‘Saipan’
For those seeking filmic appetizers to go with their World Cup viewing, Mubi currently has an entire program of international movies devoted to soccer, including renowned gems like Bill Forsyth’s “Gregory’s Girl” (1980), Corneliu Porumboiu’s “Infinite Football” (2018) and Alexandre Koberidze’s “What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?” (2021). Don’t miss one of the recent entrants into this canon: “Saipan,” about an infamous 2002 dispute between the star Irish player Roy Keane and the then-manager of the Irish team, Mick McCarthy. While the team was making a brief stopover on the island of Saipan on their way to Japan for the World Cup finals, Keane, known for his short temper and brash rants, got into an explosive argument with McCarthy over dissatisfactory training arrangements. The manager sent him home — causing a media furor and essentially aborting the Irish team’s chances of winning the tournament.
In this restaging of those few high-strung days in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the directors, Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn, capture the tragic absurdity and pressure-cooker atmosphere of the scandal by cutting between faces, places and archival and fictional footage at a pulsating rhythm. Even viewers who may know all the details of the incident might find themselves holding their breath as Keane (Eanna Hardwicke, walking a tightrope between obnoxiousness and admirable conviction) gets increasingly combative, pushing McCarthy (Steve Coogan) to the end of his patience. The film demonstrates why soccer is such a cinematic game: The egos, the plays, the dramas off the pitch are as absorbing as those on the field.
This Croatian drama opens with the young, curly-haired Marko (Lav Novosel) engaging in a series of physical feats: riding his bike furiously, lifting his girlfriend in his strong arms, winning a pull-up contest with his soccer mates (and then indulging in crude locker room talk about girls). He is the perfect jock, showing no signs that he was once in love with another boy, Slaven (Andrija Zunac), triggering a scandal that ended with Slaven leaving town. But then Slaven’s father dies and he returns for the funeral. Like the local river, whose dangerous rise is constantly on the news, repressed desires start to surface.
The director Cejen Cernic Canak builds a slow burn of a film with two fantastic, sensitive actors, who say more with their eyes than their words. A few stray arguments and fights aside, the film’s portrayal of toxic patriarchy is never on-the-nose; it permeates the village like a fog, manifesting in everyday gestures and speech, and in the obsession with contests of strength, their homoerotic undercurrents notwithstanding. Canak’s depiction of queer desire, too, is similarly felt rather than stated aloud, a powerful and undeniable force in the face of prejudice.
Following a gay teenager in São Paulo who takes up sex work after being abandoned by his family, Marcelo Caetano’s “Baby” is a surprisingly tender movie. The film depicts harsh realities — particularly the ways in which homophobia pushes young queer people into dangerous games of survival — but with genuine admiration for chosen families and the grit of those who defend their identities even when pushed to the margins.
We meet the 18-year-old Wellington (João Pedro Mariano) just as he is released from a juvenile detention center after a two-year stint. He comes home to realize that his parents have skipped town and left him no means of getting in touch. As he survives by sleeping on the streets and going out with his friends to cruising spots, he meets Ronaldo (Ricardo Teodoro), an older sex worker who takes Wellington under his wing, teaching him the ways of the trade.
Wellington and Ronaldo form a poignant bond, but love is hard when precarity and persecution encircle one’s relationship. Yet Caetano balances these hard truths with glowing scenes of dancing, sensuality and friendship; these characters may have to conduct their business in the dark, but they wear their queerness proudly, without shame, even in the bright light of day.
Johanna Runevad’s comedy, about a Swedish woman who finds a new lease on life as an au pair in France, is full of surprises. If the broad contours of the story feel quite familiar, treading the well-worn beats of movies about midlife crises and older women rediscovering themselves, the details are idiosyncratic and delightful. Agneta (Eva Melander), a Francophile in Sweden who has spent 25 years working at the local transport office and going through the motions with her condescending husband, is laid off. In a lost, drunken stupor, she applies to a job she finds in the classifieds, seeking a Swedish au pair for a ward in Provence.
When she gets the gig, she packs her bags and arrives in town (speaking barely any French), confident that if nothing else, she has the skills to take care of a little boy. But there’s a catch: The boy is actually an old, eccentric and irascible Swede, Einar (Claes Mansson), whose oddities include yelling daily in the garden of the house, “How do you do, my libido?” We soon learn that Einar left Sweden — and a wife and child — decades ago to find a place where he could live freely as a gay man; in France, he met a lover, Armand, who drew him into a world of romance, liberation and art. Now, growing old in his strange house full of nude paintings and memories of debauchery, he oscillates between pride at having created the life he wanted and grief at all that he had to give up to get there.
As Einar and Agneta open up to each other, his hard-won freedoms throw her stifling heterosexual life into relief. And it underlines what queerness is really about: never taking society’s expectations as a given, and instead living and loving by one’s own truths.
Two working-class geezers with years of strenuous labor (and even more strenuous boozing) under their belts roam around Venice for a night, in search of that elusive final drink. There is a deceptive simplicity and looseness to the premise of Francesco Sossai’s charming film. At one point, Doriano (Pierpaolo Capovilla) and Carlobianchi (Sergio Romano) crash the graduation party of some college students, and the bookish, lovesick Giuilo (Filippo Scotti), a newly minted architect, joins their merry band. Intergenerational misadventures ensue, including a hilarious episode in which they stumble upon a mansion and pretend to be the surveyors the owner has been waiting for.
We discern from Doriano and Carlobianchi’s aimless conversations a back story involving their years of work at an eyewear factory, a lucrative illicit business in the 1990s, the impact of the 2008 financial crisis, and treasure buried somewhere long forgotten. While Guilio stresses about deadlines, bedtimes and jobs, the older men navigate the world with the devil-may-care attitude of those who understand that striving does not guarantee prosperity, and luck rarely favors the bold. Amid the film’s entertaining high jinks, a subtle commentary emerges on how Italy has changed in the decades past, and how our experience of time has itself been reshaped by ruthless capitalism.
