Notes from London Film Festival (III.)
Blue Moon / Reflections in a Dead Diamond / Sound of Falling / Afterlives
Welcome back to our coverage of London Film Festival 2025, presented across this week in three parts.
In today’s final installment, diffuse films capture auteurists shooting for the moon, genre exercises, exercises in miserablism, and the kind of politically astute filmmaking that only Experimenta can provide. Words by Shwan Ziad, Kit Ramsay, Esmé Holden, Joel Whitaker.
Blue Moon (Richard Linklater, 2024, USA/Ireland)
Blue Moon is a rare thing: verbal filmmaking that’s meaningfully realised as cinema. Richard Linklater’s longtime collaborator/compadre Ethan Hawke plays Lorenz Hart, lyricist of some of Broadway’s most enduring songs, and a New York wit regaling, pleading, and reminiscing throughout the night at a Manhattan bar, as his former creative partner in the theatre, Richard Rogers (Andrew Scott), has successfully moved on. It’s a character film, another in the line by Linklater that’s structured with a ‘one night’ timescale, in a stage-like series of interactions. Besides Rogers, the players include a bartender (Bobby Canavale), E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy), and the Yalie young woman (Margaret Qualley) whom he’s been exchanging intimate letters with. She gives the film its deepest dramatic point, Lorenz in vicarious awe of her and her love-life, sitting on the floor, seeing her as unattainable. Lorenz sparkles with verbal ability and swift, shifting dialogue—in contrast to his diminutive figure, comb-over, and underlying desperation.
This project alongside Nouvelle Vague—a film about a wildly fortunate creative group in late 1950s Paris, which also played at the festival—shows Linklater’s enduring energy and curiosity. There’s painful subject matter here in Lorenz’s unrequited longings and sardonicly-masked heartbreak and tender alcoholism. Robert Kaplow’s dynamic screenplay follows Lorenz’s sense of lost enchantment and profound disillusion, along with an encroaching feeling of his time being up. It ain’t pretty, in many senses.
Hawke’s performance certainly stands out in his long filmography, yet all the performances in the film are admirable. Scott, in particular is notable for playing against type, with the veneer of importuned success. Linklater’s understated style unfolds within the interior world of the film through idiosyncratic performances and precise staging—without becoming exaggerated. In that way, it compares to Tape (2001), another Hawke-led long-night chamber piece that unfolded in the enclosed space of a hotel room. Blue Moon has a bigger production value in the period detail and the boozy piano-and-song atmosphere, but the filmmaking remains alive. SJ
Reflections in a Dead Diamond (Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani, Belgium)
Scattered diamonds; a laser beam-emitting ring gadget; a black shoulder holster over black turtleneck; a dead woman on a beach. Such images flash chaotically across the opening act of Cattet and Forzani’s latest experiment in genre pastiche, this time delving into the appropriately niche microgenre of mid-century Italian James Bond rip-offs, Eurospy thrillers and comic book pulp anti-heroes. These overstimulating elements function as a distillation of the experimental endeavour that is the Belgian married couples’ body of work, a conjuration of the familiar; a showcase of nostalgic collective pop cultural ephemera. One need not have seen Danger: Diabolik (1968) to get the vibe, decades of cultural osmosis gained from parodies and references one has experienced as cinephile, as ‘movie buff’, will suffice.
Separating this iteration from their earlier projects is the textually explicit elegy throughout. Starring genre legend Fabio Testi, now in his 80s, this film gestures towards fading memory in one’s twilight years, the loss of life in both natural and violent forms and the acceptance that the heights of this cinema remain firmly in the past. As the commercial viability of a wide first-run release seems dubious, their films exist primarily in cinephile spaces. LFF functions as a proscenium for this final curtain call of the aspects of cinema that Cattet/Forzani hold dear. Sound editing and design each get a virtuoso solo in a fight sequence of crinkling, groaning leather, smashed bottles and guttural howls of pain. Handsome faces of faded movie stars get final close-ups and recycled scores of decades past can be heard on 5.1 Dolby surround sound maybe for the last time. It’s a closed-casket funeral, but in the spirit of the movies it reflects, the blood and guts that lead to it are not for the squeamish but always unforgettable. KR
Sound of Falling (Mascha Schilinski, Germany)
Imagine a film that’s a little bit different. Not like your usual blockbuster fare or Oscar-bait nonsense. Imagine, if you can, a handheld camera shaking slightly. Imagine a naturalistic soundscape with great attention drawn to the sound of hard shoes on the hard floor. Imagine that naturalism being interrupted by a deep, guttural drone, when the wrongness of the world gets too much to bear. And now, if you can, imagine an actor breaking through the rigid infrastructure of the film to look us in the eye, to look through the barrel of the camera lens—the film’s confrontation with our petty ideas of what could and should be is literalised. Or, rather, we are being told it’s happening; this so-called confrontation is performed instead of, you know, actually happening.
Because at this point these stylistic tics have become as familiar as any Hollywood cliché, as the third-act fall out or the big romantic gesture. These are the realities of modern festival going, of which Sound of Falling is just another example, one that’s so aggressively self-serious that that seriousness becomes its only topic. Nominally it’s about four young girls who live in the same house over a century and how the distinctions between their timelines blur (in a shockingly non-committal way) as each are confronted with despair and death. It’s like the most miserablist and self-defeating Ingmar Bergman movies—an early scene feels like a funereal inversion of the Christmas celebration in Fanny & Alexander (1982)—with none of the melodramatic sensibility. And it could really do with a bit more womanly hysteria and a bit less masculine German stoicism.
That’s not to say it doesn’t capture some of the morbidness of children and young adults—the scenes where they fantasize about their own deaths and see the possibilities laid out before them ring true. But it lingers so fully in the bad vibes of those years, while obscuring any chance of joy and connection. Sure, those teenage feelings are ones of enclosure and solipsism, but they are also challenged during (and certainly beyond those times). Any woman of director Mascha Schilinski’s age should have come to understand that by now. But it’s a limit of her perspective that is solidified by the type of film she’s making, and until we all start to expect different things from a Serious Work of Art, or until the fundamental structure of financing and festival distribution changes, it’s a limitation that will remain inherent and sealed. EH
Afterlives (Kevin B. Lee, Germany/Belgium/France)
We live in a culture where we are constantly exposed to horrors beyond our comprehension. From the genocide in Palestine we can trace this back as far as internet access has democratised access to violent and deadly imagery. Afterlives is a continuation of Kevin B. Lee’s exploration of how we, as a culture, process this. Much like Bottle Songs 1-4 (2021), Lee’s previous film with Chloé Galibert-Laîné, Afterlives focuses on the tools the Islamic State uses to radicalise people online. As the title suggests, where Bottle Songs focused strictly on these tools, Afterlives looks at how as a wider culture we have tried to come to terms with them. Lee uses varying techniques and guests to explore this–from artists who look at the method of violent care–the idea of colonising trauma through appropriation as an act of so-called care. The key example given being 3D printed artifacts of monuments destroyed in Syria by the Islamic State being revealed in London–removed from their context and history–but celebrated as an act of liberation. The film also has particularly radical use of A.I., showing that even the Islamic State is not free from Silicon Valley’s homogenisation of global aesthetics.
Lee’s unique approach to documentary-making is exemplified in his consistent deployment of the desktop aesthetic. This not only makes the film feel much more personal, delivering information in a way that modern audiences are much more akin to consuming, while simultaneously mirroring the environment of someone being radicalised by the Islamic State via the internet. The technique feels almost Brechtian in its use of distanciation, the way we are invited to see the process in which the film’s content is put together, forcing the audience to think of the conscious choices Lee is making–and what they mean. Lee has been far ahead of the curve for years in terms of how documentaries can streamline the conveyance of information, this film feels like a natural development of his style and voice. I can’t wait to see what he does next. JW