Category: Film

Time of the Child is a book that will go down in personal legend as one that all of the stops had to be pulled out for to get it over the line. Is it nearly as accessible as This is Happiness, a book about the simple pleasures of life and the lengths that one might go to to prolong them? It most emphatically is not. Does the promise of a far off hope help to offset the drear and dread that the predicaments of the Troy family engender? Not overly.

Yet in the final analysis Time of the Child is a warm piece of fiction about a village that operates its own way even within the strictures of the heavily Catholic Irish society of 1962. It just takes a bit to get there.

Doctor Jack Troy has kept himself apart from the town of Faha all of his life, despite being raised there. He worries, too, that he has kept his daughter Ronnie from living her own life, and that he has rendered her unlovable. These issues come to a head on the day of the Christmas fair, when a baby left at the church is delivered unto the Troys’ surgery and residence. As Doctor Troy tries to protect the child, he has to reconsider everything that he knows about his relation to the town and his perception of his daughter.

Time of the Child has been promoted as both a companion to This is Happiness and an introduction to Faha all by itself, but the reader would be hard pressed to say that this book is quite so immediately accessible, spending most of its first third on a single morning with a man that you would know the basic shape of if you had read the previous instalment, referring to things that nag at you, that you think you should know.

So if you’ve somehow got yourself a copy of the premier book of the festive season just passed (maybe you were gifted it for Christmas, and haven’t got around to it yet?), I would advise putting it down and finding out what happened in Faha before the Electric came.

By the time the titular Child shows up, the shape of the novel has changed. As she shakes up the Troy family, so too does she alter the form of the piece. There are so many ways that it could go, and Williams spends a decent time tottering on the precipice of disaster and creating another, far darker, novel. What seemed like idle thoughts before the Child suddenly become manic fantasies pursued with an unhealthy zeal, and the ends needed to achieve them are dubious at best. 

Williams elides much of the horror of what would become a child born out of wedlock in the era in a way that Clare Keegan, for example, did not. Regardless, it is clear that the Child would not thrive if surrendered to the Department. Ultimately Time of the Child is not interested in worst case scenarios beyond the acknowledgment that they are real and perilous, and it opens its heart to a world of possibility, however unlikely it may be.

Unlike This is Happiness, there is not a defined narrator. We already know the fates of some of these residents from what Noel Crowe told us on the last visit, and this time Williams’ omniscience is as miserly as he is generous. He knows the future, and tells some of it, but other important factors he leaves up to the reader. This is one of the quiet joys, the mixed ambiguity of a future only half-written. 

Time of the Child is a cumulative affair, with less of a carnival feeling than the previous trip to Faha and more of a quiet contemplation. There are many worries along the way, an almost leaden gloom, but it all adds up to a final sequence that at last feels like a proper celebration of Faha, an explanation of why we’d want to spend our time among its lives in the darkest and coldest months of the year. Perhaps that is happiness.

In France, things are quite different to the Anglosphere. Over there, a literary author can still be a meaningful part of the commentariat, work the TV circuit, and be a cultural touchstone. This foreign character is our entrée to Lie With Me, a movie that elegantly juggles the past and present while completely eliminating any element of coincidence or chance.

Stéphane Belcourt (Guillaume de Tonquédec), in the grip of a bout of writer’s block, returns to his hometown to promote cognac through a new novella and a commencement speech at the anniversary of the distillery. His wandering attention almost immediately latches onto distillery representative Lucas Andrieu (Victor Belmondo), who he quickly realises is the son of his first love. As Stéphane struggles with how much to reveal to Lucas, he considers the heartbreak of his school years, when his younger self (Jérémy Gillet) spent a season with Thomas (Julien De Saint Jean, The Lost Boys).

Adapted from Philippe Bresson’s book, the more literal title is “Stop With Your Lies” (the English title is a legacy of book translator Molly Ringwald). Stéphane is famous for autofiction, that most peculiarly European genre, and has been lax at covering his tracks to the point that multiple of his novels have had characters named Thomas, and one was directly called Thomas Andrieu. In the original book, this extends as far as the narrator character himself being named Philippe. It’s not difficult to see the parallels.

Yet Lie With Me operates at a remove as a film; writer/director Olivier Peyon is steering, rather than Besson, and the film’s split structure offers a dynamic character study of Stéphane across decades. Peyon chooses to focus mainly on de Tonquédec and Belmondo, with the past used as background to inform the present. The two leads bounce off each other in an alternately cordial and antagonistic way, and there is a genuine back and forth that keeps the movie buoyant. The cognac focus allows for unusual developments, as the lead character is near teetotal; when it comes time for the grand speech to commence it has dramatic impact for the theatrical audience but, on a pragmatic level, you have to wonder what the guests at the cognac event were making of it.

Lie With Me has a particular Frenchness that sticks to its walls, despite the universality of its lost love ricochet backdrop. Though it helps, you don’t need a degree in French literature to unpack the meta to get something out of it; aided by strong performances from de Tonquédec and Belmondo, Peyon has taken Bresson’s work and made it his own.

Lie With Me is still pending an Australian release date.

Directed by: Olivier Peyon

Starring: Guillaume de Tonquédec, Victor Belmondo, Jérémy Gillet, Julien de Saint-Jean and Guilaine Londez

Henry Cavill has not had much luck as the face of franchises. Between non-starters like The Man From U.N.C.L.E., re-cast leads like The Witcher, and whatever trainwreck the DCEU has ended up with, there was a time when the man didn’t have a franchise to his name. This all changes in 2024, with Matthew Vaughn’s (The King’s Man) new flagship, Argylle. Cavill plays the titular hero, he’s front and centre on the poster, and … he’s barely in the movie. There’s a marginally different movie behind this artifice, but it’s one that you’ve already seen before. There’s barely a mind here, let alone a twisted one.

Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite) is an acquired taste, to say the least. Even if he’s presenting a relatively mundane story, there’s a sense of unease hanging around proceedings. Poor Things, however,is not a mundane film. It is a nightmarish and outré work delivered under the dark cover of having a name cast. Whether audiences are suspecting or not is up to them, but they really should have learned their lesson by now: Lanthimos has made a hypnotising tour de force that demands you get with its rhythms or die. 

Choose life.

The One Man Army has been a respected, and well trod, genre for many years. In recent times there’s been an influx of flair and personality into what can tend to be somber and bloody affairs. The Beekeeper looks like it might just be another run and gun, but there are times when it rises above itself to become heightened cinema. Adam Clay might not have personality, but The Beekeeper does.

The DC Extended Universe never had much good will, and it is well and truly past the time that it has squandered it all. Its best movie was a forbidden one that was never supposed to exist, the misunderstood subject of unconstructive memes. Most everything else has tarnished with time, and the project spawned several underwhelming or plain bad movies that underperformed at the box office. From a higher level, Warner Bros Discovery made mystifying calls, like cancelling the well-cast Batgirl while retooling and releasing the troubled and terrible The Flash to an indifferent audience.

2018’s Aquaman was amusing and satisfying, and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom retains a good deal of its creative team, so you would expect it to be good. However, this movie was doomed almost from the start, as the DCEU became micromanaged to the point that any individual would not have been able to shift the needle on it. That Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is even okayish is a minor miracle, but that’s really not good enough with the amount of money involved. At least now we know this chapter in film history is over (yet a new one struggles to be born).

Japan has its fair share of bombastic action films and novels, but it also has many mannered and cleverly compartmentalised stories that unfold like so many origami cranes. Director David Leitch (Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw) is not one for subtlety and never has been. In Bullet Train, Leitch has taken the puzzle box of author Kotaro Isaka’s superbly titled Maria Beetle and shot it, smashed it, poisoned it, and ran over it with a train. It’s quite a different experience to the book, but it’s not the worse off for it: Bullet Train is a literal high speed breakneck action comedy that keeps the audience engaged right up to the largely superfluous third and a half act.