Tickled review: fetish documentary goes from giggly to grim

Tickled, the first documentary from New Zealand TV personality David Farrier (co-directed by Dylan Reeve), caused a sensation at the True/False documentary film festival in Columbia, Missouri, where it played this weekend.

It became the talk of the event not just because of its content – eye-popping though it is – but due to the peculiar occurrences surrounding its screenings. Police reportedly interrupted the first showing to remove a person attempting to pirate the film via a camera hidden in a Starbucks coffee cup, while the following day Farrier was apparently served a subpoena.

One viewing of Tickled explains the hullabaloo. The film starts out with Farrier, who’s “made a career looking at the weird and bizarre side of life”, stumbling upon a Facebook page advertising a “competitive endurance tickling” event in Los Angeles. Male participants are offered an all-expenses-paid trip plus substantial compensation to take part and be videotaped by a company named Jane O’Brien Media.

Intrigued and baffled, Farrier reaches out for an interview, only to receive a hostile emailed response attacking his homosexuality – ironic, given the intensely homoerotic nature of the “sport”.

In no time, Farrier is threatened by absurd lawsuits for inquiring into the business, leading him only to dig deeper into the fetish empire with the help of Reeve, his computer-savvy (and straight) collaborator, in the hope of creating a full documentary on the subject. To uncover more and confront the people behind the threats, the pair travel to the US. It’s there that Tickled morphs from an offbeat caper to a disturbing exposé on the dangers of cyberbullying.

Speaking to the only former tickling-video participant willing to do an interview, Farrier and Reeve are horrified to learn about the control Jane O’Brien Media attempts to exert over its models. The man they speak to reveals how he became the victim of a vicious online slander campaign that threatened his career as a pro footballer, after he objected to Jane O’Brien Media posting his footage on YouTube.

The revelations that follow are too juicy to spoil – the pleasure in watching this documentary is derived from its countless twists. Along the way, Farrier serves as his audience’s conduit, going from amused to enraged as his journey progresses.

The film doesn’t look down its nose at those who like to engage in tickling. One extended sequence sees the directors stop in Orlando for a lighthearted visit with Richard Ivey, an entrepreneur who runs a similar fetish empire – the key difference being that Ivey fully owns its intentions (his site advertises itself as “gay foot fetish heaven”). He also doesn’t spook his models.

Biopic of Obamas' first date and Ellen Page baby swap drama among Sundance competition titles

Following the announcement of its Midnight horror-themed section, the Sundance film festival has unveiled the lineup for its competitions, in both dramatic and documentary formats, as well as its non-competitive Next selection, of promising experimental work. Some 65 films have got the nod from the programmers of the influential festival, which is designed to showcase independent and unconventional film-making.

The US dramatic competition has settled on 16 films, with the most attention-grabbing projects including The Birth of a Nation, an ironically titled account of the early-19th century slave rebellion led by Nat Turner; Goat, a fraternity-pledge drama featuring musician Nick Jonas; and Southside With You, a chronicle of Barack and Michelle Obama’s first date in 1980s Chicago. Familiar Sundance faces will be on show in other films: Ellen Page plays the lead in Tallulah, about a woman who passes off another’s child as her own; Jena Malone features in Lovesong, from For Ellen director So Yong Kim; and Rebecca Hall stars in Christine, about the TV reporter Christine Chubbuck, who killed herself on air in 1974.

Chubbuck is also the subject of a film in the US documentary strand: Kate Plays Christine, directed by Robert Greene, in which actor Kate Lynn Sheil prepares to take on a role as Chubbuck. Other major names in the 16 films in this strand include Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe (The Hamster Factor) with The Bad Kids, a study of an unconventional school in the Mojave desert; Josh “Gasland” Fox with How to Let Go of the World, an examination of the effects of climate change, and Jeff Feuerzeig (The Devil and Daniel Johnston) who returns with a profile of mystery author JT LeRoy.

The World sections will feature 12 films each, with the Ireland-based director Rebecca Daly’s Mammal selected for the dramatic competition, alongside India’s Brahman Naman (about a quiz team from Bangalore university) and Israel’s Sand Storm, focusing on a Bedouin mother and daughter whose lives are upended when another wife arrives.

Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi leads the World documentary competition with A Flag Without a Country, chronicling the lives of Kurds attempting to survive harsh conditions. Also selected is The Lovers and the Despot, a UK-produced account of film director Shin Sang-ok and his movie star ex-wife Choi Eun-hee, who were kidnapped by North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il; Plaza de la Soledad, directed by photojournalist Maya Goded, about Mexico City’s long-established prostitute community, and Sky Ladder, from British director Kevin Macdonald, a profile of celebrated Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang.

The Next programme, designed to showcase innovative and “forward-thinking” films, has pulled together 10 selections, all US-produced. These include First Girl I Loved, about a girl-girl-boy love triangle at high school; Dark Night, a study of a cinema shooting in suburban America; and The Fits, about a mysterious fainting attack that affects a midwest dance team.

• The Sundance film festival runs from 21-31 January in Park City, Utah.

Taxi Tehran review – a joyous ride

Jafar Panahi is the Iranian film-maker and democracy campaigner facing official harassment with unique wit, grace and humanity – all apparent in his new movie Taxi Tehran, whose quietly defiant good humour and charm will grow on you, as they grew on me when I first saw it in Berlin earlier this year. It is engaging and disarming: a freewheeling semi-improv piece of guerrilla film-making, cleverly staged and choreographed, with the discursive, digressive qualities of an essay film.

In 2010, following his protests against President Ahmadinejad’s democratic legitimacy, Panahi was sentenced to six years’ house arrest on the spurious charge of crimes against the state, together with a 20-year ban on film-making and leaving the country. Yet he has continued to work, shooting films covertly on smartphones and camcorders, smuggling them out of the country as digital files, technically avoiding the ban by having his direction credited to other people, or – as with this one – no credits at all.

Once these complex and subtle films appear abroad, Panahi leaves it to Iranian officialdom to react or not as it wishes, and as far as can be judged, the authorities do not want to appear any more foolish and ham-fisted than they do now. At any rate, the appearance of each of Panahi’s films is now almost a kind of procedural miracle, not seen since Yilmaz Güney directed the 1982 Palme d’Or-winner Yol from prison.

Panahi appears as himself: reduced to driving a cab. The great film director is now a humble taxi driver picking people up on the streets of Tehran, dropping them off, amiably allowing customers to share a ride, sheepishly admitting he doesn’t know where anything is, and never asking for money. If Uber had a special app for hailing free rides from cineastes … well, that would be him. He’s a fictional variant of himself, shooting a zany ridealong selfie on his dashboard-mounted videocam. Or maybe he’s Iran’s equivalent of Larry David, shruggingly accepting his own woes and his own tense celebrity and spinning it all into his creative work.

He has a bizarre mix of clientele. A couple of women get in with some live goldfish in a bowl, leading to predictable disaster when Jafar hits the brakes too hard and winds up having to replenish the bowl with water he would normally use for the radiator. He takes a gravely injured, blood-spattered man and his keening wife to hospital. There is an aggressive young guy who starts arguing with a fellow passenger about whether hanging thieves is a good deterrent.

Panahi allows that argument to echo with a conversation he has later with a friend who has been attacked in his shop, apparently for standing up for a man and woman caught stealing money. In this way, the questions of crime and punishment are coolly, indirectly raised.

Panahi has to pick his niece up from school. She is mortified that her supposedly prestigious film-director uncle only has this nasty little car. She is studying film, and the precocious tyke starts talking about what’s “distributable” and tells him how she has been told to avoid “sordid realism”. Panahi smiles enigmatically: he knows how much sordid realism to avoid. Another young guy studying film asks him about existing works and Panahi says: “Those films are already made; those books are already written. You have to look elsewhere…”

Perhaps an unemployed director is like a taxi driver, cruising the streets, looking to pick up ideas, but benignly: an anti-Travis Bickle, and perhaps being under house-arrest feels like being a driver unable to leave his cab. Certainly, shooting a film inside a car is discreet, and good for evading bans. Abbas Kiarostami has also used the car as a symbol of imprisonment, aimlessness and loneliness in films such as Ten (2002) and Taste of Cherry (1997).

Taxi Tehran comes to two separate crunches. Panahi picks up a friend who is a lawyer, disbarred and prevented, like Panahi, from practising her trade. They discuss the case of Ghoncheh Ghavami, the Iranian woman jailed for trying to attend a men’s volleyball match. Panahi maintains a smilingly fatalistic attitude to it all. Later, Panahi’s feisty niece starts making a short film for her school project; she accidentally films a boy taking money that isn’t his and dramatically intervenes in the situation. Panahi is maybe playfully showing the authorities that film-making is a force for good.

Taxi Tehran is the work of a unique director – and survivor.

Sicario review – Emily Blunt at the sharp end in war on drugs

When I saw Denis Villeneuve’s stomach-turningly gruesome narco thriller Sicario at Cannes this year, it struck me he had pinched Michael Mann’s style – and pinched his crown, too, like it or not. Perhaps it’s impossible to see a convoy of black SUVs speeding across an urban landscape in a film without thinking of Mann, but Villeneuve certainly carries off the borrowing with style.

The resemblance struck me again this week watching this film a second time, along with the thought that Villeneuve was probably taking notes during Kathryn Bigelow’s Bin Laden thriller Zero Dark Thirty – particularly for those extended special-ops attack scenes filmed in night vision, as if on an alien planet. He maybe even did the same thing with the Coens’ No Country for Old Men, though that is maybe because of the presence of Josh Brolin, and the fact that it is also shot by cinematographer Roger Deakins.

The title is cartel slang for “assassin” or “hitman”, evidently derived from the first-century Sicarii zealots of Judea, though the word is never spoken out loud in the script; screenwriter Taylor Sheridan defers the revelation of how it really applies here to the end of drama, and this disclosure ties up its attendant issues of justice versus revenge, idealism versus cynicism and how American justice is to be applied beyond US borders without anything as quaint as a formal declaration of war.

Emily Blunt plays Kate, a young FBI agent specialising in the relatively uncontentious field of kidnap-victim recovery. She finds herself co-opted into the US Homeland Security war on drugs: a new war on terror whose strategies have been repurposed and relegitimised. After a truly horrendous experience uncovering a cartel-owned safe house full of corpses in Arizona, Kate is asked if she wants to go after the guys ultimately responsible. She agrees, and admits deeply disturbing new men into her life.


Her boss for this mission will be swaggeringly irresponsible and studiedly obnoxious special agent Matt Graver, played by Brolin. There is also a second man, who appears to be Matt’s boss, though he is a civilian consultant from Colombia: Alejandro, played by Benicio Del Toro, courteous and even fatherly towards Kate, solicitous for her well-being, quietly traumatised by some event in his own past. When Kate asks Alejandro what’s going on, he coolly replies: “You’re asking me how a watch works. For now, let’s just keep an eye on the time.”

The plan seems to be to “dramatically overreact” to the safe house situation, in Matt’s words, by arresting a known cartel member with maximum publicity, in order to provoke the drug moguls into high-tailing it back to Mexico and thus revealing who the real players are and making valuable intel gains for arrests. Straight-arrow Kate is fine with all this, until she suspects that Matt and Alejandro are CIA, and what they are actually planning is a deniable multiple-murder attack raid over the border into Mexico itself, and also suspects that these acts of violence against the Mexican enemy are theatrical displays conducted partly to gain trust with the home team and see how operatives are going to bear up under fire. And there is a second level of duplicity and bad faith behind even this, relating to Alejandro’s background.

The tenor and texture of the movie are established with that truly horrible scene at the very beginning where the FBI storm the house. It has its own sheen of horror, aided by the groaning orchestral chords in the musical score from composer Jóhann Jóhannson. The scene lays down a marker for the film’s status as something like a forensic thriller and in its way a procedural thriller, in which the covert procedure itself is the crime.

When Blunt first comes on in all the tough-guy hard-body gear, it is a bit implausible. But she brazens out any possible absurdity with great acting focus and front. She delivers a real star turn, mixing confidence, bewilderment and vulnerability: all the more difficult being up against Brolin and Del Toro, who themselves give huge performances with bells and whistles hooting and clanging.

For me, Sicario is a step forward for Villeneuve: it is less discursive, less reflective than movies such as Prisoners (2013) and Incendies (2010), although I always thought the cerebral content of these pictures was a little supercilious. This is a real white-knuckle thriller, with screeching feedback notes of fear and paranoia, which plays out in a very satisfying atmosphere of pure nihilist ruthlessness.

A Syrian Love Story review – a searing insight into a marriage under fire

A family at war … A Syrian Love Story

Sean McAllister’s documentary about a family of Syrian refugees in Europe would be compelling at any time. Now it is unmissable. This is about love, but it could as well be called A Syrian Rage Story or A Syrian Despair Story. It is the tragic portrait of a disintegrating marriage; the story of two people whose love has been hammered by fate, history and each other.

These are not refugees as we are encouraged to understand them by the nightly news: nameless poor people to whom the prosperous west can respond with pity or guilt. These refugees don’t want to be passive recipients of compassion, but active participants in their own destiny. Above all, they are angry. Their anger floods the screen.

McAllister begins his story in 2009, when Syria was being marketed to westerners as a glamorous, cosmopolitan new tourist destination with ancient culture and monuments as important as anything in Greece and Turkey. And so McAllister begins his movie with a brutal twist of irony, a subliminal flash-forward to a later reality in which our certainties about the Arab spring have been overtaken by the existence of Islamic State. In the capital Damascus, McAllister meets Amer Douad, a Palestinian activist from thea coastal town of Tartus who has a heart-rending story to tell. While in prison, Amer fell in love with a fellow inmate, Ragdha Hassan, a beautiful leftwing Syrian activist against the Assad regime. Now they have three children: Shadi, Kaka and Bob, but she is back in prison and Amer must raise them on his own. McAllister is present with his camera as day by day, week by week, Amer and the children lavish their love on the idea of an absent wife and mother. When Ragdha is finally freed, their joy is overwhelming.

Ragdha Hassan in A Syrian Love Story

But then McAllister is briefly imprisoned by the regime; his friendship makes Amer and Ragdha’s position in Syria untenable. They move, first to the Palestinian enclave of Yarmouk camp, outside Damascus, then to Lebanon, and finally to Paris, having been granted refugee status by the French government. But their marriage is coming apart and McAllister records its breakdown from 2009 to the present.

Raghda is suffering from post-traumatic stress at her brutal jail treatment; she is pierced with guilt at having effectively deserted her comrades’ struggle against Assad, and at becoming an irrelevance herself, washed up on a far shore away from a battle she considers crucial to her identity. Ragdha becomes filled with resentment and depression, and McAllister’s camera captures the way her face, once alight with beauty and fun, becomes clouded and pained. Amer’s face, too, becomes older: hunted, almost furtive, a man with secrets. The film allows us to consider the awful thought that the couple were happiest apart, when they had only the tragically exalted idea of each other. Love depended on prison. Now he accuses her of being impossible to live with, of being arrogant and simply nettled at her own loss of status. Amer’s love curdles into machismo as he demands Ragdha attend to the duties of motherhood. There are walkouts from the family home, suicide attempts and accusations of infidelity.

Incredibly, McAllister was there for a great deal of this. The scenes look real enough. It takes its toll on the children, although their son Kaka emerges as exceptionally perceptive and smart. As a little boy in Syria, he is asked by McAllister about the Assad tyranny: “Does it make you want to leave? Live somewhere else?” He replies: “No, fight.” His views as a teenager in Paris are very different. As for Amer, he begins by speaking to McAllister about Ragdha like this: “She is a strong woman; I am a very weak man.”

Perhaps he has foretold their destiny. But the heartwrenching thing is that her strength and his weakness – as he perceives it – might not have been a problem, had they been able to stay in Syria. Who can tell? It could have been the agony of Syria that destroyed their relationship, or it might have fallen apart in any case. McAllister and his camera might have accelerated the breakdown, though it is just as likely he provided valuable therapy. Even at the end, Amer and Ragdha clearly have feelings for each other. This is love among the ruins.