Edinburgh International Film Festival reviews: Armand | Timestalker | Sunlight | Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust

Timestalker: like a cruel spin on Groundhog Day. | Ludo Robert

Armand

★★☆☆☆

Timestalker 

★★☆☆☆

Sunlight

★★☆☆☆

Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust

★★☆☆☆

Starring Worst Person in the World’s Renate Reinsve and marking the feature debut of Norwegian writer/director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel — the grandson of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullman — Armand is a film that desperately wants to be provocative but is so divorced from the reality of its own premise that the only thing it’s likely to provoke is derision. 

Set in a primary school that’s preparing for the end of term (but which is conveniently devoid of actual children), it begins with Reinsve’s character, Elisabeth, flooring her car en route to the school for a hastily convened parent-teacher conference about her son, Armand. From the way the staff gravely utter the six-year-old’s name, it’s clear they think he’s a problem child. Yet as the chicly attired Elisabeth strides into the school, shoulders hunched like a prizefighter squaring up to go 12 rounds, it’s also clear she’s not going to stand for anybody slandering her kid, even though she has no idea yet what the meeting’s about. 

Rather than tell her, however, the staff dance around the issue in credulity stretching ways. Shirking responsibility, the bumbling headmaster empowers an inexperienced young teacher to handle the matter in the hope it will all blow over. A little star struck by Elisabeth’s status as a semi-famous actress, she in turn assures her that it’s nothing serious, then blindsides her by bringing in another set of parents with whom Elisabeth clearly has history (they’re played by Ellen Dorrit Petersen and Endre Hellestveit). When it finally emerges that a classmate has accused Armand of sexual assault using language so adult (the words “anal” and “rape” are bandied around) it renders the charge laughable, Elisabeth can’t help but respond in kind. For more than five uninterrupted minutes Reinsve lets rip with an astonishing, discomfiting fit of the giggles.

It’s such an unusual and bravura piece of acting that had Armand been a short film built around this scene alone it would qualify as a minor masterpiece. Unfortunately, the two hours surrounding it are so preposterous, contrived and half-baked it’s impossible to buy into the film’s apparently serious attempts to interrogate such thorny and complex issues. 

Where childhood misdemeanours have, in the past, provided films such as this year’s foreign language Oscar nominee The Teachers’ Lounge and Michael Haneke’s masterful Hidden with an aura of queasily compelling dread, nothing about Ullman Tøndel’s handling of his premise suggests he’s spent any time around parents, teachers or six-year-olds. Nor does it suggest, despite the film’s occasional comedic flourishes, that he has much interest in using the fall-out from a playground incident to satirise bourgeois mores, à la Roman Polanski’s Carnage.

Instead almost everything about it is ill-wrought, from the way Elisabeth disappears at one point to call Armand to get his side of the story (because all six-year-olds have mobile phones apparently); to the weirdly protracted revelation that both sets of parents have not only known each other since childhood but are actually related through marriage; to the baffling contemporary dance interludes it uses to put us inside Elisabeth’s headspace; to the not one, but two moments where the dad of the accuser gets so horny he tries to hit on Elisabeth then his wife while discussing matters of domestic abuse. By the time it wraps up with its faux-enigmatic rain-soaked finale, incredulous laughter is actually the only logical response. 

Hopes were high for Alice Lowe’s new movie Timestalker. It had its UK premiere at the festival over the weekend and by the time proceedings draw to a close on Wednesday it will have had five screenings in total (surely some kind of record). Sadly, EIFF’s confidence in it seems a little misplaced. A kind of macabre, centuries-spanning anti-rom-com that challenges the very notion of soulmates, it stars Lowe as Agnes, a desperate-for-love woman condemned to fall for the same narcissistic nitwit (Aneurin Barnard) every time she’s reincarnated following an untimely death brought on by her own obsessive devotion.

Like a particularly cruel spin on Groundhog Day, the film pinballs Agnes through the ages, from Scotland in the 1680s to Revolutionary France to 1980s New York, where her increasing awareness of her past lives — and Barnard’s character’s ongoing indifference to her — leads to a gradual awakening about her own self-worth. There are elements of Blackadder too in the way the supporting cast — Nick Frost, Jacob Anderson, Tanya Reynolds and Kate Dickie — keep popping up in each time period to fulfil similar roles, with one character in particular proving central to a plot twist that darkens the mood in quite an intriguing way (let’s just say the more sinister implications of the title start coming to the fore). 

But while there’s no denying the ambition of the film, the execution falls short. Lowe tends to work in a deadpan register, something Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers, which she co-wrote and starred in, made brilliant use of. But too many of the jokes here are dead on arrival, punctuated with gory, obvious slapstick. Budget shortfalls also ensure the period settings have a sketch show feel that’s ruthlessly exposed on the big screen. What a shame.

For anyone craving a low-budget American indie riff on Jodie Foster’s long-forgotten Mel Gibson-starring misfire The Beaver, Sunlight might be that film. Co-written, directed by and starring Nina Conti — who’s also doing a show at the Fringe — it revolves around a depressed radio DJ called Roy (co-writer Shenoah Allen) whose botched suicide attempt is interrupted by the arrival on the scene of a monkey suited woman (Conti) on the run from her toxic step-father. Going by the imaginative name of ‘Monkey', this simian guardian angel latches onto Roy as he embarks on a weird necro-themed quest to retrieve a family heirloom from the corpse of his long-dead alcoholic cop father. 

The ensuing road trip through New Mexico is basically an excuse for Conti — who adapted the idea from her own live act (which features a puppet version of the same character) — to improvise lots of relentlessly foul-mouthed rants that are funny precisely never, all the while gradually revealing this over-confident familiar to be the brazen id of the shy, mentally ill woman hiding within who can’t quite deal with the world as herself. The relationship between these two personalities is occasionally bridged in interesting ways, but the tonal lurches from twisted comedy to sincere drama doesn’t come off at all. 

Masked identities also feature prominently in Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust, a stylish but narratively tedious animation film about a futuristic society in which everyone is forced to wear a paper bag over their head for reasons that have something to do with a totalitarian government and its efforts to maintain order by cooking up a non-existent threat from outsiders known as ‘Anomalies’. The film’s Indian writer/director Ishan Shukla apparently used video game technology to animate it, which gives it a pleasingly off-kilter look, almost like a rotoscoped Blade Runner. But do we really need another vaguely Orwellian dystopian movie full of earnest platitudes about acceptance and tolerance? The dialogue is very on the nose and the voice cast — made up of doyens of world cinema, among them Gasper Noé, Lav Diaz, Asia Argento and Shekhar Kapur — can’t quite bring it alive. 

The Edinburgh International Film Festival runs until 21 August. For more information and tickets see edfilmfest.org.