At The Movies: Supernova and The Climb dissect male relationships

SINGAPORE - The movies reviewed this week are Supernova and The Climb.

Dementia stories tend to be family dramas. That is because the person with the disease is elderly, sick, and a ward of a son or daughter. In many movies, the person with the illness serves as the villain or comic relief, sometimes both. They develop laughable memory holes, soil themselves, wander away and bring panic and distress to their children.

Then there is this film, which fits the dementia angle into a love story. Tusker (Stanley Tucci) is a writer and a storyteller who knows that the decay of his faculties will rob him of language and personhood in a matter of months. With his partner, concert pianist Sam (Colin Firth), they go on a caravan holiday, following the same Lake District route they took when they first fell in love decades ago.

But it is hard to keep the ominous future from intruding into the happy present. The problem is, each man frames that future differently. As they walk old paths, meet old friends, bicker over driving habits and directions, reminisce and comfort each other, the dissimilar futures collide.

English writer-director Harry Macqueen has written what is often dismissively called a "dying girl romance", the staple of young-adult fiction in which a boy falls in love with a terminally ill girl, the one whose disease gives the affair a ticking-clock urgency before climaxing in a multi-hanky deathbed scene.

To a degree, Macqueen tugs at the same heartstrings, but what is captured powerfully in this deceptively simple drama is the idea that these lovers are also old friends. Firth and Tucci disappear into their roles as the middle-aged couple who have eaten thousands of breakfasts and travelled countless roads together.

For men whose lives have been shaped so much by the other, dementia holds a particular cruelty: It will leave one wiped clean of memory and the other burdened by an excess of it. As this film makes heart-breakingly clear, there are fates worse than death.

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The Climb (R21)

Like Supernova, this movie is about two men in a relationship. In the case of Kyle (Kyle Marvin) and Mike (Michael Angelo Covino), they are best friends, in the way two red-blooded heterosexual American men in their 30s are best friends. That is, it is filled with emotions that neither can express because they have no idea what they are feeling.

Winner of the Coup De Coeur prize in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, the comedy plays on the idea most men stumble their way through life filling roles for which they think they are suited, such as "best buddy" or "dad", making it up as they go along.

In some circles, Kyle would be called the "beta" male and Mike the "alpha". When they ride bikes up mountains, Mike is the fitter, sportier one, and the more sexually successful with women. Kyle hates confrontation; Mike not only has no filter, he is ready to throw punches.

This movie could be called a mumblecore reply to the satire on machismo, Fight Club (1999). Instead of mocking traditional American masculinity, The Climb explains why the grip of the tough-guy image is still so strong.

Over a series of holidays and life events, Kyle is shown to be seeking stable relationships with women while Mike stays single and looking. Kyle is happy to give girlfriend Marissa (the wonderful British actress Gayle Rankin) all the power in the relationship. Mike sees it as an intolerable imbalance.

The humour comes mostly from Mike's inability to read the room, such as when he tries to save Kyle from Marissa in the most socially painful- and hilarious - way possible. Mike is a human battering ram because he mistakes lack of empathy for objectivity. If toxic mansplaining had a face, it would look a lot like Mike.

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New Gods: Nezha Reborn (PG13)

In this animation fantasy inspired by the classical novel Feng Shen Yan Yi (The Investiture Of The Gods), a modern-day delivery driver and part-time motorcycle racer Li Yunxiang finds himself bullied by gangsters. His rage causes a transformation and he finds himself to be Nezha, a deity who millennia ago defeated a range of supernatural enemies.