LFF 2017: Happy End / Call Me By Your Name

Here's an LFF 2017 Euro-friendly special, featuring contributions from Austrian and Italian directors. Make the most of it because once we leave the EU, Michael Haneke films will be banned and we'll have to smuggle them in up our arseholes.

Happy End

dir. Michael Haneke, France / Austria / Germany, 2017

I don't know about you, but I like my Haneke to be like a trip to the dentist: uncomfortable to the point of torture, but ultimately good for you. The likes of Funny Games and Hidden throw bourgeois complacency into such sharp relief that Haneke's natural audience should feel like they're the ones being punished as much as their on-screen avatars are, and I find that delicious. Sadly, I left Happy End feeling disappointingly guilt-free and mentally unmolested, and that's no way to walk out of a Haneke.

Formally, this is - thankfully - the same old Michael Haneke: long, static shots that force you to examine every square inch of the frame; elliptical storytelling that wilfully skips over massive plot points and expects you to keep up; the total absence of a score; Isabelle Huppert. Even thematically, all the hits are present and correct - an innocent animal suffers an unpleasant fate, familial bonds are tested to breaking point and the whole affair is colder than an Austrian winter.

But there just isn't that much to chew on. The wealthy, intellectual family unit is in place, and its constituent parts are ripe for some kind of catastrophic, perception-altering event, but it never comes. Haneke's script makes gentle forays into notions of class inequality and racial tension, but he doesn't employ them with the surgical efficiency he has in the past. Maybe he's just chilling out; he's 75, after all, and may well be tired of being so mean to the middle classes. But in turning out such a lesser work, he's denied us the exquisite horror we've come to expect, and that might be the meanest trick of all.

Call Me By Your Name

dir. Luca Guadagnino, Italy / France, 2017

I'll be honest, if Armie Hammer came round to my house for six weeks and spent most of that time lounging around in tiny shorts and dripping wet, I'd probably want to fuck him too. So identification with Call Me By Your Name's sexually uncertain 17-year-old protagonist Elio (Timothée Chalamet, the kid from Interstellar who grew up to be Casey Affleck) is easily achieved. And 132 minutes in Lombardy through Luca Guadagnino's lens is such a relaxing experience that you could easily save hundreds of pounds just watching this film instead of actually going on holiday to Italy.

Hammer and Chalamet perform a delightful verbal and physical dance around each other for much of the first act, while a hugely unsubtle, metaphorical apricot tree slowly ripens in the garden of Elio's family villa. Eventually an affair begins and, inevitably, ends, and it's tenderly portrayed by Guadagnino and his actors - not least the supporting cast, who circle the leads gently as if protecting and encouraging them from a distance.

Something about Call Me By Your Name doesn't quite click for me though: the relationship feels real enough - Guadagnino packs his film with detail, while Chalamet is effortlessly convincing - but the drama is small-scale, if such a thing can be said about a coming-of-age tale. Armie Hammer makes a man out of a boy, but he does it so delicately and incrementally that I found myself yearning for a little more turmoil. It's never dull, but given the comfortably-off intellectual but somewhat self-absorbed family at the story's centre, an appalling part of me did begin to wonder if Michael Haneke's Call Me By Your Name might have been a better movie.

LFF 2016: Free Fire

I realise I'm in the minority here, but I'm afraid I still don't get Ben Wheatley. I look forward to each of his films, and every one - on paper, at least - seems like it's going to be The One that grabs me and shows me that the emperor is, indeed, fully clothed. But to me, all six of his admirably original features have felt like promising debuts; calling cards that give notice of a developing talent about to burst into bloom in a massive way. The latest of those, Free Fire, takes this notion so far that it strongly resembles the first film of another independent director who really did grab cinema by the balls and tug hard: set in a disused warehouse populated by a handful of amateur crooks trading gunshots and wisecracks, Wheatley's sixth film screams Tarantino, which is the last thing you'd expect from such a distinctive, unconventional voice.

Things begin well, as a roster of immediately well-drawn characters converge on the warehouse to carry out a weapons deal: Chris (Cillian Murphy) and Frank (Michael Smiley) are IRA heavies buying guns from Sharlto Copley's unpredictable Vernon and Armie Hammer's smooth, cautious Ord; Justine (Brie Larson) is the go-between; Sam Riley, Enzo Cilenti, Noah Taylor and Jack Reynor play the grunts whose only job is to drive the guns and money into and out of the warehouse. Wheatley is now at a stage where he can command a terrific cast like this, and it's that cast that saves Free Fire from monotony at several stages throughout its brief running time. Smiley and Hammer send sparks flying with every antagonistic exchange, Larson is amusingly weary as the woman adrift in a sea of testosterone, and Copley is predictably hilarious - for the first half at least, until his schtick begins to wear a little thin.

When the deal inevitably goes south and the bullets start to zip and zing, Wheatley sets up an hour of real-time carnage punctuated by crackling dialogue and the occasional trademark moment of hilariously sickening ultraviolence: in just ninety minutes Free Fire leaps from Reservoir Dogs to a mercifully-distilled The Hateful Eight, but without the freshness of the former or the canny subtext of the latter. Wheatley deliberately portrays the shootout as scrappy - as, presumably, it would be - but in doing so loses all sense of geography inside his single location, making the experience a frustrating one to follow. And while there's a ticklish sense of fantasy that allows so many people to get shot so many times without being killed (maybe they're Death Proof?), you do begin to wonder if the apparently inexhaustible supply of ammunition will ever run out.

Undeniably stylish (the costumes are to die for) and entertainingly performed, Free Fire is a noisy blast of fun whose echo fades out even before the credits roll. The smell of cordite and the feel of polyester are stronger sensations than anything provided by the story, and in the context of Ben Wheatley's undeniably remarkable career, that seems a shame. He's absolutely still a director to watch, but at this year's London Film Festival two other, less glorified films over which he's had a clear influence - Prevenge and The Ghoul - have burned far brighter than Free Fire.

Four films I'll be giving a shit about in

THE GIFT

I appreciate this looks like your average home invasion thriller, but that's an interesting cast right there, plus Jason Bateman looks like my friend Luke and watching him being terrorised by a psychopath is my idea of fun. Sorry Luke. (7th)

THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E.

Kingsman: The Secret Sevice. Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation. The Man From U.N.C.L.E.. I'm enjoying all these tongue-in-cheek spy movies trying to out-Bond Bond. Good luck to them I say. You're all doomed. (14th)

45 YEARS

Old people, eh? You never know what they're going to do next, the unpredictable buggers. (28th)

STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON

As a middle-aged, middle-class white man from the Midlands, I'm glad there's finally a film I can connect with on a personal level. This looks to represent my cushioned upbringing and privileged childhood perfectly. Flip the policeman! (28th)