Bacurau (Amazon Prime, 18) Verdict: Genre-defying but terrific
Who You Think I Am (Curzon Home Cinema, 15) Verdict: Sexy and beguiling
The Host (various streaming platforms, 15) Verdict: Psycho rip-off
The pick of this week’s homestreaming options is a pair of foreign-language films. The strange but compelling Bacurau, plunging us into the hinterlands of Brazil, is the kind of modern-day Western that Sam Peckinpah might have made if he were a) Brazilian and b) alive.
The other brings us much closer to home. Bacurau is the name of a small, poverty stricken town in a remote part of Brazil, evidently based on the so-called quilombos, communities built by runaway slaves during colonial times. The town’s matriarch has died aged 94, and her granddaughter has returned for the funeral, bringing a supply of much-needed vaccines for the doctor, beautifully played by the veteran Brazilian star Sonia Braga, to dispense.
Sonia Braga plays the granddaughter of an impoverished town’s matriarch
Meanwhile, the town’s water supply has been cut off, seemingly by corrupt local politicians. At first, Bacurau, which won the Jury Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, feels like a window into a society with which few of us are acquainted, introducing us to weird rural customs.
But gradually we come to realise that this is not a typical community at all. It’s more like a Brazilian equivalent of The League Of Gentlemen’s Royston Vasey. W hen the matriarch’s son , a respected schoolteacher, tries to show his pupils Bacurau on a map, he cannot find it.
The mobile phone signal has disappeared, too, and someone is operating a drone which looks startlingly like a UFO. Then, indiscriminate murder is added to this cocktail of oddities. It turns out that a posse of foreigners have arrived for a recreational killing spree, turning Bacurau into a Peckinpah-style bloodbath.
The film, directed by Kleber Mendonca Filho and Juliano Dornelles, reminded me of another recent release, The Hunt, but is as slick and sur prising as The Hunt is clunky and predictable.
Who You Think I Am not only brings us back to Europe, but to a film slightly easier to categorise. Juliette Binoche is superb as Claire, a divorced literature professor who, after being dumped by her much younger lover, dupes his flatmate, Alex (Francois Civil) into thinking she is only 24 by creating a fake online identity.
Juliette Binoche stars as Claire, a divorced literature professor whose loneliness motivates her to commit fraud
Soon, they are having a ‘virtual’ affair. When I say it’s easier to categorise, Safy Nebbou’s Frenchlanguage film doesn’t exactly fall into a firmly recognisable genre. It’s an erotic, psychological notquite-thriller, with the kind of plot that could never have been constructed before e-mails and texting became a bulwark of our daily lives. As it is, Claire is befuddled when Alex refers to ‘Insta’.
Quickly, she has to learn what Instagram is and ensure she doesn’t give any clues that she’s actually a middle-aged mother of two, not a hot young intern in the fashion industry, as she claims. Too much more detail about the narrative would take me into spoiler territory, so let’s just say that it builds nicely and, in this day and age, entirely credibly, and that Claire’s sessions with a psychologist (Nicole Garcia) give the story a useful framework.
The same device pops up in The Host, with Derek Jacobi playing the psychologist, but here it just feels hackneyed and pointless. Sadly, that sense of pointlessness permeates pretty much the entire film, from the point very early on at which you realise the protagonist, a hapless London banker called Robert Atkinson (Mike Beckingham), has tattoos in place of a personality.
Robert is a compulsive gambler who heads straight to a casino with £50,000 he has just stolen, intending to settle his onerous debts. He also needs to impress his boss’s wife, with whom he is having illicit lunchtime liaisons. Naturally, the entire 50 grand goes up in smoke before you can say ‘well I never’.
This propels Robert straight into the hands of Triad gangsters, who make him their mule on a heroinsmuggling trip to Amsterdam. There, however, the gangsters prove the least of his worries, as he is lured into a torture chamber by a sexy B&B owner (Maryam Hassouni).
It’s all very silly, not especially well-written, and any echoes of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece Psycho, clearly an influence, are of the tinny and remote variety.