The critical raves about Essie Davis's performance in The Justice of Bunny King are well deserved. This was an amazing performance in a challenging role. The movie follows the character Bunny King, who has lost her children to New Zealand's child protective services for reasons that aren't clear until the vey end of the film. On the way to that point, we see Bunny, who spends her days washing windshields for spare change, trying everything she can to get her children back. The pace becomes frenetic as Bunny tries to keep the promise she makes to her daughter, that they will be together for her fifth birthday - a promise that her older son knows that she can't keep. The film's title is an interesting choice, as it generally shows the injustice of child protective services in New Zealand. As Bunny says at one point, mimicking the social workers who interview her periodically during the film, "sorry, we won't let you see your kids because you're too poor!" While the specificities of the law may be about New Zealand's policies around housing and family law, the larger story of how the capitalist state fails to adequately address sexism within the family and punishes women for things beyond their control will sadly be familiar to people across the globe.
Roaring 20's stands out for the technical prowess of the filmmaker. The film goes from one conversation to another on the street in Paris in the summer of 2020 and was shot in only 6 takes. This makes for an interesting film to watch, though part of what you wind up thinking about is the timing that must have been involved in getting the people in place to pick up the next conversation. Beyond the gimmick of the shooting, the substance was pretty light. The individual vignettes were uneven, and the lack of connection or theme across the stories made it less interesting than the film it's been compared to the most, Richard Linklater's Slacker. Unlike that film, I thought that this movie about Paris mostly lacked a real sense of place, with the exception of one pair discussing the Belleville neighborhood, and even that is mostly done through the exposition rather than the visual narrative. Much of what happens and the people we encounter could be in any city - what is so Parisian about this, after all? And if there is nothing unique about the city in this moment, why bother to make such a film to capture its utterly bland character? I also found this movie disappointing because while it could make a comment about a moment in time, if not a specificity of place, it doesn't really do that either. Despite the occasional acknowledgment of the Covid-19 pandemic through the wearing of masks, there was almost no conversation about the virus itself, or about what people did to make it through the recently ended lockdown. Not even one character remarks on what a relief it is to be out and about again! No one mentions a dead or sick friend or relative. If the filmmaker wanted the conversations to be normal and not about Covid, that makes sense as a choice, I guess, but if the whole film is shot so that the only thing uniting the characters is the fact of their being in a specific place at a specific time, it seemed like the choice was a mistake. If a fiction film makes reality less rather than more interesting and meaningful, tant pis.
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