Film reviews round-up: Call Me By Your Name, Grace Jones documentary Bloodlight And Bami

Call Me By Your Name (15)

★★★★★

Dir. Luca Guadagnino, 132 mins, starring: Armie Hammer, Timothée Chalamet, Michael Stuhlbarg, Amira Casar, Esther Garrel, Victoire Du Bois

Coming of age films set over long, lazy summers constitute a mini-genre in their own right. Few, though, have the freshness or poignancy of Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name. Based on André Aciman’s 2007 novel, it is an account of a gay affair between a teenage boy and a twentysomething graduate student. What is surprising here is the complete lack of guilt and recrimination. This is not one of those movies like Brokeback Mountain or the recent Yorkshire-set God’s Own Country in which the lovers face a backlash. They enjoy a “beautiful friendship” which means “everything and nothing”, and there is no price to pay at the end of it.

It’s 1983. We are somewhere in northern Italy. The Perlmans are an affluent and highly cultured American-Jewish family who spend their summer months in an idyllic country house not far from Lake Garda. Mr Perlman (Michael Stuhlbarg) is an easy-going academic who uses his time in Italy not just to eat, drink and relax but to carry out research into classical antiquity. He has a glamorous wife (Amira Casar) and a precocious 17-year-old son, Elio (Timothée Chalamet). Every year, Perlman hires a research assistant to help him with his paperwork and to join him on his field expeditions in search of classical artefacts.

The tempo here is very much more relaxed than in Guadagnino’s 2015 feature A Bigger Splash, which was also about a summer holiday but whose protagonists were wildly hedonistic filmmakers and rock singers. Here, the Perlmans live at a very leisurely pace.

“What does one do around here?” one newcomer asks.

“Wait for the summer to end,” Elio replies, hinting at the repetitive and even sometimes tedious nature of days spent on field trips, bicycle rides or occasional trips to the local post office.

We are clearly in the 1980s. The film has the same Psychedelic Furs music also found in John Hughes’ bratpack movies of that era to remind us of the fact. However, Guadagnino is also continually making the point that his characters are sharing the same experiences as the classical figures Perlman spends his life researching.

This is a film in which tiny, seemingly throwaway incidents assume, at least in hindsight, a huge totemic importance. We see Elio looking down from a high window with curiosity at the strapping, self-confident young American academic, Oliver (Armie Hammer), stepping out of a car as he arrives to work as Mr Perlman’s assistant. Elio is irritated because he has had to give his bedroom to the newcomer. There is a strange moment in which Oliver is showing off his athletic ability playing volleyball with the locals and then touches Elio on the shoulder.

Elio is a mix of arrogance and vulnerability. He can be very cruel. His behaviour toward the beautiful young neighbour Marzia (Esther Garrel) with whom he begins a short-lived affair is offhand in the extreme. She is the only one in the film really made to suffer.

Call Me By Your Name was co-scripted by James Ivory (the filmmaker behind Remains Of The Day, A Room With A View, Maurice and all those other upscale literary adaptations). Ivory was originally going to direct too but he would surely have made a very different kind of film. Guadagnino has a formal boldness, flamboyance and willingness to push his material to extremes that Ivory lacks. In particular, he deals in frank and sometimes comic fashion with the sexuality of the adolescent hero. Elio is capable of some very crude behaviour. We see him masturbating into an overripe piece of fruit and burying his head in his lover’s swimming trunks. The director also has a fetishistic way of filming the lovers’ bodies, as if they are contemporary equivalents to the young gods portrayed in the classical art that so fascinates Elio’s father.

Hammer is exceptional in a role a very long way removed from The Man From UNCLE or The Lone Ranger. He plays Oliver as a dashing narcissist who expects everything to come easily to him. “Later!” is his habitual expression when he leaves a social gathering because he has somewhere better to go to. He is always on the lookout for his own pleasure. At the same time, there is nothing predatory in his relationship with Elio. If anything, Elio is the one who targets him. Timothée Chalamet is equally striking as the teenager desperate for new experiences, on the cusp of adulthood and trying to work out his own identity. Both lovers are outsiders. They know, as one puts it, “what it’s oike toi be the odd Jew out”. Perhaps the most surprising performance is from Stuhlbarg as the wise and endlessly patient father who knows exactly what is going on.

As in A Bigger Splash, Guadagnino films landscape in a Sunday supplement travel-brochure-like way. With its sequences of idyllic bike rides down country lanes, dips in outdoor pools, moonlight dancing and long leisurely outdoor lunches in romantic settings, Call Me By Your Name offers an idealised, tourist-eye view of its little corner of northern Italy. The weather (at least until the equally picturesque snowbound scenes late on) is always balmy. We are in the 1980s and so the family is able to live in its own timeless, self-enclosed world. Elio may watch TV and listen to his battered old transistor radio but there are no smartphones to distract them.

We are always aware that time is passing, that summer will soon end and that, as in every other coming of age movie, the characters will have to move on. In some respects, the story here is utterly formulaic. What makes the film so magical is the extraordinary delicacy, formal daring and insight with which Guadagnino tackles such familiar material.

Grace Jones: Bloodlight And Bami (15)

★★★★☆

Dir. Sophie Fiennes, 115 mins, featuring: Grace Jones, Jean-Paul Goude, Sly & Robbie

Sophie Fiennes’ startling new documentary about Jamaican pop diva Grace Jones doesn’t bother with much in the way of contextualisation. There is no voice-over and precious little archive footage (although we do spot Jones standing next to Andy Warhol in an old photograph). Nor are there intertitles introducing characters or giving us information about such basic matters as when Jones was born, when her family moved to the US, who she married and how her career evolved. We don’t get to hear her reminisce about her battles with Roger Moore in old Bond movies or her duets with David Bowie. Instead, Fiennes plunges us straight into the middle of her subject’s life as she is living it now.

Fiennes has a close family connection with Jones. Her 2002 documentary Hoover Street Revival was about Grace’s brother, the extraordinarily flamboyant preacher, Reverend Noel Jones. Grace Jones clearly trusts the director, allowing Fiennes extraordinary access both on stage and off. We get to see the singer in the shower (she is startlingly lithe and well-preserved for a 69-year-old), eating dinner with her relatives on a trip back home to Jamaica and enjoying a champagne breakfast in one of the five-star hotels in which she stays during her tours.

Fiennes also films Jones’ performances in very inventive fashion, using multiple cameras which give us both Jones’ perspective of the spectators and the view they have of her. The singer is seen in all manner of outlandish headgear and costumes: in gold skulls, bowler hats and cat masks. She is an imposing and charismatic presence with an utterly distinctive voice. She can be very intimidating but has a sense of her own absurdity. When she is having a tantrum or giving vent to the rage she says she still feels inside her, she is doing so at least partly tongue in cheek. She is a performer off stage as much as on stage. In one scene, we see her haranguing and simultaneously pleading with musicians Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare on the phone when they fail to turn up for a recording. She knows just how much anger to unleash to get what she wants. Having been a performer for going on five decades, she has some of the same deadpan fatalism that Bette Davis showed as the ageing actress in All About Eve. She’s seen it all before. When she is clashing cymbals during a performance of one of her signature songs, “Warm Leatherette”, or singing with a very severe expression on her face at the same time she is twirling a hula hoop or talking about the “panther” inside her, she seems like a modern-day counterpart to the equally camp, equally magnificent jazz-age singer and dancer, Josephine Baker.

With her relatives, Jones slips back into the Jamaican patois of her youth. There are references to beatings she and her siblings used to receive from their step grandfather, who kept leather belts for each of them hanging on the wall.

It’s both one of the film’s most engaging traits and one of its frustrations that we are continually left to join the dots. There are no talking heads to explain the influence of church music on her singing but we hear her give a very rousing rendition of the psalm, “Amazing Grace”. We don’t discover where she learnt her dress sense but we are introduced briefly to Jean-Paul Goude, the French photographer and stylist seen by many as her Svengali.

Jones is both fabulous and terrifying. In one very revealing scene, we hear her browbeat a TV director/choreographer who wants to surround her with lots of young female dancers. Jones tells the director that these dancers make her feel “like a madame in a whorehouse”. The director gets rid of them and Jones then immediately feels prey to extreme remorse and guilt (she may be a diva but she does think of others).

Producer and Island Records boss Chris Blackwell is mentioned fleetingly but Fiennes gives no details of the part he played in Jones’ career. Jones talks on camera about the incident in which she hit a TV chatshow host who turned his back on her but we don’t get to see the famous footage of the man in question, Russell Harty, being slapped.

Every so often, Jones will hit a philosophical note. She talks perceptively and movingly about her experiences with a dying relative. She is proud of her son, Paulo, who is seen on camera from time to time, but is also intensely competitive with him.

Jones is a fascinating and enigmatic figure. Fiennes casts light on certain aspects of her character without coming close to penetrating the mystery that surrounds her. The title itself is on the esoteric side (bloodlight is the red light that is turned on when an artist is recording and bami is bread, “the substance of daily life”). The documentary is fascinating and enjoyable but it still only gives us half a picture of its subject. Again and again, we clamour for more information. You’ll need to go elsewhere to get hold of any of the everyday details about Jones, her life, career and many collaborators.

Perfect Blue (18)

★★★☆☆

Dir. Satoshi Kon, 79 mins, voiced by: Junko Iwao, Rica Matsumoto

Satoshi Kon’s adult-skewed animated feature (re-released in cinemas for its 20th anniversary) is dark and voyeuristic fare with a plot that could easily have been borrowed from one of Brian De Palma’s more lurid thrillers.

The main character here is Mima, a teen pop star who is part of girl group, Cham. After a concert is disrupted by some hooligans, she resolves to quit the band and to pursue a new career as an actress. She wins a role in an embroiled and very violent cop thriller. Belying her clean-cut image, she ends up playing a dancer who is raped in a nightclub. The events in the TV show are echoed off screen as members of the production staff are murdered in gruesome fashion.

It is the 1990s, the early days of home computing, and Mima buys herself a Mac. Once she works out how to negotiate Netscape Navigator, she discover a fansite devoted to her and which seems to know the everyday details of her own life better than she does. There’s a stalker on the loose. Mima can’t trust her own sanity. Her own behaviour becomes ever more erratic. The one character she can trust is her manager, Rumi, but Rumi herself is an ambivalent figure whose obsession with Mima isn’t healthy.

The filmmakers deliberately blur the lines between reality, the world of the TV drama and dream. They succeed in creating a very giddy and disorienting mood. Perfect Blue borrows some hackneyed ideas from live action thrillers – shards of broken mirrors used as lethal daggers, characters hit by lorries in the middle of the freeway, pizza delivery men who turn out to be homicidal maniacs. The ideas may not be original but the film still makes queasy and unsettling viewing. The ingenuous teen pop star from the early scenes becomes a very dark and troubled figure. Westerners whose experience of Japanese anime is confined to the works of Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki will be startled not just by the sex and bloodshed but by the sheer bleakness of the vision here.

Base (15)

★★★☆☆

Dir. Richard Parry, 81 mins, starring: Alexander Polli, Julie Dray, Carlos Pedro Briceño.

Base is dedicated to its leading actor Alexander Polli who died last year “doing what he loved”. That was essentially hurling himself off precipices. Polli was a leading skydiver, a Base jumper whose gravity-defying leaps in his wingsuit have been watched millions of times on YouTube. Director Richard Parry has created a fictional drama in which those jumps are showcased. There is a hint of Jules et Jim about the storyline he and his co-writer Tom Williams have fashioned. Polli plays JC, a Base jumper who travels the world in pursuit of adventure with his best friend, fellow jumper Chico (Carlos Pedro Briceño) and with Chico’s girlfriend, Ash (Julie Dray). They’re a tight-knit threesome but it is apparent JC has feelings for Ash too.

The jumps themselves are astonishing. The wingsuits make the jumpers look like wizards or Marvel superheroes as they soar through the air, always delaying pulling their parachutes until the last possible moment. The jumpers are equipped with multiple Go Pro cameras. We see from their perspectives as they drop from bridges, mountain peaks and the top of skyscrapers. It’s on land that the film sometimes wobbles. For reasons that are not at all clear, the interactions between the three leads, when they’re in hotel rooms or on beach holidays or sitting talking in cars, are also shot with the Go Pro cameras in juddering and shaky fashion, from a variety of strange angles (at times, it seems as if the characters keep their cameras in their shoes). You can’t help but wish that the director would just use a tripod for once.

There’s obvious poignancy here. When he is not jumping, Polli’s character sits at his computer, editing footage of old friends and comrades (several of whom died Base jumping). Most viewers will know that he himself was killed in exactly the same circumstances shortly after shooting was completed.

Polli might have made an excellent subject for one of Werner Herzog’s documentaries about obsessives who put their lives at risk in pursuit of their dreams. He wasn’t an especially accomplished actor but Parry’s film conveys his charisma and the philosophy behind his very reckless lifestyle. As he says from the top of a very high building, sounding just a bit like Harry Lime in The Third Man, he doesn’t want to be “like the people down there.” Whenever one jumper dies, another will spread his or her ashes during the next leap.

There’s a lot of souped-up chat here about living every moment like it’s your last and “embracing the fear”. As for the risk of dying, that’s part of the lure. Everyone else is going to die too and Polli’s theory is that if his life does flash before him in his final moments, at least there will be “plenty to watch”. “Can I do this. Should I do this. Why would I not do this?” is the logic he uses to justify a lifestyle that proved lethal to him and to many others.