exclamation — men! —
and a shake of the
head signalling
disgust and a
soupçon of pity.
Like Edgar Wright’s
Last Night in Soho,
but perhaps less
successfully, Men is
an act of #MeToo
commiseration from a male
director keen to show off his
feminist bona fides.
Not the best reason to make
a movie perhaps, because it
risks coming off as a fiendishly
reverse-engineered piece of
mansplaining — “Hey, I get
your fear about me, better
than you do.” Hence the
casting of Buckley, an actress
of emotional vibrancy, lion
heart and cockeyed grin, who
has, at 32, proven herself
capable of anything — except
perhaps submitting to the
crap of emotionally
blackmailing males for very
long. “You’re tormented,”
that priest insists. “I don’t
know if I’m tormented,” she
reasons. “Haunted, then.”
She listens to his guilt trip for
a few minutes before exiting
with a crisp “F*** off ”.
In short, she is the least
easily spooked actress in
Britain. Which makes her
miscast. When RomanFILM
Polanski cast Mia
Farrow in Rosemary’s
Baby he chose the
kind of woman
who might be
susceptible to the
devilish whispering
campaign and
paranoia that lies at the
film’s heart — and his own
— but Buckley works on the
film’s mixture of spooky
lyricism, oblique horror and
special effects viscera like
a dose of smelling salts.
“Come off it,” she seems to
say. She’s too sensible for this.
I’m guessing that Garland
was wary of casting someone
more timorous in the role
for fear of allowing his
feminist credentials to slip
— or the slightest whiff of
victimisation — but movies
are an ideologically impure
medium, and horror movies
especially need to dance with
the Devil. There is nothing
creepier in Men than the
appearance at Buckley’s
window of a naked man,
silently staring in, but when
the priest starts quoting
TS Eliot’s The Waste Land I feel
my primal fears quietly put
their feet up and reach for
the popcorn.
By the end, Buckley
stares at the special effectsAlex Garland’s Men begins
with a slow-motion shot of
a man sailing past a window,
en route to the pavement,
followed by an image of
dandelion seeds being blown
from their stem. Poetic. I
think we’re supposed to
think: how fragile is life,
blown aloft on an indifferent
breeze, or somesuch. But
please do pay attention: the
image of that man’s suicide
and the dandelion seeds are
going to recur, and there will
be a test at the end to make
sure you’ve understood the
film’s whole symbolic scheme.
Rather like a long
monologue from a bright
16-year-old boy as he makes
his way from poetry class to
film studies class, his head
teeming with unseen
connections, Men comes
from the head, not the gut.
It’s distractingly clever,
beautifully made and not
very frightening.
Jessie Buckley plays Harper,
a young woman who recently
lost her husband, James
(Paapa Essiedu), from a
balcony of their Docklands
apartment after a ferocious
argument. To recover, she
rents a country house from a
ruddy-cheeked squire named
Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear),
whose overbearing cheer
masks deep reserves of
hostility. “Where’s hubby?”
he asks, before chastising her
for eating an apple from his
garden — “Mustn’t do that...
Forbidden fruit” — before
No nonsense Jessie Buckley
stars in horror movie Menphantasmagoria meant to
represent the self-spawning
cycle of male self-loathing
with an expression not of fear,
but deepest pity. There can be
few more unpromising places
for a horror movie to end up.
It’s worth sticking with
Mia Hansen-Love’s Bergman
Island, although there’s a lot
to stick through too. Two
film-makers, a woman named
Chris (Vicky Krieps) and an
older man named Tony (Tim
Roth), make the trip to the
Swedish island of Faro, where
Ingmar Bergman lived and
worked, to soak up the great
man’s ambience while
working on their own projects.
There’s an inevitable
gaucheness about any film
filled with hat-doffs to another
film-maker — every five
minutes a Swedish tourist
guide pops up to impart some
gobbet of information about
Bergman’s work — and you
can sometimes feel as if you’re
trapped on the “Bergman
safari” Tony goes on one
afternoon. But the subtleties
of the interaction between
Roth and Krieps, both
world-class naturalists,
are fascinating. It’s like a
competition to see who can
most successfully underplay
each scene: Roth sauntering
around, scratching and
sniffing like he has been
caught on candid camera;
Krieps lolling around, wind-
tousled, or succumbing to a fit
of bedtime giggles. Krieps is
the winner, by a nose.
Then, at the halfway mark,
Hansen-Love switches things
up. Chris tells Tony the story
she’s writing and we get to
see it as a film-within-a-film,
starring Mia Wasikowska as a
woman who rekindles an
affair with a former boyfriend
(Anders Danielsen Lie) while
attending a wedding. Is Chris
confessing to infidelity under
the guise of fiction? For once
the film-within-a-film is more
interesting than the film that
frames it. It’s like a puzzle box
showing you the characters’
inner lives. Suddenly, the
uninflected, slightly boring
naturalism of Bergman Island
yields a small gem of romantic
anguish and longing. cThe horror of mansplaining
Jessie Buckley
isn’t spooked by
a director showing
off his feminist
credentials
Men
Alex Garland, 15, 100min
HHH
Bergman Island
Mia Hansen-Love, 15, 112min
HHH
TOM
SHONE
telling her he is only joking.
One of those. The film has a
lot more where he came from.
Harper soon discovers a
naked prowler, a policeman
who doesn’t believe her about
the prowler, a creepy priest
who puts her on a massive
guilt trip about her husband’s
death (“You must wonder why
you drove him to it?”) and a
few others, all of them played
by Kinnear. It’s a ticklish
conceit, familiar from Coming
to America and Kind Hearts
and Coronets, that never quite
manages to be horrifying,
such is your pleasure at
spotting Kinnear again, like
a cinematic game of Where’s
Wally?.
Do you get the point,
though? That’s the main thing.
Of course you do. It’s there in
the title: Men. Said with anIt’s beautifully
made and
not very
frightening
THE
CRITICSHHHHH KO HHHH A-OK
HHH OK HH So-so H No-no14 5 June 2022