Outdoor cinema: Figuring Bodies of Water, at the Sculpture Park, Barbican, London

Two minutes from the door, a great idea to see film outdoors on a hot summer evening, with a different film each night of the week. Constraints on our time determined which night we visited — as it happens, the coolest night for two months. However, the concept was good: a huge inflatable screen and earphones to avoid disturbing the neighbours.

We watched a set of 5 short films:

Acera and the Witches’ Dance,1972 by Jean Painlevé. This was an initially entertaining natural history film of a strange sea snail with an odd courtship dance set to some interesting music. But it went on too long. 2*

Cold Rights, 2022 by Susan Schuppli.

An attempt to take legal action against the US and other relevant nations to prevent their fossil fuel-related warming of the cold climates of the earth, presented as a right of people, and the land and animals they protect, to be cold. 4*

Common Heritage, 2019 by Emma Critchley.

A short documentary outlining how the ocean bed is a potential source of minerals and chemicals far in excess of those that can be mined on land, but that the UN treaty on retaining the ocean bed as an internationally shared resource is already being infringed. 4*

Deep Down Tidal, 2018 by Tabita Rezaire. Poorly presented propaganda on how the internet is a racist political weapon. 1*

Ziggy and the Starfish, 2016 by Anne Duk Hee Jordan. More strange sea creatures in close up without music. 2*

Prima Facie, a play by Susie Miller. NT Live broadcast from the Harold Pinter Theatre, London and screened at The Light Cinema, New Brighton

An astonishing tour de force from solo actor Jodie Comer, who is on stage for the full two hours, with barely a pause in the script. She plays the part of a successful criminal law defence barrister, who prides herself in the successful challenge of her prosecution barristers’ clients, including women who are pursuing a case of alleged rape. At the same time as celebrating such victories in court, she recognises, and preys upon, the weakness of the position that women are in in those situations.

All this changes when she has a brief mutually agreed affair with one of her male chambers’ colleagues which, on the second occasion of their liaison, results in his forcing her to experience unwanted sex. All this is conveyed to the audience through her animated description. Despite the potential damage to her career, the potential problems she has to face with the police and, not least, the huge delays before any case comes to a criminal law court (only 768 days when the play was written, now even longer), she pursues her case against him.

Her defence goes as badly as she expects it to, knowing the problems women have in such jury trials, but she manages, by virtue of her insider knowledge, to get the jury suspended and to make a strong case that the the adversarial English legal system is inappropriate for rape and sexual assault cases.

The message of the play is perhaps too blatantly presented, but the acting, the stamina of the performer and, in the end the seriousness of the message are all extraordinarily powerful. 5*

Hit the Road, a film by Panah Panahi at Barbican Cinema, London

This film won the top award at last year’s London Film Festival. The director is the son of Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who directed the excellent Taxi Tehran a few years ago. The storyline is a serious one: an Iranian family are transporting their older son to a site where he is being smuggled out of the country, having paid a trafficker an apparently very large amount of money, such that they no longer own their own home.

We follow the family on this last road trip. They are under stress due to fear and suspicion of being pursued by the authorities. At the end of the film, the son finally reaches the border and there is a moving moment when we see the family taking leave of the boy, shot from a distance against a bleak but beautiful evening landscape.

Maybe in order to distinguish his films from those of his father, whose work is banned in Iran and who has recently been imprisoned, Panahi chooses to portray the characters as something between the family in the popular Little Miss America and the actors in a Bollywood Musical. So we have continuous smart comic dialogue between the father and the kooky younger son, we have the mother breaking out into mimed song and we have multiple comic episodes where things go wrong on the trip. These are irritating rather than amusing and they jar with the serious nature of the political message that is undoubtedly mean to come across. Of course it is good to portray the intimate nature of family relationships during a tragic and life-changing event of this sort, but it is impossible to believe that this is a normal Iranian family we are observing and not comic actors playing to the camera. The film has received multiple-starred reviews on its general release. I was extremely disappointed. 2* , 

The Big City, a film by Satyajit Ray at British Film Institute, London

This film dates from 1963 and is part of a Ray retrospective on the South Bank. The main character is Arati Mazumdar, wife of a poorly paid, but unambitious, bank clerk. Their living conditions in Kolkata are cramped, shared with their young son and Arati’s parents and sister. Arati decides that she needs to remedy the situation by looking for a job herself, a move that meets with the serious disapproval of her parents and the very reluctance acceptance of her husband. Although she has few relevant qualifications, she turns out to be a model employee — selling knitting machines — and gains promotion in the company. However, the tension in the household becomes too difficult and Arati decides to resign, just at the moment when her husband finds himself unemployed as his bank fails. I’ll omit further details, but what transpires from this is a positive resolution to the family’s dilemma where they realise that both husband and wife can make equally important contributions to family life and the stage is set for the creation of the modern Indian working woman.

I was hoping for more scenes of Kolkata in the 1950s/60s, but most of the shots were indoors at home or at work. It was interesting to see the portrayal of the anachronistic Anglo-Indian population in one of Arati’s workmates Edith Simmonds, existing as a kind of separate race, working alongside local Indian people, speaking only English but understanding Hindi. Ray’s work was hugely influential in the development of the modern international film and I watched a number of them enthusiastically in the 1970s. But this film seemed less impressive with time, whether as a result of the slightly dubious acting or the limited sets. 3*

Nitram, a film by Justin Kurzel at Barbican Cinema 2, London

Best film of the year, so far. This is based on the incident in Tasmania, 1996, in which a lone person killed 36 people and wounded 23 in an unprovoked mass shooting. We see the events in the years leading up to the shooting, but the shooting itself is only portrayed peripherally. However impossible it is to forgive or fully understand how such an event can happen, we see in detail how the prior life of the murderer influences his decision to carry out the attack.

It is an extraordinary tale. The murderer, Martin, was a young man with learning difficulties (inadequately diagnosed Asperger’s syndrome, probably), who lived with his parents — a bitter, edgy, critical and manipulative mother and a loving but downtrodden father — into his early twenties. He had been taunted and humiliated at school (his palindromic nickname Nitram had been given to him by his school peers) and had very limited social skills. He was obsessed with guns and explosions but was never permitted to own a gun.

His life changed when he met a local woman, Helen, in her 40s/50s, who was similarly a loner and had inherited a fortune from her parents. She lived in a large house in near-squalor with uncontrolled dogs, continually bought expensive cars and dressed in an eccentric way. Helen bought Martin a car and took him into her home; it appeared that they had a platonic relationship. After a tragic accident, Martin inherited all of Helen’s wealth and was, remarkably, able to travel abroad on his own. More importantly, he was able to buy automatic rifles (cash purchase, no questions asked) and to plot and implement his revenge on the society that he believed had failed him.

The skill of the director was to balance our sympathy as the audience for Martin’s circumstances with the sense of tension and helplessness throughout as we could see the tragedy unfold. 5*