Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  ‘There are films I want to make. There are films I have to make. This is a film I had to make.’ This is how writer-director Mia Hansen-L ø ve introduced her latest Paris-set family drama, Un Beau Matin ( One Fine Morning ), a film whose optimistic title suggests its tone if not its subject. The logline might be, ‘as she tries to arrange long-term care provision for her ailing, near-blind father, single mother Sandra commences an affair with a married man’. It is the affair, with all its difficulties, that gives cause for optimism, without detracting from the heartbreak of seeing one’s parent being transferred to an anonymising environment, one that reduces them to their most basic bodily impulses, to sleep, eat, wander, perhaps to sing, untethered from the life before. I boarded the Hansen- Løve train after watching her long-delayed, very enjoyable English language relationship drama, Bergman Island . She is an intimate director, dealing with emotional situations and milieux o...

  Pictured : Grete ( Luna Wedler ) and  Thomas ( Johannes Hegemann ) contemplate the mysteries of the great outdoors in the 1908 section of writer-director   Ildikó Enyedi 's exploration of the secret thoughts of plants, ' Silent Friend '. Still courtesy of Pandora Film . (c) Lenke Szil ágyi. If we could understand what plants are saying, what would we learn? This is the question posed by Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi’s film, Silent Friend . The ‘friend’ of the title is a large gingko tree featured in two strands of a film that spans three time periods, 1908, 1972 and 2020. Enyedi examines the role played by women in understanding the secret language of plants. ‘The results are going to be vague,’ notes Dr Alice Sauvage (Léa Seydoux), who supervises research carried out by Dr Tony Wong (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) in a mostly vacant facility in Marburg, Germany – his study takes place during the Covid lockdown of 2020. Enyedi doesn’t provide an answer, but perhaps the tree is...