1.
Gone Girl
2014, David Fincher

You couldn't get more entangled than Gone Girl...

I thought I'd never seen it before. Nigel thought he'd seen it on a plane. Having watched it, Nigel remembered a few scenes. I thought I remembered a scene, but it was such a snippet of a memory that I wondered if I'd just seen a clip somewhere.

Later, a diary search revealed that we saw it on Saturday 13 December 2014, in a cinema in KL... Whoa... It's so scary how much we forget.

At the time, I wrote this: "Gone Girl was excellent. Very chilling; very creepy; full of strange, vengeful, manipulative characters who seem inexorably drawn to one another, and slowly set about destroying each other's lives."

In brief, the aloof Nick (Ben Affleck) is suspected of killing his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike), who has mysteriously gone missing. Neither of these characters is particularly attractive, so at first we don't quite know which of them to believe. When that's sorted out, and we're clear exactly what's afoot, one shocking twist succeeds another.

It's not realistic: "I overheard a couple listing all the dropped plot threads and narrative holes big enough to hide aircraft carriers in. This isn't the sort of movie that can withstand that kind of scrutiny. You might as well say, 'That part in my dream where the penguin told me where to dig for the treasure seemed unrealistic.'"

But, somehow, it manages to be funny, albeit in a deep-black kind of way.

And it does have some quite interesting things to say about marriage. On which, see here for a spoiler-rich but perceptive discussion that begins with a quote from Barack Obama, and ends like this: "You never really know, fully, the person you marry. And regardless, the person you marry -- 'life' and all that -- will turn into someone different, over time... We are all, inevitably, products of each other. Friends and colleagues and -- maybe most of all -- partners are sources not just of companionship, but of influence. The people we choose help, in ways big and small, to make us who we are. We can only hope we choose well."

2.
The Enigma of Arrival (dida zhimi, Arrival Mystery)
2018, Song Wen

Set in a port city on the banks of the Yangtze River, this is another film where we don't at first know whom to believe.


Chongqing, another Yangtze city, 2016

The opening scenes feature a reunion of friends. One of them reflects that "life is floating between fiction and reality", and "everyone remembers things differently". (The movie's English title is taken from a book by V.S. Naipaul, which also explores the way we perceive our surroundings.)

Then we flashback to a younger version of the friends as they were in the early 1990s. The lads are racketing around, having fun, trying to impress the girls. Then they become involved, fatefully as it turns out, in some petty crime, which escalates dramatically when it trespasses on the fiefdom of a vicious gang.

Two of our young men, Xiao Long (Li Xian) and Fang Yuan (Dong Borui), are in love with Dongdong (Gu Xuan), a promising young athlete. But the world falls to pieces for all the youngsters on the night they decide to set fire to the gang's boat, and Dongdong goes missing. From that point, they're irrevocably entangled in webs of concealment and heartbreak.



While in prison for trashing a disco, Da Si (Lin Xiaofan), another of the friends, reveals to Xiao Long that he was the one who, in a fit of jealousy, accidentally knocked Dongdong over the side of the boat on which she'd been told to wait. She falls into the river, is swept away, and the case is left open.

The reunion with which the film opens is occasioned by Fang Yuan's claim that he has found a new piece of evidence. This turns out to be a calendar photo of Dongdong, dated at least six months after her disappearance. But Xiao Long knows this can't hold the meaning Fang Yuan wants it to. He fetches Da Si, and tries to persuade him to reveal to the others what he had told him. Da Si can't seem to bring himself to do that; Fang Yuan can't bear to believe that Dongdong is definitively dead; and Xiao Long keeps saying he wants justice. We leave them in turmoil, fighting each other, with the rain pouring down outside, and Da Si repeatedly banging his head against the mirror.

The film closes with two flashbacks. In one, we see Dongdong doing a photo-shoot for the calendar, and using her payment to help the guys get out of the fix they'd got themselves into with the gangsters. In the next, we see the four young guys, as they used to be, down by the river. But the voiceover tells us that they can never do things as a band of friends again. Their bond has been broken by violence, secrecy, and distrust.

As Richard Yu puts it: "The Enigma of Arrival is a darker take on the coming-of-age story. Instead of featuring the lively highlights of youth, and disappointing -- yet ultimately harmless -- heartbreaks, it shows how a series of adolescent mistakes can cause lifelong consequences."

It's beautifully shot, and very atmospheric. And the message resonates. But it was somewhat confusing. I had to watch the ending a second time.



3.
Love and Friendship
2016, Whit Stillman

This one offers entanglements of a much more amusing nature. It's based on Lady Susan, an epistolary novella by Jane Austen, written at the end of the 18th century while she was still in her teens, but not published until 1871, more than 50 years after her death.

It's a book I read years ago. (In fact, my copy, the Penguin edition that contained Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon, was inscribed "Form Prize, form 5A, 1974, presented by The Lord Bishop". It was a plain, orange-spined paperback, and didn't have the nice binding of my other form prizes, but I obviously felt the need to complete my Austen collection.) After watching the film, I took the opportunity to re-read it (it's available free via the ever-useful Project Gutenberg).


The house in Winchester where Jane Austen briefly lived before her death in 1817

Apart from tweaking the ending to get a slightly more satisfying conclusion, the movie stays surprisingly faithful to the brief text. At its heart, you have the eponymous Lady Susan (Kate Beckinsale). Recently widowed, and mother to the unfortunate Frederica (Morfydd Clark), Susan is beautiful, charming, and good with words. She's also a ruthlessly deceptive and manipulative flirt... When we first encounter her, she is determined to maintain her influence over (married) Lord Mainwaring (Lochlann O'Mearain), while pushing her daughter into the arms of the idiotic Sir James Martin (Tom Bennett), and engaging the interest of the dashing Reginald De Courcy (Xavier Samuel), just for fun.

Richard McClelland, speaking of the book, contends that Austen has anticipated the personality type that psychologists would later define as Machiavellian. As such, Susan is cool, cynical, and vengeful, holds herself in high esteem, practises "an externally oriented mode of thinking" (that is, she constantly blames others for everything that happens in her life), displays a "dismissing attachment style" (illustrated by the way she denigrates, bullies, and eventually abandons Frederica), and thrives on high-stakes gambles. As he says, "She is playing a dangerous game: if she goes too far she may lose her social standing altogether."

But what's a woman to do? She has no home to call her own; she's impoverished; she has a daughter to support. Her overriding task, then, is to pull off that balancing act that guarantees her financial security while not landing her entirely beyond the pale of respectability. Late 18th-century society doesn't give her many other options.

As David Edelstein comments, "Stillman doesn't hate Lady Susan nearly as much as Austen seems to." Richard Brody agrees: Susan's career is, "for Stillman, a story of a woman’s secret self-liberation in a society in which the burden of restrictions on women’s behavior is onerous". So Beckinsale's Lady Susan, while reprehensible, also inspires a grudging respect. You wouldn't want to fall foul of her, but you can't help admiring her.

By the end of the book, it's Lady Susan who ends up marrying Sir James (having scared off Reginald by her continued liaison with Mainwaring), while Frederica goes to live with Reginald's sister and brother-in-law (who are very fond of her, and hope that Reginald, having got over Susan, will fall in love with her one day). The film is a little more explicit. Susan marries Sir James (but Lord Mainwaring is still very much in the picture, and is almost certainly the father of the unborn baby whose remarkably speedy conception would have made more suspicious types than Sir James smell a rat); Frederica and Reginald, meanwhile, happily become husband and wife.

All in all, Love and Friendship's entanglements are fun to watch. Amusing dialogue (some of it straight from the book); great performances; and a sumptuous presentation (all large hats, droopy curls, sweeping lawns, and elaborate drawing-rooms -- it all adds up to a very enjoyable evening's entertainment.


Austen is buried in Winchester Cathedral

4.
Cairo Time
2009, Ruba Nadda

Juliette (Patricia Clarkson) has travelled to Cairo to meet up with husband Mark (who works for the UN, and is always away Doing Something Humanitarian), but she is left in the hands of Tareq (Alexander Siddig) when Mark gets stuck in Gaza helping to sort out some emergency. The entanglement emerges as Tareq, a former colleague of Mark's, shows Juliette round his city, and a strong attraction develops between the two of them. It is barely acted upon (lingering glances and an accidental kiss are about as far as we get), and just when you wonder where this is going to take them, Mark returns, and the entanglement is disentangled. But their world has been changed.

They are both somewhat mysterious figures. Despite her apparently high-powered job as an editor on a New York women's magazine, and the apparently happy conversations she has on the phone with her husband, Juliette seems lost and frustrated in a way that goes beyond being disorientated in a strange city and cooped up in a hotel room. Tareq, disappointed in love many years ago, has abandoned the UN to run a coffee shop, where he seems to spend a lot of time playing chess. We don't totally know what makes either of them tick, so that's intriguing. And the film's refusal to end with an easy resolution is refreshing. Juliette will always have that what-if question in her mind, and Tareq -- well, he has been burned again.

But it's a slightly annoying movie. Juliette, given her husband's international career, is surprisingly naive. Worse, what she lacks in the way of cultural knowledge, she makes up for with white-saviour plans. Her magazine sounds fairly pappy, so you can't help but roll your eyes when she proposes writing an article for it on Cairo's street children. To be fair, Tareq instantly gives this idea the reception it deserves... Ella Taylor nastily but accurately pinpoints the problem here: "For all her discreet sneering at the local scene's 'petroleum wives' -- from whom she firmly distances herself -- Juliette never transcends her role, somewhere between cut-rate Somerset Maugham and retro Merchant-Ivory, as the statutory Sad Blonde from the West."

Elizabeth Adams skewers some of this even more ruthlessly: "Behavior that might be believable in an adolescent character comes off as ridiculous in a middle-aged woman of Juliette's background; the craziest moment is when she stubbornly boards a bus full of Palestinians bound for Gaza because she 'just wants to see' her husband, but of course the bus is stopped by military police and she's taken off, cell phone in hand, to call Tareq to come and fetch her." Adams also takes aim at the stereotypes: "The Canadian director ... has a Palestinian mother and Syrian father. This film, her second feature, seems shot through western eyes sympathetic to Arab culture but colored less by knowledge of cultural nuance than by the allure of the exotic that Edward Said called Orientalism."

Cairo and environs are depicted very beautifully (making you really hope you'll get the chance to go one day). But why do movies never show the normal, tourist-thronged, problematic reality of these places?And why does this one, given we have Tareq's insider knowledge, only show us the stock scenes -- feluccas on the Nile, lunch in a Bedouin tent...?


They visited the Pyramids...

There might be good reasons for this, according to a 2010 account by Paul Byrnes: The movie "was filmed under constant official surveillance in Cairo, a city where Americans are sometimes targeted by terror groups. Some scenes were shot in the fabulous Khan el-Khalili market, where a bomb killed a 17-year-old French girl last year, just before location shooting began. One could say, gloomily, the film was made in a place that did not welcome it, for audiences that are unlikely to want to see it. I'm amazed that the Syrian-born Canadian director was able to get it made but happy to say it was worth the effort. Cairo is one reason the film is so rich. We almost never see this amazing city on film, precisely because it is so difficult to film there."

He concludes: "There are few films in which American characters journey alone in the Arab world; fewer where the character is a woman; almost none where the filmmaker is a woman, let alone one who speaks Arabic and understands something of the clash of these two cultures... A film in which an American woman finds love in the Middle East is almost unknown."

So that's definitely a plus.