There are films against which one’s head puts up a fight until, finally, the heart simply wants what it wants. Lion (eOne, PG) is one. This sweeping, sun-baked account of a life fatefully divided in childhood between two countries and families risks applying a glib National Geographic gloss to a unique existential crisis, until its sheer blunt force of feeling takes hold and the tear ducts are unlocked. Its opening stages, vividly conveying young Saroo Brierley’s accidental separation from his Indian family and subsequent Australian adoption, are unimprovable, its terror and compromised relief written in the extraordinary gaze of eight-year-old Sunny Pawar.
Weighed down by a half-cocked romance, the adult Brierley’s story of self-rediscovery never regains that specific, sensory urgency as the more expected mechanics of an inspirational weepie kick in, right down to the obligatory Sia ballad. Here’s the thing about mechanics, though: they tend to work.
As machine-tooled awards also-rans go, meanwhile, I’ll take a whole pride of Lions over Hacksaw Ridge (Lionsgate, 15), Mel Gibson’s gory, gaudy second world war ordeal, which ostensibly celebrates devoutly Christian soldier Desmond Doss’s refusal to bear arms by brandishing more than enough ammo to compensate. Excruciating onscreen violence, shot with the oozing sensual detail other directors reserve for love scenes, is Gibson’s stock in trade. But for all its Oscar-winning technical sound and fury, Gibson’s film-making hasn’t the irony or finesse to braid a story of pacifism with what smells suspiciously like bloodlust.
You couldn’t ask for a jauntier cleanser to wash off Gibson’s grime than Sing (Universal, U), a cartoon-critter karaoke session in which a menagerie of animals runs the musical gamut from Leonard Cohen to Katy Perry. It’s a sugar-high spin on the old let’s-put-on-a-show movie, but directors Garth Jennings (Son of Rambow) and Christophe Lourdelet work some peculiar charm into the formula.
Elsewhere, coming unstuck on a vintage Hollywood format is Ben Affleck, whose prohibition gangster saga Live By Night (Warner, 15) buckles under the weight of its earnest genre reverence. Honouring the sprawl of Dennis Lehane’s novel without finding human momentum, it’s a lustrously designed slog. It could use some air, of which Girl Asleep (Metrodome, 12), a beguilingly misty Australian coming-of-age reverie, has plenty to spare. Swinging between the sensibilities of Jane Campion and Lewis Carroll, Rosemary Myers’s film eschews the expected adolescent drama, realising a teenage girl’s warring emotional and sexual impulses as a stylised, fantastical mind-map.
This week’s robust rerelease menu mixes known treasures with ones that could use a little critical polish. You hardly need me to tell you to seek out David Lynch’s snaking, mind-snaring City of Angels nightmare Mulholland Drive (Studiocanal, 15), for example, though a new 4K restoration, doing inky justice to its shadows and spotlights, offers a fresh impetus to dive into its abyss.
On the other hand, Bill Forsyth’s Housekeeping (Powerhouse, PG), making its Blu-ray debut, was a revelation to me. A cooling zephyr of deep sadness cuts through the quirk of this midwestern family comedy, in which two orphaned sisters are placed in the care of their eccentric young aunt, played with exquisite, wistful strangeness by a magnificent Christine Lahti. Less celebrated these days than Forsyth’s more straightforward charmers such as Gregory’s Girl, it’s by far his greatest film, a symphony of softly conflicting tones.
Finally, Mubi.com’s ongoing retrospective of veteran French sensualist Philippe Garrel, tying in with the Cannes premiere of his latest, reaches its dreamy apotheosis with the uncovering of 1974’s Les hautes solitudes. A wordless, hypnotic facial study, centred on the visage of fallen American starlet Jean Seberg, it’s effectively a reflection on reflection. Five years away from death, her troubled personal history is knotted into her silent stare, while others, the German singer Nico among them, occasionally join the frame. It’s a shivery time capsule, yes, but still an eerily moving experiment.
