Suspiria

Challengers

21/04/24

Cineworld, Edinburgh

Challengers

I’m a huge tennis fan, but I’d be hard pushed to think of a non-documentary film that has ever come close to capturing the verve and excitement of the game. Until now. Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers manages to capture the gladiatorial nature of the sport and at the same time interweaves it with a stylish, sexy drama, which centres on three players and their complicated relationships. Guadagnino is a gifted filmmaker with both Call Me By Your Name and Bones and All as brilliant examples of the art. (I’ve just about forgiven him for his pretentious remake of Dario Argento’s Suspiria.)

The film opens midway through an intense tennis final between Art Donaldson (Mike Faist)  and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), who are playing under the baleful gaze of Art’s coach – and wife – Tashi Duncan (Zendaya). Art has been a top player but his star is waning; he’s still got the sponsorship deals earning him big money but he’s lost his mojo so, in a desperate attempt to rekindle his ambition, Tasha – who’s only ever really been motivated by her own thwarted obsession with tennis – persuades him to enter an open tournament, feeling that playing a series of lower seeds will be good for his confidence. Patrick is doing rather less well financially, living hand to mouth and at one point reduced to sleeping in his car – but he is playing to win.

From this point, the film flashes effortlessly back to thirteen years earlier, when the two young men, best friends since their first day at boarding school, encounter Tashi, the player everyone’s talking about. Both of them fall head over heels in lust with her and, in a playful scene in the men’s shared hotel room, Tashi announces that she will sleep with whoever wins the match when the two of them play tennis tomorrow…

It would be a crime to reveal much more about the plot from this point, but suffice to say that it takes some pretty labyrinthine twists and turns as it moves forwards and backwards in time, taking in everything that happens along the way.

There are strong performances from the three leads – nobody else gets much of a look-in – and while the story has some strong sexual content, it’s never allowed to feel prurient. It’s clear from the outset that Tasha is the main motivator in this three-way entanglement and she’s not about to be manipulated by anybody. 

Justin Kuritzke’s script is cleverly nuanced and sometimes wickedly funny, while Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have created an atypical electronic score, one so propulsive that I find my feet tapping along to the urgent rhythms. For the most part it works brilliantly, though I do feel it’s occasionally overused. A special mention must go to the inventive cinematography of Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, particularly in the climactic stages of the final tennis match, which at one point has the camera careering madly back and forth across the court as though its been glued to a tennis ball.

Challengers is a grown up, slick and inventive feature, which is the work of a director at (ahem) the top of his game, set and match. 

4.6 stars

Philip Caveney

The Empire Podcast

19/09/19

Cameo Cinema, Edinburgh

Can we review a podcast? Well, we reviewed No Such Thing As a Fish, didn’t we? And, nobody complained about that. Besides, me and Empire, we have some history…

The first issue of Empire came out in July 1989 and I purchased a copy. It wasn’t a particularly auspicious month to launch a movie magazine. The featured film was, if memory serves correctly, Great Balls of Fire starring Dennis Quaid and Winona Ryder. This isn’t a film that lingers long in the memory, nor one that’s likely to feature in The Criterion Collection, but nonetheless, I liked what I read in the magazine and, being the absolute obsessive that I am, I’ve purchased every single copy published since then. I’ve been reading it for more than thirty years, Indeed, anyone who possesses a copy of  issue 100 will find a picture of yours truly, grinning like an idiot, dressed in my grey Empire T-shirt (which I still own) and proudly showing off my collection of one hundred pristine magazines.

Somewhere back down the years (probably around the time when a copy started taking a bit less than three hours to download), I switched to a digital edition and I now read Empire from cover-to-cover on my iPad. The podcast, a relatively recent development, is something I listen to on my daily visits to the gym. Consequently, I know things about these people. I know, for instance, that Chris Hewitt’s greatest shame is giving a 5 star review to Attack of the Clones…

So imagine my delight when I hear that the regular team of Chris (resident clown-prince), Helen O’ Hara (resident sage), James Dyer (resident grumpy-git) and Terri White (resident snappy dresser and editor-in-chief) are coming to Edinburgh – and, moreover, that they will be hosting their podcast at our beloved Cameo Cinema, less than a ten minute stroll from Caveney-Singfield Towers. Are we going to buy tickets? Are bears Catholics? Does the pope shit in the woods?

And sure enough, here we are. The Cameo is completely sold out, Chris is performing his rendition of Call Me By Your Name (as requested by yours truly via Twitter) and Scottish actor Jack Lowden is explaining why his greatest ambition is to play a character a foot shorter than his actual height. I even get to ask the team a question (“Which film would you nominate as the biggest ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ contender of recent years?”). Chris goes for Suspiria (agreed!), Terri chooses Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (agreed!), Helen opts for La La Land (Susan definitely agrees!) and James chooses… The Shape of Water (really don’t agree, but I did warn you he can be a curmudgeon).

Afterwards, there’s time to score a Bangily Bang! T-shirt and get a photograph with the team in the bar. And I reflect that podcasts really are weird things because, when you hear those familiar voices over and over, you start to feel that you are friends with these people, that you know them intimately – and, of course you don’t, and surely never will.

But I enjoyed their visit to Edinburgh and I’m already looking forward to getting on the old crosstrainer and listening back to that recording…

4.5 stars

Philip Caveney

 

Suspiria

 

18/11/18

After the sublime Call Me By Your Name, director Luca Guadagnino could probably have made pretty much any film he wanted to. For some reason, he’s landed on a remake of Dario Argento’s 1977 giallo masterpiece, Suspiria. This is starting to feel like a trend. After Steve McQueen’s recent reinterpretation of Lynda La Plante’s Widows, I wonder what we can expect next? Guillermo Del Toro’s On the Buses, perhaps?

I’ll admit that I’ve long had a soft spot for the original Suspiria. I first saw it at a University film society in the early 1980s. (I wasn’t even a student there, but they had the full uncensored cut, so naturally I inveigled my way in!) I had, I suppose, been expecting just another slice n’ dicer and was quite blown away by what I saw on the screen. To me, it was an almost overwhelming onslaught of vibrant colour, copious bloodshed and histrionic terror, quite unlike any other horror movie I’d ever seen. One thing it most certainly wasn’t was pretentious. Sadly, I can’t say the same about this film, which is long and rambling and only occasionally fizzes into enough life to fully command my attention. It feels as though it’s a long-cherished dream project for Guadagnino, and the problem with such an undertaking is that, while the director knows exactly what he’s trying to say at any given moment, the audience is not always quite so lucky.

The story is broken up into six acts, and is set in a divided Germany in 1977, where the news is all about the the Baader-Meinhoff separatists and their exploits in Entebbe. Patricia (Chloe Grace Moretz), a student at a prestigious dance academy in West Berlin, comes seeking the help of elderly (and suspiciously latex-faced) psychiatrist Dr Joseph Klemperer, before running off into the night, leaving her journal for Klemperer to read. We then meet Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson), who duly arrives at the self-same dance academy, eagerly looking to enrol. At her audition, she manages to catch the eye of influential dance tutor, Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton), but not everything here is as it appears…

While Guadagnino certainly doesn’t stint on the bloodletting and the nudity, he does attempt to intellectualise what was once a very straightforward tale of witchcraft and demonic possession, pulling in strands of other – seemingly disparate – stories,  with the result that they feel clumsily crowbarred into the proceedings. There’s the aforementioned Red Army Faction, and also Dr Klemperer’s tragic history during the Second World War, which, if nothing else, gives Suspiria’s original star, Jessica Harper, a brief cameo. And sadly, the only dancing in evidence seems to consist of people writhing around on the floor without recourse to any music.

Of course, this being a Luca Guadagnino film, it’s not a total loss –  there’s a decent sense of foreboding throughout and some truly jarring bits of body horror – but with a punishing running time of two hours and thirty two minutes, this one is only for the hardiest viewers and those, like me, who can’t resist seeing how a brilliant original has been reinterpreted.

I have to say, my major feeling here is one of profound disappointment.

3 stars

Philip Caveney