Dominic Green

You know the feeling. One minute, you’re an oversexed adman, strolling the streets of Paris and propositioning every woman you pass. The next, you’ve walked into a lamp post, and knocked yourself unconscious. You wake up in the same Paris, but now the sex roles are reversed, and the hierarchies of power and values too. Every day is now Freaky Friday in the sex wars. Is it a dream, or a nightmare? A nightmare for forty year-old Damien, whose headlong encounter with a piece of Belle Époque street furniture begins Eléonore Pourriat’s I Am Not an Easy Man (Je ne suis pas un homme facile), a new Netflix film. Not much better for the other men, either, who are wolf-whistled even when they’re holding the baby. But for Alexandra (Marie-Sophie Ferdane), everything becomes easier.

This is a golden age for documentaries, if you have time to view them. Digital film and editing have reduced the cost of making a documentary, and online streaming has resolved the problem of distribution. The result is a glut of documentaries, generally well-made, and generally too long. Lorna Tucker’s Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist comes in at eighty minutes. This is the same as a movie like Run, Lola, Run, and only slightly less than Paths of Glory (88 mins), The Producers (88 mins) and Stand By Me (89 mins). Westwood is a self-made character, the Edith Sitwell of British fashion, and her biography has the plot twists and characters of fiction.

Women get paid less in Hollywood. Surely the budget for the female variation on Ocean’s Eleven and Ocean’s Thirteen could have stretched to Ocean’s Twenty? Still, Gary Ross’ crime caper is right on the money. The franchise remains familiar — perhaps too familiar — but Ocean’s Eight feels fresh, with its gender-flipping of Rat Pack clichés, and an ensemble strong enough to ensure that there are at least two good female leads on the screen at any one moment, and never a man in sight. Debbie Ocean (Sandra Bullock) is the sister of the late Danny, George Clooney’s character in Ocean’s Eleven and Thirteen.

Leon Vitali is an actor who passed through the looking glass of Stanley Kubrick’s camera and became Kubrick’s right arm. When the documentary film maker Tony Zierra discovered Vitali’s story while investigating Kubrick’s final, flawed film, Eyes Wide Shut, he decided to first make a film about Vitali, who is sixty-nine and not in good health. This is only fair, as Kubrick took over Vitali’s life, admittedly with Vitali’s consent. Kubrick is an object of worship to film lovers and the people who merely work in film. The critics have tended to go along with the cult, though Pauline Kael and Roger Elbert both expressed strong reservations.

‘I’m bipolar and have ADHD and multiple personality disorder,’ Roseanne Barr once said. ‘But they’re now all in remission due to the powerful drugs I smoke.’ In the same interview, Barr described herself as ‘on the autism spectrum’, and said, ‘I talk directly to God within my own mind and need no intercessor.’ Clinically speaking, Barr is as mad as a bag of badgers. Professionally speaking, disinhibition is no handicap in a comedian, and frequently mistaken for honesty. Socially speaking, she is the kind of person compelled to share her madness. She is the kind of person who was born for Twitter, and consequently should wear a pair of thumbless gloves whenever she is online.

‘That was some weird shit,’ George W. Bush is said to have muttered after Donald Trump’s desolate inauguration speech of January 2017. ‘I couldn’t have agreed more,’ wrote Hillary Clinton in What Happened. Americans cannot agree on what has happened to their country, other than that everything has gone wrong. Is it ‘white supremacy’ and patriarchy, or the collapse of the white working class and the decay of patriotism? The symptoms too are polarized, beyond mutual comprehension. The leading cause of young black male deaths is murder, but the leading cause of young white male deaths is suicide. The weirdness of these linked statistics has a common source.

Here in the English-speaking world, the hours after work and before dinner are known as the ‘reverse commute’. We spend these hours standing on trains, sitting in cars, or pedaling for our lives. Over there in France, these hours are called the ‘cinq à sept’. Although they may also involve being pressed up against other people, the sequence of postures is different. Strange, then, that so many skilled workers have left France. Stranger, still, that so few skilled foreign workers have moved there. You’d think they’d be banging at the door. Isabelle, the heroine of Claire Denis’ Let the Sunshine In, is so committed to the ‘cinq à sept’ that she does it round the clock.

Racer and the Jailbird is a terrible name for a film. It sounds like an unsolicited tribute to that sorrily misbegotten Seventies’ genre, the action-comedy buddy movie—like Freebie and the Bean (1974) or Smokey and the Bandit (1977). But it is not. Nor, though the trailers for Racer and the Jailbird misrepresent it as such, is it a sexed-up, souped-up heist movie for knuckleheads and chuckleheads, like Gone in Sixty Seconds or Baby Driver, but with sexy Europeans instead of Nicholas Cage looking like he’s been shot with an elephant tranquilizer, and then put in someone else’s dentures because he’s still a bit woozy. Racer and the Jailbird is none of these things, probably because it isn’t really Racer and the Jailbird at all.

If you were to revisit the house you grew up in, would you take a look at your old bedroom? The answer is yes, of course you would—unless, that is, you are Ronit, Rachel Weisz’s character in Sebastian Lelio’s Disobedience. If you are Ronit, you will instead ponder your late father the rabbi’s rich collection of Talmudic literature, then kiss Esti, the lost love of your teenage years, with tongues. There should a joke here about pastrami and tongue sandwiches, but Disobedience has no jokes. Adapted from Naomi Alderman’s novel, Disobedience is set in an Orthodox Jewish community in London. Jews are supposed to be smart and funny, but this lot are slow-witted and mirth-impaired, like black-clad, black-hatted Stepford Wives.