Took a while because of Corona but Sight & Sounds' pick for Best Film of 2019 finally made it to theaters here. Of course like all of Sight & Sounds picks it then went on to get ravaged by plebs who still don't understand how Sight & Sounds picks their films. Regardless, it's a clinical and personal retelling of director's Joanna Hogg's own experience as a young adult in the 80s. Julie is a film student from a family of privilege who gets entangled with a posh dandy who works for the ministry of foreign affairs. He compliments her on her fragility, which Julie does not understand but soon enough becomes clear as he puts their relationship to the test and she simply cannot break away from him. Fun fact: Julie is played by Honor Swinton Byrne, daughter of Tilda Swinton, who is a childhood friend of director Hogg and plays Julie's mother in the film. Anyway, the film is delicately told with a lot of
show not tell, which is quite amazing for a film that is filled almost entirely with dialogues. I found it highly captivating but I can easily see why the average Joe would hate it, because it's not a film made to entertain, to teach or to experience. It's precisely what it is, a personal retelling of true events, not some big rise & fall story or historic event but of naivety of a young woman and a broken relationship.
Ironically this is a highly received film by critics too (and seemingly audiences alike) but I'm left to wonder why. If there was ever a film that was style over substance, it's this. Sure, this Brazilian modern western parable of a small town encountering strange events has some things to say about modern (and historic) Brazil, but it's also two hours and fifteen minutes long and features zero character development. And when I say zero, I mean zero. Even the schlockiest of B-films (which this borrows a lot from) have more basic character development than this film. Even characters that get introduced as if they might have an intriguing position in the story end up contributing absolutely nothing of the aspects they were introduced with. It's bafflingly amateurisitc but worse it makes it hard to care about anything that happens for a good hour and half. What is left is some B-schlock action but so casually brushed over it apparently wasn't on the directors' minds either. The most I can give it is
'At least it looks good'.