(First published by Headstuff.org)

 

The Sound of Music (dir. Robert Wise, 1965)

 

Made six decades ago this year, The Sound of Music (1965) was directed by Robert Wise, the prolific talent behind West Side Story (1961), The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951) and The Set Up (1949). With its operatic scope, exuberant staging and Technicolor glory, West Side Story is the grander musical, but this now-classic Julie Andrews vehicle has charm a-plenty, and too many famous numbers to list. Loosely based on a true story, the plot concerns a young nun-turned-governess Maria (Julie Andrews), sent by her convent to care for a family of motherless children, at the request of their disciplinarian father, Captain Von Trapp (Christopher Plummer) – all on the eve, as it happens, of their country’s forcible incorporation into Nazi Germany, in 1938.

 

 

To curmudgeonly viewers who like their entertainments drained of joy, Maria’s doe-eyed confession – “I can’t seem to stop singing, wherever I am” – will induce dread and annoyance. Must the wayward holy-woman quaver quite so heartily? Does a romp in the mud really require melodic expression? For most fans, however – in Ireland, the sort of people who consider radio presenter Aedín Gormley a heaven-sent transmitter of eternal truths – Julie Andrews’s most famous of roles will remain as iconic as ever. She may be the only movie star who could make Maria’s conversion, over the course of the film, from a wild, dishevelled daughter (of God) to a caring, love-bestowing wife and mother – saviour of a lost brood of sweet-natured children, and their father – feel proper and plausible, even inspiring, rather than didactic or hollow. As in Mary Poppins (1964) – another messianic nanny role – she seems to balance poise and practicality, zest and wisdom, like no one else.

 

For his part, when he’s not crooning nicely (in fact, his singing was dubbed), Christopher Plummer is haughty and bemused as the Captain, prowling around like a panther while Andrews, a regal songbird, studies his every move. There’s genuine emotion, and dramatic tension, in the scene in which Maria – sopping wet after having fallen into a lake, no less – castigates her employer (and future husband) for his callousness and rigidity, instigating a heated argument that dissolves as the voices of his children can be heard singing from the house. “You brought music back into the house”, the Captain whispers in disbelief, his anger and frustration falling away, “I had forgotten.”

 

Often quaint, and sometimes clanging, at a distance of sixty years The Sound of Music nonetheless feels wholesome as well as warm. This may be a feature of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s repertoire in general. Although dated in many respects, South Pacific made a point of examining, and condemning, the cultural manufacture of racism in and between societies (“you’ve got to be taught to hate and fear”); in Carousel, the superficially twee love story was in fact edged with thought-provoking and unsettling complications. Here, Maria’s brave insistence on the right of every child to experience fun and play, parental love and joyous song, to live their lives freely and with a sense of discovery, is as central to the film’s idealistic messaging as the Captain’s unyielding contempt for German fascism, which today seems entirely salutary and pertinent.

 

In his own words, the Captain is “a proud Austrian” who finds himself living in “a world that’s disappearing.” When he returns from his honeymoon to find the Nazi flag hanging from his home, he tears it down and flings it from view. “Some of us prefer Austrian voices raised in song”, he says, to “ugly German threats.” As here, none of the main protagonists can be described as especially multi-faceted, but the traits they have are, for the most part, humanly appealing. Tellingly, it’s the Mother Superior (Peggy Wood), heartily trilling, who persuades – or rather, instructs – Maria to leave the convent to re-join the man she loves, brushing aside the sanctimonious fretting of her young ward. Passion trumps piety, as all true abbesses know and teach.

 

Perhaps most importantly, this is the kind of film that can be watched and enjoyed by viewers of pretty much any generation. It stands as a coming-of-age drama (for Maria, but also for the adorable children and teenagers she cares for), with elements of an adventure story; an exploration of family complexities that errs on the side of happiness; a softly political parable that also spreads its wings, becoming a love song that flies. The Sound of Music has heart: one reason among many why it remains so beloved and deserves to be celebrated.

 

 

Flow (dir. Gints Zilbalodis, 2024)

 

People who find themselves in despair at the state of the world should, if they can, take themselves to see Flow (2024), a poetic eco-fable directed by the young Latvian animator Gints Zilbalodis, who co-wrote it with his friend Matiss Kaža. Charting the feats and travels of a nimble cat in the wake of a habitat-levelling flood, this wordless film is gentle, intelligent, magic-filled, and wondrous: everything that contemporary life often seems to doubt or deny.

 

As spectacular as Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) and as sensitively searching as Bas Devos’s Here (2023), Flow – which was made for pennies, relatively speaking – is that rare phenomenon: a children’s film that feels lasting and universal in its imaginative scope. To spend an hour and a half (actually, the run-time is even shorter) with Zilbalodis’s cat, capybara, ring-tailed lemur, secretary-bird, and companions, is to feel somehow more human than before. Whether this is due to the entrancing animation or the mystical, quietly compassionate story, one thing is certain: only the great movies have this effect.

 

Flow feels important as well as lovely. When the ever-more-totalitarian Disney Company – which also owns Pixar, Marvel Studios and Lucasfilm – seems intent on merely churning out photo-shopped re-makes and endless spin-offs of previous hits, artistically arid and emotionally hollow, Zilbalodis and Kaža’s dedication to fresh ideas and an accessible form is attractive, and reassuring.

 

Flow was created using the open-source software Blender, and the fact that its makers won an Academy award may be indicative of the yearning for genuine creativity that can still be found lurking in the insipid jungle of the profit-hungry and power-obsessed that the American film industry increasingly resembles. Despite the corporatized dreck that clogs so many cinema screens and streaming channels, hope is not lost – far from it.

 

Flow is both exciting and gentle, a visually beguiling journey-film that sets out, among other things, to foster an appreciation for animals and non-human nature in its audience. In a strange way, this last quality, the source of its appeal, might also be considered a limitation. True, there are no talking animals here, as in countless other animated features, but the creatures Zilbalodis has us follow are subtly anthropomorphized nonetheless.They form friendships, they experience visions and desires, they use their wits and learn, haltingly, to love and support one another, despite the interpersonal frictions and narrative obstacles that present themselves along the way. They become, in other words, a family – the premise (and promise) that likewise gave cohesion to The Aristocats (1970), say, or Ice Age (2002). Flow is more beautiful (and perhaps, also, less spoofily funny) than the latter, but its dramatic structure may not be as unfamiliar as the post-Oscars hype suggests.

 

This, of course, is merely an observation, not a critique. In the final measure, Flow is gorgeous and inspiring: a real achievement. And well worth watching, as they say, on the big screen.

 

 

Ernest Cole: Lost and Found (dir. Raoul Peck, 2024)

 

Like last year’s superb Soundtrack to a Coup d’État, Raoul Peck’s new documentary examines a period of decolonization through a cultural lens, in this case the work of the South African photographer Ernest Cole – a stash of whose pictures were discovered under mysterious circumstances when found in a safety deposit-box in Sweden in 2017. Ernest Cole: Lost and Found stands as a cinematic tribute to a neglected artist, while also offering an oblique commentary on our own day, when new forms of colonialism and apartheid have emerged on the world stage, and racist, authoritarian politicians have likewise ascended to the halls of power on every continent. The footage of US president Ronald Reagan, English (Labour) prime minister Harold Wilson, and French premier Jacques Chiraq blithely dismissing calls for the imposition of economic sanctions on the Afrikaner state is unsettling, but also seems strangely familiar amid on-going debates as to the necessity or validity of boycotts against Russia and Israel, among other regimes.

 

In any case, Peck’s portrait of Cole might also be thought of as an unofficial companion-piece to his resonant 2016 study of James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro. As was also true of the American novelist, Cole’s art offers a window into the violence and recalcitrance of white supremacy as a political phenomenon – both ideology and system of coercion – and like Baldwin, too, his unflinching recognition (and documentation) of the human effects of a segregated society caused him anguish and loneliness in his personal life. Whereas Baldwin chose to leave America for Paris in the 1940s, Cole was forced into exile after the publication of his acclaimed 1967 photographic portfolio, House of Bondage – which the apartheid government immediately banned, deeming it too subversively truthful a depiction of life under their reign for public consumption.

 

Distrustful of the Western urge to pigeon-hole him as a “chronicler of misery”, Cole nonetheless found refuge, if never exactly a home, in New York (where for periods he slept in YMCA shelters) and occasionally Stockholm (where he was refused entry to popular restaurants because of his skin colour). Movingly curated by Peck – with a slow, hypnotic voice-over by LaKeith Stanfield – Cole’s photographs capture the vibrancy of the places he lived in, even as they also express his own isolation and despondency over time, alone in “a soulless city”, disconnected from his family and unable to return to his own country. The traumatic ramifications of apartheid, we come to see, were manifold and long-lasting, even for those who, on one level at least, appeared to have escaped its worst ravages. Much of the film’s power, in fact, stems from this nuanced interpretation of Cole’s private experiences, with all their pain and promise, as symptomatic dramas in a collective history of struggle, suffering, and endurance.

 

Peck, once Haiti’s minister for culture, must surely rank among the most overtly radical and internationalist of directors now working anywhere. His filmography includes dramatized interpretations of the lives of Karl Marx and the Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba, as well as an array of documentaries exploring the effects of colonialism and racism on modern life. Ernest Cole: Lost and Found is a humane and compelling chapter in this larger historical narrative that Peck has dedicated his career to exploring. His oeuvre, and this film in particular, deserve a wide audience.

 

 

By the Stream (dir. Hong Sang-soo, 2024) 

 

Hong Sang-soo’s By the Stream is slow and thoughtful, a film about drama-making that resists theatrical excess at every turn. In it, a bookshop-owner and former actor Choo Sieon (Kwon Haehyo) is invited by his niece, Jeonim (Kim Minhee), a lecturer at a female-only university, to direct a short play for an upcoming student drama festival, after the original director drops out in somewhat scandalous circumstances. Taking up the role, he is introduced to Jeonim’s senior departmental colleague, Jeong (Cho Yunhee), who happens to be an admirer of his work; in fact, her dream in life, apparently, has been to tell him so in-person – which she soon does. Over the course of rehearsals, personal connections develop and small-scale revelations occur.

 

Needless to say, but for many viewers this will be an appealing aesthetic: observant and mostly affirming, in a world in which human affairs frequently seem anything but. At times, By the Stream seems like a lower-budget version of Mia Hansen-Løve’s One Fine Morning (2022), or – with its interest in theatre and education – like a less elaborate (and maybe, also, less dynamic) version of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car (2021). Life, we’re led to see, may not be so much a matter of monumental events and ineffable clashes as the quotidian rituals and interactions that happen in-between, through which people learn to endure or grow.

 

Hong’s style is withdrawn and meditative, his camera-work unobtrusive and remarkably still. In general he seems content simply observing the demeanour of his characters: the way they inhabit the rooms they move through, their shyness and humour when they interact, their need to return to the streams and parks that surround the university in Seoul. For stretches of this quiet film, the protagonists (if that’s even the right word) are just sitting, or eating, or – in Jeonim’s case – sketching or weaving, half-out of sight. Mid-conversation, characters will trail off, noting how “Autumn is setting in”, or expressing tiredness or gratitude (whichever they happen, at that moment, to be feeling). These are sensitive people, filled with soft hopes and disappointments.

 

For hard-nosed critics, there may be something in all of these films that doesn’t quite persuade. Are the coincidences and curated dialogues that propel their plotlines justified, for instance? Does the fact that their loquacious, incurably self-aware central characters feel lonely also make them interesting? Comfortable people feeling sad (and eventually, happy again), while telling us about it, may not be as dramatically compelling as their (no doubt, equally comfortable) script-writing believe. Perhaps inevitably, some varieties of cinematic humanism seem more solipsistic than others.

 

Such questions hover over By the Stream, partly due to its spare, cost-efficient style of filming, but also because of its slightly stilted script, which can feel a tad tacked-together. Still, Hong makes space for contradiction and mutual understanding in the relationships he explores, which is surely a cause for praise. Happily, Dublin audiences will have a chance to make up their own minds: it’s playing in the IFI this weekend.

 

 

In the Lost Lands (Paul W. S. Anderson, 2025)

 

On a postapocalyptic planet mashed together from bits of Middle Earth and Rebel Moon (2023), a much-persecuted ninja-witch (Milla Jovovich) enlists a grunting man-thing (Dave Bautista) to hunt down a mysterious monster that resides, as the title suggests, in a wild terrain outside the urban, totalitarian realm of The Overlord, who is secretly dying. So begins In the Lost Lands, an unmagical bland-fest which – Bautista informs us, in the prologue – “isn’t a fairy-tale.” No kidding.

 

Bautista seems to be playing a version of Idris Elba’s Gunslinger, Roland, in the critically reviled (but in fact quite tolerable) 2017 adaptation of The Dark Tower novel series by Stephen King. Unlike Elba, Bautista isn’t much of an actor, not that this is especially relevant here. He and Jovovich look and sound like AI-generated versions of themselves, hallucinations as flat as the green screens that surround them for the entirety of this “film”, if that’s what Paul W. S. Anderson has created. With its questing theme and lengthy conveyor-belt of random challenges that its robotic protagonists must surmount and face, In the Lost Lands – supposed to be based on a George R. R. Martin story – behaves with all the relentlessness of an a eight-year-old’s idea of an epic videogame. (Anderson, of course, is most well known for his Resident Evil adaptations, also starring Jovovich.)

 

Such snide remarks may ultimately be unfair to videogames. After all, Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) was witty and enjoyable; Edge of Tomorrow (2014) was never less than charming; even the Halo series (2022-) featured some fun action scenes. None of which can be said of Anderson’s lame excuse for entertainment, which runs like a Zack Snyderized variation on Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024), or as if Grok had produced Prometheus 4 for television, starring Arwen’s vapid, imaginary cousin from Lord of the Rings (2001) Even mentioning In the Lost Lands alongside those thrillingly cinematic franchises seems like an insult to the medium. Hell, compared to Anderson’s flick, Riddick (2013) comes to resemble a neglected masterpiece.

 

In fact, Pitch Black (2000) the first of the Riddick ventures, could – with only a little exaggeration –  be accurately described in that way: much like Vin Diesel’s ferally violent, inscrutable space-convict, its pulpy plot is smart and lean, and the special effects, even at a distance of a quarter-century, are probably better than the numb, dumb CGI saturating every inch of Anderson’s made-to-order, necrotic yawn of a movie.

 

The healthiest approach to In the Lost Lands might be to pretend it never existed. Rewatch Pitch Black instead: it’s great.