Film reviews round-up: Dark River, Birth of the Dragon, Finding Your Feet, The Touch

★★★★☆

Dir Clio Barnard, 90 mins, starring: Ruth Wilson, Mark Stanley, Sean Bean, Esme Creed-Miles

Clio Barnard’s Dark River is a brooding rural drama, set deep in the Yorkshire countryside. The haunting atmosphere is established by the mournful folk song, “An Acre Of Land”, performed by PJ Harvey. Dialogue is kept very sparse.

Barnard’s narrative style is elliptical and mysterious. The sun rarely shines. Nonetheless, the film has an impressive intensity. Although it is set in the present day, it evokes memories of some of the bleaker Thomas Hardy adaptations or even of Wuthering Heights.

Alice (Ruth Wilson) is the young woman returning to the family farm after many years away. Her father has just died. The reason for her long absence is revealed in ghostly flashbacks in which we see her (played as a teenager by Esme Creed-Miles) together with her father (Sean Bean).

“I ain’t seen you for 15 years,” her brother Joe (Mark Stanley) mumbles at her when she turns up. In her absence, the farmhouse and buildings have gone to seed. Rats abound. The roof has leaks. Dust covers everything.

Alice can hardly bear to set foot in it. She takes up residence in the “pre-fab,” a makeshift building nearby with stoves. She is resourceful and hard-working but clearly traumatised. In the course of the film, we find out why.

Alice and Joe have a close but fraught relationship. Both are vying to take over the tenancy of the farm from their father. Developers are also circling the property.

Dark River follows on from God’s Own Country and The Levelling as another drama which exposes seething family tensions that more cosy rural fables won’t go near. Barnard’s screenplay is on the portentous side.

The tone of the storytelling here is closer to that of the Old Testament than to that of The Archers or of TV’s All Creatures Great and Small. You begin to wish that the characters would speak in more than monosyllables.

What lifts the film is Barnard’s flair for filming landscape and her ability to generate tension and drama from seemingly throwaway details. For example, one of the strangest and most disturbing moments comes when Alice sees her father’s old walking stick.

Holding it brings back many oppressive memories. When she talks about fumigating the farm buildings, we know that it is not just a question of getting rid of the rats and the insects: there are deeply traumatic moments in her past that she needs to exorcise as well.

Barnard captures the solitude and harshness of life on a struggling sheep farm. Ruth Wilson brings a febrile intelligence and hyper-sensitivity to her role as Alice. Barnard doesn’t give her any long monologues. Instead, the actress relies on looks and gestures to convey her feelings. She’s resilient and strong-willed.

Like her brother, she has been “grafting on the land” since she could walk and is used to a life which is without any creature comforts at all. Trips to market or one foray to the pub are all she enjoys by way of recreation.

In her previous Bradford-set feature, The Selfish Giant, Barnard dealt with equally downbeat subject matter (poverty, exploitation, the lack of opportunity for even the most resourceful youngsters) but leavened her story with humour.

Dark River offers little such consolation. It has some lyrical and delicate moments but the mood is generally overwhelmingly bleak and lugubrious. Incest and abuse don’t leave much space for any comic interludes. This is a powerful film with a grinding intensity about it. Light relief it isn’t but Dark River still has quite an impact.

★★★☆☆

Dir George Nolfi, 95 mins, starring: Philip Ng, Xia Yu, Billy Magnussen

Birth of the Dragon is a very cheesy but enjoyable kung fu romp. All the ingredients you expect are thrown into the mix – crackpot mysticism, romance, comic interludes and plenty of high-kicking action.

The film seems extremely far-fetched but claims to be partly based on a true story. It is set in San Francisco in 1964, just as a certain Bruce Lee (Philip Ng), nine years before his apotheosis in Enter The Dragon, is making his first forays into the film and TV world.

Wong Jack Man (Xia Yu), a Shaolin master from China, turns up in the city. His reasons for being there are ambiguous. On the one hand, he wants to learn humility after losing his temper and giving a near fatal kick to a rival martial arts master during a ceremonial fight. (With this in mind, he takes a job as a plate-spinning dishwasher and waiter in a Chinatown restaurant.)

On the other hand, he has come to America to chide Bruce Lee for teaching kung fu to westerners. Wong Jack Man is self-effacing and spiritual. He likes to limber up and pray in sight of the Golden Gate Bridge. Bruce Lee is cocky and macho. He sees kung fu as a way of winning street battles and making himself a celebrity, not as a path to spiritual enlightenment.

Steve (Billy Magnussen) is a young, Steve McQueen-like American who studies with both men – and gives Wong Jack Man lifts around town on his motorbike. Steve is in love with a beautiful Chinese woman he has met at a restaurant run by gangster matriarch Auntie Blossom, whose henchmen extort protection money from all the local businesses.

The real question audiences are asking themselves from the very start of the film is just when Wong Jack Man and Bruce Lee will face off against one another – and who will win. Philip Ng has a certain swaggering charisma as Lee. It helps that he looks like the kung fu legend and is clearly a proficient fighter.

Xia Yu is likeable and understated as his rival and potential mentor. The problem is Steve, the bungling American interloper, and his ridiculous romance with the Chinese waitress, who will be sold into sexual slavery unless he can rescue her. Cultural stereotyping abounds.

The film is full of absurd philosophising about the nature of life, combat and the universe. At one stage, Bruce Lee has to remind his rival that “we are not in a monastery in China… in America, we have winners and losers”.

The silliest episode of TV’s Kung Fu with David Carradine would seem sophisticated by comparison with Birth of the Dragon. Even so, the film is considerable fun. We get to see Bruce Lee’s famous one-inch punch – the blow he throws with a minimum of back lift but that still sends all his opponents sprawling – and there is plenty of helter-skelter chop-socky action.

To the non-specialist, the fight sequences appear to be very well choreographed. They’re often shot in full frame without an over-reliance on cutting or special effects beyond the predictable slow-motion leaps and back flips. The actors clearly know their moves. It’s the screenwriters who stumble, not them.

★★☆☆☆

Dir Richard Loncraine, 111 mins, starring: Imelda Staunton, Celia Imrie, Timothy Spall, Joanna Lumley, David Hayman, Indra Ové

It’s disappointing to see actors of the calibre of Imelda Staunton and Timothy Spall mugging it up in a comedy as crude as Finding Your Feet. Mike Leigh would never let them get away with the over-egged, very broad performances they give here.

Finding Your Feet yields quite a few laughs early on with its sitcom-style gags and one-liners. It also has some poignant observations about love, betrayal and ageing. It’s aimed squarely at the audience who relish films like Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and Ladies in Lavender but doesn’t have their formal polish. Its least attractive quality is its smugness. We’re in a world where the characters like to have a “naughty sherry” and do all their grocery shopping at Waitrose.

During the opening scenes, Staunton is very funny as the uptight, self-important, social climbing “Lady” Sandra Abbott, who has been married for 40 years to the impossibly priggish Welsh windbag Mike (John Sessions at his most orotund). Her world falls apart when she discovers that he has been “bonking” her best friend (Josie Lawrence) behind her back for five years.

Captured in flagrante, Mike responds with the wonderfully ludicrous line, “It’s not what it seems.” Sandra flees the family home and goes to stay with her free-thinking, bohemian sister “Bif” (Celia Imrie), who lives in a council flat which still has Ban the Bomb posters on the walls. Bif quickly diagnoses the root of her sister’s unhappiness, namely that she “married a tosser and then became obsessed with keeping up with other tossers”.

At first, Sandra can’t stand Bif’s irreverent, pot-smoking, van-driving friend Charlie (Spall), who lives on a barge and is known for his uncanny ability to fix anything. Inevitably, the hostility between them soon thaws.

True love blossoms after they dance together at the classes organised by Jackie (Joanna Lumley), a variation on Lumley’s Ab Fab character. (After several divorces, she has taken to online dating but is very surprised when a man turns up with his wife in tow – and then she realises she clicked “swinging” instead of “swimming” in her list of likes.)

Gradually, Sandra “finds her feet” and rediscovers her lust for life – and for dancing samba. As she does so, the humour gradually seeps out of the film and the storytelling becomes ever more treacly.

There is an excruciating interlude in Rome, lots of scenes of the old dears hoofing, and more than one moment at which characters pop their clogs when the audience least expects it. Finding Your Feet touches on some dark subjects – Alzheimer’s, depression, cancer – but somehow always manages to keep up its irrepressibly cheery and inane mood.

★★★★☆

Dir Ingmar Bergman, 108 min, starring: Elliott Gould, Bibi Andersson, Max von Sydow,

Ingmar Bergman wasn’t happy with The Touch, which was neither a financial nor a critical success on its original release in 1971. Four decades later, re-released in a restored version as part of the Bergman centenary celebrations, it makes fascinating viewing.

Bibi Andersson gives one of her richest, most complex performances as the seemingly happily married wife, Karin Vergerus, who, shortly after the death of her mother, embarks on a reckless affair with American archaeologist David Kovac (Elliott Gould).

The affair is both destructive and liberating. Her husband, Dr Andreas Vergerus (Max von Sydow) is intelligent and kindly. They have two children and live an idyllic, bourgeois life, tending their beautiful garden and having boozy dinner parties. Nonetheless, she is ready to put everything at risk when, seemingly almost on a whim, David tells her that, by the way, he happens to love her.

Certain elements of The Touch seem very kitsch. The Vergerus family home conforms to stereotypes of Ikea-like Swedish domestic perfection. The switches between English and Swedish language are jarring. The cheery, plinky plonky 1970s music is incongruous.

Just as in The Seventh Seal, we see Von Sydow playing chess but, this time, his opponent isn’t the Grim Reaper: it’s his wife (and she’s far better than he is). They’re not playing on the beach but in their luxurious sitting room.

The Vergerus family home provides a stark contrast to the cramped and dark apartment in which Karin and David have their illicit trysts. “Let’s take off our clothes, get into bed and see what happens,” they suggest to one another.

She is self-conscious and even prudish. Her bottom is too big, her legs are too short. He is boorish. Nonetheless, they are obsessed with one another and somehow manage to convince themselves that no one in this small and gossipy town has noticed their affair.

Of course, the guilt and recrimination soon follow. Karin suffers but, in her suffering, achieves an independence that she had completely lacked in the life she had been leading before. The film has its idiosyncrasies and obvious weaknesses but is frank and utterly relentless in the way it probes into the emotional lives of its three main characters.