The Big Picture, In A Better World, Junkhearts: A trio of acclaimed new releases
Junkhearts
Junkhearts (Soda Pictures) tells the story of Frank (Eddie Marsan, Happy Go Lucky) a traumatised, middle-aged ex-soldier who tranquilises himself with scotch each day to stave off terrifying flashbacks from his tour of duty in Northern Ireland.
On one of his regular visits to the off-licence, Frank meets Lynette (Candese Reid), a feisty black teenager who is sleeping rough in the neighbourhood, and after a tense start, the pair form an unlikely bond, with Frank offering the youngster his spare room. However, the duo’s pleasantly warped version of domestic bliss is thrown into chaos when Lynette invites her shifty drug-dealer boyfriend Danny (Tom Sturridge) to take advantage of the reluctant Frank’s hospitality -nudging the boozy war veteran into a debilitating downward spiral.
Newcomer Candese Reid won the 2011 BFI award for Best British Newcomer for her role in Junkhearts, and while she delivers a memorable debut performance here, the chameleonic Marsan and the menacing Sturridge confidently steal the show, and it will be interesting to watch the latter in Walter Salles’ upcoming version of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road.
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Interestingly, director Tinge Krishnan discovered Candese Reid at Nottingham’s prestigious Television Workshop (which offered a springboard for Samantha Morton, Toby Kebbell, and a whole host of Shane Meadows regulars). The Meadows link is an apt one too, as Krishnan’s disturbing feature-length debut recalls the intense career of the man often dubbed ‘the Midlands Scorsese’.
Riddled with great scenes, Junkhearts’ only weakness is the superfluous sub-plot starring Romola Garai (The Crimson Petal and The White) as a drug-addicted businesswoman. What’s more, its significance is fairly predictable -arguably the film’s least subtle element. After a string of well-received short films, director Krishnan has been labelled ‘one to watch’ for some time; despite an unfortunately saccharine conclusion, Junkhearts sees him comfortably repay the faith shown in him, and deliver a memorably corrosive debut feature.
In A Better World
After a brief sojourn to Hollywood in 2007 to shoot flame-grilled melodrama Things We Lost In The Fire, Danish director Susanne Bier (After The Wedding, Brothers) returned home to make In A Better World (Axiom Films), a film conceived as a response to misconceptions that Denmark is a harmonious society.
Bier’s decision to spurn Hollywood’s inevitable advances proved well-judged in this instance, and she scooped the 2011 Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film and also the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar at the 83rd Academy Awards, meaning that In A Better World’s reputation precedes it.
The dual-narrative focuses on Anton, a Swedish doctor who bides his time between a Sudanese refugee camp and his idyllic family home in small-town Denmark. In Africa, Anton treats female victims mutilated by a sadistic local warlord known as Big Man, but finds himself troubled when the maniac arrives at the refugee camp demanding treatment for an infection. Meanwhile, back in Denmark, Anton is forced to wrestle with further conflict, with the revelation that his young son Elias is being mercifully bullied by his classmates. However, the situation is flipped on its head when feisty new boy Christian intervenes on Elias’s behalf, setting in motion a chain of events that sees everyone’s fragile world altered forever.
Buoyed by a number of strong performances -particularly from Mikael Persbrandt as Anton, and young William Jøhnk Juels Nielsen as Christian -In A Better World contains a number of electric scenes, not least a menacing early set-piece when Christian confronts the boy tormenting hapless Elias. However, for all of its dramatic strengths, In A Better World feels like a strangely muddled piece of work, and the split narrative sometimes feels like a tame re-tread of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s early work. Viewers familiar with Bier’s previous movies won’t be surprised by the powerful, confident filmmaking on display, but as the movie edges towards its suspiciously neat conclusion it is hard not to feel like a crucial piece of the jigsaw is somehow missing.
The Big Picture
Based on the 1997 novel of the same name by US author Douglas Kennedy, The Big Picture (Artificial Eye) tells the story of Paul Exben (Romain Duris, The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Afterwards), a slick lawyer with a seemingly perfect life. As well as his sought-after partnership in one of Paris’s most successful law firms, Paul has a beautiful wife (Sarah, Marina Foïs) and two young children, on whom he dotes. However, all is not well at home, and Paul’s life takes a dramatic turn with the stomach-churning revelation that frustrated Sarah is having an affair with smug mutual acquaintance Greg Kremer (Eric Ruf).
After drunkenly making a fool out of himself at a dinner party, Paul goes to meet Greg to thrash out their differences, only to lose his cool and become embroiled in a violent altercation with his love rival. After accidentally killing his wife’s lover, Paul is forced to assume a new identity and concocts an elaborate scheme to flee the country -only to discover that fate has a cruel way of catching up with you
Despite flashes of The Talented Mr Ripley and its duplicitous drama, The Big Picture lacks the 1999 movie’s sinister undercurrent. Further, in spite of an impressively intense performance from the ever-reliable Duris, Eric Lartigau’s meticulous thriller feels a little bit too po-faced at times. Elsewhere, French screen icon Catherine Deneuve cameos as Paul’s mentor, and Niels Arestrup (who starred as Cesar, the fearsome elderly convict in A Prophet) rounds out the cast as a deceptively boozy degenerate who takes a special interest in Paul, but the star-studded cast and elaborate set-up struggle to disguise the film’s hollow core. The Big Picture is a stylish, unusual thriller -with bags of insouciant Gallic flair -but the whole enterprise feels suspiciously pointless, leading you to question whether it is a misjudged case of (admittedly impeccable) style over substance.
- Interview: Billy O’Brien and William Todd-Jones - March 2, 2017
- The Childhood of a Leader: the birth of a terrifying ego - February 10, 2017
- Hold your breath: Don’t Breathe, and more reviews - January 26, 2017
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