Saltburn review: This class comedy is like Brideshead, but with a dark, suspenseful twist… writes BRIAN VINER
Salt burn
May December
Saltburn, Emerald Fennell’s exuberant satire on class and privilege, opened the London Film Festival last month and got the event off to a great start.
It’s an intriguing, flawed, at times immensely enjoyable follow-up to her critically acclaimed 2020 debut Promising Young Woman.
This one is about a promising young man. Barry Keoghan plays Oliver Quick, a boy from a seemingly deprived background on Merseyside who arrives at Oxford University feeling like a fish to water, both socially and academically.
He befriends a quirky math whiz on his first day, and his first week becomes an exercise in shaking off this weirdo, a situation that anyone who’s studied anywhere will surely relate to (although I imagine some of us might be the were weirdos). ). Anyway, it’s very funny.
Fortunately for him, Oliver manages to win his way into the affections of another freshman, the scheming, popular, wealthy Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), with whom he quickly falls in love.
Barry Keoghan plays Oliver Quick, a boy from a seemingly deprived background on Merseyside who arrives at Oxford University feeling, both socially and academically, like a fish out of water.
Felix’s friends don’t all welcome this lower-class interloper into their circle; his cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe) is particularly hostile. But unsuspectingly and generously, Felix invites Oliver for the holidays to the extravagant family center of Saltburn, where his parents Sir James (Richard E. Grant), Lady Elspeth (Rosamund Pike) and sister Venetia (Alison Oliver) wallow in hilarious self-indulgence. in aristocratic splendor.
Grant is a limited actor, but when given a role that plays to his strengths, he rises to the occasion gloriously. So here it is, though it’s Pike who steals the show, with valuable support from Carey Mulligan as ‘poor dear’ Pamela, a family friend who has rather outstayed her welcome at Saltburn. “Darling, where is Liverpool,” Lady Elspeth chirps at one point, capturing to perfection the kind of clueless, posh, entitled but utterly charming woman of a certain age and race who might well be lord of the manor of a house like this can be.
The writer and director, in her own words, cheerfully used her gilded upbringing as the daughter of ‘social jeweller’ Theo Fennell to determine the scenario.
A fine actress, she clearly didn’t have to dig particularly deep to play the young Camilla Parker Bowles in The Crown. Overseen by Paul Rhys as a fantastically snooty butler, this is the rarefied world that Oliver is immersed in, in what has until now been a broad comedy of manners, Brideshead Revisited with jokes.
Felix invites Oliver for the holidays to the extravagant family village of Saltburn, where his parents Sir James (Richard E. Grant), Lady Elspeth (Rosamund Pike) and sister Venetia (Alison Oliver) (pictured) wallow in aristocratic splendor with hilarious smugness
But I hope it doesn’t count as a spoiler to say that the second half of the film owes a lot more to The Talented Mr Ripley, as Oliver sits down under the handsome mahogany table and the story takes a shocking leap into something else. becoming a dark psychosexual thriller. I felt a little uncomfortable with this shift in tone and had a few more specific complaints, not least Keoghan’s ‘Merseyside’ accent, which darts distractingly back and forth across the Irish Sea. Even though he’s a great actor, he’s 31; it’s a tall order to believe in him as a newly arrived Oxford student.
But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t see Saltburn. At its funniest it’s a real hoot, and at its darkest it’s still strangely compelling.
There are also dark, psychosexual undertones in the excellent May December, which is loosely inspired by the true story of a California woman named Mary Kay Letourneau, a teacher who began a relationship with a student when she was 34 and he was just 12. gave birth to his child, went to prison as a sex offender and later married him.
Todd Haynes’ film cleanses up that sordid backstory somewhat. Julianne Moore plays Gracie, now married to the much younger Joe (Charles Melton), who was at least a teenager when the affair began.
With the scandal almost a quarter of a century behind us and the couple’s enduring relationship seemingly rock solid, an actress arrives at their home to interview Gracie and study her mannerisms before playing her on screen.
Julianne Moore, left, and Natalie Portman in a scene from May December
This is Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), whose presence little by little begins to expose Gracie’s human weaknesses and the rifts in the marriage. Elizabeth is also not as completely straightforward as she seems at first glance.
Moore and Portman are both great in this film, while Melton is never overshadowed by two such illustrious Hollywood heavyweights.
But the laurels also belong to Haynes, whose 2015 film Carol was yet another impeccably observed story of emotional tumult beneath a serene surface, and to screenwriter Samy Burch. She and the wonderful cast have given us a psychological drama of real weight.
Madeleine riding
Driving Madeleine is a sweet French-language film about a Parisian taxi driver, Charles (Dany Boon), plagued by money worries, sent to pick up a lively 92-year-old woman, Madeleine (Line Renaud), on the day she moves. out of her house.
She wants him to drive her around town, looking at her old haunts, before reluctantly moving into a retirement home, and the pair bond over the long, winding and sometimes eventful journey. It could all be a bit saccharine, except that Madeleine’s backstory includes a 13-year prison sentence for disfiguring an abusive partner, some of which we see in flashback, as well as another terrible tragedy.
The acting is delightful, the sights of Paris evocative, the writing is sometimes a little clunky, but overall Christian Carion’s film is a delight. And those who look at cabaret star Renaud and think she can’t possibly be 92, you’re right. She’s 95.