Good Favor

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Audience Member Intriguing film which accurately portrays man's genuine desire to follow God yet struggling to understand suffering Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 02/23/23 Full Review stephen c Rewarding if you have the patience (but don't expect easy answers) Essentially a parable about the nature of religious extremism and the perils of self-imposed isolationism, writer/director Rebecca Daly's Good Favour is far more interested in asking questions than answering them. Functioning as a kind of blank canvas onto which viewers can project their own interpretation, the film is not especially concerned with either standard character arcs or narrative beats. Instead, it works primarily as a pseudo-allegorical examination of the possibility for hermetic religious groups to see the miraculous in scientifically explainable phenomena. For many, the slow pace culminating in a highly ambiguous finale will prove alienating, but for me, the deliberate narrative style is perfectly matched to the unsettling and studied story Daly wishes to tell, and the denouement is as well-handled a piece of cinematic ambiguity as I've seen in a long while. Set in an ethnoreligious Christian community of goods in "the forests of Central Europe", prior to the beginning of the film, the community's faith has been shaken - newly born cattle have been dying without reason, and a young boy has gone missing. The film begins when 17-year-old Tom (Vincent Romeo) confusedly emerges from the forest. Wounded and exhausted, he wanders into the commune and collapses. Mikkel (Lars Brygmann), the group's leader, elects to interpret Tom's arrival as a blessing, touting him as the possible solution to their recent problems, and encouraging his followers to accept him as one of their own. Either unwilling or unable to speak about his past, Tom agrees to live by their rules and work in the commune. As time passes, however, the local children, and soon some of the adults, begin to attribute Messianic characteristics to Tom. The film signals it's part-esoteric, part-allegorical status almost immediately - when Tom stumbles into the commune, there are holes in both of his wrists and a large gash on his side. Does he bear the Stigmata or is it a coincidence? This is the first of the many, many (many) questions the film poses which could be addressed via either an ecclesiastical-based supernatural interpretation or a scientific explanation. Tom comes to be seen by some as a non-corporeal saviour, and by others as an interloper and possible charlatan, but which group is correct? When a young girl is drowning and Tom saves her life, is it because he has healing hands, or simply because he knew how to treat her medically in the circumstances? The scene is shot in such a way as to suggest both, without committing to either. His role as possible saviour receives its most sustained analysis in the brilliantly conceived and executed finale. Relying on the viewer's perception, Tibor Dingelstad's ambiguous camera blocking, and Tony Cranstoun's fascinating editing rhythms, the scene is as ambivalent as the rest of the film, whilst also directly addressing the mystery at the heart of the narrative. Based on the Hutterites, the unnamed group in the film (whose belief system is never explicitly revealed) are not an easy target for derision and social commentary. Instead, the depiction is one of respect, with Daly emphasising many of the community's more beneficent qualities. However, Tibor Dingelstad's cinematography, with its muted colour scheme, certainly depicts them in a less than flattering light; when a policeman visits the commune, the colours on his car seem garish when compared with the palette used to up to that point. All the photography in the village is also shot in shallow focus, flattening the image, with background details difficult to discern. When outside the village, however, Dingelstad uses a much deeper focus, making the village seem dull and lifeless, and the forest is vibrant and endless. As with both of Daly's previous films, Good Favour is not interested in providing answers. Instead, it directly encourages the audience to speculate, with its mise en scene specifically built so as to create maximum ambiguity. It's Daly's most complete artistic statement thus far, combining the centrality of mood and tone from The Other Side of Sleep (2011) with the uncomfortable moral issues raised in Mammal (2016). The slow pace and ambiguous ending will put many viewers off, but, for me, both work to help establish theme and tone, as Daly slowly builds up a disquieting worldview, before examining what happens when that view is fundamentally disrupted. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 03/30/23 Full Review Read all reviews

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