Reel view: The kids aren't all right

Felicite is about the eponymous lead character in the Democratic Republic of Congo's capital, Kinshasa

Movies with kids are usually the kind of sentimental garbage I wouldn’t wilfully subject myself to, but three recent ones changed my mind.

Félicité is about the eponymous lead character in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, who does everything in her might to stump up the one million Congolese francs (Rs 40,000) required to stop her injured son’s leg from getting amputated.

French-Senegalese filmmaker Alain Gomis’ fourth feature film, which won the prestigious Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, is super gritty and shows DRC in all its squalor. Céline Bozon’s unremittingly dour camerawork is achieved entirely through a handheld camera. After Timbuktu, this has to be the most outstanding African movie I have watched. It’s hard to imagine the movie with any other lead (Véro Tshanda Beya). The pain in her voice is palpable when she’s performing her evocative songs with Congolese institution, Kasai Allstars, while her son is battling it out in hospital. It’s amusing that I found the movie on a 14-hour United Airlines’ flight to New York.

A still from Félicité

In-flight entertainment always drives me up the wall because there are never any English subtitles for American movies and TV series. A few years ago, I heard Tom Stoppard talking at the Jaipur Literature Festival and he said that he never watched anything American without accompanying subtitles because he believed American actors eat up 20 per cent of their dialogues. Call me petty for ignoring American stuff on a jetlag-inducing flight, but I am good if I am on the same page as the man who wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Anyway, I hope Félicité, which is Senegal’s entry for Best Foreign Language Film at next year’s Oscars, makes it to the shortlist.

Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Killing of a Sacred Deer has to be the most deadpan American movie I have ever seen. The idiosyncratic Greek filmmaker channels the myth of Iphigenia to superb effect by having his successful cardio surgeon lead, Colin Farrell, wife Nicole Kidman and two kids stalked by a pre-teen (Barry Keoghan) who believes his father died due to Farrell’s drunken scalpel work.

“There is so much ancestral or eclectic memory rubble lying around in the film that you suspect it is bidding for Unesco Heritage status. We won’t give it that. But we might give it Ionesco Heritage status,” wrote Nigel Andrews in his Financial Times review while throwing in a snarky reference to the Romanian-French playwright who was fond of delivering dollops of surrealism. Keoghan’s unflagging commitment to making Farrell feel guilty ends up with the surgeon taking matters into his hands as his kids lose their mobility and one starts bleeding from the eyes. Despite a late-stage decay in the proceedings, Lanthimos got me hooked primarily because of the bricolage of his references, which includes Stephen King’s Thinner. I had to Google my Euripides after seeing Farrell playing Russian roulette with his family members.

In contrast to the Lanthimos movie, Sean Baker’s The Florida Project (I watched both at Denver’s arthouse Mayan Theatre) is an anti-helicopter-parenting movie. It is about a six-year-old girl, Moonee (Brooklynn Prince), who lives with her mother, Halley (Bria Vinaite in a career-defining role as the lazy woman who would rather peddle her erotic capital than aspire for a decent lifestyle), in a community of extended-stay motel guests adjoining the Disney World in Orlando. Prince’s role might just be the biggest American breakaway act by a child after Quvenzhané Wallis.

Baker is one of the current American filmmakers whom I find exciting. His oeuvre has been ever-expanding since his 2004 movie, Take Out, and he always makes cinema that evokes Broken America vividly. His previous movie, Tangerine, showed the seedy side of Los Angeles frequented by transgender prostitutes, and The Florida Project is a contemplative take on the American underbelly.

Willem Dafoe as Bobby Hicks, the manager of The Magic Castle Motel, is inspired casting. His lined face exudes the grim reality of the motel and those who inhabit it. All his acting chops cohere beautifully in the scene where he realises a paedophile is on the prowl, and he completely humiliates him. After Moonlight, here’s another movie set in Florida that will deliver a sucker punch to Trump’s mindless clarion call of “Make America Great Again”.

jagannath.jamma@bsmail.in