Film n. 18: Red Road

American Honey

Winner of an Oscar for Best Short Movie (Wasp) in 2003 and winner of no less than THREE Jury Prizes at the Cannes Film Festival of 2006, 2009 and 2016, British director Andrea Arnold established herself in these last 10 years as one of the most interesting voices of contemporary cinema.
Zazie has been a huge fan of her work since Arnold’s amazing first feature length, Red Road, a gloomy and intense story set in Glasgow. After the exploit of Fish Tank (with a still-not-so-famous Michael Fassbender), and a modern transposition of British classic Wuthering Heights (my least favourite of her movies, I have to confess), Arnold has just set the Croisette on fire with her magnificent latest work: American Honey.

Andrea Arnold on the Red Carpet at the last Cannes Film Festival

In the bleak parking lot of an American suburban city, a girl (Star) and two children (her brother and sister) are searching for something to eat in a garbage bin.
A big van full of boys and girls (having more or less Star’s age) arrives in the parking lot: they look like a gang, even if not a bad one, and they seem to have a leader, a young man called Jake. After a short conversation with Star, he suggests the girl to join the group and work with them: they sell magazines door to door travelling through the whole Midwest.
Star, who’s got nothing in life and a family better to forget, decides to embark in this journey. She will meet all sorts of people, she will see many (awful) places, she will get to know the other guys and girls, she will have to deal with Krystal, their pitiless and scary boss, and she will fall in love with Jake. Basically, she will grow old. 

What a wonderful thing when a movie is able to transport you into a parallel world where the only things that count are the images you’re watching on the screen. What a powerful force when a movie tells you something that couldn’t be more far away from your day-by-day life and yet it is able to shake you completely and to bewitch you. It is the sensation that I personally love most in life and in movies and, even if road movies are not my cup of tea (I didn’t even like reading On the Road when I was young), American Honey has been like a giant wave - the film is almost 3 hours long - that overwhelmed me at 11 am on a rainy Sunday morning.  
Much more than a sociological essay on American youth, this film lets you perfectly understand what it means to be 20something nowadays in the US with no family, no education and no money. The group of youngster Star is living with is a phenomenal group of people: from the shy girl obsessed with Darth Vader to the fat girl singing all the Rihanna songs, these boys and girls cling to your heart from the very beginning and don’t let you go. 
The three characters who invade the screen, though, are the one of Krystal, the chilly, heartless and dollars driven manager of this weird business (amazingly played by Riley Keough, Elvis Presley’s grandchild), the one of “super salesman” Jake, a dangerous mix of a child and a cheeky bastard (the best role that controversial actor Shia LaBeouf has ever had) and, of course, the one of Star, The Real Star of this movie, a force of nature, a wild, smart, beautiful, fearless, rebellious girl who goes through life at full speed and without any filter. Newcomer Sasha Lane is simply astonishing in a role that could easily be the one of a life-time.

Star (Sasha Lane) at the Cannes Film Festival

Andrea Arnold’s camera follows everybody with a lightness of touch, almost a non-presence, so discreet and yet so essential, that can only be considered a blessing for the movie. There is no moral judgement, no sociological intent, and no heavy explanations. Just a vital flow that submerges the audience and for which I was personally very grateful.
Music is a fundamental part of the movie: all these girls and boys live through the music they’re listening to (even the movie title is a song title). If you didn’t see the Red Carpet of the cast at the Cannes Film Festival I strongly recommend you to watch it: they didn’t walk, they danced the whole time on one of the songs movie: Choices (Yup) by E-40. And the one who got really wild is Robbie Ryan, the cinematographer of all Arnold's movies but also the one of many Ken Loach movies:

I didn’t see all the movies of the competition but I believe American Honey could have easily been a Palme D’Or. 
For the second time in cinema history, we could have had a woman winning this award. 
I think it is about time, because more and more movies made by women are simply incredible. 
And this is one of those.
So, please, when this movie will be out, go and see it: it could make a difference.
The one women are still struggling to achieve.

The cinema of Andrea Arnold

How many special movies do you have the chance to see, every year?

I mean, very special ones, movies able to change your perspective on something, able to move something deep inside you, to leave you breathless and speechless? Not many, as far as I’m concerned.

In these last years, I’ve seen two movies by the same film maker that had such a big impact on me and I’m very happy to write that the man behind the camera is… well, a woman.

Her name is Andrea Arnold.

Born in England in 1961, Arnold won an Oscar in 2003 for her short movie Wasp. She wrote and directed her first feature film, Red Road, in 2006 (winner of the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and part of the Advance Party project created by Lars Von Trier) and this year she’s been back with Fish Tank (winning again the same prize at the same Film Festival).

Arnold’s stories are very bleak. They are set in bleak places around UK and they talk about bleak people: not happy, not rich, not particularly beautiful and very often traumatised by some not-very-funny event.

So, I know what you’re thinking right now: why on earth Zazie is telling us to go and see such depressing movies? Well, it is because these movies are not depressing, are just great.

Red Road tells the story of Jackie, a Glaswegian CCTV operator, a lonely and sad woman in her 30s who spends her life watching other people’s lives through the monitors, until the day she catches a glimpse of a man and this seems, somehow, to change her life dramatically. I’m not going to tell you who this man is or why he is so important for Jackie: if this movie’s atmosphere is so fascinating, it is mainly due to this mystery. You don’t know anything about it, you desperately try to understand why she is doing what she is doing, and you’ll be aware of that just towards the end. Red Road is a very dark and very slow movie but there is a fire burning inside it, and you can feel it since the beginning. This woman seems dead, inside, but she is not. You are touched by her fragility, fascinated by her willing to pursue her idea (wherever this will lead her) and when you finally find out what’s going on, you just want to cry for the rest of the movie. In Red Road there is one of the strongest and most beautiful sex scenes I’ve ever seen on screen and, I know half of the population will disagree with me, but I think this is because there’s a woman behind the camera. Ok, I wrote it. And I take full responsibility for that.

 The main character of Fish Tank is, once again, a woman: Mia is a teenager living with her single mother and a younger sister in a dingy housing estate somewhere in the south of England. The only thing she really enjoys in life is to dance all alone on hip-hop tunes. At school she is a disaster and her relationship with the rest of the world is quite dramatic: no friends (her bad temper and bad manners don’t help) and no chances to be supported by her mum (kind of an alcoholic). Something changes with the arrival, in their apartment, of Connor, her mum’s new boyfriend (played by Irish-German actor Michael Fassbender, whose arrival would change any woman’s life on planet earth).

Mia, who spends her time defending herself against other people and the world outside, by meeting Connor (probably the first adult who seems genuinely interested in her as a human being), opens up to new feelings and new hopes. Things won’t turn very well with him, in the end, but the process has started, and a new phase of her life is spreading in front of her.  

Supported by an outstanding cast (newcomer Katie Jarvis, found by Arnold while furiously fighting with her boyfriend on a station’s platform, English actress Kierston Wareing, already appreciated in It’s a Free World by Ken Loach, as Mia’s mum, and the above mentioned Michael Fassbender, by far the best actor of his generation), Fish Tank is a vibrant, emotional story.

There are at least a couple of perfect moments: every time Mia finds herself close to Connor and this simple contact produces in her a physical upsetting (like a crack in the fish tank she constantly feels trapped in) and the dancing scene between Mia, her mum and her (irresistible) little sister.

Maybe they’re desperate, maybe this world is a shitty place to live in, but everybody has the right to hope and to look for bliss.