Premieres of the weekend: “Son”, “Saint Omer”. The People vs. Laurence Coly” and “Welcome Mr. Banksy”

He sees Wolverine crying

Eduardo Galan Blanco

Although they sell it as a sequel Fatherit has little connection Son the film stars Olivia Colman and Anthony Hopkins, in addition to featuring a veteran British actor, and both films were written and directed by French playwright Florian Zeller.

True to form, Hopkins makes a brief appearance in the middle Son. In the middle of the nonsensical narration are five minutes of intense intensity in which an eight-year-old makes fun of his offspring. “If you’re tied to a teenager, that’s you,” he tells his son, played by Hugh Jackman, in a sequence of deliberate cruelty in which the two confront their differences, seated at a table and separated by an eloquent distance like that which separated Orson, Welles and Ruth Warrick in the breakfast ellipsis A citizen of Kane. “You came to show me your supremacy because you are a good father, to settle scores and cry because I was not good to you or your mother.” And certainly, seeing Wolverine cry can be a bit strange for many viewers.

Jackman is a sensitive divorced father — the character played by Laura Dern — and remarried — to the youngest Vanessa Kirby — who tries to take a new approach to his to shoot a seventeen-year-old boy who is in a tunnel of acute depression, self-punishment and suicidal ideas. The kid is Zen McGrath, another Timothée Chalamet-style physicist. And the comparison is not only imposed on us because of the similarity between the young actors, but also because the relationships between parents and children explored in the film strongly resemble those shown in handsome boy. The drug in that feature film here is the discouragement of orphanhood.

But unfortunately, Son relies on a script that uses a series of morally ambiguous and dangerously reactionary platitudes about responsible parenthood.

“THEY ARE”

United Kingdom-France-United States, 2022.

Director: Florian Zeller.

Cast: Hugh Jackman, Zen McGrath, Laura Dern, Vanessa Kirby, Anthony Hopkins, Hugh Quarshie, Shin-Fei Chen, William Hope, Akie Kotabe.

Drama. 123 minutes.

sober and unique

Miguel Anxo Fernandez

Elegant, sober and unique. These are three perhaps trite adjectives, and perhaps even rhetorical, but they fit the dramatic feast that is in the film Saint Omer brings us newcomer Alice Diop, originally from Senegal. While she was pregnant, she closely followed the trial that took place in France in 2016 against a young immigrant and compatriot, who one day in 2013 left her child on the beach to immediately return to her apartment in Paris. From there, the script was born, which they wrote together with two other colleagues, and the result is an elegant film in form, sober in its narrative closure and unique as a whole, which seeks to navigate the stormy waters of the drama so that the viewer grabs the savior that you consider the best.

That is his main virtue. This is why the final sequence closes with the defender’s reflection — looking at the camera, at the viewer. We attend a trial in the province, with several protagonists — a judge, a lawyer, a prosecutor, a popular jury and some members of the public — and a parallel plot that is a transcription of the experience of the director herself, present at that trial: a young black university professor, with a white partner, pregnant and in a bad relationship with the family, especially with the mother. On the bench, baby boy. In public, her. The director is careful not to repeat the clichés of court footage, starting with the camera placement and medium shot, which will be (almost) the standard of style. In addition, he relieves various testimonies of emotional weight in the manner of well-graded monologues, playing with facial expressions, silence and gestures. We sense that the defendant is not just another immigrant who crossed the Mediterranean to survive; on the contrary, a solid creation shines. He reasons the execution of his act, but acknowledges the telluric or ancestral causes of his conduct. Material that Freud would find fascinating, like a movie.

“HOLY OMER”

France, 2022.

Director: Alice Diop.

Cast: Kayije Kagame, Guslagie Malanda, Valérie Dréville, Aurélia Petit, Xavier Maly, Robert Cantarella.

Drama. 122 minutes.

The enigma wall

MA Fernandez

You ask the documentary, in addition to the formal questions, to shake you mentally. The genre works with materials that are tied to reality, and the person in charge of the work applies his view and cooks in his own way. Apart from the fact that the urban art festival Las Meninas de Canido has a consolidated trajectory and enjoys popularity, the director Carlos A. Quirós invites us to penetrate into its bowels based on the intelligent alibi of a public appeal to the British artist. Banksy so he comes to leave one of his creations on the wall reserved for him. It happened in the summer of 2017 at the initiative of Edu Hermida, and soon a well-known beer brand joined in, sponsoring a certain international promotion. In addition to dosing this adventure — obviously, with different textures of the image — the camera closes in on Hermida’s personality to show him as a character whose projects, obsessions, doubts and some controversial brushstrokes are familiar to us, as we witness the development of the project to transform the once depressed district of Ferrol into a place where is the motley family of Felipe IV, immortalized by the great Velázquez, depicted in a distinctive way. From that August until four years later, things happened, including the appearance of Banksy’s signature graffiti of a couple from the Civil Guard kissing. Regardless of whether it is original or not, the documentary tries to argue it with Hermida’s testimonies, a tone that Quirós spices up with traces of false documentary, together with considerations about the world of urban art and its peculiarities, including its commodification and the betrayal of fundamental principles, such as justification, cancellation and protest. An interesting proposition, well worth seeing. In the end, whether Banksy is the author of the mural or not, the film leaves you feeling rewarded.

“WELCOME, Mr. Banksy”

Spain, 2021.

Address: Carlos A. Quirós.

Screenplay: Carlos A. Quirós and Antón Varela.

Music: Gabriel Prada.

Photos: CA Quirós and Cristina Esteiro.

Documentary. 86 minutes.