Part 1
One of the strands of films shown at the London Film Festival was entitled Laugh. I thought if I watched the films in it I might laugh; was I wrong to come to that conclusion? There were seventeen items in this strand of which I managed to see thirteen. The laughs were very, very few. There were some films with no laughs at all. If I’d read the over-enthusiastic blurb and invited some friends out to watch one of them in the evening I would have been very disappointed and felt I should have handed out refunds. Words like witty and funny are bandied around in the Festival catalogue. The Trade Descriptions people should be involved.
Here’s part one of what I managed to see, with each film’s laugh quotient (LQ) out of 10.
Men and Chicken
LQ – 0
An unpleasant film starring Mads Mikkelsen. After their father’s death two extremely socially inept brothers discover he had not been their actual biological father. They head off to the island of Ork to investigate their real father. Here they find more brothers living alone, unwanted and deformed in a decrepit mansion, along with revolting secrets from their history. Comedy in Men and Chicken is missing almost completely, though there are occasional attempts at broad slapstick that don’t fit with the rest of the film. The brothers’ appearance is calculated to repel. The colours are muted and attractive but everything else is either slightly, or a lot more than slightly, horrid. A coda tries to skew the film’s meaning into love everyone however unusual. But the minutes before have been a festival of distaste and repetitive unpleasant behaviour. Not recommended even if you are given a free ticket.
21 Nights with Pattie
LQ – 1
Another poorly chosen film in the laugh strand. This time the transgressive subject matter is necrophilia. Isabelle Carré plays Caroline, a forty something women who has travelled to the south of France for her estranged mothers funeral. It turns out her mother owned a big house with an attractive outdoor eating area which is soon full of the peculiar neighbours.
The light and scenery of the French hilltop village is attractive, but the story quickly stalls. Before the funeral the mother’s corpse disappears. No one knows who took it. It frankly looks impossible that anyone could have taken it, given all the people around. Nevertheless it happens, although the how, why and who doesn’t really matter. Instead the film wends onwards through much talk of the locals’ sex lives and silly ‘ghost’ shots. Then an old friend of the dead mother arrives. Is he actually Caroline’s father? Does anyone care? This is archetypal film festival fare. Slow, unnecessary, pleasantly shot with an unpleasant undercurrent.
Latin Lover
LQ – 0
No one laughed at all in the screening of Latin Lover that I saw. The film’s name is entirely literal, the story being based around the extended family of a philandering Italian actor. Ten years after Saverio Crispo’s death his ex-wives, lovers and daughters meet up for a reunion. Cue – as you would expect – tensions and revelations.
It starts with a sense of anticipation and the hope that things might be amusing. Crispo is quickly introduced in a medley of clips from the many genres of films he starred in. Briefly we see him dancing in musicals, pondering in New Wave black and white and full of action in a gritty ’70s urban drama. He even had a Swedish existentialist phase. Later one scene takes on a Spaghetti Western style and if the film had slipped into more such cinematic pastiches it may have worked better. As it is Latin Lover is a lot of women (whose names all begin with S to add to the difficulty in keeping them separate) bickering. There are some nice views of an Italian palazzo and a few scenes aim for humour, but they don’t hit the target. Latin Lover demonstrates the difficulties left by broken relationships for the next, innocent generation but has no place in a film festival strand called Laugh.
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