playground
Little Nora goes to school for the first time. When she sees her older brother, Abel, mistreating a boy her age, she comes out of it in her defense, making Abel a victim of his classmates. A passive victim, because he asks Nora not to tell anyone, not even her father. Abel’s increasingly humiliating situation will make Nora, increasingly anguished and divided, lose her friends, get angry with her brother and stop being a good student. In “Recreio”, the Belgian Laura Wandel films this overwhelming youth drama with the camera always at her eye level, giving us her point of view of her world. The film is not just a story of bullying, about the cruelty and violence that children are capable of. It is also about the relations of power and loyalty, and the rituals of aggregation, humiliation and exclusion at school, which can turn it into a hell for the smallest, the weakest, the most passive or the most dissatisfied. The children are examples of naturalness, especially Maya Vanderbeque in the role of Nora.
blood field
João Mário Grilo was inspired by the homonymous novel by Dulce Maria Cardoso, in which the main character manifests himself to the writer and interferes in the story, to shoot a confusing “meta” movie. Carloto Cotta is the protagonist, an anonymous man, arrested for killing a girl, and who is surrounded by five women, from his mother to the author herself, Dulce (Luísa Cruz). The director intends to play with the “reality” of narrative and fiction, and with the status of the main character, who may or may not be just a construction of the writer, or of each of the other women, although he fails to show organization and legibility in the film exposure of all this ambiguity and complexity. The vague characters, the dry and distant tone and the performances, almost all stiff or dead, also do not help to suspend our disbelief and engage us emotionally or intellectually with the film, or feel the pretended “vertigo”. Also with Teresa Madruga, Suzana Borges, Sara Carinhas and Fernanda Neves.
Elvis
Recently premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, this new biographical film on Elvis Presley, signed by the Australian Baz Luhrmann (“Moulin Rouge”, “The Great Gatsby”), stars Tom Hanks in the role of Colonel Tom Parker, the manager of the singer, and the little known Austin Butler (who beat candidates like Harry Styles or Ansel Elgort) playing Elvis. Luhrmann, who is also one of the four authors of the script, presents his version of the rock legend and recreates his life, from childhood to consecration. The complex relationship between Elvis Presley and Parker is particularly in focus in the film, whose cast also includes Kodi Smith-McPhee, Olivia de Jonge, Richard Roxburgh and David Wenham. “Elvis” was chosen movie of the week by The Observer and you can read the review here.
Source: Observadora
