Just love, actually

Michael Shamash reviews the 52nd London Film Festival

This year’s London Film Festival produced lean pickings when it came to depicting disability and impairment. There was only one film where disability was the central theme, the Slovakian film, Blind Loves.

Director Juraj Lebotsky examines the emotional worlds of four characters trying to find love. The film explores the complexity of relationships and how that is affected by being blind.

The affair between a Roma gypsy and his girlfriend movingly reveals how class, race and disability alter companionship. A young girl, Zuzana, searches the Internet for love, hoping to avoid revealing her blindness.

This is a delicate work, using both documentary and performance to show the universal pitfalls of loving and the barriers visually-impaired people face in finding fulfilment.

Other than this, disability only featured in films as a secondary issue. The British film Better Things delves into the underside of rural life: the poverty, isolation, illness and drug-taking. Though beautifully shot, its deliberately enigmatic tone is rather cold and distancing. The lack of engagement stops you caring.

Two Italian films look at topics that disabled people and those closest to them have to face daily, namely caring and bereavement. The charming Mid-August Lunch, directed by Gianni di Gregorio, tells the tale of a middle-aged man, living with his mother, who also has to care for and feed the mothers of other people connected to him. It has a very positive portrayal of older women and the food is truly mouth-watering.

Two disappointments were the French A Christmas Tale and the Franco-Belgian Johnny Mad Dog. A Christmas Tale centred on the cancer of an eccentric family’s matriarch and was full of tortured souls making “profound” utterances about life’s futility while eating sumptuous meals in elegant houses. Despite superb acting, including the wonderful Catherine Deneuve in the lead role, it seemed far too smug and far too long.

Johnny Mad Dog was a graphic realisation of child soldiers at war in an unnamed country. The depictions of war in a poor country and of disability were frighteningly realistic but despite a fantastic central performance by Christopher Minie as Johnny Mad Dog, the sheer violence numbed and became repetitive.

Finally, let me make two recommendations. Synecdoche, New York, directed by Charlie Kaufman, was a bold delight. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Caden Conrad, an aging, infirm playwright who is given a grant that he uses to represent his life through a monstrous set in a giant warehouse. Although centred on the awareness of mortality, it is uplifting and visually stunning.

On a darker note, After­school is a low-budget film dissecting the violence in American schools. Rob, a young man with emotional difficulties, films a tragedy that affects the entire school. Directed by Antonio Campos, using various experimental techniques, it is a disturbing but enthralling take on a difficult subject.