Berlinale correspondent Elena Lazic reviews Being 17. Although it was written by Céline Sciamma and directed by André Techiné, it’s got Sciamma’s fingerprints all over it.
LGBTQ
Nasty Baby is a half-baked bougie satire
The film gleefully sends up bourgeois attitudes as ridiculous before suggesting they’re harmful. Yet we’re not meant to dislike the characters causing harm. It’s an interesting premise that hasn’t been fully fleshed out. Likewise, Silva’s choice to shoot the film handheld, in all its clumsiness, prevents the film from ever being a beautiful work of art. It’s an aesthetic designed to be cheap and adaptable to an improvised script, but it doesn’t allow for much formal rigour. It lulls us into a kind of complacency, setting up a story of middle-class liberalism, before subverting the genre’s expectations.
Please Like Me gets even better in season 3
Here in the third season, we get the sense that everything’s going to be OK — Josh, Tom, and Alan even repeat this mantra in unison — even if there are more storms to weather. Josh is finally in a loving, stable relationship in which he’s the rock. Tom is slowly figuring out how to grow up, as he plays third wheel to Josh and Arnold. Rose is living independently with her twenty-something friend Hannah, whom she met at the psychiatric facility last season, and their storylines are often independent of Josh. Josh still spends time with both of his parents, but he actually gets support from them rather than merely putting out their fires.
Fire Song presents an authentic, First Nations queer narrative
Adam Garnet Jones’ Fire Song is a frank portrait of indigenous LGBT people and how depression and isolation intersect within a First Nation community.
What do we mean when we talk about Canadian cinema?
Where is Canadian cinema going? What is its purpose? And what can we say about how the country is being reflected back at us through this year’s TIFF15 crop of Canadian films?
Lily Tomlin vehicle Grandma is mostly a bust
In Grandma, Lily Tomlin plays misanthropic widow Elle who embarks on a whirlwind tour of the past in a single day when her granddaughter Sage (Julia Garner) arrives on her doorstep pregnant, broke, and in need of an abortion.