5 things to watch this weekend – 11 to 13 November
Country-house intrigue, hall-of-mirrors metafiction and an animated quest – what are you watching this weekend?
No Bears (2022)
Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide, including BFI Southbank
Made just prior to his imprisonment on jumped up charges by Iranian authorities in July, No Bears is Jafar Panahi’s latest stunning meta-drama – a film that continually skips over the barrier between fact and fiction, reality and film, like it’s no barrier at all. Panahi himself plays a filmmaker called Jafar Panahi who, to avoid state interference, is shooting his latest project just over the Turkish border. But problems arise when the local community suspect Panahi may have inadvertently captured a young couple’s indiscreet moment in the background of one of his photos. No Bears’ hall-of-mirrors self-reflexivity is dazzling to behold, but it’s rooted in a very real portrait of the artist living with political oppression.
The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982)
Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide, including BFI Southbank
Forty years after it became an unexpected crossover hit with audiences, Peter Greenaway’s ludic mystery The Draughtsman’s Contract returns to cinemas in a new BFI remastering. Fresh from Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Anthony Higgins plays the 17th-century draughtsman whose commission to undertake landscape drawings of a country house leads him into complicated intrigue and danger. Greenaway’s precise world of decadence and deceit is mapped out in shots of careful symmetry and to a classic score by Michael Nyman that updates Purcell themes with minimalist repetitions. It’s witty, cerebral but also huge fun – one of the pinnacles of British cinema of the 1980s.
The Secret of Kells (2009)
Where’s it on? Film 4, Saturday, 12.50pm
As the latest film from Cartoon Saloon, My Father’s Dragon, lands on Netflix, here’s an opportunity to see the film that made the Irish animation house’s reputation. With exquisite hand-drawn animation that evokes illuminated manuscripts and stained glass windows, it sends us back to pre-medieval Ireland in the 9th century – a time of Viking invasions and Celtic mythology. The story is a quest narrative involving a young apprentice in a monastic scriptorium and his efforts to finish the sacred manuscript known as the Book of Kells. Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey’s film began their ‘Irish folklore trilogy’, later completed by Song of the Sea (2014) and Wolfwalkers (2020).
The Metamorphosis of Birds (2020)
Where’s it on? Netflix and Mubi
If the Netflix algorithm is worth its salt, it should serve up this gleaming jewel from Portuguese filmmaker Catarina Vasconcelos – an unexpected addition to the streamer this week. Shot on 16mm, it’s a kind of fictionalised memoir about her own family, particularly her grandparents and late mother. What’s unique is its form. Vasconcelos’s film comprises a succession of carefully composed, painterly, static shots: of nature, objects, faces. The effect is something like a scrapbook, or photo album, touched with motion. Its intimate lyricism won’t be for everyone, but this is diaristic cinema, bracing in its sense of beauty and feeling.
Both Sides of the Blade (2022)
Where’s it on? BFI Player
Those great faces of French cinema, Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lindon, play a loving couple whose relationship hits turbulence in this bruising, tense romantic drama from Claire Denis. The trouble starts when Binoche’s Sara bumps into an ex-flame (Grégoire Colin) on the street and can’t get him out of her head. The way Denis makes films, we feel the rupture too – the queasy longing that’s set to destroy happiness. As ever, her camera is close and intimate – this is a relationship drama played for anxious immediacy; a kind of sensory seasickness. It’s another of her frank, unimpeded explorations of middle-age sexuality, deservingly winning her best director at Berlin earlier this year.
