By -

Say what you want about Bong Joon-Ho; he’s thematically and stylistically consistent. He could’ve followed the roaring success of Parasite with another grounded project that expanded his political concerns. He could’ve been another Nolan, a filmmaker who gets progressively more “adult” (read, serious) as his films gather more critical success. So pour one out for Joon-Ho, who grabbed his Academy Award and followed it with another sci-fi-comedy crowd-pleaser, similar to his Snowpiercer and Okja. All the while, he continues to use his films to highlight the inherent ruthlessness of capitalism. Welcome back, Bong Joon-Ho. We missed you.

Based on the Edward Ashton novel Mickey 7, Mickey 17 is set in a future where humanity developed the technology to make copies of ourselves, same memories and all. The moral implications are not lost on the dystopian future, so the world leaders decide that this technology can only be used in a specific case – only one person can be copied outside of our planet to help expeditions to new planets.

And here’s how we meet Mickey (Robert Pattinson), a good-for-nothing small-time crook on the run from the local mobster with his friend Timo (Steven Yeun), who signs up for one of these expeditions as the ship’s expendable. When the film starts, number 17 is about to die as he tells us his story all the way to that point – from his relationship with Nasha (Naomi Ackie) to the group leader Kenneth Marshal (Mark Ruffalo doing his best Donald Trump) and his wife Yifa (Toni Collette).

The life of an expandable is only tolerable if you have nothing to lose. There’s this concerning passivity about the citizens of this world regarding their status quo, which makes their situation even more despairing. Kenneth and Yifa rule the ship not with an iron fist but with phony sensitivity  – dealing with their subjects like they’re offering their employees free pizza. In this universe, everyone is expendable, not just Mickey. And while Kenneth and Yifa don’t want others to die (part of the plan involves eventually repopulating this new planet), they don’t see their workers as anything else but the value of their workforce. In one pivotal scene, Kenneth argues with a subject who’s witnessing Mickey dying of poison. For her, this is a human being suffering. For Kenneth, it barely registers – they’ll make a new one. Poor Mickey. He’s probably tired that everyone always asks him “how does it feel to die?”. He’s not having the best of times, but it’s nothing personal when everyone takes his hand breaking off in space, or his insides melting, as if it’s a fun curiosity instead of a tragedy.

The twist in Mickey 17 comes when Mickey establishes contact with a population of strange animals called creepers and is deemed dead. This kicks off the second half of the plot, which involves two different Mickeys working together to stay alive against the colony’s laws. It’s there that Joon-Ho cranks up the anti-capitalist metaphor. It’s not that he sees it as a fallible economic system but that he wants people to understand that there’s nothing humane about it. He’s not dismissing it; he’s just warning us that the system will not care if we live or die unless we have the power to influence it.

Mickey 17 is Joon-Ho at his comic-book-best. The pacing is an improvement from Snowpiercer and Okja (two films that suffered from exhaustion in the second half). He’s still trying to pack as much information and subplots into the plot as before, but it doesn’t feel as spread out as before and is, in turn, more satisfying.

Verdict: 4 out of 5
In his post-Oscar daze, Bong Joon-ho decided not to play it safe and went back to his preferred anti-capitalist futuristic sci-fi genre. The result is as entertaining as it is sharp.

Hard Truths

Hard Truths

Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is a woman we all know. She’s a constant force of anger, ready to scoff and scorn in any direction – be it her husband, her son, her sister, a man looking for a space to park his car, or the person behind her in the supermarket. She’s distilled rage to the point that it is evident she uses it to cover something she refuses to address. It’s not directed at anyone in particular but is there to perpetuate this validation in her life – that it’s rotten because of everyone in the world.

Pansy contrasts with her sister Chantelle (Michele Austin), a single mother hairdresser who lives in a small council unit with her two daughters. On paper, Chantelle has more reasons to complain, such as Pansy being still married and living in a lovely townhouse in an affluent neighbourhood. But happiness is not related to your social status, and trauma creeps in in many forms. Pansy’s husband, Curtley (David Webber), feels frustrated about marrying someone he no longer recognises. Their son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) was a target of his mother’s constant complaints.

None of these themes are new to Mike Leigh. Pansy is the opposite of Sally Hawkins’ Poppy in Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky and closer to David Thewlis’ Johnny in Naked. But while Johnny expresses himself by being a narcissistic sociopath, Pansy doesn’t know how to address her mental health, so she lets her behaviour indulge in the most primal way – by complaining and being nasty to everyone.

What is satisfying is how Leigh develops Pansy’s character by making her face the consequences in such a simple way. Leigh is known for working with the actors personally and without a script, so everyone knows their character well but doesn’t know what’s going to happen next, which means their reaction to a scene is pure – the more an actor embodies their character, the more they get lost on the event unfolding in front of them. Jean-Baptiste, who had previously worked with Leigh in the pivotal Secrets and Lies, thoroughly embodies Pansy without letting go for a minute.

The effect is a masterclass in acting. A genuinely emotional performance that explores her character’s complexities without having to explain it all to us. There’s a moment of earnestness between Pansy and Chantelle in the cemetery (unsurprisingly, one of the causes of Pansy’s pain comes from the relationship with their mother) that is juxtaposed by a family dinner where a simple revelation is enough to break Pansy.

Hard Truths is a powerful film about that person we once saw in our local shop and quickly judged. The scene in the parking lot before would’ve played differently if we were following the man on the other side of the argument. Leigh wants us to understand human beings without reducing them to one moment we meet them. He wants to study his characters’ behaviour, quietly observe them and then challenge them with the crashing reality they have been avoided.

Verdict: 4.5 out of 5
Probably the best Mike Leigh film since Secret and Lies. A masterclass of acting by Jean-Baptiste, part Gena Rowlands and part Isabelle Huppert, this is the best performance since Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood.