Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  Why do film directors, when dealing with historical subjects, stray from the truth? Usually, it is for commercial reasons. You take a real figure and imagine a romance that they never had in order to give a hook to your narrative. Emily , Frances O’Connor’s biopic of Emily Bront ë, is an example of this. Corsage , Austrian writer-director Marie Kreutzer’s fifth feature, does this to an extreme. The inference, at the end of the film, set between December 1877 and the autumn of 1878, is that its subject, Empress Elizabeth of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, committed suicide by throwing herself from the prow of a ship, aged 40. In reality, Elizabeth lived until 1898, when she was assassinated by an Italian anarchist. Kreutzer’s film doesn’t just feature one historical indiscretion. It imagines Elizabeth (Vicky Krieps), known affectionately as Sisi, meeting the father of cinema, Louis Le Prince (Finnegan Oldfield), in Northumberland in the spring of 1878. She then becomes the subject of...

At the start of the biopic, Lou Andreas-Salomé , there is a caption: 11 May 1933. The Nazis are in a book burning mood. Psychiatry is seen as a Jewish profession, therefore all books on the subject must be destroyed and all practitioners - well, we can imagine.  The earnest (read: cash-strapped) student Ernst Pfeiffer (Matthias Lier) visits 72 year old noted psychiatrist Lou Andreas-Salomé (Nicole Heesters) whose privacy is jealously, nay, religiously guarded by her ‘housekeeper’ Mariechen (Katharina Schüttler). ‘Frau Andreas-Salomé does not see patients anymore,’ Ernst is told. He writes her a note, which Mariechen dutifully passes to Lou. ‘Well, let him in,’ she instructs. The note refers to a matter of life and death. The nervous Ernst starts talking. He has a friend who has a wife to support and is a student with a crisis of confidence. He wants to kill himself. Lou – and the rest of us – sees through him.  ‘You are married and you want to kill yourself.’ Ernst nods. Fo...

Life Guidance is a foray into near-future territory from Austrian co-writer-director Ruth Mader. In it, citizens and families living in relative comfort are expected to strive to be optimal. Performance rather than moral well-being is what counts. Perhaps it is better described as being set in a parallel society, significantly one without computers or social media or even advertising. It depicts a way of living that might have been culled from George Orwell’s novel 1984 , or dreamed up by Franz Kafka, though one where is there is little talk of the outside world, religion or cultural difference. It is as if Mader imagined a world in which Nazism or white supremacy had won and is no longer a talking point or rallying cry. In so far as there is a sense of the world outside, it is in commodities, whether investments should be embraced or discouraged. In this alternative world, there is no police. If citizens or families diverge from accepted performance or attitudinal levels, a private a...