17 January 2025.
This week we have three excellent releases:
One – a Brazilian family under duress during the 1970s military dictatorship.
The next – an innovative, exhilarating biopic about pop star Robbie Williams.
And finally – a torrid tale of a mature career woman becoming unhinged because of a masterful lover.
I’M STILL HERE **** (vo Portuguese)
We’re in the 1970s in Brazil under a military dictatorship. By the renowned Brazilian director, Walter Salles, of such award-winning films as “Central Station” and “The Motorcycle Diaries”, this true story about Eunice Paiva, a survivor of the horrors of those military years, is both an intimate portrait of a family under duress and the history of Brazil in that desperate era.
Salles opens up the film with a joyous family in the sunshine on the Copacabana beach near their home. We feel the famous Brazilian warmth and openness in their interactions and their ease. Their small son picks up a cute stray dog and brings it home, hoping to keep it. The family maid helps him hide it until he can convince his father to let him adopt it. There’s love, there is complicity, there is plenty, here is a home full of laughter and security.
But there comes a tense moment when the elder daughter and her friends are accosted on the road by the military police who search their car. The tone is beginning to darken. The father is Rubens Paiva, a liberal Congressman with many friends who come often for dinners and conversation. Then one night some agents arrive to take the father away for questioning. And here starts a downward spiral of events which the mother tries to control so as not to frighten the children. She is played by the excellent Fernanda Torres who just received the best actress award at the Golden Globes for this portrayal.
Salles shows in this excellent film how a gentle, happy family can be thrown into turmoil by the evils of a ruthless dictatorship. And how one woman manages to surmount all the upheavals to create a new life dedicated to decency and freedom. Impressive.
BETTER MAN ***1/2
Biopics are the trend these days. There are excellent ones, like the documentaries “Arnold” and “Beckham” on Netflix, the superb “Superman – The Christopher Reeves Story”, and mediocre biopics like “Back to Black” or “Spencer”. While the mediocre ones tend to distort their subjects, they are a draw because they concern celebrities about whom we’re often curious.
This latest biopic on the life of singer and pop superstar Robbie Williams is an absolute blast – inventive, warm-hearted, an honest portrait of his childhood, his rise to fame through the boyband ‘Take That’, his troubled relations with the band members and his solo career.
Included in all the honesty are his demons: his addiction to drugs, alcohol and fame, his father who left the family to follow his own dreams of stardom, and his own botched-up relationships due to his impatience and arrogance as a brash young man climbing to stardom.
But amidst all the furore of ambition are touching moments with his mother and grandmother who were his pillars of love and stability, and his reconciliation with a father who instilled in him the glories of such stars as Frank Sinatra and his cohorts. It’s a wonderful, down-to-earth story of the highs and lows that are the makings of a man in search of himself.
As an interesting metaphor, director Michael Gracey has an amazing, convincing computer generated monkey play Robbie Williams. For the pop star has often said he considers himself a performing monkey on stage. And the replica works, with panache!
I dare you not to have a lump in your throat at the finale.
BABY GIRL ***
This urban erotic tale, starring Nicole Kidman, is as steamy as you could possibly imagine. And it’s a shocker of a film that will certainly divide opinions, for it’s not only sensually controversial, but also emotionally and mentally so. It is solidly directed by the Dutch writer and actress Halina Reijn, who presents it boldly from a woman’s point of view.
Simply put, it is about a successful career woman in her fifties who seems to be in complete control of her perfect-seeming life. She is a loving wife and an attentive mother of two daughters while running a thriving company. Her husband, played by Antonio Banderas, is a top theatre director currently rehearsing a Hedda Gabler revival. And their love life, which very graphically kicks off the movie, seems quite active indeed.
But one day a much younger, brash, over-confident fellow (Harris Dickinson, brilliantly cool and conniving) comes into her life as a new apprentice in her company. From day one he pursues her, feeling that there is an emotional void in her life. It turns into a cat-and-mouse game of major proportions which, for once, is out of her control. The shocker is the theme of submission and domination between them made both gentle and exciting, unlike the awful “50 Shades…” or portrayals of de Sade’s perverted fantasies. This film is about the hidden desires of women. Discover the rest for yourself…but don’t go with your mother or your kids!
Superb **** Very Good *** Good ** Mediocre * Miserable – no stars
By Neptune
Neptune Ravar Ingwersen reviews film extensively for publications in Switzerland. She views 4 to 8 films a week and her aim is to sort the wheat from the chaff for readers.
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