Movies..

Attenberg

2012-01-31T09:33:00.000-08:00

Director/producer Athina Rachel Tsangari’s reluctance to be lumped in with some nebulous Greek New Wave is as understandable as the categorization is inevitable. She has been producing the work of Giorgos Lanthimos, and her second film as director shares with his Dogtooth (2009) and Alps (2011) not only strong tonal and thematic similarities, and an interest in linguistic distortion, but also the cool white light of Thimios Bakatakis’ camerawork (Dogtooth) and Lanthimos even takes the supporting role of in the quartet of Attenberg’s cast.

Like Dogtooth, this is something like a case study of a strange, sequestered group. The title is a mispronunciation of (Sir David ) Attenborough, the idol of a young woman, Marina (Ariane Labed, from Alps). She lives in a rather bleak industrial town on the coast, with a dying architect father, and a sexually forward best friend, Bella. The study concerns her discovery of sex, towards which she initially feels disgust: the film opens with a sloppy, forcibly awkward (no hands) kiss the between the best friends, with Bella instructing. Marina says Bella’s tongue in her mouth feels like a slug but later, after an awkward episode of nudity, she will be initiated into actual intercourse by a visiting engineer (Lanthimos). That their eventual coupling should evidently be real, filmed by a detached camera, is entirely appropriate to the film’s evocation of nature documentaries; it connects also (albeit in an apparently contradictory manner) with the father’s explanation that taboos are a tool of evolution in the human animal. The depiction of actual intercourse, the busting of a cinematic taboo, and the presentation of the characters as objects of study all aspire to devolve the participants (in general, however, Tsangari worries at the uncomfortably off-limits much less than the films she produces for Lanthimos).

It is that absence of unease that allows the film’s eccentricities to protrude. The recurring emphasis on physicality (present also in those previous films) stems from Tsangari’s extensive dance background: she has Labed move her uncanny, protruding shoulder blades in a beautifully lit abstract composition, for Bella’s entertainment; and time and again we cut to the girls in almost matching dresses, doing silly walks down a long courtyard pathway. Amusing as some of these walks are, they develop a rote tone, like actor’s exercises; the same is true of several scenes that devolve from rat-a-tat assonant wordplay into non verbal, animalistic play-acting.

The childish air of the opening scene (it develops into all-four primate play) and Marina’s semi-autistic approach to sex (she appears normally developed in all other ways) are elucidated by her father’s wish that she live with other people – she simply states that that is not how he brought her up, and we’re left to wonder at past details. The heady atmosphere of awakening is convincingly whipped up by Bella’s detached account of a dream, a tree dripping with penises; but one remains fatally curious as to what has retarded this young woman so.

The offhand elision of backstory is familiar from Dogtooth and Alps, as is the small group in self-imposed separation, of vague cause. There are others in this albeit sparsely populated town, however: the few patrons of the bar in which Bella works; in a slo-mo female changing room to the bird-like chirp of Daniel Johnston singing “I am a baby in the universe” (women are? Marina is? It seems calculated more for suggestion than meaning); and in a row of lamplit youths past whom the girls walk slowly, lip-synching to François Hardy’s cry of loneliness, “Tous les garcons et les filles”. The causes of Marina’s feelings of isolation are vague, and ultimately, in ways also skirted by Lanthimos films, the eccentricity feels a trifle put on.

Just as the film presents these people as mammals, its languid pace allows also for numerous static interstitials of their habitat, the wintery, industrial town. This landscape becomes resonant only for a moment however, when Marina’s father Spyros late on rues his part in its creation, the failure of his dream of innovation, and the banal, repetitive reality that resulted: all too inevitable, however, that the final shot should long hold on a dour mining yard, to no more than suggestive purpose.

Tsangari confessed last year to Jonathon Romney that she feared her film might really be a mess, and she’s close to being right; structurally haphazard, it is almost a collection of sketches. Some are intriguing nonetheless: there’s a lovely soft image shot through a rain-drenched window; and one episode in particular strikes a true emotional chord, a surprising and underplayed expression of grief, in an empty hospital corridor, as though the impending inevitable finally sinks in on Marina for the first time; but together these scenes add up to nothing very comprehensive or satisfying; and undermined by eccentricities, the casting of the naturalist’s eye on specimens of the human animal does not ring true, either in terms of sexual discovery or grief.

d/sc Athina Rachel Tsangari p Maria Hatzakou, Giorgos Lanthimos, Iraklis Mavroidis, Athina Rachel Tsangari, Angelos Venetis ph Thimios Bakatakis ed Sandrine Cheyrol, Matthew Johnson pd Dafni Kalogianni cast Ariane Labed, Vangelis Mourikis, Evangelia Randou, Giorgos Lanthimos
(201o, Gr, 97m)

Orly

2012-01-31T09:22:00.001-08:00

A familiar sort of festival film, small of scale, with a potentially interesting conceptual slant, but unlikely to get any sort of wide release, Orly is the sort of film one is glad to have seen, but which one is unlikely to urge anyone else to seek out.

The interesting slant is that it takes place in the eponymous Paris airport, filmed in almost real time over the course of a morning with what must have been at least a semi-hidden camera since most of the crowd of travelers (and there’s a release headache-inducing number of them) take no notice of either the film-makers or the protagonists.

In fact, it is not quite entirely confined to the airport: the film opens in a living room with a middle-aged man, Théo, talking painfully and semi-idiotically on the telephone to his recent ex, Sabine. He’s only obliquely related to what follows, and we leave the airport only once again to follow a young woman in a cab, who it turns out is this same Sabine.

In the airport itself, the film focuses on three couples — the first is a man and a woman who meet in passing and fall gently into a life conversation, she apparently dissatisfied with her married existence in Montreal, he just decided to return to live in Paris from America, perhaps against his better judgment. An older woman and her consistently disrespectful teenage son pass the time in conversation that keeps returning to the sort of semi-deliberate misunderstandings that makes the relationship ring true. Later on, a young German couple, of whom the boy keeps wandering off to follow the woman who caught his eye in the airport store, the man leaving his (much prettier) girlfriend reading Ada and admiring a nearby baby.

We also return from time to time to a check-in girl who sits and stares, exchanges minimal small talk with her colleague, and eats a sandwich. Sabine sits and reads a letter from her lover Théo, who returns in voiceover, before the airport is evacuated for some unspecified alert and we return with her to another taxi; this time she is unexpectedly accompanied by a small child who pointedly ignores her question “where were you going?” before the film comes to a close.

This ending epitomizes the deliberate inconsequentially. Essentially, the film is a portrait of the airport waiting lounge and a tiny sampling of the sort of lives which pass through, although peppered with suggestive elements, such as when the first woman (Natacha Régnier) posits that “when you meet someone you meet yourself”, or when Théo’s voiceover describes looking around a cafe and seeing an old man whom he designates as God, among us, observing. Equally, however, the most oft-repeated lines are “I don’t know” or “I’ve no idea”; there’s no scheme here to create a web of meaning from quotidian and barely-related conversations.

It’s fortunate therefore that the patter of the script is neat and well-played, particularly by Régnier, quintessentially French both in her easy openness of conversation and body language, and in her amusing reaction to discovering she’s lost her coat; also by Mireille Perrier as the mother, whose facial expressions, especially at her son’s neatly set-up revelation, are priceless. Neither character, nor any of the others, is particularly solicitous of our interest, however, any more than in a randomly overheard conversation, which is undoubtedly part of the point. In the end, however, this inevitably makes the experience of watching the film little more interesting than spending an hour and a half in a departures lounge.

d/sc Angela Schanelec p Christophe Delsaux, Céline Maugis, Gian-Piero Ringel, Angela Shanelec ph Reinhold Vorschneider ed Mathiulde Bonnefoy cast Josse De Pauw, Maren Eggert, Natacha Régnier, Bruno Todeschini, Mireille Perrier, Emile Berling
(2010, Fr/Ger, 84m)

Art House

2012-01-05T08:47:00.000-08:00

There are predictably interesting questions bubbling under here, concerning the nature of art, what makes an artist, and how one decides the aesthetic worth of their work. Perhaps with equal predictability, the film is content to coast through a stock story of slacker students struggling to prove their worth in the face of the comic-evil dean who’s trying to convert their bequeathed-to-art dorm house into a golf-team club house; they must knuckle down and actually make some art in order to save the decades-long tradition of a free space for art students to live and work. It’s a fine concept, such an art-haven, although it hardly looks as though many of the students actually deserve the cushy set-up.

Whilst trying to save their living space, terminally nice house leader Greta Gerwig must also contend with the emotional demands of a wimpy but hetero best friend, the amusing older (piss-)artist who hangs around, and the latter’s visiting bo-hunk photographer nephew. Gerwig’s surprisingly shaky early on, but resigns herself to the blandness of the role; indeed, no-one is required to exhibit more than two dimensions apart from Chris Beier as the morally ambiguous man-candy, but he is the least well-equipped of the cast to manage it, woefully inadequate in even the simplest dialogues.

Iggy Pop is on only fairly good form, but takes ages to turn up, despite being second-billed; what’s more, despite neatly setting up an amusing reappearance for the finale, the film (or perhaps his schedule) denies us the pleasure. We are also denied the pleasure of seeing much art – Gerwig’s portraits for the final show are almost intriguing, but we see them only obliquely, and most of the other pieces are strangely sidelined: an odd decision that functions deliberately or not as a satirical jab at effort and craft, since the piece that finally saves the house is created by accident, purely through drunken emotional outpouring, with none of skill, intention or concept.

It’s unlikely that this is the message, however: the film has no interest in the philosophy of aesthetics even on the most basic level, and the saving of the house is entirely in the tradition of giving the sensitive oddballs a safe place and a free ride, than it is about engaging with or encouraging art-making. Rather than probing or thought-provoking, it’s a film intended to be fun and warm-hearted, but it’s barely either of those things (compared to the wit of (untitled) or the evocatively-drawn milieu of Unmade Beds), and it’s at least twenty minutes too long.

d Victor Franchi p Debashis Mazumber, Eddie Rubin sc Kris Brown, Victor Franchi ph Shawn Grice ed Carmelle Flanagan pd Jennifer Durban cast Greta Gerwig, Chris Beier, Hayes Hargrove, Timothy Brennan, Danny Mooney, Iggy Pop
(2010, USA, 95m)

Night Tide

2011-12-16T20:13:00.000-08:00

Curtis Harrington’s debut feature kicks off as a seaside noir, with sailor Dennis Hopper tooling around the night-time Venice promenade before wandering into the scene at a basement jazz club. Amidst the hipsters and hopheads he spies a mysterious and elegant young woman, who’s scared away by a scary old lady speaking a weird language.

It turns out the younger woman, Mora, is the amusement pier mermaid, but it might just be that she’s also a mermaid in real life, and that the Sea People are calling her back; her last two boyfriends have been found washed up on the beach and everyone warns the sailor he’s in grave danger. Hopper is awkward with the more prosaic lines, but displays flashes of method and his winning grin to good effect, and gets a great octopus dream. Totally independent and shooting on a tiny budget, Harrington makes use of good set-dressing, locations and effective atmospherics to conjure some of the dread mystery of his hero Poe; but sense starts to drift away towards the end and the parochiality of the police station in the final scene firmly dissipates the air of mythical mystery that otherwise makes the film such an appealing oddity.

d/sc Curtis Harrington p Aram Katarian ph Vilis Lapenieks, Floyd Crosby ed Jodie Copelan pd Paul Mathison m David Raksin cast Dennis Hopper, Linda Lawson, Gavin Muir, Luana Anders, Marjorie Eaton, Tom Dillon, H.E. West.
(1961, US, 84m, b/w)

Aguas verdes

2011-12-15T08:55:00.000-08:00

For a decade or so the Argentine government has been increasingly subsidizing the local cinema industry, to produce well-made, classy films that can beat Hollywood at its own game. But in response to growing state control, a faction has formed loosely around filmmaker and teacher Mariano Llinás to produce projects of a more adventurous nature. Although not a glossy product by any means, it’s to the credit of Aguas verdes that it could be from either camp (indeed, funded in part by both the government and the national film school).

The title appears in a nicely ironic fashion over a sink of dirty dishes. Aguas Verdes is a beach resort to which bearded bourgeois social worker Juan is taking his wife and two children to vacation. He’s an intelligent and authoritative husband and father, but his family is on the brink of chaos. His children are always fighting (teenage Laura and pre-pubescent Aribal), his psychiatrist wife always forgets to lock the front door, and his car is a half-rusted rattletrap.

Once at the resort, it’s the film’s mission to worry and humiliate him as he completely fails to relax and enjoy his vacation. His wife makes friends with a pair of lesbian school teachers whom he brands ‘idiots’, Aribal is reportedly a sexual menace to the other kids, and he’s desperate to protect Laura from the handsome roguish-seeming but unfailingly polite Roberto (not that he seems concerned about her frankly inappropriate bikini bottoms).

The details of family interaction are observed with near-hilarious exactness. Rarely has a summer vacation full of potential sexual abandon been evoked so perfectly. It’s unfailingly funny – amusingly overwrought music is used to signify Juan’s panic as he feels himself being socially railroaded and imagines his family, authority and masculinity being threatened. But there are real hints of menace when he loses sight of Aribal over a dune and hears strange noises outside the bedroom at night. We have a feeling things will come to a head.

But the head is botched. It’s sudden but not unexpected, brief but not shocking, and the aftermath is immediately steered off into animal kingdom allegory, admittedly stylish, but an unsatisfying sidestep. It betrays the attention to character and detail thus far displayed, and possibly even the unrelieved tension of a lack of climax would have been preferable; it’s a great shame, since in one fell swoop the disturbing undercurrents are cheapened and an otherwise pitch-perfect hour and a half of excellent character study is spoiled.
d/p/sc/ed Mariano De Rosa ph Pablo Schverdfinger ad Oscar Lozano, Luis Sales m Hernán Cieza cast Alejandro Fiore, Milagros Gallo, Julieta Mora, Maxi Gigli, Diego Cremonesi, Jorgelina Amedolara, Efrat Wolns
(2009, Arg, 90m)

The Wild Hunt

2011-11-21T09:05:00.000-08:00

Lauded as best debut at Toronto, and winner of the audience award at Slamdance, this is an English-language Quebecois production that does away with the frequently parochial quirkiness of the region’s cinema, for an idiosyncratic outsider theme familiar to oddballs everywhere, in an attempt to conjure the resonance of Norse myth through the weekend games of a large group of live medieval role-players.

Slobby Erik (Ricky Mabe) is pissed that his girlfriend Lynne (Kaniehtiio Horn) disappears to the woods on the weekends to cavort with berserkers, knights and elves, and heads off to bring her back. The problem is that, as the Viking princess, she’s rather important to their game and currently a prisoner of the sinister Shaman (Trevor Hayes) and his crew. Aided by his rather-too-into-it brother Bjorn (Mark Anthony Krupa), a busty pixie-haired referee (Claudia Jurt) and a gawky red-haired knight, appropriately blessed with the flat sloping face of a young Max von Sydow (Kyle Gatehouse), his interference, or love quest, as the players designate it, causes the fantasy of the Shaman’s Wild Hunt – a frenzied night-time rampage initiated by the blood-letting of a “virgin” – to tip over into frightening reality.

The film-makers are D&D veterans and this is no easy mockery of the fantasy games depicted, but humorous mileage is gotten out of the incongruities of Thor’s hammer being kept under a sink, slippages between the archaic language of the game and contemporary idiolect, and pythonesque touches such as the king’s charge “in the name of my name”. The sunshine, river and forest are photographed to maximum aesthetic effect (a shade overdone) and the varied costumes and the backwoods village compound, complete with Viking longship and stone amphitheatre, are all superb. The slide from fantasy to real-life violence, however, is undercut by some easy and obvious sound design and misses out on the sickening chill that should have made it truly disturbing: blood-lust, suicide and revenge may be fine and noble in myth but look supremely ugly in real life, even if it’s movie real life. With committed playing (though Horn struggles with a part woefully underwritten) the film manages its humour far better than its conflict, and in blurring the ancient stories’ lessons as to how to live an enriched and honourable life, it ends by leaving an unpleasantly sour taste in the mouth.

d Alexandre Franchi p Alexandre Franchi, Karen Murphy sc Alexandre Franchi, Mark Antony Krupa ph Claudine Sauvé ed Stephen Philipson, Arthur Tarnowski pd Katka Hubacek m Vincent Hänni, Gabriel Scotti cast Ricky Mabe, Mark Antony Krupa, Trevor Hayes, Kaniehtiio Horn, Claudia Jurt, Kent McQuaid
(2009, Can, 96m)

To Die Like A Man (Morrer como um homem)

2011-11-20T12:09:00.000-08:00

From the war-paint-as-make-up opening, followed by a terrific sex-change origami demonstration, to the musical afterlife-view finale, Portugese director João Pedro Rodrigues’ third feature glides smoothly and unhurriedly through the story of aging transvestite Tonia (Fernando Santos), scared of the butchery implied in title’s final transformation, secure in her inner identity, but undeceived by the outer, and slowly dying from the very things that help make her physically what she is (leaking breast implants).

There are moments of stylistic exuberance but barely a hint of camp: Tonia sings quietly to herself on several occasions but we see not a jot of her high-drag cabaret act. Moments of good humour and catty club rivalry dot the melancholy, whilst Rodrigues’s serious approach ranges from distinctly Bressonian hand gestures and intonation, to the anti-spectacular Academy ratio. Tonia has two sons, one biological (Chandra Malatitch), estranged and wayward; the other her young, troubled boyfriend Rosário (Alexander David), to whom she’s devoted even while believing him to be stealing from her to feed his smack habit. He’s also a pretty spiffy dressmaker, and he’s introduced being rescued from an alley by Tonia in a particularly splendid sparkly red number, shimmering like ruby slippers in robe form. An unexpected interlude takes the pair to a quasi-magical forest where they encounter the marvelous Maria Bakker (playing herself), in retreat from the world, poised and elegant in silver-black sparkles and feathered cuffs (and tremendous hair!) In this enchanted place, Baby Dee’s beatific “Calvary” appears on the soundtrack from nowhere, and the film freezes unexpectedly into a red-filtered woodland tableau of inexplicable beauty.

No less beautiful is a late vindication of Rosário, via a back-garden treasure trove, that plays as a poignantly literal passing of Tonia’s life before her eyes. Its ending is inevitable, but the film succumbs to excesses of neither of nobility nor self-pity. As Tonia herself says, there are no secrets, only shame. Her dual nature is hidden from no-one, and her will to undergo the final sex-change speaks to the strength of how she feels herself to be on the inside; despite Rosário’s urgings, she has been reluctant to take the final step, having grown fully into this in-between identity. Now having the vestiges of her femininity stripped from her, however, it would be dishonest to die anything other than like a man. It seems like a very sad ending, in part because the film fails to show us any of the joy that must surely have filled at least part of Tonia’s life, but her final song is apposite, a wish to be plural, the impossible dream that underpins a serious-minded, tender and moving film.

d João Pedro Rodrigues p Maria João Sigalho sc João Pedro Rodrigues, Rui Catalão ph Rui Poças ed João Pedro Rodrigues, Rui Mourão ad João Rui Guerra da Mata cast Fernando Santos, Jenny Larue, Miguel Loureira, Fernando Gomes, Alexander David, Chandra Malatitch, Gonçalo Ferreira De Almeida
(2009, Por/Fr, 133m)

House on Haunted Hill

2011-11-20T11:50:00.000-08:00

An archetypal funhouse of Castle hokum. Millionaire Price offers five strangers $10,000 to live through the night, locked in a haunted mansion (atmospherically played in exteriors by Wright’s Ennis Brown House). But does he have an ulterior motive concerning his young wife (his fifth!)? Or does she? It’s scarcely important, compared with giving the audience a good scare, via a vat of acid in the basement, severed heads, guns in coffins etc and, on the first run, “Emergo”, a glowing skeleton swooping through the theatres. The shocks are executed with a minimum of ingenuity in light, sound and editing, and the plot becomes an interference, but taken as a creaky ghost-train ride, 75 minutes’ entertaining nonsense is assured.

d/p William Castle sc Robb White p Carl E. Guthrie ed Roy Livingstone ad David Milton m Von Dexter cast Vincent Price, Carolyn Craig, Richard Long, Elisha Cook Jr, Carol Ohmart, Alan Marshall, Julie Mitchum
(1959, USA, 75min, b/w)

Dirigible

2011-11-19T10:21:00.000-08:00

This was the movie that ushered Harry Cohn’s Columbia Pictures into the big time, with a spanking gala opening at Grauman’s Chinese, Hollywood’s premier premiere theater; it was the studio’s and Capra’s first million-dollar movie, and an unqualified success.

Yet like so many films from the early (and not so early) years of our still young film-art, it had sort of disappeared, as an adventure film obscure and anomalous amongst the pre-code sauciness and comedies of the common man in Capra’s oeuvre. Frank Capra III was on hand to present its re-emergence at the 2011 TCM Festival, and laud the virtues of his grandfather’s movie in a brand new restoration; his introduction was happily appropriate to the film, stilted yet endearing, broad-brush inaccurate but with good old-fashioned, optimistic enthusiasm trumping any more troubling issues.

The story centres on stolid dirigible captain Jack Braden (Jack Holt) and daredevil plane pilot ‘Frisky’ Pierce (Ralph Graves), both set on getting to the South Pole. Despite their being best pals, this goal turns into a rivalry contest, thoughtlessly initiated by Fay Wray, married to the latter but in love with them both. Capra hadn’t found his ear yet: the dialogue is remarkably uneven in its pacing, the human story is negligible (Holt is a stiff, Graves an arrested adolescent, Wray simpers throughout unable to decide what she wants) and the wonky tone is exemplified by a terrifically ironic reading of a love letter at the climax, immediately negated by a far-too-obvious accident and a weak “can you beat that?”

If that was all there was to the film it’d hardly be worth restoring, even with the Capra name on it. The real draw, however, is in the terrific aviation stuff and a splendid 3-acre Antarctic set built in the 90° heat of the San Gabriel Valley. There’s great footage of the USS Los Angeles taking off, landing, and sailing majestically through a skyful of balloons; Pierce’s aeroplane soaring and corkscrewing through the clouds; and a fantastic sequence of the latter docking beneath the former whilst in flight (also of interest is extensive footage of the Lakehurst naval base, where the Hindenburg burned up four years later).

The dirigible’s thunderstorm crack-up is rather underwhelming, but there’s excellent model-work and process shots elsewhere, alongside actual flying footage, and a strikingly effective polar crash-land. Capra III told a pretty grim story about using dry ice to simulate sub-zero breath (an actor losing several teeth and part of his jaw..) but the breath is all that’s missing from the Californian Antarctic; the bright cumulus skies photograph in black and white as crisp and frigid over an impressive vista of ice mountains and snow plains, and the grim hardships of a 900-mile trek over the ice are neither glossed nor gloated over. For all that it may lack in texture of character, Dirigible rattles along quite happily, eminently deserving of restoration not only as a significant picture in the history of Hollywood, but as a terrific document of a brief and exciting chapter in US aviation.

d Frank Capra p Frank Capra, Harry Cohn, Frank Fouce sc Jo Swerling ph Joseph Walker ed Maurice Wright, Harry L. Decker sd Edward C. Jewell, Edward Shulter m C. Bakaleinikoff cast Jack Holt, Ralph Graves, Fay Wray, Hobart Bosworth, Roscoe Karns, Harold Goodwin, Clarence Muse, Emmett Corrigan
(1931, US, 100, b/w)

Mother (Madeo)

2011-11-18T10:58:00.000-08:00

An old woman walks slowly through, then dances, in a field. The dream-like opening of Bong Joon-ho’s fourth feature has apparently little to do with what follows, but serves to introduce the film’s gentle, semi-absurdist sense of humour, and the captivating presence of Kim Hya-ja. Her performance is central to the movie, as the title suggests, and she is mesmerizing, without a jot of overplaying or sympathy-begging, in her search for the perpetrator of the crime for which her slow-witted son has been lazily convicted (Won Bin, also excellent).

The film is shot through with a distinctly Lynchian lid-lifting on the seamy underbelly of small-town life, via a Chandlerian gallery of questionees/suspects. With superb photography from Hong Kyung-Pyo, Bong pulls off an impressive interweaving of comedy and tension; there are several excellent lip-biting sequences, and a fine and varied score (by Lee Byung-woo) contributes greatly. And through it all, the unlikely pitbull of an old lady worries at the case with undaunted determination.

More fundamental than the detective element, however, the characterisations and performances of the mother-son relationship incorporate a certain moral queasiness that builds to an uncomfortably complex head, and this lends unexpected weight to the film; Bong lets the audience wrong-foot themselves, through assumption, but even without such merciless logic, his film would be completely riveting – and entertaining – from start to finish.

d Bong Joon-ho p Moon Yang-kwon, Park Tae-joon, Seo Woo-sik sc Park Eun-kyo, Bong Joon-ho ph Hong Kyung-pyo ed Moon Sae-kyoung pd Ryu Seong-hie m Lee Byung-woo cast Kim Hye-ja, Won Bin, Jin Ku, Yun Je-mun, Jun Mi-sun, Song Sae-Byeok, Lee Young-Suck
(2009, S.Kor, 109m)

Tomboy

2011-11-17T17:51:00.000-08:00

Director Céline Sciamma made a splash (hoho) a couple of years ago with Water Lillies, and her new film Tomboy sticks with the pre-pubescent female theme. The confusing dangers of sexuality are more abstract here, however, still cloaked in something of the protectively asexual innocence of childhood: Laure is a 10 year-old girl – a tomboy – newly moved to a new town, who tells the local kids she’s called Michael. She’s still a lanky, unformed thing, so playing soccer topless poses no threat to her deception (though swimming trunks require a play-doh prosthesis, amusingly). We don’t know why she’s a tomboy, but nor do we need to; she is close with her kind and loving father but that can scarcely be the reason.

She's committed to her self-image, but the decision actually to pass seems spur of the moment: less a decision than a childish impulse. Her clear blue eyes are searching and intelligent, but apparently unable to conceive of ramifications to her behaviour. The marvelously self-possessed Zoé Héran is outstanding, childishly steadfast, and when she is inevitably forced to put on a dress, her whole demeanor is almost animal in its naturalness – not a powerful animal, perhaps, but one caught and coiled between anger and fear. Backed up by sure direction and pacing, a little bit of visual poetry and fine support from Mathieu Demy and Sophie Cattani as the parents, Héran gives a stunning performance of childhood torn between conviction and uncertainty.

Laure has a little sister, a curly-haired cherub with giant lash-frilled eyes, and she’s far too cute for my tolerance. But she is an amusing presence and an amusingly facile liar and, as with Laure, there’s a real sweetness in her pleasure at having other kids to play with (she's thrilled that they’re older too, with bursting pride in her big brother). The sisters love to horse around together at home also, but there’s also more footage of kids at play than I care to watch: the point that they – and Laure specifically – are kids like any others is quickly made.

The flipside, however, is that she is not like the other kids; she feels, presumably, born into the wrong body, and has only the barest hesitation in kissing her (female) friend, an act that the other children find incomprehensibly abhorrent. Sciamma's narrative is slight, observational rather than probing, but its gentle tone and terrific central performance allow the wider ramifications to be felt.

d/sc Céline Sciamma p Bénédicte Couvreur ph Crystel Fournier ed Julien Lacheray pd Thomas Grézaud m Jean-Baptiste de Laubier cast Zoé Héran, Malonn Lévana, Jeanne Disson, Sophie Cattani, Matthieu Demy
(2011, Fr, 84m)

Hoop-La

2011-11-17T12:32:00.000-08:00

Bow’s final screen appearance shows what a loss she was to movies. She retired at the height of her powers, aged 28, tired of picture-making (and of dieting). By Hoop-la, she’d conquered her sound-stage fright, and proves herself an irresistibly natural performer once again: saucy, snappy, and backed up by a well-practised silent technique through which to channel the tender inner life of traveling-circus belly-dancer Lou. Against a conscientiously evoked carny backdrop and a neat script by Moncure March, sensitive work is also done by Preston Foster also as circus manager Nifty, whose idée fixe is a better life for his son Chris than he stubbornly refused for himself. Throwing over his justifiably sour-tempered floozy for Chris’s sake, Nifty and Bow compete almost like spouses for the kid. Dad’s concern gets a bit over-sensitive at times (he and the boy are repeatedly posed like lovers) but this being pre-code, Nifty’s no match for the luscious Bow: she appears first at a crap game in glorious dishabille, and ends up in as outrageous a snake-dance costume as would not be seen again until Debra Paget in The Indian Tomb (1959), more than once demonstrating her favourite seduction technique (getting naked) in between. Reconciliation is inevitable, though surprisingly moving, and Bow’s final shot ever is a real emotional knockout.

d/p Frank Lloyd sc Joseph Moncure March, Bradley King ph Ernest Palmer cd Rita Kaufman cast Clara Bow, Preston Foster, Richard Cromwell, Minna Gombell, Herbert Mundin, Jamers Gleason, Richard Imhof
(1933, USA, 85m, b/w)

The Devil Is A Woman

2011-11-17T11:14:00.000-08:00

During the Spanish Carnival, handsome young blade Antonio makes an assignation with a mysterious and alluring woman, Concha. But that night, he runs into an older friend Pasqual, who warns him of her devilish charms: Pasqual had fallen in love with Concha and been treated as a (wealthy) plaything before being discarded. When Antonio meets with her his resolution to resist is eroded, until Pasqual bursts in, still in love, and enraged at Antonio’s ignoring his advice. Happiness does not ensue.

Over the course of five features with Marlene Dietrich, Sternberg molded her into a ravishing, perfect star. Increasingly stylized photography and production design took precedence over sense and plot as he boiled everything down to pure aesthetics, whilst building the Dietrich persona from saucy beer-hall girl to irresistible goddess. The creative marriage was perfected – with all the bitterness in which Sternberg perpetually reveled – in their final collaboration, The Devil is a Woman. The story was adapted by John dos Passos from the Pierre Louÿs novel La femme et le pantin (also used by Buñuel for That Obscure Object of Desire). Pantin is "puppet", and the femme is this Spanish Concha, a great beauty, of cruel and inescapable charms, whose means of subsistence is men, wielding her power over them with something like a compulsion of delight

This is Sternberg’s hymn to Dietrich, and a lament for their relationship, already souring – it’s no accident that Lionel Atwill is mustachioed as a dead ringer for the director. Realism is out the window; this is a fevered poem to the exquisite emotional anguish of the cast-off lover. Sternberg and Atwill make Pasqual a perfect embodiment of noble bearing brought to ignoble humiliation, the still-burning flame of desire unconquered by even the most flagrant cruelties. Whatever the specific circumstances of Sternberg’s and Dietrich’s parting of ways, the heart-wrenching realization that a relationship can no longer be, the bitter satisfaction of that realization, and the act of defying one’s own plain common sense, are transferred to the screen straight from his heart: the exquisite masochism of the cuckold. So there’s a certain amount of indulgence in the emotional line of the film, but it’s not a patch on the visual. For much of the flashback structure, Sternberg takes us to a port town where he can sling the fishing nets wherever he likes, and he conjures two wonderful fairytale woodland scenes. But the present tense opens the film, during the bacchanalian Carnival, crazy with streamers and ribbons, thin white rope, somewhat grotesquely, a suggestion bolstered by the preponderance of pendulous, long-nosed masks. What to make of the film’s hero covered in these ejaculative strings? Nothing specific to sexual preference, but rather an indication that sex and desire will engulf everything.

Jaunty Rimsky-Korsakov themes constantly encourage us not to take anything too seriously; Concha’s mother supplies rather grating comic support; Edward Everett Horton is the buffoonish (but not entirely) town mayor; and the Republicanism subplot is consistently dismissed as unimportant. The frivolity may be a carnival mask for Sternberg’s emotional pain (and vanity, of which Concha pointedly accuses Pasqual of confusing with love) but it is a sumptuous one and, as photographed by Sternberg himself, is inescapably, personally bound up with it. No-one could photograph (or light) like Sternberg, and here finally he gets to let his aestheticism run rampant without anything so troublesome as a plot to get in the way. Emotion is conjured through light and shade, and the screen is filled with extras and production design, perfect, suggestive objects and décor that overleap realism to conjure a physical poem of reality.

Most hyper-real of all is Dietrich’s Concha, as presented by Pasqual, an all-too believable incarnation of a fickle, playful Senora Satan. In the extreme stylization of her character, Sternberg and Dietrich create an ideal. She embodies not only a certain ideal of sexual womanhood, but is a personification sex itself; her every look, her every gesture is suffused with sexuality as though she has nothing else on her mind: no-one can glance approvingly at a strong hand laid on her shoulder like Dietrich can. Much of this is used merely to inflame, and so the film is drenched in the non-rational, febrile state of mind of the aroused lover, of crazed, unfulfilled desire wherein sensual gratification becomes of primary importance. The reliability of Pasqual’s narrative is less in question than his motives in telling it (and he claims he doesn’t like to speak of himself!) but if he has exaggerated his tale, that’s all to the good, allowing Sternberg to dispense with mundanities.

Returned, to the present tense Concha starts to seem a little more human, with possibly even a little weakness for handsome young César Romero. And who can blame her? For with those cheekbones and that curiously sculpted, subtly muscled mouth Romero is something of an ideal himself. This makes the ending a rather half-hearted vanity on Sternberg’s part, but the shape of the story is not the point – the point is Dietrich, and her spell. Even dressed in a sack (or a gorilla suit..) she could be the most bewitching woman imaginable, a goddess who never lost entirely the earthy lusts of the peasant girl. And oh, that wardrobe! Each scene brings a newly jaw-dropping ensemble, with outrageous jewelry and a series of increasingly fantastical headpieces. Sternberg’s films with Dietrich are almost as much about her clothes as they are the people, but of course she could carry them off with effortless insouciance, her characters therefore the sort of women who can do likewise.

For all the excess of production design, these elements are still in service of character, setting and emotional atmosphere; this is why Sternberg can never be written off as merely a self-indulgent aesthetician, because the clothes, the jewels, the décor, the nets, the lace, the shadows, the rain, all work with a dream-like relevance to character and situation, and aspire to induce a heady, Stendahlian state where the feverish emotions of his stories most properly belong.

d/p Josef von Sternberg sc John dos Passos ph Josef von Sternberg, Lucien Ballard ed Sam Winston ad Hans Dreier, Josef von Sternberg m John Liepold, Heinz Roemheld cast Marlene Dietrich, Lionel Atwill, Cesar Romero, Edward Everett Horton, Alison Skipworth, Don Alvarado, Edwin Maxwell
(1935, USA, 75m, b/w)

Je me souviens

2011-11-16T12:33:00.000-08:00

André Forcier is one of the veterans Quebec cinema, with a 40-year career behind him now. I've seen only one of his twelve features, the strange cod-autobiographical tale of union unrest, marital jealousy, grief and national liberation in a remote snow-covered mining community in 1949 (Duplessis era) , Je me souviens.

Shot appropriately in wintery black and white (the first credit is for “Images”) it’s partially narrated by Louis, the child of the socialist workers’ leader Bob. Bob is up against genial Richard, a “bonus man”, in the forthcoming union election, but when the latter suffers a tragic domestic accident his widow, Mathilde, reacts schemingly to the rumours that she deliberately murdered him.

We then abruptly flash forward nine years. Just as the union dispute is hardly the focus of the first half, Irish sweepstake man Liam's resolution never to return home while the British are still there is significant to the action and narrative by implication only. Fun is certainly had throughout, mocking the capitalist, besotted mine owner, his ridiculous blind sister, and the fat limping priest but it’s less a tub to thump than of a piece with the story’s plentiful oddball moments: there’s midnight tap-dancing at the telephone exchange (though the absurdity turns out to have a rather painful purpose), and the there's Mathilde’s daughter Némésis: she’s a rather funny, self-possessed little girl, who turns out to be a natural at Gaelic, having spoken not a word of anything for the first nine years of her life.

Elsewhere, orphans are amusingly put to work in the mine to sway the capitalist vote and are casually disposed of. One is even found in the snow-covered woods devoured by wolves. The film exhibits a particular and enthusiastic sexuality, the presence of kids, exploitation and backwards reasoning proving no obstacle; desire and jealousy drive the narrative rather more than the politics of the mine.

If this all sounds a bit Guy Maddin, it sort of is, but I gather that Frocier has been operating in a similar mode for years now, and the film displays a distinct individuality and unfussy aesthetic, following its own eccentric path with some witty cutting and not a hint of pastiche. Despite some appealing playing the characters cannot quite shed a storybook feel, but Louis is recounting his life rather like the storybooks he enjoys to hear read (the film opens on this). Thus, like all films purporting to be reminiscent, or those that simply make a virtue of their eccentricity, Je me souviens stands or falls on the strength and appeal of its personality and humour, and for the most part it stands.

d/sc André Forcier p André Forcier, Linda Pinet ph Daniel Jobin pd Gilles Aird cast Céline Bonnier, Roy Dupuis, Rémy Girard, Michel Barrette, Hélène Bourgeois Leclerc, Pierre-Luc Brillant, Julie du Page, Mario Saint-Amand, Gaston Lepage, David Boutin, Renaud Pinet Forcier, Alice Morel-Michaud
(2009, Can, 86m, b/w)

The Baron of Arizona

2011-11-15T13:27:00.000-08:00

Ever the newspaperman, Fuller sets out in his second film to reveal the story behind the (true) headline “19th-century con man passes self off as Baron of Arizona, cheats residents, brought to justice”. Clumsy exposition cedes to an extended flashback wherein Price emerges atmospherically from the rain to present an orphan girl with long-lost deeds of entitlement. Three years in a Spanish monastery forging documents and he comes back to marry the now-grown waif and assume the title. Fuller hammers the story points, while Price is all arched eyebrows and smug self-belief, and Drew is given almost nothing to do but rise above the sentimental ending with dignity. The picture and Fuller’s blunt camera style are aided immeasurably by James Wong Howe, culminating in a thrilling mob scene, but the finer points of a petty civil servant’s presumptive aristocratic dreams are left untouched.

d/sc Sam Fuller p Carl K. Hittleman ph James Wong Howe ed Arthur Hilton ad Frank Paul Sylos m Paul Dunlap cast Vincent Price, Ellen Drew, Vladimir Sokolov, Beulah Bondi, Reed Hadley, Robert Barrat, Robin Short, Tina Pine
(1950, US, 97min, b/w)

Outrage (Autoreiji)

2011-11-15T12:24:00.000-08:00

It is a little alarming to hear people describe Takeshi Kitano’s latest, Outrage (Autoreiji), as a return to form, since it comes off the back of his masterpiece, Achilles and the Tortoise. What they means is that it’s a return to the straight Yakuza genre with which Kitano started his career, and into which he has injected some interesting elements at various subsequent points. Not so much here, which from anyone else would be fine, but from him is a disappointment. Nonetheless, it is a perfectly efficient gangster film, told at the usual slow-steady pace, laced with black humour, and boasting some particularly unpleasant moments of violence.

It sets up before the credits as a basic mob-family in-fight, and covers all strata, from track-suited chairman, via local family bosses, the soldiers, the street punks and the bent cop. Characters are neatly-drawn, due more to distinctive casting than scripting, and fight amongst themselves for control of turf and positions of power. Kitano is Ôtomo, a relatively low-level boss, his standard, sardonic, twitchy-eyed heavy, old-school in a changing world, who’s office is a drab mess and whose gang always get the dirty work. So he goes about offing various people at others’ behest, before getting the double-cross himself.

There’s an inexorable logic to the film, as the various moves must be countered by the appropriate reaction (one in the hospital, one in the morgue etc) and a hint that it’s all been masterminded by one of the high level mobsters, but in fact there’s no sense of a complex web beneath the narrative, simply a straight-forward momentum, playing the game through to its inevitable conclusion. The points of interest, therefore, are the absurdist humour – Kitano loves to set his yakuza bickering – and the blood-letting, which is on more than one occasion turn-away-from-the-screen effective. So much so, in fact, that one sits in nervous tension at the most innocuous of later sequences, in anticipation of another sudden burst of unpleasantness.

I don’t really care for Kitano’s streak of sadism, but it is a requirement of the genre, and the real pleasure of the film is simply that he is a master of this form. He could have made it more interesting - he certainly has in the past - and there’s a slightly disturbing racist subplot involving the eye-rolling ambassador for “Gbana”; albeit the racism is attributed to the mean yakuza, it's still played for casual laughs. But the film commendably refuses to aggrandize itself or glorify the gangsters, and takes us to all the right places including steam-bath shooting, family massacre montage, and the trademark hail of machine gun fire in the office; perhaps it could have benefited from going further in the Asphalt Jungle direction and anthologised the genre’s set-ups, but as it is, it remains a solid example of the type, disappointing only in that it’s a coast for Kitano.

d/sc Takeshi Kitano p Masayuki Mori, Takio Yoshida ph Katsumi Yanagijima ed Takeshi Kitano, Yoshinori Ohta cast Takeshi Kitano, Kippei Shiina, Ryo Kase, Tomokazu Miura, Jun Kunimura, Tetta Sugimoto, Takashi Tsukamoto
(2010, Jap, 109m)

Zero

2011-11-15T09:50:00.000-08:00

With stylish photography, a good rock score, and a fiendishly intricate set of interlocking stories that unfold over 24 hours in Warsaw, Zero is the second feature from writer/director Pawel Borowski (after 2003′s I Love You), and certainly one of the glossiest-looking Polish films I can recall seeing.

It’s been described as the Polish version of Crash, though that over-credits the American film’s structure. The pessimistic tone of everyday absurdity is more that of Songs From The Second Floor. In fact, it kick-starts with characters handing off center-stage at whirlwind speed: a businessman calls two slobby guys in a van about a surveillance job (they turn out to be ninja buggers); they stop to buy a paper from a roadside vendor; the cab behind also buys a paper, and when the passenger gets to his office, his colleague is on the phone with her mother at a hospital where a little boy may die if he doesn’t get 4,000 Euros for a transplant; passing by, a porn star also on her cell phone is lost and late for work.

The hand-offs are managed deftly, locations switched by telephone or by the camera picking up a character passing by, Slacker-style. Individuals start to reappear, their stories intermingle and relationships reveal themselves (spouses, lovers, parents, children). However, the chain of coincidence starts to strain after a while – who should walk into a shop at the end but an unexpected character we’ve already met? Who else would be in the cab that conveniently appears but the driver we already know? The music helps greatly in smoothing the rapid flow from one vignette to another, but even that becomes rather overbearing after a while.

With parts given so little room to develop, excellent character playing makes up for a lot, as do a few sour laughs, but one still cannot shake the impression that this is a dazzling construction of no special purpose. Compared to Ashkan (also shown at the 2010 Santa Barbara Film Festival), for example, the scope implies something more like universal significance (or at least a kind of city portrait) but ends up being too hermetic to convince on that sort of level.

Very few new characters are introduced after the first dizzying round of vignettes, and the point seems to be less the inter-connectedness of human existence than life’s absurdity (very Eastern European, granted), as a series of financial transactions, wherein a child’s life must be bought and another’s sex can be, violent death (usually by car) can strike at any moment, and tomorrow will be no different or meaningful than today.

d/sc Pawel Borowski p Piotr Borowski ph Arkadiusz Tomiak ed Magdalena Mikolajczyk pd Wojciech Zogala m Adam Burzynski cast Robert Wieckiewicz, Marian Dziędziel, Agnieszka Podsiadlik, Przemyslaw Bluszcz, Malgorzata Buczkowska, Roma Gasiorowska, Bogdan Koca, Zbigniew Konopka, Andrzej Mastalerz
(2009, Pol, 110m)

The General Died At Dawn

2011-11-14T18:10:00.000-08:00

Life is cheap in 1930s China, but war’s expensive so the MacGuffin in Odets’ unambiguous script is a moneybelt carried by freelance do-gooder O’Hara on behalf of the oppressed poor, effortlessly snatched by the cash-strapped warlord’s goons. Coop and Carroll make a supremely attractive couple, but pet monkey and valiantly devil-may-care attitude aside, his role is dull, and she flip-flops between over-emotionalism and cynical self-loathing. Tamiroff is an unconvincing Chinese, and barely threatening, but when dawn finally rolls around, the devotion of his soldiers is demonstrated alarmingly. Largely irrelevant support add self-interest and unprincipled opportunism to the list of things that are not as good as democracy, but the mood is pleasantly noirish, spiced with some neat editing and dialogue peppered with niceties such as Coop’s summation of the central conflict: “I don’t like your friends, I don’t like your politics and I don’t like your hat”.

d Lewis Milestone p William LeBaron sc Clifford Odets ph Victor Milner ed Eda Warren ad Hans Dreier, Ernst Fegté m Werner Janssen cast Gary Cooper, Madeleine Carroll, Akim Tamiroff, Dudley Digges, Porter Hall, William Frawley, J.M. Kerrigan, Philip Ahn
(1936, US, 98min, b/w)

Accident (Yi ngoi)

2011-11-14T17:39:00.000-08:00

Produced by legend Johnny To and directed by Pou-soi Cheang, this is a sort of strange throwback to both a stylish 80s kind of thriller, and to the grubby US cinema of paranoia of the 70s, as well as being stylish, moody Hong Kong through and through.

The accidents of the title are in fact fiendishly devised murder set-ups: the movie opens in a busy midday street where through a finely-tuned but entirely natural-seeming series of events a driver gets out of his car and is rained down upon by large amounts of broken window. It turns out he is a Triad boss, and it turns out that a few of the crowd whom we’ve seen watching are a gang who orchestrate such events.

For the next hit, we see something of the planning process. The leader, Brain (Louis Koo), drives them hard (a foxy young woman, a large young man – Fatty – and a doddering older one, Uncle) until they figure out how to electrocute a cripple on the tram lines. It is all to the cinematic good that they realise they must do it in the rain. Again, Brain is exacting; evenings pass with several aborts as the timing is off or the rain doesn’t come, but when conditions are correct, it makes for a rather remarkable sequence (it’s raining really hard). The hit completed, an out-of-control bus heads straight for Brain. Is this also an accident? He really doesn’t think so..

The gang dissolves and Brain sets out to find out who set him up. He’s quiet, intensely cautious (carefully arranged mirrors allow him to see every part of his apartment) and melancholy, intermittently fondling the broken watch of a woman we saw fly through a car window at the start (it’s a Tag Hauer, a brand Koo promotes). It’s not exactly that he’s doing all this in memory of her, but we get the impression he couldn’t do anything else. The film takes much of its pace from his careful methodical manner, setting things up slowly and letting them unwind like clockwork. So Brain begins spying on a large insurance building with his monocular, and he moves into the peeling 70s apartment below his suspect, paints a floorplan on the ceiling and sits listening to his bugs on headphones day and night. There’s plenty of opportunity for stylish 80s shadows and neon, simple but effective piano and synth soundtrack music, quiet noble suffering in close-up (being sad about his dead wife is enough to earn it; doesn’t seem like an especially noble guy otherwise) and, finally, fear and panic as he thinks he’s been rumbled.

With such an outrageous premise and such far-fetched but convincing accidents, the fact that the denouement involves an unexpected eclipse of the sun is not really a problem (and executed with some beauty). Somewhat more of a problem is that it’s hard to care too much, and the accidents are so ingenious and well-orchestrated that a few more wouldn’t have gone amiss; but the movie star soulfulness is bearable, the paranoia well-wound and the slow pacing a welcome surprise, and as stylish fripperies go it serves its purpose fully.

d Pu-Soi Cheang p Johnnie To sc Kam-Yuen Szeto, Lik-Kei Tang ph Yuen Man Fung ed David M. Richardson ad Silver Cheung, Stnaley Cheung m Xavier Jamaux cast Louis Koo, Richie Ren, Shui-Fan Fung, Michelle Ye, Suet Lam, Alexander Chan
(2009, HK, 89m)

Gainsbourg (Vie héroïque)

2011-11-14T17:14:00.000-08:00

Serge Gainsbourg was a star of nationally monumental importance at home, for his song-writing, his love affairs, his provocations and his archetypically French fuck-you nonchalance. His musical influence reverberates world-wide, but he’s best-known as the unshaven, sex-obsessed, chain-smoking drunkard adored by the media and by hordes of new young fans in the last decade of his life (the 90s).

Joann Sfar’s new film, Gainsbourg (vie héroïque), stops just short of there. Indeed it stops just short of several things: if one happened not to know of the scandal of “Les sucettes” for example (innocent girl-child sings dirty-sounding lyrics), one would not realise the significance it had on Gainsbourg’s career and profile. Nor would you realize that he worked quite extensively in the cinema. The world of his popular career and the media, and his various national provocations, are largely elided until an isolated episode near the end; instead we more often see him hiding from press, or just outside of a film set, or on the end of a telephone to France Soir, dishing the scoop on his own coronary.

Sfar directs his first film, adapted from his own graphic novel, and proudly declares Gainsbourg his Master. This is mostly a loving portrait that aspires to some insight into the man’s psyche, but presented as a fairytale (“une conte de..”), with free interpretations in the “spirit of Gainsbourg” applied by Sfar to certain personal events. Narrative shape, change and personal growth are notorious biopic hazards, but their looseness here leaves Gainsbourg trotting through incidents as though more concerned with covering the ground between wartime childhood and the early eighties, than developing anything at all really. Beyond an invented auta-da-fé, when he threw up painting for music, change is provided mostly by the succession of women: Bardot inspires a fevered night of famous song-writing, and it is implied that Jane Birkin is turning him from his true self and into a drunkard. But the narrative jumps abruptly through time and space and frequently skimps distractingly on details (what the hell is he doing in Dali’s bedroom? Where the hell did that blonde wife come from?) and the inner Gainsbourg remains at arm’s length.

This despite the fact that Gainsbourg is followed around by a tall, stick-thin version of himself: his (ugly) mug, with enormous ears, nose and fingers. It’s the defiant figure he conjured in his constant childhood sketchbook, who basically represents all Gainsbourg became, as a public figure at least, in the last decade of his life. The transition is muted in the film: it was a conscious decision to adopt the dirty old man “Gainsbarre” persona, and here we see him momentarily endowed with the cranial appendages in a barber’s mirror, embracing his own grotesquery. Apparently Sfar wanted to keep these on for the final scene, but was dissuaded by producers; a pity, since it would have provided a far more piquant ending, in the ad-pretty sunset, on a wordless drive with his daughter in a gleaming chauffeur-driven Rolls.

This id-incarnate Gainsbourg – “Flipus” – is an occasionally charming addition, a mischievous imp on the shoulder, but veers too close to Jar Jar Binks territory. Far more successful is the giant head that leaps from a Beware of the Jews poster to follow the child Gainsbourg around, as the first incarnation of his self-doubt (he was then Lucien Ginsberg, a poor White Russian Jew in occupied Paris). The opening section of the film is in many ways the more interesting, before well-known events hi-jack the course of action. The child actor, Kacey Mottet Klein, is a superbly self-possessed little tyke, and dealing with his Jewishness involves bribing his way with cigarettes into getting the first yellow star being handed out.

The child’s attitude is curious, but his ethnic guilt/confusion is transferred with no further ado to the external entity, and then merged with simple non-ethnic concerns over self-image (he is told he is ugly in the first five seconds of the film). In the form of Flipus, these hang over him for the rest of his life, but on the evidence onscreen, in his imagination only. People will be mad at him for being drunk, or for rewriting "La Marseillaise", but not for being Jewish or ugly. After a glorious knees-up as a young man with a group of eastern European refugee children, his adult attitude towards the issues must simply be inferred: the appearance of Cabbage-Head Man in the 70s merely reiterates half the point.

The big question with Gainsbourg is how did this ugly toad get so many beautiful women? That’s hardly explored either, but Sfar is blessed with a perfect lead in Eric Elmosnino. Not only does he have those features – the weird nose, the fat lower lip, the grizzled jowl – but his quick, sly glance and most importantly the insouciant attitude, really do bring Gainsbourg and his effortless charisma to life. This is where the film’s main pleasures lie, and around the central performance the cast are terrific.

The late Lucy Gordon captures that weird Jane Birkin combination of self-possession and awkwardness to a tee; Sara Forestier does a hilarious dance as France Gall; Anna Mouglalis doesn’t quite have Juliette Greco’s otherworldly sexiness, but still smolders to good effect; and if Laetitia Casta can’t pull off Brigitte Bardot (who one earth could?) she does at least get a killer entrance and a very sexy dance with a sheet, to the kapow-whizz of “Comic Strip”.

Sfar’s intent to make a poetic tribute to his idol is entirely realised. It’s delightful in places, from the charming animated credits to Greco’s talking cat-valet, and for the Gainsbourgophile there’s lots of detail to be enjoyed. The established facts of his life are horned in or awkwardly omitted, but the various milieu are finely evoked – the jazz years are particularly whiskey-sodden and smoke-filled – and Olivier Daviaud’s arrangements and interpretations of the original songs are spot-on. The film does not allow its central character to emerge totally from his public image, nor does it grapple with the less pleasant facets of that image, but Elmosinino’s performance gives us a real sense of how captivating that image was.

d/sc Joann Sfar p Marc Du Pontavice, Didier Lupfer ph Guillaume Schiffman ed Maryline Monthieux pd Christian Marti m Olivier Daviaud cast Eric Elmosnino, Lucy Gordon, Laetitia Casta, Doug Jones, Anna Mouglalis, Kacey Mottet Klein, Sara Forestier, Mylène Jampanoï, Claude Chabrol
(2010, Fr, 130m)

Once Upon A Time In Anatolia (Bir Zamanlar Anadolu'da)

2011-11-13T15:32:00.000-08:00

It’d be best to be prepared before going into this, for a long slow evening. Amongst the various aims of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s sixth feature is the conjuring of the strange all-night atmosphere experienced by a group of officials in search for a dead body, based on the experiences of his co-screenwriter, Ercan Kesel, a doctor who partook in a similar investigation when serving in the same remote village region as depicted in the film. Another of Ceylan’s aims is an explicitly Chekhovian tapestry of apparent banalities, everyday concerns, and the passing of time, that will bring various of the characters unhurriedly to life, and add up incrementally to a portrait of something like life itself.

The film has nothing to do with the Leone near-namesake, although it does begin with three men waiting; a pantechnicon thunders past and, if they’d brought three horses with them, there’d be one too many. The end of the credits moves us days further on, by which time the remaining two have confessed to murder, and we’re on the early evening hunt for the grave, with policemen, soldiers, doctor, prosecutor and underlings. Although the main perpetrator claims to be able to take them to the grave site, he seems unable to remember the location, vague geographical details aside, and the landscape through which they travel over the course of the night, as one cop points out, all looks dispiritingly similar.

So fairly soon we realize the search is hardly the point, compared to what takes place in the passing of this empty time. After a while, we no longer follow the frustrated chief into the off-road grasslands, but stick with the doctor as he chats with a driver or with the prosecutor. The conversations, in the car and by the roadside, range from debates about yoghurt to musings on mortality, the latter pulled off in unusually successful Tarkovskian style, the camera holding on the backs of their heads, the gently waving grass in the golden headlights, and the still of the night.

At about 4am, a village stop-off brings the men a vision of beauty in the form of the local mayor’s teenaged daughter, offering tea in the lamplight. It is as though a shift away from reality were taking place, and moments later, the killer sees a vision of his victim. Somewhat earlier, the doctor was surprised in a flash of lightning by a giant, sinister face carved in the rock. It is as though there are things in life that are slightly beyond rational explanation; late on in the film the chief relates his wife’s constant worry about their disabled son: “why did God pick us?” The journey of life, here shown in long-shot, along winding roads through gently rolling hillsides, can be illuminated to an extent, but much of it will remain shrouded in mystery (the passage of a fallen apple down the hillside, to roll along a stream and come to rest by its rotting fellows, is superfluous in this respect). No wonder the film opens on a dirty window: the glass through which we see darkly, but which the power of cinema, of art (and focus-pulling) can help illuminate a little.

When daylight comes, we cannot see much clearer, the car’s windshield obscured by rain. But morning brings the final discovery of the body, and allows the bubbling-under comedy of the various personalities to emerge more fully, the relaxation of relief mixed with weariness, and perhaps Ceylan’s sop to the audience for having stuck it out thus far. But for the doctor, Cemal, the job is not yet over. We follow him back to his office, and Ceylan perfectly conjures that early morning feeling when one has not slept, when one moves slowly, but with a special sort of awareness, as the town wakes up around him. The prosecutor too must finish his report before the autopsy begins, but the pair also needs to finish a conversation that has recurred throughout the night: the prosecutor told of a woman who had successfully predicted her own death, to the day; Cemal expressed skepticism, and suggests perhaps a drug-induced, self-administered heart attack. But the actual reason for her death, or the reason for her suicide, remains obscure, and the conversation leaves both men feeling somewhat shaken in different ways.

The prosecutor makes his bald description of the corpse, and Cemal and his assistant stand lost in thought next to the naked body – can this really be all there is to a man? Not at all, for he will have his concerns, both petty and significant, just as the assistant complains peevishly about his equipment. Throughout the film, a disconnect between sound and image is kept up as conversations play out over long shots of the cars in the landscape, and this reaches its apogee here in the coda, as the autopsy gets under way, entirely invisible but unpleasantly audible. And Ceylan has one final mystery for us: an unexpected, rather ghastly fact comes to light, which Cemal firmly omits from his report, and we cannot tell why.

Cemal, as played by Muhammet Uzuner, is a quietly appealing presence, with a trustworthy manner, and a handsome, thoughtful appearance. We have seen him extend a gesture of sympathy to the killer in fetching him a cigarette, and he has spoken, it seems, honestly and plainly throughout the film so far; we also suspect that he is melancholy about his ex-wife and nostalgic for his youth, from the photographs he flips slowly through in his morning office. But behind the Plainview-esque moustache, we do not know if he is really a man of integrity, or why he leaves his report incomplete. Ceylan says that there are least five reasons, and that the clues are there in the film; that we must use our imagination. They are hard to find. The final shot has Cemal stare from the window at the deceased’s widow and child. It’s fairly certain the child is that of the confessed murderer, though less certain that it was him and not his frightened brother who committed the deed; talk of the sins of the parents being paid for by the children perhaps prompts Cemal’s decision; or maybe even the sense that there is already so much that is ghastly in the world that he may as well keep this extra horror a secret. As the prosecutor says, in his twenty year career he has more frequently needed to be an astrologer than an investigator to divine the motives of men.

So Ceylan leaves us with a slightly frustrating mystery, but one in tune with his thesis that life cannot be explained away neatly, merely half-examined through its mundane details. There are mysteries here that cannot be solved, atmospheres that hint at something beyond our obvious understanding. Fine naturalistic acting, superbly controlled pace, and subtly gorgeous photography align the audience with the special eeriness of the night-long journey; and the truly Chekhovian texture of the commonplace, like the fairytale suggestion of the title, conjures implications and substance far beyond the routine procedure of what actually happens.

d/ed Nuri Bilge Ceylan p Zeynap Özbatur sc Ebru Ceylan, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Ercan Kesal ph Gökhan Tiryaki pd Çagri Erdogan cast Muhammet Uzuner, Yilmaz Erdogan, Taner Birsel, Ahmet Mümtaz Taylan, Firat Tanis, Erkan Kesal, Cansu Demirci
(2011, Tur, Bos & Herz, 150m)

This Is Not A Film (In film nist)

2011-11-13T14:53:00.000-08:00

This is most definitely a film, a wonderful, essential conjuring of something from nothing, a necessity for the film-maker, and the selfless defiance of a repressive regime. The Iranian government has banned director Jafar Panahi from film-making or from leaving the country for twenty years, and at the time of this film’s making, he was appealing a six-year prison sentence; the movie was smuggled to Cannes on a flashdrive hidden in a cake. For what can a film-maker do but make films?

Panahi invites over his friend, documentarian Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, to kick some ideas around, and they start off with Panahi taping out a Dogville-like set on his living room carpet to talk through the script of the film he was about to make before the ban. For the most part, he is not letting his situation get him down, chipper and positive, chuckling over the official lies that he is presiding over the Berlin Festival jury, and always ready to see what they can come up with. But he throws up his hands in a moment of bitterness, saying “if you could tell a film, why make it?” He is quite ready to interrupt the path they are on if it strikes him as false, his guiding light being to film the truth (ostensibly). And so he relates the episode of “taking off the cast”, when a child actor in one of his previous films – Mirror – threw off her prop cast and proclaimed that she knew perfectly well how to get home on the bus, unlike the character she was playing.

This feeds into a later clip Panahi plays on his TV, of another of his films, Crimson Gold to which he explains that amateur actors, or even the location, can take over the direction of a film: if one turns the camera on the right people or things, the film can make itself. This is a familiar, fertile strand of Iranian film-making, but Panahi is more sly than just to cut together a day’s fooling around with a DV cam – he suggests to Mirtahmasb that he tell his wife they’re “just two idle men filming one another”, like hairdressers grooming one another when they’re bored. The disingenuousness is charming: the film was shot over four days rather than the one it appears, but Panahi uses that deceit to validate his repeated variations on “let’s see what ideas we can have”. No matter if it’s on a cheap prosumer camera or even an iphone, the film-maker must film, and indeed has a duty to do so. As Mirtahmasb points out, if Panahi had turned on his iphone on coming out of his trial, the footage would be tremendous. If one doesn’t film, one doesn’t have a film, but a film is not just the camera left running, even if it sometimes looks as though it is.

The slyness extends also to the world outside – virtually the first sound we hear is a gunshot, as Panahi spreads his morning jam on toast, and the noises recur throughout the day. Only towards the end do we learn that this is “Fireworks Wednesday” and that we cannot be sure if the increased cacophony of bangs and whizzes is gunfire or fireworks. Nor can we be sure how staged his final descent in the elevator is, filming the fill-in trashman who never gets to finish his story of being present the night the police came for Panahi. It ends with the camera peering outside, at some kind of conflagration beyond the building’s gates, before the younger man warns Panahi to get back inside lest someone see him with a camera in his hands. But by this time, of course, it is – defiantly – too late.

So from the apparent banality of simply two idle men with cameras, Panahi has created not only a personal work, encompassing some of his reflections on film-making and revealing something of his film-making thought-processes and principles; but also, deliberately and unavoidably, a political one. For all that Mirtahmasb amusingly refuses to cut when Panahi tells him so (“you’re not the director”!), and the end credit “an effort by”, he has directly contravened the government’s ruling in the greyest way possible, illuminating both the artist’s need to express himself, and the possibilities for expressing oneself under the most limited of circumstances. Bold, brave and deceptively featherlight, it is a glorious exploration and a jubilant affirmation of the possibilities of art under oppression. Also, he has a really cool iguana.

d/ph Jafar Panahi, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb p/sc/ed Jafar Panahi cast Jafar Panahi, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb
(2010, Iran, 75m)

Headhunters (Hodejegerne)

2011-11-13T14:22:00.000-08:00

A rather appealing if throwaway cat and mouse thriller, Headhunters introduces us immediately to the forcefully charming persona and slick art-thievery methods of its protagonist, Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie). His criminal activities subsidize a career as über-successful corporate headhunter, but he makes no bones about having overextended himself for the sake of his Nordic model-beautiful wife, ostentatiously luxurious lifestyle, and 1m 68 height (5’6”).

So sure of himself is Roger that he cannot resist the bait of a lost Rubens in the apartment of impossibly handsome Dutchman Clas Greve (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), for whom he may also be able to land a prime CEO position. His research swiftly reveals, however, that said Dutchman is also ex-missing persons special ops, and developer of high tech personal tracking equipment (micro-transmitters!); it’d be insane to take him on, but such is Roger’s self-belief, and commitment to playing for the highest stakes, that he doesn’t think twice.

It’s quickly apparent that this was very far from a good idea, but Roger gets by with a great deal of luck in the early stages of the chase. Basically an obnoxiously arrogant individual, he wins our sympathy due to the frightening efficiency of the man who is hunting him, and an early encounter with those charming Scandinavian toilets. Director Morten Tyldum keeps things rattling along at a smart pace, with a decent amount of inventiveness even if, for example, the usefulness of two fat cops or the tines of a tractor fork are identifiable in advance (the former raises a chuckle).

It is all plenty good-humoured – Roger’s jovial security firm accomplice is particularly amusing in his naked gunplay-foreplay with a Russian prostitute girlfriend – but the tone wavers when Tybald decides he wants us to take things seriously (the music is frequently not in on the joke). Brown is also subjected to a remarkable amount of physical punishment – a self-executed head-shaving is actually quite grueling – so when both his art-thievery and people-judging skills kick in at the end, and it all turns out alright, we’re cannot mind too much that the criminal has gotten away with it. The other criminal was far more cold-blooded, and Brown’s not actually gotten anything but his life back, gained a deeper understanding of himself and his relationship, confronted his insecurities, and tempered his hubris. Besides, occasionally bathetic missteps apart, it’s all been in good fun.

d Morten Tyldum p Marianne Gray, Asle Vatn sc Lars Gudmestad, Ulf Ryberg ph John Andreas Andersen ed Vidar Flataukan pd Nina Bjerch Andresen cast Aksel Hennie, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Julie Ølgaard, Synnøve Macody Lund, Eivind Sander, Baard Owe, Kyrre Haugen Sydness
(2011, Nor, 98m)

Faust

2011-11-13T13:58:00.000-08:00

Sokurov concludes his Moloch tetralogy, on evil and power, with a loose adaptation of Faust. So loose, in fact that one would be hard-pressed to recognize anything of the original save the name of the protagonist. He’s still a doctor, but poor, neurotic, and, after a while, fixated with a very young girl named Margarete. It is for a night with her, rather than for unlimited knowledge, that he finally signs the Mephistophelean pact late on in the film, and rather than the smooth persuader who will inevitably triumph, this Mephistopheles is a vile, goatish moneylender named Mauricius who ends up buried beneath boulders in a place suggestively described as “far away and very high up”.

The film opens with a descent through clouds, past a cinemascope-shaped mirror, and swoops over an ugly, shining CG landscape. This is the last sense of distance and perspective we will have until the film is almost over. Cutting to a giant close-up of the grey-green penis of a dissection subject, guts spill and gurgle as the camera, Faust and his assistant whirl about, pondering where the soul may be found, and the merry-go-round is on. For Sokurov has adopted a particularly heady ’70s Euro-style, à la The Hourglass Sanatorium, wherein the film seems to consist of one headlong, scattershot conversation in near real-time, as the protagonists scamper through bustling sets and crowds of local color, tossing out questions about life and death, good and evil, getting into impromptu scrapes, and generally obscuring the through-lines of plot and theme.

It all looks tremendous, with boisterous peasants and townsfolk cavorting in fine eighteenth century sets and a rigorously (somewhat over-) controlled colour palette, that at its best conjures a Breughelian vision in greens and browns. Sokurov emphasizes the bustle by hemming his characters into a vignetted Academy frame, compounding the disorientation through frequent use of the squeezed and slanted anamorphic lens, as he has recently been wont to do, for some impenetrable reason. Most confusing of all is why he bothered to cast the wonderful Hanna Schygulla in a brief and almost wordless role that would have no impact at all if she were an unfamiliar face (fantastical hats aside).

There is a brief respite from the perpetual motion when Faust and Margarete commune in lovely golden close-ups (a far more resonant communion than when he finally has his night with her) and amidst the whirligig bustle there are some striking touches: the weird creatures who creep into Margarete’s bedroom; the ghastly homunculus in a jar created by Faust’s assistant; Mauricius’s and Faust’s climb through an abstracted, rocky canyon in full armour; and the hellish geyser they find at the top of the world. Mauricius himself is a fantastically grotesque creation by Russian clown Anton Adasinsky, with stringy straw hair, evil jowls, and wobbling, weeble walk. But it’s largely difficult to figure out what Sokoruv is getting at here, beyond a freewheeling gallop through the chaos of life – as seen, and distorted, in that floating mirror called cinema – and a dismissal of God and the soul, in favour of the carnal and the venal. An unholy mess.

d Alexandr Sokurov p Andrey Sigle sc Alexandr Sokurov, Marina Koreneva, Yuri Arabov ph Bruno Delbonnel ed Jörg Hauschild pd Yelena Zhukova m Andrey Sigle cast Johannes Zeiler, Anton Adasinsky, Isolde Dychauk, Georg Friedrich, Antje Lewald, Florian Brückner, Hanna Schygulla
(2011, Rus, 134m)

Alps (Alpeis)

2011-11-13T13:44:00.001-08:00

A big crash of Carmina Burana opens proceedings in style, as a skinny girl goes through her rhythmic gymnastics routine. She is threatened excessively by her coach, for wanting to perform to a pop song, and it is some time before we learn that they are also part of a group called Alps, so-named, in a deadpan explanation, for the symbolic irreplaceability of the greatest of all mountain ranges, and for the fact it gives no clue as to what they do. The audience indeed has no clue, for rather longer than is tolerable, even if one knows in advance; but it become clear that they act as substitutes for the deceased, playing roles and reciting scripts for the bereaved partners and families. Of the four members of the group, Anna (Aggeliki Papoulia) seems to be the busiest, playing best friend to a blind old woman, lover of a lighting salesman (with amusingly stilted English dialogue) and covertly taking the place of a teenaged tennis player, whilst telling her colleagues the girl is getting better in the hospital where Anna works.

When she’s found out, she goes a bit crazy of course, and for all Lanthimos’s opacity, there’s too much obviousness here: a large plate glass window is there to be broken, even if after several attempts; and if the baton held by the Alps leader (“Mont Blanc”) who has discovered her deceit, can stay the same color, or turn red, you know which it will do, and just what will turn it red. The final line is a repeat – by the gymnast - of an earlier spiel, which in itself sounded rote, and along with the fact that for some time we cannot be sure if Anna’s father is her father, or if she is substituting for his comfort, there’s an oblique point about the roles we play for one another. But it’s merely hinting, and holds no more power than the repeatedly fuzzy focus that blurs much of the frame, keeping an ear or shoulder sharp at the edge, while the person being listened or spoken to remains obscured. Personality may indeed be ill-defined, and our ability to connect with or understand others unfocused, but like much of the rest of the film’s quirks, with the audience kept at arm’s length, this plays as a stylistic affectation rather than effective thesis. There’s plenty of humour, from Papoulia’s wonky dancing and the show-off old-folks at her father’s dance club, to Mont Blanc’s Bruce Lee substitution in a game the group plays to amuse itself, but for its more serious subtext, it is a film of suggestion rather than substance.

d Giorgos Lanthimos p Giorgos Lanthimos, Athina Rachel Tsangari sc Efthymis Filippou, Giorgos Lanthimos ph Christos Voudouris ed Yorgos Mavropsaridis pd Anna Georgiadou cast Aggeliki Papoulia, Aris Servatalis, Johnny Vekris, Ariane Labed, Stavros Psillakis
(2011, Greece, 93m)

A Separation (Jodaeiye Nader az Simin)

2011-11-12T22:05:00.001-08:00

An exquisite salmagundi of moral grey shades, A Separation explicitly hands off judgment to the audience in the opening scene, as Simin and Nader sit before a judge and address directly to camera their cases for and against divorce. She wants to emigrate, to raise their daughter, Temeh, away from the difficulties and repressions of Iran, whilst he does not want to leave his Alzheimer’s suffering father, but must provide consent for the daughter to travel. They agree to a temporary separation whilst this is resolved, and Simin moves out.

So Nader must hire a carer for the daytime when he is absent. Enter Razieh, a devout, mousy woman who is overworked and underpaid, with an angelic-looking daughter who’s a brat like any other, playing with the granddad’s oxygen and scattering trash on the stairs. Razieh requires religious advice when the old man soils himself, and is unable to tell her husband that she goes to a single man’s house; he meanwhile is unable to fill in for her, having been hauled away temporarily by his creditors, for he was summarily fired from his job at a cobblers, and been unable to make legal headway in claiming compensation. Everyone has their reasons.

The small decisions, mistakes, and self-serving moral choices escalate at an impressive rate. No-one does anything too obviously bad, and certainly nothing for which we audience cannot fully understand their motives, but the situation quickly becomes one in which any of five lives may easily be ruined. Director Asghar Farhadi is meticulous with the logic of character, and the cast are tremendous, jointly awarded best actor and best actress awards at Berlin, where the film itself won the Golden Bear. Farhadi strives to give each equal screen time and not to allow his discreet camera to push in closer to any one of them than another, in the name of maintaining a balanced viewpoint; he is almost entirely successful in spreading sympathy and blame evenly across each of the four adults, whose conflicting emotions and motivations are painfully clear.

Even the interrogator/magistrate before whom they repeatedly appear is allowed to be not merely a faceless representative of the dispassionate law, and we certainly sympathise with the difficulty of his job. Razieh’s husband comes off worst, however, for his hotheadedness; but as he rightly points out, his lower class status and lack of smooth articulation automatically puts him at a disadvantage in the legal wrangles that ensue with the principle couple. For all the fairness of approach, however, it is clear that Simin and Nader are not doing right by their intelligent, sad-eyed daughter Temeh: it is down to her to try to fix the marriage, and the position in which they place her at the end is odious.

The layers of blame and moral nuance build up so swiftly and naturally that it is hard to tell how far Farhadi is manipulating his audience – on a single viewing my suspicion is that he is genuinely trying not to. One cannot help but be nudged towards favouring Nader, however: he does after all have a sick, tragic-looking father, and exhibits remarkable patience at various points in the film; Farhadi cast his own daughter as Temeh, with whom Nader has a sweet, warm relationship; and the threat of imprisonment for the murder (not even manslaughter) of a 19-week old foetus is about as absurd a situation as one could imagine, without its being ridiculously unbelievable. Nader also gets to point out Simin’s tendency to take the easy way out, whilst he is prepared to fight; but at the same time, it is his bullish pride that prevents him from asking Simin to stay, which is all that it would take to reunite the family. He also tells the most significant lie of the film, and it is only he who can make his child cry with disappointment, and betray her own sense of what is morally correct.

The film puts only a single foot wrong, cutting short a scene near the start in a way that feels odd at the time, and reveals itself later to have elided a crucial piece of information (that seems not quite necessary in any case). But that is a minor quibble with a work that deftly weaves together issues of gender, religion, class and morality, whilst remaining firmly rooted in the daily life and preoccupations of specific, normal individuals: as the parents sit in the courthouse corridor over the closing credits, it is clear that their story is one of many that could be told, of similar circumstances. Our conventional need for resolution may feel disappointed at the film’s withholding the final decision, but Farhadi is not about to step in now and provide judgment. It is that rare sort of film which affords its audience the respect of drawing their own conclusions – indeed, encourages it – whilst presenting characters that are all-too human, rather than cold case studies. For it really to work one has to let the bad parenting slide, but it is in any event remarkably even-handed, complex, and gripping, and extremely impressive.

d/p/sc Asghar Farhadi ph Mahmoud Kalahi ed Hayedeh Safiyari pd Keyvan Moghaddam m Sattar Oraki cast Peyman Moaadi, Leila Hatami, Sareh Bayat, Sarina Farhadi, Shahab Hosseini, Merila Zare'i, Ali-Asghar Shahbazi
(2011, Iran, 123m)

Nightmare Alley

2011-11-12T21:08:00.000-08:00

A real Hollywood oddity, and an atypical highpoint in the otherwise classy filmography of Edmund Goulding, this is a cracking carnival noir charting the rise and fall of hubristic mentalist Stanton Carlisle – Stanton the Great – from cheap clairvoyant-act barker to nightclub attraction, to quasi-religious swarmi, to.. well, that’d be spoiling it, but by the look on Tyrone Power’s face, he knew it had to be.

Power plays Stanton with bursting, shining-eyed ambition, buff in his white carny tee and dapper as anything in evening dress or robe and cravat. He cozies up to milfy Joan Blondell to learn the code trick of her old act, but is forced to get hitched to gorgeous, scantily-clad Coleen Gray in a scene unusual for its turning on an understated, unspoken flash of understanding between the main characters.

Once Stan hits the big time, amusing the tony Chicago supper-club crowd, he attracts the attention of feline Lilith Ritter (Helen Walker), psychologist to the wealthy, through whom he sees his way into the big-money spook business. Walker is a superb flinty peach of broiling sexuality, and the looks they exchange are priceless, disdain mixed with desire mixed with the promise of selfish gain. Truth be told, Stan’s transition to private medium is rather skimped, and the late revelation that he’s been careful to be god-fearing rings hollow. But his derision of Blondell’s tarot deck is never quite convincing – he’s prepared to hedge his bets in the hope of getting off on a technicality, it seems.

It's riveting, but all trash, of course, like Stan in his dinner jacket, dressed to the nines with a heady score by Cyril Mockridge and the fantastic, shadow-laden photography of Sternberg collaborator Lee Garmes, from night-shrouded carnival wagons to the magical grotto where Stan’s plans come crashing down. It is a murky netherworld where the mysteries of the tarot can believably come true, and the transition happens smoothly and naturally that Power and Moore slip into the roles of Blondell and her rummy partner. Stan’s shadowy moral sleights of hand will push him too far, but he is as enamoured of his own silver-tongued facility as the suckers are of his spiel. Over the hump, Power kills it as the down and out, the fire not quite gone from his eyes, but now so cushioned by foul bags and wrinkles that we cannot help but feel a little sorry, even though we know he’s where he deserves to be. The tragedy is that he knows it too.

d Edmund Goulding p George Jessel sc Jules Furthman ph Lee Garmes ed Barbara McLean ad J. Russel Spencer, Lyle R. Wheeler m Cyril J. Mockridge cast Tyrone Power, Coleen Gray, Helen Walker, Joan Blondell, Mike Mazurki, Ian Kieth, Taylor Holmes
(1947, USA, 110m, b/w)

The Loneliest Planet

2011-11-12T20:37:00.000-08:00

This is really a one-idea movie, but it’s a very good idea (taken from a short story by Tom Bissell). Nica and Alex are young travelers in Georgia, engaged to be married, who depart on a trek with mountain guide Dato. And then Something Happens. To explain the Something would be to spoil the impact of the film, but one of its major problems is that to create that impact, for the first half of the film virtually nothing happens at all. The second problem is that virtually nothing happens afterwards either.

We’re subjected to seemingly random snippets of traveler footage, the pair fooling around with kids or climbing across mountain pastures. They seem charming enough, and there’s some pretty outdoors photography, but by the time we get a close up of the two playing cutesy footsy, patience has worn extremely thin. We learn next to nothing about them, beyond their engagement, and what little dialogue there is is simply random filler. They may as well be Young Man and Young Woman, but director Julia Loktev relies on the fact that they are handsome, smiling Gael García Bernal and flame-haired, gap-toothed Hani Furstenberg to retain audience interest.

Slipped into this nothingness, the Event that takes place, involuntary, and over in a moment, is genuinely shocking, and the following scene of the trio walking in separate silence through a forest leaves us ample space to ponder what we’ve seen. But of course it’s a forest – previously they’ve been in open grassland but now they’re hemmed in; and when reconciliation takes place, it must be beneath a torrential downpour. Not that anyone is going to talk about it, and to start off with we can empathise with the characters’ tongue-tied horror, even if they are no more than male and female ciphers (it’s anyone’s guess what Dato thinks about, a two-dimensional Other whose moment in the spotlight comes too late and shows how wasted his part is).

Left with all this space to ponder, however, the audience cannot help but consider that an involuntary, immediately rectified action might be apologized for or forgiven, between two people in love. They’re not even kids – it’s a surprise to learn that she is 30, and he is presumably of similar age. This comes, finally, in a long campfire scene at the film’s end which shows that given the opportunity for more than baleful looks, Furstenberg and Bidzina Gujabidze (as Dato; a first-time actor but renowned mountaineer) are quite capable of getting their teeth into some more nuanced acting. Likewise the camera here gets to exercise a bit more imagination than the standard landscape shots or Dardennes following, tracing a neat side-to-side motion that unobtrusively conjures ambivalence. The Event that closes this scene is also fairly ghastly, but half-expected and without ramification, an unacknowledged revenge; the next morning as the trio slowly pack their tents in long shot, we have no way of guessing the future of this couple, knowing so little of who they are – never once do they have an actual conversation with one another – but nor, by this time, do we care. The yearning for impact is exemplified by the pointless, opening full-frontal scene; the film reveals itself to be, appropriately, as full of potential implication but ultimately as meaningless as its title, and pretty infuriating.

d/sc Julia Loktev p Jay Van Hoy, Lars Knudsen, Helge Albers, Marie Therese Guirgis ph Inti Briones ed Michael taylor, Julia Loktev pd Rabia Troncelliti m Richard Skelton cast Gael García Bernal, Hani Furstenberg, Bidzina Gujabidze
(2011, USA/Germ, 113m)

The Day He Arrives

2011-11-12T20:01:00.000-08:00

One’s experience of seeing The Day He Arrives may well differ with exposure to other Sang-soo Hong films, for like this one, I gather, they are all about film-makers, the faltering beginnings and ends of relationships, and the talking of life and love over drinks. I cannot guess if repeated return to similar territory is likely to be endearing or irritating, but there presumably is some sort of progression at work here, as Jun-Sang Yu plays a Hongian director Sungjoon, who’s got four features under his belt but has (temporarily?) given up film-making to teach in the provinces. All that happens on the day he arrives in Soeul is that he fails to hook up with his friend Youngho, falls into drinking with three amusing film students, scampers off crying “don’t copy me”, and ends up weeping in the apartment of an old flame, before they agree they should not see one another again.

What happens on subsequent days is no less peripatetic, but does involve repeated returns to a particular bar, with Youngho and his pretty friend Boram. Some commentators see in this a reworking of ideas and repeating of possibilities – the day he arrives replayed with permutations – but in truth they keep going back because Sungjoon has a crush on the owner (who has an amusing habit of never being there when they arrive and settle in, and is played by the same actress as Sungjoon's crush). The repetition is less like an examination of the dynamic from different angles, than the natural behavior of people who’ve found a comfortable spot, and whose lifestyles allow for plenty of sitting around chatting and drinking.

These conversations have a wonderfully natural air, and skirt their subjects in perfect barroom philosophy style. A disquisition on coincidence has Sungjoon suggest they should not look for reasons in chance happenings, but simply enjoy the rich tapestry with which life presents and surprises them, and his film follows this same order, producing events simply for us to enjoy, ponder at, but ultimately look for no deep meaning in. As he meets in quick succession, in a similar way to encounters related by Boram, various film-maker acquaintances on the street, he wonders at their friendliness or lack thereof, but refuses to draw conclusions or pass personal judgment on the workings of life.

All this is shot in a lovely soft black and white, with a stylistic quirk of gentle zooms when one character or another starts on a little spiel. The use of road signs at the start – Constitution Junction, a church – drops off, as though Hong thought better of the symbolic suggestiveness of the device, more comfortable with the freewheeling, meaning-avoiding rhythms of just hanging out. Such deliberate detachment, inconsequentiality and, frequently, self-deprecation, could come off as irritatingly self-absorbed – particularly as Sungjoon appears to be universally attractive to women – but Hong is humble in his presentation of a character who it seems is simply not sure what to make of life or how to proceed. He is in a state of stasis, lacking the strength, he feels, to make another film, and perhaps with a respectable oeuvre of four now behind him, no pressing need to do so. But he’s not sure. His final encounter, however, suggests a small step of growth as he allows a fan to photograph him, an action Hong had denied the film-maker protagonist of a previous film (so they say). Hong’s obsessions may be wearing thin to those more familiar with his work, but to a virgin, The Day He Arrives comes across as deceptively well-textured, consistently funny, and quite charming.

d/sc Sang-soo Hong p Kim Kyounghee ph Kim Hyungkoo ed Hahm Sungwon m Jeong Yongjin cast Yu Junsang, Kim Sangjoong, Song Sunmi, Kim Bokyung
(2011, S.Kor, 79m, b/w)

Hanaan

2011-11-12T19:45:00.000-08:00

The main draw of Hanaan is its ethnic exoticism: a Korean cop in the urban/industrial wasteland of Tashkent, Uzbekistan, is certainly not something you see every day (Stalin forcibly relocated thousands of Koreans to populate the USSR’s Asian republics). The story feels well-worn, however – like something from an American movie, as one character observes of a stakeout – with the ups and downs of drug addiction providing automatic pathos but few surprises.

Stas is a narc who, in the course of a sting, runs into the petty criminal who killed his cousin six years previously (in a real bonehead move by the cousin, as we see in the film’s opening section). Unfortunately, he also tries heroin, for the sake of undercover credibility, and when he quits the force in disgust over corruption, he lifts the evidence. As bad an idea as he knows this is, it’s too late. Another encounter with the killer, and a pathetic attempt to rob his aunt, prompt him to go cold turkey in the (beautiful) Uzbek mountains, the wind whipping his thin tent as he clutches his legs in agony.

Debut writer/director Ruslan Pak doesn’t dwell on the suffering to an exploitative degree, but neither to an affecting one. There’s a pointedly voyeuristic overdose, as squalid as can be, and an extended sequence in a filthy toilet as Stas prepares his hit, but Pak shies away from any actual injecting, for example, and whilst the smackheads are all convincingly sniffy and scabby, he goes nowhere near the fine line between a look-at-this and look-away depiction of their lifestyle.

The film’s prologue deals with the title, as a Korean man tells his kid a bedtime story and then explains to his grubby Uzbek drug buddy (we see neither of them again) that every culture has its Hanaan, the land of milk and honey. When Stas runs into one of his pals from the old days, now moved to Korea, he asks what they have in Korea that they don’t have there. The answer, somewhat at a loss, is “the sea”. So the film ends with Stas gazing mournfully over a wintery Korean waterway. It is a moment of respite rather than resolution, however; there’s still his friend’s drug-running to deal with, and the revenge plot goes unresolved. If the unusual setting offers nothing new in terms of story or local specificity, the film is at least presented with a welcome lack of flash and a more restrained pace than is usual in the American model, executed with well-meaning if unimaginative commitment and integrity.

d/sc Ruslan Pak p Ellen Kim ph Taesik Um ed Sehoon Lee, Ruslan Pak m Hyun-min Park cast Stanislav Tyan, Bahodir Musaev, Ilbek Faiziev, Dmitry Eum, Ruslan Pak
(2011, S.Kor/Uzb, 88m)

Les yeux sans visage (Eyes Without A Face)

2011-11-12T18:29:00.000-08:00

Georges Franju has remained a marginal figure in film history, despite being a pal of Henri Langlois and playing an integral part in the establishment of the Cinémathèque française, directing a highly acclaimed (and suppressed) slaughter-house documentary short, Le sang des bêtes in 1949, and becoming a key figure on the festival circuit with piercing, poetic features like Le tête contre les murs (1959) and Thomas l’imposteur (1965). But he remains best – indeed, frequently only – known for his masterpiece, Les yeux sans visage, infusing with a melancholic poetry the dime-store tale (by Boileau-Narcejac) of a renowned doctor whose daughter has lost her face in a car wreck, and whose repeated attempts at transplanting her a new one are doomed to failure. The operation, when we see it, is truly unsettling, in part for the slow, tense, medical precision with which it is presented and conducted. It must have been goodness-knows how shocking in 1960.

The doctor is aided by a devoted former patient, Louise, played by Alida Valli, an Igor in pearls, whose lifeworn face has lost the freshness of The Third Man, alternately registering motherly kindness as she ensnares fresh victims, dispassionate resolution as she lights a cigarette in preparation to pounce, and the sadness of a deep, subtle, and not-unrecognized insanity. The doctor too acknowledges the wrongness of what he is doing for his daughter’s sake, and Pierre Brasseur’s doleful mien contributes a great deal to the film’s tragic power. But its aching heart is Edith Scob as Christiane, floating like a ghostly doll through the passageways of the chateau in her striking triangular dressing gowns, prettily tied to expose long, stick-like arms, with her plain white face-mask, eerily immobile, and revealing only those giant, mournful eyes. It is she who raises the film to the poetry for which it is renowned, as though in a serene, sleepwalking trance, assuaging her bottomless sorrow by transforming into an ethereal angel of freedom for the innocent.

Music and photography contribute also, opening the film with Maurice Jarre’s eerie carnival theme over headlights flashing sinister across road-lining trees; by the end the melody has resolved itself into a lyrical minor-key lament of acute bittersweetness, and the shadow-laden photography of Eugene Schüfftan follows Christiane deep into the moonlit woods, surrounded by white doves, a fairytale image both inexplicable and movingly expressive of release, an unburdening passage to another world.

The melancholy, hermetic atmosphere of the chateau is counterpointed by scenes of police procedural, as two amusingly stock cops investigate the missing girls. Their work mirrors the trial and error of the doctor’s, but they accept their failures with steadfast, professional resignation, because of course for them it is not personal. The film could have dispensed with them entirely, in fact, relying for suspense solely on the doctor’s efforts, Valli’s disposing of bodies like a gangster in her shiny black mac, and the savage ending; but the contrast only heightens the poetic atmosphere of the chateau, with its unsettling chorus of barking dogs and dark corridors, and Scob’s quivering excess of feeling. Cocteau, needless to say, was a fan.

d Georges Franju p Jules Borkon sc Pierre Boileau, Thomas Narcejac, Jean Redon, Claude Sautet ph Eugene Schüfftan ed Gilbert Natot pd Auguste Capelier m Maurice Jarre cast Pierre Brasseur, Edith Scob, Alida Valli, Juliet Mayniel, Alexandre Rignault, François Guérin, Claude Brasseur
(1960, Fr/It, 88m, b/w)

Extraterrestre

2011-11-12T11:00:00.000-08:00

Irrepressible director Nacho Vigalondo explained in his introduction to the screening that he was stuck in a long pre-production process, and wanted to make a quick little film. That’s just what he did, with even greater economy than his impressive debut Time Crimes, but with just as sure a control over the narrative logic of escalating complications. A man wakes up in the bed of a beautiful young woman, unable to remember a thing about the night before. The playing-out of a stock situation is handled with perfectly judged restraint and deadpan performance (they discover, amusingly, that they are named Julio and Julia, but she’s ditzy enough to forget his name more than once). The awkward morning after is derailed, however, when they notice that there’s no-one outside and that a 4-mile wide flying saucer is hovering over Madrid.

Before too long Julia’s enamoured neighbor Ángel, turns up, having stayed in the city to be near Julia, but to Julio’s alarm, her boyfriend Carlos also returns. Vigalondo lets the UFO dictate part of the situation, but it is essentially the excuse for a bedroom farce, poker-faced Spanish style. As played by the lanky, strong-nosed Julián Villagrán, Julio is an appealing, easy-going chancer who can scarcely believe his luck at having hooked-up with the rather pretty Michelle Jenner. She’s not much more than a pretty face, although her anime-giant, slightly crossed eyes are used to amusing effect and she easily tosses off the completely unselfaware moments of dumbness she’s given (underplayed a little by the script, in fact). Ángel (Carlos Areces) meanwhile, is a spot-on, speccy pest, and Carlos, played with perfect, blithe seriousness by Raúl Cimas, is the man in charge, the man who can accomplish anything except see what’s under his nose.

Carlos is a cheerful cuckold, undone by his good-natured, trusting heart, and he’s placed in a situation of ridicule, though never belittled. Julio and Julia’s lies upon lies to conceal their tryst run all four around in circles, but the film allows them moments of quiet gingerly to sound out their new relationship. Carlos is allowed to maintain his dignity, going underground to hunt out the extraterrestrial infiltrators the pair has invented. Julio and Julia come slowly and unshowily to recognize their bad behavior and Julio gains some nobility of his own with his biggest lie yet. Vigalando never lets farce take over entirely, nor lets the characters slip into caricature, but he keeps the laughs coming (there’s also an amusingly inept and angry underground TV broadcaster) and totally avoids sentimentalizing the doing-the-right thing resolutions. Julio ends up drinking beer with the TV guy, sitting on the roof watching the still-impassive flying saucer, chewing the fat and chilling out. The film is no more serious than that, but it is played and plays out with such deftness, good humour, and skilful lightness of touch to character, that it is completely charming.

d/sc Nacho Vigalondo p Nahikari Ipiña ph Jon D. Domínguez ad Idoia Esteban m Jorge Magaz cast Julián Villagrán, Michelle Jenner, Raúl Cimas, Carlos Areces, Miguel Noguera
(2011, Sp, 90m)

Café de Flore

2011-11-12T08:42:00.000-08:00

A voiceover at the start tells us how Antoine (pretty-man Kevin Parent) is perfectly happy, with a perfect life, a beautiful woman with whom he is perfectly in love, great kids, great job etc. Problem is, for the audience at least, he’s a vacuous international club-lite DJ with bad tattoos, more than a little in love with his upper arm sculpting, we suspect, who dumped his childhood sweetheart-wife Carole for a standard-issue blonde he saw across a loft party dance floor. Of course he spins around when someone says “hey, handsome”. His daughter puts it best: he’s an asshole.

Luckily for this asshole he ends up with the blessing of ex-wife and family all because of some reincarnation/perfect soul-mate rigmarole. In between scenes of modern-day Montréal we follow Vanessa Paradis in late ’60s Paris, as the single parent of a Down’s syndrome boy, Laurent. She’s great with the kid, and her fiery determination to have him outlive life expectancy and conduct a normal-ish life is both impassioned, and nudged over the edge to worn-out craziness with excellent finesse.

Director Jean-Marc Vallée’s cross-cutting between past and present, including Antoine’s punk-rock youth with a foxy teenaged Carole, is for the most part very neat, with several nicely cut montage sequences. Elsewhere, however, he has an irritating habit of slipping glimpses of one directly into the other, as well as dropping in the beefeater from Antoine’s dad’s gin bottles as a vague sort of guardian angel, in a quirk as glib as his protagonist. Many of the montages are scored to annoyingly bland lounge beats: the title refers to a song that Laurent particularly enjoys in the 60s, and the clubbed-up version to which Antoine first spies his (new) true love, but even the original is nothing special.

Vallée has Antoine admit that the tune is “almost banal”, but the “almost” is not true, and we’re nonetheless punished with it ad nauseam; elsewhere, his family mock him for an obsession with an annoying Sigur Rós song, yet we’re subjected to that too, a few scenes later. The point is how music, regardless of its quality, can take on special meaning for a person, depending on when they first hear it, with whom they associate it, and so forth, but it’s a point ill-made and self-defeating if the repetition grows so annoying to those for whom it is not special. Repeated use of Pink Floyd’s “Breathe” improves things with its ominous scream and (slightly) more musically complex conjuring of aural bliss, but it’s rather dismal if that’s the best one can say for a movie’s soundtrack.

The suggestive interplay between past and present loses its interest in thudding fashion when the reincarnation theme is specified, then beaten into the ground. But with such a bland soundtrack and protagonist, whose crappy behaviour gets entirely excused by the vague soul-mate nonsense, the film never stood a chance. Antoine wonders at one point about the possibility of dying in a plane crash, and the recurring pretty-pretty image of a jet-stream leading into a bright sun leads one to hope it will have some sort of augural significance. No such luck.

d/sc/ed Jean-Marc Vallée p Pierre Even, Marie-Claude Poulin ph Pierre Cottereau pd Patrice Vermette cast Kevin Parent, Vanessa Paradis, Hélène Florent, Evelyn Brochu
(2011, Can/Fr, 120m)

The Turin Horse (A Torinói ló)

2011-11-11T10:23:00.000-08:00

In an alternate universe, a Turin Horse will become the name for a movie that turns out to have nothing to do with its title. Slow-cinema maestro Béla Tarr’s latest (last?) opens with a blank-screen voiceover relating the semi-apocryphal story of Nietzsche’s madness-inducing encounter with a mistreated carthorse, and declares that “of the horse, we know nothing”. Cut to a carthorse, trudging through a hellish swirl of mist. But this is not necessarily the same horse, we are clearly not in Italy, and the film soon lets the animal retreat to the background, in order to focus exclusively on the slow, hard, regular days of the old carter and his daughter. He has an apostle’s beard and a mop of grey curls, frequently backlight-haloed, and the use of only his left arm; she has a hard, handsome face, tight-mouthed and dead-eyed, beneath long wind-whipped hair; and they live a life of emptiness and hardship in a stone croft on a barren plain.

Long, slow takes are the order of the day, of course, although Tarr and DP Fred Kelemen rarely hold for long on an empty frame. The camera steadicam-glides around the couple’s activities over the course of six similar days, as they eat their unchanging meal of boiled potato and a pinch of salt, fetch water from the well, or simply gaze out of the window. The technical aspect of the film is truly marvelous, an almost pathological avoidance of the cut by movement and reframing that speaks wonders of the operators’ stamina and agility, and Kelemen’s complex, invisible lighting. With irresistible immediacy, one striking composition follows another, frequently in the same shot, in familiar dirty Tarr blacks and contrasty white. The camera calms down towards the end, as the pair’s already minimal energy diminishes, and winds up in the last section with two stunning images: the first, inexplicably moving, of the daughter staring ghost-like from the window as the camera zooms ever so slowly in; then finally, a fixed two-shot of the pair seated at the old oak table in Old Master lighting, abstracted from reality.

All the while, a ghastly wind storm rages outside. Its terrible howling tears across the soundtrack in parts, but is frequently replaced with a simple musical refrain, an AABC violin/cello theme played over and over against scraping strings and organ ostinato like some purgatorial devil’s dirge, repeated forever. Excitement comes halfway through in the form of a sudden neighbour, who tells them that the wind has blown the town away, that life is now “the most ghastly existence you can imagine” and that the great and noble are nowhere now to be found, having lain down before the acquisitive. The apocalyptic tone is hardly countered by the old man’s “that’s rubbish”. His gruff, needless antagonism returns when he chases of a band of “filthy bastard” gypsies who stop for water (we’re in Hungary, for sure); but they’re not so bad, paying for what they take with a book, from which the daughter reads haltingly: some religious tract that makes no sense to her and little to use. Needless to say there is no God in this world.

The horse swiftly (relative, in the context) gives up moving, and then eating. The well runs dry. They pack their belongings and leave, then inexplicably return, presumably for lack of point. The father stops eating. The lamps mysteriously go out – “what is this darkness?” the daughter asks. She stops eating. Although the horse is clearly not Nietzsche’s, the world of the film is the one he saw in a flash of depressive lucidity, as the legend would have it, a world of pointless, never-ending, self-perpetuating hardship and cruelty. Tarr’s vision of life is certainly nasty and brutish, though not necessarily short, and full of false endings before it finally sputters out like the lamp. We were fortunate enough to have Tarr himself to introduce the screening, and he described the film as ugly, boring, miserable and slow, which is perfectly right. He also says that this will be his farewell to film-making which, with such a hopeless frame of mind, may be just as well.

d Béla Tarr, Ágnes Hranitzki p Gábor Téni sc László Krasznahorkai, Béla Tarr ph Fred Kelemen ed Ágnes Hranitzki m Mihály Vig cast János Derzsi, Erika Bók, Mihály Kormos, Ricsi
(2011, Hung/Fr/Ger/Switz, 149, b/w)

La folie Almayer

2011-11-10T11:34:00.000-08:00

It boded so well. The credits play over a serene beam of moonlight on the water, while an excerpt of Tristan and Isolde tinkles gently; then we’re thrown into a noisy neon Malayan karaoke club/shack, where an unexpected, very public murder is followed by an even more unexpected, somnambulant Ave Maria. But Chantal Akerman, taking flight from Joseph Conrad’s first novel, goes nowhere near such stylish flamboyance again and delivers much that is expected, and much that is unexpectedly unsuccessful.

We were warned by the programmer’s introduction not to expect much plot, but part of the film’s problem is that there is too much, and that detail, content and frequently dialogue are all half-baked; indeed, I found myself wishing for longer, slower, emptier takes (my prayers were eventually answered). The film is at its best when contemplating the murky greens and blues of the moonlit forest and watery glades, and achieves a couple of moments of transcendence: a great deal is shot in suggestive darkness and the storm rains that pockmark the murky green water turn it in close-up to the writhing skin of an octopus. It is a wild environment of the ancient unknown in which to imprison the protagonists; the sway of Tabu that Akerman has confessed is clear in both the photography and the story that involves, latterly, two “native” lovers whose union cannot be.

What presumably drew Akerman to the material was the position of the girl, Nina, part Malay and part white, daughter of French trader Almayer, whose folly, in part, is allowing her to be whisked off to boarding school at the start by Captain Lingard. Lingard failed in his attempts to Europeanize Nina’s mother – to make her “one of us” – so married her off to Almayer with the promise of gold mines which never materialize, and he wants to try again with Nina. Akerman gives her a couple of long, meandering explanations of how hard it has been for her as a half-caste, and once she’s grown up, and once plot-motor Lingard is out of the picture, the film’s rhythm slows to a seductive languor. But it’s not enough. For all of Akerman’s thrall to Tabu, there’s not a jot of ethnography here which, in the film’s explicit focus on colonialism and Lingard’s efforts to “turn” the native women, is nigh on inexplicable: the Malays are presented to us just as they appear to Almayer, with no significant life or culture of their own. He dismisses their (lovely) singing as a racket (and tunelessly hums Chopin to make his point), and is swiftly revealed to be the standard-issue white man in the jungle, sweating, inert and sickly, shouting in desperation from the unhealthy darkness of his hut, or standing Aguirre-like on the canoe that will certainly not take him to the gold.

To see the locals through his eyes only is justifiable in that Almayer is the center of the film, but even the concerted efforts of Stanislas Merhar cannot make a three-dimensional character of him. One does not expect as much, necessarily, from Akerman, but it makes the film’s adoption of his viewpoint notably uncomfortable, and completely undermines the notorious final shot: Almayer has disowned Nina (she’s run off with her outlaw lover) and says that tomorrow he will forget her. He sits in close-up for a long, long time, remembering. His Malay factotum props up the doorway, out of focus, in the background, presumably, in this context, with nothing better to do. It’s a superb, moving finale in theory. Merhar does a great job, wordlessly holding down the shot for its punishing duration, but his character is beyond our interest, or even favour, for the stupid, hackneyed attitudes he has shown, and since he gave Nina away at the age of five or so, he’s not got a great deal to remember in any case. The best he can come up with, eventually, is that he told her not to walk barefoot in the grass for fear of snakes, which would be a decent enough metaphor for the colonialist attempts to Europeanize the foreigner for their own good, were it backed up by any piquancy of conflict, involving a character of any complexity or sympathy at all, however repressed. So it’s not.

d/sc Chantal Akerman p Chantal Akerman, Patrick Quinet ph Raymond Fromont ed Claire Atherton cast Stanislas Merhar, Aurora Marion, Marc Barbé, Zac Adrianasolo, Solida Chan, Bunthung Kim, Sun Yucheng
(2011, Belg/Fr, 147m)

Beyond the Black Rainbow

2011-11-06T08:21:00.000-08:00

Let me be clear: this film has not been picking up fans on the festival route, with complaints ranging from “deathly dull” and “unnecessarily lengthened student short” to “retro-hipster counterfeit” and “complete crapola”. It’s slow and derivative, with a jarringly misjudged ending, but far as I am from an ’80s nostalgist, I couldn’t help but fall a little bit in love with it.

Don’t worry about the plot, for it hardly matters. It’s an alternate 1983, and we’re introduced via a promotional video and the eerily red backlit Mercurio Arboria, to his institute for some sort of pharmacologically-assisted spiritual health-giving. Most of the film plays out in the Arboria Institute, which appears to have only one inmate, a semi-stupefied young woman (a surprisingly good Eva Allen, with no spoken lines). She clings to an illicit photo of her mother, and is questioned slowly and semi-sadistically by a younger doctor, Barry Nyle. There’s also a floating diamond pulsating with white light, motorbike-helmeted Sensonauts, and some weird veiny bald guy in a strait jacket. A mid-film flashback “explains” how the girl was born with telekinetic abilities. But since this involves Nyle submerging himself in an inky pool and turning into a weird upside-down version of the cover of Nirvana’s Sliver single (except made of melting cheese), don’t expect to understand the finer points.

The movie’s a visual trip, the molasses-slow pace and sinister set-up excuses for a terrific succession of images employing heavily colored lighting, indoor lens flare, abstract close-ups, reflections wherever possible, billowing smoke, melting walls, a terrific sequence of double exposure, and cool, precise compositions framing the antiseptic lines of the sets. The flashback flips to a nice and freaky blown-out black and white look, and whether director Panos Cosmatos was actually trying to engage us with his story or merely mesmerize with visuals, he and DP Norm Li conjure one retina-dazzling image after another, accompanied almost non-stop by a throbbing synth score – analogue only! – by Sinoia Caves (Jeremy Schmidt of Black Mountain).

The hypnotic effect of the film is greatly helped by the creepy, robotic Michael Rogers as Nyle, with his malevolent black eyes and “that guy” look. He could have stepped out of early Cronenberg, and Stereo through Scanners are not the only films invoked: most obviously, a pulsating 2001 iris over the credits, swathes of THX-1138, and Vangelis noodling over dreamy golden architecture shots in Blade Runner (not to mention a literal eye-popping). There’s plenty of other direct steals, and many I no doubt missed – Cosmatos has spoken of wanting to make the sort of film he imagined was in the early 80s VHS cases his parents wouldn’t allow him to rent. He’s obviously caught up on many of them since, and his sense of period sci-fi design is entirely sure.

The film fatally loses its grip in the very final section, venturing outside the institute, inexplicably changing tone entirely, and relying on idiotic chance for its resolution. But for all the self-indulgence, blatant stealing and portentous mystification (what the hell does the title mean?), Cosmatos, Li, Schmidt and production designer Bob Bottieri have up until that point conjured a deliciously narcotic treat for the senses. So don’t try and understand it – it’s a midnight movie after all; you can cut it some slack – just open your eyes, get ready to trip, and let the sweet synth sounds wash over you.

d/sc Panos Cosmatos p Oliver Linsley, Christya Nordstokke ph Norm Li ed Nihcolas T. Shepard pd Bob Bottieri m Jeremy Schmidt cast Michael Rogers, Eva Allen, Scott Hylands, Marilyn Norry, Gerry South, Chris Gauthier
(2010, Can, 110m, col & b/w)

Kill List

2011-11-04T09:48:00.000-07:00

This starts off like a regular domestic drama of frustration and little shards of social awkwardness, as Jay and Shel argue over his eight months’ unemployment, then entertain another couple for dinner. Jay, it seems, might be something of a fantasist, and he’s certainly got a temper on him. But why does he have an assault rifle in the garage, and why does his chum’s googly-eyed girlfriend incise a sinister sigil in the back of their bathroom mirror?

The answer to the first comes quickly: Jay and Gal are Iraq veterans who’ve since made a living as hitmen, and the title refers to their latest targets, as provided by a sinister, posh “client” in an anonymous regional hotel. So off they go, unconvincingly (as acknowledged) undercover as salesman, to work their way through the contract. Things take an unpleasant turn when they discover their second victim’s hideout full of porn and a horrific torture video. We don’t see the video, but we see the result of Jay’s righteous anger, meted out with a hammer in impressively sickening fashion. He’s more unhinged than we thought. And as to the other, it’s signaled from the opening – that sigil appears onscreen before anything else – that things will take a turn for the Wicker Man.

The film’s main strength is the easy camaraderie between Jay and Gal. Michael Smiley as Gal has a terrifically long, wonky face (he was the hilarious bike courier in Spaced) and acts as an easy-going foil to Neil Maskell’s more conflicted Jay, sometimes boiling with rage, but at other times a convincingly regular dunderhead – the intensity of his stare and weakness of mouth conjure an unnerving mixture of Michael Fassbender and Ricky Gervais that helpfully prevents his character from settling into a psycho rut. They work the matey charm to good enough effect, that Wheatley can get away with having them heave themselves from the couch with a weary “right, let’s go and kill this MP then”.

But for the rest, the film is full of suggestiveness, most bluntly through an excessive lathering of the score’s ominous rumbles and screeches over scenes that seem not to warrant it, save to make us feel uneasy. The ambiguity of the Iraq war, exploitation of the working class, and Gals’ (Irish) religion are all toyed with; and a brief interlude with a weird infection and a weird doctor hints that we may indeed be watching some fantasy world of Jay’s (we’re not, even if people do keep pointedly telling him to wake up). The first two victims give him a sincere “thank you”, and the second explicitly divines in him some secret identity, of which Jay is unaware. He’s vaguely an avenging angel, or crusader perhaps, but if there’s a specific, meaningful secret here, Wheatley and co-screenwriter/wife Amy Jump choose to let it drop. And poor old Shel gets short-changed, revealed at the start to be a Swedish ex-commando, but given only the briefest chance to show her stuff (and their kid exists only to make the ending more unpleasant. Shel too, for that matter).

Jay’s repeated unprofessionalism can be excused by his unhinged anger, and is bad enough to have created problems in the past (and his self-enforced unemployment), but opening fire on the torch-light pagan ritual is thoughtlessly suicidal, even in his deranged state. The participants are dressed in rather good twig masks, and all appropriate trappings are present, naked maidens included. But there is no real sense of ancient, deep-seated Wicker Man beliefs and menace here (or even the frightful unknown of something like Race with the Devil). Much of their threat is predicated on the fact that it is some secret, upper-class cabal. And as for all the suggestively impersonal talk over dinner about human resources, and the client’s later reference to “reconstruction”, it all remains too vague to matter, as we really have no idea what the baddies are up to beyond amusing themselves.

Wheatley and Jump create a serviceable texture and illusion of depth, but it is no more than that. The strands are woven deftly enough, that if one doesn’t mind or notice the gaps, then Kill List works as a perfectly decent horror-thrill with amiable leads. There’s a well-worn sequence in ancient, water-dripping underground passageways that Wheatley pulls off with a fine degree of terror; but ultimately this is exploitation fare pure and simple, as revealed by the thudding meaninglessness of the finale. The mechanics are sound enough, and it’s a horrible enough horror movie, but if one is inclined to watch with any degree of attention, or a desire to unpick the story’s suggestive secrets and metaphors, one will come away feeling robbed and a little insulted.

d Ben Wheatley p Claire Jones, Andrew Starke sc Ben Wheatley, Amy Jump ph Laurie Rose ed Robin Hill pd David Butterworth m Jim Williams cast Neil Maskell, Michael Smiley, MyAnna Buring, Emma Fryer, Struan Rodger, Harry Simpson, Gareth Tunley, Mark Kempner, Damien Thomas, Robert Hill
(2011, UK, 95m)

Le gamin au vélo (The Kid on the Bike)

2011-11-03T12:45:00.000-07:00

One usually knows what one’s getting with films of the Dardennes brothers – moral and ethical travails amongst the put-upon working class of wintery industrial Belgium, with a handheld camera and Jérémie Renier. They change things up a little this time (although Renier still has a cameo), shooting in summer, with an established star (Cécile de France) and almost entirely eschewing a socio-economic dimension.

That last element is present only in that dire, unspecified circumstances are what have forced the title kid to be dumped into an orphanage by his dad. As played – superbly – by Thomas Doret, Cyril’s a hard, determined tyke, not a bad kid, but scrappy and anxious, furrowed brows ready for disappointment, and defiantly self-reliant. He has only one thing on his mind: asked what’s wrong, he replies “I want my dad”. Kindly young Samantha (de France), whom he meets by chance, first fetches him his bike, and then takes him in at the weekends, which allows him to peddle round the neighborhood in his search.

It doesn’t take long before dad turns up, but once it is clear that father Guy is too broken to consider taking responsibility for his child, the film, like Cyril, starts to lose its focus. The Dardennes’ typically rigorous logic is in place, but the sequence of events hereafter lacks the usual feeling for moral necessity. Cyril falls in with an older kid, whose sinister attentions make him an easy father figure, or at least a pal, but we know that won’t end well. Likewise the search for a mother never enters into it (we learn zero about Cyril’s) and Samantha for him is just a means to an end. But her role in the film is almost as simplistic as it is to Cyril, and despite a fine performance of warmth and restraint from de France, she is fundamentally an inexplicable angel, who with barely a thought can throw over her decent-seeming boyfriend for the kid, embodying the vague equivalence, raised several times, between wanting something and agreeing to something (it is Cyril who asks her to take him in; she agrees).

There’s nothing seriously wrong with the film, propelled by Doret’s fierce performance and the finest handheld camerawork in contemporary cinema, immediate but unobtrusive (from usual DP Alain Marcoen), but the Dardennes have their own high standards to meet. A case in point: for the first time, they employ non-diegetic music, mere seconds snatched from a Beethoven adagio (the Emperor Concerto). It is a superbly moving few notes: on its first two appearances it makes audible the boy’s emotion as we see his face or frantic pedaling, and marks the film’s structure in an entirely useful way. But the third time it appears, it is to cap a scene of rejection that is quite moving enough on its own, and playing over the back of Cyril’s head as he cycles off, hits an uncharacteristically manipulative note. Likewise, after a series of scenes which feel like they could be the last, the film comes to a close with an unmistakable resurrection, which works nicely as a scene and as resolution, but feels let down by the meandering lack of dramatic heft that precedes it.

That said, there’s a new and endearing optimism to the brothers’ film-making, along with a striking amount of bright color and golden light. Their insistent respect for character and truthfulness of behavior is typically to the fore, as is their ability to elicit superbly naturalistic but carefully worked-out performances; and frankly, even a disappointing film from them is better than most everything else out there.

d/sc/ed Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne p Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne, Denis Freyd ph Alain Marcoen cast Thomas Doret, Cécile de France, Egon di Mateo, Jérémie Renier, Fabrizio Rongione, Baptiste Sornin, Valentin Jacob, Youssef Tiberkanine, Samuel de Rijk,
(2011, Bel/Fr/It, 87m)

The Color Wheel

2011-11-02T08:37:00.000-07:00

Alex Ross Perry’s second feature follows the oddball backwoods Pynchon riff Impolex (2009), this time without the surrealism and heading straight for mumblecore land. One wonders when exactly American independent cinema became so focused on dislikable, no-hope twenty-somethings. If they fail entirely to engage with the business of growing up, clinging to the self-belief that they are somehow special, it must be in the name of showing us how they really are, yeah, so what? Some people are just like that (some people are also just bored, middle-aged suburbanites with no terrible secrets, majestic dreams or burning passions. Including the desire/need to make a film about themselves).

Perry seems well aware of the failings of millennial, navel-gazing cinema, but dives in all the same, with super-grainy b/w 16mm, the obligatory acoustic guitar-strumming soundtrack, and seemingly a third of the whole running time shot out of car windows. Mimsy sincerity is at least replaced by desperate, defensively cynical humor – witness the private, opaque irony of the title – and the attempt to invest a limp current trend with some backbone is certainly a relief. For this time out, his literary inspiration is the talky east coast self-hatred of Philip Roth (queasy sex obligatory).

Colin is a petulant defeatist; his slightly elder sister JR is a charmless, unsuccessfully-aspiring news anchor, whose unfounded self-belief is near unflappable. They are on a three-day road trip to retrieve her belongings from a finished relationship with her professor. The method is to make these characters as undeserving of sympathy as possible – they don’t even come out well from an early encounter with a creepy motel clerk, and JR’s “Who farted” t-shirt gives an exact measure of how funny she thinks she is; to reveal their obnoxiousness and self-delusion without excuse (Colin’s casual racism is apparently meant to be truthful, acceptable and funny); and then to subject them to encounters with lovers and ex-friends even more obnoxious than they are, as a way to force audience sympathy. To an extent, this actually works, in part for the fearlessness with which Perry denies the pair any redeeming qualities, and in part because Colin’s girlfriend, JR’s ex, and the high school friends to whose party they are by chance invited, are such unpleasant, patronizing people.

This makes slight nonsense of Colin’s seduction by the party fox – one expects her intentions to have ulterior, humiliating motives but no, apparently he was irresistible from the moment he arrived, in the film’s one true lapse of believability. It’s unlikely that Perry simply wanted to snog his girlfriend on camera, but that’s what he does. For he plays Colin himself, opposite co-writer Carlen Altman: lumbering, bug-eyed and generally derided, he’s a fairly appealing dullard, once one gets past the clever-cleverness and annoying voice (put on or not?). Whereas for all that Altman frequently looks like she stepped out of a New Wave movie (some business about a shirt collar clinches it), it’d be a forgiving audience who could warm to her, even in the face of repeatedly merciless put-downs.

Perry might have done well to give himself a little more distance. Evidently enjoying himself, he indulges the pair with plenty of goofing off, in the name of sibling chemistry. Pointed conversations alternate with throwaway nonsense. They’re meant to be antagonistic, and do exchange the harsh words away with which only siblings can get. But no real sense of the dislike or long-borne hatred that can pull against family ties emerges; Colin constantly reminds JR how their parents dislike her, but makes sure to distance himself from their remarkably unpaternal behavior, as reported; whilst JR is given several occasions to exhibit instinctive protectiveness for her little brother.

There’s no avoiding the denouement, signposted throughout the film, as they josh together more like lovers than siblings. It’s the most interesting part of the film, partly because it fails to convince as an act of forgiveness – despite the bickering, they get on just fine. Nor does it quite convince as a desperate act of cathartic self-pity: they both seem more or less inured to everyone else’s derision (Colin even admits as such), and their treatment at the preceding party does not seem that much worse than anything they’ve shrugged off before. The film is too slight (83m, including all those car window shots) to accrue the necessary mass, but the final act is basically the recognition by two lonely, obnoxious people that they are the only ones who can understand – and tolerate – one another.

And that’s the end of the movie. The long-take tension is successfully built, though partially damaged by a wobbly handheld push-in (of an obtrusive piece with some fidgety editing elsewhere), and the decision to downplay the shock value veers too much towards indie whateverness. This is a big deal, but most fatally of all the fall-out – or even silent avoidance of it – is completely elided. JR is allowed brief moments to fantasize, contemplate, and be overcome by emotion, but these are mere gestures. How Colin feels is anyone’s guess. The film skips right to their arrival home, and a flashed shot of the front door reopening closes the picture with cheap suggestiveness. It’s as though Perry wrote only half a film – how the pair deal with this would have been far more interesting than how they got there (as presented, at any rate) and a true test of his ability to have the audience sympathize with unlikable, damaged individuals.

d/ed Alex Ross Perry p Alex Ross Perry, Bob Byington sc Carlen Altman, Alex Ross Perry ph Sean Price Williams sd Anna Bak-Kvapil m John Bosch cast Carlen Altman, Alex Ross Perry, Bob Byington, Anna Bak-Kvapil, Kate Lyn Sheil, Ry Russo-Young, Roy Thomas, Craig Butta, C. Mason Wells
(2011, USA, 83m, b/w)

Miss Bala

2011-11-01T12:53:00.001-07:00

Torn from the headlines, Miss Bala pitches beauty queen aspirant Laura into the murky world of the Tijuana drug cartels; it’s the title of Miss Baja California she’s going for, but bala means “bullet”, plenty of which are expended before the end of the film. The real-life Miss Sinaloa (also named Laura) was indeed arrested for her association with the Mexican drug gangs, but this is no docudrama. Laura here is an innocent, drawn into the underworld through being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and buffeted from dangerous situation to dangerous situation by the twin expediencies of self-preservation and having no other choice.

Indeed, we are almost as bewildered as she is when she’s inexplicably crowned at the pageant halfway through, but it swiftly becomes apparent that there are advantages to quietly charismatic gang boss Lino in having a beauty queen under his thumb. Naranjo opens the film with an extended shot from directly behind her head, and returns several times to that point of view, like an old-fashioned computer game, taking us on a first-person tour of the drug wars. Men’s faces are consistently hidden by cap brims, shadows, shallow focus or police masks, and for all the action that takes place, he ties us tightly to Laura’s viewpoint, showered with debris whilst cowering in the front seat of a car or under a bed, the soundtrack exploding with gunfire. Not that he cannot stage a set-piece – he shows us a rather terrific street battle as Laura is ferried through to a waiting truck, and her first encounter with the criminals is ushered in by their eerie background roof descent as she turns the corner of a low-rent club bathroom.

The deliberate avoidance of freneticism and violent antics pays dividends as great as those provided by DP Mátyás Erdély’s elegant long-take camerawork, and the willowy, doe-eyed Stephanie Sigman as the appealing and resilient Laura, but that is about as far as it goes. This is not an examination of environment or social problems, nor the study of a character caught in a tricky moral net; we know next to nothing of Laura, save that she seems to be a good-natured family girl, loyal to the search for her missing friend, and a more or less decent sort not comfortable with the way she wins her crown, who does the right thing in the end. The oft-repeated device of having the back of her head lead the camera makes her a sort of blank everywoman, as though the film is a thrill ride for the spectator, thrown into one dangerous situation after another and denied full knowledge of what exactly is going on.

And that’s really the point of the whole enterprise. Making crime boss Lino a sympathetic-seeming sort muddies the waters (cleared up by an unexpected, understated and arguably unnecessary ending for him) – how much more intriguing if we’d shared his view of the back of her head at one of the film’s climactic points. But that would have violated the narrow viewpoint to which Naranjo confines us in order to evoke the same general uncertainty and fear as Laura experiences. It’s less that we are to sympathize with her, than actually feel like her. The morality of exploiting such a messed-up real-life situation as no more than a violent backdrop to an audience thrill ride is dubious at best, but there’s no denying the surprising restraint and frequent excitement with which Naranjo pulls it off.

d/ed Gerardo Naranjo, p Pablo Cruz sc Gerardo Naranjo, Mauricio Katz ph Mátyás Erdély ad Ivonne Fuentes m Emilio Kauderer cast Stephanie Sigman, Noe Hernandez, Irene Azuela, Gabriel Heads, Miguel Couturier, James Russo
(2011, Mex, 113m)

Subida al cielo (Mexican Bus Ride / Ascent To Heaven)

2011-11-01T09:26:00.000-07:00

The improbable recipient of the Cannes 1952 prize for best avant-garde film, Mexican Bus Ride (or Gate To Heaven) is one of twenty films Buñuel made in Mexico between 1946 and 1964. Several started life as potboilers, several were remarkable, and most were highly independent productions (this one ran out of money before many of the planned final scenes had been shot). And none of them, Buñuel stated, contained “a single scene that compromised my convictions or my personal morality”.

Although it’s hardly avant-garde, even for 1952 (a couple of dream sequences and characteristic black humour aside) Buñuel evidently managed to enjoy himself on a project for which he had initially felt little attraction. Oliverio (Esteban Márques) is a country boy who must take the long bus-ride to the city to fetch a notary for his dying mother, whose not-inconsiderable legacy is much-contested by his three elder brothers. This being Buñuel, said journey must interrupt Oliverio’s wedding night (to have been spent on a beautiful island across the – always sexually-charged – water) and in his frustration he must contend with the advances of local bombshell and fellow passenger Raquel (Lilia Prado). He’s no lillywhite hero, though: the most coveted item of the mother’s inheritance is the house in Mexico City, and whilst the brothers gamble for it amongst themselves, it is Oliverio who in the end allows the notary, unkeen to make the trip over the mountains, to send him home with a bogus will, which he will then sign with his mother’s thumbprint after she has died. With equally casual amorality, Buñuel sends Oliverio and Raquel up the mountain to the “Gate of Heaven” where, in a terrific thunderstorm and teetering on a sheer drop, he finally gets his wedding night and she too gets what she’s after. As a stock type, Prado more than fulfils the requirements for Mexican slut, with dangerous heels and strapped ankles, tight sweater and forthright manners, and when she affords Buñuel the opportunity to combine his leg fetish with his persistent association of water and sex, by hitching her skirt indecently far up her thigh to descend the bus, the erotic charge is genuine.

The other passengers in the dilapidated vehicle provide equal amusement: the driver stops to celebrate his mother’s birthday, climbs through the window to surprise her as she pretends to be asleep, and wakes her as would a gallant lover; there’s a goat and a sheep, and a chicken trader who, as an epitome of progress, carries a handsome album of photographs of his birds (“easier than carrying real chickens”); and the human comedy busload is completed by a birth and later a death (the Buñuelianly grotesque moment comes when we are solemnly shown the dead child’s face through a window in the lid of its coffin). There is also an old man, dressed like an aristocrat but riding for free – he says he’ll pay when the government gives his land back. As usual with Buñuel, political elements create more of a frisson than a thesis, most explicitly in the character of the local candidate for senator. A lookalike for then-president Miguel Alemán, he is generally derided (and his attendant flunkey has a wooden leg or rather, a piece of wood strapped to his side with his leg bent at the knee and proudly visible), the son of a water-vendor, jumped-up to his own people and pathetic to the cityfolk.

For the real heart of the film is specifically rural, old-fashioned humanity, celebrated in the jovial atmosphere of the bus and the birthday fiesta, and accompanied by a succession of mariachi bands. The rickety old bus is contrasted with a shiny American streamliner (and the presence of Americans at the fiesta is partly due to a proud showing-off of traditional rural culture). Most explicitly, when the bus is stuck in a river, it is a child leading two oxen that retrieves it, rather than the tractor spinning its wheels in the mud nearby. That the film tails off somewhat hardly matters at all, the bus-ride simply a joyful picaresque, a formal equivalent to the unfettered, “primitive” way of life it champions.

d Luis Buñuel p Manuel Altolaguirre, María Luisa Gómez Mena sc Manuel Altolaguirre, Luis Buñuel, Juan de la Cabada, Manuel Reachi ph Alex Philips ed Rafael Portillo ad Edward Fitzgerald, José Rodriguez m Gustavo Pittaluga cast Estaban Márquez, Lilia Prado, Luis Aceves Castañeda, Manuel Dondé, Roberto Cobo, Beatriz Ramos, Manuel Noriega, Roberto Meyer, Leono Gómez, Carmelita González
(1952, Mex, 84min, b/w)

The Mill and the Cross

2011-10-17T08:11:00.000-07:00

A remarkably ambitious project, in the slender tradition of recreating paintings on film, The Mill and the Cross delves into Brueghel’s “The Way To Calvary” to present everyday vignettes of peasant life, Rutger Hauer as the artist musing on his method, and Michael York as his wealthy patron, ruing the follies of man and pointing out that Christ’s red-coated guards in the picture are actually the Low Countries’ sixteenth-century Spanish overlords. The production design team go all out (great peasant fashions, albeit glaringly ungrubby) and director/co-cinematography Lech Majewski frequently conjures lovely northern light interiors, with inky shadows, plentiful doorway framings, and through the windows, glorious glimpses of the painted mountains outside.

The artistic, political and human elements of the film are given little substance, however - the vignettes remain no more than that - for those mountains are the point: the film as a whole coasts by on the wonder that it has been done at all, for Majewski goes one better than Godard, Greenaway, et al, by using extensive CGI to place much of the film within the painted ‘set’ of Brueghel‘s semi-fantastical landscape. Beneath the spindly mill-topped finger-mountain, the painted field teems with moving figures and the brutishness of medieval life. Majewski takes us inside the landscape to show the breaking wheel go up and a woman (inexplicably) buried alive, Charlotte Rampling vaguely mourning as Mary, and Breughal strolling through his terrain until having God on high (the miller) raise his hand to still the tableau.

The use of the painted landscape – beneath real clouds, eventually found in New Zealand (where else?) – is inspired, the seductive blue-green of the middle-distance rockscape reproduced to perfection, and the mountain itself comes majestically to life for the dramatic (non-dramatic?) climax as the action freezes. But it’s not all good. The wonky perspective in the full-canvas views is a bit much, even for 1564, but far worse are the frequently buzzing edges and glaringly artificial light of the blue-screen elements and a jarringly emphatic sound design. It truly is a wonder that it has been done at all, a valuable celebration of a wonderful piece of art and occasionally stunning in its alchemical mixture of photography and painting. But with such undercooked textual substance, the film’s main strength is the illusion that we have indeed passed into Brueghel’s picture, and it is with fatal frequency that we are reminded that we have not.

d Lech Majewski p Lech Majewski, Feddy Olsen, Dorota Roszkowska sc Michael Francis Gibson, Lech Mejewski ph Lech Majewski, Adam Sikora ad Stanislaw Porczyk m Lech Majewski, Józef Skrzek cast Rutger Hauer, Michael York, Charlotte Rampling, Oskar Huliczka, Joanna Litwin
(2011, Swe/Pol, 93m)

Oka!

2011-10-16T14:41:00.000-07:00

Inspired by the life story of ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno, who has spent 25 years with the BiAka pygmies of Central Africa, Lavinia Currier’s film aims partly to parallel Sarno’s work: that is, to bring to world-wide attention the wonderful and complex music of the forest-dwelling hunter-gatherers. The BiAka’s music is as rich and well-practised as any other such heritage in the world; possibly even more so, structured around an unusually long 64-beat cycle, and incorporating the natural sounds of the jungle as an integral part of the harmonious, pulsing music.

Currier’s western eyes take care not to privilege her ostensibly central character, Larry, portrayed with gangling affability and quizzically starey eyes by Kris Marshall. A “shot liver” and ear complaint urge his possibly final return to Africa, but occasional reminders of his dwindling mortality lose their power to affect as he remains a somewhat opaque character. Similarly, his objective to record the semi-mythical molimo, the last instrument from the area he has yet to hear, plays more like plot device than characterization.

Larry’s appeal is greatly enhanced by Marshall’s having acquired an easy conversational style in the local language (Akka). Much of this conversation takes place with a trio of old-timers who sit around passing the pipe, and comprising a welcome peanut gallery. The BiAka perform with complete unself-consciousness; performance it is, playing up in a wonderfully natural way, but Currier captures a great deal that feels authentic about their way of life, and it is to the film’s credit that it never feels intrusive, but rather a joint effort.

More intrusive is the wider picture of the people’s precarious position in their country, effectively ruled over by the Bantu, with their habitat headed rapidly for the belching sawmills. That the foreign wood baron is Chinese might have worked as sharply inevitable rather than cheap, had he been less of a cardboard figure, and Isaach de Bankolé (co-executive producer) relishes playing broad as the dastardly mayor. The opening shots of giant logs being carted away are sobering, but the eco angle is degraded by bargain-basement skullduggery.

The conflict between the BiAka’s traditional way of life and the political and economic concerns of their newly “modern” nation does strike an effective chord in the end however, as they return to their ancient practice, now-outlawed, of elephant-hunting. This is the mayor’s wheeze to get them in trouble, but it’s unsettling to learn that Larry’s old friend Sataka, once the greatest hunter of them all, wants to kill the giant beast not to exercise a primal, suppressed urge, but as a gift to his friend, a chance to bring out the mysterious molimo, traditional to the hunt. It’s a sharp enough ethical conflict that we don’t need Larry to agonize over it, which is just as well, since he is given little chance to do so.

There’s a sense that the wizened, grinning Sataka embodies a deep-rooted, ages-old tradition of lore and spirituality, but this is presented without elucidation. A hallucinatory opening, with Larry in New Jersey, flashing with visions of Africa to literally transportative music, suggests a magic of which the film could well have done with more; it’s reprised only at the end, and less successfully, when the molimo is finally revealed. Brief glimpses are all we get, however; its size apart, it is a relatively uninteresting object (not, apparently, made of ivory as promised) but it is at least played in a delightfully bizarre fashion, evoking a terrific animalism that must surely be a significant part of the forest people’s culture and beliefs.

The sound of the molimo is tremendous, and the music throughout is superb, deftly woven together in places by Chris Berry and presented elsewhere unadorned. But it mostly plays as background. Despite the film’s title, it is not especially concerned with the making or recording of music, of showing off its structures, uses (a couple of brief dances aside), or strangeness. Which is true enough to its general presence in the people’s everyday life, perhaps, but a few interesting-looking instruments are short-changed as they zip by in passing, and if one were drawn to the film for the ethno-musical elements, one too would feel a little short-changed on detail.

It is strange, though far from unwelcome, to see an on-the-ground movie set in Central Africa, heavily featuring non-actors in a region barren of amenities, play out with such an admirably professional gloss. The photography of local flora and fauna, by Conrad Hall’s son Conrad W. Hall and Alphonse Roy Yogeswara, is lovely; Currier and producer James Bruce faced a monumental task first in getting a decent-sized unit of pros to travel out there, and then actually to manage all the shoot-requirements that that entails (whilst dealing with the slipperiness of local politics and economics). There’s nothing inherently wrong with the presentation of these people in the context of a well-worn plot, because it is naturally a conflict of some complexity, and undoubtedly some real-life villainy.

The film is underdone by the division of its attention, however: its elements of story, character, and documentary never quite cohere. The silliness of the bad-guy narrative (it ends up being played for laughs) makes one wish for more of the village and forest life. That aspect of the film avoids tourism (pointedly: a couple of pretentious travelers at the beginning are amusingly skewered) but Currier is disappointingly loath to probe, and details of the culture’s spiritual and musical heritage progress little further than hints. “Oka” means listen, but whatever the Akka word for “look” is, it would have been just as appropriate; for where the film undoubtedly succeeds is in providing a very precious window into a wonderful, secret world, seriously threatened by extinction, and in very comfortably navigating the potentially patronizing pitfalls of filming an Other. Would have liked it to be more about the music, though.

d Lavinia Currier p James Bruce, Lavinia Currier sc Lavinia Currier, Louis Sarno, Suzanne Stroh ph Conrad W. Hall, Alphonse Roy Yogeswara ed Kristina Boden, Nicolas Gaster pd Alex Vivet m Chris Berry cast Kris Marshall, Isaach de Bankol, Mapumb, Mbombi, Will Yun Lee
(2010, USA, 106m)

Merry-Go-Round

2011-10-07T11:20:00.000-07:00

The late 70s were not an easy time for Jacques Rivette. His filles de feu tetralogy was cut short halfway through by the director’s physical breakdown, followed by a desultory, dismal release for Duelle and none at all for Noroît. The Centre National de la Cinématographie radically altered its heretofore improbably sympathetic funding policies, and it was by the skin of its teeth that Merry-go-Round got made at all (it too was then shelved for five years). Partly thanks to Maria Schneider’s interest in working with both Rivette and Joe Dellasandro, some of the tetralogy money was diverted into a resurrected project, but Rivette was starting from a premise slender even by his own improvisatory standards.

Ben and Léo are strangers, called to Paris by Elisabeth, lover and sister respectively. Telegrams, notes and telephone calls lead them on a merry dance that ends with bogus estate agents in a sleepy village and an ambulance kidnapping straight out of Hergé. Thereafter, it becomes apparent that the girls’ father had appropriated 4 million dollars and possibly faked his own death, and that various mysterious parties - usually not whom they claim to be - are involved in trying to recover the combination, key and location of the safe in which it is presumably stashed. By Rivette’s own admission, the film falls apart after the first half-hour, their search for the information and missing Elisabeth repeating itself three times over, and getting nowhere, not very fast.

For once Rivette’s powers of mystery-story invention seemed to have failed him. He decided to focus on his two leads’ getting to know one another, setting up lengthy improvised sequences of killing time while they search through empty houses. Schneider claimed to have known Dellasandro in Rome, but on set they were not close, if indeed they ever had been, and relations deteriorated. Perhaps in response to this, Rivette inserts with increasing frequency sequences of Ben running through woods and Léo in some dunes, each location representing some kind of inner, psychic space, beset by an undefined variety of terrors. Schneider left before the end of the shoot, and in effectively disconcerting fashion, Léo is represented by Rivette veteran Hermine Karaghuez in the non-literal sequences; in his own headspace, little Joe is menaced by a knight in armour, before each threateningly invades the space of the other, to mirror the real-life tension and confusion.

This is Rivette really at the edge of his abilities to conjure cinema from nothing but fun and games, partly because it seems as though no-one was having much fun. His use of an avant-garde bass and bass clarinet duo, filmed in a dingy studio and inserted between, and sometimes in the middle of, scenes is a welcome and mysterious distraction. Schneider is deliciously sour and moody and Joe is his usual hulking wooden presence, until the desperation of the whole enterprise seems to get to him and he just stops acting – uncertainty and vulnerability flash occasionally in his eyes, and he drops the wooden line readings, making one wish that he’d been made so uncomfortable more frequently in his career. For all that, even by Rivette’s standards, there’s not a lot going on here: the mystery’s grip is fatally loosened, but the film is saved by good old fashioned star power – Maria and Joe make a terrific couple, handsome and charismatic. As a film about two people getting to know one another, it is hardly successful, but the chemistry sparks from time to time in their scenes of goofing around; if the pairing seems like a missed opportunity to create something truly striking, it seems remarkable that it was ever completed at all, and in the days when Rivette was still about cinematic playfulness, even a lost game is a fascinating one. Plus, of course, that music is tremendous.

d Jacques Rivette p Stéphane Tchalgadjieff sc Eduardo de Gregorio, Suzanne Schiffman, Jacques Rivette ph William Lubtchansky ed Nicole Luntchansky, Catherine Quesemand m Barre Phillips, John Surman cast Maria Schneider, Joe Dellasandro, Danièlle Gégauff, Sylvie Matton, Françoise Prévost, Maurice Garrel, Michel Berto, Dominique Erlanger, Jean-François Stévenin, François Mitterand
(1978, Fr, 160m)

Mistérios de Lisboa (Mysteries of Lisbon)

2011-09-22T11:32:00.000-07:00

That Raúl Ruíz describes his new film as his most theoretical might seem a bit daunting. He’s made over 100 movies in 30 years and they’re all pretty theoretical, from The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1979), to Time Regained (1999). Plus, the new one’s a four and half-hour nineteenth-century drama.

The theoretical aspect keeps heritage stuffiness at bay, however. Ruíz has been attached to Harvard and lectured at various other Universities, and much of his singular teaching has recently been collected in the book Poétique du cinema. He has explicitly presented Mysteries of Lisbon as an alternative to the Bordwell Paradigm of straight-arrow narrative, although his simplistic demarcations may be a little tongue in cheek (Ruíz expounds in the New York Times; Bordwell responds with polite bemusement on his blog). There are intricacies to be hashed out by the academically-minded, but the most immediate result is that Ruíz’s new film is an explosion of narratives weaving and nesting in and out of one another.

The first narrator of several presents himself as an orphan child Joao, and the story cleaves to his immediate situation – begun on a sickbed – as a secret, titled mother pops up; his gruff priest father-surrogate turns out to have been a soldier and a gypsy; a scar-face Brazilian freebooter and a Parisian seductress are mixed in; flashbacks grow out of flashbacks and names and identities fluctuate as the whirl of character relationships becomes increasingly head-scratching.

All of this is presented in exquisite period style, with perfect production design that hides its budgetary restraints, and long, long takes through gorgeous sets and locations: the camera (and occasionally even people!) glides and cranes so smoothly as to be frequently invisible. Ruíz fully creates a world here, but there is a tension between the lived experience of environment and his constant attention to theatricality. Like the narratives, these elements feed into one another, as servants peer through windows; the camera peers through frames and masks (and at one point, through a delightfully mobile crack in a chamber curtain); and guns and sometimes even gazes are leveled directly at the viewer. Joao sets the whole thing in motion with a toy theatre, to which we return from time to time, and these intermissions serve to break the lull of the film’s languid rhythm in the same way as the uncanny use of a split-diopter and other suddenly striking shots.

The stylistic quirks fit perfectly with that rhythm, however, because the film reveals itself to be – just like his Klimt (2006) – no more than a deathbed fever dream. The child never grows up, even if he imagines a youthful suicide, and then an alternate, lovelorn growing-up. The febrile get-out actually robs Ruíz’s narrative strategy of its most potent force: the chaos of the universe as opposed to that of an individual mind. Chinese-box tales from the Thousand and One Nights to The Manuscript Found at Saragossa are gripping and infinite because their potentiality seems limitlessly expansive. Ruíz’s bag of stories looks ever inward, reluctantly adding new characters, and the confusion of information becomes that oppressive, Wuthering Heights sort of brain-deadening, wherein one’s interest in who was who’s lover/brother/love-child or whatever becomes rather eroded by repetition. Ruíz has also been explicit in his fondness for the soap operas on which he worked in his youth and freely admits their relevance. The problem is that the self-generating narrative of soap opera is almost by definition a law of diminishing returns: the mechanical nature of the reconfiguring of a limited set of characters and relationships is supposed to be invisible, and attempts to expand and extend are typically limited – new characters are a big deal in soap opera.

None of which is to suggest that the film doesn’t succeed on its own terms. It’s just that those terms seem predestined to deliver rather dry rewards. There is little to be excited about here, and as impressive an achievement as Mysteries of Lisbon is – let it not be forgotten that Ruíz is now over ninety and that it looked like a dud kidney would carry him off before he’d finish shooting – it lacks the sense of pleasure in story-telling that would seem to be essential to these sorts of never-ending narratives: they never catch fire or excite in the way that, say, the multiple tales of Mario Llinás’ Historias Extraordinarias (2008) grip one from the very start of its four hours. But Ruíz is a masterful film-maker, of an elegantly old-fashioned Romanesque style, with an exquisite eye for the period and a powerfully seductive camera all combining to weave a certain kind of hypnotic spell.

d Raul Ruíz p Paulo Branco sc Carlos Saboga ph André Szankowski ed Carlos Madaleno, Valeria Sarmiento ad Isabel Branco m Jorge Arriagada cast Adriano Luz, Maria João Bastos, Ricardo Pereira, Clotilde Hesme, José Afonso Pimentel, João Arrais, Albano Jerónimo, João Baptista
(2010, Por/Fr, 272m)

El gran calavera (The Great Madcap)

2011-08-19T16:02:00.000-07:00

The opening close-up of a jumble of feet is the nearest thing to a Buñuelian touch (they belong to drunk-tank bums) but he and old ham Soler lend a devilish tone to this story of a rich drunkard whose family dupes him into thinking he’s lost his fortune. The pace is easy-going to meandering and while socio-economic disparities are a constant rumble, there are no outright villains; the foibles of the bourgeoisie are treated with an affectionate lack of scorn and their poverty-row sojourn improves their prosperity, health and temperament. The only real loser is the church, as the bride-to-be flees altar, fortune hunter and sermon in favour of poor handsome Pablo who, in his salesman’s van outside the church, extols via loudspeaker the merits of Sin of Syria cream, Venus stockings and Devil’s ham. Minor in the oeuvre, but after the misfire of Gran Casino and nigh-on fifteen years without stepping behind a camera, the film’s importance lies not only in its cementing of Buñuel’s characteristically tidy technique, but also in its commercial success, which kickstarted Buñuel’s Mexican career and, most immediately, allowed for Los Olvidados.

d Luis Buñuel p Óscar Dancigers, Fernando Soler sc Janet Alcoriza, Luis Alcoriza ph Ezequiel Carrasco ed Carlos Savage pd Luis Moya m Manuel Esperón cast Fernando Soler, Rosario Granados, Andrés Soler, Rubén Rojo, Gustavo Rojo, Maruija Grifell, Francisco Jambrina

A Cottage on Dartmoor

2011-06-29T14:21:00.001-07:00

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From Film International Vol.7 no.2 (2009)

La vie de Jésus

2011-06-29T14:12:00.001-07:00

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From Film International, Vol.9 no.2 (2011)

Entrance

2011-06-28T13:35:00.000-07:00

A crashingly dull portrait of early 20s urban ennui (set in Silverlake, no less) finally gives way to a home invasion screamfest with a tritely abrupt and emptily suggestive ending. The empathetically distanced approach to Suziey’s complete inability to engage with anything but her dog and, with rare attention, her hair, precludes any interest of character interaction or insight.

She does find herself listening a lot, unsure of the noises in her canyon-side renter as the soundtrack drops eerie hints of a prowler. But the audio is so full of distracting ambiance throughout that the sinister suggestions of these sounds is muted, emerging only blurrily from the carpet of noise. The camera work is little better, with horribly wandering (auto) focus and the typical jitters. Suziey’s dog disappears, people creep her out in the street, and she decides to move back home. Doesn’t matter where that is, or indeed why she came to LA in the first place. She could be any eastside hipster, see? They have feelings too; they just can’t articulate them.

Most unfortunately, the guests at Suziey’s leaving dinner are massacred by her stalker, whose entrance is by now long overdue. All traces of her personality are finally removed as she sees out the final fifteen minutes bound and gagged in a blood-stained party frock (nice green). Muffled screams feature heavily as she sees/discovers the murders of her successive friends. The violence is the most neatly handled part of the film, with inexplicit unpleasantness; the hipster touch of a record player upstairs is put to decent use to cover or reveal the sounds in the house, and the irony of thrift store clown paintings is made to look pretty insignificant. But it’s too little too late, and ends in a way which begs us to imagine horrors to come; trouble is, with such bland characterization (in the case of the stalker it’s non-existent) we're more inclined to respond (as many in my audience did) “you’ve got to be fucking kidding".

d/ed Dallas Richard Hallam, Patrick Horvath p Suziey Block, Karen Gorham, Dallas Richard Hallam, Patrick Horvath, Michelle Margolis sc Karen Gorham, Dallas Richard Hallam, Patrick Horvath, Michelle Margolis ph Dallas Richard Hallam cd Michelle Margolis cast Suziey Block, Karen Gorham, Florence Hartigan, Joshua Grote, Jonathan Margolis
(2011, USA, 83m)

Silent Lubitsch

2011-06-13T09:25:00.000-07:00

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From Film International, vol.8 no.5 (2010)

Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern Perspective (Marguerite H. Rippy, 2009)

2011-06-04T13:26:00.000-07:00

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From Film International, vol.9 no.1 (2011)