Women Talking (15)
**
Let’s be honest, the title is likely to turn some men’s blood cold, but when it comes to the cinema, it’s the talking rather than the people doing it that’s the problem.
Granted, there have been some fine Just People Talking films, but we are right to be wary of any movie that imposes such restrictions on itself. And Women Talking is true to its title - this is an hour and three-quarters of discussion, debate, recrimination and reconciliation.
Despite being her adaptation of a book by Miriam Toews, Sarah Polley’s film feels like a movie of a play. This is mostly because it consists of a group of people interacting in a single location, but also because it has a firmly non-naturalistic theatricality. The book is based on a real incident in a Mennonite community in Bolivia, between 2005 and 2009, but here the location and issues become abstractions. It’s an all-encompassing allegory of patriarchal theocratic society.
In an isolated fundamentalist commune, the women have been drugged and subjected to regular rapes by unseen night time visitors. The group’s male hierarchy dismissed these as the work of Satan, ghosts, or attention-seeking hysteria: until one of the attackers is caught and identifies the others. They are all part of the commune and the response is to raise bail for the attackers and tell the women that they must forgive them. The women gather in the barn to decide whether to stay and fight, or leave and be ex-communicated. A single male school teacher (Whishaw) is there to take the minutes.
Though there is a clicking clock - the two days before the men return - the film is almost entirely without drama, and the discussion sounds like a series of position papers rather than genuine human interaction or characterisation.
Mara, looking like a Renaissance Madonna, is the figure of saintly wisdom. Angry and confrontational Buckley has internalised the oppression. Ben Whishaw’s teacher is the most fantastic drip, meek and mild to an abject degree. That doesn’t invalidate the critique of male-dominated societies, but the viewpoint of a film where the only representations of adult masculinity are either rapists or creatures without backbone, feels a little skewed.
Directed by Sarah Polley. Starring Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Judith Ivey, Ben Whishaw and Frances McDormand. In Cinemas. Running time: 104 mins.
Blue Jean (15)
***
Thatcher's Britain. Clause 28. Oakley’s low-key but persuasive debut whisks us back to the bad old days of the 80s when we were being ruled by a draconian, ideological, Tory government.
Their free market, anything goes, let it all hang out, approach to economics was the fiscal equivalent of the Joy Of Sex video. Yet when it came to other people’s sex lives they were always poking their oar in.
Jean (McEwen) is a gym teacher in a Newcastle secondary school, whose desire to keep her sexuality hidden from colleagues and students is sharpened by the proposed introduction of Section 28, forbidding local councils from promoting homosexuality.
Blue Jean comes to us from the BFI and BBC Films and to some degree is the kind of earnest social drama you'd expect. It's elevated though by McEwen’s central performance as someone desperate for a quiet life and to keep their head down, but who is gradually having that option taken away from her.
The film subtly captures the paranoia of living a double life: the suspicious looks from the neighbour when she gets home, lying awake at night, even though there is no immediate threat.
Directed by Georgia Oakley. Starring Rosy McEwen, Kerrie Hayes, Lucy Halliday, Lydia Page and Stacy Abalogun In cinemas. Running time: 97 mins.
Nothing Lasts Forever (12)
***
Diamonds won’t be forever and they aren’t all that anyway.
Kohn’s breezy, entertaining documentary looks at the threat the precious stones industry faces from synthetic diamonds, rocks made in laboratories that are indistinguishable from the "real" thing.
From there, it explores the question of what is real anyway, how the diamond industry is a cartel controlled by the De Beers and the history of how they carefully manufactured and maintained their product's image as a rare and precious element, an essential accoutrement to any marriage proposal, when in fact diamonds are one of the world's commonest gems.
Kohn’s film has all the elements needed for the slick, successful modern documentary. There’s a globe-trotting adventure; jumping from America and Europe to various locations across Africa, India and China. There is a cast of big characters delivering startling anecdotes. (Author and jewellery designer Aja Raden is so stridently acerbic the interviewer has to check with her that she doesn't have a personal grudge against De Beers.) And then there's the revelation of a big, global conspiracy by a secretive corporation, all swiftly delivered with an engaging music score.
Directed by Jason Kohn. Featuring Martin Rapaport, Aja Raden, Dusan Simic, John Janik and Stephen Lussier. In cinemas Feb 10th, On Demand from February 13. Running time: 83 mins.
Go to http://www.halfmanhalfcritic.com/ for a review of the BFI’s 6 disc, 8 film, Ingmar Bergman Vol 4 boxset.
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