Celeste's Top Ten: films I saw in 2023 - PART TWO - ENGLISH LANGUAGE FILMS!
Barbie, Medusa Deluxe, Living, Marcel the Shell With Shoes on, and Rye Lane tickled me pink this year
WHOOPS sorry this is rather late isn’t it. But I know you all forgive me, because we’re a family and we love each other. Now, let’s crack on.
SOME SPOILERS BELOW!
Barbie, d. Greta Gerwig, United States
I’m gonna be honest with you guys. I saw this film three times (including once in Skopje, where it was heartbreakingly not dubbed. I was so ready for Macedonska Барби).
You’re probably wondering why I didn’t review it at the time. It’s because I was too blown away, and also busy bopping around on my bike singing “I’m Just Ken” at the top of my lungs (apologies to the good people of Spaarnwoude). I couldn’t really disentangle my thoughts properly and in any case, everyone had something to say about it and I would have just been another voice in the wind. Greta Gerwig doesn’t really need my patronage.
For the uninitiated, the Barbie movie follows Margot Robbie’s character of stereotypical Barbie and her life in Barbieland. Barbieland is perfect and the Barbie’s run everything while their Kens jostle for attention. One day Barbie starts feeling weird - she falls off her house, her feet become flat, and she’s having unexplainable thoughts of death. It turns out that someone in the real world is playing with her and they’re feeling out of whack, and that’s messing up Barbieland. Barbie then has to go to the real world and fix everything. Ken tags along, discovers the patriarchy, returns to Barbieland and ruins everything, and the Barbie alongside America Ferrera and her daughter save the day. Yay!
The main negative feedback I heard from friends about this was that it wasn’t particularly groundbreaking and that it could have been far more radical and political. We’re seeing this from the position of educated and socially aware feminists, so of course Barbie’s message doesn’t really resonate with us. However, I would argue that that’s not the point. Millions upon millions of young girls across the world will have nagged their parents to take them to Barbie, thinking it was a pastel pink girly film about dolls. They instead will have been exposed to a very basic - yet very important - introduction to feminism, the concept of patriarchy, and an idealised version of what a perfect world for women looks like. This world is one where they are not objectified, threatened, endangered, or harassed by men, where men are sort of harmless simpletons on the edges of their peripheries. That’s the world I want to live in.
Besides the storyline and whatever your opinion of it might have been, one cannot ignore the spectacular production value in Barbie. Greta Gerwig’s insistence that Barbieland be physically built and that CGI only be used when necessary caused a global shortage of pink paint. What a queen. The giant cast (including some real surprises) are charming and lovely and marvellous. The costumes and choreography are a delight to behold. It’s just a big pink glittery feast for the eyes and I absolutely loved it.
Medusa Deluxe, d. Thomas Hardiman, United Kingdom
I saw the trailer for this at Its Holy Stickiness Peckhamplex and was OBSESSED. I had to wait for months for it to appear in the Netherlands and it was absolutely worth the wait.
So, the premise: there is a hairdressing competition taking place at a run down, faded glory-esque conference centre in Preston (that’s in one of the more miserable bits of the North of England, foreign readers). Various hairdressers and their models are milling around the place, getting coiffed up for the competition when news gets out that one of the hairdressers has been found scalped to death.
Medusa Deluxe is filmed in a single shot throughout and around the conference centre, switching between characters as they encounter each other in its dingy corridors. We’re drip fed information as the models and hairdressers gossip and speculate as to whodunnit. There’s a security guard wandering around the place and acting very suspiciously, the competition organiser is revealed to be an ex-lover of the dead man, and the hair stylist with intense anger issues starts to freak people out. At one point I got a bit muddled up about who some of the characters were, but I kind of enjoyed the confusion. The feeling of the film switched first from speculation and mystery as the characters reeled from the gruesome murder, to absolute chaos and confusion after a model’s extravagant hairstyle goes up in flames and it’s revealed that maybe that shady security guard is more involved in the madness than we were led to think.
This is Thomas Hardiman’s first film and it’s an extraordinarily creative and unique debut. Granted, there are some plot holes and confusing moments, but really they just add to the ambience of it all. It’s hard to categorise this film, because it’s spooky like a horror film but scarier than your average murder mystery. It takes place almost entirely in darkness, illuminated only by that awful fluorescent lighting that you get in shitty conference centres. It’s extraordinarily stylish, extremely fitting given the presence of so many models with their bonkers hairstyles who seem too beautiful to be from this world. It’s also a glimpse into this niche world of competitive hairdressing and the dedication and passion shown by stylists and models alike. It almost feels like a love letter to them - indeed, the credits dedicate the film to the hairdressers of the world. Medusa Deluxe is truly original and a feast for the eyes, and definitely worth a watch.
Living, d. Oliver Hermanus, United Kingdom
My boyfriend and I ventured out of the house on a drizzly Saturday afternoon to watch a film, and I’d glanced at the synopsis to check there wasn’t any horrible gore and thought it looked like a nice little English drama set in the olden days. I was not prepared for Living. Hardcore Celestestackers will know that I think Bill Nighy’s performance as Billy Mack in Love Actually is so uncanny that it’s hard to remember that he’s not actually a washed up rock star. It turns out he’s just a very very very good actor because I had to remind myself that he’s not a postwar public servant.
This film has quite the artistic pedigree that I know absolutely nothing about, which shows how little I actually know about, well, anything. The screenplay is by Kazuo Ishiguro (very famous), who adapted it from the 1952 Japanese film Ikuru by Akira Karusawa (again, famous), which itself was inspired by Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Tolstoy also very famous). It’s 1953 and protagonist Rodney Williams is one of those faceless civil servants in the public works department, surrounded by other civil servants who share in common a real lack of wanting to do any improvement to public works. Have you ever dealt with anyone from the council? The similarities are uncanny (looking at you, Gemeente Amsterdam). A new enthusiastic colleague quickly learns that any paperwork coming in goes round and round the office without being considered and then gets rejected. This angers the writers of one of these petitions; a group of local mothers who want to build a playground on a WW2 bomb site. Their persistence and enthusiasm is no match for the buttoned up bowler hatted civil servants of public works.
Rodney gets a terminal cancer diagnosis, and in true old man fashion doesn’t tell anyone about it. He goes to the seaside intent on killing himself, but instead spends a wild night at a bar with strangers singing around the piano. Back in London, he runs into a former colleague, a young lady called Margaret who now works at a tea room. They begin to spend more time together and her youthful exuberance and hope begins to rub off on old Rodney. He knows the end is near and decides that it’s time to make the most of the time he has left. So he does what no-one in the public works department has done before - he does his job! Rodney’s persistence and bothering his superiors leads to the playground being built and everyone around Rodney is astonished at the diligence he is showing to his work. No one can really figure out what’s changed, but they take his lead and start to do their jobs too.
Of course, we know what’s changed. Rodney dies soon after and nobody saw it coming - because he didn’t tell anyone. The final scene of Rodney on the swing of the playground did it for me. God I cried so much.
Why did this film get to me? I’m not really into these sort of sensitive portrayals of life and death, or twee portrayals of postwar Britain (I left for a reason). Dear reader, the strangest things set me off. I never react the right way to anything. Why do I cry like a baby at Living and Where the Wild Things Are and Love Actually, but not at For Sama or Close? I suppose in this case it’s seeing how quickly you can go from being old to being dead, and how it can lead to such a monumental shift in thinking. What would have happened if Rodney didn’t have cancer, and had retired, reading the newspaper and smoking his pipe until a natural death came to take him in his sleep? Would he have carried on as before, not particularly invested in anything important but wanting to have a bit of peace and quiet?
Rodney’s diagnosis is a terrifying kick up the backside that made him reconsider his actions and, suddenly, his legacy. Now most people assume that their children will be their legacy, but Rodney can’t face telling his son what’s going on. By virtue of his profession, he manages to use his time left on earth to do something for his community, and something that no-one will know was his doing. It’s not called the Rodney Williams Memorial Playground. Living doesn’t try to moralise but its undeniable takeaway is that we don’t know what will happen to us, so make good with the time you have - and it somehow manages to convey this message without being twee or saccharine or sanctimonious. People will remember you for your actions, and it’s never too late to change direction and do something good (if anything, this film is a beacon of hope to us who think their parents will never go to therapy. Any over 50s reading? Take the hint).
But there are some reasons to be optimistic, once you’ve mopped the tears off your face. These days our old loved ones wouldn’t go off to the beach to die alone and one would hope they’d try and spend some time together before the afterlife comes a-knocking. Medicine has improved a lot since 1953 and people who work for the council are a tiny bit less irritating now because they’re not all old blokes. And you know what we’ll always have? Playgrounds. They’re just marvellous.
Marcel The Shell With Shoes On, d. Dean Fleischer Camp, United States
Despite the enormous amount of time I spend online, the character of Marcel the Shell completely passed me by. Originally a trilogy of 3 minute stop motion animation films released in 2010, Marcel is a lil seashell with a googly eye and a sweet and childlike disposition who is interviewed to camera in a mockumentary style by creator Dean Fleischer-Camp. Showing Dean around his home, he does a lot of “guess what”-ing about his life in miniature, such as wearing a lentil as a hat and toenails clippings as skis. Even though he has this typical 10 year old quality of treating everything like show and tell, Marcel has the confidence of a much older shell, introducing the first video with “My name is Marcel and I’m partially a shell, as you can see, on my body, but I also have shoes and um a face, so, I like that about myself. And I like myself and I have a lot of other great qualities as well” and indignantly ending the clip with “some people say my head is too big for my body and I say, compared to what??”. Fleischer-Camp and Marcel’s voice actor Jenny Slate (her actual voice with no effects!) made the first silly little video for a friend’s comedy show, and only uploaded it to YouTube because a friend of theirs wanted to see it. It now has 33 million views.
Fast forward eleven years and a full length feature film of Marcel is born. He and grandma Connie live in a community with other shells and weird lil guys made out of inanimate objects (pencil mouse, tampon ghost, pistachio cousins, etc), in a real person house. After the couple who live in the house have a break up, the man accidentally takes all of the house’s tiny residents in his suitcase, leaving only Marcel and Connie behind the fend for themselves. A filmmaker then moves in, and inspired by Marcel’s story, films him and puts his story online so that he can try and track his family and friends down. It goes crazy viral, and Marcel becomes a reluctant internet celebrity. Spoiler alert, he is reunited with his giant extended family and everything turns out ok.
So sure, it doesn’t sound like a particularly “original” story - and maybe it isn’t. What hit me about Marcel the Shell is how human they managed to make a shell with a single googly eye. As Marcel’s voice actor Jenny Slate put it, it’s “a movie about how to be unapologetically alive”. Marcel is naive and full of childlike wonder whilst being wise and complex. He talks a lot with Dean, his human roommate, about the big world that lies beyond the four walls of the house, a world that Marcel found himself catapulted into via the internet. When his grandmother begins to show signs of her age, he becomes extremely overprotective and does all he can to make sure she is resting. After Connie dies, he is overcome with grief but tries to hide it. He makes a beautiful memorial for her in their garden, where Connie spent hours and hours tending to her plants. It’s the film’s most magnificently human moment, and it made me weep.
Mockumentaries are my favourite genre of film, and this is usually because they’re very silly and I love that. But Marcel’s film manages to tell a very tender story about communities, family, friendship, and loss, and the only “mock” part of it is that none of the characters are real. The only thing that is more fun than how tiny household objects are used by Marcel to do day-to-day stuff, is the crazy attention to detail of the production. As seen in this behind the scenes video about how the film was made, this film was a labour of love for all involved and their diligence paid off.
Rye Lane, d. Raine Allen-Miller, United Kingdom
Doesn’t it feel like it’s been so long since we’ve had a good ol’ British rom-com? Those glory days of Notting Hill, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Bridget Jones and Love Actually feel far behind us - though I stand by my belief that Bridget Jones’ Baby is a feminist masterpiece. The long and short of it is that we Brits have forgotten how to do the genre… until Rye Lane.
The film follows strangers Yas and Dom, who’ve both been dumped recently and meet in the toilets at an art gallery in South London. Though their personalities seem quite incompatible - Yas is vivacious and outgoing and Dom more reserved and a bit bewildered by her - they spend the day together, on a gentle wild goose chase around Peckham. After talking about their break-ups, gatecrashing a date with Dom’s ex and her new guy, and getting burritos made by actual Colin Firth from a place called Love Guac’tually, Yas realises she’s left a record at her ex’s place and they cook up a scheme to get it back. Some karaoke, a gatecrashed barbecue, and various hijinks later, the guy gets the girl in the end. Yay!
Obviously the plot is more detailed than this but I’m not going to sit here and type it all out. It almost feels a bit like a wild caper, with quest after quest woven in to a story of two heartbroken people getting to know each other as they amble through a part of South London I used to call home over a decade ago. Peckham is a funny old place, a name that was associated with crime, gangs, and Blackness by middle class white people who would end up living there a decade later because it’s soooooo up and coming, darling. It still manages to cling on to its vibrant character whilst gentrification slowly ensnares it from all sides - then again, where in London isn’t like this?
Maybe that’s why Rye Lane is so endearing. The film’s cast and crew is almost entirely Black and POC, with the show’s only white character Cass providing silly comic relief as she tells everyone to look at a big picture of her anus at the art gallery. British romcoms are often so white in character, and seeing the genre done so magnificently by these marvellous young actors has revitalised it. Similarly to Polite Society, Rye Lane tells a story - about two people falling in love again - without making their race a part of the story. With that omission, we can fully enjoy the setting, the characters, the music, and the twists and turns of the narrative in their own right. It’s a love letter to Peckham as a place as well as two lives interweaving through chance, and it should be on your watch list.
Thanks for reading! I will try and write more reviews this year! Please nag me!