My Favorite Neil Jordan Film

My favorite Irish film director is Neil Jordan, who has received a lot of attention for his contemporary melodramas, historical biographies, and sensitive transgender narratives.  He also has a habit of regularly making some really gnarly horror and fantasy films, including the '90s version of "Interview With the Vampire."  However, it was his werewolf picture that I was obsessed with as a teenager.  In 1984 he made an adaptation of Angela Carter's short story "The Company of Wolves," a feminist take on The Little Red Riding Hood.  He directed and co-wrote the film with Carter.  

"The Company of Wolves" unfolds as a literal fever dream, offering several stories about monsters, wolves, and sexual awakening through a dark fairy tale lens.  Most of the film is concerned with the familiar figures of a girl in a red hood, her storytelling grandmother, and the wolfish stranger met by chance in the woods, but in the nested realities of the additional stories told in the film, we also meet the distinguished Devil who arrives in a white Rolls-Royce, an enchantress who turns her betrayer into a beast, and multiple unfortunate creatures who are both human and wolf, or perhaps something in between.  

The film is best known among special effects aficionados for its spectacular werewolf transformation scenes, including one where a snarling wolf muzzle erupts from the mouth of the huntsman as he violently sheds his humanity.  However, other images have stayed with me longer - a woman's face smashing into pieces of porcelain when she's attacked, a wedding feast attended by wolves in human clothing, and human babies hatching from bird eggs.  Jordan purposefully leans into the psychosexual symbolism, creating this uneasy twilight world where idyllic childhood fantasies are easily twisted and corrupted into nightmares.  He also used this approach in later films like "The Butcher Boy," and "In Dreams," both exploring the psyches of disturbed killers. 

Dark fantasy films were popular in the '80s, but few were as richly rendered as "The Company of Wolves."  The surreal imagery appears throughout, often using disturbing juxtapositions and dream logic to impart a lasting sense of horror.  This reflects the origins of many folk tales as morality plays and cautionary tales, the whimsical allegories having roots in much grimmer reality.  Jordan's visuals have a beauty and a lyricism to them that is mesmerizing.  I'm not fond of most werewolf films, because they're usually so focused on the monstrosity and gore.  "The Company of Wolves" certainly has its share of blood and guts, but it doesn't forget about the seduction, that sweetest tongue comes before sharpest tooth.     

In addition to the central narrative, the film features four stories told by various characters to each other, and there were a few more in early scripts that didn't make it into the film.  They're variations on the same themes of love gone wrong and maturation bringing unexpected horrors, except the very last, which offers a more hopeful, conciliatory message.  I love that "The Company of Wolves" heavily features the act of storytelling, and it's important who tells which story to whom, and what the motives for each telling might be.  And characters who aren't telling stories are always offering advice and adages and explaining their own ideas of how the world works.  

The budget on the film was low, and clearly most of the wolves in the film are actually large dogs with dye jobs.  However, the practical effects work, the art direction, and the cinematography are all excellent, and the cast is fantastic.  Having sturdy UK thespians like Angela Lansbury, Stephen Rea, and David Warner delivering the dire warnings about never trusting men whose eyebrows meet in the middle goes a long way towards setting the mood and tone.  And it's astounding that this was Sarah Patterson's screen debut, playing our heroine Rosaleen, one of her only appearances in any film.

The moral, ultimately, is to beware of wolves in their many shapes and guises.  However, wolves lurk everywhere, as the embodiment of our deepest unconscious minds, both in men and women.  And I've never seen them summoned to the screen as beautifully as they are in "The Company of Wolves."

What I've Seen - Neil Jordan

The Company of Wolves (1984)

Mona Lisa (1986)

The Crying Game (1992)

Interview with the Vampire (1994)

The Butcher Boy (1997)

In Dreams (1999)

The End of the Affair (1999)

Breakfast on Pluto (2005)

The Brave One (2007)

Byzantium (2012)

Greta (2018)

Marlowe (2022)

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"Hedda" and "The History of Sound"

Let's look at two more LGBT romances today that aren't in the awards conversation, but probably should be.

"Hedda" is based on the Henrik Ibsen play "Hedda Gabbler," but altered to the point where it's as much a commentary on the original play as it is a new version of it.  For one thing, the story now takes place in England in the 1950s, and Hedda is played by Tessa Thompson.  This isn't race-blind casting, and Hedda is now a black character, one acutely aware of the difficulties of being a black woman in a world dominated by white men.  Hedda is married to George Tesman (Tom Bateman), a white academic whose fortunes hinge on getting a job that is likely going to go to his rival, Lovborg.  In the play Lovborg, Hedda's ex-lover, is a man.  In the film, Lovborg is a white woman, Eileen (Nina Hoss), and currently in a relationship with one of Hedda's old schoolmates, Thea (Imogen Poots). 

Most of "Hedda" takes place at a lavish party that Hedda throws to try and impress Professor Greenwood (Finbar Lynch), who will decide the course of George's career.  Eileen, Thea, and Hedda's current lover Brack (Nicholas Pinnock) are all in attendance, giving Hedda the chance to manipulate the situation to her own advantage.  Hedda Gabbler is one of the great antiheroines of the stage, and Da Costa and Tessa Thompson have done their very best to bring her fascinating, complex nature to the screen.  This Hedda is a passionate woman of great appetites and terrible regrets, who is introduced to us at the beginning of the film deciding to abandon a suicide attempt.  While the races and sexualities of the various characters in play have been adjusted to match changing audience sensibilities, Hedda continues to be a provocative figure simply because she's a bold, often unsympathetic woman who refuses to behave.       

The cast is excellent.  Eileen, Hedda, and Thea are now three brilliant, ambitious women whose actions and worldviews we can compare and contrast as they fight for their place in the social order.  Eileen is a recovering alcoholic, and we see her at her best and at her worst as she falls under Hedda's influence.  Nina Hoss delivers her most substantive performance in the English language that I've seen to date, and it's a tremendously brave one.  Imogene Poots is firmly in a supporting role, but effortlessly becomes sympathetic or threatening as the situation demands.  Tessa Thompson, however, is the main event as Hedda, a woman who can be a careless social butterfly, a shrewd social climber, a lovelorn unfortunate, and a jealous brat all at the same time.  But not without a cost.    

I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about the production design, with its gorgeous costuming, lavish settings, and invigorating musical performances.  "Hedda" follows in the steps of "Babylon" and "Saltburn" by having most of the action revolve around a party that goes out of control.  While this doesn't appear to have the budget of either of those pictures, it certainly nails the intoxicating hedonism.  I also appreciate that this is another example of a story and characters that are traditionally associated with a very European milieu that is being reinterpreted and reexamined through the lens of the black and queer experience.  In film, that's still a perspective that barely exists, and every new addition is a precious one.  

"The History of Sound," directed by Oliver Hermanus, is almost the polar opposite of "Hedda" in style and approach. While "Hedda" is loud and colorful and full of incident, "The History of Sound" one of those gentle, contemplative, completely earnest historical romances that is a little difficult to take at face value.  Paul Mescal and Josh O'Connor play a pair of young musical academics, Lionel Worthing and David White, who meet in the 1910s and form a lasting bond, despite several long separations.  The most significant time they spend together is a journey through rural Maine on an ethnomusicology song-collecting mission.  The structure and the themes are similar to "Brokeback Mountain," except with folk singing taking the place of the sheep herding.

There's a very old fashioned feel to "The History of Sound" in its pacing and tone.  The film isn't afraid of long silences or letting its characters just exist in moments of rest or conversation.  It's clear from very early on that Lionel and David are in a homosexual relationship, but their connection often comes across as more fraternal than passionate, as a deep friendship rather than a romantic pairing.  Their initial attraction to each other is based on their mutual appreciation of music, and the music in the film is mostly vocal pieces, often rough and unaccompanied.  Likewise, the filmmaking is very sedate, with a limited color palette and a lot of time spent in dim interiors or the natural world.  The film is lovely, but it takes a while to acclimate to the severity and the minimalism of its elements.  

I like the performances - Mescal gets the majority share of the screen time as we largely follow Lionel's POV.  He handles the musical requirements of the part and the Kentucky accent without any issue.  More importantly, he does a great job of showing his character adapting and changing as he moves between worlds - his humble beginnings on a tiny farm in Kentucky, his apartment in Maine where he progresses in his academic career, and then loftier environments in Italy and England.  O'Connor's David presents more of a mystery, or rather he's giving us an incomplete impression of a charismatic, lively man who Lionel is obviously going to fall in love with.  It's a familiar concept, but O'Connor plays it well enough that it worked for me.

"The History of Sound" is traversing well-tread ground, but I was charmed by its willingness to go against the grain and give us an old-fashioned epic romance, filled with more longing than intimacy.  And like "Hedda," movies like this are still rarer than you'd think.

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A Bewitching "Kiss of the Spider Woman"

One of the major box office bombs of 2025 is Bill Condon's adaptation of the "Kiss of the Spider Woman" stage musical, and it's a terrible shame.  Initially, I was apprehensive about the story being turned into a splashy screen musical, only being familiar with Hector Babenco's non-musical film adaptation from 1985 that starred Raul Julia and William Hurt.  However, the new approach works, specifically the way that it manages to pay homage to Hollywood's golden age, while giving the main characters some important modern updates.

Molina (Tonatiuh), a queer window dresser, and Arregui (Diego Luna), a studious revolutionary, are forced to share a cell during their incarceration by the Argentinian military dictatorship in the late 70s.  Initially, Arregui wants nothing to do with the "frivolous" Molina, who is obsessed with movies and fashion.  However, Molina is persistently friendly, and passes the time by telling Arregui about his favorite actress, Ingrid Luna (Jennifer Lopez), and the plot of his favorite Luna musical, "The Kiss of the Spider Woman."  As their time in prison becomes more harrowing, Molina and Arregui grow closer, though all is not what it seems.

It's interesting that "Kiss of the Spider Woman" was pushed so heavily as a Jennifer Lopez vehicle when she has the least interesting role in the movie.  Sure, she's at the center of the gorgeous song and dance numbers that feature in Molina's fantasies, and is perfectly lovely to watch as both the glamorous Hollywood star and the looming spectre of death in her Spider Woman guise.  However, she's a cipher rather than an actual character.  The real lead of the picture is Tonatiuh, whose Molina is not explicitly said to be a transwoman or nonbinary in this version of the story (so I'm using male pronouns), but is given much more narrative space to express himself in ways that strongly suggest that this may be the case.  I don't think that Tonatiuh is as good an actor as William Hurt, but there's a welcome authenticity to the performance that is undeniable.  Arregui and Molina's dynamic is also more romantic, because it's not the '80s anymore.

Tonatiuh's character is expanded through the fantasy sequences, which are his escape from the harsh reality of the prison.  This is the biggest improvement on the previous screen version, where the "Kiss of the Spider Woman" movie within a movie was a Nazi propaganda/romantic melodrama pastiche with very sinister overtones.  In the new version, "The Kiss of the Spider Woman" is a full blown Latin themed MGM musical tribute, with elaborate staging and cinematography, vibrant colors, and a far more coherent plot.  Molina gives himself and Arregui roles within the movie too, so their real and fantasy selves can mirror one other throughout the story.  And this works because the filmmakers were very, very careful to maintain the line of demarcation between the two halves of the film until the very end.  Song numbers from the stage musical that occurred during the prison sequences were all removed, so songs only appear in the fantasies.  And the more vibrant and artificial as the musical sequences are, the more starkly unpleasant the prison scenes are.  Anyone going to "Kiss of the Spider Woman" for a fun romp may be in for more than they bargained for.  

Like many musical adaptations, the second half slows down and gets unwieldy.  It doesn't help that I don't find any of the songs memorable, and we lose Arregui for a few key scenes.  This is where it probably would have helped to have a more seasoned lead, as Tonatiuh delivers moments of great vulnerability and humor, but there were aspects of Molina's character - like his fear of the Spider Woman - that didn't land for me at all.  Still, witnessing the joyous finale where he gets to be himself at last, it's hard to argue that there was anyone more suitable for the role.  And once you've seen "Kiss of the Spider Woman" as a musical, how could it be anything else?  

Like Lars Von Trier's "Dancer in the Dark," "Kiss of the Spider Woman" functions as a metamusical, critiquing and commenting on the musical form, common movie tropes, and the function of fantasy as an escape.  Add its queer hero, and themes of surviving a Totalitarian regime, and "Kiss of the Spider Woman" couldn't be more timely.  The bungled release means it has an uphill battle, but I have no doubt that this one will become a classic - it's too good not to find its audience eventually.   

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"Peacemaker," Year Two

I'm not quite sure what to do with the second season of "Peacemaker," which has shifted from being less live-action "Venture Brothers" to more generic superhero antics, and also being used as a connector piece between the big screen "Superman" movies, which is the exact sort of thing that got the MCU in so much trouble.  There is a compelling hook for the season, which is that Peacemaker has to confront more fallout of his past misdeeds while dealing with his romantic feelings for Harcourt, with the added complication of discovering that the quantum portal his father left him happens to lead into other dimensions.  And one of these other dimensions is a world where his father and brother are still alive and well.

I like all the secondary characters in Peacemaker, including Adebayo, Economos, Vigilante, and Harcourt, who have taken to referring to themselves as the 11th Street Kids.  They get a bunch of new antagonists, including ARGUS agents played by Tim Meadows and Sol Rodriguez, plus Frank Grillo as Rick Flag Sr., the new ARGUS leader.  There are a ton of cameos from James Gunn regulars, and a few faces from "Superman" too.  Judomaster (Nhut Le) is back, and as lovably annoying as ever.  And I have absolutely no issue when the show is focusing on any of them.  The trouble is that Peacemaker is the central character, and he's in an absolute funk this year that is no fun to watch.  When he's not mooning over Harcourt, grieving family members, or feeling guilt-ridden over killing Rick Flag's son, he's allowing himself to avoid his problems by being drawn deeper and deeper into the alternate dimension, where everything is obviously too perfect to be true.  

Some of the new concepts are interesting, but in general everything's a lot more toned down than the previous season.  It feels like Gunn has to be more budget conscious, so only the finale really features any expensive CGI setpieces and creature effects.  This isn't a bad thing in the least, but it does mean that this round of "Peacemaker" is less about fantastical comic-book adventures, and more intent on focusing on the real, personal problems of its oddball crew, and it's not very good at that.  I don't fault any of the actors, and John Cena remains wonderfully committed, but the material just isn't working a lot of the time.  The banter and the silly team dynamics are as good as ever, and Vigilante is quickly moving up the ranks of my favorite characters in this show, but every time we cut back to Peacemaker in existential crisis, it really takes the wind out of their sales.

It doesn't help that there is a lot of indulgent fanboy excess going on.  It feels like that since James Gunn got away with certain things in the first season of "Peacemaker," he's doubling down in this one.  For instance, there was that great opening dance sequence everybody loved in season one.  Season two gives us a new one, set to Foxy Shazam's "Oh Lord."  It's a perfectly fine song, but it doesn't deliver that big dose of bombast that Wig Wam's "Do You Want to Taste It" did.  And the music references and playlist curation are a lot more prominent this time around.  Foxy Shazam even shows up in the finale, where the camera lingers on their performance for an uncomfortable length of time.  Maybe Gunn is more interested in being a deejay than a showrunner for this crew.  

Sophomore slumps like this are pretty common, and I have no reason to think that future seasons of "Peacemaker" won't improve from here.  There's plenty about the second season that I did enjoy.  However, I think that it's pretty telling that certain brief cameos were the best parts of the episodes they appeared in, and I finished off the season much more interested in the further adventures of pretty much everyone except Peacemaker.  Frankly, it was rough finishing this batch of episodes, and now both of James Gunn's DC television projects have thrown up some major red flags for where the rest of the new DC franchise is going.  

At least "Peacemaker" is better than "Creature Commandos," but not by as much as it should be.

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Wrapped Up in "The Roses"

Danny DeVito's "The War of the Roses" dark comedy was one of my favorites when I was a kid.  I didn't really understand the dynamics of the doomed relationship between the feuding couple in the film, but I loved watching Kathleeen Turner and Michael Douglas's performances.  I was a little wary when I heard that there was a remake in the works, but the right people seemed to be involved in "The Roses" - director Jay Roach, screenwriter Tony McNamara, who worked on "The Great" and "The Favourite," and stars Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman as Theo and Ivy Rose. 

"The Roses" is not what I expected.  It is very different from the 1989 "War of the Roses" and is definitely not the broad comedy that the trailers have made it out to be.  I know both of the film versions are based on a novel that I haven't read, and I wouldn't be surprised if "The Roses" hews much closer to it than the first adaptation.  Where "The War of the Roses" focused on the end of the Roses' marriage, "The Roses" spends much more time documenting the whole relationship.  And the relationship starts out very supportive, loving, and healthy, which makes its eventual downward spiral rather sad and unfortunate.  However, this means that the emotional stakes are definitely better laid out, and it's easier to feel sympathetic towards both parties when the hostilities finally commence.

Theo is an architect and Ivy is a chef.  They're Brits who meet in London but move to the San Francisco area to seek their fortunes.  They have two children, Hattie (Delaney Quinn and Hala Finley) and Roy (Ollie Robinson and Wells Rappaport), and a circle of friends including lawyer Barry (Andy Samberg), his wife Amy (Kate McKinnon), rival architect Rory (Jamie Demetriou), and his wife Sally (Zoe Chao).  Everything is going fine for the first decade of the marriage, with Theo working and Ivy as the stay at home parent, until circumstances change unexpectedly, forcing their roles to switch.  We watch them adjust to the new status quo fairly well, but resentments start to build.  And they just keep getting worse and worse over time, until things fall apart spectacularly.  

So, I was invested enough in the relationship by the end of the film that I was rooting for Ivy and Theo to stay together, as opposed to the couples in most of the similar movies I've seen, like the '89 "War of the Roses" and "Marriage Story," where I was rooting for the breakup.  McNamara has added some interesting nuances, such as swapping the traditional gender roles and making parenting styles a bigger point of contention.  Colman and Cumberbatch don't engage in the same kind of grandiose scenery chewing as Turner and Douglas, but I like them together onscreen, and I bought them as a couple.  Their comedic sensibilities are strong enough that the shift to more physical farce in the last act mostly worked, but not without a lot of bumps and setbacks along the way. 

Jay Roach is better known for straight comedies, and it's curious that the comedy is probably the least effective part of this movie.  I love Kate McKinnon, but she sticks out like a sore thumb here.  Sandberg gets by, mostly by playing it straight.  I think part of the issue might be that the British leads are so much drier than the usual comics that Roach has worked with, and it's tough at times for the audience to know when they should be laughing.  Some of the tonal shifts are rough, and it's not until very, very late in the movie that it feels like we're finally watching a comedy.  I ended up enjoying "The Roses" more for the poignant drama than the laughs, and I expect that anyone looking for more humor will have their patience tested by the first two thirds of the film.     

But all that said, I like "The Roses."  I like its ambition and its willingness to get uncomfortably blunt about the difficulties of marriage.  I like the pains that were taken to update the material, and the character work that keeps Theo and Ivy from coming across like caricatures when they start behaving badly.  I'm sure you could have made a much simpler, sillier film just covering the divorce portions of "The Roses."  It certainly would have been cheaper.  However, it wouldn't have been as interesting or as memorable.    

 

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A Look at "Lazarus"

I admit that I was only interested in watching the newest anime from Shinichiro Watanabe, "Lazarus," because it's so obviously trying to evoke the look and feel of "Cowboy Bebop," one of the best animated series ever made.  The opening sequence in particular uses the same visual style and a similarly bombastic opening instrumental.  Several of the primary "Bebop"  voice actors also pop up here and there in smaller roles.  Another selling point is the participation of Chad Stahelski, best known as one of the directors behind "John Wick," as a consultant for the show's fight choreography.  The "Lazarus" premiere features a jaw-dropping prison escape sequence that is tremendously fun.

"Lazarus" was a joint production with Adult Swim, and it's clear they wanted another "Cowboy Bebop."  In fact, it often feels like Watanabe had an entirely different show in mind and just grafted all the "Bebop" aesthetics on it in order to get the thing made, down to every episode taking its title from a song or album, and ending with a white text fragment on a black background.  "Lazarus" takes place in the near-future, where a wonder drug called Hapuna has been created by Dr. Deniz Skinner (Koichi Yamadera).  Hapuna eradicates pain and quickly becomes popular recreationally.  However, it turns out to be a Trojan Horse, and everyone who took Hapuna will die three years later unless Skinner and his antidote can be found.  Who can get the job done?  If you guessed a ragtag group of criminals coerced into becoming a superteam team by a shady governmental figure with access to way too many resources, you're right.

So meet Axel Gilberto (Mamoru Miyano), a petty criminal and escape artist, Chris Blake (Maaya Uchida) a sexy mercenary, Leland Astor (Yuma Uchida) a teenage drone pilot, Elena (Manaka Iwami) a hacker prodigy, Doug Hadine (Makoto Furukawa), the guy in charge of keeping them all on track, and finally Hersch Lindemann (Megumi Hayashibara), the aforementioned shady governmental figure.  One of them is a former Russian spy, one of them is a former secret test subject, one is a former cult member, one is a double agent, and one is secretly filthy rich.  They have thirty days to find Skinner before people start dying, and somehow every place they look results in the team getting involved in gunfights, chases, and improbable action sequences.  Axel, a parkour expert, is positioned as our lead character and gets all the showiest scenes.  

For the most part, "Lazarus" looks pretty good.  There's a predictable drop in the animation quality after the first episode, and the character designs are incredibly derivative, but if all you're after is a slick piece of entertainment, "Lazarus" fits the bill just fine.  After the introductory episodes lay out the science-fiction premise, the show mostly falls into the pattern of a mission-of-the-week action show.  I kept wanting to compare it to "The A-team" or "Mission: Impossible" television programs, where the gang ends up in all sorts of improbable situations.  This is the kind of show where an insecure male character ends up in drag trying to suss out a drug dealer's potential connection to Skinner.  Axel eventually gains an evil psychopathic stalker, because we have to have an evil psychopathic stalker, don't we?   

The premise is a good one, but largely goes to waste.  I assumed that "Lazarus" was going to lean into its dystopian vibes, showing how the world would react to an apocalypse on the horizon.  They could have targeted the pharma industry like "Common Side Effects" or the culture of distraction, like "Paranoia Agent."  Instead, anything too serious is only addressed obliquely.  A handful of episodes have one of the main characters explain why they took Hapuna via somber opening narration, but this has little to do with the plot itself.  There's almost no attempt to have the main characters grapple with the morality of any of their actions, and the mood is always very light.  There's some material showing how Skinner gradually lost faith in humanity, but it's always kept peripheral.   

What's more disappointing is that Axel and the rest of his team stay pretty flat characters.  We eventually learn more about everyone's backgrounds, and there are a few tragic backstories, but there's never a sense of much character growth.  The characters bond as a team, but they never feel like they form individual relationships with each other.  For instance, when Elena makes a friend it's with a fellow hacker.  And when Chris gets into trouble with ex-employers, the rest of the team decide to use up precious time to rescue her, but there's next to no discussion of why.   

As a result, "Lazarus" ends up feeling generic and disposable.  There were clearly a lot of resources poured into this project, but I don't think I can recommend more than the first episode or two, and really that's just for the fancy animation.  Everything else here has been done better by other series, including the "Cowboy Bebop" homages.  

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"The Librarians" and "Mr. Nobody Against Putin"

More spotlights of recent documentaries today, this time focusing on films about the politicization of education systems.

"The Librarians," directed by Kim A. Snyder, profiles several librarians and former librarians from Texas and Florida, who were at the center of the book banning controversies in their states in the post-COVID years.  From the opening frames, it is a film that had my blood boiling, because of the subject matter.  The bans are documented in great detail, shown to be based on the flimsiest pretexts and being pushed by bad faith actors from the very beginning.  Eventually, they are revealed to be the result of a concerted campaign by a handful of extremist Christian Nationalist groups to try and demonize the LGBT community by spearheading a witch hunt of inclusive educators and librarians.  

When we look back on this period in American history, "The Librarians" will provide one of the clearest examples of how the culture war was propagated through fearmongering and misinformation, and the deleterious effects on some of our most vital educational and informational systems.  The film is structured around the interviews with the librarians, who make it very clear that the losers in this fight are always the children who lose vital access to books.  While a portion of the film is spent tracing where the money is coming from that is funding the hate campaigns, I appreciate that little time is wasted on the aims of the Christian Nationalists, whose viewpoint is based entirely in ignorance and intolerance.  Instead, the focus stays on the heroic efforts of the librarians, who do their best to resist not only against their single-minded harassers, but against the complacency of the administrators who often try to appease the mob.  Some of the most uplifting moments I've seen in any film all year are the clips of the students who are inspired to speak out against the bans.

A very stark example of what happens when you don't push back against this kind of politicization of education comes in "Mr Nobody Against Putin," a documentary largely put together by Pavel Talankin.  Talankin is the former videographer and events coordinator of a primary school in the Russian industrial town of Karabash.  Due to his position, he was able to document what happened to his school and its students after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, when the government made drastic changes to the curriculum and instituted new measures to spread propaganda and nationalist fervor.  Talankin narrates and provides context to his footage, which is very rough and piecemeal, but does a good job of capturing a very personal view of Russia's propaganda tactics in a very specific context.

"Mr. Nobody" benefits from the POV of Talankin, who is exactly the kind of energetic, optimistic personality you'd expect to be working as part of the staff of a primary school.  He spends the early part of the film situating us in Karabash and showing us the ins and outs of school life before the government's disruptive edicts start coming in.  The propaganda itself is fascinating, progressing from heavy-handed justifications for the war being delivered by the teachers, to showy demonstrations of loyalty to the state, and lessons where both the teachers and the students have scripted parts.  Significant efforts are expended on looking the part of Russian patriots, and performing for the cameras, as video documentation of their efforts has to be regularly uploaded to a government website.  It's a fascinating, sobering look at the way old totalitarian tactics and new technology have intersected.

I wish we'd gotten a better look at the lives of some of the individual students, but Talankin is only able to include a very few glimpses of young men bound for the front lines and the families they leave behind.  Considering that Talankin was forced to flee Russia by mid-2024, however, I'm not inclined to look a gift horse in the mouth.  

   

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