Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  The spiralling overhead shot that begins Jessica Hausner’s film, Little Joe , introduces us to the central clash in the director’s first English language feature, between the colours blue and red. Blue is the colour of the flower ‘Flash Two’, a thriving species. Red is the colour of the flower bred by Alice Woodard (Emily Beecham), a carrot-haired, buttoned-up floriculturist, who has created a plant that ‘requires warmth, cold and talking to’ but emits a scent that will make people happy ‘as a reward for all that hard work’. Hoping to enter it into an upcoming flower fair, Alice brings a sample home and keeps it under a blue lamp, calling it ‘Little Joe’, Joe being the name of her schoolboy son (Kit Connor). She is separated from Joe’s father, Ivan (Sebastian H ü lk) who lives ‘in the wild’. (The dialogue is sometimes stilted.) Alice has a colleague, Chris (Ben Whishaw) who admires her work. They share the same taste in plain clothes, though unlike Alice, Chris’s shirts have a ...

  I’d like to make a prediction here on Sunday May 7, 2017, that on its eventual release in the UK, the film Brakes will be critically hammered. It is not that the film isn’t ambitious, funny and at times extremely well-acted. It is just that it exhibits writ-large the unconscious bias of its writer-director, Mercedes Grower. It is a film about break-ups, the moment when people look to their other half, their travelling companion on life’s travails and say ‘it’s not me, it’s you’. The more polite – can you be more polite in a break up – say ‘it isn’t working’ as if relationships are expected to be work. Compromise, yes. Tetchy - most certainly. Involve the throwing of crockery – only in the movies. Nothing says I hate you more than the smashing of a cereal bowl, except I still eat my Cheerios out of my son’s plastic ‘Noddy’ bowl, and it is very resilient. The couples don’t have children – or at least those under the age of eighteen – that we hear about. They are mostly young...