The Gist: Sarah Manvel's 2024 Cinema Year

I asked author Sarah Manvel to contribute a piece of her film writing to our Christmas Cracker round up because I have spent the year enjoying reading a person who seems interested in criticism of film. It is very hard to find someone who writes criticism on movies, as opposed to recaps of what happened or bean-counting descriptions of box-office returns. But it's not quite impossible yet.

by Sarah Manvel

No Sex Please, We're Watching

There’s been a recent cultural shift in the Hollywood blockbuster. Where once the big finale would always involve a kiss, this is no longer the case. This shift (or lack of) began in 2016, when Hollywood said ‘global’ audiences wanted Matt Damon to kiss nobody, not even Pedro Pascal, in The Great Wall, and that a hug was sufficient at the end of Rogue One. Now the responsibility for our smooch-free movies seems to belong with a younger generation. So uncomfortable are the youths with sex stuff onscreen that Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell had to content themselves with smiling at the end of this year’s Twisters.

Considering both Miss Edgar-Jones and Mr Powell have a smoking-hot reputation thanks to their respective bold work in Normal People and Hit Man (which had film festival crowds literally bursting into applause), you’d think audiences would like to see what they could do together. But right now at the cineplex it’s clear the all-powerful young-adult market is generally uncomfortable with snogging, much less anything else. Part of this is a hangover from the lonely isolation of lockdowns. Following that we’re seeing some long-overdue social change about power dynamics and unwanted physical contact, but this protectionism is sometimes extended into seeing physical contact between other people. Concern for safety and consent is adorable and appreciated. But when this extends to good-looking actors briefly locking lips, it can morph into puritanism.

There’s a great case to be made for the importance of all kinds of hot stuff onscreen. When my sister was at uni in France, her host family covered the kids’ eyes at even the mildest violence on television. Yet whenever there was nudity and sex scenes, the children were encouraged to watch and ask questions. My shocked sister was told it was important to learn first that all bodies are normal and then how to give and receive pleasure with them. Whereas violence – taking pleasure in hurting others – was the worst thing of all, never to be tolerated in life or in art.

I never met this family but they changed my thinking. After all, how are people disturbed by seeing someone kiss going to get the courage to kiss someone themselves, much less be any good at it? And when all depictions of physical affection are driven out of the mainstream and into pornography, doesn’t that cause more problems than it solves?

Queering Bond

Daniel Craig’s recent courage has been obvious. Back in October 2005, the announcement that he would play James Bond set off a furore (A blond? Playing Bond? My stars!) despite his pre-Bond work demonstrating a radioactive attractiveness perfect for an idealised spy. Unfortunately the straightjacket of the part, which largely is to embody a specific idea of masculinity in the service of sophomoric romantic ambitions wrapped in a cartoonish Union Jack, curdled his interest in acting.

This is a tragedy most apparent when watching Casino Royale, which has aged like fine wine. An extraordinarily vicious and visceral performance was there right out of the gate for audiences unprepared for how he took the character back to basics. Decades of Roger Moore’s winks to the camera and Pierce Brosnan’s politely stylised action meant audiences had forgotten that an assassin, state-sponsored or not, is tragic, not comic.

Since No Time to Die’s release in 2021 Craig has been acting like a man reborn, or at least one determined to smash stereotypes of what makes a ‘real man,’ starting by exclusively playing homosexuals. In Rian Johnson’s gentleman detective movies, 2019’s Knives Out and its 2022 sequel, Glass Onion, Craig is the preening ‘confirmed bachelor’ Benoit Blanc, unravelling ludicrously complicated crimes with his mind and a respected female assistant instead of his body. A third instalment is in the works, too.

Now, in the recently released Queer, Craig plays a version of real-life writer-slash-junkie-slash-manslaughterer William S. Burroughs looking for love and enlightenment in all the grossest places. The scene where he waits for the heroin to take hold is the single best thing Craig has ever done, a complete lesson in pain and heartbreak. The rest of Queer is a hallucinatory mess, but there’s no such missteps in Craig’s performance as a needy, demanding, damaged man desperately trying to escape the prison of his self. It’s a gruesome triumph. Let’s hope that Craig continues to find a way back to parts which allow him to demonstrate all the nuances of his enormous talent as he pleases. 

But is it a Better York?

How women’s horizons have expanded in movies is also pleasing, even when imagination about women’s lives has its limits, such as the overused trope of a New York City setting. But it’s always been a hell of a town. 2015’s Brooklyn focused on an Irish woman (played by Saoirse Ronan) in the 1950s building a new life for herself guess where because there was no work for her at home. But when suddenly life in Enniscorthy, complete with a fella, becomes an option, she has to decide if she wants to choose the place that made her choose in the first place.

2023’s Past Lives told a similar female-immigrant story but one more strongly rooted in New York. There a Korean woman, Nora (Greta Lee), has a happy career and a happier marriage with an American before her childhood sweetheart comes from Seoul for a visit. It becomes clear the two kids in love remain in love despite their vast differences as adults. Nora has already made her choices, but naturally wonders what if. And of course her husband from her chosen culture will never understand her the way someone from her home culture does. Which understanding is better? And is this a question that can be answered?

Two movies from this year similarly explored the life choices of daughters of immigrants in Brooklyn, one to huge success and the other not so much. Palme d’Or-winning Anora brought a class-based twist to its tale of heedless marriage between a Russian-American stripper (Ani, played by Mikey Madison) and an immature but unimaginably wealthy young Russian man. As things go sour there’s the unignorable awareness of everything money can buy, and Russian superstar Yura Borisov has made an international name for himself as the man who understands Ani’s value when no one else does. 

But this year’s Tendaberry, written and directed by Haley Elizabeth Anderson and which has not been picked up for distribution despite playing at Sundance, does a more emotional job of showing one young working-class woman in Brooklyn navigating her own way. A broke Dominican-American woman (Kota Johan) cannot join her Ukrainian boyfriend when he must return to Kyiv. She spends her time alone watching the video diaries of Nelson Sullivan, a real person who documented his life in 80s New York with a camcorder, new tech at the time, before he died of AIDS. Studying how he lived and moved is how she realises she must also build her own unique city, leading to an end of life-affirming power to rival Anora’s. In a time when audiences are hungry for emotional guidance, it’s shocking no one has taken a chance on Tendaberry. Watch it somehow, and you’ll also feel your own personal culture shift around you.