www.list.co.uk/film
DRAMA XXY (15) 90min 000.
What would you do if your only child was a hermaphrodite? Would you let this anomaly of nature lie or would you welcome the intervention of major surgery? This is the dilemma at the centre of Argentinean screenwriter Lucia Puenzo's directorial debut. 15 year-old Alex (Ines Efron. a revelation) possesses both male and female sexual organs. Her liberal parents (Ricardo Darin and Valeria Bertuccelli) have moved to a remote seaside area so Alex can avoid any potential bullies at her school in Buenos Aires. A visit from a surgeon friend Ramiro (German Palacios) and his family raises the question of what is to be done with a girl/b0y like Alex.
Adapted from a short story Cinismo by successful Argentine writer Sergio Bizzio, XXY is a subtle dissection of family dynamics when challenged by such a rare biological dichotomy. Deliberately underwritten to slowly reveal the portrait of a family exhausted by nature‘s ability to make them exiles from their own society. XXY is a slow, challenging but ultimately satisfying chamber piece. Is the need to be sexually registered more important than accepting a life of ambiguity? Recommended. (Paul Dale)
I GET, Glasgow, Fri 9—Thu 75 May; Filmhouse, Edinburgh, Fri 76—Thu 22 May. See profile, in listings.
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DRAMA HONEYDRIPPER (PG) 124mm .000
God may have given rock‘n’roll to us but Alabama gave us the electric blues. The story of its genesis is one that writer and director John Sayles (Lone Star, Matewan, Silver City) sets out in his latest film treatise in search of the real history of the US.
It’s 1950 in rural Alabama. There’s cotton in the field and recruits in the army bases but no one is coming to the Honeydripper Lounge. Owned by morally circumspect pianist Tyrone Purvis (Danny Glover), the Honeydripper is bankrupt and Tyrone is deep in debt to everyone. Then his sidekick Maceo (Charles S Dutton) comes up with a plan: hire famous electric guitar player Guitar Sam to come and play a gig and all the young ones will appear. The trouble is getting the man they think is the legendary guitar player to turn up and play on the day without being arrested by the racist sheriff (Stacy Keach).
Master storyteller Sayles’ new film is a benign and jolly tale about one ageing playboy’s attempts to save his ass from prison. The joy, as always with his work, is in the language, the turn of phrase, the monologues invested with the bravado and intelligence that in reality most of us so deeply lack. Sayles’ biggest challenge here is to catch the cadence of the southern dialect at a time of racial discrimination and agricultural depression (the 1950 boll weevil infestation led tens of thousands of African Americans to seek out opportunities in northern cities).
Sayles is more than up to the task and his dialogue, as seamlessly performed by this consummate cast, is a joy while he uses a tall tale scenario to portray a forgotten history of a remarkable musical form. Honeydn'pper puts one in mind of Preston Sturges’ depression era farces, or the early less urbanised fiction of James Baldwin and Maya Angelou. Like all Sayles’ films Honeydn’pper is too long and has too many characters but his ability to spin a good yarn remains undiminished, irreproachable, enviable and all too rare. (Paul Dale)
I GET, Glasgow, Fri 9— Thu 22 May; Filmhouse, Edinburgh, Fri 23— Thu 29 May. See interview, page 54.
DRAMA/ROMANCE UNDER THE BOMBS (15) 98min .0.
This heartfelt road movie from Lebanese writer-director Philippe
Aractingi was filmed during Israel's 33—
day bombardment of Lebanon in the summer of 2006. It follows a wealthy Shiite woman Zeina (Nada Abou
Farhat) and a Christian taxi driver Tony
(Georges Khabbaz), who are travelling
from Beirut to the devastated south of the country, in search of Zeina's young
son Karim and her sister. And Tony, it transpires. is struggling with his own troubled family history: his brother remains in exile having joined the South Lebanese Army in an earlier war.
Abou Farhat and Khabbaz are the only professional actors in Under the Bombs. All the supporting characters - be they refugees, soldiers, nuns. foreign journalists, Hezbollah supporters or aid workers - play versions of themselves. Together with
the TV news footage that 's woven into
the stOry, this casting gives the film a powerful authenticity. Aractingi steers clear of political sermonizing and concentrates on showing the impact of war upon a society's infrastructure and its civilian population. As one character laments: ‘Houses can be rebuilt. but what about lost souls?‘ The film's credits are dedicated to ‘the suffering of the innocent', and the ending to Zeina's quest is appropriately wrenching.
(Tom Dawson)
I GET, Glasgow from Mon 79—Thu 22 May; Filmhouse, Edinburgh from Fri 30 May—Mon 2 Jun.
ln the words of Faithless“ Maxi Jazz.
DRAMA/ROMANCE CASHBACK
(15) 102min on
art student and late night supermarket shift worker Ben (Sean Biggerstaff) ‘can‘t get no sleep'. Ever since he split
. up with his girlfriend Suzy (Michelle
Ryan) he's been wandering around in a daze. While his playful workmates muck about, he's hallucinating naked women in the aisles. Maybe Sharon (Emilia Fox) the checkout girl can help him sort his head out.
For his debut feature, writer/director Sean Ellis has chosen to broaden out his award-winning 2004 short of the
, same name. allowing it to exist in its
complete form as the centrepiece of
this lightweight fusion of Justin Kerrigan’s Human Traffic and Lynne
f Ramsay's adaptation of Morvern
Callar. With Ellis taking the unusual route of building a backstOry around
; his short, this has the effect of creating a couple of continuity anomalies and a whole load of tedious padding.
The amoral ambiguity and high porn content of the original Cashback (still
one of the most downloaded shorts
on the internet) is diminished by the construction of a fairly conservative I framework whose central message
seems to be that love is always right in
front of you. For its meagre budget ? however, this Cashback is fairly i entertaining and soulful, with good
performances from all involved. It will
be interesting to see what this
promising filmmaker’s new horror/thriller, The Broken, is like. (Paul Dale)
I Selected release from Fri 9 May
8—22 May 2008 THE LIST 51
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