduction of his student, Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef). Max is a poor-disheveled student who's clearly in awe of his professor, who has offered him an opportunity he can’t refuse. He has a gentle and friendly energy, but we also see an edge of darkness that he wants to let go. Part of the draw for Max is that he has lived a very sheltered life, and Bella seems safe, and very pure for obvious reasons. He’s a character that grows and whose moral compass shifts as he encounters Baxter and Bella. There's a rawness about Bella which attracts Max, she really speaks to something that any person is probably trying to regain. She's a modern woman in this time, and she gets to retain that human curiosity that we all had at a young age. It really shows the multitude of what is thrown at women from a young age. Bella gets to experience that from a different vantage point and then pick it apart and demolish it.   Harry Astley (Jerrod Carmichael) is someone that Bella meets at a key point in her journey on the ship. So far, she thinks that people are good, which comes from a place of privilege. Harry broadens the scope of the world. He shows her poverty that she didn’t know existed in a way that's juxtaposed to the very wealthy as a spectator sport. Harry is a cynic, through his life and career, his viewpoint has narrowed, which is why the scenes with Bella work so well; the juxtaposition of her naivety to his prejudices. When he takes Bella to Alexandria, she's confronted for the first time by mankind’s inhumanity to poverty. When he takes her to Alexandria, her soul shatters and her entire life changes. It's her first trauma and leads to some very important decisions in her life. Bella’s eyes are opened to the monstrous part of society when Harry takes her to Alexandria, and she sees the impoverished slum dwellers. This is the only time we see Bella as a representative of her social class and as an upper-class woman. There are really souls in the world that are pure and nonjudgmental, and you oscillate between thinking that they’re naïve and also wishing that you could have that freedom.   Bella is fascinated by Martha Von Kurtzroc (Hanna Schygulla) when she meets her on the cruise ship. She’s an older woman who's dressed eccentrically for the time and is very independent, so Bella is inspired by her instantly. Martha is a Women’s Libber and emancipated. She’s wealthy and can afford to have certain thoughts and ideologies because she’s never been dependent on a man. In Paris, Bella reaches a pinnacle for her sexual and intellectual development. It all comes together there in a way, she truly decides on how to see the world and how she wants to live in it. Swiney (Kathryn Hunter) is outrageous and cruel. On the face of it, she’s the horrid Madame of the Brothel, but then she falls for Bella, and she wants to possess this extraordinary creature. With Swiney’s character, Bella ultimately understands that it’s not just men who try to control her. With the profession she works in and the assortment of characters that have come through her doors, Swiney assumes that she has seen every facet of womankind. When Bella shows up on her doorstep, it astonishes her. She’s amazed by this, kind of naïve genius.   After Bella returns home and starts to settle back and relax into this world — and the happiness of her existence, Alfred Blessington (Christopher Abbot) suddenly appears, and her whole backstory comes to surface. He’s a bit of a cunt, generally, but he still has a heart somewhere deep down, shrouded under a bunch of ice. He's very possessive in some ways, but he's been through war and has a lot of PTSD. While Alfie knows Bella from her former existence, he's, ultimately, seeing her for the first time. It's probably quite jarring for Alfred because he's catching her when she's become a fully formed adult again. To him, he probably actually believes this is her, and it's some farce, there's a lot of denial happening. His character admits that their relationship had not been an ordinary one. It feels like they probably had this sort of mischievous, very combative, but fiery relationship in the past.   “Poor Things” deals with the patriarchal tension through Bella’s eyes. Bella is not only the protagonist but also the foil for the male characters. It's her ability to remain true to her humanity and to use her experiences to discover a sense of purpose that makes her admirable. Her zest for life encapsulates the curiosity that humans possess and crave new life experiences. It's about the development and liberation of a woman who grows up in a very repressive male society. That’s a lot of the source of the comedy because her relationships with the male characters are very frank and quite exposing of the fear men have of women. The male characters are trying to control Bella in their own various ways, and she doesn’t even entertain it. She's just too autonomous. The film explores men’s views of women and the lens that they're put under, and how men believe women are there to serve them.   What would a woman be, if she were able to start from scratch? Alasdair Gray’s novel is immediately something very visually striking and complex, the themes, the humor, and the complexity of its characters and language. The book is packed with ideas about gender, identity, and even Scottish nationalism. You’re in this incredibly rich philosophical and political world, all while being hilarious. It's a story about a woman’s freedom in society. To imagine a world where your mind isn’t conditioned by growing up and being taught to be a certain way. But it's also a version of the Frankenstein story, inverting the classic story by making the monster’ a very perceptive, beautiful woman, and her love interests potential monsters. While the book is told from numerous points of view, the script gives Bella the central one. It’s Bella’s coming-of-age story, and it lives in a dystopian version of a Merchant Ivory film, with the idea of a grand tour. The script pulls on different mythologies and story tropes. The story is grotesque and visceral.   There's a different mentality around sex in Europe versus America. We can watch so much violence and pain inflicted on people in a mass way in America, but nudity and sexuality are shocking to us. With the liberation of social constraints, also comes the return to a child-like wonder of the world. It’s that draw to purity, to something that hasn’t been tarnished. A wish to possess something that maybe reminds us of whom we used to be and try and regain that innocence in ourselves. We're very cognizant of the sexual politics and how that relates to the present day. There are always those people in society that don’t have the look of the time. You could walk down the street now and see someone who looks like they’ve come straight from the 70s. We're exploring who those people might have been, and what if they thought differently? When reading about women in the Victorian times, she noticed it was often much more about what rules they should follow. Bella has no shackles on her, making her a wonderful character to watch and the perfect example of pushing back against what was expected in Victorian England.   “Poor Things” comes at a time that might offer some insight into the problems currently faced around the world. The times that we live in right now can feel particularly chaotic. Sometimes you want to look back in history and learn lessons from the past. This is a political film, and we've to recognize the feminist and socialist aspects. The endeavor of the novel and the film is to make the world a better place by not accepting the evils we've come to regard as normal.   Written by Gregory Mann