In Front of Your Face (2021)
Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide, including BFI Southbank, and online on BFI Player
In a parallel universe (utopia?) cinemas would block-book the latest Hong Sang-soo movies the way they do the newest Marvel. They come down the pipe with similar regularity. Yet the quiet, often gently cryptic films of this most prolific of South Korean auteurs often don’t get released here at all. Perhaps they seem too slight, too effortless, too like one another to warrant it. Let’s be thankful that In Front of Your Face has come here then; it certainly works as a taste of Hong at his best. Playing out as a series of conversations in which a melancholy secret comes to light, the film sees a former actress return to Seoul to live with her sister and reunite with a movie director who’s interested in working with her.
Silent Land (2021)
Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide
Set against the stunning Mediterranean backdrop of a holiday villa in Sardinia, Polish director Aga Woszczynska’s debut feature nonetheless brings a real chill into the air. It’s the kind of chill that fans of the films of Michael Haneke or Ruben Östlund know well. Everything is in place for a perfect holiday for a perfect-looking Polish couple, but irritations keep mounting up. The pool hasn’t been filled, and after their landlord gets his handyman in to fix it, a freak accident leaves a man dead. Did the couple do enough to help? And why does their version of events not match up with the villa’s CCTV footage? Shot with icy detachment, Silent Land is a bad-faith, bad-holiday film – think a sunnier Force Majeure (2014).
Love (1971)
Where’s it on? Blu-ray
One of the New Budapest Twelve, a list of the dozen best ever Hungarian films drawn up by that nation’s critics in 2000, Károly Makk’s Love makes its Blu-ray debut this week courtesy of the folk at Second Run DVD. It centres on a young woman in 1950s Hungary whose husband has been imprisoned by the secret police. To spare her dying mother-in-law the details, she spins an elaborate deceit that he’s travelled to America to become a filmmaker. These imagined scenes are represented on screen alongside other shards of memory and experience in Roegian montage sequences that register as flickers in the mind’s eye. At 89 minutes, this is a jewel of a film: tender, sobering and extraordinarily passionate and moving in its final scenes.
The London Nobody Knows (1969)
Where’s it on? Talking Pictures TV, Sunday, 4pm
This is an artefact beloved of psychogeographers and modern-day flâneurs: a cult 45-minute documentary in which the velvet-voiced movie star James Mason takes us on a walking tour of some of London’s derelict, in-between places. What was vanishing in London terms in 1969 is borderline archaelogical by this point, so Norman Cohen’s eccentric doc only grows in fascination. He was making it at a time when the capital was in the full swing of the 60s, projecting shiny images of hipness and glamour around the world. Instead, what Cohen’s film gave viewers was an idiosyncratic kind of ruin porn: faded places, forgotten histories, a sense of crumbling.
A Bigger Splash (1973)
Where’s it on? Netflix
Added to Netflix without much fanfare this week, this 1973 portrait of David Hockney and his relationship and breakup with his model Peter Schlesinger ranks among the most intriguing and creative ‘life of the artist’ biopics ever filmed. Hockney appears as himself in a film caught midway between documentary and drama – an ambitious hybrid for British-Syrian debut director Jack Hazan. The film’s gaze is intimate and exceptionally revealing, both physically and emotionally. Hockney himself thought it went too far and offered to buy up the negative, before later coming round to what Hazan had achieved. It’s erotic, impressionistic and wholly wonderful.
