In Batman Begins, we discovered the combination of loneliness, bad luck and extreme wealth that created the Caped Crusader and in Joker, we found out why his nemesis, Arthur Fleck, turned out to be such a fruit bat. Now it’s Cruella de Vil’s turn.
Ok, so Cruella may not have quite the same pop cultural stature as The Batman, but she was a reviled feature of many a childhood, roaring about in her sporty Rolls Royce, wreaking havoc as she hunted down those cursed Dalmatians.
She wanted to turn them into coats and perhaps a jaunty pillbox hat, but you have to admit, her sense of style was impeccable.
Cruella first appeared in the 1961 Disney animation 101 Dalmatians and has been portrayed with icy panache by Glenn Close in two live action spin-offs.
But in this origins adventure, we meet Cruella unformed, still young and capable of goodness. Back in the good old days, villains were bad to the bone, pure and simple — they existed to be hated.
Now every hoodlum has a sob story and, in fairness, Cruella’s is rather compelling.
The only child of an impoverished washerwoman called Catherine (Emily Beecham), Estella (played as a child by Tipper Seifert-Cleveland) is born with hair half-black, half-white and a spiky sensibility that sets her apart from her peers.
Bullied at school, she fights back with ingenious aplomb, but always ends up in trouble.
Young Estella’s abiding passion is fashion and after she’s expelled, her mother agrees to bring her to London where, in the mid-1960s, big things are happening.
But on the way, Catherine comes to an untimely end and Estella, now an orphan, carries on to London, where she falls in with two light-fingered street waifs called Jasper and Horace (Joel Fry, Paul Walter Hauser).
Living in a bombed-out building and making ends meet by picking pockets, they form a kind of family, but Estella (now played by Emma Stone) never loses her love for fashion, and when she gets a cleaning job at the Liberty fashion store, her luck changes.
After she gets drunk one night and rearranges a fusty shopfront display in punkish fashion, her talent is spotted by legendary designer The Countess (Emma Thompson, giving it socks).
Estella is promptly hired and though The Countess is clearly sociopathic, she sees promise in the young waif, and takes her under her wing.
But The Countess has a secret and when Estella finds out, she adopts the vengeful alter ego of Cruella and sets out to steal her mentor’s fashion thunder and put her out of business.
There’s much to enjoy in the first hour or so, as Estella, in languid voiceover, gives us a whistle-stop tour of her life. Music is used inventively, and as our heroine grows from girl to woman to supervillain.
The costume designs are wonderful, from the classic Dior and Chanel-style frocks that The Countess designs and wears to the more ragged Vivienne Westwood-inspired creations Estella/Cruella favours.
That split personality is the film’s dramatic crux: it’s well acted, but clumsily written.
Stone is very good as the psychologically compromised designer, and gives depth to her characterisation whenever possible, with little help from a cartoonish screenplay.
There’s a lot of fun to be had, especially with Thompson’s Countess, but Cruella’s biggest problem is one of tone.
At times, it seems to be almost reaching for the angsty grit of Christopher Nolan’s Batman films, then recalls its cartoon origins and gets all giddy. One approach or the other might have worked — both simultaneously do not.
By the end of the film, Cruella seems fully formed and loudly hints at a sequel. I’d like to see Stone play the villainous vamp in her pomp. Let’s hope she gets the chance.
Rating: Three stars
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The 8th (ifi@home, 94mins)
In 1983, the Irish people, herded backwards by church and State, voted to add the 8th Amendment to the Constitution, thereby granting ‘the unborn’ equal right to life to that of its mother.
Thirty-five years later, the amendment was overthrown, but only after a bad-tempered campaign, and the grassroots struggle of the repeal campaign is explored in this fine documentary.
At the centre of the fight is veteran campaigner Ailbhe Smyth, who inspires a growing band of young female activists and points out, “3,500 women travel to Britain for an abortion every year, in the most dreadful circumstances”, their human rights denied by the state. ‘Keep your rosaries off my ovaries!’ read the protesters’ banners; ‘womb for improvement!’.
There’s plenty of context, from clips of the 1983 referendum to mentions of the X-Case, and the death of Savita Halappanavar.
We don’t hear much from the No campaign, though we do hear them scaremongering about what will happen if the 8th is repealed. On May 25, 2018, it happened, and the sky did not fall.
Rating: Four stars
State Funeral (Mubi, 135mins)
When Joseph Stalin died on March 5, 1953, a massive state funeral was arranged.
Hundreds of thousands of mourners would attend, the whole thing carefully choreographed and filmed. But within a few years of his death, Stalin’s reputation had declined.
He might have defeated Hitler, but the taciturn Georgian had also killed a million Russians during the Great Purge, millions more during forced collectivisation.
And so reams of funeral footage ended up in drawers, gathering dust, until Sergei Loznitsa used it to create this mesmerising documentary.
A fascinating glimpse into a vanished time, State Funeral scans the crowds in Red Square as the fallen leader’s body passes: a few weep, but most look on cautiously, not wanting to give anything away.
At the time, people who dared celebrate the tyrant’s death were rounded up and shot.
On the VIP dais, members of the Politburo are similarly downcast, their grief largely simulated. Among them Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s henchman — a rapist and murderer, who would shortly be killed by his rivals, allowing Nikita Khrushchev to worm his way to power.