EIFF Review: Charlie and Hannah’s Grand Night Out – “Fun, funny, silly, sweet, touching, surreal and totally charming”

I don’t know Bert Scholiers or the starts of his Belgian film, but sometimes I just get a vibe from a film or book and know I am likely to enjoy it even before I start. Charlie and Hannah’s Grand Night Out was another of those that I just had that feeling about as soon as I spotted it going through the Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) programme. I am happy to say that gut instinct was on target, and that this was a film which had me smiling throughout.

Shot mostly in black and white (save for a short segment in strong, almost lurid colours), the basic premise – two girls, best friends, Hannah (Daphne Wellens) and Charlie (Evelien Bosmans) head out on the town for a night out with friends – doesn’t really do this justice. What starts as a pair of slightly kooky but charming young women, joking and laughing as they try to have a nice night out while figuring out their place in the world and why they are as they are (jobs, boyfriends, work, life, the same things we all think about), soon starts to bend off into a more unusual track, starting with some fourth wall breaking as they occasionally talk to the audience, then slowly starts to feed some fantastical elements in (after the pair have swallowed some magic candies which, they explain with a smile are certainly not drugs, they’re “homeopathic”).

Starting small – at a small party with friends Hannah’s breasts start talking (strangely in male voices for some reason), offering advice, bickering with her and each other (one breast complains that it has to get up early tomorrow to work on an opera libretto). Charlie goes out into the garden for a smoke, hears what sounds like someone having some sexual fun in the bushes and yes, indeed there is, it’s Catherine the Great (a horse can be glimpsed in the background, playing on the old myth) and naturally she bums a smoke from Charlie before offering some advice on not sleeping with some famous Russian historical figures. Soon, however, it goes off onto an increasingly surreal bent.

The pair talk about testing their friend Fons (Patrick Vervueren), making him perform odd tasks such as finding a “mummy in denial” (the bandage-wrapped Egyptian style mummy, not the maternal type), their friends produce a picture book of Hannah’s life to explain things, then flip to later pages to show what’s just about to happen next. As the evening wears on with the inevitable “I should go home” moments from the various friends, Charlie and Hannah go off on their own routes, each with a different man, but their evenings still revolve around each other as even apart they talk to their male friends about one another (the men are, well, not exactly superfluous, they have a role, indeed there are many men in this, but this is very much a film about the two women).

The evening – or now early hours of the morning – become increasingly fantastical, travelling to strange places, transformations, a magical mystery tour that takes in talking buildings and haunted houses and bordellos staffed by famous literary characters (fancy a Jane Austen foursome?). Imagine mid to late 70s era Woody Allen, if the films were more female-oriented, mixed with a dash of a more light-hearted Francis Ha, and fantastical flights of early Jean-Pierre Jeunet (and a friend suggested to me perhaps a touch of Mighty Boosh). Fun, funny, silly, sweet, touching, surreal and totally charming and smile-inducing. Loved it.

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