PoppyTransfusion

This film is like every great film - multi-faceted, which means it has resonance that is almost universal. It's about a black girl. It's multi-racial. It's about children born of recent immigrant families. It's about coming of age. It's about being a girl. It's about mental health with limited support for families affected. It's about a brother and sister. It's about working classes. It's urban. It's London. It's Hackney. It's amazing and the story of Rocks and Emmanuel made me cry.

I chose the girl's story for personal resonance because girls on the verge of adulthood with talents, ambitions and dreams fire the film.

Rocks is British. Her grandma is Nigerian. Her mother troubled. She has a younger brother who loves dinosaurs and who has the lines that are the emotional heart of the film. "Close your eyes and think of everything that makes you happy. Keep breathing in and out." He says this when his sister and him are displaced to a grubby hotel as she tries to keep them together in their mother's absence and with Social Services looking to find them.

Before her mum leaves Rocks was able to live as a normal teenager with a group of friends I loved and envied. After her mum leaves the friendships are challenged and the challenges are coming of age, as maturity replaces innocence.

I have no more of the story to relate because it is the characterisation and superb acting that brings everything alive. Just has to be seen.

This is a taut film for most of its (short) screen time and the chase reminds me of Spielberg's Duel. This is a sad films in terms of the political and racial truth it reflects, not just of the USA but the current western attitude to migrants. The closing song by Woodkid is fitting. What is stunning about the film is the desert; it's beautiful and vast and it destroys predator as well as prey. Surviving the desert is a survival of the fittest.

There is a brief scene of huge significance in the film where the American hunter meets a US police/patrol officer. Each eyes the other, takes stock and then parts with whispers of contempt to the other. Law enforcement is at breaking point and the Wild West and citizen's rule is returning, literally and figuratively. A clever and sinister moment.

In conclusion, the desert is a place of karma for transgressions of all kinds including illegal migration and murder.

Makes for interesting viewing when a wry and empathetic eye captures their lives. On commission from PBS to make a documentary in Minnesota, Malle and his team drove through Glencoe. Along the way they spotted a beautiful garden tended by an older lady whose age we discover was 85 in 1979! She didn't look it at all.

Malle and his film team stay in Glencoe and become acquainted with the small town and its folk. The documentary seems to amble without much directed narration but Malle is exploring what makes Glencoe the place it is and who are its people. He asks some probing questions about race and sex/homosexuality but mostly lets the people tell their stories. It's quite clear from things Malle says that he likes Glencoe and becomes close to some of the inhabitants. But even without saying such things his camera evidences his fascination with Glencoe.

There are some really poignant moments; e.g. Glenhaven, the elderly care home. Malle meets one of its folk shuffling along a path. He tells Malle that he wants to die. This is our introduction to Glenhaven. Malle films the recreational room in which 10 or so elderly people, most in wheelchairs sit aimlessly whilst the TV blares in the background. The TV adverts are so incongruous given the audience that it makes for a very funny moment. But then Malle focuses on one female resident who stares at the camera. She stares and stares and Malle stares back. What she's thinking is anyone's guess but her eyes suggest many things. This elderly woman is a strong contrast to the woman we meet at the beginning who tends her beautiful garden and who in 1986 at the age of 91 was still going strong, canning vegetables from her garden as she goes rather than deteriorating in a soulless care home.

Another funny moment occurs when Malle's camera pans up into a shot of a female's bottom. The female turns around and Malle introduces her formally at this point for the camera but of course the camera's already met her!

Steve was the most eligible bachelor in Glencoe in 1979 and a man who inseminates cows! Who knew that Malle could be quite so irreverent of his subjects whilst so generous with them at the same time?! When Malle returns in 1986 Steve is still single and still inseminating cows. As Malle remarks to Steve "too busy with your cows".

There are moments of heat in the documentary regarding race, politics, who controls America's finances (the Jews declares one of the farmers), young marriage and sex. But it's all part of the richness and complexity of the society. Of every society. It leaves me imagining how I might be documented in such a film were one to be made of my community.