LFF: I've Been Somewhere, Boy

Dave here, reporting from the LONDON FILM FESTIVAL one last time. It's been my first full-on film festival, and if I said I wasn't dying to lie in my bed for twenty-four hours in a deep sleep, I'd be lying. But it's been a fantastic few weeks, a reignition of my passion for film, and an experience I'll probably never forget. Below, you can read my full review of Nowhere Boy, the John Lennon picture that received its world premiere as the festival's Closing Night Gala, and then my own personal set of "awards". But first, a big thanks to Nat for making it all happen, and I really hope you've enjoyed my coverage and that you'll seek out some of these movies - should you, of course, be given the chance.

Nowhere Boy begins with a couple of coy nods to that which it avoids mentioning explicitly - the Beatles. (Clearly I have no such qualms myself.) The exhilirating screams of a crowd rise on the soundtrack as the young John Lennon races down the road - pursued by no one. It is, one feels, the perfect way to deal with a fact that isn't integral to this particular story, but will inevitably be flitting around the audience's minds. It's not ignored, it's merely unimportant for the portion of John Lennon's life the film choses to focus on. It's also exemplary of the spry, brisk humour that lightens the load of a story that errs slightly too much to the heavily emotional.

Sam Taylor-Wood's debut feature, following her acclaimed short Love You More and almost two decades of artistic work, shows her aesthetic skills to be, thankfully, pushed more in the direction of emotion than style. There remain some striking visual moments, but all are tailored to deepen the understanding we have for the characters that Taylor-Wood has made so empathic. Matt Greenhalgh's script is serviceable but suffers from similar problems to his previous musician biopic-of-sorts, Control, in that, in its choice to follow a similar template - a man stuck between two women - it risks reducing a life to a set of scales. But where Control's romantic triangle remained elusive because the interactions between the trio were limited in their complexity, Nowhere Boy not only has more angles to the three points of its shape but has a better sense of who they are.

It helps, of course, to have such a fine cast, and all three of the lead players here respond with impressive dexterity and emotion to their director, lifting the script's occasionally tired dimensions to a fresher, natural feeling. The film peaks in a powerful, confrontational scene between the three of them - Lennon (Aaron Johnson), his mother Julia (Anne-Marie Duff) and his Aunt Mini (Kristin Scott Thomas) - where the odd dimensions of this triangle are laid bare. What is Julia to John? A mother? A sister-type? A crush? An obvious dimension to this all sets John as caught between embodiments of the sides of the stark shift that was occuring at this moment in time - Aunt Mimi is the stiff upper-lip, reserved old guard, where the estranged Julia is the free spirit of the rock 'n' roll generation. All three actors finely modulate both the surfaces and the recesses of their characters, never compromising on who they presents themselves as and playing the slips from it as natural, organic moments. Kristin Scott Thomas, you won't be surprised to learn, steals best-in-show honours, her firm, slightly cold attitude mediated with the fierceness of her love for John, expressed in the strict mothering way that seems to be the way that makes the most sense to her. That's not to discredit Duff, whose vibrant exterior cracks as her past is scrutinized by her family, or Johnson, who combines rakish charm with a slightly off-putting arrogance, as it's the combination of the three performers that really makes the film spark.

Nowhere Boy doesn't spring any particular surprises, but it's as good as it could possibly have been. Taylor-Wood's artwork, some of which I glimpsed at her talk a few days ago, was much less visually styled than intensely personal and emotional, and it's this trait she carries so strongly across to her filmmaking. Ultimately, while it's not the film's focus, Lennon's music emerges as important because it makes him individual, it escapes the need of both women in his life. Nowhere Boy is a promising debut from a director who evidently has a lot of passion for what she's doing, and thankfully seems to be quite good at doing it. B+

In the end, then, a very good film to finish with. And now, because no one can ever resist them, my own picks for the best of the fest:

SUPPORTING ACTOR
Niels Arestrup, A Prophet
(runner-up: Oscar Isaac, Balibo)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Rosamund Pike, An Education
(runner-up: Kristin Scott Thomas, Nowhere Boy)

CINEMATOGRAPHY
Aleksei Arsentyev, Wolfy
(runner-up: Stéphane Fontaine, A Prophet)

DIRECTOR
Jacques Audiard, A Prophet
(runner-up: Jane Campion, Bright Star)

ACTOR
Tahar Rahim, A Prophet
(runner-up: Aaron Johnson, Nowhere Boy)

ACTRESS
Abbie Cornish, Bright Star
(runner-up: Yana Troyanova, Wolfy)

FILM
A Prophet
(runner-up: Samson and Delilah)

Thanks for reading, commenting, thinking, and, hopefully, watching.

LFF: Time To Grow Up

Dave here, still at the LONDON FILM FESTIVAL, and apologising profusely for his absence - it's been a busy few days of film, and having an hour staring at Julianne Moore and ten seconds staring at Eva Green. (Both are as stunning as you've been led to expect.) There have been some big names and some big films the past few days, and so this is a triple-threat of things-you'll-actually-have-heard-of - and all this without The White Ribbon, thoughts on which are lingering on my computer, waiting for me to approve of them. For now, you'll have to make do...

By far the loudest applause I've yet experienced at the festival was given at the end of Precious. The film's status as a crowd-pleaser seemed odd to me - granted I'd avoided as much press on it as I could, but I knew the basic story. It seems obvious in retrospect that the harshnesses Precious deals with serve to make the audience investment that much deeper, and coupled with the generous, poignant amount of humour the film also emits, it's a hard film to argue with the pure love it might inspire. The education storyline errs a bit closely to the Dangerous Minds, Dead Poets' Society cliche, and the fantasy sequences and vibrant, distorted flashbacks are a bit too overtly flashy (even as these artistic choice makes sense narratively), but the performances are as powerful as you'll already know. Sibide and Carey project a subdued, painful honesty, while Mo'Nique's erratic, monstrous character sears through the screen almost too heavily - the film ends almost unbalanced in her favour. But reservations about the narrative construction and aesthetic flourishes seem churlish in the face of such emotion, such a refreshingly unpretentious attitude, and such vibrant human feeling. B+ [I know this is my show, but if you've yet to read Nick Davis' review of the film, it's one of the best pieces I've read in quite a while and says everything I wanted to, even things I hadn't yet understood I even felt.]

Jacques Audiard's A Prophet retains the nervy, lucid, enthralling energy of his previous films, and objectively speaking it's surely his most assured, controlled piece of work yet. It helps, of course, that newcomer Tahar Rahim is so superb in the central role, progressing from a nervy but proud young offender and, gradually, becoming a top dog. But the greatness of this film lies in the complexity of the arc - the Malik of the beginning is recognisable in the Malik of the ending, and there is no pretence that these experiences mean Malik is anything impressive or worthwhile - a notable conclusion here is of how narrow prison life is, as Malik's youthful wonder remains in his brief experiences of the outside world. And despite the intensely personal, close shooting style that really involves the audience with Malik's story, the story opens out wider, from the toweringly magnetic Niels Arestrup as a prison don to the tragic, intriguing figure of Adel Bencherif's ex-con who proves Malik's only connection to the outside world. The film's compass is more observant than incisively judging, a film that could be - and likely sounds like - a sprawling epic is instead a deeply engrossing personal story, lingering in the mind with its dark, inconclusive ending. A-

Leaving starts with the deadening bang of a gunshot. But as we flashback months previously to see how we reached this mysterious act of violence, we find that Leaving is anything but dead. It's almost too alive. Kristin Scott Thomas, acknowledging her English roots but once more making use of her French-language skills, stars as a married, bourgeois housewife who cannot resist an affair with a builder (Sergi López), much to the violent outrage of her husband (Yvan Attal). Catherine Corsini rattles through the cliched processes of affair melodramas so quickly it's vaguely absurd - "I can't live without you" is uttered about twenty minutes in - but this leaves plentiful room for such dramatics to be expanded upon. Leaving self-consciously seems to acknowledge, in the speed of its melodrama, the childish, impulsive attitudes of all three main characters. The actors, especially Attal with his torrid, merciless anger and Scott Thomas with her naive, wilful, rebellious passion, play up to the faintly hysterical tone, making Leaving both perversely enjoyable and oddly insightful. B