Matthew d’Ancona’s culture: Against the odds, A Real Pain is a triumph

David Kaplan (Eisenberg) is a neurotic, OCD-afflicted New Yorker, married with a child and holding down a steady job selling digital ads – the polar opposite of his cousin Benji (Kieran Culkin) a charming, outspoken slacker from whom David has become partially estranged. In memory of their beloved grandmother Dory, a Holocaust survivor, they head for Poland to join a group of tourists visiting sites connected to the genocide of the Jews.

David’s anxieties are all too obvious, depriving him of Benji’s instant connection with the others. “I love him, and hate him, and want to kill him, and want to be him,” he admits. Yet Benji’s showmanship, flirtation and flippancy occasionally peel back to reveal deep turmoil. When he says to David that “I totally forgot you have such nice feet”, he is expressing heartache and loneliness with the eccentricity that is his defensive shield. 

After a trip to the site of the Majdanek concentration camp near Lublin, the cousins leave the group to see the village where their grandmother grew up. What they find there is both funny and sad; bathetic in its normality, tragic in the past that it evokes.

Culkin fully deserves the Golden Globe he picked up on Sunday: a real pain to his cousin (who also adores him), and full of unanswered pain himself. The movie poses serious questions: is it indecorous to compare contemporary worries to the terrors of history? And is David’s repression healthier than Benji’s disinhibition? A Real Pain is a tremendous movie, establishing Eisenberg as director of real accomplishment.

Maria (selected cinemas)

Angelina Jolie delivers the performance of a lifetime in the third of Pablo Larraín’s trilogy of movies about legendary women of the last century – following Jackie (2016) and Spencer (2021). As her health fails in September 1977, Maria Callas is a ghostly, disturbed figure in her magnificent Parisian apartment, propped up by heavy medication and the loving, round-the-clock assistance of her butler Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) and housekeeper Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher).

Still only 53, the revered soprano has not sung in public for four-and-a-half years. “Audiences expect miracles,” she says. “I can no longer perform miracles”. 

Instead, Larraín sets a magic-realist stage for her final week, in which the distinction between reality and hallucination is far from clear. Notionally, she is cooperating with a film crew documenting her life and career. But the interviewer (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is implausibly called “Mandrax”, the name of a hypnotic sedative. Is he, in fact, the angel of death?

Ed Lachman’s cinematography is often breath-taking as the diva walks through Paris, down colonnades of trees that recall Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Outside the Palais de Chaillot, a crowd breaks into the Anvil Chorus from Verdi’s Il trovatore. An orchestra plays in the rain, while costumed geishas sing Coro a bocca chiusa from Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. 

As past and present blur, Callas remembers – in vivid black and white – her traumas in Nazi-occupied Athens, her early operatic triumphs and her love affair with Aristotle Onassis (brilliantly rendered by Haluk Bilginer). “I took liberties all my life,” she recalls, “and the world took liberties with me.”

As she prepared for the role, Jolie immersed herself in the craft of singing, which means – though most of the sound we hear is of Callas’s own voice – that the actor’s is mixed in too; more to the point, she looks as though she is engaged in the immensely draining physical task of performing a great aria. 

The most tragic scenes in the movie portray Maria singing in private with a rehearsal pianist named Jeffrey (Stephen Ashfield), trying desperately to recover the transcendental gift of “La Callas” in her prime. Fleetingly, it is there as she performs O mio babbino caro from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi – but only fleetingly. 

Though Maria is obviously catnip for opera fans like me, its true theme is universal: the exquisite transience of talent, beauty, love and life itself.

Babygirl (selected cinemas)

“I thought you were raised by soldiers or robots,” jokes Esme (Sophie Wilde) to her formidable, apparently unflappable boss, Romy Mathis (Nicole Kidman). As CEO of Tensile, the logistics company she founded, and punctilious choreographer of her family’s upscale home life, Romy does indeed embody machine-like perfection. The symbolism of the gliding robotic trays on a grid at her completion plant is not difficult to decode. 

Yet, beneath the immaculately Botoxed surface, she is gripped by transgressive sexual fantasies of which her theatre director husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas) is totally unaware. So she is both shocked and aroused when one of the company’s new interns, Samuel (Harris Dickinson), intuits her secret needs immediately and dares to tell her that “you like to be told what to do”.  

Thus begins a torrid sub-dom affair which is massively complicated by the fact that they are colleagues and of different generations. As Samuel reminds Romy in a flash of real (rather than performative) cruelty, he could destroy her with a single phone call.

Halina Reijn’s movie is a knowingly counter-cultural exploration of contemporary puritanism and sexual mores. As such, it is a little less daring and less interesting than it thinks it is. There are moments when Babygirl is really no more than 9½ Weeks (1986) for the digital age – needle-drops such as George Michael’s Father Figure and INXS’s Never Tear Us Apart subliminally encouraging the sense that Romy and Samuel have simply travelled back to the Eighties as sexual tourists.

That said, the performances are uniformly excellent, especially Kidman’s. As she showed in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and Yorgos Lanthimos’s mythic masterpiece The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), she is as fearless as she is accomplished, radically enhancing everything in which she appears.

The Story of Us (BBC Two; iPlayer)

As cultural magus to the nation, Simon Schama is uniquely placed to explore the relationship between post-war creativity and our collective identity. His splendid new three-part series is a profoundly personal essay on the role of art, culture and free expression in building what he calls a “mansion of multitudes” – embracing his own awestruck response in 1951 to the Festival to the Britain, Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), the pop art of Pauline Boty, the calypso music of the Windrush generation, Ian Fleming’s Bond novels, Enoch Powell’s nativism, the multi-racial ska of The Specials, Hanif Kureishi’s fiction, the poetry of Philip Larkin and Seamus Heaney, the role of U2 in the Northern Ireland peace process and Derek Jarman’s garden at Dungeness. Along the way, he talks to Jarvis Cocker, Ali Smith, Cliff Richard, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Clive Myrie, Jerry Dammers and Bono. 

Of course, Schama is all too aware that vivid pluralism, digitally turbo-charged, can descend into tribalism and cultural relativism. “The cultural conflict which was a symptom of a healthy democracy,” he says, “now threatens to actually tear it apart.” 

The differences “between the profound and the trivial” are being lost. But, to his great credit, he remains vigilantly optimistic about the healing power of creativity. 

Murder for Busy People, by Tony Parsons (Century)

The seventh Max Wolfe detective story may well be the best so far – which is saying something. As Wolfe struggles to raise his 12-year-old daughter Scout and to stay on point in the pursuit of villains, his first ever collar – the beguiling Emma Moon, whom he arrested at the scene of a famous safe robbery – is released from prison after 16 years. Meanwhile, the other members of the gang, whom she refused to give up, start, one by one, to die. Is this Emma’s revenge?

Like all great detective novelists, Parsons is as interested in the interior life of his hero, whose dedication to public service is matched by doubts and insecurities, as he is in page-turning action. He is also a vivid chronicler of London life: the city, in all its historical depth, is a character in its own right. A Raymond Chandler for our times, Parsons is at the very top of his game.