Sick of Myself is another one of those Norwegian films about a woman whose problematic behaviour is masked by her sizzling nature. But although you can imagine the characters from this film appearing at parties with their counterparts in The Worst Person In The World, this feels like a very different film. Sick of Myself sees Kristine Kujath Thorp playing Signe, half of a terrible couple (their awful nature is established in the opening scene, where they order a €1,000 bottle of wine in a restaurant and then run off with it without paying). She works in a coffee shop while her partner Thomas makes terrible art from stolen furniture; for inexplicable reasons, Thomas' bullshit art starts becoming popular. Resentful of the attention he is receiving, Signe starts pretending to be ill, progressing from trying to get dogs to bite her to faking a nut allergy and then to buying dark web medications with horrendous side effects. It's funny, but in a deeply uncomfortable way.
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor [sic] among Thieves is OK and has some entertaining bits but is not as good as some people said it was. No cleric, no credibility.
Directed by Sinéad O'Shea, Pray for Our Sinners is a fascinating documentary about the social control exercised by the Catholic Church in Ireland in past decades, focussing on Navan, the filmmaker's home town. But the emphasis here is on resistance to that social control, which makes it a bit less miserable than other works looking at the same subject. Part of the film deals with unmarried mothers being forced to give up babies for adoption (and work by a couple of local doctors to protect these women and assist them in holding onto their offspring), but another major focus is extreme corporal punishment in church-controlled schools, where again the doctors were in the vanguard of resistance (triggered initially by a child's parent coming to the doctor's for a note asking the school to only beat him on his left arm as his right arm was too injured). One of my films of the year, but might not travel that well outside Ireland.
Barber crept into the IFI and then swiftly disappeared, which is unfortunate as I think it deserved a better reception. It's an attempt at making an Irish neo-noir, with Aiden Gillen playing the eponymous private detective hired to look into the disappearance of a young college student from a well-off but troubled family. It had proper murky-levels-of-intrigue stuff but what I thought was an impressive twist on noir conventions was Barber being a former cop who had been quietly hustled out of the Guards after his superiors discovered his being in a same sex relationship. Sadly the film then did not have the courage of its convictions, because after dealing well with some awkward semi-closeted gay stuff, it then has him cop off with the noir cliché shady lady character played by popular singer Camille O'Sullivan, leading to this clunky bit of dialogue:
SHADY LADY: I thought you were, you know…
BARBER: Actually I'm bisexual.
O'Sullivan and Gillen being in a real-life relationship led to a certain lol-factor here; O'Sullivan meanwhile was not so much playing herself as her stage persona.
I nevertheless considered the film to be worth my time for the mystery stuff and the amusing Dublin locations. The performances are pretty strong too, and not just in the lead roles.
images:
Syk Pike (Wikipedia: "Sick of Myself (film))"
Barber walks (Hot Press: "Aidan Gillen: 'We wanted Barber to capture the essence of modern Dublin and make it look beautiful' ")
No comments:
Post a Comment