Custody review – the screw turns in understated separation drama

There’s a unidirectional agony to this psychological drama from actor turned director Xavier Legrand – this is the much-talked-about festival prizewinner which Legrand developed from his 2013 short Avant Que De Tout Perdre, or Just Before Losing Everything. Legrand could have kept that title for his full-length feature version. It’s almost a story without a story, in that there is hardly any narrative progression as such, no phased revelation of character, no twist and counter-twist, and no point-of-view switches designed to raise queries about the truth. No: the focus is on one single horrible situation, getting steadily and unwatchably worse: a simmering pot of rage and toxic masculinity under which the gas-ring gets turned up and up. It concerns a divorce, and a legal hearing about custody.

Denis Ménochet plays Antoine, a glowering, heavy-set guy who is in dispute with his ex-wife Miriam (Léa Drucker) about custody of their 11-year-old son Julien (Thomas Gioria). The couple have an elder daughter Joséphine (Mathilde Auneveux) who, being about to turn 18 and enter adulthood, does not form part of the case. The drama begins with a hearing in front of the judge (Saadia Bentaïeb) who must hear Miriam’s fears about Antoine’s violence and threats, although there is no clear legal evidence.

The case is settled by the judge in a way that surprises both parties. Now Antoine is allowed access to Julien, but not allowed to know Miriam’s address, to interfere with their household arrangements – and he certainly has no say in the matter of Julien acquiring a new stepfather. With icy rage, Antoine decides he has a right to know everything that’s going on and begins to turn the screw on his innocent, terrified son. The performances are frighteningly good – and without these performances, in fact, the film would have been merely blank or histrionic. This especially applies to Gioria as the young son, and more than any actor in a film I can remember, he conveys what emotional and physical abuse is like. Julien’s scenes with Antoine have to be watched between your fingers. Legrand shows how simply getting into his dad’s car and being driven by him is an unspeakable ordeal; there is a clever moment when the seatbelt alarm keeps pinging because Julien has failed, to his dad’s irritation, to buckle up. Later, Antoine will be too enraged to do it himself and the pinging becomes an ominous alarm system for his state of mind. Meanwhile, other family tensions are orbiting.

The film shows that a lot of Antoine’s macho rage and bullying derives from anger at his own father, Joël (Jean-Marie Winling). Miriam is also concerned that Joséphine’s education is about to be derailed by her possessive boyfriend, Samuel (Mathieu Saikaly), who seems charming enough – but Miriam knows how these things can turn out. And where are we going with all this? The temptation is to compare Custody with Asghar Farhadi’s modern classic A Separation. But they are quite different. Custody doesn’t have the subtlety or nuance of Farhadi’s film, nor is it quite like Joachim Lafosse’s divorce drama from 2016, L’Économie Du Couple, or After Love.

There are moments in the original custody hearing here which hint that blame may not be straightforward. But actually, blame is pretty straightforward, and it is incidentally a flaw of this film that it sticks very predictably to Chekhov’s rule about what happens to a firearm which is produced in act one. The film it resembles much more is something like Claude Chabrol’s L’Enfer, or Hell, from 1994, about a married man who simply descends into the horror of fanatical jealousy and paranoia. There is not much storytelling light and shade in Custody, but it has the shock and swipe of real life.

Robin Williams groped and flashed me on set, says Mork & Mindy co-star

Robin Williams’s Mork & Mindy co-star has said he repeatedly grabbed her breasts and bottom and exposed himself to her on the set, a new book reveals, but she excused it as part of Williams’s playful personality.

“I had the grossest things done to me by him,” said Pam Dawber, who played Mindy. “And I never took offence. I mean I was flashed, humped, bumped, grabbed. I think he probably did it to a lot of people … but it was so much fun.”

Williams would also wrestle her, break wind on her and come on to the set totally naked. He also once “goosed” an elderly woman playing Mindy’s grandmother by poking her between the buttocks with a cane.

The revelations are contained in a new biography of Williams by New York Times journalist Dave Itzkoff, to be published in May, and were reproduced in the Daily Mail.

“If you put it on paper you would be appalled,” said Dawber, 66. “But somehow he had this guileless little thing that he would do – those sparkly eyes. He’d look at you, really playful, like a puppy, all of a sudden. And then he’d grab your tits and then run away. And somehow he could get away with it. It was the 70s, after all.”

“It was just Robin being Robin,” said Howard Storm, who directed Mork & Mindy. Often Williams groped Dawber because he was “bored”, he said: “He’d be doing a paragraph and in the middle of it he would just turn and grab her ass. Or grab a breast. And we’d start again. I’d say, ‘Robin, there’s nothing in the script that says you grab Pam’s ass.’ And he’d say: ‘Oh, OK.’’’

The show’s producer, Garry Marshall, also recalled: “He would take all his clothes off, he would be standing there totally naked and she was trying to act. His aim in life was to make Pam Dawber blush.”

Mork & Mindy ran from 1978 to 1982, and starred Williams as a curious alien who lodged with Dawber’s Mindy in Boulder, Colorado. The show was Williams’s springboard to a successful movie career. He went on to star in Hollywood hits including Good Morning Vietnam, Dead Poets’ Society, Mrs Doubtfire and Good Will Hunting – for the last of which he won the best supporting actor Oscar in 1997.

Williams killed himself in 2014, following a history of depression, drug addiction and mental health issues. He was misdiagnosed with Parkinson’s and found after his death to have had Lewy body dementia.

Despite his on-set behaviour, Dawber characterised her relationship with Williams as sisterly and spoke of his “gigantic heart”. “I really loved Robin and Robin really loved me,” she said. “We just clicked.”

Ophelia review – Daisy Ridley stranded in disastrous Hamlet reimagining

If a producer cornered me in an elevator and pitched “Hamlet, but from Ophelia’s point of view, and we’ve got Daisy Ridley in the lead”, I’d sell everything I had to invest. And I’d probably make a killing, as Claire McCarthy’s Ophelia is going to cut into one heck of a trailer. But to thine own self one must be true.

This film looks absolutely gorgeous, but apart from its production design it is basically a disaster. Shakespeare purists will revolt, high-fantasy fans will be bored and the kids who make gifs of Daisy Ridley and put them on Tumblr will wait until they can pirate this anyway. This project is madness with no method to it.

Daisy Ridley’s voiceover introduces us to Ophelia, floating in her watery grave, suggesting that only now will we hear “the real story”. We cut to her childhood at court, a little scamp that Queen Gertrude (Naomi Watts) chooses to be one of her ladies-in-waiting. She and young Hamlet are already making eyes at one another, yet when he returns to Elsinore as a young man (played by George MacKay) their flirtation soon escalates.

The first obvious hurdle this film faces is figuring out how these people talk. They can’t speak the language of Shakespeare, so the dialogue is dumbed down to a generic Game of Thrones level. So when the narrative intersects with scenes from the play, lines like “Get thee to a nunnery” are changed to something on the order of “I told you to go to that nunnery”. (I didn’t write down the precise line, by this point of the film I was clutching my head with both hands.)

The other problem is that nearly every scene we see has almost no narrative drive. It’s well over an hour before Polonius is killed, with Ophelia essentially offstage twiddling her thumbs. Sure, she’s floating about the palace and witnessing things – but there is zero emotional investment.

Lisa Klein’s novel (adapted by screenwriter Semi Chellas) decides it will be great fun to make substantive changes to the story. So Gertrude has a lost witch sister that makes potions (the influence is more The Dark Crystal than Macbeth), and one such brew can temporarily simulate death like in Romeo and Juliet. This leads to a, shall we say, altered version of the play’s final scenes that caused more than one snicker during the Sundance premiere.

It must be said though that the film looks exquisite, from the costumes and props to the cinematography and camerawork. There are iridescent blue dragonflies and white peacocks and so many intricately brocade gowns. The level of craft in this film is absolutely off the charts. That said, I’ll tell you a quick story.

About 20 years ago I saw a production of Macbeth in a New York City park that was defiant in its lack of scenery and props. The actors were in their street clothes. They went all-in on the acting and the words, and I tell you that it was one of the best Shakespeare performances I’ve seen in my life. I’d do anything to somehow experience a repeat of it. For all the flash and filigree in Ophelia, the only way I’ll sit through this again is to laugh at it.

A Matter of Life and Death review – timely rerelease of sublime celestial romance

AMatter of Life and Death is the utterly unique, enduringly rich and strange romantic fantasia from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. You could put it in a double bill with It’s a Wonderful Life or The Wizard of Oz, though its pure English differentness would shine through. It was released in 1946, the same year that Winston Churchill coined the term “special relationship” – an idea that the film finds itself debating. With that concept now under pressure, 2017 is a good time for this classic to be rereleased in UK cinemas.

The film begins with a sensational flourish: a nuclear explosion that destroys a solar system. We start by drifting through outer space, accompanied by a droll narrative voice, commenting on its vastness and noticing a sudden supernova way in the distance: “Someone must have been messing about with the uranium atom.” The eerie casualness of that revelation sets the otherworldly tone for the rest of what follows. The starlit expanse, the intertitles, the distant detonation, the huge quasi-senatorial valhalla, all hint at where George Lucas got ideas for the Star Wars movies.

Then we find ourselves on Earth in 1945, where RAF pilot Peter Carter, played by David Niven, is flying back to Britain after a bombing raid, losing height, badly hit. He has presumably been attacking German cities, and it has to be noticed that Germans are not represented here, either in this world, or the next. Carter’s parachute has been damaged; he knows he is going to die, and with impossibly dashing flair, he radios his final position to an astonished American radio operator called June, played by Kim Hunter, asks her to contact his family and flirts with her. June and Peter fall in love at that moment.

The miracle is that Peter seems to survive, staggering out of the sea. He finds June, and with the help of a local doctor, Frank Reeves, played by the incomparable Powell/Pressburger stalwart Roger Livesey, he is gradually nursed back to health. Yet an emissary from heaven, in the form of a dandified pre-revolutionary French aristocrat played by Marius Goring, informs Peter that his survival is a mere clerical error and he is expected back in the afterlife right away. Peter complains that now he has fallen in love he is entitled to remain below. A huge trial is in prospect, and a prosecuting counsel is chosen: American revolutionary veteran Abraham Farlan (Raymond Massey), who intends to argue that this decadent Brit has no business with a good American girl. Frank believes that these heavenly visions are delusions caused by his brain injury and everything – or almost everything – is consistent with that rational explanation. But how did Peter survive the fall?

A Matter of Life and Death is a visually extraordinary film: a gorgeous artificiality is created by Alfred Junge’s production design and Jack Cardiff’s vivid Technicolor photography. Counterintuitively, the heaven scenes are in black and white and Earth is in colour. The modernist architecture of heaven is something to rival Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and the “stairway to heaven” sequence (which gave this film its US title) is narcotically weird. Even down on Earth, and without the angelic visits, things have a distinct surreality. Frank likes nothing more than to keep the village under benign surveillance with his camera obscura device, evidently kept on a high rotating turret, which gives him live pictures of everything that’s happening in the village. He is like the voice and eye of an all-seeing God. And perhaps the most extraordinary moment comes when Peter encounters a naked young goatherd on the beach: it is this figure – like someone from a late Shakespeare play, such as The Tempest – who tells Peter that he is back on Earth. (The boy’s nakedness meant that this sequence was cut for TV transmission by prim US networks; Martin Scorsese has spoken entertainingly of his periodic exasperation at sitting down to watch and finding it is the bowdlerised version.)

So what does this film have to say about the special relationship? The speechifying on the subject of history and politics might disconcert some viewers who would rather hear and see more about Peter and June’s romantic adventure. But Powell and Pressburger are telling America and the world that just as Squadron Leader Peter Carter does not want go to heaven, so Britain itself is not dead; it does not deserve to be consigned to history along with those effete and irrelevant periwigged Frenchmen. Britain lives – in partnership with America.

I have watched this film many times, but it was only on sitting down to it again that I finally realised what Frank Reeves’s death reminded me of. Riding his motorbike fast in the rain, Dr Reeves had selflessly swerved in order to save the lives of the ambulancemen and their patient, conveying Peter to hospital. His sacrifice means that he can go to heaven to be Peter’s defending counsel. How should we feel about this terrible event? I had a flashback to a long-suppressed memory of reading CS Lewis’s The Last Battle, the final Narnia episode, in which Peter, Edmund, Lucy, Diggory and Polly are revealed to be killed in a train crash, along with the Pevensie parents, and so they can be admitted to eternal life. It was a profoundly strange happy-sad collision. So is this.

Losing the X Factor: is it time for the X-Men universe to stop expanding?

When James Franco entered talks to play superhero Multiple Man in an upcoming movie, we can only imagine the actor, director, screenwriter, musician and poet saw the character as a metaphor for his own creative endeavours. For Marvel mutant James Madrox was named for a useful ability to duplicate himself countless times over, meaning he is capable of living scores of lives all at once.

Hence, one Multiple Man can spend decades learning Shaolin kung fu, while another can study for a law degree, all while the main Multiple Man goes about his daily superhero business. Eventually these “dupes” are (usually) reabsorbed back into the original Multiple Man, resulting in useful new skills for Madrox Prime, but occasionally they crop up years later to cause trouble for their clone daddy.

Likewise, it is rather tempting to imagine Franco frowning at the memory of the time one of his forgotten Franco dupes turned up unexpectedly in General Hospital, or appeared as the second Green Goblin in superhero dud Spider-Man 3. Can this really be the same accomplished indie actor who played Sean Penn’s on-off lover in the wonderful, Oscar-winning biopic Milk, or who directed himself as Tommy Wiseau in the acclaimed story of the so-called “worst film ever made”, The Disaster Artist? Perhaps there really is an army of Franco clones out there, allowing the actor to teach classes at a New York University while simultaneously running his own production company, hosting the Oscars and recording albums for his own English new wave–themed pop duo.

The very existence of a Multiple Man movie also reminds us that the X-Men universe itself is exploding into myriad new forms like a mogwai in a shower who’s just been fed several Big Macs long after midnight. Next year’s big mutant movies are a mixed bunch: X-Men: Dark Phoenix will revisit the famous comic book storyline in which Jean Grey loses her powers, while Josh Boone’s The New Mutants will further push the envelope by segueing into psychological horror. Elsewhere on the big screen, Bryan Singer’s mainstream saga has been all the way back to the 1960s, swapped its cast for younger models and subsequently zoomed forward in time to both the 1980s (X-Men: Apocalypse) and the late 2020s (this year’s Logan).

Deadpool, one assumes, operates in the present day, though it barely matters given the meta-tastic filter that has been applied, and the loose (to say the least) connection between Tim Miller’s movie – an untitled sequel is also due next year –and any of the other films. Likewise, FX’s Legion might be about a mutant who is the psychologically challenged son of Professor X in the comics, but you’d hardly know it.

The latest TV series to spin off from the X-Men is Fox’s The Gifted, which focuses on a mother and father (True Blood’s Stephen Moyer and Joss Whedon regular Amy Acker) who are forced to go on the run after their teenage children begin exhibiting dangerous mutant powers. Again, the show is supposedly part of the same universe as the X-Men movies, but is conveniently set in an alternate timeline where the costumed mutants have disappeared – so don’t expect Patrick Stewart or James McAvoy to turn up any time soon with sage words of follically challenged wisdom.

This time around, creator Matt Nix has chosen to hark back to the early X-Men movies, back before Brett Ratner was handed the keys to the kingdom on X-Men: The Last Stand and it was still possible to see mutant powers as an intelligent pop culture metaphor for queer identity, or simply being different. But the new show doesn’t stop there. Possession of the mutant gene is also not-so-subtly compared to the African American experience in times of slavery. The underground network of sympathisers that exists to get mutants over the border to Mexico recalls the historical Underground Railroad that helped slaves escape to free states and Canada in the 18th and 19th centuries. One has to wonder if Nix and his team would have been better off creating a single well-honed allegory to a historical example of institutionalised prejudice, rather than choosing to borrow from every example under the sun.

Moreover, I can’t be alone in wondering if all these myriad X-Men shows and movies will ever be reunited into one great X-Universe with a single tone and timeline, or if they ever could be. In the original Marvel comics, part of the fun (as in the Marvel shows and movies) is that you never know when household names such as Spider-Man or the Hulk might turn up at the X-Mansion to borrow some sugar. Likewise, the best Multiple Man stories were those in which Madrox came into contact with one of his long-lost “dupes”, and either gained a useful skill upgrade or found that he had inadvertently fathered several new sprogs.

As long as the X-Men universe keeps expanding in so many diverse ways, it seems unlikely that we’ll ever see its many offspring reabsorbed back into the whole. And there is also a sense of ever-diminishing returns here. For when dozens of duplicates all operate under a single guise, as Multiple Man could have warned us, there is no guarantee they will all retain the qualities that made us warm to the original in the first place. Haven’t they seen Gremlins?