A Simple Favour, McQueen: film review

This stylish, sexy suburban noir is comic from start to finish, but goes to a lot of other places, psychologically and emotionally.

Anna Kendrick as Stephanie and Blake Lively as Emily in A Simple Favour.

A Simple Favour is a breakthrough film for American director Paul Feig, best known for comed­ic collaborations with Melissa McCarthy such as Bridesmaids (2001), The Heat (2013), Spy (2015) and the girl-power remake of Ghostbusters (2016).

In this new movie he receives a few favours of his own. It’s based on the recent debut novel of American writer Darcey Bell and is scripted by Jessica Sharzer, who wrote the 2017 television remake of Dirty Dancing.

But the biggest favours come from the stars, Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively, who deliver two of the best lead actress performances I’ve seen in a while. And no, I have not forgotten about Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri or I, Tonya. Indeed my immediate response after leaving the cinemawas to look up ­Kendrick and Lively on Wikipedia and write down a list of movies to catch up on.

I’ve seen a bit of Kendrick, in the Pitch ­Perfect movies and opposite Ben Affleck in the underrated The Accountant (2016). She was also excellent in the wedding-from-hell Table 19 last year. I’m told she’s good in the original Twilight (2008), which will take me on an untrodden path. I want to watch all of her movies.

Ditto Lively, who has a briefer filmography, having worked more in television. I did notice her in the 2015 romantic fantasy The Age of ­Adaline. But I suppose I best go back to the beginnin­g and discover the TV series Gossip Girl. See how art can change us.

A Simple Favour opens with a 30-something woman, Stephanie (Kendrick), doing a cooking video blog. She seems to know her audience: “Hi moms.’’ She’s in Connecticut and we soon learn she’s a single mum to a 10-year-old boy. Her husband died in a car crash.

Stephanie tells her viewers that something unsettling has happened in her life. She’s been minding another 10-year-old boy, the son of a new friend, Emily (Lively). The trouble is, Emily, after asking Stephanie to do this simple favour, hasn’t been seen for five days.

There’s a subtle change of perspective at this point where we realise we are seeing not Stephanie doing the vlog in her kitchen but someone, somewhere, watching it on a laptop.

We then cut back to Stephanie meeting Emily, who is beautiful, has a handsome novelist husband (Henry Golding, also in Crazy Rich Asians at the moment) and a glamorous job with a fashion designer (Rupert Friend, who is fun to watch). She dresses in men's suits, swears a lot, loves martinis and thinks being a parent sucks.

Stephanie presents as a helicopter mum. Emily, asked if her son has any dietary requirements, responds: “Yes, don’t feed him shit he doesn’t like.” The first meeting of the two women, over strong martinis at Emily’s stunning home, where there’s a huge full-frontal nude of her on the wall, is brilliantly tense and funny. Kendrick and Lively, in what at this stage is a two-hander, knock it out of the park

Ten minutes in, it looks like Feig might be making another movie about girls who want to have fun, and of course claim their rightful place in the modern world. He does, in one sense. This stylish, sexy suburban noir is comic from start to finish. But it goes to a lot of other places, psychologically and emotionally. The 1955 French film Les Diaboliques is mentioned. Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot sing Bonnie and Clyde. Younger viewers may think of Gone Girl.

This is a movie where talking about the plot must end now. All you need to know is that two women meet. They are different on the outside, but who knows what’s within. Then one of them goes missing. Is Emily who she says she is? Is Stephanie? Is Emily’s husband only a spunky writer who hasn’t written a novel in 10 years? What happened in that car crash that killed Stephanie’s husband?

Is either of them telling the truth? The novel, it’s worth noting, uses the unreliable narrator trope. “Secrets are like margarine,’’ Stephanie says in her opening vlog. “Easy to spread, but bad for the heart.”

English fashion designer Alexander McQueen.

There are fashion designers such as the Friend character in A Simple Favour and then there are real ones, such as Alexander McQueen. “I would go to the far reaches of my dark side and pull these horrors out of myself and put them on the catwalk,’’ he says in the opening minutes of McQueen. If anything, he is underplaying it, as we will see in this mesmerising, revealing and, it must be said, ultimately depressing documentary directed by Ian Bonhote and Peter Ettedgui.

McQueen, who went from Stratford-born son of a taxi driver to the heights of the global fashion business, hanged himself in his London home in 2010. He was 40.

This movie tracks that rise and fall through detailed interviews with his family, friends and colleagues, and through extensive video footage of Lee, his first name and what family and friends called him.

The overwhelming impression is of a man who never found happiness. The only time he looks cheerful is when he’s with his mother (he killed himself on the eve of her funeral) or when he’s with his dogs. As was revealed in the wake of his death, he was sexually abused as a child. As an adult, he had trouble coming out as gay.

These personal demons were unleashed in his extraordinary fashion shows, with their references to Jack the Ripper, the rape and abuse of women and mental asylums. “If you want to know me, just look at my work,’’ he notes.

Of course McQueen did make clothes that people could wear, but his catwalk shows were something else. They could be seen as art. Dark, troubling, unreconciled art. This is a visually powerful, emotionally draining documentary.

A Simple Favour (M)

4stars

National release

McQueen (MA15+)

3.5 stars

Limited national release