Frontier of the Dawn (2008)

Yet another film of Philippe Garrels with his mutli-rumple haired son Louis as Francois in the lead role. He’s fallen in love with Carole (Laura Smet) falling in love with him.

Well, she is a bit of dish. She only had to capture him with this smile while he was photoing her – and he was automatically snapped into her seductive clutches.

She’s a married celebrity actress whose film director husband is away long term in Hollywood. Feeling neglected, she’s ripe for some romantic lovering.

Its difficult to gauge how serious this love affair is given how adolescent she is about it.

We don’t have much to go on. They keep saying they love one another but we don’t see much evidence to substantiate what will eventually turn out to be – their fatal attraction.

Carole gets into playing the Love Law of Windshield Wipers. She consciously flirts with another man at a party to deliberately test Francoise; see how much she can wound him into jealous possession. She wants to make him hurt, see him suffering.

(The Law of Windshield Wipers indicates that the more one lover wants, the more the other lover has to withhold and pull away; with the proviso that this push-pull dynamic is then reversed)

Eventually, Carole realises she’s gone far enough in tormenting the poor lad, and feels the suffering of what she loves rebounded back within herself.

Carole, it turns out, is more of a hurtee than a hurter; bi-polared up to her be-brittled brink. Insecure as fuck. Desperate as hell. Well, she has to be, because she ends up in a mental asylum strapped into a straight-jacket having electro-convulsive therapy. And all because Francois has left her for another woman.

None of this is really making much sense. It all feels far too fraught and melodramatic. It isn’t at all clear, or properly motivated, why she’s going into mega breakdown mode. What is it about Francois that she’s finding too unbearable to be without?

And why has she now gone and killed herself? Anyway, I don’t care. It all smacks of self-induced, self-indulgent, neurosis if you ask me.

But she hasn’t finished with Francois quite yet. Even though she’s dead. She’s going to haunt him through his subconscious yearnings. She’s going to torment him again. Appear in mirrors, to taunt him to come back to her (in her afterlife)

And he seems powerless to resist. Even though he’s about to get married and be set up in conventional life as a husband and a dad. Carole’s demonic love is about to possess him – and take him away.

He’s just jumped out the window.

They will be re-united at last (and forever more)

This hasn’t worked at all. There is next to no character development. There is nothing about their relationship that is either credible or convincing. All the silly supernaturnal baloney in the third part beggars belief.

What a sloppy, superficial, film this has been.

Dir: Philippe Garrel, France

4/10

Paterson (2016)

I’d quite liked this when I first saw it a couple of years ago. But this 2nd watch didn’t do it for me. In fact I gradually got more and more irritated by it.

First source of irritation is this ugly mutt

He’s called Marvin and he’s supposed to be an object of morose mirth and deadpan drollery. But he’s just a slobbery dog who is getting paid far too much loving attention.

By his owner, Laura. She thinks the sun shines out of Marvins dirty fat arsehole.

Paterson (Adam Driver) is less enamoured, but he’s going along with walking the shitty thing because, well, its his wifes dog, and he’ll do anything it seems to make his lovely wife content.

His wife, is the second, and perhaps the biggest source of irritation in this whole film. The Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani playing Laura seems mismatched as Patersons’ adoring wife, and miscast as a quirky kooky oddball. Its barely believable that she’s shacked up with this lanky lugubrious bus driver.

And the contrived idiosyncracies of her kookiness fall flat, feel false. seem hardly credible. All the business with the obsessive black and white interior design, the cheddar cheese and sprout supper pie, the compulsive cupcake making.  Its not daftly charming. Or even cutely endearing. Its mostly mildly moronic.

Here is Paterson trying not to vomit out the cheedar cheese and sprout pie (which of course, his nutty fruitcake wife is tucking into with exxagerated gobs of gusto)

All of this batty behaviour would be believable in a dotty old dear, but not in a young woman who looks as lovely, and as cooly super-sexily viable, as Golshifteh Farahani. Maybe she’s suffering from some hidden Persian personality defect like borderline dopey American disorder. Or maybe she’s suffering from chronic lack of self-esteem. Or maybe she’s simply in the wrong film.

Here she is trying to console Paterson. Slobbery mutt Marvin has just eaten her husbands poems dull doggrel.

And here is glum Paterson looking across at the dumb dog (staring at us) lugubriously contemplating whether to kick the mutts butt.

‘I don’t like you’ says Paterson to the dog. That makes two of us (me included) Marvin merely squats there with slobbery tongue hanging out of his mushy fat face.

But Paterson won’t do anything to Marvin. Because Paterson will disengage himself from any active service with anger. Paterson does not getting irritated. Paterson does not do livewire act-out expressive feelings. Paterson is a poet with an uncapital p. Patersons job as a poet is to listen and to observe, and to scribble his listenings and observings into his little poets notebook. Therefore, Paterson will simply accept what has happened with a borderline bored air of blank impassivity.

Which brings me to the third irritation: Adam Driver as Paterson. He’s being directed to play a boring bus driver doing his hum drum day writing his ho hum poems, and all flattened inside a dulled down detachment of lugubrious docility. He is the epitome of an everyday everyman boring bloke. Who for some unfathomable reason, his gorgeous Persian wife dotes over, and wants to wrap up within her dopey half baked notions of domestic bliss. I didn’t believe in any of it. I didn’t see marital harmony. I saw mundane marital mismatch and mild mental health melt-down. I mean, either Paterson is going to have to kill that dog or he’s going to have to suffocate his smother-lovering wife. He definitely shouldn’t give up his day job. No more Paterson poems – please! Just drive the bleedin bus – stop pestering us with all your drivelling doggrel.

Oh yes, the fourth irritation is with Jim Jarmusch the director. I’ve had more than enough of his limp and lame Aki Kaurismaki affectations. Deadpan drollery only really works if your half hearted heart is in the right kind of desolate place. Like the frozen forests of deepest darkest Finland.

Dir: Jim Jarmusch, US

So, from a initially promising 7/10 this drops down disappointingly to 5/10. And also gets kicked, along with Marvin the mutts butt, into the delete bin.

Outside Satan (2011)

Marginals, Minimals and Misfits. Mavericks and Mystics. Thats who Bruno Dumont seems to like to make his films about. And quite possibly Mads and Mentally Ills.

This Boy is a very strange boy. Does odd and inexplicable things.

Also does criminal things, things outside the law, outside of sanity. And possibly outside of Satan also; meaning the kind of irrational acts that even Satan would struggle to find justification for evilly enacting.

Like shoot this goth girls abusive stepdad stone dead. As if he were out with his gun, casually taking a pot shot at an innocent deer.

And then whacking an unfortunate lad over the head because he dared to kiss the goth girl (who he seems to have little interest in being in possession of, our making his girlfriend).

And then sucking on the mouth of a possessed girl as if exorcising her demons.

He doesn’t appear to have any sexual or carnal interest in the goth girl..

Maybe he’s her good bad angel.

A backpacker has latched on to him and, inexplicably, wants to be fucked. She’s offering her naked body to his grunting body on a plate.

He fucks and throttles her almost to death. She starts foaming at the mouth.

Is that female ejaculation happening, but gushing out the wrong end? (or is she evicting his curdled cum out of her mouth?) Talk about a mind-blowing orgasm. Don’t think she’ll be wanting casual sex with strangers again in a hurry. Just asking for it she was. Asking to be punished.

The Boy is up to more of his funny business. Resurrects the goth girl back to life (after she’d been raped and murdered)

This film gets more and more banally ‘incroyable’, upping the ante on the credibility meter. It shouldn’t be taken too literally. Even if it has pretensions at being seriously parabolic. If not to say parodic (although I wouldn’t dare say that to Dumonts face. He might start making his malicious mischief with me)

The Boy, like all the other characters in the film, is a non-professional actor. Which is to say, he can’t, or doesn’t, act. He gets very few words of dialogue to act or emote. He just walks around the countryside with this stupid enigmatic grinny grimace on his blank face.

Thats him unconscionably, and consciencelessly, walking off, out of the village, and out of the film. Off to do more dirty derring do in the next God-forsaken hapless place that needs his horrible  ‘help’.

What a casually, and vacuously, unpleasant film this has been. Mind you, unpleasant is sort par for the course for Bruno Dumont. He’s always wanting to give watchers of his films a nasty slap in the face, a brutal kick in the guts, a vicious knife in the goolies.

I just can’t be arsed to work out what all this quasi religious anti-hero mundane everyday everyman radicality is supposed to mean. Its a pseudo parable of ugly parobolic and phony horribolic distortions.

Dir: Bruno Dumont, France

5/10

Dog Days (2001)

This film goes out of its way to show the ugliest, moaniest, nastiest, nuttiest aspects of Austrian humanity; the word humanity is used loosely, as most people are portrayed acting no better (and much worse) than the dirtiest dogs. I’m sure this is deliberate.

All these Austrians get hot and very bothered (under their copious mounds of flesh)

In a while the teacher on the left of this picture is going to be horrendously humiliated
(not by that short stump of a psycho stood next to her, although horrendous and humiliation may well be implicated somewhere inside his pervy murkiness)

This is the leather panted flabby slob who is going to be humiliating her.

Her horrible pimp of a boyfriend (who apparently, in real life is some kind of Viennese Porn Purveyor cum Impressario)

This horrible pimp of a boyfriend will himself, be humiliated eventually. And she, the teacher girlfriend, will be forced – at the point of a gun – to do the humiliating.

Here is another disturbing ‘character’.

She keeps thumbing lifts in cars then irritating and insulting the drivers.

I suppose this is meant to be amusing. But it quickly becomes quite uncomfortable to behold, to be a witness (a voyeur) to. Because you realise that she isn’t acting any of this autistic oddness. So is Seidl – the director – exploiting her nuttiness merely for comic effect? You get to wonder how much of her part in the film she was actually aware of, and consciously responsible for.

‘People are so cruel’ somebody says at the end of the film. They are. In this film gratuitously so.
We’ve been witness to various man-ifestations of vile misogyny. Women get slapped in the face, get their hair pulled, get called cunts and sluts, have to act like sluts in order to get male attention and approval, get degraded, get humiliated.

I’ve used that word – humiliation – a lot in this review.
And that’s what it seems to be wanting to show.
Human behaviour at its most inhumane, at its most debasing, at its most humiliating.

I’m glad I’ll never have to watch this again.

Dir: Ulrich Seidl, Austria

4.5/10

La Collectionneuse (1967)

For some reason I forgot to review this film (I’ve reviewed all the other Rohmers)

I remember being quite enamoured by it on the first watch. But this second watch didn’t appeal to me quite as much. That happens quite often watching Rohmer films: I can like, or dislike, the same film depending on what mood I’m in, how receptive I’m feeling to Rohmers ‘art’. Some times the talky talk nature of them can be beguilingly candid and intriguing. And at other times I just want the constipated characters to shut up with all the neurotic and microscopic analysing of every single little minor, even petty, detail of what they’re feeling and thinking.

This film definitely felt more stuck in top-heavy (or heady) self-conscious anal neurosis. (head stuck up its own arse in other words)

The main protagonist, an art dealer called Adrien, is doing most of the anal-ising. We hear him voice-overing his precious thoughts and pet theories about what he percieves is truly going on throughout the entire film. He seems to think he knows it all, and does come across as a self regarding big-headed know-all. A good looking guy who knows he’s a good looking guy – and can go for, and have, more or less any woman he fancies, or wants. As long as they’re not ugly. Because that would be insulting. An offence against his good looking, and higher being, better nature.

This little girl, Haydee, is his other-appointed antagonist/nemisis. He wants to be playing head games with her, denying her pussy his cock; because he’s wanting to test how morally superior he is, as against what an immoral little salope (slut) she is (having it off as often she does with all the boys that come to the villa)

Adrien puts a stop to all the boys coming to the villa. So as to cut off her supply of easy cock, and unearned (to his eyes) immoral pleasure. So as to frustrate and punish her I suppose. And then he sets about pitting his superior intellect, his stronger will, against her mindless and immature instinct. And then he ropes his greasy snidey mate, Daniel, to join in with this slut-shaming Game.

They regard Haydee as a Collector (the ‘Collectioneuse’ of the title) of men, which makes her the lowest of the low

To be a ‘Collectionuese’ is to be a wanton hussy. If men, if they, were doing what she’s doing, they’d be called ‘studs’. But she has to be downgraded and degraded as a slut.

Its supposed to be wryly and delightfully witty, but it actually comes across as being casually, and cruelly, misogynistic.

Daniel really gets stuck in to degrading the poor girl.

Leave her alone! She’s done nothing to deserve your opprobrium or your contempt, other than be a young girl on holiday in the South of France who wants to enjoy herself exploring what pleasure she’s capable of with guys. Stop bullying her you arsehole (Daniel). And stop sticking your mean-spirited moral judgments all over her (Adrien) Its you, the pair of you, who’ve been degrading her with your hypocritical slut shaming talk.

Yes, well I’m sure  any silly girl would soon get very fed up of you and your self-importance – you vain and conceited, pompous, egotistical, git.

Neither of these 2 guys, Adrien and Daniel, are sympathetic, or even that likeable. I’m thinking: you’d be well shut off them Haydee – just get the fuck out; go and spend time with guys that will appreciate you, and give you some simple loving and guilt-free fucking, without messing with your pretty head.

Which she does in the end (although Adrien has to frame her escape as some kind of decisive moral victory he’s won over her, and also over his own lower instincts)

I suppose what has appealed to me the first time I’d seen it was the languid hazy hot sunny vibe – and wishing I were there, being part of a set up that seemed to include rent free accommodation in a villa on the French Riviera, and all summer long to laze around in the sun, reading books, being foot-loose and fancy-free. Living the so seeming easy life of leisure and aesthetic pleasure, and getting away with it. The life of idle slackery elevated by bookish thoughts, and enriched, even drenched, in erotic sensuality. I wasn’t looking into it as deep as I could have, or thinking as critically as I am now about it.

As a sidenote: so many birds are heard singing in this film. And in the 50 years since it was made, most of this beautiful bird background is turning silent, has disappeared.

Dir: Eric Rohmer, France

5.5/10

The Man Who Sleeps (1974)

You are watching a film about a man who sleeps. A man who reads. A man who watches. A man who washes his socks.

A man, like you, of vegetal life (a bit of a couch potato) A man, like you, who has cancelled his existence (in order to watch you watching this)

A man, like you, who has no voice, and who does not speak (like you)

This man (or boy) you watch has shut his eyes, like this

In order to create a little bit of restful oblivion (this is not the man who sleeps actually asleep or sleeping yet)

You watch him washing his rotten socks and you wonder whether your own rotten socks may also need washing. You go check. No, they smell, but have yet to reach peak stink

Watching this film is helping you live what cannot be learnt: how to solace in solitude, how to be indifferent, how to play patience, how to untrumpet silence.

To go on waiting and forget. Impassively. Indifferently. Without expression. Without regret. To multiply the reflection of image, cloned as self, as if divisible transparencies.

And thirty six minutes have passed. And still you are here. All you you’s. Still you are still. All you stills. Still you are undeciphering the text, deconstructing the signs, disillusioning the images.

You are profoundly and proudly ennuied. You are bored beyond the outer limits of Mongolia. You have outbored yourself.
You are living in a blessed parenthesis of bracketed boredom. Soon you will be able to unsuck (or unsock) ennui through a vacuum full of unpromise.

You are living merely mirely, within monochromal miserable monotony.
This film has limpided you in. It has snuffed out your last sparkle.

You have now paused in order to toast toast (sliced precisely, meticulously, sans rancour, with a thin smearing of indifference)

Lassitude has become lessitude. Lethargy has atrophied thick into a vat of fat apathy. All moments are equivalent. There is no better, no worse, no next, no now, no upcoming marvelous moment. No even this. Or even that. No anywhere. No any time.

You watch and you do not watch. You think and you do not think. You do not feel. Emotion has become motionless. To stumble has become your big toe. Stubbed out on the hard merciless pitiless rock of existence-indifference.

You are now fast dissolving into an imutable state of unshakeable inertia.

You calmly measure the sticky extent of your unhappiness (and wipe it off your trousers)

This film has reduced you to the null state of robotic, but comforting, comatosefulness.
This film does not excite your enthusiasm, it does not stimulate your interest, it does not arouse your desire. It even fails to irritate or frustrate you to fuck.

But, And except. For that persistent discordant noise. Breaking from somewhere. Is it from you, from within your coiled and dumbed inner voice of regret? Or is it coming from somewhere else. Where is it? It is starting to blare. Starting to feel like intrusion, interference. It is insistent. It is a horrible racket. Blot it out. Obliterate it. Please.

But obliteration is futile. Indifference is futile. Patience is futile. Solitude is futile. Isolation is futile. Futility is futile.

This film, and the watching thereof, is, and was, futile. Nothing has, or had, happened. For the last 1 hour 17 minutes and 45 seconds (give or take 10 minutes when you toasted toast, wee’ed a wee) time has stood still. And been endured, meaninglessly.

You are not dead. You have not gone mad. You have survived. This film tried to, but did not, end your existence.

Dir: Bernard Queysanne, France

5/10

Vivre Sa Vie (My Life to Live) (1962)

I’m searching for something by Godard that I can conceivably watch from beginning to end like you would a ‘normal’ film.

I’ve attempted, and aborted (after about 20 minutes, painstakingly failing to find  something remotely resembling a story, with credible characters, coherently connected series of events, images, scenarios, comprehensible dialogue, congruent matching of what is seen to what is heard (via soundtrack or score) the following films : Le Mepris (Contempt) Une Femme est une Femme (A Woman is a Woman) La Chinoise.

Maybe thats the whole point of Godard. He doesn’t do normal. He’s out to break down conventional cinema (its dreamy wish-fulfillment) deconstruct its conceits (its lies and fabrications), shatter its complacencies (its need to be pleasing, its desire to pleasantly divert, entertain) In other words, Godard is an intensely irritating and antagonising shit-stirrer-upper.

But unfortunately, even though it isn’t quite as abstrusely alienating as all those other Godards I’ve seen, this film is still undercut and overdone.Underwhelming.

Doesn’t quite give you what you want does Godard. Wilfully witholds. Deliberately subverts. Intentionally frustrates. You’re only going to get what he wants you to have – whether you want it or like it or not.

Of course I liked Anna Karina. I defy any man not to.  Parisian prostitutes couldn’t come any less alluringly lovely in 1962 than Miss Karina.

I’ve done my own little 4 minute edit of the film.

There’s this scene, her first time on the job with a client

Why not? Because you’re trying to rape my face with your mouth that’s why. I don’t want you possessing my face like you own it (even though you’ve paid for it).

In this 2nd scene she’s telling her friend (who is also prostituting herself) or trying to convince her friend, that the life she is living (as a prostitute) is the life she’s choosing

‘I think we’re always responsible for our actions. We’re free. I raise my hand – I’m responsible. I turn my head to the right – I’m responsible. I’m unhappy – I’m responsible. I smoke a cigarette – I’m responsible. I shut my eyes – I’m responsible. I forget that I’m responsible, but I am. I told you escape is a pipe dream. After all, everything is beautiful. You only have to take an interest in things, see their beauty. It’s true. After all, things are just what they are. A face is a face. Plates are plates. Men are men. And life, is life#. 

It’s all sounding good, it’s a Plausible Prostitute Promotional Pitch

And yet,

How much does she truly believe in, own, take responsibility for, what she’s just said? That face says sad to me. Says, I’ve no way out. I’m trapped. My life cannot be otherwise. Other than this. To become the sexual gratification cum plaything of an unloved mans unlovely unloving brute-force desire.

And in the third and final scene I edited, here she is prancing about doing a sad little silly solo jig around an empty pool hall

The men look on with blank indifference. She doesn’t move them with her dance. Because her dance is more for herself than them. She’s dancing with herself, perhaps as a way of negating the desire in them (the men) and forlornly giving it to herself instead.

Something like that. Probably not the interpretation Godard intended me to make. Never mind. No matter.

Its been, as per, difficult to connect together, or make much coherent sense out of this film. I can’t say I’ve really understood too much of what has been going, or not going, on. In other words, this has been my usual baffled and bemused, alienated and estranged, Jean-Luc Godard film watching experience.

And I can’t really be arsed to make the effort to try. When what you’ve watched leaves you cold, confounded, and chillily disheartened, you’ve got little investment of feeling to care less about making meaning..

Dir: Jean Luc Godard, France

5/10

Police (1985)

But turns out he doesn’t. Or can’t. Because she doesn’t. Or can’t.

Its probably for the best. Neither of them are reliable love conduits. She’s a congenital liar. And he’s a brutish volatile cop cum thug. Any love given or received between them would be slipping and sliding across treacherous ground. Their love would be bound to fall, and fail, and end up in more lying (her to him), and slapping (him of her)

They’re both playing a Game. He (Mangin) playing the Game of being a cop. She (Noria) playing the Game of being a devious drug-pushers moll. And in a way the love affair between them is a bit of a racket, a misdemeanour, a misadventure.

I couldn’t buy into this film.
Partly because I don’t do crime dramas. And as a crime drama this is mostly all standard stereotypical stuff.
But also I wasn’t getting sucked into this doomed petty love affair between Mangin (Gerard Depardieu and Noria (Sophie Marceau).
Gerard Depardieu does what Gerard Depardieu does. He grabs and gropes at women because well, because he’s Gerard and he can get away with it. Stick his great big paws all over them then poke it in.

‘My mother didn’t like me so I get back at all the women’ is his lame excuse for being such a crude jerk (aka misogynistic pig) And yet underneath all that macho swagger we’re meant to believe he’s a huggy bear of a bloke really (mother mother me – you dirty whore!)

His copping is as rough and ready as his loving. He’s a purveyor of the head slap. And if these arabs get cheeky they get face slapped plus their greasy nuts kicked in
(Just jut them wiv your jaw Gerard, that’ll get em jabberin)

The crime melodrama was all drearily blah-de-blah. The cliche being banged out was: Cops are like crooks.  They’re both the same. Playing the same Game. All at it on the same unlevel, uneven, slip-slidey, treacherous quagmire of a playing field.

Anyway, here are Gerard and Sophie having their eventual bit of tenderesse.

Only a little moment. Didn’t last long. Wasn’t meant to last long. Because the love between them was too runny, too  racketty, too fickle, too hopelessly adolescent.

Dir: Maurice Pialat, France

5/10

24 Frames (2017)

This is the final film by Iranian autuer Abbas Kiarostami. You wonder how much he had to do with it and how much has been unauthorisedly ‘added’ on or in to get it posthumously released (under his name).

Its not very good. I doubt Kiarastami would have been happy with the post-production ‘effects’: in this case, CGI animations that attempt to realise what the before and after might be like of treasured photos he had taken (throughout his life)

Decidedly jerky, not to say tacky, animations running through his still images – like these deer trotting through a stand of trees in the snow.

As well as visual manipulations you have sound add ons to evoke atmosphere, to suggest other things that might be happening off stage that have inadvertently, but purposefully, contributed to these movements in the pictures.

The sound art doesn’t appear as so obviously naff as the computer generated graphic artifices but when you listen a bit more intently, what you hear does not quite match up to what you see.

In this picture waves have been rolled in, rain has been rained, a storm has been thundered, crows have been cackled over and across

But they don’t add up to much these additions. Or not enough. Not enough of vital interest anyway.

In this picture you hear the snow and wind whistling away, and sheep bleating, as if of the sheep tucked in under that tree, but sounding far too far away; and then the distant howling of a wolf wakes the dog to get up and start barking.

But then the wolf, who sounds like he’s howling from off some far away mountain top is seen skulking across at the back of the picture.

There are far too many of these spatial and temporary discrepancies. It just comes across as being fakely fabricated, in the sense of being artificially contrived, and as I say, ‘tacked on’ to create the semblance of some motivating cause going on.

I actually did my own edit of this film. The 24 frames (or photos) were reduced to 5. The 1 hour 53 minute run time reduced to 4 minutes. I considered the other 19 pictures and 1 hour 49 minutes to be ineffectual and redundant.

When these pictures are frozen, except for snow falling in the foreground, or thunder storming in the background, the image resembles nothing more than some kind of simplistic screensaver.

You wonder what the point of this whole enterprise was. A good photo is more than capable of precisely, and specifically, evoking the rich resonance of associative life beyond itself. It doesn’t need to be jazzed up . Phony contrivance via animating CGI manipulation isn’t simply redundant; it’s reductive. And also, in this case, untruthful, artificial, amateurish.

Dir: Abbas Kiarostami, Iran

4/10

Funny Cow (2017)

I’m wondering why a film like this had to be made. And even why its still being made.

All this grim up t North kitchen sink drama has been done to death. This films simply rehashes and reinforces every stereotype about Northerness we’ve all see before. You’ve got a violent wife beating husband: ‘I’ll break tha fucking nose. Cunt!’ (He duly breaks her fucking nose) (this is Funny Cows terrible husband) Funny Cow’s mam is on t ‘booze as a way of coping (or denying) with how violent her husband was. Funny Cow is also a boozer. Everybody eats chips and shouts their fat gob off. Northern Mens Clubs are cesspits of racist, homophobic, misogynistic hostility and hatred (Bernard Manning anyone?)

The USP of this film was the female stand-up angle; out of all the dire material of her ugly childhood and awful marriage Maxine Peakes Funny Cow (she’s not given a name) fashions her against-the-odds fuck off comedy persona.

All the characters are thinly drawn and unsatisfactorily fleshed out, all with similar vices in alcoholism and addiction.

I kept thinking this would have been better as a six part TV drama by Jimmy McGovern; more deeply developed, and more empathetically nuanced. McGovern would be guaranteed to at least give you a Funny Cow you could care about.

Dir: Adrian Shergold, UK

4/10