Foreign Language Film 7: Jean de Florette & Manon des Sources (France, 1986)

Plot intro

A French provincial farm-owner, Cesar “Le Papet” Soubeyran (Yves Montand) and his nephew, Ugolin (Daniel Auteuil) have their greedy little eyes on getting hold of a local farm, where Ugolin can start his business of growing and selling carnations. They accidentally murder the owner of the farm land, and block off the farm’s natural water-supply in the hope that the farm will be sold off to them at a cheap price. However, the farm is inherited by a city-dwelling, tax-collector hunchback named Jean Cadoret (or “Jean de Florette”) who hopes that his new-found rural life will bring peace and a stronger connection to nature. But Papet and Ugolin have no intention of telling him about the blocked water supply, as they hope to secretly drive Jean off the land. Their plans lead to horrific tragedy, both for Jean and for them…

Paul says

These films are comparable to Call Me By Your Name in that the director spends a huge amount of time evoking the life and climate of the setting. All throughout both films (which are better viewed as one 4-hour epic), you can feel the heat radiating off the dying crops, the sweat of Jean and his family as they desperately hike several times a day for water, the lethargy and slowness of life in these cut-off, minuscule villages who perceive the city as a far-away, fantastical place full of snobbish imbeciles. It’s no wonder that Jean de Florette is credited with improving tourism to rural France (although, bearing in mind the nefarious actions of its inhabitants, I can’t think why!)

Not only are they beautiful to look at, but beautifully acted and written. Doug is right that the first film is slower, less eventful, and perhaps less satisfying from a cathartic perspective. But that’s why it is necessary to watch the second film almost immediately afterwards, because it is essentially a series of “microphone drop” moments in which the quiet, drama-free, self-satisfied life of these hostile villagers comes crumbling around them. 

The whole thing works like a Greek tragedy, with Papet being the Agamemnon/Oedipus/Hippolytus of the tale. His downfall is entirely due to his own greed, pride and dedication to Ugolin’s inheritance. And bloody hell, what a downfall he has! Not only is he publicly shamed and shunned by the entire village, he also loses his only heir and ally. And just when you thought that was bad, in walks a blind old lady who drops the sort of revelations that only Cassandra, the blind ancient Greek prophetess, could have revealed. It even involves lost letters, and decades-old secrets, just like any of the best Greek tragedies. Note to self: if a blind old lady with dark secrets ever comes to Streatham, I’m moving out.

It’s pretty dramatic stuff, and after a few gins we were fully, and vocally, involved in events before us. Hopefully our neighbours don’t think we’re exacting revenge on some poor peasant farmers. 

Not much else remains to be said other than I highly recommend a Sunday afternoon where you watch both these film back-to-back, and I don’t care what your thoughts are on miserable, slow-moving French dramas. The lethargy of the first half perfectly juxtaposes the action of the second, as it shows how the slowness and “heads down, no drama” philosophy of provincial French life leads to utter devastation when your morals and conscience slip away. 

And Yves Montand gives one of the best performances I’ve ever seen in cinema. Formidable!

Highlight

The blind old lady’s big scene towards the end. Prepare thyself for a twist you won’t see coming.

Lowlight

Perhaps the first film could do with some editing. But I still think it’s exquisite.

Mark

10/10

  

Doug says

Split across two films, it’s important to note that this is definitely one work, and should be seen ideally in one evening. That’s because Jean de Florette is not particularly great, and Manon des Sources is triumphant. 

But the reason Florette is not brilliant is that it’s slowly telling you the backstory that you need to understand in order to fully access Manon. It establishes the villains, and shows you to what extent they are prepared to go in the name of something actually pretty trivial. You need it because you need to go in to Manon, gunning for their downfall. I kept thinking of Kill Bill and how during that revenge story, Tarantino utilises flashbacks to show how The Bride has been abused, and why her revenge is necessary. 

Perhaps if they made this story today, they’d do the same. But there’s actually something to be said for the slower route. I didn’t particularly enjoy Florette because there’s one plot and it’s pretty simple to follow: how the two greedy farmers bring down Jean without wavering. I’m not a massive Gerard Depardieu fan and here he turns in a good but not particularly memorable performance. From the get-go, these films belong to Daniel Auteuil as the snivelling, obsequious Ugolin who just wants to grow flowers and Yves Montand as Le Papet, the manipulative old patriarch desperate to win at any cost. Auteuil and Montand give fantastic performances, obsessing over Jean and slowly turning everyone against him. But it’s a story that could be told in 45 minutes and while the beautiful French scenery is lovely to watch, I found myself a little bored. 

It’s the final moments of Florette that grab you and establish a new protagonist, and within minutes of Manon, it’s clear that this is the real story. Florette is a long, necessary prologue and once you’re into the actual film, it’s tremendous. How the now adult Manon avenges herself upon the villagers who turned a blind eye to her father’s struggle is magnificent, and Auteuil does fantastic work as Ugolin in love, now obsessed with Manon to the extent that he sews her abandoned hair-ribbon to his chest (we actually could not watch this scene, it’s too realistically done). It’s also full of catharsis - when the villagers realise that Jean de Florette had been descended from their village and was one of them, their guilt and horror is palpable. There’s a tremendous scene when the water runs out, where a farmer sets upon the town council, smashing plaster busts with his staff. This whole film is full of destruction - but mostly positive - smashing the blindness and webs of lies carefully constructed in Florette.

The strongest element of Manon though is the downfall of the horrendous Le Papet. Yves Montand doesn’t pull any punches. Montand is considered one of the great French actors, with a forty-five year career in cinema, dying in 1991. Here he proves it. It’s a towering performance, with moments of insiduous evil, and then a slowly unfolding horror at what he has done and the unexpected consequences. In a scene when Manon confronts him in front of the villagers, he scrambles defiantly, accusing everyone but himself, while later after Ugolin kills himself, he becomes shrunken, unable to look anyone in the eye or even move. But the narrative isn’t done yet, and thanks to Florette, nor are the audience. We are gunning for his downfall the entire film, and perhaps the length of Florette is necessary to ensure we never start to pity him. This is an evil man, and yet the shock of the film’s final punch left me open-mouthed for ten minutes after. It’s a brilliant piece of storytelling and pulls the rug from under the viewer, despite having been dropping hints throughout. We are left shocked, but appeased. Try as you might — the film says — but evil deeds will reap their rightful rewards. 

Highlight

The scene when Manon turns on Le Papet in front of the villagers, and then a poacher with useful information chimes in is fabulous. Montand is at his scrambling best, Auteil shows a man in love beginning to realise with horror that he’s messed up his own chances at happiness, the villagers suddenly clock their own complicity in Jean’s death and Emmanuelle Béart as Manon delivers the anger that we have been craving since the end of Florette. Marvellous drama. 

Lowlight

While I understand that Jean de Florette is essential for Manon des Sources to work, I still feel it could have been a bit more engaging. It does great work for the French Tourist Board though. 

Mark

9/10 

71. Shakespeare in Love (1998)

Plot Intro

Struggling playwright, William Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes), has hit writer’s block. But his theatre agent, Philip Henslowe (Geoffrey Rush), is putting a lot of pressure on Shakespeare, because debt collectors are after Henslowe. So Shakespeare starts to write and rehearse an incomplete play about two star-crossed lovers in a tragic romance. Little does he know, that a young, upper-class woman, Viola de Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow) has disguised herself as a boy to perform as Romeo, and she and Shakespeare start to fall in love themselves.

Doug says...

A slightly unexpected winner, Shakespeare in Love beat Saving Private Ryan and Everything is Beautiful, and delivers a well-told fiction about how a dashing young Shakespeare once had an affair with a noble lady — which in fairness could be entirely true given the stories of Elizabethan playwrights and their torrid love-lives. Like last week’s Titanic, this is a film from my childhood and again I was slightly wary of approaching.

And unfortunately in this instance, time hasn’t been as kind. Shakespeare in Love hasn’t aged quite as well, and although the clever aspects that writer Tom Stoppard imbues it with (it has a five act structure, as do all Elizabethan plays; it plays with cross-dressing and provides entertainment of both high wit and crude roughness etc. etc.) are good, I found myself finding it thinner and a bit more trite that I remembered. 

The main issue is that I can’t really get behind either of the lead performances. Paltrow does a decent job showing a love for the theatre and a desire to be free of the social norms that bind her but her infatuation with Fiennes’ Shakespeare isn’t particularly engaging or enthralling. Fiennes is just painfully thin. It’s particularly noticeable next to Titanic where Kate Winslet & Leonardo DiCaprio deliver brilliant performances alight with crackling chemistry. This feels like a wash out. 

I think this is a film where the ‘80s love of melodrama is tying up with the ‘90s overdone scripts and while it’s by no means a car-crash, it doesn’t result in a film that particularly rises above average. Judi Dench storms onto the screen and although it’s a testament to her talent, it’s also slightly telling that in twelve minutes, she so dominates the film that she nabbed an Oscar. 

Highlight 

The final shot of a fictional Viola escaping a shipwreck to walk the beaches of an unknown land is stunning, and made me wish the film had really been an adaptation of Twelfth Night. 

Lowlight

The two leads lack a certain something and as their fame fades (Paltrow now sells weird non-approved health stuff and Fiennes has all but disappeared), the thinness of their on-screen chemistry is suddenly more obvious than ever. 

Mark 

5/10

Paul says...

Unlike Doug, Shakespeare in Love is a film that, for me, has displayed more depth, complexity and thought on repeated viewings throughout my life. My first viewing came before I had a strong knowledge of Shakespeare, and so I enjoyed it as a lively love story across class boundaries. As Shakespeare’s plays and words have become clearer to me over the years, the cleverness of Shakespeare in Love has become more and more pertinent, making it one of the most meta-theatrical and intelligent pieces to have ever won Best Picture. It’s essentially a film that is written in the style of a Shakespearean play, about the production of a Shakespeare play, involving a romance that parallels that very Shakespeare play.

Let me explain… I lost count of the number of Shakespearean tropes and references that writers Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard have managed to segue into the action, and most of my enjoyment comes from spotting them. There’s obvious ones such as Viola being based on her gender-bending namesake in Twelfth Night and having the characteristics of other Shakespearean heroines such as Rosalind, Juliet, Portia, Perdita and Miranda. There’s a play-within-a-play, and it skilfully augments and mirrors the action of the film, as well as showing the potential ending for our lovers should their romance take a more tragic turn. There’s the serious main players in the action, as well as a troop of “Mechanicals” who provide comic interludes and there’s even an amusing Nurse.

But there are more subtle, structural references thrown in for the more intense Shakespeare readers. The film opens with a scene between subsidiary characters, while the title character doesn’t appear until the second or third scene- something which Shakespeare did more often than one might think. The very language used by the characters, especially Viola who proves to be the most poetic and soliloquy-loving, is heavy on iambic pentameter-esque-ness (I literally couldn’t think of the right noun here). And the film concludes with the most high-ranking character (in this case, Judi Dench’s inimitable Queen Elizabeth I) sorting out all of the squabbling underlings’ meagre troubles.

Finally, most interesting of all, the ending is not the happy, euphoric one that we expect. Viola and Shakespeare never make it together, and Viola must embark to the Americas with a deeply unpleasant husband (Colin Firth shaking off his Mr Darcy-in-the-pond image). Many Shakespearean comedies end with marriage, but some of these marriages are famously problematic- see A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale for prime examples of this. 

It’s true that the love story itself has become a little outdated over the last 20 years. Gwyneth’s lengthy speeches on the true nature of love become tedious, and remind you that Shakespearean comedies are not always as funny nor involving as you might think from the most famous of English writers. Modern film-making generally prefers to “show not say” its feelings, with this year’s If Beale Street Could Talk being a good example of how sparse dialogue and imagery can establish the thoughts and themes of the film much more succinctly. 

But what I love most about Shakespeare In Love is its celebration and homage to Shakespearean writing and theatre. It’s written and created by people who “get” the Bard on a level much higher than even the most pretentious of academics, because they see how his language and structures have influenced story-telling even today. Whilst it’s not the most emotional piece, it’s one of the cleverest, and after a long string of 3-hour historical epics, it’s a breath of fresh air.

Highlight

Pretty much all 12 minutes of Judi Dench’s magnanimous screen time.

Lowlight

Some of the love speeches could have been chopped. There’s one in a boat between Viola and Shakespeare that left me cold and disengaged.

Mark

8/10

Bonus Spoof 'Art' Movie Poster That We Found Online

70. Titanic (1997)

Plot Intro

Penniless American Jack Dawson (Leonardo Di Caprio) and upper-class semi-American Rose Dewitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) both board the cruise ship Titanic in Southhampton, 1912. Rose and her mother (Frances Fisher) have been left many debts by the death of Rose’s father, therefore Rose is engaged to marry rich prick, Cal Hockley (Billy Zane). But she hates him, and her lifestyle, and starts falling in love with Jack, despite Cal’s machinations against him. Oh, and the Titanic wallops into an iceberg. 

Paul says...

Oh, we’ve been looking forward to this one for quite some time. There aren’t many films where you can learn history whilst sobbing to a Celine Dion song on repeat. Titanic was a stupendous hit and remains a firm favourite amongst, well, pretty much everyone. It equalised Ben Hur’s record of 11 Oscar wins (a record that will be equalised again by The Lord of the Rings, but has not yet been surpassed). It is the second-highest grossing film of all time before adjusting for inflation, right behind James Cameron’s other colossal hit, Avatar. After adjusting for inflation, it’s the third-highest. It’s arguably one of the biggest, most exhilarating, most emotional Best Picture winners ever.

But is it flawless? No, I wouldn’t say so. But hear me out before you throw your Celine CD’s at me. James Cameron is not known for nuanced films - after all, this is the man who turned Alien and Terminator into action-adventure franchises rather than low-budget stand-alone thrillers. And Titanic suffers from probably the most superficial characterisation I’ve ever seen. Every upper-class person has a well-maintained sneer and says things like “This ship can’t possibly sink” and “That Picasso will amount to nothing”, while every third-class passenger has gained Essential Life Skills from the School of Life, such as right hooks, arm wrestling, chugging pints of Guinness and being nice to people. There is not so much a fine line between good and bad people, more like an unbreakable Berlin Wall. And the dire script is peppered with atrocious lines - my favourite is Rose’s “I saw the iceberg…and I see it in your eyes”. 

What disguises these horrendous faults, is the acting, especially from Di Caprio and Winslet. Both so young and fresh in 1997, they make their torrid and trite love affair seem natural, spontaneous and adorable, rendering the actual sinking extremely tense and tragic because we genuinely want them to survive and triumph. It’s easy to see why both of them have gone on to have outstanding Oscar-winning careers.

The second half of the film is what obviously won so much well-deserved praise. What I love most about this re-enacted sinking is how many aspects of life on the Titanic are explored. Memorable scenes such as the band playing continuously during the sinking; small scenes in the gym, the engine rooms and the chapel; historical touches such as the death of Captain Smith and Ismay’s controversial escape from death. All of these work together to show a forgotten and sometimes mind-boggling lifestyle with lavish detail. 

Plus the special effects have barely aged over the last 22 years. Cameron does what every great blockbuster of the 90s and early 00’s does- he presents the events not just with a sense of horror but with a sense of awe and wonder too. The film taps into just how huge, devastating and terrifying the sinking of the Titanic was, as we see it through the eyes of the poor victims on board, and the lucky survivors in the lifeboats. 

It’s true that Titanic is a film that won its accolades because, quite frankly, it’s easy viewing. But that doesn’t mean it deserves a low grade. In fact, it deserves a huge amount of praise for its historical research, a storyline that will have the most toxically masculine of people sobbing into their Kleenex, and some of the most memorable and euphoric viewing I’ve had during this entire project.

Highlight

Celine Dion’s key change.

Lowlight

A toss-up between Billy Zane’s sneery, slimey pantomime villain (some subtlety is okay, Mr Cameron!) and the horrendous racial stereotypes that will have Irish and Italian people rolling their eyes. 

Mark

9/10

Doug says...

It’s hard to judge a film like Titanic when it’s already carrying so much emotional weight. This is the first film of this entire project that I have grown up with. It’s like asking me to point out the flaws in Disney’s Aladdin. I simply don’t want to. It is a film I love, and have loved through my childhood, teenage years, and adulthood, and I don’t want to find gaping holes and issues on a closer inspection. 

However, reader, I did it for you. Preparing to watch it again, I readied myself for disappointment, and even distaste. Luckily for me, this is still a wonderful, soaring and momentous piece of cinema that manages to make every moment of its three hours and fifteen minutes count. 

What James Cameron does so deftly is he builds up the romance of Jack and Rose to a point where we want them to succeed, using the class systems that are so prevalent on the Titanic as a backdrop, and then switches it abruptly when the ship hits the iceberg. What’s noticeable is that after spending almost every moment with DiCaprio and Winslet for the first hour, we suddenly go for broad stretches without seeing them at all. The background characters such as the Irish mum with her children and the ‘unsinkable Molly Brown’ get given equal screentime, allowing us to see the disaster’s effects all over the ship and in the lifeboats. 

Cameron enacts this brilliantly. We see the cheerful woman who was dancing in the third class party now clinging bitterly to the back of the ship as it rises up and out of the water, before catching Rose’s eye and letting go, falling to her death. It’s the stuff of theatre directing - ensuring each tiny and large role have their own narrative throughout the piece, so that there’s a sense of reality to it at all times. 

The acting is, as Paul says, superb. But I disagree about the script. Yes there are some ‘90s clunkers, but there’s some great lines in there too. Most of them, however, are delivered by - in my eyes - the strongest actor in there: Gloria Stuart as Old Rose. Stuart is dynamite, serving wry sanguinity with a hint of cheek, and then really hitting every emotional note in her recounting of the disaster. She takes the unsubtle script and imbues it with subtlety - ‘the crash of ’29 hit him hard and he put a pistol in his mouth later that year - or so I read,’ tells you instantly of her removal from the obscene wealth and boredom of those classes. Stuart was nominated for an Oscar and won a host of other trophies for her performance. 

But what I most admire about this film is the way the myths and legends from Titanic are woven together. During the sinking of the ship, so many of the moments that have gone down in legend are brought to life - Benjamin Guggenheim and his valet putting on their dress suits and sipping whiskey while saying ‘we are dressed in our best and prepared to go down like gentlemen’, an officer shooting a passenger and then committing suicide, Ida and Isidor Straus dying together in their bedroom as she would not go without him. Cameron adds in additional ones, giving voice to the previously mute third classes, we see the Irish mum telling her children a fairytale as the water seeps in under the door, and the ill-fated Fabrizio crushed by a falling pillar. To misquote Whitney Houston -  it’s not subtle, but it’s okay. 

Highlight

Stuart’s line-reading of ‘Afterward, the seven hundred people in the boats had nothing to do but wait: wait to die, wait to live, wait for an absolution that would never come’ as the camera slowly fades to images of passengers wrapped in their furs, shell-shocked, bobbing in the pitch-black sea is just Art. 

Lowlight

The romance at the beginning does pall a little in comparison to the full scale of humanity explored in the second half. But Winslet and DiCaprio make it work.

Mark

10/10. An iconic movie. 

69. The English Patient (1996)

Plot Intro

A French-Canadian nurse in WW2 named Hana (Juliette Binoche) is tasked with caring for a dying patient suffering from severe burns after a plane crash (Ralph Fiennes). As they live together in an abandoned Italian monastery, the mysterious patient begins to reveal the story of his injuries, and details his tumultuous romance with a married woman named Katherine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas) while fending off a vengeful spy (Willem Dafoe). 

Doug says...

I came to this without very high expectations, having tried unsuccessfully to plough through the novel a few years ago. The experience of watching it was then made more difficult by the lack of subtitles (why on earth a film made in 1996 doesn’t have subtitles on the DVD is beyond me). So I’d be forgiven for not getting much from this film. 

Except that it is actually a beautiful, powerful, aching work that doesn’t need every line to be heard. That’s right, reader - I loved it. 

The performances are fine, Ralph Fiennes does well as the slightly odd, dashing leading man while Kristin Scott Thomas takes on her usual role as Upper Crust British Lady with aplomb. There’s also strong support from Juliette Binoche (who nabbed best supporting actress for this) and Willem Dafoe as a suspicious hanger-on. I particularly liked Naveen Andrews as Kip who managed to bring real tension to his bomb-defusing scenes. 

But the real success of this film belongs to the direction and cinematography (hence why Anthony Minghella took both Best Director and Best Film). It is ravishing. It recalls previous winner Gandhi and 2019 nominee Roma in how utterly beautiful it is. Minghella takes the ordinary moments and makes them arresting, whether it’s planes flying against the endless dunes of the desert, cars buried in sandstorms, or the flashing lights on a rickety train throwing a nurse’s silhouette into sharp relief. There isn’t a trick missed in seizing the moment. 

It’s noticeable in the way Minghella uses these moments to echo the love-story at the heart of it. As the two lovers grow closer while they’re trapped in the desert, the light from pink emergency flares shimmers across their hopeful faces. In the crucial plane crash, Katherine sits erect in the wreckage, despite the angle of the plane, and then - carried by the Count over the deserts - her scarf flies out behind, caught by the wind. In the present day, Kip uses aerial wires to lift Hana into the height of the church so she can see the frescoes. As she swirls around the paintings, the flare she holds to see flickers and smokes, so we see the joyous Hana in the midsts of paintings, light and smoke. It’s utter theatricality made bespoke for cinema. 

It’s a film of beauty, and it’s just wonderful to watch how Minghella uses the art of cinema to accentuate his points. The flickering painted caves contrast with the steady blue tones of the hotel where they finally sleep together. There are so many images and moments to talk about - but ultimately, it’s easiest just to say this is a work of art. 

Highlight 

I think my ultimate favourite imagery was of the planes flying high. There was such a sense of freedom, always tempered by the clear danger of the desert. 

Lowlight

The final half hour does start to drag, but then again that’s when there’s most dialogue so I felt behind. A second watch on a version with subtitles might change my mind…

Mark 

9/10

Paul says...

For me, The English Patient is an example of melodrama at its most turgid and self-righteous. Yes, reader, unlike Doug, I didn’t like it!

I agree that the film is stunning to look at. The opening shots of the desert in Northern Africa immediately evoked fond memories of Lawrence of Arabia and, indeed, the desert has the same element of menace and danger that David Lean created in the 1962 epic. The cinematography during the scenes in Italy also create feelings of serenity and lethargy that contrast well with the comparative chaos of the flashback scenes. There’s a real sense that the drama and conflict was long ago and far away, and that Almasy, the patient of the title, has finally reached the peaceful end of his twisty-turny road. 

But I struggled with the story. For starters, Almasy and Katherine’s fling is signposted so obviously that they might as well have neon signs above their heads screaming “We’re gonna shag soon!” The first time we meet Katherine, she tells a story from Herodotus about a Queen who is seen naked by a common man. The man then has to kill the King and marry the Queen to save her honour. She narrates this whilst staring wistfully at her husband and her future lover. Ooh, I wonder what could possibly happen?! Tales from ancient history, myth and folklore crop up at other times in the film, and they’re designed to augment the action but their parallels with the film’s events are so blindingly stark that it’s almost laughable. 

The storyline is not just predictable, it’s downright simple. Far too simple for a film that steers dangerously close to surpassing 2.5 hours. The film sets up a degree of mystery around the patient suffering from memory loss, gradually remembering the events that led him to this point, but the crux of it all turns out to be his affair with Katherine. There are side-plots but, for me, they didn’t benefit the main action. For example, Hana’s relationship with Kip (played by the dishy Naveen Andrews who readers may recognise as Syed from Lost) is sweet but inconsequential. And I did not get the significance of Willem Dafoe’s character. Caravaggio enters the action convinced that Almasy is responsible for his capture and torture by Nazis, but it seemed obvious to me that this is not the case. And when Almasy does describe the truth of what happened, Caravaggio’s accusations aren’t revisited. Nor is his character really completed. I still don’t quite get what his role was meant to be in the action.

Despite these, I concede to the fact that The English Patient has some lovely acting. Fiennes is as intense and attractive in a “I really fancy him but I shouldn’t” way as he was in Schindler’s List; Juliette Binoche is very engaging (she nabbed Best Supporting Actress for this); and the ever-charismatic Kristin Scott Thomas really knows how to dominate a scene. 

But this wasn’t enough to counteract what was, for me, an overlong and un-engaging tale with the sort of huge landscapes and tragic deaths that '90s audiences evidently lived for. Usually I’m a sucker for films such as these but, and I never thought I’d say this, Braveheart did it better.

Highlight

The scene in which Kip (Naveen Andrews) is desperately trying to defuse a bomb whilst a tank full of drunk, revelling soldiers runs the risk of setting the bomb off is pretty terrifying. My heart skipped a few beats at that point.

Lowlight

Willem Dafoe’s entire storyline needed more relevance to the central plot. Or written out entirely.

Mark

3/10