Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
Fingernails
Luke Wilson turns up early in Fingernails, as the CEO of a science-based love institute, and his presence—hangdog-shaggy, droll behind-the-beat delivery, trailing echoes of his past comedic work—is one of the signs that this movie, despite its polished and mostly sober exterior, is kidding us around. If it were meant to be taken straight, we'd have problems, because there's much about Fingernails that is ludicrous, from its basic premise (there's a test that can determine whether couples are going to stay in love with each other) to its details (the test involves yanking out an entire fingernail from each romantic partner—that's the bit that gets tested).
You should be laughing during the testing scenes, as the participants yelp with pain; if you don't feel so inclined, this movie will be a puzzling slog. We follow a teacher, Anna (Jessie Buckley), who's already "tested positive" with her partner (Jeremy Allen White), so they have a secure love connection. But she's curious about the process, and gets a job at the very institute where they do the testing, where she and her mentor Amir (Riz Ahmed) work with couples on exercises that will improve their chances at getting a 100% match. Amir is a lonely soul whose crush on his new co-worker is so obvious it is hardly worth the pinky-nail Anna sacrifices to run a surreptitious test—but then she is checking her own stats as well, because she's been wondering about the doldrums in her relationship.
People have been comparing director Christos Nikou's debut English-language feature to the work of Yorgos Lanthimos, for their shared weirdness and I guess for their Greek-ness. Nikou is not at Lanthimos's level, but if the deadpan approach is inspired by the older director's example, it's pretty convincing. There's a lot of stupid stuff in this movie presented straight-faced, such as the little dioramas of love-test situations that Amir has apparently made (not referred to later, maybe because they are idiotic), and the training exercise that includes couples sniffing around a roomful of unwashed bodies to sharpen their talents for picking out their mate by smell. I did like the institute's practice of having participants sing French songs like "La Mer," which leads to Amir admitting that the lyrics don't really matter because the music is so good, an affirmation of my own feelings about pop music.
Nikou has a nose for those things, and he also has a thing for noses—the four main actors all share a sharp, prominent schnozz. The film does grind down a little, and it's minor in the end, but Buckley and Ahmed are such decent actors that you want them to pull off the final reel, and they mostly do—a quiet attempt to rescue messy human feeling from the graph of percentages.
Fair Play
In the final half-hour of Fair Play there are some unexpected moves that suggest the edgy sexual politics of movie eras past, resulting in a poisoned pas de deux in which each partner is so seriously messed-up they escape the cookie-cutter outlines of most screenplays. The 90 minutes that precede this section are, alas, an off-putting exercise in workplace intrigue, full of slick surfaces, performative smoking, and people horndogging in suspiciously forceful ways.
You can't say writer-director Chloe Domont doesn't warn us: After all, we are watching a movie about two people whose dream is to succeed as stock-market sharks. I know—finally, a story with young people you can actually root for. They are romantically involved while working at the same firm, but secretly so, because their affair (which becomes a wedding engagement in the opening sequence) is against company policy. The movie's twist is that she (Phoebe Dynevor) gets the big promotion that he (Alden Ehrenreich) assumed he'd get, which means he becomes more of an asshole than he already seemed to be. Eddie Marsan is around as their cruel boss, showing these young actors that withholding can be more effective than exploding (they don't take the cue).
It may be that Domont is daring in offering these unsympathetic characters, but the tone suggests more conventional kinds of identification are intended. Elsewhere, the film's shiny surface is hard to crack and unpleasant to look at, and the tangled edginess of those final minutes is too long in coming.
November 3, 2023
