Out to own today: Toni Erdmann, Jackie and Loving

​Out to own today:

​Toni Erdmann

“What do you find worth living for?” Ines (Sandra Hüller)
 
With less than three weeks to go, can this 162 minute German comedy be toppled as the best film of 2016? TONI ERDMANN is about the three pillars of society: Family, romance and work. Unless you are at ease with yourself (the holy grail of life surely?), these circles are kept separate. The pillars perhaps give us an opportunity to modify how we present ourselves and reinvent ourselves in each sphere. The focus of the movie is the relationship with our parents, but it is used to discuss much more. Psychological, philosophical and political discourse is rarely as cinematically entertaining.
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​Jackie

“Nothing is ever mine, not to keep anyway,” Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy (Natalie Portman)
 
Eerie, experimental, unnerving. The aftermath of JFK.’s assassination from the perspective of Jackie. It takes time to get used to Natalie Portman’s performance. It jars and initially comes across as an impression; but then acclimatisation, to a distinctive thespian inhabiting the persona of one of the world’s most famous women. Though we try to settle into our seats, we never really do. Akin to a Michael Haneke movie, the skin crawls without the audience quite able, at the time, to place a finger on why. The image of blood on Jackie’s face, her immaculate suit in slight askew, is surely meant to haunt. A non-salacious shower scene has the lead washing husband gore from her hair.
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Loving

“I’m going to build you a house right here. Our house,” Richard Loving (Joel Edgerton)
 
More often than not social justice cinema feels the need for big moments and big emotions. LOVING sidesteps the non-believability and triteness of such situations, offering up instead the war of attrition and elongated time frame it actually takes to create legal change. The film’s meditative pace at times frustrates, observing the lives of two people who do not speak unless it seems necessary, but one is aware that movies like SELMA and LINCOLN are rare beasts – both politically astute and propulsive. LOVING, by its very title, is of course a romantic story, not just the surnames of the leads, and also quietly effusing a societal dream.
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