Waves review – high-school sports star wrestles with his emotions

After disturbing us all with survivalist thriller It Comes at Night in 2017, Texan film-maker Trey Edward Shults – still just 31 – steps up his already impressive game with this vehemently acted and formally audacious drama about an African American family in Miami. It is a parable of redemption, and about a kind of spiritual or metaphysical resonance between the unhappy lives of two siblings.

At film festivals worldwide, Waves has already been much praised for an experimental, anti-narrative approach and a supposed privileging of vignettes, scenes and moods over regular storytelling. Actually, this is misleading. The movie is perfectly legible in conventional linear terms. But where it goes, how it gets there and how it comes back again, is more unexpected. There is a wonderful score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

Waves has flaws. Some of the emotional transitions are maybe a little forced and Shults, a former crew-member on Terrence Malick films, maybe gets a little too Malickian occasionally. There is only so much value in ambient shots of people putting their hands out of the window of a moving car and dreamily undulating their palms in the rushing wind. The other movie it clearly resembles is Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight and, although not quite as ambitious, Waves is intelligent and heartfelt in a comparable way.

Tyler is an outstanding young high-school student, self-consciously poised for greatness at college and currently a thrustingly aspirational star of the school’s wrestling team, presided over by a fanatical and shouty coach who makes them all chant in unison: “I cannot be taken down! I am a new machine!” The cult creepiness of all this, combined with Tyler’s not-so-subtle air of being pleased with himself, is disquieting.

He is played by Kelvin Harrison Jr, combining an air of calmly submissive worthiness with a hint of something destructive and bottled up, rather as he did with a similar high-school role in the movie Luce. Tyler is forever addressing throwaway greetings over his shoulder at his parents as he arrives home at the end of a school day, trotting upstairs to his bedroom to do his homework or jerk off to porn. He is dating beautiful fellow student Alexis (Alexa Demie) and their relationship is in still in the state of euphoric infatuation. Yet how well do they really know each other?

For the present, Tyler’s real problem is his impossibly demanding and overbearing dad Ronald: a fierce performance from Sterling K Brown. Ronald requires absolute commitment from his son in everything (while ignoring his daughter) and insisting with tragic absurdity on training with him, even challenging him to an arm-wrestling match at a family supper when Tyler presumes to mock his dad. (Maybe he is a little like Robert Duvall’s gruesome basketball-playing father in The Great Santini.)

Ronald is married to Catherine (Renée Elise Goldsberry) who is the counterbalancing carer in this family, all too aware that star-student golden boy Tyler is sucking the attention oxygen away from his quiet, smart, shy sister Emily (a lovely performance from Taylor Russell). But there is serious trouble ahead. Ronald uses opioids to manage residual pain from an injured knee, and Tyler is in the habit of stealing these from the bathroom cabinet to medicate his own worryingly painful shoulder. The film shows that he has inherited denial, an intensified and less manageable state of denial than the one Ronald is used to, but – rather terrifyingly – he has been made aware of his own fragility and even mortality in a way that his middle-aged elders have learned to ignore.
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When Alexis sends him a disturbing text, Tyler’s life spins out of control, generating a parallel drama in the life of Emily, who is to find a connection with classmate Luke (Lucas Hedges), who we last saw getting beaten at wrestling with rule-breaking violence by Tyler. Whatever agonies Emily is suffering on Tyler’s account are being salved by her relationship with Luke, and Shults shows that Emily’s story has a kind of mysterious spiritual equivalence to Tyler’s. She acts out the workings of some secular form of divine grace.

There are big scenes, big performances, big emotions here, and audiences will have to recalibrate their antennae for these, especially for the stunning shock that arrives around halfway through. The waves of emotion can get very high, yet they bring exaltation with them.

The Trial of Christine Keeler review – a furiously fast, fun ride

I had no idea what an extraordinary life I was leading,” says the voiceover as a young woman prepares to leave her flat in Notting Hill to go to an audition for a toothpaste ad. The year is 1962, the woman is Christine Keeler and she ain’t seen nothing yet.

The Trial of Christine Keeler (BBC One) is the story of the Profumo affair told from a rare perspective: hers. The opening episode is a cracker and the rest – with so much ground still to cover, as by the end the seeds of the scandal have barely been scattered – promises to be likewise. It captures the tremendous sense of fun the 19-year-old model Keeler (Sophie Cookson) had, but it never turns her into a dolly bird or airhead, or paints the time and place as a hip and happening idyll. Racism, experienced directly by her black boyfriend Johnny (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) who is habitually passed over for white applicants at job interviews, and indirectly by her as his companion in the street, is endemic. The capital is a bubble into which she has escaped from her deprived childhood and within which she thinks herself protected, despite its periodic punctures by her mother’s phone calls and constant requests for cash.

The man who brings her into the bubble within the bubble, upper-class London, and introduces her to all the right people who are so very wrong for her, is society osteopath Stephen Ward (James Norton, perhaps too earthy a casting choice for the part, though his creepily patronising delivery of “little baby”, his nickname for Keeler, is worth the price of admission). He’s a man who knows people. And who likes to watch them, from a safe distance. He winds them up like clockwork toys, sets them off and waits for the collisions to entertain him. I would watch a drama from his perspective, too. Who doesn’t want to know what the voyeur thinks? Although I’m most interested of all in the psychology of a man who can live with the title “society osteopath” and make it work for him.

We flash back at various points to Keeler’s first meeting with Profumo (customarily convincing stuff from Ben Miles, giving the secretary of state for war a steely charm that goes precisely so far and no further) and watch as she becomes increasingly tangled in a web whose reaches she can barely imagine. The question of whether history happens to her or she makes history lurks in the shadows of every scene. “Look what you made me do,” says her jealous ex-boyfriend, Lucky (Anthony Welsh), when he sees her in the street and, maddened by her continued existence without him, hits her. It is a sentiment, we understand, she has met before – from the men who groped her as they took her home as a teenager from babysitting their own children – and will again in the near future, as men with ever more to lose cast around for someone other than themselves to blame.

By the end of the opening episode, Ward and his circle have come sufficiently to the attention of the secret services to make a crisis inevitable. In the closing scenes, Johnny – by now another maddened ex – shoots at Ward’s flat with Christine inside and the quality of attention on them all shifts. “I didn’t know it then,” comes the final voiceover. “But I still had a hell of a lot to learn.”

If The Trial doesn’t quite reach the dizzying heights of last year’s A Very English Scandal, about the 70s equivalent of Keeler and its fallout, it remains a furiously fast, fun ride which doesn’t let the deeper, darker issues fall from its grasp. And it works, incidentally, as a great companion piece to the closing episode of The Crown’s second series, fleshing out the people with whom Matt Smith’s Prince Philip may or may not have partied the night (or many nights) away, watched by Ward.

Like The Crown, it could also have a scroll atop every scene reading “O tempora! O mores!” In the decades since the Profumo affair we have moved from a time when a politician having sex with a woman tangentially associated with Russia caused the establishment to have a near nervous breakdown, to the leader of the free world snuggling up to Putin while soliciting favours from Ukraine with near impunity. To say nothing of our own government now being led by … well, insert your own term here. But I shall go out on a limb and say that “a man who evokes all of Supermac’s pragmatism, wit, unshakeable calm and firm grasp on how many children he had fathered” is probably not among them.

'A very nice guy': how Godfrey Gao made it to the top

Taiwanese-Canadian actor Godfrey Gao was famous for being the first Asian international supermodel but he was much more than just a pretty face – he had a reputation for being one of the friendliest stars in an intensely competitive industry.

“He was known for being a very nice guy,” says Cecilia Pidgeon, a former celebrity editor at GQ China. “He had a very good reputation among other actors. He was always nice to his fans. All of the colleagues he worked with only had good things to say.”

His shocking death at the age of 35 yesterday from a heart attack on the set of the reality TV show Chase Me cut short a career that included a role in 2013 as Magnus Bane in the Hollywood adaption of The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones.

Born Tsao Chih-hsiang in Taipei, Taiwan, Gao moved to Vancouver in Canada as a child and became the first Asian model to star in a Louis Vuitton campaign in 2011.

After returning to his home country in 2004, he became part of a new generation of actors, who were born in Asia and moved back to establish their careers after emigrating abroad with their families. Along with Gao, Shawn Dou, a Chinese-Canadian actor who was born in Xi’an, and Eddie Peng, a Taiwanese-Canadian actor and singer from Penghu, have also achieved fame by returning to Asia.

“Because of the success of the mainland Chinese film industry, they all decided to go back to Asia to start their career there,” says Dr Ruby Cheung, lecturer in film studies at Southampton University. “For Chinese, Taiwan or Hong Kong-born actors who have emigrated, there are more opportunities there for them to become really big. If they started out in Hollywood, they would have to work extremely hard to achieve the same level of stardom.”

Gao started acting in Chinese TV shows in 2006, but his most popular role came in Remembering Lichuan, a romantic drama that aired in 2016. By then he had already moved into films with roles in Chinese blockbuster Shanghai Fortress and as the character of Ken in Toy Story 3 for the Mandarin dub.

Transitioning from TV to film is a traditional route for most Asian actors. Chinese superstar Fan Bingbing, Red Cliff’s Vicki Zhao and Liu Yifei, who will take the lead in the upcoming live action adaptation of Disney’s Mulan, all became massive stars in China this way.

It’s also very common for the Asian acting world to look to the modelling industry for new talent. Hu Bing, who was nominated for best actor at the 2010 Rome film festival, is one of China’s most famous models, while Taiwanese star Lin Chi-ling also started out on the runway.

But in the past few years, reality TV shows have emerged as one of the easiest ways to gain instant stardom. I Am a Singer, The Rap of China, Idol Producer and The Voice of China are all wildly popular and have produced overnight sensations. Then there’s Chase Me, the competitive sports challenge show broadcast on China’s Zhejiang Television, that Gao agreed to guest star on.

The actor is reported to have collapsed while on Chase Me’s set in Ningbo, China, after working for 17 hours straight. According to Pidgeon, long working hours are extremely common in the Chinese TV and film industry. “It’s normal because it’s a very competitive industry. You can get famous very quickly. So everyone works extra hours to finish a show fast. All these actors make a lot of money but actually they work really hard. Working overnight is normal.”

China, of course, is now becoming a major player in Hollywood too, with an increasing amount of investment from Chinese companies. This means there’s potential for more crossover artists like Gao, who appeared alongside Lily Collins and Jamie Campbell Bower in The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones.

The actor was not just a rising star with a career that was likely to take him to giddier heights but also a trailblazer for diversity and Asian representation in US movies. It’s a real tragedy that such talent was brought back to earth so cruelly.

Monos review – Apocalypse Now on shrooms

This overpoweringly tense and deeply mad thriller from Colombian film-maker Alejandro Landes is the best thing I have seen at Berlin this year: something between Apocalypse Now, Lord of the Flies and Embrace of the Serpent. It depicts a dysfunctional society and guilt-ridden family in miniature, and demonstrates the shifting power dynamics of a cult, the craziness embedded in the minds of child soldiers, the resentments nursed in a military unit without a supervising commanding officer, and the very real danger of eating shrooms grown in cowshit.

The Monos are a unit of teenage guerrilla bandits, operating in a country very similar to Colombia or Bolivia — and apparently named after the Mono Grande, the mythical giant monkey for centuries rumoured to exist somewhere in South America. They are initially shown in their up-country mountainous retreat where they have little to do but hang out, await orders on the radio, look after a cow that has been given to them for milk (good for their young bones and teeth) and see to their American hostage, an engineer who is being held captive separately from her small child. They are permitted and even encouraged to develop sexual relationships among themselves, and have developed weird rituals and traditions. When one of them has a birthday, there is a version of the bumps, except it’s sexualised thrashing with a belt. Everyone joins in and their hostage is also sportingly allowed a go.

But what they most like doing is firing their semi-automatics, an excitement simply impossible to resist, and this, inevitably, leads to disaster. (I was reminded of something PJ O’Rourke wrote about hearing semi-automatic fire for the first time at close quarters: the “chemical craziness” it triggers in the pit of your stomach – something that is horrible for most, but for some could be addictive.) The Monos are required to move from the eerie aloneness of the mountain down into the jungle, and when the hostage shows signs of wanting to escape, the leader has a spasm of rage, trashes the radio that theoretically connects them to a larger command structure and the entire group effectively goes rogue – even more rogue than it was in the first place.

It is not clear if they are now just breaking the rules in pursuit of some definite objective, or submitting to some collective orgiastic breakdown. There is no Kurtz, no progressive loosening of the unstable bonds of civilised restraints; it’s just an intensification of the chaos which was there all along.

Monos is not concerned just to show a static situation deteriorating. There is a driving narrative impulse: tense things happen. And they are made even tenser by the vivid, disturbing musical score from Mica Levi, which periodically rolls in timpani like exclamations of thunder.

Jasper Wolf’s cinematography captures the transcendent beauty of the landscape, the density and hostile lushness of the undergrowth and the banks of cloud with us floating overhead, as if monitoring the characters’ habitat in some dreamily removed state.

What is so intriguing about Monos is that it is simply about the group, collectively, with no member more important than any other. Individuals do emerge, yet it is never clear who is evolving as the most significant. Landes’s film refuses the final girl trope or indeed the final boy trope. And of course it is not simply about child soldiers, but rather soldiers generally, although it is conceivable that their parodic littleness offers a faint pun on Conrad’s Mr Kurtz: sounds like kurz, or short.

In some ways, Monos is a ritual heading to disaster, like a Jim Jones ceremonial in the jungle clearing, or alternatively a dream, a hallucination, one that we are having about them, or they are having about themselves: a delirium brought on by altitude sickness or hunger or post-traumatic stress disorder. And Landes withholds from us any sense of when precisely this is supposed to be happening: now, or in some postapocalyptic future or in the past, as if his children are a version of the mythic Japanese soldier in the jungle unaware the war is over.

Perhaps it is an allegory about his homeland, Colombia, a country awakening as if from an endless dream of violence but with an uneasy suspicion that the seedlings of new violence are always there. An unforgettable immersion in terror.

Joker makes great disability art by letting its hero bite back

I knew Joker was a film whose relationship to society today is a rich – and sometimes fraught – one. But until I saw it, I hadn’t realised just how pertinent a film it would be. Set in dystopian Gotham of the 1980s, it’s a world where the vulnerable of society, such as single mothers, the elderly and people with mental health issues are crammed into crumbling housing projects, while super-affluent bankers live it large. The villains in Joker are the filthy rich, such as the bullying, Trump-like Thomas Wayne who blames the poor for their own poverty as he campaigns to become mayor.

This is first-person cinema told from the point of view of someone with mental health issues. The character of Arthur Fleck is an authentic and well-researched depiction of a man with borderline personality disorder. At times, it felt less like watching a superhero movie and more like a social drama depicting a real-life horror story of austerity.

Played with corporeal commitment by Joaquin Phoenix, Arthur has a neurological condition called Pseudobulbar Affect, most straightforwardly explained as spontaneous and uncontrollable laughter at inappropriate moments. The scene where Arthur is confronted by a woman on a bus who becomes irritated by his laughter is a situation that will be all too familiar to anyone who has experienced firsthand the frustration, misunderstanding and sense of helplessness involuntary mental health conditions can cause. It’s not Arthur who has the problem, though – it’s an uncaring and misunderstanding society and that’s what this scene brilliantly conveys. Joker puts us in the shoes of the Other, a disabled man oppressed by the able-bodied.

People with mental health issues are feared in society – derogatory terms such as psycho or nutter are part of everyday conversation. We live in fear of “the insane” and avoid them on the street or move away from them on the train. The truth is that the vast majority of people with mental-health issues are the real victims. Those with non-visible disabilities face everyday hostility, persecution and lack of care. In her recent book Crippled: Austerity and the Demonization of Disabled People, Frances Ryan writes that the new fit for work tests can be linked to 590 extra suicides in England.

But Joker isn’t just the standard disability tragedy narrative that we’ve come to expect. It’s about someone with a disability biting back. Watching the hordes of Joker’s acolytes descend on Gotham in revenge for their degradation at the hands of the wealthy had the audience I watched it with cheering. Joker’s Network-style takedown of a talk show that seeks to ridicule him made me wonder what would have happened if the Block Telethon protest by disabled rights activists who stormed the live ITV Telethon broadcast in 1992 had gone further? At the time there was a sense of anarchy, mayhem and poking fun at the charity culture that oppresses the disabled. The actions of those disability rights activists contributed to the introduction of the disability discrimination act almost 25 years ago.

Joker might just be a classic of disability cinema, a film that takes the experience of the outsider and makes us root for them. I can’t think of a more subversive mainstream film, especially not in the sanitised, spandex-clad, wholesome worlds of the superhero genre. Unlike Heath Ledger’s Joker, Arthur Fleck’s violence isn’t chaotic, it has angry purpose, and he unwittingly creates a vent for the dispossessed. I think the film will divide the disabled community and I am sure some people will take issue with the depiction of mental health. Maybe though, we’ve seen enough of disabled people depicted as pious martyrs, and it’s time the victims fought back. Not by shooting people, but with smart, anarchic direct action.