Tag Archives: Golshifteh Farahani

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Blood Pressure

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Alpha

by Hope Madden

There are drawbacks to being one of the most daring and original voices in cinema. Chief among them is expectation. Audiences anticipate that each new effort will somehow outshine the previous.

After 2016’s Raw, Julia Ducournau’s incandescent first feature, surely no one expected Titane. And I mean no one. Feral and unforgiving, homaging others but blazing its own wildly individual path, Ducournau’s sophomore effort took home Cannes’s Palm d’Or in 2021. The film that defies summarization managed to make Raw look tame, almost precious. Raw, by the way, is about a college freshmen overcome with cannibalistic frenzy whenever she’s aroused, if you haven’t seen it. Tame and precious.

So, expectations for Alpha, the filmmaker’s latest, were high.

The tale begins with its best scene. Amin (a wondrous Tahar Rahim) sits with his arm outstretched as his 5-year-old niece Alpha (Ambrine Trigo Oaked) makes his needle wounds pretty by connecting them, constellation-like, with a black marker. Simultaneously heartwarming and queasying, it seems the perfect opening to a Ducournau project.

We flash forward quickly to another disturbing scene. This time, 13-year-old Alpha (Mélissa Boros) has her arm outstretched. She’s barely lucid, surrounded by teens partying obliviously, as someone tattoos an enormous A on her arm. The work is not professional and draws plenty of blood.

From here, Alpha oscillates between two timelines in an alternate reality France. The core story of love and negligence, family trauma and addiction, sits in the context of a blood-borne epidemic. An epidemic to which Alpha has now made herself susceptible.

The AIDS analogy is clear but expect Ducournau’s visual style to turn the somber into something harrowingly beautiful. Sufferers of this unnamed virus show symptoms of smoke escaping their mouths when they cough. As the diseases progresses, bodies turn to something akin to blue veined, cracking marble.

It’s in this world that confused, self-destructive Alpha comes of age. Her mother (Golshifteh Farahani), a doctor, becomes passionately, almost blindly obsessed with keeping her junky brother and her reckless daughter safe.

The crisscrossing timelines often rob the film of its momentum. The real problem, though, is that in the end, Ducournau employs a fantasy trope to connect the timelines and embody the mother’s anxiety. Vague as she is about it, and powerful as the final moments are, Ducournau cannot breathe enough life into the cliché to elevate it above cliché.

There is a haunting ghost story at work here. Ducournau’s cast is astounding, and her visual style, though far more somber here than in her previous work, is still enough to draw a gasp. But Alpha boasts less imagination than either of the filmmaker’s previous efforts, and it’s hard not to be a tad disappointed.

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Moon in Her Eye

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Hood Witch

by Hope Madden

Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. It’s a popular sentence in the Old Testament, one used to excuse a lot of needless suffering, mainly women’s. It’s not the only spot in the Bible that condemns sorcery, divination and what not. Jesus never mentioned it, though. (He never said anything about women being submissive to their husbands, either.)

Islam is no more forgiving, and Nour (Golshifteh Farahani, Paterson) is about to run afoul of keepers of both faiths and keepers of none in Hood Witch.

Co-writer/director Saïd Belktibia examines the muddy difference between a religion’s acceptable magic and harmful witchcraft. However similar the practice, the differentiator seems to be based primarily on whether a woman benefits.

Nour makes a living smuggling exotic animals into Paris, mainly to be used in rituals of healing. Newly divorced and struggling financially to raise her son Amine (Amine Zariouhi), Nour is in the development stages of a new app that will link users to a variety of different healers.

Nour knows it’s all smoke and mirrors. Her impressionable son is not so sure. Her abusive ex (Jérémy Ferrari, sinister) is willing to believe, as long as it’s a man of religion wielding the mirror and blowing the smoke, and as long as it’s his ex-wife who suffers.

Though Hood Witch is far more a drama/thriller than an outright horror film, it does follow a longstanding genre tradition of using witchcraft to point out religions’ hypocrisy and misogyny. But the filmmaker goes further, complicating characters by implicating capitalism as being equally dangerous—particularly to the desperate and easily manipulated—as religion.

Farahani delivers a fierce, passionate performance full of rage, compassion and vulnerability. Nour is sharp and not without a conscience, but when tragedy strikes it’s because of her meddling. The consequences, though, are deeply unsettling.

Belktibia’s pacing and framing match Nour’s panic, and it’s impossible not to panic along with her.  Hood Witch is a tough watch, as misogyny and apathy play out in the film the same way they play out every miserable day, infecting each generation like a poison. The rage that fuels Nour and the film is what feels most relatable.

“People think I’m possessed by the devil. I think I’m just angry.”

There are unexplored ideas and mixed messages that keep Hood Witch from becoming a great film, but it’s an angry, observant thriller and solid reflection of the time.

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Fire in the Sky

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My Father’s Dragon

by Hope Madden

Like most animation fans, I eagerly await each new Cartoon Saloon adventure. Their output is simply stunning: Wolfwalkers, The Breadwinner, Song of the Sea, The Secret of the Kells. Even Pixar doesn’t have a stronger batting average.

Nora Twomey directed two of those beauties, The Breadwinner and The Secret of the Kells (which she co-helmed with Tomm Moore). She returns to the screen with the lovely romp about a dragon with a problem and a boy who solves problems, My Father’s Dragon.

Animator Masami Hata first adapted Ruth Stiles Gannett’s beloved 1948 novel for the screen in 1997. Twomey’s update takes advantage of intricate, hand-drawn animation and an impressive voice cast to bring Elmer Elevator’s imaginative journey to life.

Elmer and his mom have left behind their small town and the little store they ran. They’re living on the leaking top floor of an apartment building in a crowded city. Neither is happy about it, even if both pretend well. Then a talking cat points Elmer toward a chance to fix everything. He just needs to save this one dragon.

Charming and endlessly good-natured, My Father’s Dragon succeeds despite its comparatively predictable nature. Go into any of the other Cartoon Saloon films and you’ll find yourself surprised with each narrative turn. My Father’s Dragon, on the other hand, feels more familiar.

If the studio’s defining uniqueness is missing from its latest ‘toon, its heart is not. Voiced by Jacob Tremblay, Elmer’s the kind of kid who’s wound too tight. He tries so hard, he breaks your heart, even when his anxiety shortens his temper. Elmer’s own personality mirrors his mother’s when the chips are down, which feels of bittersweet authenticity thanks in part to Golshifteh Farahani’s tender vocal performance as Mom.

As Boris the dragon, Gaten Matarazzo is silly and sweet with moments of raw emotion. Whoopi Goldberg, Judy Greer, Mary Kay Place, Rita Moreno, Chris O’Dowd, Alan Cumming, Diane Wiest and Ian McShane round out a uniformly excellent vocal ensemble, O’Dowd is especially impressing as McShane’s harsh second-in-command, Kwan.

My Father’s Dragon represents a new direction for the animation studio. While it’s not the unassailable success of their previous films, it’s a joyous, beautiful film.