Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 30/11/2017)

There has always been an admonitory element to Michael Haneke's cinema, as though the Austrian auteur was both raging at the follies, flaws and failings of the modern world, while also scolding the audience for needing a piece of entertainment to recognise them. Five years have passed since Haneke showed the softer side of his nature with Amour (2012) and many have seen Happy End as a valedictory summation of the themes that have preoccupied Haneke for the last three decades. Yet, while he does revisit such ideas as the future of Europe (The Seventh Continent, 1989), technology (Benny's Video, 1992), the invasion of space (Funny Games, 1997 & Time of the Wolf, 2003), immigration (Code Unknown, 2000), sexual expression (The Piano Teacher, 2001), surveillance (Hidden, 2005), sinister children (The White Ribbon, 2009) and euthanasia (Amour), this often feels more like Haneke is critiquing rather than justifying himself. Consequently, this rigorous and remorselessly disconcerting domestic saga works as a darkly droll satire on both a canon and a continent, as well as a sly reproach to those who have attempted to pigeonhole Haneke and categorise his films. The action opens with four scenes filmed with a smartphone. Each is accompanied by angry text messages, as they show Aurélia Petit completing her toilette before bed, a hamster named Pips being killed with anti-depressants, Petit putting something in the oven and the texter savouring the silence before calling an ambulance after her mother has lost consciousness. These narrow rectangular images are replaced by a wide-angled shot of a building site in Calais. The radio is playing and nothing remarkable appears to be happening until a wall collapses and some of the workers are trapped underneath. We cut to property developer Isabelle Huppert in her car, as she postpones a rendezvous with financier fiancé Toby Jones in order to attend the scene. At dinner that night, she reprimands adult son Franz Rogowski for drinking too much and father Jean-Louis Trintignant asks if she can postpone their quarrel until they have finished eating. Huppert apologises, but protests that she is just being concerned for the well-being of her son and this prompts sister-in-law Laura Verlinden to announce that her infant son said `daddy' earlier in the day and she knows that this will delight her doctor husband, Mathieu Kassovitz. His 12 year-old daughter, Fantine Harduin (the owner of the phone from the opening sequence), has accompanied her mother to the hospital and denies all knowledge of the pills she seems to have taken. She packs a couple of bags and moves into Trintignant's house and she allows Verlinden and Kassovitz to make a fuss of her before she goes to bed. The following morning, Huppert asks the Moroccan servants, Hassam Ghancy and Nabiha Akkari, to make up a room for Harduin and introduce her to the family dog, so they can start getting used to each other. She heads to the site to meet the accident inspector and ticks off Rogowski for making such an aggressive defence of their safety record and he is still sulking at supper when Trintignant asks why Harduin is eating with them. Huppert explains that she is staying while her mother is in hospital and Trintignant senses a kindred spirit, as he dourly welcomes her to the club. Alone that night, Kassovitz exchanges kinky emails with an online mistress, while Huppert makes her regular call to Jones in London and Harduin watches trashy teen vlogs on her tablet. She is still watching them the next day while the family awaits news of Trintignant, who has crept into the garage in his pyjamas and driven one of the firm's vans into a tree. Kassovitz gets home late with the news that he has broken his leg and a couple of ribs and he shares Huppert's concern that this is their father's latest attempt to kill himself. Following another lengthy online chat involving Kassovitz and his lover, Loubna Abidar (whom we see briefly tapping away on her laptop in a darkened bedroom), we see Harduin filming her half-brother in his cot and she explain in a series of texts how she lost her older brother when she was five and now hopes she has found a replacement. Father and daughter go to the beach and Harduin has to go to the ice-cream counter alone when Kassovitz takes a phone call. As they walk back, she asks him if he loves Verlinden and wonders how he could have also loved Petit. Momentarily stung, as if he suspects that Harduin has stumbled across his cyber adultery, Kassovitz reassures her that things are fine with Verlinden and tells Harduin how they met, as they wander back across the sand. Meanwhile, Rogowski has been to see the son of one of the accident victims in a block of flats on the outskirts of Calais. The camera keeps a discreet distance as he rings the bell and has a brief word with the man who answers the door. However, he get punched in the face and kicked in the stomach for his pains and he staggers back to his car in a state of shock. Too embarrassed to come home, he hides out in a waterfront apartment belonging to the family. But Huppert tracks him down and asks why he got into a fight. She questions why he is drinking so heavily and he wishes she would leave him alone, as he knows he is too much of a screw-up to take over the family firm. That night, he goes to a karaoke bar and turns somersaults while singing. But he ends up crumpled on the stage. Kassovitz and Harduin go to visit Petit in hospital, but she is still unconscious and Harduin seems unwilling to linger. Down in the town, Trintignant pushes himself along in a wheelchair. He begins a conversation with a group of black men and a middle-aged white man intervenes to check he is okay. Having failed in his bid to goad some strangers into beating the living daylights out of him, Trintignant asks barber Dominque Besnahard if he would procure him a pistol or a supply of pills. However, he is too scared to go agree and Trintignant (who had been refused admission to a euthanasia clinic in Zurich the previous year for being too healthy) orders him to forget he asked and finish the haircut. He is more enthusiastic when Huppert hires a gambiste to play at his 85th birthday party and she also introduces the guests to Harduin, who has to stand to a round of applause. Rogowski takes her into the garden to sample the buffet and she is embarrassed when Kassovitz draws everyone's attention to Akkari and her amazing cooking by jokingly referring to her as their `Moroccan slave'. Needing a distraction, Kassovitz sweeps Harduin indoors to wish Trintingnant many happy returns and he seems not to recognise her. Huppert and Rogowski attend a hearing with the wife and son of the man injured in the accident. They offer them compensation, but make it known that they have found a witness to the assault at the flats and will press charges if the family chooses to make trouble. Meanwhile, Harduin has wound up in hospital after taking some pills and, when Kassovitz tries to reassure her that he would never put her in a home, she accuses him of only loving himself and reveals that she has read all of his messages to Abidar. He contacts her to let her know that their secret has been discovered. But, rather than ending the relationship, Kassovitx suggests that they stop saving their threads and meet only at prearranged times so that they leave no incriminating evidence. While Huppert and Jones are arranging a loan with his bank, Kassovitz asks Trintignant to have a word with Harduin. She is summoned to his study and he sits her down at his desk and shows her photographs of his late wife. He explains how much he loved her and, thus, when she became bedridden and started to suffer, he had no compunction in suffocating her. Harduin doesn't seem surprised and confesses to feeding tranquillisers to a girl at camp after she had been prescribed them to cope with Kassovitz leaving Petit. Suppressing a half-smile, Trintignant asks if she regretted her action and Harduin admits it was a mean thing to do, as the victim had done nothing to deserve it. However, when he inquires why she had tried to commit suicide, Harduin is less forthcoming. But he senses that they have forged a bond. Shortly afterwards, Kassovitz is called in by Ghancy and Akkari because their dog has bitten their little daughter. He assures them that she will be fine and Huppert brings the child a box of chocolates to help her feel better. She shrugs when Ghancy offers his congratulations on her upcoming wedding and bundles her brother out of the servants' quarters. A little while later, Harduin tries to log on to her father's laptop and is peeved that he has changed the password. Huppert and Jones get married and are dining in a sunny room overlooking the sea when Rogowski bursts in with some friends he has made at the Jungle detention camp. He pushes Jones away when he tries to silence him and he only stops shouting about the nightmares the migrants have to endure when Huppert breaks his fingers. While everyone is watching the spectacle of the strangers being seated, Trintignant asks Harduin to wheel him outside. He nods in the direction of the slipway and she struggles to control the chair, as the slope takes effect. She puts on the brakes at the water's edge and he orders her to leave him alone. Releasing the brake, Trintignant rolls into the sea and he braces himself for what he hopes will be his final moments. But, as Harduin starts filming on her phone, Kassovitz and Huppert rush out to rescue their father and the action ends with the latter shooting a glance back at her niece, as though trying to work out why she would be videoing rather than helping. Since its lukewarm reception at Cannes, Michael Haneke's twelfth feature has been dividing opinion. It's not one of his masterpieces, but it's certainly not a complacent rehash, either. There are moments when the mischievous ellipses recall the studied style of Eugène Green, while, at others, it almost seems as if Haneke is parodying those who have sought slavishly to emulate his distinctive approach to both framing and staging the action. He also appears to be teasing his admirers by giving Huppert and Trintignant's characters the same Laurent surname they had in Amour, which also centred on a mercy killing. But, while the strand involving Franz Rogowski feels somewhat contrived, Haneke has serious things to say about the social, economic and moral state of Europe, the family unit and the way in which social media is not only transforming the way we interact with each other, but also the way in which we respond to mundane and dramatic situations alike. He also dispels the myth that online communication brings people closer, as Kassovitz and Abidar's messages only serve to emphasise how far apart they really are. Similarly, we never learn where the sociopathic Harduin is posting her clips and ponderings, but Haneke almost seems to have banished exposition from this picture and many other viewer questions seem set to go unanswered. Reuniting with longtime cinematographer Christian Berger, Haneke picks up the details dotted around Olivier Radot's splendidly atmospheric sets (with Trintignant's study being a particular delight) without ever straining for effect, as the tone switches between soap and satire. Monika Willi's editing and the performances are similarly well judged, with Huppert and Trintignant being matched by Belgian newcomer Fantine Harduin, who has a watchfulness that recalls the young Ana Torrent in Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) and Carlos Saura's Cria Cuervos (1976). While he may not be as prolific or as provocative as Takashi Miike, Sion Sono is no stranger to subversion, as he has demonstrated in such fascinating features as Suicide Club (2001), Noriko's Dinner Table (2005), Love Exposure (2008), Cold Fish (2010) and The Virgin Psychics (2015). His latest outing, Antiporno, has been made as part of the Roman Porno Reboot Project launched by the Nikkatsu studio to mark its centenary. Requiring directors to put a modern spin on the skin flicks that the zaibatsu had churned out between 1971-88, this sequence has so far spawned Akihiko Shiota's Wet Women in the Wind, Isao Yukisada's Aroused by Gymnopedies, Kazuya Shiraishi's Dawn of the Felines and Hideo Nakata's White Lily. But Sono is less interested in outright titillation than in the way that cinema has commercialised sex and, in the process, objectified, fetishised and exploited women. Waking face down on her blue bed with a pair of pink panties around her ankles, Ami Tomite pulls up her underwear and teeters out of her yellow bedroom into a red bathroom. Sitting on the loo, she gazes into a fragment of broken mirror and curses the fact that it's her birthday and she is falling apart. She decides to cheer herself up by putting on a peach dress and chats to the ghost of her late sister, who is playing the piano as Tomite flits around the room and sympathises with a lizard that is trapped inside a wine bottle. Having danced around for a while and contemplated the dichotomy that she is both a virgin and a whore, Tomte watches some pornography on a video projector and becomes so agitated urging the couple on that she has to rush to the bathroom to vomit. Musing on the importance of bodily functions, Tomite turns off the film and begins laughing hysterically while proclaiming that she is not alone but an independent woman. She is interrupted by the arrival of her loyal assistant, Mariko Tsutsui, who starts reading the daily schedule. But Tomite is distracted by the four large paintings propped against the wall and she declares them depressing because the model is ugly. Tsutsui tries to stop Tomite from damaging the art and has a glass of water poured over her head for her pains. Tomite asks if she would like to be a whore and Tsutsui nods eagerly, as she is ordered to get on all fours and bark like a dog. Tomite puts a collar around her neck and leads Tsutsui around the room on a lead, as she laughs that she lacks the purity of heart to be a proper wanton. Enjoying the power she has over her minion, Tomite orders her to read the schedule while licking her legs. But, as she begins to take pleasure in the sensation of being pampered, Tomite is overcome by nausea and dashes back into the bathroom to throw up again. Although Tsutsui expresses concern, she is rewarded with a thrashing with the leash that is only brought to an end by the doorbell. A trendy magazine editor and her photographer breeze in with their minions to do an interview and they are about to pose Tomite when she decides that her rouge is not suitable and orders Tsutsui to slash her wrists so that she can use her blood. As the others look on enthralled, Tsutsui cuts into her flesh and red spots drip on to the floor. However, Tomite derides the quality of the blood and urges one of the liggers to cut into her own arm. Rather than applying the blood directly, however, Tomite orders Tsutsui to strip naked and crawl on all four so that her skin can be smeared for her use. Dabbing the blood on to her cheek, Tomite seems satisfied. But she wishes to pile further humiliation on Tsutsui and tells one of the acolytes wearing a strap-on to rape her, while she answers questions about her work as a novelist and her habit of using actresses to fashion her characters and creating artworks based on the books. She smiles at the hazy spirit of her sister on the other side of the room, as she ridicules the idea that her work has a theme. Whirling around the room as the camera snaps, Tomite asks Tsutsui if she is enjoying being raped and laughs when she replies that she aspires to being as big a whore as her boss. Suddenly, Tomite has a vision of this scene taking place on a floor soaked with red liquid and she wretches as inspiration washes over her and she searches frantically for a paint brush to pound the image into canvas. But, as she turns around, a voice shouts `Cut!', and we realise that everything we have seen thus far has been self-consciously staged as a film within a film. The director is furious with Tomite for messing up and she looks round to see her co-stars sitting on the bed and shaking their heads in disbelief. Tsutsui is particularly irate and she slaps Tomite for her poor performance and she asks the director why he is wasting his time with such a third-rater. Tomite burns with shame and promises to improve, but the director hits her over the head with his clipboard and warns her to get it right or else. Tsutsui also threatens to ruin her career and the crew bay for Tomite to get on all fours and likc Tsutsui's leg. They resume from the moment Tsutsui strips, but the scene doesn't play as before, as Tsutsui slaps Tomite around the head and, when she delivers her speech about the freedoms enjoyed by Japanese women, she has lost the confident conviction of the first take and the director calls for a break. Feeling miserable, Tomite looks up and sees several women in print dresses with long trains standing before her. They encourage her to be the best she can be and she appears to have a flashback to a moment in her childhood when she stalked through a moonlit forest brandishing a knife and standing before a couple having sex. When she comes round, Tomite is lying on the bed again, only this time she is wearing the pink panties around her waist. She feels flustered and opens the door to Tsutsui with an admission that she is finding this role difficult because she is an ordinary woman and not the whore she is being asked to portray. The falseness of the situation oppresses her and she turns to find herself alone on a stage with Tsutsui and an audience laughing at her speech about her life and her work being separate things. Back on the film set, she asks Tsutsui if she will hit her again when the director calls `cut!' But Tsutsui is as confused by the question as she is Tomite's insistence that the film beaming on the wall shows her having sex, when it simply shows a sun-dappled woodland glade. Light pours through the extractor fan vents and spirals like disco lighting on the floor. Tomite has a vision of her schoolgirl self coming down a flight of stairs and she dines with her parents, who discuss their conjugal activities with her sister using a formal language that they belief distinguishes their love-making from the sordid acts depicted in pornography. Tomite announces that she would like to die and her mother urges her to improve her grades instead. She leaves the table and marches into an adjoining room, where she begs a young man in a suit to kill her by plunging a knife into her abdomen. He obliges and she falls to the floor, while looking up into the lens. Suddenly, we are back in the yellow room, with Tsutsui posing for Tomite, who has decided to make her the model for her next heroine. She orders Tsutsui to strip and removes her own underwear before fondling her body. They kiss, but Tomite breaks away as inspiration hits her and she rushes back to the canvas. As she paints, she is stricken with self-doubt and is urged on by the women in long dresses who are now kneeling at her feet. She curses being a woman, as they always have to be subservient to men. The doorbell rings and Tsutsui enters to begin another day's work. She begins reading the schedule, but Tomite is distracted by a vision of her parents having sex against the red bathroom wall. Tsutsui is puzzled that she would be so taken aback by the fact that her parents slept together, but breaks off to answer the door. The editor and photographer breeze in with their entourage and Tomite offers to show them footage of the time she lost her virginity. But the projected image shows snow blowing gently in a glade and the women exchange sceptical looks. But, as Tomite tries to assert herself, the director loses his patience and sends everyone for a break. Tsutsui tuts in disgust at Tomite's incompetence and she wanders behind the scenery in a daze. She changes into a school uniform and returns home to find her parents canoodling on the stairs. Much to their horror, she announces that she has a role in a roman porno and, when her father protests, she says she is sick of seeing him coupling with her stepmother all the time and pleads with him to take her virginity. She tries to pull him on top of her, but he wriggles free and Tomite rushes into the street to ask a stranger to sleep with her. He agrees and pushes her down in the woods and begins to force himself on her when she suggests that they just grind instead. Looking up, she sees the long-dress woman gathered around a camera on a tripod. But they have vanished by the time her first sexual experience ends and she scrambles to her feet with dirty knees. A cut take us to Tomite in her uniform auditioning for the film role. The director asks why she wants to appear in a roman porno and she says she wants to be naked and have lots of sex. He isn't convinced and orders her to strip to her underwear and she implores him to make her chaste body smutty. As she yells that she would be a great choice, the director tells Tomite to look into a white cardboard box. She sees her parents fornicating and recalls the pain of losing her younger sister, which she compares to all the pictures of butterflies in the pages of a book flying free and congregating on the ceiling. Tomite gets up from her desk in a classroom and knocks on a door. Tsutsui answers. She is now the author and she makes Tomite remove her skirt and crawl on all fours like a dog. Tomite is now the one to receive the thrashing with a belt, but the scene is crosscut with Tomite striding up and down the yellow room reading from a manuscript. At that moment, the editor and the photographer arrive and Tomite lets them in. Tsutsui now recites the speech about freedom and how Japanese women are too timid to reach out and take it for themselves. Once again, the scene shifts to Tomite sitting at a desk, as she describes the plot of the porno and explains that is being made to show that Japanese men are as useless as the fake freedoms and daydream world they have created. She begins to shout, as she denigrates chauvinist voyeurism and all it represents. But she is interrupted by her sister bringing her a birthday cake, which she places on the desk. Tomite repeatedly buries her face in the cake, as she raves that she is worth more than the cheap freedoms men claim for themselves. As purple paint cascades from the ceiling, Tomite throws herself on the floor and writhes and cackles before pushing the desk out of the top shot showing her being spattered with more paint from above. As two naked women gyrate on the floor beside her and her sister wanders into the torrent of paint as snow begins to fall, Tomite slithers around in search of an exit. She bawls in distress, as we cross-cut to a shot of the lizard trapped in the bottle beside the squished birthday cake. Typically transgressive, but markedly less controlled than Sono's best work, this is a deliberately difficult picture to watch and fathom. Clearly, casting a jaundiced eye over the roman porno and its poor relation, the pinku-eiga, Sono often appears to be biting the hand that feeds him, as he questions the social and aesthetic aspects of pornography and the way in which its commodification of women impacts upon the way that men treat them in the real world. But he also exploits the old Nikkatsu strategy of giving film-makers a degree of creative leeway providing that they slipped in some nudity or simulated sexual activity every 10 minutes. Thus, this could also be seen as a dissertation on the nature of artistic freedom, as well as the liberty that is referenced so frequently in the script. Despite the bullishness of Ami Tomite and Mariko Tsutsui, who throw themselves with disarming verve into demanding roles alongside such adult video stalwarts as Fujiko, Ami and Saki, this always feels capricious in its criticisms and excesses. Mako Ito's photography captures the brilliant colours in Takashi Matsuzuka's audacious production design, while Junicho Ito's editing keeps the audience from settling into any sort of passivity. Yet, despite the potency of the audiovisual assault, this is rather laboured in its denunciation of sexploitation and its dissection of the movie-making process. Given the current scandal brewing in the entertainment industry, the asides on the power dynamics between an actress and a director are timely (and droll, courtesy of the self-reflexive shift in the relationship between Tomite and Tsutsui and the characters they are playing). But the hectoring nature of the abrasive satire and the blatancy of the symbolism make this more of an ordeal than a revelation. As Paul McGuigan's adaptation of Peter Turner's wonderful book, Film Stars Don't Die in Livepool, continues its theatrical run, BFI Southbank has curated a season of films starring Gloria Grahame, the actress with a talent for trouble who is played in the recreation of her last days by Annette Bening. Despite being more versatile than the studios would ever allow, Grahame was often cast as girls who were good at being bad and two of her finest film noir performances are back in cinemas this week. As one of the masters of the expressionist style that had emerged in Weimar Germany after the Great War, it was almost inevitable that Fritz Lang would take to film noir. His first efforts were little short of brilliant, as The Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945) lured Edward G. Robinson out of his depth, as he became entangled with femme fatale Joan Bennett. He also enjoyed considerable success with the `newspaper trilogy' of The Blue Gardenia (1953), While the City Sleeps and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (both 1956). But his most disturbing study of evil was The Big Heat (1953), which was adapted by former crime reporter Sidney Boehm from a Saturday Evening Post serial by William P. McGivern. Taking its title from the slang for a police crackdown on urban crime, this was one of several pictures in the early Eisenhowerian era to focus on syndicate busting. However, featuring one of the most iconic moments in noir history, Lang's unflinching procedural easily outstrips similarly themed outings like Bretaigne Windust's The Enforcer (1951), Robert Wise's The Captive City and Phil Karlson's Kansas City Confidential (both 1952). When Kenport cop Tom Duncan commits suicide, his widow, Bertha (Jeannette Nolan), finds a confessional suicide note and contacts civic bigwig-cum-crime boss Mike Lagana (Alexander Scourby), who advises her to call the police before calling henchman Vince Stone (Lee Marvin). The phone is answered by his brassy moll, Debby Marsh (Gloria Grahame), who enjoys seeing her thuggish beau squirm. He is playing poker with his pals and orders Debby to leave the room, but she can't resist checking her appearance in the mirror as she sidles out. As Duncan had been head of the records bureau, homicide sergeant Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford) is surprised by the absence of a suicide note. But Bertha (after composing herself in front of her own mirror) reveals through sobs that her husband had been battling depression and wishes she could have saved him. The press runs with Bertha's version of events and Bannion reads the report before helping wife Katie (Jocelyn Brando) prepare supper for their daughter, Joyce (Linda Bennett). Bar hostess Lucy Chapman (Dorothy Green) thinks it's bunkum, however, and Bannion is called away from the table to interview her at a downtown club called The Retreat. He listens to the account of her affair with Duncan with judgemental distaste, but still pays Bertha another call and she concedes that her husband had often strayed since their marriage. However, she denies Chapman's claim that she had agreed to a divorce and reaffirms her belief that Duncan had shot himself because his health was deteriorating. Intrigued how a cop could afford a second house for his assignations, Bannion puts Bertha on the defensive and she sniffily dismisses his snooping before bidding him goodnight. A few hours, however, Chapman's body is discovered after being thrown out of a speeding car. It's covered with bruises and cigarette burns and Dr Kane (Joseph Mell) informs Bannion that this was the work of a psychopath. But, when Bannion returns to headquarters, he is reprimanded by Lieutenant Wilks (Willis Bouchey) for upsetting a grieving widow and advised to let the case drop. He does no such thing, however, and badgers Retreat bartender Tierney (Peter Whitney) for information. He has no sympathy for barflies and calls Lagana after he thinks Bannion has left. But, even though he is taken to the precinct for questioning, he sneers that he knows Bannion can't touch him because he has been ordered to back off by the brass. He is further reminded to keep his nose out of other people's business by Larry Gordon (Adam Williams), who calls his home and intimidates Katie before Bannion grabs the receiver. Convinced that Lagana is somehow involved, Bannion drives to his mansion and interrupts a party he is throwing for his daughter to warn him off his family. But Lagana is livid with Bannion for trying to link him to the murder of a worthless girl and orders bodyguard George Fuller (Paul Massey) to eject him. However, Bannion outflanks the thug and leaves under his own steam with renewed determination to put Lagana behind bars. Following another carpeting from Wilks, Bannion contemplates turning in his badge, as he is tired of the force being corrupted. But Katie urges him to remain true to his principles and get a promotion so they can give Joyce a better life. However, when she gets into the car to run an errand, she detonates a bomb and Bannion billets Joyce with in-laws Al (John Crawford) and Marge (Kathryn Earnes) for safety. However, Wilks and Commissioner Higgins (Howard Wendell) refuse to accept his contention that Lagana planted the device and insist on going through the files to see if anyone else Bannion has investigated is holding a grudge. When he accuses them of being in cahoots with Lagana, Bannion is suspended and he hurls his badge at them. Partner Gus Burke (Robert Burton) promises to pass on any information he can, but he urges Bamnion to cool down and not do anything rash. As Bannion moves out of his dream home into a cheap motel, Stone returns home to his luxury apartment and starts pawing Debby. However, his flirtation is cut short when Lagana calls to admonish Stone for entrusting two such important hits on a palooka like Larry Gordon (Adam Williams). He also confides that Bertha is demanding $500 a week to stop her from handing over the suicide note that implicates Lagana. As he has an election coming up, he is prepared to tolerate her blackmail and warns Stone against making any more mistakes that can be traced back to his door. Meanwhile, Bannion has been seeking out mechanics capable of fitting a bomb. But the likes of Atkins (Dan Seymour) at Victory Auto Wrecking are too scared to talk. As Bannion leaves, however, he is accosted by disabled secretary Selma Parker (Edith Evanson),Selma Parker (Edith Evanson), who is tired of the community going to the dogs and she tips off Bannion about a link between Gordon and The Retreat. Venturing along that night, Bannion sees Stone extinguishing his cigar on the hand of a woman who picks up the dice too soon during a game of craps and he accuses him of doing the same thing to Chapman. Stone threatens Bannion before leaving. But Debby is intrigued by his courage and talks her way into being invited back to his hotel room. Removing her coat to reveal a slinky black dress, Debby plants herself on the bed and accepts a scotch. She admits that Stone is a brute, but considers the odd slap a small price to pay to escape poverty. Bannion asks her about Gordon, but she swerves the question and is insulted when he rebuffs her attempts at seduction and brands her Stone's chattel. Debby leaves disappointed and disillusioned and returns home. However, one of Stone's goons has seen her leave and he throws a pot of scalding coffee in her face for betraying him. Commissioner Higgins takes Debby to the doctor, but she slips away to seek refuge with Bannion. She is hurt by his lack of concern for her lost looks, but retains her determination to make Stone pay and tells Bannion about her boyfriend's links to Lagana and several other dignitaries and crooks. Dismissing Debby as a worthless tramp, Bannion persuades Parker to identify Gordon at his apartment building and bursts in to coerce him into confessing to working for Lagana. He also lets slip that Bertha has been on the Lagana payroll for many years. But Bannion has no compunction in sending Gordon to his death by leaking details of their meeting and Stone breaks the news of Gordon's demise to Lagana. He is irked than Bannion is trying to play the hero and orders Stone to abduct Joyce and use her to keep him off the scent. But Bannion is warming to his task and uses force to intimidate Bertha, who has made arrangements for her husband's letter to be released if anything happens to her. He hisses his hatred, while squeezing her throat and reminds her that she will never rest easy, even with police protection. Returnng to his hotel, Bannion goes to see Debby, who has checked in to lay low from Stone. She asks about Katie to take her mind off her own problems, but Bannion is in no mood to talk. He confesses to almost throttling Bertha and Debby commends him for having more scruples than Stone. As they chat, Marge calls to inform Bannion that the police detail has failed to show up to protect Joyce and he is happy to find that Al has ringed the building with old army buddies. When the cops finally arrive, Bannion greets Wilks and Burke, who are happy to do their bit to clean up the stench hovering over Kenport. While Bannion is away, Debby pays Bertha a call and describes them as sisters under the mink. Aware that her death will spell the end for Stone and Lagana, Debby shoots Bertha dead before seeking out Stone to hurl boiling coffee in his face. As he writhes in agony, she tears off the bandage from her own scarred cheek so he can see how he will look. She taunts him that Bertha is dead and Stone pulls a gun and fires, just as Bannion bursts into the building. He consoles Debby before following Stone to the penthouse, where he stops short of killing him because it will give him greater satisfaction to let Wilks and Burke take him into custody. Returning to the dying Debby, he tells her that she would have got along nicely with Katie and she slips away happy that he felt she was a good enough friend to confide some details about his home life. Although he knows he can never recapture his lost bliss, Bannion takes pride in the news report of Lagana and Higgins being exposed. He also accepts his job back and heads out to investigate a hit-and-run accident by asking his new assistant to keep the coffee nice and hot until he gets back. Many Americans had been shocked by the revelations of the Kefauver Committee in the early 1950s that organised crime was being run like a respectable business, with the co-operation of powerful people within the establishment. Initially, Hollywood had been cautious about basing movies on the Senate findings, but the drift toward greater authenticity in so-called `problem pictures' persuaded the studios to depict investigations from the perspective of the police and not the mobsters, as had been the case with the Warner crime cycle in the early sound era. But Lang and Boehm insisted in tweaking McGivern's novelised serial by making Bannion an ordinary Joe rather than a more bookish sleuth. The role was a perfect fit for Glenn Ford, who had already demonstrated his noir credentials opposite Rita Hayworth in Charles Vidor's Gilda (1946). Indeed, her theme tune, `Put the Blame on Mame', plays on the soundtrack when Ford first encounters the hissably brilliant Lee Marvin. Yet they are both upstaged by Gloria Grahame, who should really have won consecutive Best Supporting Actress awards after landing an Oscar for her kittenish display as screenwriter Dick Powell's ambitious wife in Vincente Minnelli's Tinseltown saga, The Bad and the Beautiful (1952). Lang has found Grahame a little too headstrong for his liking, but her frustration with the script led her to coaxing future husband Cy Howard into writing a few zingers for her and they are among the best lines in the entire picture. However, Lang was right to focus on Marvin not Grahame when he flings the coffee in her face, as it was the cruelty of the act not its impact that caused audiences to flinch. Grahame didn't rate Lang as a director, but he is on fine form here, in conjunction with cinematographer Charles Lang, production designer Robert Peterson, editor Charles Nelson and composer Daniele Amfitheatrof, who sustains the simmering sense of menace that makes this such a landmark entry in the genre that helped change the tone of postwar American cinema. The second feature selected by the BFI is Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place (1950), which was something of a family affair, as Grahame had married Ray in June 1948 and given birth to their son, Timothy, that November. In order to team with Humphrey Bogart at RKO, Grahame had had to secure a loan deal from Columbia to take a role that had originally been intended for Lauren Bacall. However, she must have had an idea that her husband had tweaked Edmund H. North and Andrew Solt's take on Dorothy B. Hughes's source novel in order to examine his feelings about their on-off marriage. Ray and Grahame would finally divorce in 1952. But, before the split was formalised, she reportedly started a sexual relationship with her 13 year-old stepson, Tony, which came to an abrupt end after Ray caught them in flagrante. Unrepentant to the last, however, Grahame had resumed the relationship in 1958 and she and Tony had two sons together before divorcing in 1974. But the union was often strained because Grahame's third husband, the aforementioned screenwriter Cy Howard, caused her to have a nervous breakdown in 1964 by claiming in court that she was an unfit mother during a bitter custody battle over their daughter. However, the temperature within the Ray-Grahame household was not the only source of subtextual inspiration, as atmosphere of suspicion, paranoia and betrayal owes much to the ongoing investigation into Communism in Hollywood that was being conducted by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. As a prominent member of the Committee for the First Amendment that had been set up to oppose HUAC, Bogart had been part of a delegation that had flown to Washington in 1947 to protest at the victimisation of the Hollywood Ten. But he had become disillusioned with the cause and had managed to resume his career without being blacklisted after publishing an article entitled `I'm No Communist' in the March 1948 edition of Photoplay magazine. There's no suggestion that Ray was critiquing Bogie's experiences, but the mood of disquiet around his character would not have gone unnoticed in screen circles at a time when Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard and Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve (also 1950) had exploited the air of unease in the entertainment industry. Following an altercation at some traffic lights with a starlet (June Vincent) and her jealous husband (Charles Cane), Hollywood screenwriter Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart) arrives at Paul's Restaurant, where a girl tells her friend not to bother asking for his autograph as he's a nobody. Having already dissed his own scripts during his exchange on the highway, Dix is clearly aware of his lowly status and jokes with agent Mel Lippman (Art Smith) that he will never need to worry about tax dodging like director Lloyd Barnes (Morris Ankrum). However, he has offered Dix the chance to adapt a pulp novel for a handsome payday and hat-check girl Mildred Atkinson (Martha Stewart) assures him that it has huge potential. At the bar, Dix bumps into Charlie Waterman (Robert Warrick), a silent star who has fallen on hard times. Yet, he also urges Dix to accept Barnes's offer, as he is a long time between hits and studio executives have short memories. However, Dix takes a pride in his work and refuses to be a mere popcorn salesman. He is also loyal to his friends. So, when Junior (Lewis Howard), the jumped-up son-in-law of a studio boss mocks Waterman for being a drunk and puts his cigar out in his glass, Dix tries to slug him and has to be restrained. He also has a run-in with ex-girlfriend Fran Randolph (Alice Talton), who is well aware that he has a short fuse and teases him for being so misanthropic. Tired of scraping along the bottom, Dix agrees to read the book. But he decides it would be easier to ask Mildred to summarise it for him and she agrees to come back to his apartment. On the stairs, they pass new neighbour Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame) and Mildred gushes about how wonderful it must be to be famous. She burbles her way through the plot of the bestseller, but Dix quickly loses interest and wander on to his balcony, where he catches a glimpse of Laurel looking across the courtyard at him. However, he rushes back inside when Mildred begins loudly re-enacting a melodramatic sequence and he has to remind her not to scream for help, as his neighbours will wonder what's going on. As it's past midnight, he asks Mildred if she would mind if he didn't drive her home and give her $20 for a taxi from Santa Monica Boulevard. Early the next morning, Beverly Hills detective Brub Nicolai (Frank Lovejoy) wakes his old wartime buddy with the news that Junior has filed an assault complaint against him. Once at the station, however, Captain Lochner (Carl Benton Reid) quizzes Dix about Mildred and asks why he sent her out into the night instead of calling a cab like a gentleman. Dix is surly and barely changes his expression on learning that Mildred's corpse was thrown out of a speeding car in Benedict Canyon in the small hours. He is shown photos of the crime scene and manages a sympathetic tut. But Lochner has taken a dislike to Dix and brings Laurel to his office to question her about Mildred's movements. Somewhat coquettishly, Laurel turns to look at Dix while claiming not to know him very well. She recalls their exchange of glances on the balcony and makes it clear that she liked what she saw. But she also insists that she happened to see Dix bidding Mildred farewell at his front door and Lochner is forced to take her word and Nicolai's reassurance that Dix was a fine commanding officer, if a bit enigmatic. Laurel refuses a lift home with Dix and he pauses en route to send some flowers to Mildred's family. However, he doesn't know where they live and tells the florist to look up the address of the murdered girl. On arriving home, Dix finds a frantic Lippman pointing at a newspaper headline and fretting that the book deal will be cancelled. However, Dix swears that he is innocent and mentions that Laurel gave him an alibi. The name rings a bell and Lippman looks her up in the casting directory and discovers that she has made a couple of B movies. Dix makes a crude remark about a role he is sure she could play, but Lippman is more concerned that his previous brushes with the law might make him a genuine suspect. Lochner and deputy Ted Barton (William Ching) have also found Dix's rap sheet, which includes mention of Fran Randolph calling for help, only to claim that she had broken her nose by running into a door. But, while they agree that Dix plays rought, they can find nothing that would connect him to Mildred's death. Nevertheless, Lochner badgers Nicolai into inviting Dix to dinner so he can assess whether he has changed on Civvy Street. Back at the apartment, Laurel calls on Dix and asks Lippman if he can keep her name out of the papers. Dix thanks her for being such an observant witness and she admits that she had fibbed to Lochner about seeing Mildred leave. They start to flirt and she reveals that she is trying to lay low after bailing on an engagement to a property tycoon. But, when Dix leans in for a kiss after she compliments his looks, Laurel backs away and refuses his invitation to dinner. He commends her on being honest in a town renowned for its falsity, but she reiterates that she knows her own mind and likes to take things slow. The following night, Dix dines with Nicolai and his wife, Sylvia (Jeff Donnell). Naturally, the subject of the murder crops up and Dix stages a reconstruction using a couple of chairs to represent the inside of the speeding car. He draws on his creative experience and insights into human nature to explain why the killing happened while the vehicle was in motion and proves to adept at directing Nicolai and Sylvia that the cop almost gets carried away, as he gets his wife into a headlock. As he speaks, Dix's eyes glaze over and, after he leaves, Sylvia suggests that he is not quite right in the head. But Nicolai defends his old mucker and insists that he has learnt more about the case from Dix than he has from the evidence. Feeling amorous, Dix drops in on Laurel on his way home. He is coy at first, but he relaxes and kisses her after being reassured that she had been on the phone to her ageing masseuse. Yet, while there is something sinister about the way in which he muses about the circumstances that brought them together, Laurel quickly becomes indispensable and Lippman is surprised to see how she has domesticated Dix and persuaded him to settle down to his script. Their repartee is edgily quaint, as Laurel jokes that she is Dix's new typist and she repeats the claim when Lochner brings her back for questioning. He finds it odd that Laurel has become close to Dix so quickly and wonders whether she is aware of Dix's previous scrapes with the law. She dismisses them as ancient history and refuses to accept that her lover has any psychological problems. As Laurel leaves the precinct, Mildred's boyfriend, Henry Kesler (Jack Reynolds), arrives to help with inquiries. But Lochner's words play on her mind during a night out. It starts well, with the pianist (Hadda Brooks) singing `I Hadn't Anyone `Till You' and Dix promising Laurel that he only wants to make her happy. But the arrival of Deputy Barton angers Dix, who resents being tailed, and makes a point of informing him of his departure, as he wouldn't want to make his life difficult. However, more doubts are cast on Laurel's happiness when Martha the masseuse (Ruth Gillette) comments on how tense she feels and suggests that she would be better off going back to her property tycoon rather than stress herself out trying to stay in Dix's good books. Indeed, she continues to hint that Dix is a bad egg after he wanders in with a pile of presents and Laurel orders Martha to leave so that she can cook Dix some breakfast. That night, Dix and Laurel unwind at a beach party thrown by Nicolai and Sylvia. They are amused by Dix's cynical remarks about Laurel being an improvement on most Hollywood women. But, in joking that Laurel should marry Dix and invite Lochner to the wedding, Sylvia accidentally reveals that Laurel has been quizzed for a second time and Dix loses his temper and storms out. He speeds recklessly along Mulholland Drive and gets into a violent argument with college kid John Mason (Don Hamin) after scratching his paintwork. Horrified by his lack of control, Laurel prevents Dix from hitting the battered student with a rock and accuses him of taking out his frustrations with the cops on someone who had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Dix puts his arm around her neck and changes the subject by telling Laurel about a line he can't quite slot into his script: `I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.' She says it sounds like something someone would put in a farewell note and they drive home. The following morning, Dix sends a money order to Mason by way of an apology and calls at the precinct to remind Nicolai to direct any questions at him rather than Laurel. He is introduced to Kesler and offers him sympathies. However, he also reminds him that he is a prime suspect and warns him that Lochner will do whatever it takes to build a case against him. Meanwhile, Laurel apologises to Sylvia for Dix's outburst on the beach and admits that he seems to be the kind of guy who can turn any slight into a slugging match. She asks about the crime theory that Dix had outlined over dinner and accepts that Lochner has her best interests at heart in warning her about Dix's temperament. Moreover, Laurel confides that she is afraid of Dix, despite being in love with him, and she agrees to think about going away for a while until the case is resolved. However, she has a restless night, with Martha and Lochner's warnings running through her dreams. Effie the cleaning woman (Ruth Warren) informs Dix that Laurel has been taking sleeping pills and she urges him to pop the question. While cutting grapefruit in the kitchen, Dix suggests that domesticity is more authentic than any sappy Hollywood love scene and makes Laurel feel so uncomfortable that she reluctantly accepts his marriage proposal to keep him sweet. While he goes off to make arrangements for a party and a whirlwind trip to Las Vegas, Lippman arrives to offer his congratulations. But Laurel confesses that she is too scared of Dix to go through with the ceremony and plans to take a plane to New York before he gets home. He asks why Dix's mood swings are suddenly getting to her and Laurel tells him about the incident with the student. Lippman admits he has had to put up with a lot during their 20-year friendship and urges Laurel to let Dix down gently, as he has a monstrous ego. She decides to give Lippman the completed script, so that Dix can forget about her by throwing himself into the picture. But her plans to make a quick getaway are scuppered when Dix calls to summon her to a jewellery shop to buy a ring. He throws her a party at Paul's that evening, but flies off the handle when he hears that the producer has offered the lead in the film to Fran Randolph. Dix berates Lippman for taking the script without his permission and, even though Laurel admits to giving it to him, Dix slaps Lippman so hard that he breaks his glasses and cuts his face. While still in a rage, Dix intercepts a phone call for Laurel from Martha before stomping into the washroom. He calms down when Barnes informs him that the studio love the script and Dix apologises to Lippman for being such a boor. By the time he returns to the table, however, Laurel has gone. In chasing after her, however, he misses a phone call from Nicolai letting him know that Kesler has confessed to killing Mildred and has tried to commit suicide. Rushing up the stairs, Dix bangs on Laurel's door and she ignores him, as she completes her packing. Eventually, she lets him in and he begs her forgiveness for hitting Lippman and being cross with her about the script. However, he notices that she is not wearing her engagement ring and Laurel locks herself in the bedroom to protect herself. She tears up a goodbye note and cowers, as Dix barges through the door and demands to know whether she is about to do a midnight flit. At that moment, the phone rings and Dix learns that Laurel's reservation to New York has been cancelled. In a blind fury, he grabs her by the throat and she has to promise to marry him before he relinquishes his grip. The phone rings again and Lochner breaks the news about Kesler and asks to apologise to Laurel in person for putting her through the ringer. Dix hands her the receiver and she tells the cop that his message has come too late to save their relationship. She stands by the window to watch a stooping Dix wander across the courtyard and out through the gate. Uncertain what to do next, Laurel repeats the line about living while he loved her in whispering a mournful farewell. In the original script, Dix had killed Laurel. But Ray spares the mismatched lovers in a way that suggests he was seeking to set Grahame free and wish her the best for her own future. Whatever his motive, this is a desperately sad ending to a stark story that makes chilling use of reflective surfaces, close-ups of eyes and eruptions of brutality to convey the HUAC undercurrent and emphasise the faultlines in Dix and Laurel's romance. Bogart and Grahame, with the former revelling in another opportunity to explore the darker side of his broodingly heroic screen persona after he had teamed with Ray on Knock On Any Door (1949). He would return to this aspect of his psyche over the next couple of years. But, despite her spirited display as a vulnerable masochist who learns how to stand up for herself, Grahame's star would only burn brightly for another five years, as directors began to tire of her tantrums and she started to damage her face with repeated plastic surgery on her hated lips. Abetted by art director Robert Peterson, cinematographer Burnett Guffey, editor Viola Lawrence and composer George Antheil, Ray directs with the visual precision and insight into human nature that made his pictures in this period so effective and enduring. Bogart also deserves credit for wishing to extend himself as an actor and to escape from the kind of gruff good guy roles in which he had been calcifying since Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946). But what makes this so compelling is Ray's faith in film and in those true artists working within a commercial enclave who are prepared to tackle adult themes with intelligence and integrity. Yet he also trusts the audience to see through the sham glamour of Hollywood and recognise that the glossy entertainment is churns out is produced by mere mortals, who are as flawed as anyone else. Ray clearly identifies with the central couple, hence his reworking of the ending, which he had Bogart and Grahame improvise on a closed set. But he is also astute enough to realise that the plot of Althea Bruce that Martha Stewart enacts with such vulgar enthusiasm isn't that far away from the story he and his estimable ensemble are trying to tell. Last week saw the release of three independent features by first-time British directors. While James Kermack's Hi-Lo Joe, Mercedes Grover's Brakes and James Carver's #Starvecrow all took stylistic risks in order to tell their stories and fire the audience's imagination, they often fell into the traps that ensnare so many debutants. By contrast, Ana Asensio's Most Beautiful Island manages to combine aesthetic innovation with a dramatic discipline and schematic control that belies the fact that the thirtysomething Spanish actress had never attempted anything more than a one-scene showreel before she started shooting on the streets of New York in 2014. Following a series of shots showing young women alone in the bustle of the Big Apple, the camera settles on Ana Asensio. She seems distressed and we learn from a late-night call to Spain that she is still mourning the young daughter who died in an accident before Asensio left for the United States. Unable to sleep, she smells the clothing she has carefully preserved in sealed bags and, the next morning, she takes a train across the suburbs to seek an appointment with doctor David Little. Concerned that she could compromise his reputation, he is furious that she has turned up at the surgery out of the blue and is unimpressed that her Ukrainian friend Natasha Romanova had recommended him. Asensio goes back to her flat and finds a reminder on the fridge that she folds into a paper plane and writes `most beautiful island' on the flap before throwing it out of the window. She runs and bath and winds up sharing the water with some cockroaches that scurry in through a hole in the wall. The camera goes underwater to show them swimming around and the close-ups make them look monstrous. But Asensio holds her nerve and does her make-up before rushing to meet Romanova for a shift dressed in a short-skirted chicken outfit to hand out flyers to passers-by. Roaring with laughter at the stupidity of the job, the pair go to a coffee shop, where Romanova urges Asensio to lighten up and fails to understand why she gets upset when she mentions having to quit her job as a nanny because the baby kept crying. She asks why Asensio doesn't return to Spain if she hates New York so much, but she insists she was stifled back home and knows she will never get back to the USA if she leaves without documents. Keen to help, Romanova tells Asensio about a gig she is too busy to handle and promises that it pays good money for little effort or risk. All she has to do is wear a little black dress and some high heels and she will be quids in. Cutting into the strapping of a dress she is trying on in a ritzy boutique, Asensio persuades the clerk to sell her the damaged item for $20 and rushes into a café washroom to change and apply some more make-up. She then collects brattish siblings Kayla Erickson and Finn Robbins from school and walks them home. They are angry with Asensio for being late and she has to drag them along the pavement, as they make their feelings known. She offers to buy them an ice cream, but they don't like the cheap brands she chooses and Erickson runs in front of a car in frustration after she drops her cornet. With Robbins trying to feed his treat to a dog, Asensio is unable to chase after Erickson, who vanishes without trace and Asensio is mightily relieved when elderly neighbour Alix Elias finds her hiding in the bushes and agrees to watch over them so that Asensio can get to her next job. Asking for directions to the address in Chinatown that Romanova had given her, Asensio reaches a restaurant and is nervous about entering through a delivery door in the pavement. Even though no one knows where she is going, she takes a chance and follows a brusque man in a suit, who keeps telling her that she can't take her holdall to the party. He returns with a small padlocked handbag and tells Asensio to take a taxi to the basement of an industrial warehouse on the West Side Highway. She doesn't have the money to pay the fare and has to stash her bag in a rubbish bin on the street. Tentatively, she approaches the door and rings the bell. She takes the lift downstairs and passes through a series of doors before she is admitted to a large waiting area by bouncers Larry Fessenden and Nicholas Tucci. Much to her surprise, she sees Romanova standing in one of the numbered chalk circles drawn on the floor. But her friend refuses to acknowledge her and Asensio is ordered to stand still and keep quiet because the guests are about to arrive. A door opens and a number of well-dressed men and women mill around in front of the girls. Mistress of ceremonies Caprice Benedetti welcomes the visitors and asks them to make their selections before returning to the main room. As Asensio asks Romanova what is going on, Benedetti emerges to collect Jennifer Sorika Wolf, who is the first pick of the night. Urging her to be pretty, Benedetti escorts her into the room and a disconcerted Asensio makes a bolt for the door. However, Fessenden bars her way and orders her to return to her spot. The others listen apprehensively, but no one fixes a gaze. Eventually, a round of applause rings out from the gaming room and Wolf comes out to collect her pay from Fessenden and leave without her clutch purse. Benedetti approaches Asensio and lets down her hair. She reminds her to look as though she is at a party before accompanying Fenella A. Chudoba into the room. Looking around her, Asensio asks what is happening and what the bags contain, but no one answers her. Needing time to think, she requests a bathroom break and Tucci accompanies her to a tiny room at the end of a dark corridor. She opens the window, but it is too small to climb through and she fails to open the handbag before Tucci urges her to hurry up. Trying to be flirtatious, she asks if he can help her escape and he looks her up and down before offering to consider assisting her in return for sex. He begins pawing her and Asensio knees him in the groin and he grabs her throat and threatens to snap her windpipe like a twig if she gives him any more trouble. Back in the waiting area, the girls hear a scream from inside the room before another round of applause. Two men rush inside, as Ami Sheth has a panic attack and Bendetti strides over to Romanova and warns her that she will lose her trusted status if she keeps recruiting such feeble specimens. In an effort to keep everyone calm, Olga offers them drugs and they are snatched out of her hands. Anna Myrha, Sara Visser and Natalia Zvereva keep bickering, however, and they are only silenced when Benedetti returns to inform Asensio that she has been chosen to play the next game with Olga. She suggests that they think pleasant thoughts while the guests place their bets and reminds them that they are here to make money and keep their mouths shut. As Asensio tries to work out what on earth she has let herself in for, Miriam A. Hyman tries to reassure her and asks if she believes in God, as the screen goes blank. Once inside the room, Asensio sees a glass coffin on a table top and notice Dr Little among the guests. He looks away in embarrassment before Bendetti explains the task, as handler Brian Kleinman opens Asensio's bag and releases a potentially deadly Chilean spider from a box. The task requires Romanova and Asensio to lie naked in the coffin for two rounds each so that the spider can crawl across their bodies. The other girl will be armed with a stick and has to push the spider back on to flesh if it wanders away. Asensio is to strip first and she lies face down in the coffin, as Benedetti turns an hourglass. Trying to remain as calm as she had done in the bath with the cockroaches, Asensio stays as still as possible, as the insect scurries over her body. The guests look on, some of whom have wagered that she will not survive the experience. But the time elapses and Asensio is allowed to dress to a ripple of applause. However, Olga is to face a more aggressive and unpredictable Brazilian spider that bites repeatedly unleashing a venom that has no antidote. She undresses and takes her place, as Asensio is handed a wand to prod the creature if it threatens to stray. Halfway through, however, Romanova begins to shake and sob, as she begs someone to remove the spider. In spite of the fact that she had led her into peril, Asensio lowers her hand so that the creature crawls up her arm and even Benedetti looks scared as she watches the last grains of sand run out of the hourglass. As skin contact was maintained throughout the ordeal, the house agrees to pay bets on both girls remaining unharmed and the guests shuffle off to collect their winnings. Benedetti tells Romanova that she is finished and that Asensio can be her replacement if she wishes. She reminds her, however, that they come here to make money not friends. As she emerges from the room, Asensio shoots an anxious look at the waiting women and collects her pay from Fessenden before leaving. Rummaging through the bin, she finds her bag and replaces her high-heels with her pink sneakers. Crossing the busy road, she stops an ice-cream vendor on a bridge and buys a cornet. She pulls up the hood of her jacket, as she licks the whipped cream and looks across the darkened river. She casts a glance over her shoulder at the building she has just left and disappears into the night, leaving the audience to wonder if she will ever return. Seven years elapsed between the first draft of the screenplay and the final edit, but the wait has been entirely worthwhile. This is a compelling picture that lays bare the immigrant experience, while also contemplating the cheapness of life in our recessional times. Echoes of Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and Gela Babluani's 13 Tzameti (2005) reverberate around the second half of the story, which builds with clammy tension to a teasingly ambiguous conclusion. But, given the need to accept that Asensio is as naive as she is desperate and the mediocre acting of the party guests, many will find the opening slice-of-life more intriguing, as it explores the workings of the underground gig economy in New York that allows retailers and middle-class parents alike to exploit undocumented workers for pittance payment. In addition to giving a disconcertingly credible performance alongside the equally impressive Natasha Romanova and Caprice Benedetti, Ana Asensio also directs with remarkable assurance for a debutant. She appears to have been abetted along the way by veteran horror director Larry Fessenden (who also cameos as one of the basement bouncers) and cinematographer Noah Greenberg, who helped conceive the contrasting shooting styles that enabled Asensio to switch from the jerky handheld Super 16mm footage grabbed in natural light on the streets to the more stylised lighting and more precise camera movements in the warehouse. But composer-cum-sound designer Jeffery Alan Jones and editors Carl Ambrose and Francisco Bello also play a crucial role in creating the lingering senses of immediacy and menace. Employing lengthy takes that are artfully punctuated with jump cuts to give the outdoor scenes an urgency that reinforces the stress and uncertainty of the daily struggle, Asensio makes survival in an alien environment seem just as perilous as any games dreamt up to amuse the rich and bored. And she would know, as she has based the scenario on her own experience of being sufficiently strapped for cash to allow herself to be lured into a situation without a guaranteed exit. An equally unflattering picture of New York emerges in Eliza Hittman's Beach Rats, which takes us to Brooklyn for a tale of teenage self-discovery that demonstrates the same keen ear for adolescent argot that made It Felt Like Love (2013) so unsettling. Once again, the story centres on a confused kid exploring their sexual boundaries by placing themselves in potentially dangerous situations. But, while the setting is captured with typical authenticity and flair by French cinematographer Hélène Louvart and the leads are admirable, some of the secondary characters ring a little hollow. Fresh from chatting to an older man in a gay chatroom, 19 year-old Harris Dickinson meets up with pals David Ivanov, Anton Selyaninov and Frank Hakaj and takes the train to the Coney Island boardwalk. While smoking a joint and watching the fireworks, Dickinson catches the eye of Madeline Weinstein, who flirts with him, even though he dismisses her contention that the display is romantic. She follows him to fairground, where the boys test their strength on a punching machine. When they move on to the dodgem cars, Weinstein slips in beside Dickinson, as his ride starts. Moreover, when they all meet up again, she tells his mates that he is going to be busy for the rest of the night and sends them packing. They travel back to the house he shares with mother Kate Hodge, younger sister Nicole Flyus and father Neal Huff, who is slowly dying of cancer. Sneaking into the basement, they exchange glances as Dickinson prepares some cocaine. Weinstein declines, but strips to her underwear and asks if he thinks she is pretty. He avoids the question and apologises for not being up to the task. She fishes for another compliment and gets upset when Dickinson puts on her bra and impersonates her voice. Dressing in a huff, Weinstein storms out, leaving Dickinson high and unconcerned. Nexr morning, Dickinsons is sent to fetch Huff's prescription. But he dawdles back via a dope den and even steals a couple of pills for later. He watches the nurse operate the bed to medicate his comatose father before skulking off to join the gang at the beach. They play handball for a while before lounging on the beach. Dickinson spots Weinstein with her friends and sidles over to apologise for being so boorish. He explains about his domestic issues and tells her she's pretty. She's sceptical about his sincerity, but has a crush on him and agrees to let him walk her to work. That night, however, he is back online, looking at the live feeds through his fingers. A short while later, Huff dies after a touching family farewell. Flyus speaks at the funeral and Dickinson stares at a picture of the crucified Christ before turning to see Weinstein sitting a few rows behind wearing a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses. He makes it through the wake with the help of some purloined pills and takes out his frustration on a handball in the pouring rain. Nevertheless, he returns to the chatroom and arranges to meet older man Douglas Everett Davis near the beach. He is nervous and admits to not knowing what he likes when it comes to sex. But he undresses and surrenders to his urges before skinny-dipping in the sea. When Hodge asks why he was out so late, Dickinson lies that he was with Weinstein and asks her out in gratitude for her coming to the funeral. He gets a haircut with his pals and she is slightly taken aback by how short his hair is. She is also surprised that he wants to hang out near home rather than going into the city and makes the most of an evening of hot dogs and arcade games before finally getting her man into bed. Dickinson needs a line before he can perform, but Weinstein is satisfied and poses them for numerous selfies before venturing out to meet Hodge and Flyus for breakfast. The latter spots her navel piercing and asks if she can have one. However, Weinstein warns her that hers got infected and Hodge is please to discover that they met on the boardwalk, as that was where she first saw Huff. As he sees her off at the station, Weinstein tells Dickinson not to mess things up and he smiles. However, he arranges another hook-up with Erik Potempa and they check into a motel. Dickinson strips and they roll on to the bed and kiss. Potempa asks Dickinson if he is really gay and he admits to having a girlfriend. But Potempa notices that Dickinson's index finger is longer than his ring finger and he teases him that this is a sure sign of homosexuality. He blushes, but feels comfortable and stays after sex to smoke, while Potempa sleeps. Determined to keep his two worlds apart, Dickinson goes swimming with his mates at the beach. They creep into the house to steal a pair of Hodge's earrings to pawn and tease Flyus when they catch her with her boyfriend. Meeting up with Weinstein, they go to a disco on board a boat and Dickinson is mortified when he spots Potempa in a sailor uniform behind the bar. He remains discreet, however, and gives them their drinks free because Weinstein is so pretty. She is delighted with the compliment and fails to notice the look of dread on her boyfriend's face, as he tries to pay because he doesn't want any favours. But he freaks when Potempa sends a bottle to the table and begins to feel woozy on the dance floor. Yet, while walking home to clear his head, he has an encounter in the bushes with a stranger and Hodge is so concerned when he barges into his room that she asks if he is on drugs and he admits to using the best and loving the sensation. However, she detects the bitter irony in his voice and urges him not to toss his life away. Hoping to put things right with Weinstein, Dickinson goes to the shop where she works. But she breaks up with him and he resorts to the dope den when he discovers that Hodge has thrown away Huff's pills. Trawling online, he arranges a meeting with Harrison Sheehan and is heading to the rendezvous when he bumps into Ivanov, Selyaninov and Hakaj. He tells them that he sometimes pretends to be gay in order to score weed from people he meets online and they seem more accepting of his explanation that Weinstein had been, as she thinks it's hot when girls get together and weird when men do. When Sheehan shows up in his car, however, he is unnerved by the sight of three working-class palookas in vests and drives away. They go back to Dickinson's place to search for another prospect, but Hodge doesn't like the look of the company her son is keeping and she orders him to leave. A message pops up from Sheehan and Dickinson agrees to another meet. But he has also told the others to hide in the dunes and they pounce on Sheehan to steal his stash. Dickinson looks on in anguish, as Sheehan tries to run away and gets pinned down on the tideline and punched. He gets home in a daze to find Hodge waiting for him. She demands to know what he is doing, but he remains silent. Erasing incriminating evidence from his computer, Dickinson wanders in a daze before taking the train to Coney Island. As people have fun around him, he tries to get his head together and stares up into the sky, as the fireworks explode around him. Whether this pyrotechnic reference is consciously linked to Kenneth Anger's 1947 landmark, Fireworks, it certainly helps put Hittman's film in its Queer context. However, by depicting Dickinson as a little boy lost, she also brings to mind Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin's classic kidpic, Little Fugitive (1953), which sees a much younger Brooklynite wander around Coney Island after being bullied by his older brother. Dickinson may not be quite so innocent, but he certainly lacks experience and his awkwardness with everyone other than his inarticulate friends implies that his social skills have been warped by the amount of time he spends online in quaintly antiquated chatrooms. But, while Hittman channels Larry Clark, Claire Denis and Lynne Ramsay in drawing attention to her anti-hero's reluctance or inability to communicate (particularly with women), this is more a study of millennial ennui, as Dickinson shows no signs of wanting to grow up, let alone start thinking about his future. The English actor acquits himself well in an alien environment, as he struggles with both his social and sexual identity and a crippling sense of denial. But he has the advantage of playing the only fully fleshed character, as, even though Hodge, Weinstein and Nicole flyus make the most of their deftly sketched roles, none of the other males are more than ciphers. Evoking the naturalist style favoured by John Cassavetes, Louvart's 16mm camerawork is effectively energetic or languid, depending on Dickinson's mood, and this air of listlessness is well sustained by editors Scott Cummings and Joe Murphy. Chris Foster's sound mix similarly reinforces the sense of place established by production designer Grace Yun, while Nicholas Leon's electronic score keeps things simmering. But it's Hittman's refusal to resort to empathetic melodramatics, coy romantics or grandstanding set-pieces that makes this so credible, as Dickinson proves to be just another guy on the IRT rather than a LGBT poster boy. CinemaItaliaUK returns in cinjunction with the London Migration Film Festival on Sunday 3 December at the Genesis Cinema in London with a double bill addressing the subject of migrant heritage. In addition to Amin Nour and Paolo Negro's short, Ambaradan, there will also be a chance to see Suranga Deshapriya Katugampala's debut feature, For a Son, which follows on from the impressive experimental short, Son of the Lovely Capitalism (2015), which used lengthy takes of static males and superimpositions of archive images to examine the extent to which modern youth has been marginalised by rampant capitalism. An opening caption informs us that thousands of Sri Lankans were driven abroad by the economic effects of the 30-year civil war. Kaushalya Fernando decided to take her chances in the Italian city of Verona and she has found a job caring for the elderly and infirm Nella Pozzerle, who laments the fact that her son never visits her. Fernando hardly sees her own teenage boy, Julian Wijesekara, unless the bump into each other on the stairs of the building where they share a tiny apartment. Indeed, it's so small that the kitchen table has to fold away to allow the fridge door to open and Fernando tuts when she gets home from another shift to discover that the earring-wearing Wijesekara has left his lunch plate on the table rather than washing it up. They briefly chat again, as Fernando replaces a dodgy light bulb and checks that Wijesekara has done his homework before he goes out with his pals. Having fielded a phone call from Pozzerle's son, Fernando rides her moped back across town to be ready for Pozzerle waking from her nap. However, she has wet the bed and asks Fernando in her frail voice why she was absent when she was needed and demands to know if she has taken another job. Having slept on a cot in the spare room, Fernando zips home to give Wijesekara a croissant for his breakfast. But he barely acknowledges her, as he eats in silence looking at his phone. Returning to Pozzerle, Fernando finds a bag of groceries on the kitchen table and the old lady is frustrated because her son disappeared without saying hello. She reluctantly has a bath and complains of the cold when Fernando wheels her into the bedroom. They sit together on the edge of the bed and Pozzerle lies down with her head in Fernando's lap. Meanwhile, Wijesekara is charging through the woods with mates Elias Della Rosa, Diego Zambelli and Gregory Nunez Perez before they spend time smashing bottles in an abandoned building. One of the gang takes umbrage at the others teasing him and slopes off alone. When Wijesekara gets home, Fernando has his supper ready and tries to explain that it is getting harder to leave Pozzerle alone. But he retains a sulky silence, as he picks at his food and scrolls through his text messages. He ignores her concerned remarks about studying and she can't bring herself to confront him over the nude pin-ups he has hidden on the back wall of his wardrobe. However, she calls on a dishwasher friend (Sharantha Gleshan Fernando) and asks if the traditional spells that are cast to protect people from demons would work just as well in Italy. That night, he comes to the apartment with a younger acolyte and they politely drink tea while waiting for Wijesekara to come home from a day lounging at a café playing bar football with his pals. They cover him with a white sheet and pray to the gods, while beating out a rhythm on a drum. Brusque neighbour Luigino Anderloni rings the bell to complain about the noise and she asks her friends to keep the noise down. But, as she looks over at her son, she notices that he is playing a video game on his phone. Unable to pay right away, Fernando asks for a little time and is taken aback when the holy man says there are ways she could meet her debt. He tells her to keep a candle burning for three days to ward off the spirits. But, when Wijesekara orders her out of his room, she blows it out in despair. The following day, Fernando helps Pozzerle pick out a nice dress and wheels her to the local old people's home, where she enjoys herself being pushed around a small dance floor to an accordion-and-singer combo. However, Fernando takes the opportunity to slip away and check up on Wijesekara. Unable to find him at his favourite haunts or at home, she tracks him down to a bench and lectures him about hanging out with non-Sri Lankan boys. He turns his back on her and his mates taunt her sticking her nose in their business. By the time she gets back to the home, darkness has fallen and Pozzerle has been left alone in the hall. Protesting in her thinnest voice that everyone abandons her, she pleads to go home. Fernando gets a telling off down the phone from Pozzerle's son and is so fed up with being at everyone's beck and call that she releases the brake on the wheelchair on a steep slope. However, she is relieved to see that it has run into a doorway and struggles home to put the old lady to bed. Getting home to find Wijesekara is still out, Fernando locks the door and makes him knock. She stands in the corridor and flinches, as he bangs with his fists and begins swearing. Eventually, she opens up and tells him that she refuses to allow him to treat the place like a hotel. The neighbour comes out to complain and Fernando pushes her son out of the doorway and locks him out. He is forced to sleep on the stairs and is woken next morning by a policeman and a social worker. They interview Fernando and ask how she manages to take care of her child when she has a full-time job as a live-in carer. She persuades them to accept her word that she copes. But she is furious with Wijesekara and slaps his face when he shrugs about the sacrifices that she has made since he insisted on moving out of Pozzerle's house because he couldn't stand her whining. He fronts up to his mother and she dares him to strike her and is relieved when he merely barges past her. Fernando chases after him to his bench on the square, but he pulls away from a brief hug and throws stones at a fence. After her morning snack, Pozzerle asks Fernando to sit with her for company. She mentions a pain in her chest and wonders if it's normal because she breastfed all five of her children. However, Fernando never got to feed Wijesekara, as she had to come to Italy to find work. Meanwhile, Wijesekara and two of his pals have discovered a couple copulating in the abandoned housing complex and they spy on them. When another Sri Lankan kid, Randula Senanayakaghe, turns up, Wijesekara joins his mates in beating him up and shows little sign of remorse when he runs into him at a community party. He shows too much interest in a woman trying to feed her baby and beats a retreat. Arriving home, he finds Fernando asleep in the kitchen and he nuzzles beside her and tries to put his head on her shoulder and on her lap. But he can't find the room or the inclination and he heads out again to stomp through the streets. When she wakes, Fernando rides across town and crashes on the bed beside the sleeping Pozzerle. She gets through another day, while Wijesekara enjoys a walk in the peaceful woods. When his mother gets home with a bagful of shopping, he stays in his room without a word and remains silent during supper. However, he listens to her movements and, when she leaves for work, he finds the plastic container in which she hides her money behind the sink and stuffs some notes into his pocket. As he waits for the lift, neighbour Isabella Dilavello - a prostitute whose loud moaning disturbs Fernando and who keeps bumping into Wijesakara while bidding farewell to her clients - opens her front door and beckons him inside. They emerge together and go to the abandoned estate. Nothing is said, but Dilavello follows Wijesekara into the woods, where she removes her top and allows him to suckle and fondle her breasts in a quiet glade. As he returns home that evening, Wijesekara sees his mother ride up on her moped. He hangs back to avoid bumping into her. At the table that night, he listens to music on his headphones, while Fernando peels them some apples. Neither says a word, as they tacitly agree to keep making the best of the hand that fate has dealt them. Born in Negombo in Sri Lanka, Suranga Desapriya Katugampola came to live in Verona when he was eight years old and, thus, he has a fine insight into the difficulty of acclimatising to a new culture and becoming estranged from hard-working parents clinging to the tastes and traditions of home. Indeed, he understands the situation so well that he maintains an empathetic balance between Kaushalya Fernando and Julian Wijesekara by setting the latter's youthful naiveté against his self-centred moodiness and feckless delinquency. He also allows Fernando to vent her frustration against the whiningly manipulative Nella Pozzerle, although, here too, Katugampola and co-scenarist Aravinda Wanninayake take note of her physical suffering and the pain of being all-but abandoned by the son she adores. Improvising their dialogue, the leads are excellent, with Fernando and Wijesekara bringing to mind Ritwick Chakraborty and Basabdatta Chatterjee as the married couple who never see each other in Aditya Vikram Sengupta's Labour of Love (2014). More might have been made of Wijesekara's relationship with his sketchily drawn mates, while his sudden interest in prostitute Isabella Dilavello comes somewhat out of the blue. But Katugampola deftly captures the tension between the mother and son and their Italian neighbours, while cinematographer Channa Deshapriya and production designer Cristina Mirandola capably contrast the cramped interiors of the apartments with the rundown neighbourhood and the therapeutic woodland. Technically, however, this is less ambitious than Son of the Lovely Capitalism. But Katugampola still does enough with this studiously minimalist drama to suggest he is a talent to watch. There will always be times when a documentarist finds such meagre pickings among the archives that they become heavily reliant upon the best items they unearth. This is definitely true in the case of Lisa Immordino Vreeland's Love, Cecil, an engaging profile of the photographer and set-cum-costume designer Cecil Beaton, which makes extensive use of John Freemna's 1962 Face to Face interview and Bill Verity's tele-doc, Beaton By Bailey (1971), which pitted the 67 year-old against fellow shutterbug, David Bailey. Both programmes can be found in full on YouTube and it's interesting to see how Immordino Vreeland has filleted them and slotted the highlights in between her own talking-head interviews, extracts from Beaton's diaries and her inspired selection from his photo files. The result may be somewhat conventional. But, such is the subject's wit, eloquence and forthrightness that this gradually becomes an amusingly perceptive treatise on the rise of celebrity culture. While being quizzed by John Freeman on the BBC's Face to Face in early 1962, Cecil Beaton confessed that he had no idea whether he best excelled as a photographer, a painter, a designer or a writer. In an extract from his diary (read with world-weary insight by Rupert Everett), he cursed the fact that he was unable to take a flattering self-portrait, as he knew himself too well. But, while he had exposed countless rolls of film and had used thousands of words to capture the fleeting moment, he continued to wander in `the labyrinth of choice' trying to find his métier. He concedes that ambition had driven him more than talent at the outset, but reveals that a need to reach the end of the rainbow now prevents him from turning back. As an array of voices opines over a montage of still images, however, everything Beaton did had a unifying touch of grace and Vogue editor Hamish Bowles and photographer David Bailey note how he reinvented Edwardian chic in his own image in the Ascot sequence of George Cukor's My Fair Lady (1964). Auctioneer Philippe Garner comments on Beaton's love of beauty and we see the title page of The Book of Beauty and some of his striking portraits, as Beaton declares that beauty is rarely static and that we all restlessly search for the next beautiful thing. Photographer Tim Walker suggests that Beaton had a relationship with an idealised vision of his sitters and, as a consequence, created the notion of finding `truth in fantasy'. Yet Beaton didn't plan on remaining a photographer, as he initially took pictures as a means to an end. His fascination began with a love of theatre and a postcard of Lily Elsie in a white suit with a cigarette and cane. Garner claims Beaton was seduced by the escapist nature of theatre and that he determined to live his life intoxicated by the thrill he derived from the stage. At first, he enlisted sisters Nancy and Baba to be his models and never quite mastered the technical side of the art. But, having hated school and only learnt about life rather than anything scholastic, Beaton developed the knack of teaching himself what he needed to know. Despite his mediocre academic record, he still went up to Cambridge in 1922 and set about becoming `a rabid aesthete' by studying the Renaissance and Diaghilev's Ballets Russe, as well as the theatre and photography. He discovered a talent for shocking people, with his modish costumes occasionally being complemented by drag outfits. Giving lectures a miss, Beaton helped found the drama club and designed stage scenery for numerous productions, while also acting. The photographs from these period have been carefully preserved in albums and look strikingly modern, even though they are almost a century old. It's intriguing to note how many were self-portraits and, as biographer Hugo Vickers notes, Beaton often sent these snaps to the London papers in order to promote himself and the production he was working on, in that order. Leaving St John's College without a degree in 1925, Beaton lacked the confidence to act, the subject matter to write plays and the opening to design for the West End stage. So, he continued to photograph his sisters, who indulged his whims and later joked with him that he had made them twist like a corkscrew in order to strike the right poses. He often sent these pictures to journals like The Bystander and got the odd snap into the society pages of the mainstream press. Yet, as model Penelope Tree recalls, Beaton was terribly insecure and resented being the son of a timber merchant from Hampstead, who had preferred his younger brother, Reggie. Flitting between diary extracts and his Face to Face responses, Beaton admits that he had been happy until puberty, when he began to feel reined in and rebelled by painting his face with his mother's cosmetics. Vickers and Sir Roy Strong note the difficulty of securing an entrée into society during the 1920s and explain that Beaton finally got into the charmed circle after the Honourable Stephen Tennant became his patron. Suddenly a member of the Bright Young Things, Beaton spent his time partying and we see home-movie footage of him dragging up in acted scenarios at Savay Farm in Denham in 1927. The dressing-up box played a key role in their revels, as they harked back to the elegance of the Regency and Belle Époque eras and Beaton discovered his milieu among these fellow escapists, who found fun in narcissism and subversion. While Beaton lacked an inherited income and remained an outsider, his friends went along with every odd concept for pictures, with Daphne Du Maurier placing her head inside a Victorian glass dome and Edith Sitwell reclining amidst flowers and cellophane clouds. Daisy Fellows posed in front of crinkled silver foil and the result is stunning. But, as Beaton tells Sheridan Morley in an television interview, he was not averse to creating images that he knew would garner publicity. In one newspaper piece, he called them his `freak photographs' and explained how he could make the camera do gymnastics. His father had been astonished by his success and by the fact that he had made such a splash in the United States, We see Beaton discussing beauty in an early talkie short from 1929, as he sought to create a self-promoting fuss by declaring that American girls couldn't hold a candle to their British counterparts, who were so ravishing that their beauty ought to be immortal. However, he did admire the wrists, feet and legs of American girls and described their movement as `perfect'. A wonderful shot at the end of the diatribe sees Beaton examine his nails in a moment of almost schoolboy vulnerability. Yet one senses even this was done for calculating effect, unlike the snaps he took on the streets of New York, which have an authenticity and energy that now seem at one and at odds with the Beaton style. His campaign to get himself noticed led to a contract with Vogue and Contributing Editor Robin Muir suggests that Beaton brought a new sophistication and elegance to fashion photography. He was influenced by German Expressionism and French New Romanticism and made enough money to buy Ashcombe House in Wiltshire, which was painted by the likes of Rex Whistler, Pavel Tchelitchew, Christian Bérard and Salvador Dalí during the fabled weekend parties that Beaton used to host, where there was always something going on. He often sent invitations together with costume suggestions and always made his guests trace the outline of their hands on the wall in one of the bathrooms. Despite claiming that he tried hard not to be, Beaton confided to his diary that he was `a terrible, terrible homosexualist' and, around this time, he became infatuated with Peter Watson, whose looks and charm he envied. Yet Manolo Blahnik is horrified that Beaton identified with such a man and Vickers reveals that Watson treated Beaton shabbily and later betrayed him with their mutual friend, Oliver Messel. The heartbroken Beaton sought refuge in Hollywood and Blahnik swoons over his picture of Gary Cooper, while we also see portraits of Judy Garland, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Katharine Hepburn, Orson Welles and Marlene Dietrich. But, just as he was getting his foot in the door, Beaton caused a scandal with some anti-Semitic details in an illustration for the February 1938 edition of Vogue that prompted Condé Nast to pulp the entire run. Beaton claimed not to know what the offending word he had used meant and pleaded to detesting Hitler. But Vickers avers that he gravely misjudged the situation and got above himself in seeking to shock and paid the price by being forced to resign. Despite being largely ostracised for 18 months, Beaton received a phone call in July 1939 from a lady-in-waiting at Buckingham Palace asking him to photography Queen Elizabeth the next day. He wrote about his relief and excitement in his diary and V&A Photography curator Susanna Brown reveals that the first session with the queen posing with a parasol lasted over three hours. In all, Beaton would work with over 30 members of the Royal Family and somehow managed to stay in the good books of both the queen and her detested sister-in-law, the Duchess of Windsor. During one session, Queen Elizabeth described the pink glow of the sky over Piccadilly and said she often felt like it was on fire. But her words proved prophetic, as the Blitz hit the capital during the Second World War and Beaton got a chance to do his bit as a combat photographer. The Imperial War Museum's Hilary Roberts explains how the Ministry of Information saw Beaton as an ideal person to record the bomb damage to help win the propaganda war in neutral America. Seeing this as a chance to redeem himself after the Vogue incident, Beaton took over 7000 photographs during the conflict and published eight books of images, while writing and drawing for magazine articles. He later recalled that this commission had afforded him a marvellous opportunity to dig himself out of a rut. But Beaton took it very seriously, as he travelled to Burma, China and Egypt. Bowles opines that what set him apart from his peers was his eagerness to find beauty in extremis and Beaton noted in his diaries how the destruction he saw often resembled Surrealist paintings. Yet, as Bowles jokes, the crusade to depict defiance also had an eroticised tinge, as Beaton's eye for manliness is readily evident in his images of service personnel without being blatant. Beaton found aircraft hangars more visual than film sets and hospitals more dramatic than stages. He photographed four year-old Eileen Dunne with her bandaged head clutching a toy and it made the cover of Life magazine on 22 September 1940 and changed many an American mind about the war against Fascism. Beaton himself survived a plane crash and frequent illness and Walker notes how the onetime foppish dandy proved to have a tough interior. As Beaton told Freeman, he was always willing to take on tasks that helped him become a better person. With an unexploded bomb putting his London home at 8 Pelham Place off limits, Beaton took refuge at Ashcombe, only to learn that his landlord wanted to evict him. He was pained by the discovery of the last note that his brother Reggie had written before throwing himself under a Tube train in 1933 and the telegram announcing the death of a father who had been crushed by the blow. In 1948, Beaton moved across Wiltshire to Reddish House and remained there until 1980. He felt grown up here and Roberts recalls how the change of scenery coincided with a shift away from photography and into stage design. Beaton began with John Gielgud's production of Lady Windermere's Fan at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, which brought colour back to postwar London. Taking cues from Diaghilev, he relied on taste to govern his choice and New York Times dance critic Alastair Macaulay suggests that he also took the essence of Anna Pavlova's elegance. He wishes he could have seen the 1936 production of Frederick Ashton's Apparitions, which marked Beaton's bow with the Royal Ballet and made daring use of violet and scarlet for the dresses. Macaulay claims that Beaton's instincts were so good because he had been a dandy. He had informed Freeman that he was no longer self-conscious and restricted affectation to his hats. In a clip from Beaton By Bailey, Truman Capote marvels that Beaton could be vain and self-effacing at the same time. But Beaton denied having any vanity and interior designer Nicky Haslam opines that he spent his life trying to improve himself rather than preening on his laurels. During the course of his cross-examination, Freeman had asked Beaton to name the most beautiful woman he had ever photographed and he had replied, Greta Garbo. Over a clip from George Fitzmaurice's Mata Hari (1931), he admits his obsession to his diary. But Garbo resisted his requests to sit for him until 1946 and fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi insists that the resulting pictures rank among the most loving he ever took. However, their new-found closeness came to an abrupt end when Garbo cabled (after the spread had been printed) to insist that only one image appeared in Vogue and she felt sufficiently betrayed by Beaton to ostracise him for six months. Actress Leslie Caron is convinced that there was `hanky panky' between them, although actor Peter Eyre is less sure it went that far. Haslam suggests both were bisexual and felt they could `turn' the other and Beaton recorded a conversation in which he had once teased Garbo that they would have made a good married couple. However, she had given him a glare to suggest that she thought otherwise. In addition to his diaries, Beaton also kept scrapbooks (150 diaries and 97 scrapbooks) and he chose one for his luxury item on Desert Island Discs. But he was forever restless and David Bailey jokes that his penchant for royalty had existed long before he photographed Queen Elizabeth II at her Coronation in 1953. Seated above the organ pipes at Westminster Abbey, Beaton had apparently secreted some sandwiches inside his top hat and had munched on them as he made the simple sketches of the ceremony that were published in a number of magazines. But it was the radiance he captured in his colour photographs of Her Majesty that did so much to sell the romance and glamour of the new reign. Yet, as Vickers, Bowles and Mizrahi testify, Beaton always felt unworthy of being in their company and exaggerated the sense of subservience that he adopted with his other celebrity sitters. Beaton wrote 38 books during his lifetime and Mizrahi claims that The Glass of Fashion changed his life. Walker recalls getting a job in the Beaton Vogue archive and experiencing the thrill of seeing pictures of worthies like Coco Chanel, Marilyn Monroe, Sugar Ray Robinson, Marlon Brando, Cecil Day Lewis, Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Francis Bacon and Aldous Huxley. He claims the nobility of Beaton's romanticism rubbed off on him, while David Hockney declares that Beaton taught him the value of portrait photography and Garner suggests that Beaton never recorded the world as he found it, as he always transformed it to conform to his vision. In 1958, Beaton found himself in the position of being a kid in a sweet shop when MGM producer Arthur Freed gave him carte blanche on the sets and costumes of Vincente Minnelli's Gigi (1958). He confided in his diary that Leslie Caron was the textbook example of photogenicity, as the pop of a flashbulb transformed her from a frog into a princess. Beaton also worked on My Fair Lady and Bowles ticks off his seven year-old self for sniffily disapproving of the fact that he had given the Ascot ladies too much mascara. Yet, despite winning a brace of Academy Awards for transferring his stage vision to the screen, Beaton had informed Sheridan Morley that he had not enjoyed the filming process. Haslam confirms that Beaton had come to hate Hollywood, although a clip from Barry Norman's interview with George Cukor implies that it was tension on the set with the director that had spoilt the experience and it's clear that their mutual antipathy remained strong long after the cameras stopped rolling. During the shoot, Beaton had escaped to San Francisco and promptly fallen in love with Kinmont Hoitsma, an American Olympic fencer he had met in a bar named the Tool Box (not that this is mentioned in the film, as such details are a little too gritty). Their romance lasted only a year before Hoitsma returned Stateside, although Vickers suggests that Beaton had an aversion to coupledom and had only dallied with Hoitsma because he made him feel young at a time when society was changing rapidly. Former butler Ray Gurton declares that Beaton had an active a sex life, but had to be discreet as homosexual practices were still illegal in Britain. But Penelope Tree suggests that Beaton he was more dedicated to being a great artist than a lover. We see pictures of him with Gertrude Stein, Mova Bismarck and Diana Cooper and Vogue maven Diana Vreeland sings his praises as a loyal friend to Truman Capote, who applauds him for being a total self-creation. But they joke that Beaton also had a gift for gathering enemies like roses. He also smiles as he reveals his loathing of Evelyn Waugh to Freeman and puzzles in his diary why he detests Noel Coward so much while loving his work. Beaton also hated Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor for their crassness, vulgarity and ostentatious bad taste. He similarly lays into Katharine Hepburn for being a mottled piece of decaying matter whose lack of generosity and grace has turned her into a dried-up boot. Beaton admits on camera that he excels at hating, even though he tries to convince himself that he is only fooling. But Eyre and Bailey recall a genius for rudeness and Tree admits that he could be hard to read, as he was a mass of contradictions. Roy Strong bluntly declares Beaton to be two-faced and impersonates him unctuously greeting a woman he had been badmouthing seconds before. Beaton admits to Freeman that he didn't always like the person he found in his diaries, but he didn't airbrush out the less flattering aspects of his personality. However, as Vickers notes, his revelation of the affair with Garbo offended her greatly, along with several others who felt that Beaton had not behaved as a gentleman by kissing and telling. We see a clip from Beaton By Bailey of Bailey photographing Beaton snapping Penelope Tree in a verdant garden. But they disliked each other intensely and when Bailey is informed that Beaton had called his film `inconclusive and superficial', he cackles that those were the characteristics he had been striving to expose. Hockney was fonder of Beaton, however, and recalls him buying a painting for £40 that enabled him to go to America for the first time. Yet, over footage of Beaton snapping him, Hockney jokes that a Vogue assignment to sketch Beaton had taken an eternity to complete because they could never agree on what represented a good likeness. Tree enthuses that she had no idea how Beaton got so much done, as he never seemed to stop. Over images of Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton, the diary boasts of his stamina and an ability to outlast even the youngest friends at work or play. His parties were legendary and Hockney recalls meeting Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh and Mick Jagger, who had bumped into Beaton in Morocco. His diary entry marvels at his ugly beauty and feminine machismo and Bowles wonders how Beaton would have coped in the Instagram age and what his diary entry would have said about Kim Kardashian. Gurton recalls his employer being happy pottering in the garden and we see him fussing over his white cat, Timothy. But Beaton was not one for idle retirement and we cut to a 1968 National Portrait Gallery Retrospective, as Strong reveals that this was the first major exhibition of a living photographer at the gallery and that it did them both the world of good. Another would follow in 2004. We see images of Dietrich, Merle Oberon, Pablo Picasso, Lillian Gish and Elizabeth II, as Beaton laments in an interview that he hadn't possessed greater intellectual depth. As the new decade began, Beaton developed an admiration for Barbra Streisand while working with her on Minnelli's On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970), which was released the same year that Julie Andrews presented him with a Tony Award for his contribution to the Broadway show, Coco. A year later, he curated Fashion: An Anthology at the V&A, while he was knighted in 1972, an award he considered to be `practically posthumous'. Yet he felt he needed to keep working hard just to stand still. Ultimately, however, he was halted by a stroke in 1974, as he never fully recovered the use of his right hand. Vickers reveals he was also depressed by a loss of elegance in the world and spent much of his later years fretting over his financial security. In his diary Beaton grieved for lost youth and absent friends and wished that he could feel gratitude for what he had managed to fit in rather than sadness for what had gone forever. But Eyre ventures that Beaton was never entirely satisfied with what he had achieved and always felt that he could have done better. While writing his biography, Vickers had discovered a post-stroke diary and notes that Beaton had stopped writing after the 17 year-old Timothy had been put to sleep and Beaton had wondered whether he was the lucky one for being able to enter oblivion. A week later, on 18 January 1980, he died at Reddish House after getting flustered in the night. In his room were pictures of Watson, Garbo and Hoitsma. As voices off sum up - with one surmising that Beaton would have resented dying because he hated missing anything - he concludes in his own diary that he had managed to stick to his goal of being daring and different and had fought to the end his battle against `the played-safers and the slaves of the ordinary'. This seems an ironic closing remark, however, as Immordino Vreeland rarely stray from the tried-and-trusted clips`n'quips format that served her so well on Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel (2011) and Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict (2015). Nevertheless, she and editor Bernadine Colish have done a fine job in compiling a portrait that does respectful justice to Beaton's artistic achievements and his marvellously busy life. They also leave one wondering how Beaton would have felt about post-Warholian celebrity and how he would have dealt with the temptations offered by social media. Moreover, the film provides a timely reminder of how the film-makers of the future will be forced to mine Facebook and Twitter accounts (if they have not already been long deleted) for the kind of insightful acid drops that Beaton used to confide to his diary. What is particularly intriguing, however, is how Beaton was rescued from the oblivion caused by his anti-Semitic misstep by the Royal Family. One can scarcely imagine this happening today, with so many online trolls being ready to taint by association. But Beaton didn't simply rely on royal patronage to secure his rehabilitation and his wartime heroics probably deserve a film to themselves, as do the glorious monochrome photographs, which not only testify to Beaton's eye and aesthetic flair, but also to a lost era of style that passed with the Golden Age of Hollywood. According to the maxim, `Behind every great man, there is a great woman.' This has always been the presumption in the case of César Chávez, the founder of the National Farm Workers Association, and Dolores Huerta. But, as Peter Blatt reveals in Dolores, the tireless, fearless Latina campaigner was as much a driving force in the movement that eventually became known as United Farm Workers and that a combination of racism and misogyny has deprived the 87 year-old mother of 11 of her rightful place in the history books. Following an opening salvo of images and plaudits establishing Dolores Huerta as a remarkable woman with a talent for getting things done and for raising the hackles of her opponents, we learn from film-maker Luis Valdez that she was not the kind of woman to sit at home and play mother. Marriages to Ralph Head and Ventura Huerta produced children, but Dolores felt the need to make a contribution to society and became a disciple of Fred Ross at the Community Service Organisation in Stockton, California. Daughter Lori De Leon notes, however, that her mother was always interested in more than improving amenities and Dolores herself takes pride in the fact the CSO helped convict a number of policemen who had beaten up Latino youths. In 1959, Dolores became the CSO's political director and author Randy Shaw points out how unusual it was to have a women in the State Legislature in Sacramento, let alone a Latina. But, as Senator David Roberti is quick to point out, Dolores became a tenacious and effective lobbyist, with one of her first campaigns leading to the restoration of welfare payments to the parents of Second World War veterans. During her time with the CSO, Dolores helped set up the Agricultural Workers Association and this led to her being introduced to César Chávez, who had been campaigning for workers' rights for several years. He was impressed by the breadth of Dolores's ideas and strategies and they co-founded the National Farm Workers Association in 1962. There was much to be done, for, as Valdez reminds us, the United States had a poor record on the exploitation of its workers (and particularly its immigrants), in spite of its image as a beacon of liberty and democracy. Former farm workers Eliseo Medina (now Executive Vice-President of the Service Employees International Union) and Eloy Martinez recall the harshness of the conditions in the fields and vineyards and how much worse it was for women, who were often subjected to sexual assault by the overseers and their fellow workers. According to LGBTQ activist Ricky Rivas, his grandfather was a slave in all but name, as he was an illegal alien who didn't speak English and whose family would be made homeless if he upset his employers. Such abuses persuaded Dolores to leave her comfortable home, billet her youngest two children with relatives and take the remaining five to the dirt poor settlement of Delano, California. Son Emilio Huerta recalls that his siblings soon realised they were on their own, while their mother dedicated herself to her impoverished neighbours. In tandem with Chávez, Dolores started setting up worker committees, credit unions and health insurance clubs in a bid to improve daily life. They also began plotting a strike to force the growers into addressing the issues, but they felt compelled to act in September 1965 when the Filipino labour force began to protest against the violence that made its already deplorable conditions intolerable. Colour archive footage shows the police wading in to control the strikers, as Chávez and Dolores rallied the workers with speeches and both Valdez and Medina testify to the infectious nature of her commitment. Dolores also encouraged other women to stand beside their menfolk and Chávez was proud of the work they did on the picket lines and behind the scenes. Indeed, the NFWA had more women activists than all the other American unions combined. They also played a key role in the march to Sacramento in 1966, which led to an agreement being signed en route. Civil Rights activist Angela Davis was impressed by their efforts and they realised they had a common cause in terms of racial prejudice. Union activist Wendy Greenfield recalls the sense that so many radical movements rising up together could change the world and this is what made the 1960s such a time of optimism. Among those to join them was Senator Art Torres, who defied his wealthy father to go back to his roots and help to improve things from the ground up. In an interview, Dolores scoffs at the idea of being pampered in a spa because it would be a waste of her precious time and daughter Juana Chávez highlights the influence of Gandhi on her mother's thinking. Brother Ricardo S. Chávez recalls that they had a tough childhood, as Dolores insisted on living in the same way as the people she represented and they felt a certain resentment because they felt so different from other kids at school. But, looking back, they can see their mother standing shoulder to shoulder with Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, as he backs their campaign and openly debates with the Kern County sheriff and the local DA about their tactics of intimidation and repression. Ethnic studies teacher Curtis Acosta finds it remarkable that Dolores and Chávez brought a man of such importance into their campaign and he suggests that few politicians today would stand up to the major corporations in the same way. Sadly, Dolores had been standing beside Kennedy during his victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel and her pride turned to sadness when he was assassinated. Feminist Gloria Steinem remembers feeling like the future had been torn away from her, but Dolores renewed her commitment to non-violence and expanded the protest to include the pesticides being used on the crops and the dangers they posed to workers and consumers alike. In addition to exposing the toxicity of the poisons used, United Farm Workers (as they were now called) also identified links to cancer clusters and birth defects. But they also claimed that the growers would not use such chemicals on the workers if they were white and middle-class and, thus, shamed the agribusiness into addressing the essential racism of their hiring and remuneration strategies. These programmes helped raise the awareness of the Latino community and, as a consequence, there was an outpouring of art and music to express pride and protest. Congressman Raul M. Grijalva recalls being inspired by the sight of Chávez on the cover of Time magazine, while writer Roberto Lovato remembers the sense of belonging he got from seeing other `brown people' uniting for the greater good. But they also experienced a lot of negativity and daughter Camila Chávez remembers her mother impressing on them how beautiful their skin colour was. Interviewed at the time, grower Jack Pandol denounces Dolores for having so many children and daughter Maria Elena Chávez explains that her romance with César Chávez's brother, Richard, caused tongues to wag. Chauvinists also joked that she never shut up and claims were even made that the UWF hierarchy preferred her to be at Delano because they didn't want her in their hair yapping all the time. Teamsters Roy Mendoza and Jonny Macias spoke to camera about her using tears and tantrums to get her own way, while they also question the morality of having so many children and entrusting them to others while she goes about her union duties. Lori and Emilio recall that she was often away from home and they missed having her around to share their achievements. Camila and Juana admit that there are scars, as they sometimes felt the UWF mattered more than they did, while Maria Elena cries at remembering being placed with another family while Dolores was in New York and then resenting having to leave the nice people who had been caring for her because they felt more like real family. Dolores admits to guilt at making her children share her sacrifices, but Greenfield insists that she was giving them invaluable life lessons that they would come to appreciate when they realised what she had been doing on behalf of their people. In 1969, with strike breakers being used to disrupt the grape protests, the UWF leadership decided to promote a boycott of products by the growers involved in the dispute. While in New York, Dolores became friends with Steinem and began to accept feminist ideology, even though her Catholicism led her to oppose abortion. Davis notes that a lot of black and Hispanic women felt alienated by the feminist movement at first, as it was perceived to be a white cause that mattered less than basis human rights. But they were also won over and came to see their campaigns were connected. Back in California, Governor Ronald Reagan denied there was a strike, as he claimed Chávez was blackmailing the growers into accepting his union as the main negotiating body. But Medina declares that they simply resented the serfs standing up for themselves. Yet 17 million Americans boycotted Californian grapes, even though Richard Nixon bought a massive consignment to send to the troops in Vietnam. Steinem curses the Republicans for playing politics with people's lives. But the stand brought results and Medina points to what concerted and organised action can do in the face of injustice. Chávez was surprised by the change in Dolores when she returned to Delano and Lori suggests that she no longer accepted being the junior partner in their relationship. They admit during a joint interview that they argue about topics, but Chávez insists it was always political and never personal. UWF volunteer Ramona Holguin remembers how heated things got and yet Dolores was always the first into the office the next day. She refused to take any nonsense from the others on the committee, however, and artist Barbara Carrasco recalls the storm that followed a magazine interview in which Dolores accused the union of being sexist. But Torres and Medina applaud her stance because it brought more women to the forefront. In 1973, the growers signed a deal with the Teamsters union that gave them control over agricultural workers and negated many of the rights that UWF had secured. The police sided with the Teamsters in violent clashes with UWF supporters picketing the vineyards and we see footage of the brutality that resulted in a number of deaths. Speaking afterwards, Dolores realised that she could never be an American, even though she had been born there, because the white population didn't want people of colour to have an economic stake in the country. As if to prove this, right-wing groups opposed President Reagan's amnesty for illegal aliens as they knew they would have to grant them rights they could withhold if they were undocumented migrants. Over a speech given by George HW Bush in 1988 about America's high moral principles, we see a riot cop beating Dolores with his stick outside the hotel in San Francisco, as a demonstration became agitated. A rather unnecessary rapid rewind through Dolores's career follows, as though she was seeing her life flashing before her eyes follows before we see a photograph of her battered and bruised in hospital after she required emergency surgery to remove her spleen and treat three broken ribs. However, the incident proved beneficial to her family, as the children took it in turns to nurse her and Dolores was touched that they had rallied to her when she had so often abandoned them. But the siblings came to recognise that their mother belonged to everyone and they became much more supportive of her activities. Chávez also accepted how dependent he was on Dolores to keep him honest and UWF relevant. But he died in 1993 and it was expected that Dolores would take over as president. Yet, while the membership backed her, the committee felt they would have to fight too many unnecessary battles because she was a woman and she lost the vote to Arturo Rodriguez. After nine years of having initiatives blocked and being increasingly marginalised by the new leadership, Dolores gave a valedictory speech at the 2002 UWF convention, in which she reminded the delegates that she had co-founded the union with Chávez and that he had trusted a woman with seven children going through a divorce. Her bitter disappointment at their betrayal is evident. But she has never been one for looking back. Consequently, she launched the Dolores Huerta Foundation with a grant given to recognise her humanitarian achievement and she has gone back to the grass roots of cummunity organising to ensure that Mexican-Americans understand their rights and the role they have to play in the running of their own lives and the country at large. On 3 April 2006, she caused a furore when speaking at a Tucson high school by declaring that `Republicans hate Latinos' and Fox news anchor Bill O'Reilly not only dismissed her assertion, but also claimed never to have heard of Dolores Huerta. However, this led to a backlash from those like Angela Davis who resented the fallacy that Chávez had been the supremo of the UWF and that Dolores had merely been his sidekick (or his mistress). Moreover, Dolores herself was persuaded to reclaim her role in the movement and she now speaks to girls and women about owning their achievements and not letting men take all the credit for their hard work. Thus, when Barack Obama began using the slogan `Yes We Can' and UWF bigwigs gave the credit to Chávez, Dolores's supporters pointed out that she had coined the phrase `Si Se Puede' and Obama apologised for pinching her words when he gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It would be tempting to suggest that his successor should be made to watch this film, as he should be very afraid of people like Dolores Huerta. But let's not forget the prejudice that she has had to face from within the union movement and the Chicano community. John Lennon and Yoko Ono once sang about woman being the slave to the slave and those sentiments come across loud and clear in this appreciative and illuminating profile. Yet, for all the salutations capably assembled by editor Jessica Congdon, Bratt also allows Dolores's offspring to speak their minds and their input raises intriguing questions about the role their fathers played in their upbringing and whether a male freedom fighter with a large family would be subjected to the kind of judgemental criticism that Dolores has often had to endure. On its release, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others (2006) was hailed as a masterly exposé of the tactics employed by the Stasi to spy on the citizens of the German Democratic Republic. However, as Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker reveal in Karl Marx City, the Oscar-winning drama might not have provided an authentic insight into life behind the Berlin Wall after all. Following on from their assessment of the impact of the War on Terror in Gunner Palace (2004) and The Prisoner, or How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair (2006), the married documentarists delve into the Stasi archives in Berlin and Chemnitz in a bid to discover why Epperlein's father hanged himself from a tree in the garden of the family home in 1999, shortly after sending his daughter a couple of cryptic letters. Narrator Matilda Tucker opens by revealing that East Germany was the most surveilled state in human history. Over what look like colour home movies of children at school (but which are covert footage), we learn that over 90,000 Stasi agents and around 200,000 informants operated in this so-called workers' paradise. Petra Epperlein was raised in Karl-Marx-Stadt, the name given to the industrial city of Chemnitz to honour the co-author of The Communist Manifesto, which shaped lives behind the Iron Curtain for over four decades. Shortly after Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the residents voted to restore the name of Chemnitz and removed every trace of the detested authoritarian regime. However, the giant bronze bust of Karl Marx designed by Russian sculptor Lev Kerbel and positioned outside the Socialist Unity Party's headquarters in 1953 proved too heavy (at 40 tons) to move and it continues to watch over a city still coming to terms with its benighted past. Following Die Wende, Epperlein emigrated to the United States. But she still felt a sense of `Ostalgie' for the olden days, when Indianerfilme like Werner W. Wallroth's Blutsbrüder (1975) took the side of the heroic Native Americans against the capitalist oppressors. During the festive period in 1998, Epperstein had gone to stay with her in-laws and had watched cosy favourites like Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946). She called home to wish her family a happy new year, only to be informed that her father, Wolfgang, had killed himself at the age of 57. Suddenly, Epperlein felt she no longer knew the man who had always seemed so happy. Shown wearing a pair of large black headphones and holding a fluffy boom microphone, Epperlein brings the story forward 15 years, as her daughter describes in voice-over how Germans have words like `Erinnerungskultur' and `Vergangheitsbewältigun' for their ability to deal with the past. She cycles along a country road and takes the wheel of a car to recall Wolfgang's claims to have been a champion cyclist in Saxony and a superb driver. But he did his best to erase all traces of his past by burning documents and photographs before taking his life and Epperlein recalls returning home after his death to find a letter from her father commending her on her decision to leave Germany. However, this brief note raised more questions than it answered. She shows the letter and a postcard from 1990 to Professor Udo Grasshof, an expert in suicide in East Germany and he reassures Epperlein that her father was approving of her decision to leave and sending his fondest love. Needing more concrete information, she pays a call on her 75 year-old mother, Christa, who shows her a photo album that includes pictures of her father in Nazi uniform, while recalling that she had declined to join the Communist Party, as she didn't believe in state control. She denies that everyday life was a nightmare, as most people didn't feel the Stasi breathing down their necks and they made the best of their lot, as they had jobs to do and families to raise. Historian Dr Douglas Selvage agrees that the majority of people knuckle under and comply with dictatorship, as resistance would only endanger themselves and their families. Yet, the Epperleins felt torn when the Wall came down and waited for several weeks before crossing into the West. They also lost their jobs and the degree of normalcy that they knew would never return. But, just as they were adjusting to a new lifestyle, Wolfgang received a series of letters from a group calling itself `The Revisers' accusing him of being a Stasi informant and, in 1991, he took a handful of pills and drove his company car into a tree. Epperlein had known nothing of this at the time, as Christa had told her that Wolfgang had lost control of the vehicle because he was suffering from a heart condition. Grasshof suggests that such behaviour is normal for a mother trying to spare her children pain, but Epperlein is angry that she was unable to ask her father direct questions to ascertain the truth about the accusations. Over a clip of an expert in The Lives of Others being able to identify key strokes made by specific typewriters, Epperlein goes to the Hohenschönhausen to meet Dr Humbertus Knabe. He reveals that Henckel von Donnersmarck had asked to make the film in this Stasi prison to ensure its authenticity. But he had refused permission, as he felt the story about an agent who feels sorry for his prey was too far fetched because nobody would have been willing to take such a chance on behalf of strangers. Instead, friends often informed on each other and he recalls a priest who helped him smuggle books was a Stasi agent and Knabe repeats the old joke that if three people sat down to chat, one would be an informant. Bearing this in mind, she asks twin brothers Uwe and Volker whether they believed their father had had Stasi connections. They remember him intervening when they were singled out at school as potential paratroopers because they were so tall. He had teamed with boss Erwin Scherzer to defy the school's Party liaison and they were released from the programme. So, while they would hope that Wolfgang wasn't a Stasi snoop, it wouldn't surprise them if he had been. Epperlein decides to investigate in the Stasi archives and Christa agrees to make a request for access. She admits to being nervous about what she might find, as she would not like to discover that the man she had trusted had been a wolf. Archive spokeswoman Dagmar Hovestâdt explains that it may not be possible to see every file pertaining to her family, as some are still classified in order to protect people mentioned in them. She also reveals that they are still in the process of decoding many files, as the Stasi used their own methods to ensure documents remains confidential. Hovestâdt stresses that privacy remains important, but also points out that there are 40 million record cards in the archive and they have not yet been cross-referenced to make searching them as efficient as typing into Google. Selvage ponders how the Stasi might have made use of Facebook, while implying that surveillance still goes on today, but in a less obviously intrusive manner. Carrying her microphone like a buckler in a gladiatorial arena, Epperlein wanders through the corridors of closed shelving until she reaches the fourth floor and finds reels of film that were secretly filmed by trained camera operators to detect any anomalies in the day to day life of workers clocking in at their factory. As she speculates on the significance of a scene in which a man picks up a knife left by two others, Epperlein suggests that the figures recorded in the grainy monochrome footage are spectres trapped between a sinister past in which they are all suspects and an uncertain future, in which not everyone is a victim. As the snow falls, Epperlein goes to Chemnitz and sees the factory where her father had worked. Under GDR rule, Karl-Marx-Stadt had a reputation for precision engineering. But the promises made to keep the factories open after Reunification were not kept and 25% of the population moved away. Consequently, Chemnitz recorded the lowest birth rate in the world in 2006 and it very much has the look of a ghost town. She visits her old apartment block and the Karl Marx Monument and suddenly the parades and carnivals she had enjoyed as a girl seem more sinister (as the cross-cutting between shots of Epperlein wandering around and Stasi surveillance footage makes clear). Epperlein meets Stasi archive section head Lothar Raschker and he reveals that there were 3500 full-time agents in the city in 1989, with another 12,000 informants. But there is no sign of the 22 offices now and even the family home where Wolfgang perished has been demolished to make way for a busy road. She pays her respects in a snowy cemetery before spotting a monument to a Soviet rocket and recalls that her school had been named after female cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova. She meets up with her onetime best friend, Jana, who was once a true believer, but is now something of a tree-hugger. Her parents (named only as R and SX) both worked for the Stasi and Epperlein interviews them. The father describes how he claimed to be in the armed forces in order to stop people speculating about what he did. His wife was a nurse and they both looked for points of weakness that they could use to intimidate people. This technique was called `Zersetzung' and it was designed to make citizens feel so paranoid that they wouldn't dare do anything wrong because they felt they were being watched. The Herr X recalls how he used to break into apartments and conduct searches for incriminating materials. His colleague used to take Polaroids of a room to make sure that every item was returned to its precise place. But, sometimes, the furniture was completely rearranged so that a suspect knew that the Stasi was on their case. Looking back, he finds it all foolish and regrettable and there is a quiver of remorse in his voice. However, Grassfof explains that he was on the wrong end of a search, as he was arrested as a young boy for coming home early and catching some Stasi agents rummaging through the family's belongings. Knabe reveals that the East German regime was so broke that it often sold prisoners abroad to get some hard currency into the coffers. In all, 35,000 political prisoners were sold to West Germany for 100,000 DM each, after they had been held in prisons like the one that Epperlein had passed every day on her way to school. She films inside and she notes how its design was based on Jeremy Bentham's idea of a Panopticon, in which it would be possible to spy on everyone within its walls from a single vantage point. As Knabe suggests, nobody in the GDR felt there was any point in trying to resist and, so, they conformed and became part of the controlling mechanism. When it became clear that the country was going to collapse, hundreds of people crossed into Hungary and Czechoslovakia and Epperlein goes to Dresden station to see where residents tried to jump on a train full of refugees being transferred from Prague. This riot sparked the breaching of the Berlin Wall just 36 days later and Stasi communication wires were hot with reports of fugitives leaving the sinking ship. Jana's parents remember the panic at HQ, as the order went out for all loose paperwork to be destroyed. However, there was no way of shredding the informant files and these were left on the shelves. But, as archivist Dr Juliane Schtterle reveals, the 16,000 bags of shredded documents were salvaged in 1990 and they are busy putting the pieces together so that Stasi secrets can be recovered. Two days after this visit, Epperlein gets confirmation that her father wasn't an informant and that a file was kept on him between 1984-89 because he was often critical of the way his company was run. Her brothers are rather proud that he was considered an enemy of the state and are surprised to discover that the person snooping on him was boss Erwin Scherzer. As emotions run high, Epperlein is relieved that Wolfgang was on the right side and she wishes she could hug him. Questions remain, such as whether the anonymous letters were sent by Scherzer and whether they drove Wolfgang to his death. But, as she continues to search in the files, Epperlein finds a photograph of herself and her father taken on the day of a 1989 protest against the celebration of the GDR's founding and she knew it would have been used as evidence against them if the Berlin Wall had not fallen. Instead of incriminating him, however, this furtive snapshot had exonerated him. Parodying the covert tactics employed by Stasi operatives, Petra Epperlein adopts a Nick Broomfield look to produce a memoir as personal and off-kilter as Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg (2007). She puts herself through the wringer, while trying to maintain an outward detachment. With her husband wielding the camera providing the sombre, but atmospheric monochrome visuals and her daughter contributing the narration for her odyssey, this is a family affair in every sense of the term. But, while it's often harrowingly stark in its discussion of daily life in the GDR, this is also a fond memoir of the people who made being in a state-sized prison bearable. It also broadens the debate about the nature of Ostalgie and many will be dismayed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's contention that he viewed Ulrich Mühe's character in The Lives of Others, Captain Gerd Wiesler, as a kind of Iron Curtain Oskar Schindler. The final image of Epperlein and her father on the frontline as history was being made is as potent as the family footage of him singing in the car with his grandchildren. Yet Epperlein (and Tucker) also wishes to leave viewers with the reminder that if it could happen to her, it could happen to them in a new age of physical and cyber surveillance that is potentially as terrifying (if not more) than anything experienced by the Epperleins and their compatriots. But the modern generation has become so blasé about what it posts online that people no longer need their friends to betray them, as they often condemn themselves.