Volume 111: The Blue Caftan / Line of Fire / Seriously Red
The Blue Caftan (dir. Maryam Touzani)
Halim (Saleh Bakri), the master tailor that is part of the nucleus of Moroccan director Mayram Touzani’s masterful new film The Blue Caftan, handles everything in his life with care and quiet. He sews with a steady concentration, producing elaborate designs on his garments that are so adored that the woman who ordered the titular gown begrudgingly puts up with a long wait for the finished product. His interactions with customers in his tantalizingly colorful and cluttered shop have a hushed sensuality. During a fitting, he brushes his hands along the sides of a young woman draped in shiny lilac with caution and awe. He leaves the negotiations on price and the handling of prickly customers to his wife Mina (Lubna Azabal). She’s the balancing force in the marriage, content to be as charming and brash as a situation requires.
The two aspects of Halim’s life that he keeps most silent about are Mina’s illness — a recurrence of cancer that forced the surgical removal of her left breast — and his homosexuality. Even his trysts with other men at a bathhouse are set off by a glance and a shared understanding rather than words. The weight of it all bears down on Halim, especially as he wrestles with his attraction to Youssef, the talented young apprentice (Ayoub Messioui) working in his shop, and as Mina’s health takes a downward turn.
Touzani treats the many details of this story with the same restrained touch. Her filmmaking style isn’t visually showy, but she knows exactly where to point the camera to achieve maximum effect. Touzani’s lens often focuses on hands: Mina’s delicate fingers picking the right oranges from a street vendor, Halim’s soft touch as he embroiders more gold brocades on the blue caftan, the growing blister on Youssef’s palm from spinning yarn in the alley behind the shop. Or witness the way the camera treats one of Halim’s dalliances. It stays on the wooden door of a shower before panning down to reveal his and another man’s feet as they position themselves for sex.
The director holds back so much that even the tiniest lifts in volume or moments when the characters are either forced to or choose to break their silent pacts feel breathtaking. A key scene towards the midpoint of the film where Youssef gently embraces Halim and admits his love for his mentor is downright shattering, especially when the older man shuns him. So too is the moment when Mina initiates sex with her husband, a coupling that he accepts and undertakes with a devastatingly blank expression.
What is never in question is how much Halim is committed to Mina. They share plenty of warm moments throughout the film — sweetly mocking a testy customer or enjoying a rare night in a café. The reason he won’t indulge in a relationship of any kind with Youssef is because he knows it would be far more emotional than his random hook-ups. The couple hold each other up, and tentatively allow in Youssef for added support when Mina’s health starts failing.
No grand lessons are learned and there are few big actor-ly moments for the three stars of The Blue Caftan. Messioui, Bakri, and Azabal have such empathy for their characters and extend that out to their interactions with one another on screen and to the audience. It’s not difficult to feel as deeply for these people as they clearly feel for each other. (now playing at The Film Forum in New York City and select theaters)
Line of Fire (dir. Scott Major)
Below the surface of Line of Fire, a crime thriller from screenwriter Christopher Gist and director Scott Major, lay the bones of a great movie. Or at least one that packed more of a wallop.
The structure of the story is strong: Samantha (Nadine Garner), a cop in a small Australian town, is at her son’s high school when someone starts shooting the students. But instead of rushing into danger, she freezes, scared to engage, even as the shooter kills her son. In the aftermath, Jamie (Samantha Tolj), a reporter who grew up in the same town and is hungry for a big break, pre-sells a story about the incident and begins pestering the policewoman for an interview. After one too many texts, including an awful post-mortem picture of her son, Samantha snaps. She abducts Jamie’s family and goes about gaslighting the reporter toward a near-mental break.
Sound as that all seems, Line of Fire is wobbly from the jump. Tolj never seems to find the center of her character outside of blind ambition. She comes alive in fits and starts, especially once Jamie’s family is put in danger and she’s forced to cooperate with the whims of someone going through a mental break. Garner fares a bit better, particularly once her fury at Jamie turns into steely-eyed focus. But what’s missing is any nuance or any sense that this character has any mixed feelings about torturing people in some cockeyed revenge plot. She instead pitches the character into several shades of red.
The same can be said for the script, which eschews any potential refined commentary in place of straight down the middle drama. There were plenty of lanes open to the filmmakers. Coming as it does not long after the school shooting in Uvalde when several police officers failed to act to stop the mass killing, there was a chance to open up a discussion on how even the most stout-hearted of people can crumble when faced with adversity. I almost applaud how they made both main characters almost impossible to root for. Samantha clearly has some mental health issues while Jamie winds up becoming a proxy for every Daily Mail or Fox News reporter who plays fast and loose with the truth and resides in a moral gray area. Rather than any kind of resolution, I found myself hoping for mutually assured destruction. (available through the usual VOD services)
Seriously Red (dir. Gracie Otto)
In her native Australia, actor Krew Boylan is something of a star, having scored plum roles in theater productions and showy parts in TV and film like her 2014 portrayal of the real-life Schapelle Corby, a woman who spent nine years in an Indonesian prison for drug trafficking. The conditions are ripe, then, for Boylan’s big breakout moment as a star.
That’s the mood surrounding the release of Seriously Red, the off-kilter comedy that Boylan wrote and stars in. It’s a spotlight turn meant to introduce her to a worldwide audience with a little help from Rose Byrne and veteran character actor Bobby Cannavale who both appear in supporting roles here. (Byrne is also one of the film’s producers.) Yet for all the verve of Boylan’s performance, neither she nor the film truly achieve liftoff.
She throws her all into a performance as Red, an oddball who loses her job as a real estate agent but stumbles into a new career working as a Dolly Parton impersonator. She’s welcomed into the fold by her fellow mimics: a mumbling Elvis (played with a strange lack of personality by Byrne) and a brash ‘70s-era Neil Diamond (Cannavale). Red is soon paired with a faux Kenny Rogers (Daniel Webber) on some international dates and the two become romantic partners… a relationship that is only able to exist for them as long as they remain in character.
Boylan does a commendable job making Red as ugly and borderline unlikeable as possible. During one early scene, she loudly pisses in her mom’s backyard, and she treats most everyone around her as a stepping stone to future stardom. Red is content to step into someone else’s persona, right down to the decision to get breast implants, rather than do any work on herself. It comes, naturally, at a cost to her relationships with her mother and her best friend.
At the same time, there’s almost no chemistry between Boylan and anyone in the cast. It often feels as though Red has been plucked from an entirely different movie and is trying to play catch up with her new surroundings. Even the romance with “Kenny” generates little heat, let alone any sparks that would suggest that they’d be a good fit beyond the history of the real life people they are portraying. There’s no denying that Boylan is a talent worth watching. I just didn’t feel much like watching her in this. (in select theaters and the usual VOD services)