Bad Luck Banging, I'm Your Man, and more to watch this weekend

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Many 2021 favourites are now streaming including Bergman Island, I'm Your Man, and Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn. We also recommend checking out The Laureate — a flawed film with a wonderful central performance from Tom Hughes.

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Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn

VOD in Canada and UK, virtual cinemas US (or purchase on VOD), VirginTVGo UK

Click here for virtual cinema tickets in the US.

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn was one of our top 30 films of 2021. It's one of the smartest and funniest films of the year, and it's also the best fiction film we've seen thus far to deal with the pandemic (plus poor mask usage as a sign of moral failure). It was Romania's submission for the Oscar for Best International Film.

Here's an excerpt from the intro to Per Morten Mjølkeråen's (fantastic!!) career-spanning interview with director Radu Jude, in which he discussed Bad Luck Banging:

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is set in contemporary Romania, with the Covid-19 pandemic at full force. The film, told in three distinct parts, follows Emilia (Katia Pascariu), a schoolteacher who has been called in for a parent-teacher meeting because of a leaked sex tape that she and her partner filmed together.

The first part follows Emilia as she makes her way through the streets of Bucharest; the camera is almost documentarian in its professional distance. As she walks through crowded plazas, pharmacies, and bookstores, we get a glimpse of Bucharest in the immediate aftermath of the first lockdown. People walk around with masks around their necks or hanging from their bags, or they take them off to talk to people in confined spaces. The film is not directly about the pandemic — although Jude had a very clear idea about why he didn’t want to erase it from the film. But it is one of the few films in the Covid-19 era that uses masks, etc., to brilliant effect.

More of a video essay than a conventional narrative, the second part of the film sees Jude explore a series of topics and ideas in montage form. It covers a wide range of topics, some explicitly tied to the overall narrative and some seemingly random. It’s an exercise in dialectics: jumping from “Military,” which shows archival footage of a military parade accompanied by a text that links the Romanian military to the repression of civilians; to “Blonde jokes,” which sees a nudist blonde woman in a green screen studio (with the set dressing of a beach) being chased by a man with a bull mask. Jude talks about the dialectical nature of this montage below and also relates it to TikTok.

Read the full interview.

The Laureate

VOD Canada/US

This film had its world premiere at Mallorca last year, and is now on VOD in Canada/US (UK info TBD). If you're interested in the War Poets or exciting young actors (it stars an excellent Tom Hughes), it's worth a watch.

Here's an excerpt from the intro to my interview with Tom Hughes:

If presented with the IMDb credits of Tom Hughes, chances are, you’ll go, “Oh, I loved him in that!” in response to at least one of his roles. Recognizing him from part to part — despite his coverboy good looks — may be a challenge because he’s a real character actor who changes his physicality and movements, and his accent, too. This year, Hughes has headlined two films which had their world premiere in the fall: Shepherd (at the London Film Festival, now in UK cinemas), in which he plays a man alone on an eerie Irish island, slowly going mad with grief; and The Laureate (at the Mallorca Film Festival, still seeking distribution), in which he plays WWI poet Robert Graves (friend to Siegfried Sassoon, who appears in the film) in the PTSD-ridden years after the war.

In The Laureate, Hughes stars as WWII poet Robert Graves, a man also in a seemingly modern marriage — for the 1910s, at least — whose marriage opens up to involve a third person because caring for him in his PTSD state (in addition to their child) proves too much for his wife. Much like Vita & Virginia, the film depicts several surprisingly romantic relationships, but at the centre is Graves, a smart and articulate man who is unable to express his own feelings of trauma, which creates fissures in his marriage. Much like in Hughes’s previous roles, there are moments when Graves seems to revert to his childhood self: scared, shivering, traumatised, uncertain how to find comfort.

Though not nearly as good as the other 2021 WWI War Poet film, Benediction, The Laureate is an interesting curiosity both if you're interested in exploring this milieu and for its excellent performances.

In my interview with Hughes about The Laureate, he had this insight about his character, Robert Graves:

Robert Graves, as a person, was fascinating. There’s no denying the impact that he’s had with his literature and its influence on so many people. Spike Milligan, for example, that acerbic wit, the Mercurial geniuses. John Lennon, even, was so inspired by Spike Milligan. I felt like a lot of that spark was in Robert. I was drawn to trying to find that.

But most importantly, [I was drawn to] finding that within him a moment where he’s lost that spark. That felt like an interesting challenge as an actor. I was attracted to the idea of playing such an interesting bloke, a conflicted bloke, a guy who not only has this very important place in artistic history, but also is a fascinating walking contradiction of many incredible parts.

This guy [Robert Graves], who has a flamboyance within him, a freedom, a wit, fervor, an extreme humour — when we meet him, he is kind of locked up and trapped for a multitude of reasons. I was trying to make that feel like it was rooted in something that would have been honest, on some level, to what someone may have gone through at that time.

I'm Your Man

Hulu US, Hoopla Canada, VOD Canada/UK, VirginTVGo UK

My favourite film at the Berlinale (yes, I loved this even more than the new Sciamma!) stars a RADIANT AMAZING Maren Eggert (who won best actor and gives one of the very best performances of the year) and a never better Dan Stevens as her 'ideal man' in robot form. We'll be going deep on the film on next week's podcast.

Here's an excerpt from my review:

How big is the gulf between what we think we want from romantic relationships and what we actually need or would settle for? Is part of the joy of a relationship the knowledge that you’re needed? Is a flawed partner more attractive because they make you feel less alone for also being flawed? How do we change to suit our partners in a relationship? Wouldn’t it be convenient if you could store your partner in the spare room with the vacuum cleaner and the exercise bike? These are some of the many complex questions at the centre of Maria Schrader’s Berlinale competition film, I’m Your Man. In the film, cuneiform researcher Alma (Maren Eggert) is asked to test out a new AI robot, Tom (Dan Stevens), who has been designed to be her perfect man. For three weeks, he’ll live with her and learn from her, and at the end, she’ll write a report about the experience, evaluating what he’s like as a partner.

When the film opens, Alma arrives at a swanky club with retro decor, a dance floor, and “Puttin’ on the Ritz” in the background. Couples are flirting and chatting, either seated at tables or dancing. Guided by an employee of the establishment dressed like an old-timey flight attendant (Sandra Hüller), Alma is introduced to Tom, seated at a table, looking dapper in a well-tailored suit. The conversation is stilted. He makes bizarre comments like, “Your eyes are like mountain lakes I want to sink into,” and punctuates his suggestion that they dance the rumba with a shake of his shoulders. Alma asks him a series of bizarre but super specific questions, from solving a hard arithmetic problem to reciting poetry, which he answers without skipping a beat. Alma shifts between staring blankly at him and looking away in disbelief, disgust, or frustration. When they get on the dance floor, his dancing is so overenthusiastic, each movement exaggerated, that you wonder what planet he dropped in from. That is, until he short circuits, repeating “Ich bin” with a twist of his head, like a broken record. As he’s carried off by a group of handlers dressed like Hüller, we realise Alma’s date is not a human, but a facsimile of one.

Read the full review.

We also recorded a podcast on the film!

In October, we were joined by Lena Wilson to discuss two light sci-fi-ish romantic comedies, Maria Schrader’s I’m Your Man, which was one of our favourite films from the Berlinale earlier this year, and Richard Curtis’ About Time, about which we have complicated feelings.

Read the show notes and/or listen to the episode on your browser here.

Listen to the podcast on your favourite podcatcher.

Bergman Island

Hulu US, VOD Canada/US, Coming Soon to Mubi UK in the spring

It's still rolling out around the world, so check if it's available in your country here.

When this screened at Cannes, I watched it twice back-to-back the same evening: I just loved it that much. Mia Hansen-Løve's latest is easily in our top 5 films of the year. We celebrated with an in-depth podcast on the film and on another film by director Mia Hansen-Løve: Things to Come. All four central performances are also among the best performances of the year.

Here's Lindsay Pugh on the film:

Early on in Bergman Island, Chris (Vicky Krieps) declares, “I would like to have nine kids from five different men.” She and Tony (Tim Roth) are filmmakers who came to Fårö Island, the land of Ingmar Bergman, to work on respective projects. While they have a daughter together and often seem like a couple, Chris describes Tony as “a friend.” Hansen-Løve doesn’t define the specific parameters of their relationship, but demonstrates the differences in the way they each think about art and life. Chris envies and disdains Bergman, a prolific artist with nine kids from six different women. When she asks Tony how he feels about Bergman’s lack of involvement in his kids’ lives, he responds, “I should feel bad, right?” This is the crux of the film. Chris (and Hansen-Løve) thinks deeply about her responsibility as an artist and parent, along with the gender-based limitations she faces; so much, in fact, that those themes are prevalent in her own art. Tony, on the other hand, is not burdened in the same way. Like Bergman, his work revolves around women sans any of the complications they actually face.

In the second half of the film, Chris asks Tony for feedback on her screenplay. As she describes it to him, the film melts into the world of her work (which also happens to take place on Fårö). Her protagonist, Amy (Mia Wasikowska), is a film director who is in town for a friend’s wedding along with her ex-boyfriend, Joseph (Anders Danielsen Lie), whom she still loves. Like Chris, Amy has a young daughter and a partner back home, but her identity is not completely wrapped up in those relationships. In another striking similarity to Chris’s life, Joseph reveals that Amy “wanted two children with two men at the same time,” a desire that he found “absurd.”

As the screenplay develops, the autobiographical resemblance becomes undeniable. Chris uses her work as a lens through which to view her own life and perhaps, so does Hansen-Løve. Women don’t have the luxury of shirking their parental responsibilities to focus solely on creative endeavours; however, they have the ability to examine their unique experiences and turn them into art.

Listen to the (still free!) podcast on Mia Hansen Løve's Bergman Island and Things to Come

In October, we discussed French director Mia Hansen-Løve’s newest film Bergman Island and her 2016 film, Things to Come. We analyzed both films’ shared themes of women in existential crises, the passage of time, and the speed of change.

Click here to listen to the episode on your favourite podcatcher (recommended on mobile especially!)

Click here to read the show notes on our website (where you can also listen!)

Happy watching!

Best,

Alex Heeney, Editor-in-Chief

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