Chronic

Hypnotically disturbing character study Dir: Michel Franco 1hr 33mins (15)

Tim Roth gives “what may well be
the performance of his career” in
this “sombre, intimately disturbing”
character study, said Peter Bradshaw
in The Guardian. The actor plays
David, a Los Angeles home-care
nurse assigned to those who are
disabled or in the last stages of a
terminal illness. There’s no great
sense of narrative propulsion as he
goes about his work, tending to a woman dying of AIDS (Rachel
Pickup) and an architect who has suffered a stroke (Michael
Cristofer), said Nigel Andrews in the FT: the scenes are slow, with
sparse dialogue and no soundtrack.
Yet the film becomes increasingly
“hypnotic”, reaching a climax when
David tells a stranger that his wife
died of AIDS, a claim that we know
to be untrue, said Donald Clarke in
The Irish Times. It’s then that we
realise that his apparent altruism
masks more complex motives, linked
to his own experience of personal
tragedy. Though the story “proceeds in the lowest of keys, our
nerves never settle”, said Guy Lodge in Time Out. This is a
“sensitive, slow-developing bruise of a film”.

How to Be Single

A New York naif chooses two suspect dating mentors Dir: Christian Ditter 1hr 50mins (R)

“Being single is a mess,” said Peter
Keough in The Boston Globe. So is
this muddled comedy about the
lives of the young and romantically
unattached. It follows guileless Alice
(Fifty Shades of Grey’s Dakota
Johnson), who breaks up with her
college boyfriend so she can
discover her true self in New York.
There she moves in with her babyhating
older sister (Leslie Mann)
and meets Robin (Rebel Wilson), a promiscuous party girl who
initiates Alice in the ways of singledom. You already know
where this is going, said Richard Roeper in the Chicago Sun-
Times. Mann’s character gets maternal and hearts are broken
smitten anyway”, because the number
of laughs and heart-tugging moments
are so perfectly balanced that you
can’t help but root for our heroines.
It’s all good fun – for about an
hour, said Mick LaSalle in the
San Francisco Chronicle. Then
“symptoms of desperation kick
in”, with contrived third-act fights
between Alice and Robin and
barely disguising the fact that the stakes are pretty low for
20-something Alice, whose single status is hardly tragic.
A bawdy rom-com that aims to freshen the genre ends up
being “phony in the most obvious way”.

A Daring Moment in Arab Cinema

Tunisian film Hedi wins Best First Feature award at Berlin film festival
“Vistas of personal freedom
suddenly open up in a bittersweet
Tunisian love story,” said
Hollywood Reporter of
Mohamed Ben Attia’s Hedi.
Likewise, the film has enthralled
cinephiles across the globe. The
Berlin Film Festival’s international
jury, headed by legendary actress
Meryl Streep, awarded a Silver
Bear to the film’s lead actor (Majd
Mastoura). It also won the best
first feature award.
“Tunisian cinema is known for its daring,” Dora Bouchoucha
Fourati, the film’s producer, said to Reuters Africa. “The film
makes only occasional references to the events of 2011 and its
aftermath.” Ben Attia said “that was done deliberately”, to
better portray how everyday life had changed – and not
changed – in years after the uprising. “The thing which I found
so interesting right after the Arab Spring happened was just that
sort of discovery,” he said.
Tunisia is having something of a cinematic moment in the
spotlight, said The National. Hedi, which was partly funded by
Abu Dhabi’s Sanad fund and had its world premiere in
competition at the 66th Berlin Film Festival, “is its latest shining
star”. At first sight, the debut feature film from director
Mohamed Ben Attia “seems like a love story”. But on a deeper
level, it is a metaphor for the issues
and problems Tunisia faced before,
during and after the overthrow of
former president Zine El Abidine
Ben Ali in 2011. The film
documents a single week in the life
of Hedi (Majd Mastoura), a car
salesman “who drifts aimlessly in
life and does not seem overly
excited” that he is about to marry
Khedija (Omnia Ben Ghali). The
marriage was arranged by his
domineering mother, Baya (Sabah
Bouzouita), “a widow who organises everything for her son”,
who does what he is told without protest.
It is the first Arab production set in the Arab world since 1996
to vie for prizes at Europe’s first major cinema showcase of the
year, said ArabNews.com. “It’s not that I’m not ambitious, but
I never imagined going to Berlin! All of us are surprised,” Ben
Attia told AFP. Tunisia is “hailed as a rare success story of the
Arab Spring”, although “authorities have failed to improve the
economy” and last month imposed a nationwide curfew to curb
some of the worst social unrest since the revolution. “It’s true
we have a bit of a hangover,” Ben Attia said. In the film, Hedi
and Rim (played by Rim Ben Messaoud) start thinking about
quitting the country. But the director said “he has never
contemplated leaving”, especially as Tunisian films make
waves abroad. Good call.