FINGERNAILS

A review from 2023 remembered as Jessie Buckley collected her gong at the BAFTAs last night... and which I failed to migrate over to Substack. So, here it is! (And I'm still sadly single, btw... 🥺)

With a lineage going back to the OGs of the dramatic arts, it’s unsurprising that Greek independent filmmakers are knee-deep in brilliant ideas. I’ve already written about POOR THINGS and now I’ve seen FINGERNAILS, the second feature film from Christos Nikou who is something of a Shadow Absurdist High Concept Greek Filmmaker while the power seat remains occupied by Yorgos Lanthimos (and who was the latter’s 2nd AD on DOGTOOTH, incidentally).

And Nikou does give us a brilliant idea. He creates a world where love is a tangible thing which can be detected in a (brutally) extracted fingernail. Practitioners at the Love Institute remove one fingernail from each party, place them in a testing machine and, Hey Presto, they’ll be told if they love each other (100%), or not (0%), or if only one of them is truly feelin’ it (the dreaded 50%). There are some Ts and Cs: couples can be re-tested, so presumably things can change, and a fingernail can only indicate love for one other person at a time (sorry, polyamorists, you’re not invited to the Love Institute, apparently….).

Having caused a tsunami of separations and broken homes by “failing” many of those who took the test when it was first available, the Love Institute now encourages hopeful couples to commit to various exercises to develop their love before testing: singing French songs to one another; staring into each other’s eyes while submerged in a swimming pool; skydiving. “Even when you know they’re not going to get there, at least they’re trying,” says Amir (Riz Ahmed), which sounds like good advice to me and very much along the lines of the National Lottery’s slogan, “You gotta be in it to win it.”

Those working with the couples at the Institute, Amir and his trainee Anna (Jessie Buckley), can’t help but invest in these relationships, and sometimes their instincts about a couple are wrong (anyone who’s watching MAFS UK knows that performative ‘love’ can be anything but, right?!) and they go through their own little mini-heartbreak when they extinguish young love’s dream by handing a couple a 0% score. And it doesn’t take a love-guru to know that two rather gorgeous people working together in a Love Institute and talking all day, every day about love are gonna start feeling… love. I mean, if Strictly Come Dancing has a “curse”…..

I guess we learn that love can have moments that are fingernail-pulling-level torturous and sadomasochistic, but that we shouldn’t put the emphasis on those bits, ideally. Rather, the heart wants what it wants, whether a fingernail or any other body part or anything or anybody says it should or shouldn’t, and it wants it in the open-eyed knowledge that it may not be perfect, or last forever, and it may be painful at times. “This is gonna hurt,” Amir says to Anna in the final moment of the story.

As a film, I think FINGERNAILS suffers from an underdeveloped script without quite enough going on to propel the ideas and the audience forwards, but it’s mostly rescued by the cast including Riz Ahmed, Jessie Buckley and Jeremy Allen White. They’re all wonderfully talented, intelligent, watchable, loveable actors, and it’s pretty easy to spend a couple of hours with them. If I had any self-restraint and was capable of not relating this film to absolutely everything that’s going on in my life, then I’d stop writing now and I’d give FINGERNAILS ⭐️⭐️⭐️

But… I don’t! And I’m not!

The thing is that I spent 22 years in a mostly very happy, loving, caring relationship with a good man who made me laugh every day and put butterflies in my tummy each time I looked at him for (almost….) all of those 22 years, and a few weeks ago our divorce was granted. We tried couples counselling twice in our relationship, and both times the counsellor kept going on and on and on and on about how different we were from one another, focusing on whether or not we were “compatible”. The first time (about 10 years ago, I think), the counsellor was annoying enough to serve the useful purpose of being the common enemy that brought us back together, but the second time we listened, and we agreed, I guess, and now we are where we are.

I can’t help but think of the counsellor as the Love Institute practitioner who put our fingernails in the testing machine and told us we had failed. But I also know we had stopped trying: we were no longer in it to win it. We weren’t singing each other French ballads from karaoke machines or skydiving together or choosing to spend much time at all together, and I think that bit is the important bit, surely. Because love isn’t binary and it can’t be subjected to a Pass/Fail test, and if spending 22 years and raising two amazing children with someone isn’t a sign of pretty decent “compatibility”, then I really don’t know what is.

And so I wept a bit during FINGERNAILS and I thought about a lot of shit, and I now better understand some things that have happened to me in the last year or so, and I think, perhaps, I know myself just a little more, and I can imagine one day (not for a while, but one day…) meeting another completely incompatible partner to build a happy life with for the following 22 years. So, on that basis, I give this film ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️