BRIAN VINER reviews Come As You Are 

Come As You Are (VOD platforms, including Curzon Home Cinema)

Rating:

Verdict: Bold and warm-hearted

Saint Frances (opening in cinemas next week, 15)

Rating:

Verdict: Hugely assured debut

Arkansas (VOD platforms, 15)

Rating:

Verdict: Southern fried hokum

The spectre of political correctness, or ‘wokeness’ as it seems to be called these days, looms over Come As You Are.

It’s a really engaging, bittersweet comedy about three American men, all with major physical disabilities, intent on losing their virginity.

Early in the film, there’s a moment when one of them, 35-year-old Mo (Ravi Patel), gets on a bus.

Mo is almost totally blind. ‘You have lovely hair,’ he says to a fellow passenger with flowing blond locks.

The passenger, who also sports a beard, grunts his thanks. We don’t see Mo’s reaction on learning that it’s a big hairy bloke he’s just complimented, it’s just a fleeting visual gag which reminded me of Mr Magoo, the TV cartoon character conceived in an age of, let’s say, blunter sensibilities.

So this is a daring film, not least because its three disabled characters are all played by able-bodied actors.

There have duly been a few predictable howls of outrage but, if it’s not too insensitive a metaphor, let them fall on deaf ears.

Come As You Are is terrific and compassionate, and does everything it is meant to do. It amuses, moves, and even enlightens, reminding us of what really should be imprinted on our souls: that people with physical impairments, however profound, have the same urges, hang-ups and frailties as everyone else.

It’s a remake of a 2011 Belgian film called Hasta La Vista, which was itself inspired by the real-life experiences of one Asta Philpot, from Leeds.

Here, spiky, belligerent Scotty (Grant Rosenmeyer) and more amiable, likeable Matt (Hayden Szeto), both paralysed and wheelchair-bound, set out with Mo from Colorado, heading for Montreal in Canada where Scotty has heard there’s a brothel catering for special-needs customers.

Two of them decide against telling their parents, who are their primary carers. After all, it’s not easy for any man to tell his mother he’s off on an epic cross-country trip to visit a prostitute. But inevitably, there are terrible ructions at home.

Of course, they can’t drive themselves (although in one very funny sequence, they do) so they hire a woman, Sam (Gabourey Sidibe), with a van. I won’t be provocative and suggest that the three men are all perfectly cast, but Sidibe (still best-known for the 2009 film Precious) certainly is. She’s wonderful. So, in a lesser part as Scotty’s mother, is the ever-excellent Janeane Garofalo.

Come As You Are at times treads a fine line between warmth and mawkishness, but director Richard Wong and screenwriter Erik Linthorst deserve great credit, along with the actors, for keeping it on the right side of that equation.

It’s a film with enormous heart.

The same is so of Saint Frances, an edgy, keenly observed comedy with echoes of last year’s Brittany Runs A Marathon, and, coincidentally, of Noah Baumbach’s 2012 movie Frances Ha.

As in those films, the protagonist here is a bright, attractive woman who is mired in something of an existential crisis. Bridget (beautifully played by Kelly O’Sullivan, who also wrote the screenplay) is 34 and feeling decidedly unfulfilled.

Only when she gives up her job as a waitress to work as a nanny to precocious six-year-old Frances, known as Franny (the hugely impressive Ramona Edith Williams), does she slowly, hesitantly, begin to work out her priorities in life.

The film marks O’Sullivan’s screenwriting debut, and budgets were so tight that the first-time director is her partner Alex Thompson, hired to save money.

Happily, he does a first-class job too, on a film that tackles portentous subjects such as abortion, infidelity, religious faith and postnatal depression with considerable wit and charm.

Saint Frances could be accused of having a feminist agenda, and of meticulously ticking ‘diversity’ and ‘issue’ boxes.

For example, Franny is mixed-race, and one of her lesbian parents is in the throes of what is unkindly classified as a geriatric pregnancy.

In fact, there are more right-on storylines in this film than in an entire year of EastEnders episodes. But instead of being weighed down by them, it bears them lightly, with a sense of fun.

For both O’Sullivan and Thompson, this is a remarkably assured and accomplished debut.

As a general, if entirely arbitrary, rule, movies containing the name of a U.S. state in the title tend to be worth seeing. I’m thinking of Nebraska, Raising Arizona, Mississippi Burning, The Florida Project and of course Oklahoma!

Well, Arkansas is an exception. Written, directed by and starring Clark Duke and based on the 2008 novel of the same name by John Brandon, it’s the ‘quirky’ story of drug-runners in the Deep South.

But the quirkiness is so forced, the violence so strained, the dialogue so determinedly offbeat, that by the end you feel as if you’ve sat through the Quentin Tarantino module of a film-school project.

The quality of the cast can’t be faulted — Liam Hemsworth, Vince Vaughn, John Malkovich — although from Malkovich, in particular, it’s not so much a performance as a barrel-load of tics.

A real disappointment.

Sexy housewife … and an urchin who sues his parents 

Over the past few months, I have listed my favourite English-language films and documentaries. Now it’s the turn of foreign-language pictures.

I’m restricting myself to 20 favourites, listed in reverse order with five this week and the remainder to come.

As ever, please let me have your feedback, either by post or at film [email protected].

20 Babette’s Feast (1987)

Karen Blixen, more famous for her memoir Out Of Africa, wrote the short story from which this poignantly charming Danish film was adapted. 

It’s about a French housekeeper who cooks a sumptuous banquet, spicing up the austere lives of two elderly sisters and their fellow villagers in 19th-century Denmark.

19 Belle De Jour (1967)

Catherine Deneuve is at her most beguilingly sexy in Luis Bunuel’s singular and daringly erotic (for its time) tale of a bored Parisian housewife who was apparently abused as a child and starts spending her afternoons as a high- class prostitute.

18 Leviathan (2014)

I’d challenge anyone not to be captivated by this powerful Russian film, about everyday life in a remote fishing village, which is fuelled by petty corruption, the Russian Orthodox Church and vodka. Especially vodka.

There’s a grandeur about Andrey Zvyagintsev’s film that reminds me of David Lean’s epics, but also some glorious comic touches.

17 Pather Panchali (1955)

Sixty-five years old this year and shot in black and white, yet evergreen, this extraordinary film is the first of Indian director Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy, and tells the story of a young village boy growing up in rural poverty. The two later films follow Apu into manhood, and they’re nearly as good.

16 Capernaum (2018)

Different time, different country, but in striking ways similar to Pather Panchali, Nadine Labaki’s mesmerising, partly improvised film is set in Beirut, where a resourceful street urchin sues his parents for bringing him into such a miserable world. It’s heart-rending but uplifting.