It’s very late. My cousin says, ‘Choose a film to fall asleep on the couch.’ I am exhausted, I am sure it won’t be a problem to find a soporific element in whatever will be put in from of my eyes. But when I start browsing Mubi’s library in search for our title, and hope, I spot Dogman and I realise we actually have a chance to see a film and stay awake all through.
As the end credits roll, we slowly regain awareness of each other’s presence while our gaze is still locked on the screen. We are unable to move or blink or speak. No legal dosage of any substance would have given us the same effect, the exact same immobilising experience of my first watch, when I recorded my fresh reactions as follows.
I leave the theatre shaken. I sink hunched and uncomfortable into a velvet armchair at the bar of the Curzon Soho. It is not a prosaic lyricism. I am truly disturbed. I wonder if it shows, ambiguously at ease with the idea it could be so. A gentleman in tweed takes a seat at my table and orders a glass of whisky. I could ask him, but I leave him to a book he’s just extracted with no intent from his bag and the envied solitude of the shortsighted. Maybe it’s the turmoil of my recent state of mind, maybe I’ve got too much caffeine in my blood, or not enough sugar. In fact, I’m hungry. Dogman punched me in a way that cinema rarely has. What to do, stay here for a while, lick my wounds, wash them with the disinfectant that burns the most.
Five years on, watching it with fragmented yet vivid memories, I am immediately enthralled by how Matteo Garrone manages to pin his audience to the seat from the very first shot. Dogman’s opening scene is, in fact, a statement. Its unnerving ambiguity resolves into a sweet moment between man and animal, but the message is delivered—stay assured, there will be blood. As soon as Simone is introduced our fate becomes clear, and is nonetheless frightening. Edoardo Pesce is even more impressive in his role as an uncontrollable thug than Marcello Fonte is in delivering the complexity of his—a dog lover, a coward, a caring father, a criminal?
If the mise en scène of the film strikes as being so distinctive, much credit must be given to the incredible filming locations. The no-place and no-time that frames so sharply the narrative, its almost surreal sense of dystopian misery, only makes the psychological tension more palpable, violent, even toxic.
Among the metaphoric hints nested within the suffocating cascade of events, I am always fascinated by the scene in the picturesque workshop where Marcello gets the coke. There is a particularly disturbing obtuseness in Simone’s brutality as he bursts into the beautiful space, but also an uncomfortable meaning behind the masks the dealers craft as skilled artisans.
Along with those of Gomorra and L’imbalsamatore, these are the worlds and tones and creatures Matteo Garrone is a master in telling us about.
Despite the many characters and relative subplots, Peterloo is a masterwork of striking simplicity and linearity. Mike Leigh finds under layers of dust a shameful piece of history forgotten in the attic, and tells it with a combined sense of stage austerity and epic scale.
The enigmatic background of the opening credits, somehow reminded me of the minimalist beauty of nature as captured in an Apichatpong Weerasethakul film—an almost abstract stillness at once grim and bucolic, that immediately sets the tone of the entire film. Moments later we experience the desolation on the battlefield of Waterloo through the eyes of a bewildered and traumatized bugler. There are screams, explosions, smoke, and corps, and yet it feels so very intimate and surreal—all the more as the young soldier randomly plays his sorrowful trumpet, quite off tune. It is an extremely powerful sight that, jarring with the praise with which Wellington will be shortly saluted, silently foretells the tragic epilogue.
In another fantastic sequence, Dorothy Atkinson sings with sombre optimism a touching ballad about the times getting hard. ‘For the sun it will shine, on the weavers again, for weaving of late, has been eclipsed a main.’ All the sound effects go suddenly quiet making her words even more piercing. From under the brick arches of a lower class market, their echo will resound all the way to the final stomach-churning scene—and beyond.
A brutal memento of the human political meannesses, Peterloo is an ever timely story that plants a heavy seed in the viewer’s mind.
In a decade—it won’t be more as nothing ever lasts longer—in which offences are read everywhere except where they really are, Girl could have not but ignited an interesting debate. To have raised a fuss like cinema rarely does in our century and aroused the susceptibility of the most conformist souls in different ways, is a film that doesn’t simply delve into the difficulty of accepting oneself, but into the literal impossibility of recognising oneself into a mirror. Girl is about different forms of obsession and the physical synergy their clashing can dangerously lead to.
Lukas Dhont’s surprising debut is a wonderful story of private courage that doesn’t mean to judge or teach. Whoever saw not more than an overly anatomical portrayal of a category, that’s exactly where they proved their incapability to see anything else than that, a category. But Girl takes us beyond all that, and it does with the red eyes of a father, the embrace of a demanding guide, and the breath of a child trying to wake us up. Nothing but the silent power of life.
