Le Film de Mon Père review – father’s videotape legacy sparks intergenerational dialogue

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A Swiss film-maker’s parent leaves behind a visual diary that raises questions about the limitations of art in a fascinating documentary debut The genesis of Jules Guarneri’s documentary – his first – comes from an unusual gift. Having made more than 20 hours of a filmed diary, his father, Jean, entrusted the material to the budding director, hoping that it would form the building blocks for his son’s first feature. These visual journals, in which the older man addresses the camera – and ultimately Guarneri – with recollections from his past, are awash with nostalgia and regret. As Jean’s recordings are interspersed with Guarneri’s own footage of his family, what starts out as a monologue gradually transforms into an intergenerational dialogue between father and son. Filmed with a fixed camera, Jean’s diaries have a static quality that echoes the stagnancy of his life story. Christabel, his wife and Guarneri’s mother, was an heiress, and the couple lived as idle rich in the Swiss vil...
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Tornado review – windswept samurai western set in apocalyptic Scotland

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The second feature from John Maclean is an almost surreal tale of itinerant martial arts performers and a band of thieves in 18th-century Scotland

John Maclean’s new movie is a dour, pessimistic, almost surrealistically downbeat revenge western set in Scotland in the late 18th century – but it could as well be happening in some post-apocalyptic landscape of the distant future or on another planet. This is the follow-up to his debut Slow West, and as with that film it is shot by Robbie Ryan with music by Jed Kurzel (director Justin’s brother and collaborator). I have to admit, though, that this does not quite have the energy or the fluency of that previous film, perhaps not the same production resources either – and by comparison it is more strenuously contrived. Yet the pure strangeness of the movie commands attention and there is a charismatic lead performance by Japanese actor-musician Mitsuki Kimura, or Kôki.

She plays a dancer called Tornado, who travels around what looks like utterly empty terrain with her impresario father Fujin (Takehiro Hira) in a covered wagon, putting on a samurai show. They perform with puppets, whose little lopped-off heads and limbs squirt out fake blood with tiny ingenious pumps; they also demonstrate samurai sword-twirling combat themselves. They appear to have once been part of a travelling circus encamped elsewhere. And who do they perform to? A crowd of people show up out of nowhere, having presumably walked many miles from the (unseen) villages where they live.

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