Isabella Rossellini | Bouquets & Brickbats

11/09/24

Amazon Prime

We’re in Tuscany, some time in the 1980s. Dishevelled Englishman Arthur (Josh O’Connor) is sensitive, clever, sweet and engaging. He’s also a grave robber, recently released from an Italian prison and about to head right back to his life of crime.

First though, he has an important visit to make – to the grand but crumbling estate that is home to the aged Flora (Isabella Rossellini). Despite her gaggle of adult daughters’ cacophonous protestations, Flora is Arthur’s biggest champion. Years back, when he was a respectable archaeologist, he was in love with her other daughter, Beniamina (Yile Yara Vianello), now deceased. The bereaved duo cling to their mutual connection.

In fact, Arthur’s yearning for Beniamina is so intense that it allows him to transcend the barriers between past and present. With a dowsing rod, he can pinpoint the long-lost tombs of the Estruscan dead with unerring accuracy. He’s the natural leader of this band of thieves.

The moral questions raised are unsettling. Stealing trinkets from corpses seems inherently wrong, but Arthur and his troubadour friends are homeless, living in poverty. What good are treasures lying in the ground? What’s wrong with living people using them to earn a crust? The rich buyers – whom we glimpse at an exclusive auction – will never go to jail, but they’re the ones profiteering from the poor men’s crimes, turning a blind eye to the items’ provenance. After all, in his old profession, Arthur’s findings were deemed legitimate and sold to museums. Is there really any difference?

But then Arthur begins to fall for Italia (Carol Duarte), Flora’s singing-student-slash-maid. The future is beckoning. Can he stop looking back?

Alice Rohrwacher’s film is a panoply of oxymorons: a firmly realistic supernatural tale; bleakly comic; slow and exciting. Driven entirely by its own logic, there are surprises at every turn, but they all make sense within the story. The Tuscan landscape is beautifully evoked by cinematographer Hélène Louvart, and there’s an unnerving folksy element, caught in the songs and celebrations of the tomb raiders.

But it’s O’Connor’s fine central performance that really makes La Chimera. He embodies the quiet desperation the title connotes, faithful to his impossible quest.

4.1 stars

Susan Singfield

06/03/24

Netflix

Adam Sandler. There, I said it.

Sandler is, of course, best known for his comedies, though these can most politely be described as ‘variable’. More often than not, they seem like an elaborate excuse for Sandler to team up with a bunch of mates and improvise something that feels like it has been literally thrown together. And then, every now and again, out of the blue, he decides to star in something more substantial for a quality director. I’m thinking of the likes of Punch Drunk Love, which he made with Paul Thomas Anderson, and the stone cold masterpiece Uncut Gems, written and directed by the Safdie Brothers, which possibly qualifies as the most stressful couple of hours I’ve spent in the cinema.

Spaceman, directed by Johan Renck and adapted by Colby Day (from a novel by Jaroslav Kalfar), is not in the same league as those two films and yet it’s a sizeable step up from Sandler’s usual offerings, a slow-moving, thoughtful allegory about the distance that can exist between a man and his wife, even when they are physically together.

The Spaceman of the title is Jakub, a Czech cosmonaut, currently on a six-month mission to visit (and take samples from) the mysterious Cloud of Chopra, somewhere beyond Neptune. At home, his pregnant wife, Lenka (Carey Mulligan), is falling out of love with him, because he’s been distant in so many ways -even before he set off on his current voyage.

Jakub is nonplussed to discover that his regular calls to Lenka are going unanswered. He’s even more bewildered to learn that he has a stowaway aboard his spaceship – a huge alien spider, who can talk and is memorably voiced by Paul Dano. (Arachnophobes, take note: this film may not be for you!)

Most movies of this kind would pitch the alien as a voracious predator, with no higher motive than to chow down on the spaceship’s other occupant, but this creature (whom Jakub names Hanûs) turns out to be a gentle and communicative beast, who soon takes on the role of a kind of life coach, offering Jakub advice about all manner of things, including his failing marriage. It’s the sheer unexpectedness of this approach that grabs me most. As the mission steadily unfolds, we begin to learn more about the event that caused the rift between Jakub and Lenka. Can it ever be repaired?

Spaceman won’t be for everyone. For one thing, it moves at a glacial pace, Jakub’s journey interspersed with flashbacks to his courtship of Lenka and occasional cutaways to her present day conversations with her mother, Zdena (Lena Olin). There’s a lot of footage of the mysterious Cloud of Chopra, which – though pleasant enough to look at – soon starts to feel suspiciously like filler.

I will also confess to being initially confused by the ending, but with a little thought it soon makes perfect sense. Overall, Spaceman is an interesting little film with a fascinating premise. Though flawed, it’s light years ahead of Sandler’s customary output.

3.6 stars

Philip Caveney