tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-309640292024-03-07T05:59:31.042+01:00The Pleasures of UnderachievementA blog with observations and so on from Paris and beyond by an Irish glorified corner boy.seanachiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15359354940953059605noreply@blogger.comBlogger811125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30964029.post-70395823049087336292014-12-31T12:10:00.000+01:002014-12-31T12:10:28.347+01:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
It wasn’t a vintage year for movies; even if there was a fair amount of
decent films on release, few of them were real top-drawer stuff. Even
many of the films in this Top 20 are flawed or compromised in some way.
That said, there were a number of positive signs –– a number of good
films offered valuable auscultation of contemporary societies as diverse
as Russia, Turkey, China, Spain and Brazil, Hollywood had an unusually
good year, with some ambitious films getting green-lit and even the
bigger blockbusters were worthwhile experiences –– <em>Interstellar</em>, <em>Guardians of the Galaxy</em> and <em>Godzilla</em> all better than expected –– and we even had the rare pleasure of having a good film (<em>12 Years a Slave</em>) named Best Picture at the Oscars.<br />
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My films of 2014, available in full <a href="http://oliverfarry.com/on-film/films-of-the-year-2014/" target="_blank">here</a>. seanachiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15359354940953059605noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30964029.post-20931813785720912272013-12-20T14:31:00.000+01:002013-12-23T10:38:33.238+01:00Films of the Year 2013<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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2013 turned out to be a good year for film, with a wide and varied range of excellent movies, from pretty much everywhere, covering the mainstream, art house and documentaries. Two things I found striking this year – many of the best films I saw were of the sort that are usually done so ineptly on screen, be it the historical drama of <i>Heimat</i>, the quirky comedy of <i>Frances Ha </i>or the 'fan' documentary of <i>Fifi Howls from Happiness</i>. I also noticed how long many of the films listed here are: five are three hours or longer while another few are not far off that. That comes as a surprise to someone who never tires of complaining that most films are too long and drag on inexorably. Length need not be a problem though if the director has a sufficient command of the pace and the material to keep the audience's interest.<br />
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The rules for inclusion, as ever, are: a French cinema release before the third week of December this year. Hence there are some films that will have appeared elsewhere in 2012 or have yet to; conversely some films are missing here that are in other lists, such as <i>Nebraska, </i><i>12 Years a Slave </i>and <i>Like Father, Like Son</i>. They may make an appearance in this same list in twelve months' time.<br />
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1. <i>A Touch of Sin</i> (Jia Zhangke – China/Japan)<br />
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Jia Zhangke continues to be a man interested in just about every facet of Chinese society. <i>A Touch of Sin</i> has fallen foul of the Communist Party on account of the violence and social discontent it portrays so sparely. It is a compelling crime film, with brilliantly mounted set pieces and an almost documentary-style take on a China one rarely sees on screen. Jia also frames his four stories (and epilogue) in such a way that you want to see it again as soon as possible to see how it works and what you missed. In an exceptionally tough year at Cannes, <i>A Touch of Sin </i>came away with the screenplay prize. Many would argue it was the best film on show there.<br />
<a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/12/a-touch-of-sin-jia-zhangke.html" target="_blank"><br /></a>
<a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/12/a-touch-of-sin-jia-zhangke.html" target="_blank">Full review</a><br />
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2. <i>Berberian Sound Studio</i> (Peter Strickland – UK)<br />
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Few British directors roll like Peter Strickland. After a low-budget debut filmed in Hungarian and Romanian, he came up with this ingenious film that is a homage to Italian <i>giallo </i>horror films from the 1970s, a comic account of British resistance to continental culture and a genuinely creepy Kafkaesque thriller. Toby Jones plays a mild-mannered Foley artist missioned to the shady Berberian Sound Studio in Rome to provide sound effects for a low-budget slasher film, in spite of being incapable of watching what is on screen. There are inevitable echoes of <i>The Conversation </i>and <i>Blow Out</i> but <i>Berberian Sound Studio </i>is very much its own film, as cerebral as it is hair-raising.<br />
<a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/04/berberian-sound-studio-peter-strickland.html" target="_blank"><br /></a>
<a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/04/berberian-sound-studio-peter-strickland.html" target="_blank">Full review</a><br />
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3. <i>Blancanieves</i> (Pablo Berger – Spain/France)<br />
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The silent film revival is unlikely to be an enduring phenomenon but Pablo Berger’s Snow White adaptation shows how silent cinema might be made in this day and age without recourse to gimmickry. <i>Blancanieves </i>is an inspired conflation of the famous fairy tale and another (‘Sleeping Beauty’) and Sevilleano bullfighting lore. It looks gorgeous too with beautiful high-contrast photography from Kiko de la Rica and Seville, a city too rarely seen on screen, looks resplendent. Far more than a pastiche or a homage, Berger’s film is a great literary adaptation.<br />
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<a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/02/blancanieves.html#uds-search-results" target="_blank">Full review</a><br />
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4. <i>Heimat: Chronicle of a Vision</i> (Edgar Reitz – Germany/France)<br />
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You don’t have to have seen Edgar Reitz’s legendary TV series (I haven’t) to appreciate this prequel of sorts set in the Rhineland in the early 1840s. A four-hour black and white glimpse into rural poverty against the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of German nationalism, this ‘other <i>Heimat</i>' is masterful historical cinema. It faithfully reproduces the period trappings yet integrates them into the physical drama, unlike many other such films. And as an unexpected bonus, there's a wonderful cameo from Werner Herzog as the great geographer Alexander von Humboldt.<br />
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<a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/11/heimat-and-shoah-updates.html" target="_blank">Full review</a><br />
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5. <i>Blue Is the Warmest Colour </i>(Abdellatif Kechiche – France/Belgium/Spain)<br />
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Adbellatif Kechiche’s brilliant lesbian love story had barely won the Palme d’Or at Cannes when he was accused of mistreatment by his crew, manipulation by his leading ladies and inauthentic sex scenes by lesbians (one wonders what ‘authentic’ sex is and who sets the standard). The film - Kechiche’s fifth - will long outlive the petty controversies though. In the manner of his previous masterwork, <i>La graine et le mulet</i>, this adaptation of Julie Maroh’s comic book is a long and unflinching look at love in a way the movies rarely have the patience or heart to do. Adèle Exarchopolous and Léa Seydoux are fantastic in the two lead roles, however unpleasant the experience might have been. <i>Blue Is the Warmest Colour </i>will leave you as drained as the characters themselves but it’s exhilarating stuff.<br />
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<a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/10/blue-is-warmest-colour-la-vie-dadele.html" target="_blank">Full review</a><br />
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6. <i>It’s the Earth, not the Moon </i>(Gonçalo Tocha – Portugal)<br />
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This three-hour documentary about life on Corvo, the smallest island in the Azores, is both a marvellous piece of anthropological filmmaking and also the most likeable film of the year. Gonçalo Tocha sprinkles his narrative with wry self-deprecating asides as his camera captures the everyday of a tiny community and he constructs as best he can a narrative history of this most westerly point of Europe. There is an air of <i>Father Ted</i> about it but only in an amiable way. Tocha, for all the justness of his detached observation, clearly loves the people he films and there is no condescension on display. Yet another film that shows the gently thoughtful Portuguese cinema to be <i>sui generis.</i><br />
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<a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/12/its-earth-not-moon-goncalo-tocha.html" target="_blank">Full review</a><br />
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7. <i>In the Land of the Head Hunters </i>(Edward S. Curtis – USA)<br />
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A re-released film from 1914 gets a spot on this list because it didn’t benefit from a general release back then (though it has hardly been widely seen this time round either). Edward S. Curtis, famous for his photographs of North American Indians, made this, his only feature, in collaboration with the warlike Kwakwaka’wakw tribe of British Columbia. As well as being a priceless historical document, <i>In the Land of the Head Hunters </i>tells its tale of pursuit and revenge with gusto. It also has a bracingly modern air to it, with costumes and dances that the Western world has only recently started to catch up with.<br />
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<a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/12/in-land-of-head-hunters-edward-s-curtis.html" target="_blank"><br /></a>
<a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/12/in-land-of-head-hunters-edward-s-curtis.html" target="_blank">Full review</a><br />
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8. <i>Gravity</i> (Alfonso Cuarón – USA)<br />
Cuarón's tight space drama was one of the most hyped films of the year and, for once, it lived up to the advance noise. The circumstances of the plot reduce things (and onscreen personnel) down to a bare minimum early on and not even the distractions of some corny dialogue and cursory backstory can lessen the impact of the film's sole concern: survival. Technically masterful and terrifying in an almost tactile way, <i>Gravity </i>is not the sort of film you get from Hollywood too often, but it makes you wish the studios would use the means at their disposal to make more films of such graceful simplicity as this.<br />
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<a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/10/gravity-alfonso-cuaron.html" target="_blank">Full review</a><br />
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9.<i> Once I Entered a Garden </i>(Avi Mograbi – Israel/Germany/France)<br />
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Avi Mograbi, who, for my money, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuNYhyXAWlo" target="_blank">made the best documentary of the past decade</a>, ventures a more personal effort this time - a series of conversations with his Palestinian Arabic teacher, Ali Al-Azhari, interspersed with a number of outings to the sea and to Al-Azhari’s childhood home that he is now effectively barred from. There are also Sebaldian episodes where actress Hiam Abbass reads from the diaries of a relative of Mograbi’s written from his European exile. It’s part <i>My Dinner with André</i>, part Vladimir and Estragon, and is effortlessly watchable. Mograbi is a free-wheeling formalist who once again shows that the best stories often lie outside of fiction.<br />
<a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/08/once-i-entered-garden-avi-mograbi.html" target="_blank"><br /></a>
<a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/08/once-i-entered-garden-avi-mograbi.html" target="_blank">Full review</a><br />
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10. <i>Stranger by the Lake </i>(Alain Guiraudie – France)<br />
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Heretofore little known outside of France, Alain Guiraudie was one of the revelations of Cannes this year with his fifth feature. A tense thriller set entirely on a gay-cruising lakeside spot, <i>Stranger by the Lake</i> is both a theoretical essay on group codes and conventions as well as an icy interrogation of the risks gay men run. The frustrated hero Franck is drawn to a handsome stranger, only to witness the latter kill another bather late one evening. An initially unassuming chamber piece, it grows into something monstrous and devilishly smart.<br />
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<a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/06/stranger-by-lake-alain-guiraudie.html" target="_blank">Full review</a><br />
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11. <i>Lincoln </i>(Steven Spielberg – USA)<br />
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You'd be forgiven for not expecting much from Spielberg's <i>Lincoln</i> but Tony Kushner's screenplay helps steer Spielberg away from worthiness and the film is true to the historical moment. There is little complacency about the historical gains made by the abolition of slavery, even though due respect is paid. Buoyed by stirring performances, most notably Daniel Day-Lewis, Tommy Lee Jones and James Spader, <i>Lincoln</i> is a fine political film, anchored by a healthy dose of pragmatism. One of Spielberg's finest.<br />
<a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/02/lincoln.html" target="_blank"><br /></a>
<a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/02/lincoln.html" target="_blank">Full review</a><br />
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12. <i>Nobody’s Daughter Haewon </i>(Hong Sang-soo – South Korea)<br />
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The prolific Korean Hong Sang-soo offers up a film that retreads his familiar concerns: the capacity of sad-sack men for petty betrayal and the gentle alienation of youth. Haewon is a young student being finally abandoned by a mother that rarely cared for her. Her lover, one of her teachers, is feckless and unresponsive and Haewon has burned her bridges with her friends after a failed relationship. It all sounds underwhelming but, like Éric Rohmer, the filmmaker Hong most resembles, there is a lot going on in this languid comedy of manners.<br />
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<a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/10/blue-jasmine-nobodys-daughter-haewon.html" target="_blank">Full review</a><br />
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13. <i>Story of my Death </i>(Albert Serra – Spain/France)<br />
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Albert Serra is the standard-bearer for challenging European cinema and his lo-fi digital explorations of figures of fiction and history will seem like watching paint dry to some. <i>Story of My Death</i> yokes together the biographies of Casanova and Dracula for what is a highly unconventional historical dialogue. Despite being made with few resources, the film is luminous like a grand old tableau. It imparts a clear sense of importance while striking a note of playful levity throughout. It's difficult cinema but sometimes the difficult can be beautiful and charming too.<br />
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<a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/11/three-new-european-films.html" target="_blank">Full review</a><br />
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14. <i>In the Fog </i>(Sergei Loznitsa – Germany/Netherlands/Belarus/Russia/Latvia)<br />
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After his highly regarded feature debut <i>My Joy</i>, Loznitsa attempts an ambitious adaptation of Belarusian author Vasil’ Bykaw's novel <i>In the Fog</i>. The book may not be well known in the West but it's a landmark 20th-century text in the Russian-speaking world. A tale of a railwayman's despair at being accused of collaboration with the Nazis during the war and the two Soviet soldiers charged with carrying out his execution, it is both intensely bleak and atmospheric. Loznitsa captures the existential terror of both the period and the source novel, and Oleg Mutu, cinematographer of the New Romanian Cinema makes it all shimmer on screen.<br />
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<a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/02/in-fog-sergei-loznitsa.html" target="_blank">Full review</a><br />
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15. <i>Leviathan </i>(Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Véréna Paravel – USA)<br />
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Castaing-Taylor, a Harvard anthropologist and director of the 2009 film <i>Sweetgrass </i>and Paravel, who herself made the New York documentary <i>Chop Shop</i>, team up for this mesmerising film about New Bedford fishermen. The film is mostly shot at night so the images take on an uncanny abstraction as birds wheel around the vessel and tiny cameras bob about amid the captured fish, making it a film as much about the captured prey as it about the men that catch them. It's fashionable these days to call such a film a 'tone poem' but <i>Leviathan </i>is more visceral than simply photogenic. A film without any dialogue that roars.<br />
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<a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/09/two-experimental-films.html" target="_blank">Full review</a><br />
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16. <i>Frances Ha </i>(Noah Baumbach – USA)<br />
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Credit must go to Noah Baumbach for making the sort of film that US filmmakers give up on as soon as they get a foothold in Sundance, but it is Greta Gerwig who owns <i>Frances Ha</i>. She has it all locked down. Her Frances is a shambling Manhattan Candide, determined to succeed as a dancer even as her maladroitness seems to distance her further and further from the big break. This is a touching tale of thwarted ambition that shows a New York that is all but excluded to anyone without a trust fund behind them. It's all the better for being very funny. One of the best comedies of recent years and if there is any justice, Gerwig will win an Oscar (even if I know, deep down, she won't).<br />
<a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/07/two-us-indie-comedies.html" target="_blank"><br /></a>
<a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/07/two-us-indie-comedies.html" target="_blank">Full review</a><br />
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17. <i>The </i><i>Last of the Unjust </i>(Claude Lanzmann – France/Austria)<br />
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Lanzmann revisits <i>Shoah </i>and makes a long film with some of the material he couldn't fit in the original film. <i>The Last of the Unjust </i>is based on interviews he made with Benjamin Murmelstein, former Chief Rabbi of Vienna and head of the Judenrat in Theresienstadt under the Nazis. It is in the same mould as <i>Shoah </i>though lacks that film's insistent edge – Lanzmann is almost forty years older now and has easier access to a budget than he did back then, so there is less improvisation. It is a scholarly yet thoroughly cinematic film that offers a firm apologia for a man scorned by international jewry.<br />
<a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/11/heimat-and-shoah-updates.html" target="_blank"><br /></a>
<a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/11/heimat-and-shoah-updates.html" target="_blank">Full review</a><br />
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18. <i>Clip </i>(Maja Miloš – Serbia)<br />
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It's tricky making a shocking film about contemporary teenagers while maintaing a clear sympathy for the people you are portraying but 29-year-old Maja Miloš pulls it off. <i>Clip</i> is a warts-and-all portrayal of a working-class Serbian teenager and her hedonistic, selfy-obsessed friends. There's very little left to the imagination in it and, were it made in English, you can be guaranteed it would have roused more moral outrage than it has. Miloš's film can be questionably amoral at times but its characters' motivations, however venal they might be, are perfectly believable. Miloš knocks the puerile exploitationism of Larry Clark into a cocked hat.<br />
<a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/04/clip-maja-milos.html" target="_blank"><br /></a>
<a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/04/clip-maja-milos.html" target="_blank">Full review</a><br />
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19. <i>Shokuzai </i>(Kiyoshi Kurosawa – Japan)<br />
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Kiyoshi Kurosawa ended a few years of production nightmares with this TV mini-series that got a cinema release outside of Japan. <i>Shokuzai </i>(meaning 'penance') centres on four former schoolfriends who witnessed the murder of a classmate when they were only seven-years-old and the child's mother who never forgives them for their inability to help police find the killer. Each of the girls brings a weighty burden with them into adulthood, and each is tracked down by the obsessive mother Asako (Kyôko Koizumi). <i>Shokuzai </i>is a horror film without any supernatural presence and a pyschological thriller without any clear adversary. Though adapted from a pulpy bestseller, Kurosawa's film is one of the most sophisticated onscreen treatments of guilt and repentance.<br />
<a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/07/shokuzai-kiyohsi-korusawa.html" target="_blank"><br /></a>
<a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/07/shokuzai-kiyohsi-korusawa.html" target="_blank">Full review</a><br />
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20. <i>Fifi Howls from Happiness </i>(Mitra Farahani – USA/France/Iran)<br />
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Young Iranian director Mitra Farahani tracks down elderly (and largely forgotten) Iranian artist Bahman Mohasses to his Rome hotel suite and gets him to agree to a fly-on-the-wall documentary in return for securing him a commission. <i>Fifi Howls from Happiness </i>(named after one of Mohasses' paintings) is more than just a simple homage thanks to Mohasses' rebarbative nature and mordant sense of humour and also because of Farahani's skill at weaving narrative out of lived (and filmed) experience. A fine tribute to the painter, who died in 2010, during filming.<br />
<a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/10/behind-candelabra-fifi-howls-from.html" target="_blank"><br /></a>
<a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/10/behind-candelabra-fifi-howls-from.html" target="_blank">Full review</a><br />
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<b>Also worth a look</b><br />
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<i>Mundane History</i> (Anocha Suwichakornpong - Thailand)<br />
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<i>Home for the Weekend</i> (Hans Christian Schmid - Germany)<br />
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<i>Gimme the Loot</i> (Adam Leon - USA)<br />
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<span data-mce-bogus="1" id="_mce_caret"><i>The German Doctor </i>(Lucía Puenzo – Argentina/Spain/France/Norway)</span><br />
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<i>Wadjda</i> (Haifaa Al-Mansour - Saudi Arabia/Germany)<br />
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<i>Here and There</i> (Antonio Méndez Esparza — USA/Mexico)/Spain)<br />
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<i>No</i> (Pablo Larraín — Chile/USA/France)<br />
<br />
<i>5 Broken Cameras</i> (Emad Burnat/Guy Davidi – Palestine/Israel/France/Netherlands)<br />
<br />
<i>Camille Claudel 1915</i> (Bruno Dumont - France)<br />
<br />
<i>The Grandmaster</i> (Wong Kar-wai – Hong Kong/China)<br />
<br />
<i>What Richard Did</i> (Lenny Abrahamson – Ireland)<br />
<br />
<i>The Lebanese Rocket Society</i> (Joana Hadjithomas/Khalil Joreige – Lebanon/France/Qatar)<br />
<br />
<i>Post Tenebras Lux</i> (Carlos Reygadas – Mexico/France/Netherlands/Germany)<br />
<br />
<i>The Great Beauty</i> (Paolo Sorrentino – Italy/France)<br />
<br />
<i>The Selfish Giant </i>(Clio Barnard – UK) <br />
<br />
<i>A Simple Life</i> (Ann Hui – Hong Kong)<br />
<br />
<i>Meteora</i> (Spiros Stathoulopoulos – Germany/Greece)<br />
<br />
<i>Grigris</i> (Mahamet-Saleh Haroun – France/Chad)<br />
<br />
<i>Michael Kohlhaas</i> (Arnaud des Pallières – France/Germany)<br />
<br />
<i>Blue Jasmine</i> (Woody Allen – USA)<br />
<br />
<i>Omar</i> (Hany Abu Al-Assad – Palestine)<br />
<br />
<b>Films many others loved but left me a bit underwhelmed</b><br />
<br />
<i>The Master </i>(Paul Thomas Anderson – USA)<br />
<br />
<i><a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/05/mud-jeff-nichols.html" target="_blank">Mud</a> </i>(Jeff Nichols – USA)<br />
<br />
<i><a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/08/a-hijacking-tobias-lindholm.html" target="_blank">A Hijacking</a> </i>(Tobias Lindholm – Denmark)<br />
<br />
<i><a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.ie/2013/07/the-act-of-killing-joshua-oppenheimer.html" target="_blank">The Act of Killing</a> </i>(Joshua Oppenheimer – Denmark/Norway/UK)<br />
<br />
<i><a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/12/the-immigrant-james-gray.html" target="_blank">The Immigrant</a> </i>(James Gray – USA)<br />
<br />
<i><a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/08/the-bastards-claire-denis.html" target="_blank">Bastards</a> </i>(Claire Denis – France)<br />
<br />
<i><a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/11/inside-llewyn-davis-joel-and-ethan-coen.html" target="_blank">Inside Llewyn Davis</a> </i>(Joel and Ethan Coen – USA) seanachiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15359354940953059605noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30964029.post-13538499796264846672013-12-19T17:24:00.004+01:002013-12-21T15:57:24.832+01:00A Touch of Sin – Jia Zhangke<i>A Touch of Sin</i> (<i>Tian Zhu Ding) </i>(Jia Zhangke – China/Japan) 133 minutes<br />
<br />
If one were to name the most important filmmaker alive today, you’d be hard pushed to look beyond Jia Zhangke. Few directors worldwide are so consistently brilliant and the handful that are rarely provide such an in-depth auscultation of their own society in their work as the 43-year-old Chinese does. Even Iranian directors such as Jafar Panahi and Mohamad Roussolof, both great filmmakers deprived of their freedom because of their work, lack the world-historical angle of Jia Zhangke’s films. Jia is, with China’s exponential growth and breakneck development, living in interesting times. And he has the field largely to himself – China, despite its size and increasing economic growth, has relatively few directors who have made an impact on an international scale. Other Sixth Generation directors such as Wang Bing, Lou Ye, Zhang Yuan, Quan’an Wang and Zou Peng have made a name for themselves on the festival circuit but remain relatively marginal. Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige’s obliquely political films of the 80s and 90s have given way to their own compromises with power. Jia may not be either ineffably mainstream – even in China – nor exceptionally dissident but his films are accessible to popular audiences and he is a chronicler of turbulent social change to rival Dickens, Balzac or Döblin. His work is also possessed of a startling beauty and narrative grace – in a visual, emotional and intellectual sense, his films are big hitters. There is probably no filmmaker alive as complete.<br />
<br />
His latest film <i>A Touch of Sin</i> has seen him push the envelope a bit further, portraying violence, corruption, delinquency and discontent in contemporary China, of the sort that usually needs to be expressed in more sublimated ways. The official Chinese reaction has been one of disapproval though the Communist Party has sought not to ban the film but to immobilise it, instructing media not to report on it. Even such a relatively sophisticated means of censure is destined to fail with word of mouth, digital reproduction and the film’s international renown sufficient to earn it a notoriety in the PRC.<br />
<br />
The film begins with two briefly interlocking incidents in Jia’s native Shanxi province that will later branch off into two strands of narrative among the four separate episodes, each of which Jia drew from real-life incidents. A bored-looking middle-aged man sits astride a motorcycle beside an overturned lorryload of tomatoes. Not far away, a younger man on another motorcycle is cornered by three young opportunistic hoodlums. The first man, Dahai (Jiang Wu), has just returned to his home village and is appalled at how the chief of the village – a former classmate of his – has enriched himself by selling the local mine off for privatisation. Dahai threatens to denounce the chief to authorities in Beijing but is roughed up by hoodlums and then offered wads of cash to remain silent. The second, San Zhou (Wang Baoqiang) is a shady drifter, who lives far from his young family but who cares enough for them to send them substantial amounts of money and to visit them in Chongqing for Chinese New Year. Wang looks like a menacing version of Joseph Gordon Levitt and he is the malignant force in the film, telling his wife that he is summoning up devils rather than gods when he waves three cigarettes, incense-style, around their house. <br />
<br />
Both Dahai and San Zhou are malcontents, each in their own way. The heroine of the third episode meanwhile, Yu Xiao (Jia's wife Zhao Tao) is simply unhappy, a hostess in a massage parlour who is taken advantage of by the married man she has been having a long-time affair with. One day, she decides to say no, refusing to join him on a business trip to Guangdong, and things happen. The fourth and final episode centres on Hui Xiao (Luo Lanshan), a young man from Hunan. After causing the injury of a colleague in an industrial accident and being forced to work off the man’s loss of earnings, he bunks off down the country to Dongguan, where he gets a job in a luxury resort and falls in love with one of the prostitutes working there. <br />
<br />
All four episodes are elliptical and self-contained with only brief links to each other. The motivations of each character are sometimes vague and the instances of violence – there is a different one in each episode – are mounted with cool, forensic distance, which makes them all the more unsettling when they happen. <i>A Touch of Sin</i>, like Jia’s previous films, most notably <i>Still Life</i> and <i>24 City</i>, has an amorphous ontological quality to it. Its scenes and characters shift and reshape themselves in the memory long after the film ends. It also closes with a short, oblique epilogue which has a blackly comic echo of David Lynch or Michael Haneke. The Chinese title is idiomatic and means ‘Divine Destiny’, and is referenced in passing in each of the four episodes, which suggests the episodes are driven by fate rather than social forces; this too, you suspect, is playfulness on Jia’s part as there are too many veiled allusions to contemporary China – the beating meted out to Dahai is very similar to the Chinese police's beating of Ai Weiwei in 2009, a local bigwig and his wife make you think of Bo Xilai and Gu Kailai, another couple is killed in Chongqing – the city Bo ran till he was toppled – while a Taiwanese-owned factory in the fourth episode is an explicit reference to Foxxconn.<br />
<br />
I’m not sure if <i>A Touch of Sin</i> is Jia’s masterpiece or whether he is simply playing formal games with his audience but it is a compelling film that leaves you continually looking for clues (there are also references to animal signs of the Chinese zodiac throughout) and wondering if what you have seen has deeper underlying meanings or is simply an enactment of a society on the brink of cracking. It spans the sort of Chinese human interest stories that populate the sidebars of online news sites and also the industrial discontent that is rather less reported. <i>A Touch of Sin</i> is an intriguing film that will leave you wanting to watch it again to get more from it. The fact that it has clearly bothered China’s rulers makes it all the more valuable a work.<br />
<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/VUJt_kf7uKQ" width="640"></iframe>seanachiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15359354940953059605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30964029.post-42019023200937467342013-12-19T07:54:00.003+01:002013-12-19T08:02:58.128+01:00The Golden Dream – Diego Quemada-Diez<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">The Golden Dream </span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">La jaula
de oro</i>) (Diego Quemada-Diez – Guatemala/Spain/Mexico) 102 minutes</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">It is a
strange coincidence that two wildly different films about
immigration/emigration were released this year with roughly the same title. There
was <a href="http://underachievement.blogspot.fr/2013/05/la-cage-doree-ruben-alves.html" target="_blank">the sunny and very light French-Portuguese film</a> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">La cage d’orée </i>(‘The Gilded Cage’) and now there is Spanish
director Diego Quemada-Diez’s significantly darker Mexican film <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">La jaula de oro </i>(‘The Golden Cage’,
though it has been retitled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Golden
Dream </i>for English-speaking markets). Quemada-Diez’s film covers similar
ground to Cary Fukunaga’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sin nombre </i>(2009),
which followed the efforts of Honduran migrants to reach the US and Victor
Nava’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">El Norte</i>, where the hopeful
emigrants were Guatemalan. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Golden
Dream</i>’s teenage heroes also hail from Guatemala though this time they are
fleeing poverty rather than war and political repression. Juan (Brandon Lopez),
a cynical and moody sixteen-year-old, is joined by his friends Samuel (Carlos
Chajon) and Sara (Karen Martinez) in their journey across the border into Mexico and then north to California. Sara cuts her hair and disguises
herself as a boy, for reasons that become apparent later in the film.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">When
Mexican police arrest and deport them, Samuel gives up and decides to return
home. They have now been joined by a Maya Indian, Chauk (Rodolfo Dominguez),
who speaks no Spanish and who is the butt of Juan’s racial bullying. Sara
sticks up for the resilient and selfless Chauk and Juan grudgingly agrees to
let him tag along.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">The Golden Dream </span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">is familiar enough stuff but it is lifted above
the run-of-the-mill humanist drama by the soare sobriety of Quemada-Diez’s
style. He manages to keep sentimentalism at bay for the most part, with one
lapse late on. Though we see some acts of solidarity and kindness from ordinary
people towards the masses of strangers hitching a ride north on the roofs of
freight trains, Quemada-Diez knows that the decks are stacked firmly against
the migrants. Since the narco-isation of Mexican society in the 1980s, the
journey has become even more precarious than before with more than just social
adversity and natural conditions to surmount. The cartels prey on the migrants,
whom they see as expendable, to carry out dangerous undesirable work and there
are lesser venal ‘entrepreneurs’ operating in the drug-lords’ slipstream. Quemada-Diez’s
masterstroke is to square the demands of the drama with credible shocks
emanating from the simplest situations. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Golden Dream </i>is of a genre that affords little wriggle room for thematic or
formal innovation but Quemada-Diez is attuned to both the often super-human
determination of the Wretched of the Earth to reach the developed world, no
matter the risks, and to the sorrow that lies forever in the hearts of even
those who make it safely in the end. A fine debut from a very promising
director.</span><br />
<br />
<br /></div>
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seanachiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15359354940953059605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30964029.post-67585847945832154892013-12-18T13:28:00.000+01:002013-12-18T13:37:32.522+01:00The Counsellor – Ridley Scott<i>The Counsellor</i> (Ridley Scott – USA/UK) 117 minutes<br />
<br />
Depending on who you are, <i>The Counsellor</i>’s ultimate selling point is either its five big-name stars, rather annoyingly billed surname-only on trailers and posters, its director, Ridley Scott, or it is Cormac McCarthy, contributing his first motion picture screenplay at the age of 80 (his only previous screenwriting effort was a 1976 teleplay for PBS). Though McCarthy is reportedly working on three new novels, he has published nothing since 2005’s <i>The Road</i> and his fans will most likely scramble to consume anything that flows from his pen at this point. <i>The Counsellor</i> deals with the Mexican cartels’ terrifying rise to prominence in the past two decades, something which has given McCarthy a new form of violence to grapple with in his fiction, as in <i>No Country for Old Men</i>. The Coen Brothers’ adaptation of that book was for the most part successful and the experience seems to have given McCarthy a taste for the big screen.<br />
<br />
The Counsellor of the title is a handsome upwardly-mobile El Paso lawyer played by Michael Fassbender (a man who seems to be the go-to man to incarnate onscreen luxury these days) referred to only as ‘Counsellor’ throughout. He is talked into going in on a drug deal by Reiner, a restaurateur client of his (Javier Bardem) and a seemingly more worldly middleman Westrea (Brad Pitt). The Counsellor seems to not really understand what he is getting himself in for, which in turn suggests he doesn’t really follow the news. Early on in the film, when all is still sweetness and light, he proposes to his girlfriend, Laura (Penelope Cruz), having gone to Amsterdam to buy an expensive rock off a diamond dealer (Bruno Ganz). <br />
<br />
Things begin to go awry when a client of Counsellor’s, whom he has taken on only because the man’s mother – another client – requested it, and who is working for the cartel, is ambushed and killed. The cartel’s default reaction is a Dantean punishment for all involved, all of which has been foretold in allusions in conversation by Reiner and Westrea to the cartel’s preferred methods of exaction. <br />
<br />
The horrific sun-drenched Gothic mode is perfect material for McCarthy but his screenplay is the first place where the film goes wrong. He favours long wordy dialogue, which might be evocative on the page but is clunky and disorienting in the mouths of actors. It certainly doesn’t help either that characters that appear not to be non-native English speakers, such as Reiner and a Mexican crime boss played by Rubén Blades, utter words such as ‘heretofore’ in a strong accent. A trimming of the dialogic fat would have produced a more robust screenplay without any loss in tone. Though the universes of this film and Roberto Bolaño’s mammoth novel <i>2666</i> meet only tangentially, the Chilean writer, even in a 1000-page novel, is far more succinct and persuasive a portrayer of a hellish milieu than McCarthy is.<br />
<br />
The characterisation is also slipshod – Reiner is a silly cliché of a coked-up high-liver, a refugee from early-80s Wonderland Avenue. The women are even worse (McCarthy has often been accused of showing little or no interest in female characters in his books). Penélope Cruz’s Laura is a ridiculous caricature of a Latina Catholic, a woman who frets about sinning while in bed. Cameron Diaz suffers the greatest indignity as Malkina, Reiner’s sexually voracious girlfriend/wealth manager. While casting Diaz as a trashy vamp is in one respect an inspired idea, her character’s whorish amorality is the fruit of some seriously inept writing. It also tries to graft a film noir trope onto a world that has little or nothing in common with the traditional noir modes and devices. It is like Becky Sharp popping up in a film about the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre. Several scenes involving her are also cringeworthy in the extreme, such as one where she tries to seduce the more homely Laura and another where she pulls her panties off and pleasures herself on the windscreen of Reiner’s sports car (as if this weren’t unsubtle enough, Reiner is narrating the whole thing in voiceover at the same time).<br />
<br />
The performances are mostly askew, though the actors can hardly be blamed too much given the mangled grotesque they are expected to work with. Fassbender and Bardem, both far too good for this sort of nonsense, do their best but it is Pitt’s wisecracking, sarsaparilla wide boy Westrea that is the best turn in the film. He is the only one who manages to match the tone of his character and most the better scenes in the film involve him. <i>The Counsellor</i> also suffers by comparison to recent television drama. A previous Ridley Scott film, <i>American Gangster</i>, had already looked creaky and semi-articulate next to <i>The Wire</i> when it came out in 2008. His latest effort seems like a pointless after-thought in the wake of <i>Breaking Bad</i>, which, even in its more comic moments, conveyed far more forcefully the menace of the cartels. Scott has long been turning out films far below the level of early work, but the recent rise of TV drama has made him, like much else in Hollywood drama, look particularly irrelevant. Intelligent adult audiences are catered to far more assiduously by TV these days than by Hollywood. Ridley Scott has an irremediably <i>passé</i> air about him, he is VHS times print media times Jerry Bruckheimer. When Dean Norris (Hank from <i>Breaking Bad</i>) pops up at one point as a buyer for the cartel shipment, it feels like Scott is having a masochistically cruel pop at his own underwhelming work.<br />
<br />
<br />
<iframe frameborder="0" height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/n4rTztvVx8E" width="640"></iframe>seanachiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15359354940953059605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30964029.post-42892666167811756992013-12-15T09:06:00.002+01:002013-12-15T09:06:34.778+01:00It’s the Earth, not the Moon – Gonçalo Tocha <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiEUjNvEFLHdz1mNnC5QGvtX9u3zDJENaH6NwNkqWLo0QyHwjJkuUMRM01YddXHD5ok5aEMjufW5WJhvja9uCIRGaZQdBENEin0zhOZ1_N6AWi_Z0mB_dbqOGrsQ7O9Uny8-bB/s1600/13RDP_ITSTHEEARTH_SPAN-articleLarge-v2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="176" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiEUjNvEFLHdz1mNnC5QGvtX9u3zDJENaH6NwNkqWLo0QyHwjJkuUMRM01YddXHD5ok5aEMjufW5WJhvja9uCIRGaZQdBENEin0zhOZ1_N6AWi_Z0mB_dbqOGrsQ7O9Uny8-bB/s320/13RDP_ITSTHEEARTH_SPAN-articleLarge-v2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<em>It’s the Earth, not the Moon </em>(<em><span class="itemprop">É</span> na Terra, não é na Lua</em>) (Gonçalo Tocha – Portugal) 185 minutes<br />
<br />
Gonçalo Tocha and his sound engineer Didio Pestana arrive in Corvo,
the smallest island of the Azores, 6 km by 4, population 440, with the
intention of filming ‘everything we can, we will try to be everywhere at
the same time and not miss a thing…we will try to meet everyone, to
film every face, every service, every house, every street, every
workplace, every corner of the island, every tree, every rock, every
bird.’ The French sailor who takes them to the island says ‘the Azores
are crazy and on Corvo, they’re even crazier’ (someone else says during
the film that other Azoreans consider Corvo to be backward), but there
is little evidence of any egregious eccentricity. If anything, Tocha’s
film presents the island as such an ordinary society cast in
extraordinary surroundings that at times you begin to question his
motivation for making a documentary in such minute detail. We should be
glad he did as <em>It’s the Earth, not the Moon </em>is one of the
finest observational documentaries in recent years, an absorbing
portrait of everyday life. Its punishing length and austere style (there
are no captions and few recourses to voiceover) has led some to call it
a ‘micro-epic’; there will be some for whom it is the hardest of films
to watch, others will find it the easiest.<br />
<br />
Tocha eschews anything that might give a noticeable timeline to
proceedings and it is not always obvious the filming takes place over
several visits over the course of a few years from 2007 to 2011. The
film’s 14 chapters are interspersed with scenes of an elderly islander
Inês Inêz knitting Tocha an old-fashioned whaler’s bonnet. This is one
of several instances of manual labour documented in the film – and one
that Inêz regrets is about to die out as the younger generation have no
interest in it – others include fishing, slaughtering pigs,
cattle-herding, Inêz’s husband crafting wooden bolt locks. Some of these
crafts are more or less obsolete, now being processed on an industrial
scale. It’s a wry avowal of artifice that carries (possibly
unintentional) echoes of Robert Flaherty reintroducing the defunct
basking-shark fishing to the Aran Islands to include in <em>Man of Aran</em>.<br />
<br />
<em>It’s the Earth, not the Moon</em> has this wryness throughout.
Tocha is almost always off-screen but is regularly addressed by the
islanders, and his presence informs the action. The lightness of tone
reminds you of Miguel Gomes’ wonderful <em>Our Beloved Month of August</em>.
We meet members of a theatre troupe set up by Americans that has for
some reason stopped off in Corvo, a German music teacher who wanted to
get as far from home as possible without leaving Europe, the Portuguese
Monarchist Party – marginal nationwide but a local force on Corvo – and,
finally, a group of British birdwatchers. Tocha quickly gives up on his
encyclopaedic intent but there is still an obsessive attention to the
details of life on this tiny island. It is as if Tocha is providing his
own canon for Corvo, which has little or no written documentation
existing from its five centuries of human habitation. Until the last
thirty years, the island was cut off even from other islands in the
archipelago and it was only the arrival of an airstrip in 1983 that
opened it up to the outside world. One of the few documents Tocha finds
is shown him by a local archivist – a report from the Lisbon press in
the early 1970s, which carried the headline ‘It’s the Earth, not the
Moon’. It’s a suitably oblique title for a film that is gently
exhaustive and which makes a small remote community a subject of the
greatest importance. If Tocha’s film were a person, you would go out of
your way to become its friend. A brilliant, mesmerising and lovingly
warm film.seanachiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15359354940953059605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30964029.post-46366644927287194572013-12-14T08:58:00.002+01:002013-12-14T13:43:56.576+01:00Captain Phillips – Paul Greengrass<br />
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<a href="http://fearraigh.tumblr.com/post/69957128154/captain-phillips-paul-greengrass-usa-134"></a></div>
<i>Captain Phillips </i>(Paul Greengrass – USA) 134 minutes <br />
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‘No Al Qaeda’, say the Somali pirates in Paul Greengrass’ <i>Captain Phillips</i>;
their intentions are purely ‘business’-related. Greengrass and his
screenwriter are similarly eager for his film not to be mistaken for a
Manichean neo-con blockbuster. We see the pirates – impecunious
fishermen all – gather on the beach early in the film to await selection
for the next raid. Their grievances are made clear throughout and the
titular Captain Richard Phillips mumbles at one point while in their
captivity that ‘surely there can be more for them to do than piracy or
fishing’. It’s a little like ‘why can’t we all just get along’ crossed
with ‘let them eat cake’. Greengrass has, along with Steven Soderbergh
and others, pioneered the conscientious international thriller, a genre
that sprouted in the early days of the Bush administration, as American
liberals scrambled to put as much daylight as possible between
themselves and their internationally unpopular president. With films
like <i>Syriana </i>and Greengrass’ <i>United 93</i>, it became
possible for fans of high-octane action films to get their adrenaline
rush while retaining a pious sense of their righteousness <i>à la différence de </i>the rapacious warmonger heading their country.<br />
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<i>Captain Phillips </i>is based on the memoir of the captain of
the MV Maersk Alabama, a cargo ship that was hijacked in international
waters on its way from Oman to Mombasa in 2009. It was the first US ship
to be taken in over two centuries – it is not surprising then that the
Somali pirates led by ‘Bag of Bones’ Muse (Barkhad Abdi) are so excited
at hitting the jackpot in bringing such a behemoth to heel. This film
comes soon after Tobias Lindholm’s<i> A Hijacking</i>, a film it is
pointless to compare this one to as the circumstances of each hijacking
were so clearly different to one another (though, not, as lazy critics
might point out, because Lindholm’s approach is more ‘art house’ or
‘European’ – his film is firmly in the Hollywood mould but without the
military hardware to fall back upon). It has to be said though that <i>Captain Phillips </i>is
a more efficient thriller, with Greengrass maintaining a swift even
pace throughout and he neatly resolves the logistical conundrums that
the hijacking’s timeline throws up. He is also as adept at filming quiet
moments as he is the flashier, more elaborate set-pieces. The
dénouement is every bit as riveting, in a different way, as Lindholm’s
was, and a scene where a traumatised Hanks is treated by a military
doctor is a masterpiece of observational drama. Moreover, in an age when
many Hollywood films are catastrophically over-long, <i>Captain Phillips</i> justifies its two-and-a-quarter-hour running time and never flags.<br />
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The big problem with it however is it cannot escape the
socio-political paradigm it clearly wants to have no part of. Though
Greengrass and Ray go to lengths to show the Somalis’ side of the story,
using ample amounts of Somali dialogue and furnishing us with back
story on the pirates’ reasons, the commercial constraints of the
Hollywood blockbuster forbid too much empathy. It might be permissible
to use a cast of unknowns (another familiar Greengrass practice) but
there is no way you can reverse the perspective and show the event from
the Somali point of view. If Greengrass wanted to make a truly sincere
and radical film, he would have started it on the beaches of Somalia and
not in the Vermont countryside, as Phillips makes his preparations to
head off to the Persian Gulf. The film would follow the pirates as their
skiff catches up with the Alabama and the Somalis board it, it would be
with them as their plans unravel.<br />
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Such an approach wouldn’t mean a capitulation to lawlessness nor
would it be affirming the justice of the pirates’ cause or even
downplaying the US crew’s genuinely terrible experience. It would
however upset the dynamics of the Western action film, where the
technological infrastructure is so clearly weighed in favour of one side
(it is only in improbably <i>Die Hard</i>-esque scenarios where this
imbalance is temporarily redressed). It would be a genuinely unsettling
and challenging experience for a Western audience to watch. Of course,
Hollywood is never going to go down that route. <i>Captain Phillips</i>,
after paying its dialectical respects to the predicament of the
desperate Somalis, calls in the Navy Seals, just as Washington did in
real life. There might not be any Al Qaeda in the film, as the hijackers
like to point out, but <i>Captain Phillips </i>is ultimately as dutiful a paean to American military might as <i>Zero Dark Thirty</i>, however horrifying that might be to right-thinking liberals like Greengrass.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/pV-ptQX-75Y" width="560"></iframe>seanachiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15359354940953059605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30964029.post-63161468370713346122013-12-11T13:07:00.000+01:002013-12-11T13:07:33.855+01:00The Immigrant – James Gray<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>The Immigrant </i>(James Gray – USA) 120 minutes<br />
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James Gray’s first foray into period drama stays in New York – in a similar working-class milieu to his previous work, though this time set on Manhattan’s Lower West Side rather than the far reaches of Brooklyn. Marion Cotillard plays Ewa Cybulski, a young Silesian immigrant who is separated from her consumptive sister, Magda (Angela Sarafyan) at Ellis Island in 1921, and listed for deportation on account of charges of prostitution on the passage over. She is saved by Bruno Weiss (Joaquin Phoenix), a suave yet shifty New Yorker, who bribes an immigration official to get her out and who offers her work and promises that she will ultimately be reunited with Magda.<br /> <br />It comes as little surprise to learn that the work is prostitution, which the devoutly Catholic Ewa – still professing her innocence of the accusations of low morals – tries to escape but she is thrown out by her aunt and uncle in Greenpoint when they learn of the rumours. She is ‘rescued’ once again by Bruno, who brings her back to Manhattan and keeps her indentured, even while a love-hate relationship develops between them. A more kindly-hearted sort, Orlando the Clown (Jeremy Renner), Bruno’s cousin, appears on the scene and tries to get Ewa to abscond with him.<br />
<i>The Immigrant </i>has many fine qualities, not least Gray’s characteristically adept portrayal of a community and of relationships between people that are more often defined by what is unsaid than said. The New York of the period is wonderfully recreated, with musty sepia-washed photography from the Franco-Iranian Darius Khondji, a seriously underused cinematographer. Gray and Khondji sprinkle the film with nods to silent melodramas, such as a door surreptitiously closing after witnessing a murder in a hallway and a pursuit, filmed in wide angle, through Central Park and the city’s sewers. For all the film’s technical mastery though, it falls down in the quality of the acting and the writing.<br />
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Phoenix, a regular in Gray’s films, acquits himself gainfully, with a much more finely graded performance than the one he gave in <i>The Master</i>; in one scene with Ewa, he conveys powerfully the fearsome violence of the bully with a persecution complex. Cotillard, not the subtlest of actors at the best of times, does well enough for a time – convincingly mouthing a fair amount of Polish dialogue – until you begin to tire of her saying the word ‘monnay’ a little too often. Renner, however, is the main problem, and his character is as much the fault of Gray and co-writer Richard Menello as his own. For a start, Renner is just not convincing as a period character – he has too much of the hokey bonhomie of a 21<sup>st</sup>-century Rom Com love interest about him. He is also fed some unbelievably banal lines by Gray and Menello – his first words to Ewa on meeting her while performing at Ellis Island are ‘my God, you’re beautiful’ and when he next encounters her back in Manhattan, he advises her to tap Bruno for influence with Immigration before asking her in the next breath how she first met Bruno. There are structural problems with the script too as Orlando, a flimsy cipher, serves only as a vehicle for dramatic friction between Bruno and Ewa. I know the film’s a melodrama but it needn’t be quite so crudely mechanical.<br />
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Gray’s straining for realism is consequently questionable given how Renner is so jarring in his role. And why bother with so much Polish if one of those speaking (the Polish-American actress Dagmara Dominczyk) is similarly inclined to sound like she’s a college freshman when she switches to English? Prohibition is also oddly underplayed, given that, a year on from its enactment it would surely have been a feature of everyday life. It is especially frustrating as James Gray’s last two films <i>We Own the Night </i>and <i>Two Lovers</i> are among the finest American movies of recent times. He films New York with the same kind of verve and sensitivity as Martin Scorsese is no longer capable of mustering. <i>The Immigrant </i>might be a more creditable effort than Scorsese’s preposterous <i>Gangs of New York </i>but it is a major disappointment, one whose emotional potential is smothered far too frequently by sloppiness.<br />
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/ohVv5-rq-JY" width="560"></iframe>seanachiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15359354940953059605noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30964029.post-84957526998807360052013-12-09T11:20:00.003+01:002013-12-09T13:28:23.963+01:00In the Land of the Head Hunters – Edward S. Curtis<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>In the Land of the Head Hunters</i> (Edward S. Curtis – USA) 65 minutes<br />
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One of the best films of 2013 was released in 1914. Edward S. Curtis, well known for his documentary photographs of the dying traditions of the native peoples of North America, turned to motion pictures for this quasi-documentary set among the Kwakwaka’wakw of Vancouver Island. The film has, Curtis’ fame as a photographer notwithstanding, remained in obscurity since its brief initial release. A previous restoration in 1974 pieced together the reels of the original ‘photoplay’ and it has today been revamped further, with a techno-ambient score by Rodolphe Burger (of which more anon).<br />
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<i>In the Land of the Head Hunters</i>, made with real tribespeople and conceived in a slightly fictional register, is a simple enough film. It’s divided into two parts, the first of which sees Motana (Stanley Hunt), the son of a Kwakwaka’wakw chief, proving his capability for leadership by undergoing a series of spiritual and martial disciplines. He woos a young woman, Naida (Margaret Frank), who is also coveted by a monstrous sorcerer. Having rebuffed and killed the sorcerer in the first part, Motana then has to face a furiously vengeful raid from the dead man’s brother in the film’s second half.<br />
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Curtis’ film, made while narrative cinema was still very much in its infancy and the old Native American cultures in the process of dying out, is a curiosity in that it gives centre stage to peoples who were to face genocide a second time in the twentieth century, through the ideological slanders of the Hollywood Western. <i>In the Land of the Head Hunters</i> was the first film – and one of the last, too – to be made with an entirely native cast. Curtis’ style may have been academic – relying almost entirely on static set-ups – but he had an unerring eye for the details and rhythms of Kwakwaka’wakw life. The elaborate costumes and various dances of the tribe – marital, military, ceremonial – are brilliantly captured on camera and, the greatest irony of all, look ineffably contemporary, so embedded in the mainstream of popular culture non-Western dance has become. For this reason, Burger’s score, however admirable in itself it might be, over-eggs the film somewhat. There was no doubt a temptation to harness the wonderful dancing onscreen with some spirited musical accompaniment but the effect is intrusive. You feel that it is all being underlined a bit too crudely. (Interestingly, the US release features a more conventional score from The Turning Point Ensemble, though there might be a case made for watching the film in pure silence, without any musical distraction.)<br />
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Though short enough (just over an hour), <i>In the Land of the Head Hunters</i> has a lot in it, and in addition to an inevitably tragic air indelibly associated with a vanishing, vanquished culture (Canadian anti-potlatch laws were if anything even more crippling than American anti-Indian legislation), you have the shock of the unexpected new. Curtis’ film is an echo from the past that looks remarkably fresh and dynamic. With our cleaving to technological teleology we tend to assume that the past must needs equal the primitive. This film, like many another from the era, shows that that is not necessarily the case. Robert Flaherty later adapted Curtis’ narrative mode for his anthropological films <i>Nanook of the North</i>, <i>Man of Aran</i> and <i>Tabu</i> but none of them have quite the same visceral charge as <i>In the Land of the Head Hunters</i>, which might well be the most authentic portrayal of Native American life ever committed to film.<br />
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/88CSsfmdyvk" width="480"></iframe>seanachiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15359354940953059605noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30964029.post-59651902072588955912013-12-05T11:25:00.004+01:002013-12-05T13:35:19.381+01:00Mercy & The German Doctor<br />
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<i>Mercy </i>(<i>Gnade</i>) (Matthias Glasner – Germany/Norway) 132 minutes<br />
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<i>The German Doctor </i>(<i>Wakolda</i>) (Lucia Puenzo – Argentina/France/Spain/Norway) 93 minutes<br />
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A German couple, Maria and Niels (Birgit Minichmayer and Jürgen
Vogel) move with their teenage son Markus (Henry Stange) to a new
adventure in the far north of Norway, to the Arctic town of Hammerfast,
where round-the-clock darkness reigns for two months of the year (though
the town is not, despite what the opening credits might say, the
world’s northernmost). The move appears to proceed with the sort of
dovetailing smoothness only Germans are capable of: Niels takes on a job
in the local gas refinery and Maria as a nurse in the hospital’s
terminal unit. Markus, like his mother, picks up the language quickly
and settles in well at school. Niels even manages to farm a bit on the
side, though it involves little more than throwing a bale of hay to his
sheep every evening, which suggests a particularly urban conception of
husbandry.<br />
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Despite the lack of sunlight, it is very much a northern idyll,
couched in cosy wooden homes, with breathtaking views from seemingly
every window. Niels introduces the first threat to that pleasant state
of affairs by embarking on an adulterous relationship with a female
colleague. Markus starts joining in the bullying of an unpopular
classmate. Maria meanwhile, returning from working a double shift one
night (or morning, or afternoon? It’s hard to tell), knocks someone or
something over and flees the scene. When it later emerges it was a
drunken teenage girl, who then died of exposure and who was a daughter
of a man in the same church choir as Maria, the family is faced with a
dilemma that could tear them apart.<br />
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Glasner and Vogel have previously collaborated on a number of films, most notably the 2006 <i>The Free Will</i>, a terrifying portrait of a recidivist violent rapist, played by Vogel. <i>Mercy </i>has
a similarly theological title but it is a much more soothing,
conventional Euro art-house film. The film is initially promising but
loses its way soon after Maria’s hit-and-run, which, bafflingly, causes
little intrigue or outrage in a small remote town. Screenwriter Kim Fupz
Aakeson also seems to be flailing about in the dark with Niels’ affair
with the clingy Linda (Ane Dahl Torp), which is purely vehicular and
which is at best unconvincing, at worst casually misogynistic. At one
time the affair looks like it might land the family in the shit but it
is soon resolved in a perfunctory fashion. The relative sobriety we
might have expected from the film early on is also dissipated as it
moves towards its conclusion, with one particularly mawkish scene
mounted during choir practice in the church, replete with diegetic
melodramatic chorals. <i>Mercy </i>is a handsome, if unchallenging,
film that presses all the obvious buttons but which helps itself to
whatever grace it has, rather than gainfully earning it.<br />
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Lucia Puenzo's <i>The German Family </i>begins with an Argentine family, setting off across the Pampas in 1961 to travel
to the resort hotel in Bariloche they run during the winter season. They
encounter a stranger, who asks them if he can accompany them along the
perilous route. He, Helmut Gregor (Àlex Brendemühl), is
German and the mother of the family Eva (Natalia Oreira) is also of
German stock and speaks the language. The family’s children, Tomas (Alan
Daicz) and Lilith (Florencia Bado), whose adult self narrates, are
about to start attending the very same German school in the Andean city
that Eva herself went to. Gregor, who is a doctor, is also going that
way and has contacts among Bariloche’s German community. He also takes
an interest in twelve-year-old Lilith, who suffers from stunted growth
and who has the physique of an eight-year-old; the good doctor offers to
try new medication on her to accelerate her growth.<br />
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The family acquiesce, though father Enzo (Diego Peretti), less
enamoured of things German than his wife, is wary. He has good reason to
be, as the mild-mannered Doktor Gregor is none other than the notorious
Josef Mengele, of the Nazi death camps. This appears to be an open
secret among Bariloche’s Germans, who once enthusiastically flew the
swastika during the war and now do their best to protect Mengele from
prying eyes. Those eyes come in the form of Nora Eldoc (Elena Roger), a
pretty young German-speaker who takes on an archivist position at the
school but who is in reality a Mossad agent. She tries to get her
superiors in Tel Aviv to close in on the fugitive but they are
prioritising Eichmann and don’t want to blow the cover for that
operation.<br />
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Meanwhile, Lilith, who appears to be developing a crush on the kindly
doctor, also develops alarming symptoms that may be related to her
experimental treatment, which is minutely documented in Gregor’s
Leonardo-esque notebooks, the macabre content masked by cursive beauty.
Puenzo, who adapted the film from her own novel, is an astute observer
of the pains of medical dysfunction and the way families protect their
children (an earlier film, <i>XXY</i>, sensitively portrayed a
hermaphodite’s passage into puberty). She also adeptly engineers a tense
thriller in a very low-key setting and has a striking visual
sensibility - Enzo is an artisan dollmaker whom Mengele offers to
finance for mass production and a subsequent visit to a doll factory
provides a creepy echo, both of Mengele’s anatomical obsessions and the
mass carnage of the death camps. <i>The German Doctor </i>is a
surprisingly resonant film that might easily have been standard TV-movie
fodder. It stands a good chance of getting a Best Foreign Film Oscar
nomination and would likely be one of the better films in the running.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/0eP63OOTyVw" width="560"></iframe>seanachiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15359354940953059605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30964029.post-72795778279402504812013-12-02T15:10:00.000+01:002013-12-02T16:35:30.695+01:00Venus in Fur - Roman Polanski<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Venus in Fur</i> (<i>La Vénus à la fourrure</i>) (Roman Polanski – France/Poland) 96 minutes<br />
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When discussing Roman Polanski one seems almost morally beholden to mention the rape conviction he fled in 1976; with his new film, an adaptation of David Ives’ Broadway play <i>Venus in Fur</i>, Polanski makes it easy for you by tackling his own renown for sexual predation head-on. The film, like the source text, features just two characters, a theatre director auditioning actresses for the lead of his adaptation of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s bondage classic Venus in Furs, and the brassy, seemingly empty-headed actress who buttonholes him into giving her a try. Polanski’s wife Emmanuelle Seigner plays the role of the gum-chewing, sharp-tongued Vanda (who is looking to play Wanda von Dunayev), while Mathieu Amalric is Thomas, the harried playwright-cum-director. Amalric looks like an only slightly more frazzled version of a young Polanski and the knowledge that his Jewish mother hailed from the same Polish village as the director makes you wonder if there might even be a hidden family link. In any case, you wonder why Polanski initially overlooked Amalric in favour of the much less frantic Louis Garrel, whose participation was curtailed only by a delay in production.<br />
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So close to Polanski’s own character and experience this film appears to speak, it is easy to forget it is actually based on a previously staged play.
Vanda appears late, drenched by a Paris storm, at the theatre where Thomas, wearied by a succession of hopeless hopefuls, is wrapping up and about to leave. He is having none of her protestations, imagining this uncouth, mouthy suburban woman to be of the same stamp as those he has summarily dismissed. The opening exchanges are generic sitcom stuff, with Vanda an incarnation of Janice from <i>Friends</i> or Jennifer Tilly’s Olive Neal in <i>Bullets over Broadway</i>. When Vanda finally persuades Thomas to let her have her turn, she climbs into a tent-like Victorian frock and her delivery of the lines he has written is a revelation. She also shows insights into von Sacher-Masoch’s novel that make Thomas wonder if her vulgar comportment is just a front. Soon however, it is Vanda who is directing Thomas, tormenting and cajoling him in equal measure. When Thomas starts re-enacting roles from Polanski’s past filmography, including one particularly famous one from <i>The Tenant</i>, the film is squarely a commentary about Polanski and his critics.<br />
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It is an unusually revealing <i>mise en abîme</i> for a director, even if many of his detractors will simply dismiss it as self-serving. Polanski has spoken of his eternal regret for his rape of Samantha Geimer but has rarely addressed the matter explicitly. Recently he has grumbled in the French media about American ‘puritanism’ restricting filmmakers in the US – preaching to the choir in France, where the media has such a despairingly one-dimensional view of American mores. It’s an oblique way of protesting about his treatment (which, given the unusually privileged protection he has enjoyed as a fugitive from justice, would be more than a little rich). <i>Venus in Fur</i> is, moreover, Polanski’s first film in French, even though he has worked and lived in France since skipping bail almost three decades ago. Despite the theatrical theme and origin, it is far less obviously stagebound than his last film <i>Carnage</i>, also based on a play, by Yasmina Reza. While it can hardly be considered one of the better films of the year, much less a major film in its director’s oeuvre, <i>Venus in Fur</i> is an interesting one that provides an insight into the thinking (however self-righteous) of a director who, his protestations notwithstanding, might be coming round to the idea that the opprobrium he faces is not entirely unwarranted.<br />
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<br />seanachiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15359354940953059605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30964029.post-90994441867093614642013-11-28T14:00:00.000+01:002013-11-28T14:02:37.567+01:00Three New European Films<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Salvo </i>(Fabio Grassadonia, Antonio Piazza – Italy/France) 104 minutes<br />
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<i>House with a Turret</i> (<i>Dom s bashenkoy</i>) (Eva Neymann – Ukraine) 80 minutes<br />
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<i>Story of My Death</i> (<i>Història de la meva mort</i>) (Albert Serra – Spain/France) 150 minutes<br />
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Salvo (Saleh Bakri) is a Palermo hit man, meticulous and redoubtable, the sort who you can be assured <i>will </i>track you down. We first see him and his mob boss Randisi (Mario Pupella) anticipate a two-pronged ambush and finish off every last one of their assailants with aplomb. It’s carried out with unnerving, calculated calm, as clinical as a Christiano Ronaldo hat-trick against Sicilian landscape dun and battered in Daniele Ciprì’s bleached-out photography. Next up for the young killer is an equally youthful gangster who has crossed Salvo’s boss. Salvo lays in waiting for him at the man’s grotty beachfront tenement. The only problem is the prey’s blind sister, Rita (Sara Serraiocco) is also there. This is where the complication arises.<br />
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The protracted scene in which Salvo both pursues and hides from Rita is brilliantly claustrophobic, filmed literally <i>à l’épaule</i>, akin to the climax of <i>Silence of the Lambs</i>, even though in this case the film is only beginning. A consummate professional, Salvo finishes off his contract but spares the girl, the first apparent crack in his impervious façade. Salvo takes Rita to a safe house in an abandoned mine, as she is being pursued by Randisi, because she appeared to know more than she lets on about her brother’s operation. Salvo also takes to playing the cheesy love song on loop that Rita was listening to when he first encountered her, drawing derision from his macho colleagues.<br />
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Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza’s film has been compared to Jean-Pierre Meville’s late work, particularly <i>Le Samouraï</i>. This is largely because of the sparseness of the dialogue (just as well, as Bakri – a Palestinian – would no doubt have had an overly-telling accent) and the directors pace the action with a similar ease. <i>Salvo </i>lacks Melville’s existential urgency though and it is unlikely the French master would have given too much sway to sentiment, which is what ultimately bogs this film down. The film doesn’t collapse as a result of a blossoming relationship between Salvo and Rita – and despite initial resemblance to Luc Besson’s <i>Leon</i>, it is a far more substantial work – but it does peter out. There is just not much you can do with a temperamental switch like this when the film has been so cool and distant for much of its length. Then again, <i>Salvo</i>’s structural impasse may appositely reflect the corner its two heroes find themselves backed into. It is an impressive enough of a feature debut from Grassadonia and Piazza and speaks to the current rude health of Italian cinema but you get the sense that <i>Salvo </i>is a film that winds up being frustratingly undercooked.<br />
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At a Q&A session with the great Belá Tarr I attended a couple of years ago, the Hungarian director sidestepped a comparison between his work and Tarkovsky, by saying "in Tarkovsky’s films, the rain cleanses; in mine, it just turns to mud." The rain in Eva Neymann’s <i>House with a Turret</i> performs similar mud-producing tasks, even if the film is based on a short story by Fridrikh Gohrenshtein, the screenwriter of <i>Solaris</i>, and Neymann’s morose style is much more Tarkovsky than Tarr.<br />
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In wartime Russia, in 1944, an eight-year-old boy takes a train home to his grandfather’s house, with his ailing mother (Yekaterina Golubeva, a veteran of films by Sharunas Bartas, Claire Denis and Leos Carax, and who was herself in her last days before her early death from cancer in 2011). He is separated from his mother along the way when she is removed to a ramshackle hospital. When she dies, he is left in the charge of his indifferent aunt and feckless uncle, who bring him the rest of the way. <br />
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<i>House with a Turret</i> is simultaneously impressive and jaded-looking. The reconstruction of wartime privation and desperation is both deft and rich and Lithaunian director of photography Rimmvydas Leipus’s monochrome images shimmer atmospherically. Dmitriy Kobetskoy incarnates superbly the hunger and determination of the unnamed main character, and despite the film’s relatively short length, you get a clear sense of the scale and interminable nature of the Soviet experience of World War II (or ‘The Great Patriotic War’, as it continues to be known in Russia). So what’s the problem then? Well, if Neymann’s film looks timeless, it is not so much a compliment as an admission that we have seen it all before. It could really have been made any year since 1944. Its constituent qualities are undeniable but much of it looks like it has been culled from Soviet and Russian cinema of the past. When a gruff and brutish yet good-hearted soldier muscles in on the train compartment with his blind comrade, it’s a portrait of Russian man that is no doubt rooted in reality but nonetheless a fall-back for many makers of Soviet and post-Soviet cinema.<br />
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Catalan directors are quite a different bunch from other Spaniards, pursuing a more streamlined, formally experimental cinema. Jaime Rosales, José Luís Guerín and Marc Recha are all light years away from the super-abundant aesthetics of Almodóvar, Alex de la Iglesia, Julio Medem or the more earnest concerns of Fernando León de Aranoa and Alejandro Aménabar. No Catalan director is as ‘out there’ however as Albert Serra. The 37-year-old is the new standard-bearer for recondite, demanding cinema, the heir to the late Raúl Ruiz. His films, shot on low-grade digital video with tiny budgets, interrogate the formalised, picturesque portrayal of the past in cinema while managing to be surprisingly beautiful themselves.<br />
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<i>Story of My Death</i> is a diptych of sorts, the two parts only vaguely linked, which retell the histories of Casanova and Dracula, two avatars of extreme decadent dandyism. We first see Casanova’s court, a place given over entirely to pleasure – eating, drinking, fucking, and, in one thoroughly disconcerting sequence, shitting – overseen by the ageing goat (Vincenç Altaió) who hides his baldness under a perruque. His is a portrait of a man whose Enlightenment certitude and brazenness is about to give way to doubt and old age (he remarks at one point that he met Voltaire once and ‘it didn’t end well’.) <br />
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Casanova yields, in both a narrative and physical sense, to Dracula, similarly unnamed and appearing without the trappings bestowed on Bram Stoker’s creation by Tod Browning’s Universal Studios adaptation. Serra’s Count is charismatic but menacing, as much a cannibal as a seducer; he is avowedly anti-Christian, telling one of the young ladies he preys on that there is no place for Christ in his house. <i>Story of My Death</i> is a historical dialogue between two personages, one real and one fictional, whose characters both overlap and conflict. Despite Serra’s wilfully cheap aesthetic, his images are bestowed with an immense force, the early banquet scenes clearly modelled on Flemish still-lifes, and the later ones carry the nebulous ambience of German Romantic painting. It has to be said that Serra is never likely to reach too wide an audience – his films are far too unyielding in their rhythms and their disregard for story and plot – but for those who have a high tolerance for uncompromising primitivist art cinema, he is well worth discovering.<br />
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/-R6FP6Yh28g" width="480"></iframe>seanachiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15359354940953059605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30964029.post-33958734056844003132013-11-19T09:51:00.000+01:002013-11-19T10:41:08.768+01:00Heimat and Shoah: Updates<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Heimat: Chronicle of a Vision</i> (<i>Die andere Heimat: Chronik einer Sehnsucht</i>) (Edgar Reitz – Germany/France) 225 minutes<br />
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<i>The Last of the Unjust</i> (<i>Le dernier des injustes</i>) (Claude Lanzmann – France/Austria) 220 minutes<br />
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Edgar Reitz’s monumental TV series <i>Heimat</i>, which spans much of the German twentieth century and which has been running since 1984, is a major lacuna in my film-watching, and one I intend to finally get around to one of these days. Not that any knowledge of the TV show is necessary to appreciate this four-hour prequel, which is set in the same Rheinland village of Schabbach and centres around the same family, the Simons, that appears in the show. The action is set several decades before the start of the TV series, in 1842, in a region that has yet to be industrialised and where the only hope for many is to up sticks and move to Brazil, where the Emperor has reserved the southern regions of Rio Grande do Sul for German immigrants.<br />
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Jakob Simon (Jan Schneider), a bookish youngster, is one person who dreams of an escape, going so far as to learn the Tupi languages of the Brazilian natives, which he has never even heard. Jakob is scorned by his blacksmith father Johann (Rüdiger Kreise), who sees him as a feckless n’er-do-well, in contrast to his older brother, Gustav (Maximilian Scheidt), who returns from military service as the film begins. Johann’s intransigence has driven away his daughter, disowned for marrying a Catholic, much to the chagrin of his wife Margarethe (Marita Breur), who also encourages Jakob in his studies. Jakob though is destined to be forever upstaged by his more assertive brother, who steals the woman he loves, Jettchen (Antonia Bill) and soon begins to muscle in on his dreams.<br />
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In one sense, <i>Heimat</i> is solidly old-fashioned film-making – a seamless fresco of nineteenth-century life, a family saga, a portrait of an embryonic modern society. Like Michael Haneke’s <i>The White Ribbon</i>, the film takes its visual cues from the photography of August Sander (it is striking how similar the two films look, despite being set some seventy years apart); Gernot Roll’s stunning high-contrast cinematography is monochrome throughout with a few key colorised elements interspersed – an incandescent horseshoe, a field of bluebells, a sliver of agate. Reitz has little time for Haneke’s determinism though – the historical aspects of his film are portrayed dispassionately: the legacy of the Napoleonic invasion (and even the 30 Year War, two centuries past, evoked by Jakob’s elderly uncle), the rise of German nationalism, embodied in a boozy group of students who invite Jakob on a raft trip down the Rhine, ultimately radicalising him. <br />
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Though <i>Heimat</i> the TV series has been criticised for soft-pedalling the Weimar and Nazi era, Reitz’s depiction of the premodern society in this film is far from the idealised image of the Volk that the Nazis and Prussian nationalists liked to peddle. Life in Schabbach is miserable, its old artisanal society barely subsisting; the region is riven by famine and the village is emptying at a rapid pace, with even the local schoolmaster eyeing a spot on the boat to Brazil. In one of the many powerful sequences in the film, the villagers hold a communal funeral for a dozen infants carried away by diphtheria in the bitterly cold winter, the ground being too frozen solid to bury them until the spring. Reitz is also adept at integrating period detail into his narrative in a way that is fully organic – the sudden halting of a creaking loom alerts the family to the death of its operator and the appearance of a steam engine in the forge – built by Gustav and perfected by Jakob – points to the industrialisation that is about to send the region, and all of Germany, hurtling into modernity.<br />
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This latest chapter in the <i>Heimat</i> saga is a wonderfully rich experience, lucid and intelligent, endowed with some masterful filmmaking, and it is at times deeply moving. Reitz presents a sophisticated portrait of the mid-nineteenth century while being more than simply tasteful picturesque. Though the film stands alone admirably well, you wonder does Reitz intend filling in more gaps with further prequels, even if, at the age of 81, he may find time is against him.<br />
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The bulk of Claude Lanzmann’s new film consists of interviews he conducted over a week in 1975 with Benjamin Murmelstein, the former Chief Rabbi of Vienna, and later the Head of the Jewish council in the notorious ghetto of Theriesenstadt during the Holocaust. Lanzmann omitted the interviews from the final cut of <i>Shoah</i>, for which they were filmed, because it would have added unduly to an already marathon length. Three decades on from <i>Shoah</i>, Lanzmann has decided Murmelstein and the grotesque story of Theriesenstadt merits a film of its own, one that, at just under four hours, runs to almost half its predecessor’s running time.<br />
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The title of the film comes from Murmelstein himself, who described himself as such, in self-deprecation, given the opprobrium he faced in both Israel and among international Jewry following the war (the philosopher Gershom Scholem said he ought to be hanged). Theriesenstadt, a concentration camp located in the Czech fortress town of Terezin, has become a byword for barbaric repression airbrushed by good public relations. It was the brainchild of Adolf Eichmann, and was filmed for Nazi propaganda and called ‘The Fuhrer’s Gift to the Jews’, presented to the world as a place of comfort for its inhabitants, despite 60,000 Jews living in an area intended for 7,000. Murmelstein, who liaised with Eichmann in the ghetto, was tried for collaboration in Czechoslovakia after the war but was acquitted and released after 18 months in prison. He ended up a furniture salesman in Rome and, such was his fall from grace, the Chief Rabbi of Rome refused him burial beside his wife in consecrated ground when he died in 1989. <br />
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Given he was a community leader (and moreover one who passed up opportunities to abandon Vienna’s Jews when offered work in London upon <i>Anschluss</i>) it was ridiculous that Murmelstein be retrospectively cast as a kapo. He may indeed have been too trusting of Eichmann, despite clear signs of the latter’s brutality – Murmelstein witnessed him leading the destruction of a synagogue in Vienna before the war – but Murmelstein insisted he did everything to save as many Jews as he could. He even says in the film that the embellishment of Theriesenstadt for publicity purposes helped saved lives as, he reasoned, if the Jews in the ghetto were in the public eye, they were less likely to be slaughtered. Not that this spared the lives of those who were put to death after a series of failed uprisings, mind. Murmelstein was, then, one of the Jewish leaders at whom Hannah Arendt took aim, when she said fewer Jews might have been killed had they not had community leaders to place trust in. This is one of two issues in which the film takes issue with Arendt, the other being the famous ‘banality of evil’ applied to Eichmann. Murmelstein, who knew Eichmann better than most (and was, inexplicably, never called as a witness for Eichmann’s trial), says Eichmann was the consummate Nazi, fully aware of the enormity of his enterprise and implicated in more than simply the logistics.<br />
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Lanzmann’s film is, for one of those length and such unremitting grimness, incredibly compelling. As in Shoah, he has a keen ability to make the past come to life simply by filming the same locations decades later – in one chilling scene, he recounts, by reading from Murmelstein’s 1961 memoir, the executions of Jewish insurgents in the very same hangar in Theriesenstadt. The only thing against <i>The Last of the Unjust</i> is it is a little too complicit and sympathetic towards its subject – it lacks the dialectical force that made <i>Shoah</i> such a formidable, if at times selective, film. You see relatively little of the abrasive, conceited, and often unpleasant, side of Lanzmann’s character, which helped him coax so many fantastic interviews out of unsuspecting interlocutors in the earlier film. Similarly, Murmelstein’s story is very much an annex to <i>Shoah</i>, which renders <i>The Last of the Unjust</i> a quasi-theological film for specialists of the field. While it is remarkable in many ways, it is a film that can really only be grasped in its entirety by those that have sat through the entire nine-and-a-half hours of Lanzmann’s earlier masterpiece.<br />
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/v1FDcXcP1o8" width="420"></iframe>seanachiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15359354940953059605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30964029.post-37595023760947579092013-11-11T13:08:00.000+01:002013-11-12T18:28:29.862+01:00Inside Llewyn Davis – Joel and Ethan Coen<i>Inside Llewyn Davis</i> (Joel and Ethan Coen – USA/France) 105 minutes<br />
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‘I don’t hear any money here,’ says a music impresario to Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) upon being played the latter’s work. There is, indeed, very little money in the life of struggling folk singer Llewyn Davis, adrift in Greenwich Village in the winter of 1961; impecunious, he struggles between gigs, crashing on the couches of anyone whose hospitality he can abuse. He is the embodiment of that old muso joke: ‘What do you call a musician without a girlfriend? Homeless’. For want of a girlfriend, Llewyn sleeps with Jean (Carey Mulligan – as ever, a three-chord performance), the wife of his friend Jim (Justin Timberlake) and is then forced to resort to some ‘creative’ birth control when she falls pregnant. <br />
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The Coen Brothers’ portrayal of the nascent, ‘pre-Judas’ folk scene, is admirably rich, with Bruno Delbonnel’s photography capturing New York’s wintry scuzziness with aplomb. Llewyn, though a thoroughly dislikable character – selfish, self-absorbed, self-obsessed, self-pretty-much-everything – is still someone you find yourself rooting for, probably because we have all had a dear friend as imperiously indifferent to the concerns of others as he. He is wayward and feckless, like another Coen character, The Dude, only with added bitterness fermenting away; Isaac’s performance is perfectly calibrated, like an impudent young Martin Scorsese, and the fact he plays and sings on screen makes it all the more impressive. And Llewyn is certainly no worse than most of the others he encounters – the shrill Jean, the careerist Jim, a morosely taciturn beat poet (Garret Hedlund in a rather pointless cross-pollination of Walter Salles’ <i>On the Road</i> adaptation), an obnoxious jazzman (John Goodman), his manager Mel, who never pays him. This raises the first major problem with the film though – its tone is irredeemably sour, rather than melancholic, as many have contended. If it’s meant to be a love-letter to the Greenwich Village scene, well it’s an odd one, as the Coens are clearly not too sympathetic towards anyone in it.<br />
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The film also signposts things a bit too crudely, such as the brief appearance of a soldier-on-leave Troy Nelson (Stark Sands) – supposedly based on Tom Paxton – whose upright discipline is going to get him further in the music business than Llewyn. We hear, in passing, a young Bob Dylan soundalike, whose fame, and later capitulation to rock, would sweep folk music further to the margins than it was to begin with. It’s a fair point to make but it’s a bit obvious, as are the successive jokes involving a friend’s cat whom Llewyn gets inadvertently lumbered with. Then again, recourse to obvious gags has been a feature of the Coens throughout their career.<br />
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<i>Inside Llewyn Davis</i> is dotted with references to real-life characters – Jean and Jim carry a clear echo of the embryonic Peter, Paul and Mary; there is a wretched acapello version of ‘The Auld Triangle’ by an Irish quartet clearly meant to be The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, and Bud Grossman (F. Murray Abraham) the impresario Llewyn so desperately courts, is modelled on Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman. Llewyn himself is reportedly based on folk legend Dave Van Ronk, though the similarities are only fleeting – Van Ronk, while he never enjoyed Dylan’s success, can’t be said to have failed in a way Llewyn is destined to and his folk music was far more robust and spirited than Llewyn Davis’ watery brew (it is not a shock to learn that Mr Carey Mulligan, Marcus Mumford, had a hand in the film’s music). Llewyn’s failure, moreover, seems predetermined – the suicide of his former singing partner looms throughout the film but it seems more like a device of convenience than genuine bereavement. Llewyn’s impecunious struggles also appear picturesque and incidental, compared to the vaguely similar<i> Frances Ha</i>, which, for all its limitations, was a far more convincing account of thwarted ambition.<i> Inside Llewyn Davis</i> is a watchable, at times beautiful, film but ultimately suffers from the factitiousness that has been a recurrent problem with the Coens’ work.<br />
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/X8eKgUW5XxQ" width="560"></iframe>seanachiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15359354940953059605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30964029.post-50921545208605024312013-11-09T13:26:00.001+01:002013-11-11T18:14:53.665+01:00Israel and Palestine in two films<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Omar</i> (Hany Abu Al-Assad – Palestine) 96 minutes<br />
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<i>Common State – Potential Conversation 1</i> (<i>État commun – Conversation potentielle 1</i>) (Eyal Sivan – France) 124 minutes<br />
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Hany Abu Al-Assad’s <i>Omar</i>, which won the Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard sidebar at Cannes this year, is probably the first film to use Israel’s ‘separation barrier’ in the West Bank (also known, with some justification, as the apartheid wall) as a prop. The eponymous hero, Omar, a young baker (Adam Bakri), scales it daily, to visit his friends Tarek and Amjad, who live just the other side but whom the wall has placed at an improbable distance. Omar runs the risk of being shot by the Israeli Defence Force and on one occasion is routinely humiliated by a patrol, once they are satisfied he is not carrying any weapon or explosives.<br />
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Omar joins Tarek and Amjad in a nocturnal sortie against the IDF in which Tarek shoots a soldier at a posting, fatally wounding him. Omar is then swept up in an Israeli raid and he disappears into the sprawling black site that is the Israeli prison system. A pair of cops – both, oddly, played by actors of Palestinian origin – try to wheedle the name of the gunman out of them; one (Joe Sweid) tortures him in scenes remarkably similar to those in <i>Zero Dark Thirty</i> but filmed with far less ambiguity, the other, Rami (Waleed Zuaiter) is more in the ‘good’ vein, and is able to half-coax an admission of guilt from Omar by passing as a Palestinian prisoner. Rami tries to get Omar to work as an informer and, when Omar resists, he turns him out into the world, figuring that the suspicion he has ratted out his comrades will be punishment enough (a similar plot device was used in Sergei Loznitsa’s<i> In the Fog</i>). Omar strikes a deal, promising to deliver the gunman to Rami within thirty days but he is only buying himself time, as he hopes to marry Tarek’s sister Nadia (Leem Lubany). <br />
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<i>Omar</i> is a militant, fast-paced thriller, that is notable for the way it constantly refers to a world outside the decreasing parcels of land Palestinians live on in the Occupied Territories. Omar and Nadia talk about fleeing the place, about going to Paris for their honeymoon, even though they each know it is unlikely. Jokes refer to distant lands, Omar’s younger sister excitedly criticises José Mourinho’s benching of Karim Benzema at the dinner table, an informer pleads for his life, saying he only informed for money to visit New Zealand, because he has never seen the sea. Hanging behind the desk in Rami’s office is a large-format high definition photograph of a beach, clearly intended to tantalise young Palestinians who have never seen the Mediterranean, which lies only twenty miles or so to the west. And as if the eating away of the Palestinian homeland were not bad enough, our hero is subject to even more claustrophobic closure, hemmed in by the suspicions of those in his own community and the demands of the Occupier. Al-Assad, who won a Best Foreign Film Oscar for <i>Paradise Now</i>, chooses a radical move to cut through the Gordian Knot. It’s a bold move and one unlikely to win him a second Oscar for its disavowal of a fictitious peace process.<br />
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That fictitious peace process has also led to the death of the two-state solution. Twenty years on, the Oslo Accords are in tatters, as Israel continued to violate international law by colonising the West Bank, and discontent with Fatah led to a hardening Islamisation of Palestinian society. The one-state solution has gained increasing ground over the past decade, championed by the late Edward Said and theorised by the likes of Ali Abunimah and Omar Barghouti. The main reason for its appeal is an acceptance that settlement building is so total now that a territorial Palestinian state, as envisaged by Oslo, is an impossibility. This was acknowledged by Tony Judt following visits to the West Bank in 2004, something which did not go down well in the West, where support for the charade that is the peace process remains a strategic imperative. Even sectors of the Israeli right, such as former Knesset Speaker Abrum Burg, are recognising the reality that Israelis and Palestinians may one day have to share the same binational state.<br />
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French-based Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan gathers together a number of people from both the Jewish and Palestinian camps and has them give their views on the possibility of a single state. These range from Omar Barghouti, former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti, Palestino-Israeli Knesset Member Haneen Zouabi, Israeli academics Ilan Pappe and Ariella Azoulay, Arab rights lawyer Hassan Jabareen, Jewish poet Eliaz Cohen, Palestinian economist Leila Farsakh, Hadash party member Yael Lerer (who also has a cameo role as a lawyer in <i>Omar</i>) and Ha’aretz journalist Gideon Levy. The interviews are shown in split-screen and are filmed as binomial dialogues. The artifice makes the film more art-installation than anything particularly cinematic but <i>Common State</i> is compelling nonetheless. <br />
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You can argue that the principals are all of an intelligentsia far removed from popular sentiment on either side of the divide – it is definitely true that all those interviewed are broadly left-leaning and there is none of the toxic racial determinism so widespread among Israelis or the opportunistic Holocaust denial and anti-semitism that blights some Palestinian discourse. Still, it can’t be denied that this attempt at a ‘potential conversation’ is lucid and intelligent. The one-state solution is dismissed by many as utopian and detached from reality – given how neighbouring communities even in rich countries such as Canada and Belgium can’t get along – but the ideas broached here are about a shift in mentality rather than a project for an immediately tangible state. Roucham Marton, the only interviewee old enough to remember life before 1948, says it was a time marked by more tolerance than the present (despite real atrocities committed by either side) and that she prefers not to talk of love, ‘because love always ends in tears’. Sival, whose criticism of the Israeli state has earned him smears from the likes of French Zionist Alain Finkielkraut, is to be commended for this colloquium. The comments contained within it will seem inconceivable to many who are trapped inside the confines of two-state orthodoxy but in decades to come, it will be these interviewees who, for better or for worse, will be proven right.<br />
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/9evCAOi7D-4" width="420"></iframe>seanachiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15359354940953059605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30964029.post-25303682926589727412013-11-01T12:05:00.000+01:002013-11-01T12:20:30.626+01:00Snowpiercer – Bong Joon-ho<br />
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<i>Snowpiercer</i> (Bong Joon-ho – South Korea/USA/France) 126 minutes<br />
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Bong Joon-ho, director of the excellent <i>Memories of Murder</i>, <i>The Host</i> and <i>Mother</i>, makes his first foray into English-language film for what is the most expensive South Korean production in history. Unfortunately, the whole thing is a sorry mess. <i>Snowpiercer</i> is based on a mostly forgotten French comic book <i>Le Transperceneige</i>, which started running in 1984, and the production design, which is admirable, borrows heavily from the source material. The opening sequences inform us that in 2014, world governments, in a desperate attempt to offset global warming, smothered the planet in a chemical called CW7, which accelerated the onset of a new Ice Age. All life on Earth has died, with the only survivors having boarded, Noah’s Ark-like, a massive train, powered by a perpetual-motion engine. Now, seventeen years in the future, it travels continuously across the Asian, European and African landmasses on a circuit that had been built by its megalomaniac industrialist owner, one Mr Wilford.<br />
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The train is divided according to a binary class system, with those at the head ruthlessly suppressing the proles in the tail. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to this division, other than arbitrary pauperisation in the interest of Wilford’s holistic belief of constant order – the underclass does not appear to be retained to do any work, be it slave or indentured. The tail-dwellers, living in squalid, cramped misery, mount a new revolt – all previous ones have been savagely put down – masterminded by Gilliam (John Hurt), a crippled Gandalf-type figure, and led by Curtis (Chris Evans) in which they hope to get to the head of the train and take the ‘sacred’ engine. On the way they enlist the help of train engineer Namgoong (Bong regular Song Kang-go) and his daughter Yona (Ko Ah-sung), both of whom are addicted to Kromul, a drug made from industrial waste that is hugely popular in the front of the train.<br />
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Blocking their way is a fearsome army of security guards, led by Franco Elder (Vlad Ivanov – the abortionist from <i>4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days</i>) and overseen by Mason (Tilda Swinton as a weird cross of Margaret Thatcher with Nora Batty). The first disappointment of Snowpiercer is it doesn’t have anything to elevate itself above your run-of-the-mill apocalyptic drama, even though it clearly fancies that it does. The backstory remains as flat as it does on the page – comics can get away with short-hand like this, films need to flesh things out a bit more. The information that is divulged about the train’s history comes far too late in the film, by which time its possible dramatic impact is vitiated. It is also, for all the grisly scenes of axe murder, and talk of horrific living conditions, not a very disturbing film. Rarely do we get a real sense of menace, and even then, it mostly comes by way of the wordless killer played by Ivanov, whose character is pretty cliched anyway. <br />
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The dialogue, despite being worked on by New Yorker Kelly Masterson, is seriously hokey and embarrassing, with Swinton in particular being given some of the most cringe-worthy: ‘Water comes in the mouth, not through the bum’, when she explains how the engine absorbs snow for the train’s water supply. Chris Evans, who played Captain America in <i>The Avengers</i>, is far too lightweight a presence, and too wooden an actor, to carry a film as heroic leader. There are a few efforts at satire, such as a scene where kids are indoctrinated by a cheery schoolteacher (Alison Pill), but these are flat and one-dimensional. <i>Snowpiercer</i> has to recommend it some good production design and well-choreographed action sequences but it is for the most part catastrophically inept. Here’s hoping the talented Bong Joon-ho soon gets back to something smaller in scale and avoid the bombast on display here.<br />
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/r6UmqNuMdY4" width="560"></iframe>seanachiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15359354940953059605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30964029.post-76446057212746654312013-10-31T08:44:00.002+01:002013-10-31T08:44:30.895+01:00This Is the End & Prince Avalanche<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>This Is the End</i> (Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg – USA) 106 minutes<br />
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<i>Prince Avalanche</i> (David Gordon Green – USA) 90 minutes<br />
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Canadian childhood friends Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who wrote the comedies <i>Superbad</i> and <i>Pineapple Express</i> under the auspices of the Judd Apatow stable, step behind the camera for the first time. The result is at times diverting, but more often annoying and desperately shorter on ideas than it thinks it is. Rogen, noticeably slimmed down from his early days in Hollywood, plays himself – as does everyone else in the film – and, at the beginning, picks Jay Baruchel (another Apatow regular) from the airport. Baruchel professes to hate the phoniness of LA and is not impressed when Rogen drags him along to a party at James Franco’s house.<br />
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At first, Jay is pissed off at his friend for abandoning him among the party’s glittery but unengaging guests, but then an earthquake intervenes, and appears to be more than your average LA tremor, swallowing up a number of the party’s guests – including none other than Rihanna – and it soon becomes apparent the Apocalypse is upon us. The assembled remaining guests – Seth and Jay, Franco, Danny McBride, Craig Robinson, Jonah Hill, familiar faces all – bicker among themselves as they fight for survival and the film runs through the expected gamut of gags for the constituent group of man-children – how are these guys expected to pull through Armageddon when all they have is weed, beer, beef jerky and an Xbox? <br />
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There are a few cumbersome and tasteless jokes along the way, including one where Emma Watson mistakenly believes the guys intend raping her and makes off with the last of their water. The scenario and most of the jokes will be familiar from <i>Shaun of the Dead</i> but that film being nearly a decade old now, This Is the End’s core audience is not going to notice that too much. The one thing that Rogen and Goldberg probably imagined was fresh in their approach was their casting everyone as fictional versions of themselves; unfortunately, there is no genuinely edgy <i>Curb Your Enthusiasm</i>-esque self-deprecation on display – Michael Cera is made to look a bit pathetic and there are digs at both Franco and Hill’s thespian vanity but it is all very complicit and very safe. <br />
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You come away with the rather annoying impression of witnessing a litany of frat-boy in-jokes that every one (the supposedly dissident Baruchel included) is in upon. <i>This Is the End</i> made its first appearance as an April Fool trailer for a sequel to <i>Pineapple Expres</i>s and it resembles that film in its basic structure and tone – with apocalyptic forces replacing the murderous drug traffickers. It’s predictable and occasionally amiable enough and will please Rogen’s teenage fans but as is increasingly the case with the Apatow circle, you feel that all are capable of much better.<br />
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The director of <i>Pineapple Express</i> was David Gordon Green, for whom, back in 2008, it represented a radical career following his earlier Malickian dramas <i>George Washington</i>, <i>All the Real Girls</i> and <i>Undertow</i> (the latter of which was produced by Terrence Malick himself). Green has since <i>Pineapple Express</i> continued along in the same vein of boisterous comedy, directing <i>Your Highness</i>, <i>The Sitter</i> and the Danny McBride TV show <i>Eastbound and Down</i>. With <i>Prince Avalanche</i>, he returns to the more restrained tenor of the earlier movies even if he retains a proclivity to cheap laughs.<br />
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<i>Prince Avalanche</i> is loosely based on a little-seen 2011 Icelandic film <i>Either Way</i> and is set in 1988, a year after a massive forest fire in Western Texas. The film was actually filmed in Bastrop County, close to Austin, which itself suffered a devastating fire two years ago, but, presumably for reasons of sensitivity, Green chose to move the action 25 years into the past. Middle-aged Alvin (Paul Rudd) and his girlfriend’s feckless younger brother Lance (Emile Hirsch) are working as road maintenance men, repainting road markings and replacing signs and bollards after the fire. It’s a solitary existence, one savoured by Alvin, despite the fact it takes him away from his girlfriend, and hated by Lance, who just lives for the weekend and the opportunity to dip his wick.<br />
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We get a sense of the initial promise David Gordon Green showed in his earlier films – he films beautifully the destruction wrought by the forest fires and his casual, wordless observations of people bring home the sense of disbelief and disarray it must have occasioned those made homeless. The only two other characters in the film – an elderly alcoholic road worker and a mysterious woman who has lost her home – are never explained, and the background of the fire maintains a pregnant intrigue all the way to the end. It is a remarkable resistance to the obvious temptations of explaining everything away with signposted narrative developments and earned Green the Silver Bear for Best Director at this year’s Berlin Film Festival.<br />
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Where the film fails though is the central buddy-movie plot, which is perfunctory, hastily-constructed and never comes to life. The very first scene, in which the uptight Alvin argues with Lance when the latter removes Alvin’s German-learning tape from the stereo, gives you a taste of the contrived relationship that will follow. You imagine Green had Robert Altman or Hal Ashby in mind when conceiving the pairing, but his characterisation is slip-shod and inert in comparison. It is unlikely that greater diligence at the scripting stage would have lifted the film beyond run-of-the-mill Sundance standard but the whole thing could have been a whole lot better. As it is, it’s an interesting effort sunk by too great a cleaving to formula, which is another feature of Apatow and his circle.<br />
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seanachiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15359354940953059605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30964029.post-57014237263160349592013-10-29T09:32:00.002+01:002013-10-30T06:34:32.938+01:00Gravity – Alfonso Cuarón<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiK_ChmGe-mWq85fmMRLlcliWZ3G1ZOohRWQz9vtM6abdl7Az3u_da93jFyfeufbIuifv-r-TUnWECptGTa0dEewercED3oaguUYbAc3482MXQJXC89W8YQE9kj_nlV1NqpQr4v/s1600/gravity-venice-film-festival-2013-premiere-cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="187" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiK_ChmGe-mWq85fmMRLlcliWZ3G1ZOohRWQz9vtM6abdl7Az3u_da93jFyfeufbIuifv-r-TUnWECptGTa0dEewercED3oaguUYbAc3482MXQJXC89W8YQE9kj_nlV1NqpQr4v/s320/gravity-venice-film-festival-2013-premiere-cover.jpg" width="320" /></a><i>Gravity</i> (Alfonso Cuarón – USA) 91 minutes<br />
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In Tom McCarthy’s 2005 novel <i>Remainder</i>, the hero, who is re-enacting in painstaking detail events from his life, expresses repeatedly his frustration at not being able to get a fridge door to open and close like in the movies – the door always catches, unlike the smoothness with which, say Robert de Niro, negotiates it on screen. This is because the movies – Hollywood ones in particular – don’t do mistakes. The inconveniences of life are airbrushed out of the diegetic reality of film – characters are able to get parking spaces right in front of buildings, they survive improbably long despite losing lots of blood after getting shot and they never wait for change in shops or restaurants. <br />
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<i>Gravity</i> is an unusual film then in that its drama stems almost entirely from a single mistake – the film might even be subtitled ‘Anatomy of an Error’. In Alfonso Cuarón’s new movie, things go wrong – many things go wrong, one after another. Three NASA astronauts are doing routine maintenance on their space station when they are informed by Houston that debris from an exploded Russian satellite is heading their way at high speed. Shuttle pilot Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) instructs engineer Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) to detach herself from her post but Stone dallies. They end up getting hit by the first blast of the debris, which pierces the space station, destroying it, and killing three of the crew. Stone and Kowalski then have to make their way to one of three neighbouring space stations, in the hope of getting a shuttle back to Earth but, their peregrinations being knocked out of step, things are immediately more complicated.<br />
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Though <i>Gravity</i> has been praised for its realism by astronauts, including Buzz Aldrin, and the recreation of Earth’s orbit is hugely impressive, it is, I think, only incidentally a film about space. It seems to me to be more about the fragility of human existence, the abruptness with which lives end, the difference between life and death being often a misplaced foot or coming loose from one’s moorings, or not coming loose from them. This is what makes it such a thrilling, yet terrifying experience throughout. You have a wearying sense of mortality, of physical danger, even if the circumstances Stone and Kowalski find themselves in are hardly commonplace. In its spatial organisation, <i>Gravity</i> feels more like a Western than a traditional sci-fi film; the catastrophe befallen the astronauts resembles the march through the desert of John Ford’s <i>3 Godfathers</i> or the travails of the desperate pioneer-prospectors of the recent films <i>Meek’s Cut-Off</i> and <i>Gold</i>. There is also the echo of a road-movie in Kowalski’s name, surely a reference to the lately departed Richard C. Sarafian’s <i>Vanishing Point</i>, as well as the Country and Western music that he plays in space, much to the annoyance of Stone.<br />
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<i>Gravity</i> works as an unusually sophisticated mainstream film, imbued with an acute existential frisson, because it is so simple. It is stripped down, a two-hander with two actors unencumbered by showiness. While Clooney may be a little too noticeably Clooney to fully inhabit an astronaut’s burnished anonymity, he does the job well enough; Bullock, on the other hand, an actor whose very ordinariness is the most remarkable thing about her, is perfect as Stone, the hospital systems engineer who ended up in Space following the sudden death of her four-year-old daughter. She looks just like the steely resilient soccer moms that beam out of their oversized spacesuits in official NASA portraits. Stone is someone for whom mistakes have come to be expected – she says she crashed the spacecraft every time in the Simulator – but now she has to unlearn that habit to survive. It is a testimony to the assuredness of Cuarón’s direction – a man who, it must be said, is a cerebral journeyman rather than a fully-fledged auteur – that Stone’s narrative of self-realisation is integrated into the film without appearing cheesy or maudlin. <i>Gravity</i> is a rare film, of any provenance, that is ineffably physical and visual while also giving the mind something to chew over. There will be few Hollywood films this year – this decade even – that are as good as it.<br />
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/OiTiKOy59o4" width="420"></iframe>seanachiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15359354940953059605noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30964029.post-854612665778673452013-10-25T11:22:00.000+02:002013-10-25T11:23:39.164+02:00Behind the Candelabra & Fifi Howls from Happiness<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Behind the Candelabra</i> (Steven Soderbergh – USA) 118 minutes<br />
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<i>Fifi Howls from Happiness</i> (<i>Fifi az khoshhali zooze mikeshad</i>) (Mitra Farahani – USA/Iran/France) 96 minutes<br />
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The first I heard of Liberace was the day he died, when I was eleven years old. Within twenty-four hours I knew he was gay and had died of AIDS. And so crumbled the façade he had so assiduously maintained. The star entertainer had successfully cowed media speculation about his sexuality (though, curiously, he only felt the need to resort to suing in the less libel-friendly UK) and many of his fans were none the wiser as to the fact. Almost immediately though his homosexuality became one of the dominant things about his personality among the wider public (to be fair to the man, the attempts to out him were never motivated by emancipatory intent, so you can’t really blame him for hiding it). Another immediate effect of his death was he began to be forgotten. Liberace’s fame relied upon his presence on stage in Las Vegas and on TV holiday specials. He may have produced over forty LPs but not a single one of them lives on as testament to his fame. <br />
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Upon hearing Steven Soderbergh was to finish his filmmaking career with a Liberace biopic, I thought ‘oh yeah, Liberace, remember him.’ Like Michael Winterbottom’s recent Paul Raymond film <i>The Look of Love</i>, Behind the Candelabra feels like it has come a couple of decades too late. Soderbergh made the film for HBO – it has been released in cinemas internationally after premiering at Cannes – and, despite suggestions that the studios weren’t prepared to handle such a high-profile gay story, you sense they steered clear of it more because it is about the, well, forgotten Liberace. Besides, though the film is perfectly cinematic, its home is definitely on the small screen.<br />
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<i>Behind the Candelabra</i> is based on the memoir of Scott Thorson, Liberace’s former lover, who lived with him for several years in the late 70s and early 80s, before the pianist kicked him out as his drug problem got out of hand. Thorson (Matt Damon) is introduced to Liberace (Michael Douglas) while working as a young animal wrangler (though the film does not have him as young as he supposedly was in real life at the time – 16) and is quickly taken in, working as a chauffeur and assistant to give him something to do. Liberace seems to see more in him than in his other beaux and bizarrely suggests adopting Scott – though this may have been a publicity ploy, given that many of Liberace’s housewife fans came to assume that was their relationship. The strangeness of the demand is compounded by the plastic surgery and general make-over Scott is put through to make him resemble the older man. This backfires however when the surgeon – a wonderfully sleazy Rob Lowe in one of the film’s many casting coups – gets Scott hooked on pills as part of his ‘California diet’. The drug dependent downfall that follows is familiar from many West Coast films set in the era.<br />
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Michael Douglas won an Emmy for his portrayal of Liberace and it is hard to argue with that; if the film were eligible for the Oscars he would surely be the hot favourite for Best Actor too. Douglas inhabits Liberace effortlessly, and pulls off a performance that might have proved disastrous with the slightest false move. His Liberace has a clear sense of his impending obsolescence – a failure as a concert pianist, he reinvented himself as a hugely successful entertainer but he cannot even prevent his own brother, who plays under the same name, from chipping away at his fame. He tells Scott that he is so old he remembers the ladies playing the Wurlitzers at movie theatres; he is part of a dying world and his lawyer’s last desperate attempts to alter his death certificate to hide his cause of death are the last hurrah. Damon is quietly effective as Thorson, a man whose drug habits have never gone away – he is currently in prison for parole violation – though his performance is more biopic standard.<br />
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Soberbergh’s direction is smooth and slick and the film whips along at a good pace, but as ever with his films there is something clinical about <i>Behind the Candelabra</i> and you miss the sense of ill-manneredness that might have tipped it into the realm of genius. Still, he had the inspired idea of casting Debbie Reynolds as Liberace’s mother, providing a living link with the era that made the man huge. You imagine that, had he not succumbed to AIDS, Liberace might have enjoyed a resurgent fame in the 90s. He would probably have been able to come out of the closet and with both his camp sensibility and the faux-sophistication of the swing era coming back into fashion, he’d have been an even bigger draw than ever. As it stands, <i>Behind the Candelabra</i> is a curiosity, a slice of 20th century ephemera that catches momentarily a time when popular culture thrived on a necessary innocence.<br />
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Mitra Farahani’s documentary <i>Fifi Howls from Happiness</i> is another portrait of a gay artist in his final days. The subject is the late Iranian painter and sculptor, Bahman Mohasses, who died in 2010. Farahani, who previously directed a fascinating 2004 documentary, <i>Taboos</i>, on sexual attitudes in Iran, tracked Mohasses down to his hotel suite in Rome, where he has lived in exile for much of the past sixty years. Long out of Iran and his works within the country having been destroyed following the Islamic revolution, Mohasses is sufficiently forgotten by many to be considered a cult figure. Early on, we see wealthy young Iranian diaspora collectors waxing lyrical about his work, in which the influences of Ernst, Magritte and Bacon can be discerned. <br />
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Mohasses himself is an engaging, provocative interviewee. He perorates in a semi-reactionary way, being scornful of gay marriage, reproaching the gay rights movement for ‘taking the illicit pleasure’ out of sex – he also claims that he never cruised gay men, but always young Italian guys who had girlfriends. He is also misogynistic, remarking upon the ‘bitch face’ of the Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani (no relation to the director) on a magazine cover. However contentious he might be though, his gregarious bronchial cackle and his gleeful wit make his every moment on screen compellingly watchable. At one point he mocks the director, saying that in the old Soviet Union, she would have got a medal pinned to her chest by Zhdanov for services to Socialist Realism (Mohasses studied art in Moscow at the very time that Zhdanov was overseeing Stalinist aesthetics).<br />
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Farahani’s ‘services to Socialist Realism’ certainly don’t preclude her from playing the international art market, as part of the deal for Mohasses agreeing to do the film is her finding him a commission worth €100,000. Most collectors she calls baulk at the price, saying nothing has been heard of him since the Revolution, but two young Dubai-based brothers are enthusiastic and fly to Rome to meet Mohasses, who immediately plays hardball, demanding 70% payment up front. The episode is framed by Farahani, in voiceover, in reference to the meeting of the young Nicolas Poussin with the older painter Frenhofer in Balzac’s short story ‘The Unknown Masterpiece’. This formal self-consciousness shifts Farahani’s film more into film-essay territory, as do the extracts from Visconti’s <i>The Leopard</i>, a favourite film of Mohasses, and an explicit end-of-an-era reference. <br />
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The film ends with Mohasses’ death, though it is not clear if the scene where he shouts in distress, off camera, is that very moment. It is one of the few instances of uncomfortable voyeurism in the film, and reminds you a little of the ailing Nicholas Ray in Wim Wenders’ <i>Nick’s Movie</i>. The painting is unfinished, and instead the young commissioners get to take a selection of the artist’s works he has offered as guarantee. Mohasses’ niece oversees the packing away of the works, including the one which gives the film its title, a sunnier version of Munch’s ‘The Scream’ and which was the painter’s own favourite of his works. As the movers wrap the tableaux up and slide them into crates, you have the sense of the great art movements of the twentieth century being put to rest, of abstract canvases finally yielding to conceptualism and gimmickry. Mohasses was already someone who had the stamp of yesteryear about him, a man thoroughly imbued with the hope and certainties of the post-war art boom, now largely forgotten. This fine documentary will hopefully go some of the way towards keeping his memory alive, both in his native country and abroad.<br />
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/ZpGCIKm7Xss" width="420"></iframe>seanachiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15359354940953059605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30964029.post-15133141800800230442013-10-23T12:36:00.000+02:002013-11-10T10:45:21.242+01:00The Butler & Elysium<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>The Butler</i> (Lee Daniels – USA) 132 minutes<br />
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<i>Elysium</i> (Neill Blomkamp – USA) 109 minutes<br />
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Lee Daniels’<i> film à clef</i> about the life of White House butler Cecil Gaines carries few surprises and, after the catastrophe of the inept Southern burlesque <i>The Paperboy</i>, that is no bad thing. The Butler is conventional to a fault and probably does too much to hold its audience’s hand – the rape of Gaines’ mother and murder of his father by a brutish plantation owner did not happen to Eugene Allen, whom the film is based on, and is a rather clunky sublimation of the legacy of slavery – but much of the film is admirably done and, though sentimental, you are rarely left feeling cheated.<br />
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Forrest Whitaker plays Gaines, a man who stumbles into service through the concerned paternal racism of his childhood employer Annabeth Westfall (Vanessa Redgrave), and who, after moving north, works his way into the White House via a Capitol Hill hotel. Gaines is pleasant and jovial but he quickly learns to be discreet as he adapts to his job in the company of a pair of cynical house staff (Cuba Gooding Jr and Lenny Kravitz). We see a succession of presidents and first ladies, who are portrayed with varying degrees of success by name actors: a painterly Eisenhower (Robin Williams), a beaming John and Jackie Kennedy (James Marsden and Minka Kelly), LBJ (Liev Schrieber) barking orders to his aides while sitting on the shitter, a fantastically shifty Nixon (John Cusack) and a solicitous Ronald and Nancy Reagan (Alan Rickman and Jane Fonda). For some reason Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter are passed over, but it is Reagan’s decision to veto Congressional sanctions on Apartheid South Africa that finally prompt Cecil to quit after almost four decades of service.<br />
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What goes on in the Gaines house is more interesting though. The life of middle-class black Americans is one we seldom see in Hollywood films, for whom black life must always be a litany of drug-and-crime-tinged misery. Oprah Winfrey, making one of her rare screen appearances, plays Cecil’s alcoholic wife, Gloria. Once you get over the weirdness of Oprah playing someone else, you realise how great an actress she is. Gloria is a sharp-tongued, world-weary lady who struggles with the booze as her husband spends long hours at work, and one son (Elijah Kelly) heads off to Vietnam while the other (David Oyelowo) flirts with the Black Panthers. Louis’ drift from civil rights advocate to the Panthers is another invention of the film and it is clearly contrived to reassure mainstream audiences (he soon breaks with them and becomes a lefty Democratic politician). The film is unabashedly pro-Obama and the film ends with Cecil invited back to the White House to meet the current president, as happened with Eugene Allen in real life. <br />
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<i>The Butler</i> is an undemanding enough of a film, and is a bit too beholden to the current Hollywood fondness for grand narratives of origin and accomplishment. But it is hard to find major fault with it – the acting is good throughout (Whitaker in particular) and it’s handsomely mounted, with excellent music by the Portuguese composer Rodrigo Leão. One can sense a raft of Oscar nominations awaiting – it’s really that sort of film – but I wouldn’t begrudge it its moment in the sun, even if it is a film that is unlikely to be remembered for long after.<br />
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Hollywood ventures into vulgar Marxism once again with Neill Blomkamp’s futuristic utopia/dystopia follow-up to the surprise sci-fi hit <i>District 9</i>. The year is 2154 and the great and the good have long given up on Earth, wracked by pollution, environmental catastrophe and crime. The rich have decamped to Elysium, a habitable sealed-atmosphere space-station that looks like the one in <i>2001: A Space Odyssey</i> and which is lovingly landscaped with manicured lawns and the sort of aseptic neo-classical architecture that the American moneyed classes imagine to be the acme of good taste. It’s not unlike the hermetic, tax-free paradises advocated by Silicon Valley libertarians such as Peter Thiel, and William Fichtner, who plays John Carlyle, the villainous military systems CEO in cahoots with Elysian Secretary of Defence Jessica Delacourt (Jodie Foster), even resembles Thiel in appearance.<br />
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Back on Earth, Elysium is a dream for the desperate multitudes, not least because of the existence there of incubation technology that will cure all ills. Julio, a Mexican people-trafficker (Diego Luna) runs regular excursions up, but most are intercepted with extreme prejudice by Elysian defence forces. One particular destruction of two vessels containing hopeful emigrants is disturbing for the insouciance with which Blomkamp films it, which is the first time you begin to question the sincerity of the film’s political line. Max da Costa (Matt Damon), a former car thief out on parole, is one of Carlyle’s employees and he is exposed to a lethal dose of radiation that leaves him only five days to get to Elysium for the all-important medical treatment. To pay his way, he takes on a job with Julio where he will hi-jack Carlyle’s pod on the way to Elysium and steal valuable data. Little do either Julio or Max know that the encrypted data is intended to override Elysium’s operating system and allow Delacourt seize power. Meanwhile, Frey (Alice Braga), an orphanage friend of Max, needs to get to Elysium to get her daughter cured of her terminal leukaemia.<br />
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Delacourt has set vicious mercenary Kruger (Sharlto Copley, from <i>District 9</i>) on Max to retrieve the data. Kruger is the best thing by far in the film, a monstrous apocalyptic colossus who is at once absurd and terrifying. He also turns out to be highly volatile and untrustworthy. Foster as Delacourt is where Elysium goes badly wrong. Though I have always thought her an overrated actor, it is surprising how awful Jodie Foster is in this role, a bizarre amalgam of Christine Lagarde and Donald Rumsfeld. It’s all shoulder pads and cold stares and not the stuff of formidable villains. The denouement of <i>Elysium</i> is routine stuff and, like with <i>District 9</i> before it, Blomkamp has by then long dispensed with any effort at political analogy or serious social commentary. Still, it is enjoyable enough and is thankfully devoid of the pretentiousness which is such a common feature of such films. A diverting two hours.<br />
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</script>seanachiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15359354940953059605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30964029.post-73770262800248995822013-10-21T12:05:00.003+02:002013-10-21T12:05:58.495+02:00Blue Jasmine & Nobody's Daughter Haewon<i>Blue Jasmine</i> (Woody Allen – USA) 98 minutes<br />
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<i>Nobody’s Daughter Haewon</i> (<i>Nugu-ui ttal-do anin Haewon</i>) (Hong Sang-soo – South Korea) 90 minutes<br />
<br />The auteur theory has fallen from grace in recent decades, even in its native France, but, for all its faults, it is still applicable to a fairly broad tranche of cinema, though little of it, admittedly, commercial. And, it must be remembered that finding common themes, styles and concerns through a director’s work is no guarantee of quality. Woody Allen is a case in point: barely a year has gone by over the past four decades where he has not turned out a film – his latest, <i>Blue Jasmine</i>, is his 43rd theatrical release. Allen’s industrial output is driven by treating his career as a job – he has never re-watched any of his films once the final cut is in the can. He famously works on set 9 to 5 whenever possible, and has never liked straying too far from Manhattan, though over the last decade he has broken with that habit.<br /><br />An unfortunate side-effect of Allen’s prolificness has been quality control. Over the past two decades, his films have been of varying worth – ranging from the surprisingly smart (<i>Match Point</i>, <i>You Will Meet a Tall, Dark Stranger</i>, <i>Anything Else</i>) to the unspeakably wretched (<i>Scoop</i>, <i>Cassandra’s Dream</i>, <i>To Rome With Love</i>). Still, regardless of its merits, every one is unmistakably a Woody Allen film; you might even say the inconsistency is proof of his status as a serious artist – who wouldn’t go like that if they cranked films out with such dizzying regularity? His recent films are far below the quality of his work in the late 1970s and 1980s, when the gags were far more polished and funnier, the characterisation more thorough and the films as a whole possessed of a breezy insouciance that is usually absent these days. But, given Woody’s longevity and the continuity of theme and style. apparent in his work over decades, you suspect that he was a second-rank filmmaker all along, no matter how much one might love <i>Annie Hall</i>, <i>Broadway Danny Rose</i> or <i>Radio Days</i>. They are better than his current work but their concerns are similarly limited. That is certainly how he sees it – he has often said that he has never produced a classic film to rival <i>Citizen Kane</i> or <i>La Règle du jeu</i>.<br /><br /><i>Blue Jasmine</i> is Allen’s finest film in some years, but it is likely to be a false dawn like other bright moments in his recent filmography. It’s far from a perfect film but there is a surprising amount of meat to it. We first see the title character Jasmine on a flight from New York to San Francisco, talking incessantly to her neighbour, all the way through the airport. At first the glamour deficit between Cate Blanchett and an older unknown character actor suggests Jasmine is quite a big shot, but the veil falls when the other lady rushes away from her as soon as her luggage arrives on the carousel. It is a wonderfully economical way of dramatising Jasmine’s hyper-neurotic state and fall from grace while also being a ballsy way of introducing one’s star in such an unflattering light.<br /><br />Jasmine is moving to the west coast to be with her half-sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins), whom she wanted little to do with during her years married to hedge-fund guru Hal (Alec Baldwin). Now that Hal’s dodgy dealings have been rumbled by the Feds, Jasmine is trying to set herself up in life, having never worked for a living before. Blue-collar Ginger has split up with her ex-husband, Augie, who harbours resentment against both Jasmine and Hal over an ill-fated investment. She is now going out with Chilli (Bobby Canavale), whom Jasmine doesn’t care for much, calling him a carbon copy of Augie, and her derision is reciprocated in full. <br /><br />Jasmine’s efforts to set herself up as an interior designer are stymied by lack of funds, her proclivity for pills and vodka martinis and her determinedness to wrench Ginger away from Chilli. When she meets a blue-nosed diplomat (a brilliantly smug Peter Sarsgaard) things appear to be looking up but her past, she finds, is never really past. Too often of late, the performances in Allen’s films have been cursory and obvious; here though they are a joy – true in energy and detail. Dice Clay in particular is excellent, as is Louis CK as a smooth-talking, ingenuous hi-fi salesman and Hawkins, a less hyper version of her down-to-earth Holly in Mike Leigh’s <i>Happy-Go-Lucky</i>. It is Blanchett that is the greatest of all though; her portrayal of the self-deluded pillar of entitlement that is Jasmine is masterful. It teeters on the brink between mocking humour and terrifying alienation and the film as a whole strikes this balance incredibly well. There are flaws certainly – Allen’s squares the problem of filming an American film outside New York for the first time by populating San Francisco with Brooklyners – but <i>Blue Jasmine</i> is a creditable return to form, possibly the last good film Allen will ever make.<br />
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<br /><br />Another prolific director is the Korean Hong Sang-soo – <i>Nobody’s Daughter Haewon</i> is his eleventh feature in as many years. His films are usually shot on the hoof, on low budgets and are deceptively light. They also resemble each other a lot, often featuring as lead character a sad-sack middle-aged film director suffering a pained comedy of manners due to his philandering with younger women. His latest film is a slight variation on that, with the younger woman, Haewon (Jeung Eun-chae) the central character; she has been having an on-off affair with one of her film lecturers, Seongjun (Lee Seon-gyun). The film starts with Haewon’s mother, whom she hasn’t seen in five years (this is never explained), announcing she is leaving for Canada and won’t be coming back. Haewon is a loner – she appears to have few friends (partly because of a failed relationship) and her supposed Eurasian parentage seems to bother some of her less enlightened classmates. <br /><br />Like much of Hong’s work, <i>Nobody’s Daughter Haewon</i> is an intimiste chamber piece, with little of grand dramatic note happening. It is a succession of chance (or not so chance) encounters in the street, boozy, soju-sodden meals, and situations of sometimes excruciating embarrassment. Hong has a limited stylistic palette but it’s a very effective one – he favours sudden zooms which have a jarring effect similar to someone in your company acting unpredictably. His films are often brief slices of personal history, narrated in a voice-over that is palpably older and wiser, and while the humour is always to the fore, there is a bittersweet melancholy underpinning it.<br /><br />There are also things in the film that seem at first throwaway but which upon reflection appear to be more significant. An example in Haewon is an encounter in the opening moments with Jane Birkin, who is asking for directions, and who tells Haewon she has similar features to her own daughter, Charlotte Gainsbourg. Upon first sight, it looks like a pointless gimmick, a tacked-on cameo that is an echo of Hong’s previous film <i>In Another Country</i>, which featured Isabelle Huppert adrift in Korea, armed only with bad English to negotiate. Birkin’s cameo soon acquires a deeper meaning though when we realise how alone Haewon, a young woman both beautiful and smart, is in the world, and why has her own mother not been in touch with her for five years? <i>Nobody’s Daughter Haewon</i> is yet another limpid, economical work from Hong Sang-soo that does a lot with very little. Though a regular at Cannes in recent years, Hong has failed to impress English-speaking critics much. He is adulated in France though (hence Birkin and Huppert’s collaboration, and his excellent 2008 film <i>Night and Day</i> was set in Paris), which is not surprising. More than any director currently working, he resembles the late Éric Rohmer. Hong Sang-soo’s deftly amusing chamber pieces show him to be a worthy successor to a New Wave great.<br />
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/E6sx97sccMY" width="420"></iframe>seanachiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15359354940953059605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30964029.post-6170422234422745502013-10-15T09:15:00.000+02:002013-10-15T09:18:11.468+02:00Blue is the Warmest Colour/La vie d'Adèle - Abdellatif Kechiche<i>Blue is the Warmest Colour </i>(<i>La vie d'Adèle - Chapîtres 1&2</i>) (Abdellatif Kechiche - France/Belgium/Spain) 175 minutes<br />
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Abdellatif Kechiche’s Palme d’Or win for this three-hour drama about a lesbian love affair between two young women propelled him into the international spotlight, though he was already well established in France. Twice a winner of Best Picture at the Césars for <i>L’Esquive </i>and <i>La Graine et le mulet </i>(released in English with terrible titles, <i>Games of Love and Chance </i>and <i>Couscous </i>respectively), he is a razor-sharp observer of everyday French society and a director adept at coaxing electric, demotic performances out of unknown actors. <i>La Graine et le mulet </i>is one of the finest films about contemporary France and the struggles of immigrant communities to gain a foothold in society; it made little impact outside of France though, nor did his first period film, the 2010 <i>Black Venus</i> – about Sarah Baartman, the ‘Hottentot Venus’.<br />
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Though a universally popular winner at Cannes, <i>Blue is the Warmest Colour</i> has been<a href="http://www.lexpress.fr/culture/cinema/la-fabuleuse-histoire-de-la-vie-d-adele-abdellatif-kechiche-lea-seydoux-adele-exarchopoulos_1277991.html" target="_blank"> the subject of raging controversy</a> in France among industry professionals for what its crew called its director’s abusive behaviour. The two lead actresses, Adèle Exarchopolous and Léa Seydoux (the first real star to appear in a Kechiche film) have also said they will not work with him again, despite being co-awarded the Palme d’Or for their performances. It is not unusual for a film director to be accused of tyranny or megalomania but it is ironic that a man of such alleged abrasiveness should be a brilliantly sympathetic director of young women. Kechiche’s work might even be considered bone fide feminist, a rarity among male directors, and he has set Sara Forestier, Hafsia Herzi and, now, Exarchopolous, off on their careers. Whatever the conditions that surrounded its making, <i>Blue is the Warmest Colour </i>is another sensitive portrayal of women that subtly shifts focus as it moves along.<br />
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Based on Julie Maroh’s comic book <i>Le bleu est une couleur chaude</i>, the film relates the early adventures in love of Adèle (Exarchopolous), a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl from Lille, besotted with the 18<sup>th</sup>-century novelist Pierre de Marivaux (the film’s French title, <i>La vie d’Adèle</i>, is a nice classical allusion in this vein), and, like most teenagers, looking for love. She initially finds it in a handsome young schoolmate, Thomas (Jérémie Laheurte) but soon realises she is more interested in women. Though shy, she manages to catch the eye of twenty-something artist Emma (Seydoux), a brooding, boyish, blue-haired lesbian. They are soon madly in love, going to gallery openings together, lying to each other’s parents about their respective situations and having beastly sex, which is filmed in explicit wide-angle long-takes. You expect homophobia and accusations of statutary rape to arise but they are touched on briefly and the film quickly moves on, as Adèle becomes a nursery school teacher and Emma’s painting career begins to take off. One of the strengths of <i>Blue is the Warmest Colour</i>, aside from the characterisation and the performances, is the way it flips itself halfway through, shifting from being a self-consciously ‘lesbian’ drama to one that is more a conventional love story. This movement reflects the trajectory of the heroine’s consciousness (the film’s subtitle in French is ‘Chapters 1 & 2’) but it is also a deft wrongfooting of the audience, as well as mainlining a subject matter often considered marginal in the cinema.<br />
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Exarchopolous and Seydoux are both superb, particularly the former, who pours youthful hopefulness and insecurity into her character. Kechiche films with the same claustrophobic assiduity familiar from his previous films (it’s striking how similar the dinner table scenes are to the ones in <i>La Graine et le mulet</i>, right down to food sticking messily to people’s chins and lips). The sex scenes look very real but were actually filmed with prosthetic pudenda so the actresses weren’t actually expected to give <i>that</i> much for their art. One of the scenes is almost ten minutes long – it’s neither erotic nor pornographic, lacking the mediated aestheticisation of either, but instead looks like a natural continuation in private of the couple’s public relationship. The sharp cuts to and from the sex scenes underscore this. While some might find the sex a little too much to take, there is nothing particularly jarring about it within the context of the film. If there is one complaint to make about this splendidly moving film though, it is its length. Kechiche, when asked if he would make it shorter for general release, replied that he would make it longer if he could. This was not a problem with <i>La Graine et le mulet</i> though it was with <i>Black Venus</i>, which were both in excess of two-and-a-half hours long. You might argue that <i>Blue is the Warmest Colour </i>is sufficiently conscious of the passing of time to absorb the longueurs, but, good as it is, it does drag at times. Though it’s not a fatal shortcoming, you feel that Kechiche might easily have shaved thirty minutes off its three-hour running time without making a worse film.<br />
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/Y2OLRrocn3s" width="420"></iframe>seanachiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15359354940953059605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30964029.post-10389280351680579892013-10-10T09:10:00.000+02:002013-10-10T09:10:44.425+02:00The Dance of Reality - Alejandro Jodorowsky<i>The Dance of Reality </i>(<i>La Danza de la Realidad</i>) (Alejandro Jodorowsky – Chile/France) 130 minutes<br />
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Alejandro Jodorowsky unexpectedly returned this year with his first film since his abortive attempt to move into the mainstream with <i>The Rainbow Thief</i> in 1990. Not that the Chilean magus has been idle in that time – he has busied himself with theatre work, comics and his weekly tarot sessions at a Paris café. The new film, <i>The Dance of Reality</i>,is a ‘freely’ autobiographical work, based on his memories of an unhappy childhood in the roughneck Chilean port town of Tocopillo during the Great Depression (which hit Chile as bad as it did the US). Born to Jewish immigrants from Ukraine, Jodorowsky was close to neither of his parents – his father Jaime was a brutish Stalinist, while his mother, Sara, never loved him as he was conceived of a rape by Jaime during a rage of jealousy. Or so it was according to the 2005 memoir <i>The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky. The Dance of Reality </i>offers a slightly more sympathetic view of both parents, with Jaime’s authoritarianism offset by bravery in the face of torture by government spooks, while Sara is a good deal more indulgent of her son, doting on him, singing all her dialogue as arias of perpetual urgency.<br /> <br /> Jodorowsky shot the film in the actual town of Tocopillo, a gateway to the mining-rich Atacama Desert; you suspect the town, a rusty, wind-swept outpost, hasn’t changed a great deal since his childhood in the 1920s. Despite having a budget of $3 million (admittedly, not much for a period film) it looks cheap in a theatrical kind of way. But that may have been Jodorowsky’s intention, to denude the film of any cinematic patina and to foreground the acts of his characters. The first half focuses mostly on the young Alejandro, who is prey to both his boorish father, determined to toughen him up, and the anti-semitic bullying of his classmates. His first traumatic experience arrives when he gives a new pair of boots to a shoeless child, only for the boy to slip on wet rocks wearing them and drown. This leads to the violent recrimination of his father and his guilt at the boy’s death. Alejandro’s mother, unlike Jaime, urges him to survive in life by ‘making himself invisible’ (surely something that would have been known to many Jews from Eastern Europe); she demonstrates by bringing him to a bar frequented by sailors, stripping naked and going unnoticed by all.<br />
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The second part of <i>The Dance of Reality </i>is centred on the father, Jaime, who decides to give thanks for being delivered from the plague by attempting to assassinate populist right-wing president Carlos Ibañez del Campo, taking a job as the president’s stable hand (I suppose I should introduce a spoiler – Ibañez served a second term two decades later). Jaime then drifts in an amnesiac state, from a Santiago slum to a Christian carpenter’s studio before being picked up by agents of the state and tortured. When Ibañez is overthrown, he is rescued and returns to the family.<br />
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<i>The Dance of Reality </i>is replete with memorable scenes, such as a troop of plague-stricken peasants crossing the mountain to reach the sea; a group of amputees, straight out of Tod Browning, facing off against Jaime; the surreal appearance of a Chilean Nazi parade (the Chilean Nazis really did exist), and a fire-fighting incident gone awry in a favela. Jodorowsky, as ever, demands a lot of his actors, particularly his son Brontis, who plays his own grandfather. Brontis has electrodes applied to his bare testicles and is pissed on by the buxom Pamela Flores, playing Sara, in an attempt to cure his plague. There is much in this ingenuous, inoffensive film that will offend certain people but it is more its length that sticks in the craw. For all the inventiveness on display and for all the verve of Jodorowsky’s vision, <i>The Dance of Reality </i>goes on a bit too long and never really manages to gel into a cohesive whole, despite its origins in the director’s own experience. Jodorowsky cultists, of which there are many, will lap it up. More casual viewers will find that it drags.<br />
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/ZknCdHCdStA" width="560"></iframe>seanachiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15359354940953059605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30964029.post-6077694473268210212013-10-08T12:41:00.001+02:002013-10-08T12:41:32.551+02:00Three new films<i>Vic + Flo Saw a Bear</i> (<i>Vic + Flo ont vu un ours</i>) (Denis Côté – Canada) 95 minutes<br />
<i>Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian</i> (Arnaud Desplechin – France/USA) 117 minutes<br />
<i>Tip Top</i> (Serge Bozon – France/Luxembourg) 106 minutes<br /><br />Quebecois director Denis Côté’s second film this year (after the animal documentary, <i>Bestiaire</i>, <a href="http://fearraigh.tumblr.com/post/44607445107/aujourdhui-alain-gomis-senegal-france-86">which I reviewed back in March</a>) is elliptic and oneiric, like much of his work so far. The film starts with Victoria (Pierrette Robitaille), released from prison at the age of 61 in rural Quebec, after serving a life sentence. Needing to be assigned a residence by her parole officer (Marc-André Grondin), she moves in with an elderly paraplegic uncle, who is being cared for by neighbours that are wary of Victoria’s arrival. Convinced of her fecklessness, they soon take the uncle to their own home. She also has a wealthy brother who turns up on her first day, but is told mockingly by Victoria, ‘I know you’re never going to come here again’. Victoria is joined a few days later by Florence (French actress Romane Bohringer, gamefully adopting an Arcadian accent), a jail friend and part-time lover. The parole officer Guillaume warns them they are in violation of Victoria’s parole conditions by consorting but he indulges them anyway, when he realises Florence is not such a bad influence.<br /><br />Or at least not until a woman purporting to work for the municipality (Robert Lepage regular Marie Brassard) starts hanging around the property with a menacing sidekick (Ramon Cespedes). She is a former acquaintance of Florence, who seems to have crossed her in some undefined way in the past, and they kidnap Flo one day and break her legs. The film continues in a relatively light-hearted convalescent mode, as Guillaume warms to the prickly pair. But the relationship is under strain already by Florence’s preference for city life and her desire to go out and meet people (men included); Victoria’s tolerance for mankind is worn down by her years in jail and she snaps ‘what do I want with other people at my age?’<br /><br />The menace lurking in the background never quite recedes though and the savagery hinted at in the title (there never is actually a bear glimpsed throughout the 95 minutes) underskirts a film that is, on the face of it, melancholy and gentle. Côté is a fine gauger of mood and sentiment and elegantly employs pans and dissolves to move from one time scale to another. <i>Vic + Flo Saw a Bear</i> is an unassuming film that consistently strikes the right tone. It is a bit surprising a relatively modest film took the Silver Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival but it was nonetheless a deserving award.<br />
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<br /><br />Arnaud Despechin, so impressive in his wide-canvas ensemble pieces in his native France, misfires badly in his first American film. <i>Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian</i> (whoever green-lit that clunking title is obviously too big to fire) recounts the real-life post-war encounter between a Blackfoot Indian, Jimmy Picard (Benicio del Toro) and the Hungarian-born French anthropologist Georges Devereux – né György Dobó (Mathieu Amalric) during therapy at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. Picard is suffering from hallucinations after injuring himself during the war (none too gloriously, by drunkenly falling out the back of a truck); no doctors can find anything wrong with him and Devereux, then untrained as a psychotherapist, is called in because of his expertise with Native Americans, having lived with the Mohave for two years.<br /><br />Adapting <i>Dreams and Reality</i>, Devereux’s book documenting the case, has been an ambition for Desplechin for over two decades. It is all the more mystifying then that the resultant film is so slipshod and jejune. We take it on faith the magnitude of the subject – Karl Menninger (Larry Pine) and Devereux’s New York lover Madeleine are full of praise for the maverick anthropologist, but, apart from conducting therapy while ailing from heavy flu, we see nothing exceptional about him. One would expect race, class and historical dispossession to figure in the case of Picard but these are only fleetingly touched upon. His Native American background in the film appears to function only a vehicle for the self-congratulating pride in a sensitive, enlightened European bettering his American counterparts in treatment of a minority subject.<br /><br />The film fails on a technical level too. Even though Desplechin got US film critic Kent Jones on board to write, the dialogue is hokey and flat, something that was a problem with his previous English-language film <i>Esther Kahn</i> (1999). The performances are also jarringly unfocussed – Amalric’s Devereux is a mincing, shambling eccentric who fails utterly to convey any sense of a troubled past (he is Jewish and this is just three years after the end of the war); del Toro, usually so good, is reduced to the clichéd mannerisms of two categories of ‘quality’ screen-acting – the ethnic minority and the disabled. That two good actors should be so adrift can only be down to deficiencies in Desplechin’s direction. You get the sense the Frenchman was going for his own attempt at the wide-scale Oscar season Hollywood film. <i>Jimmy P</i> is a sorry mess though, and barely passes muster as a TV movie.<br />
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Serge Bozon’s fourth film relocates Welsh writer David Craig/James Tucker’s 2006 crime novel to the unlovely Lille suburb of Villeneuve-d’Ascq. It has all the quirks of Bozon’s previous film <i>La France</i>, in which Sylvie Testud passes as a man in uniform during World War I in search of her brother, and then some. Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Kiberlain – together in possession of 90% of the freckles in French cinema – play two Internal Affairs cops investigating possible police involvement in the murder of an informer. They are met with hostility by the police they are investigating but one detective, Robert Mendès (François Damiens) comes round to their point of view when he realises his superiors could indeed be implicated.<br /><br /><i>Tip Top</i> is laced with burlesque and intentionally stilted, choreographed acting. It’s underlit palette and fondness for interesting faces and obscure old rock and roll (in this case Turkish group 3 Hürel’s ‘Ve Ölüm’) recalls Aki Kaurismäki and the film occasionally succeeds in this vein. The lead actresses are breezy but awkward in their roles as two cops ill at ease with another and much of the world besides. The film incorporates into the plot Algerian police officers who fled their country during the Civil War, under threat of reprisals from Islamists, but, like the original murder, this is rarely fleshed out to any sufficient degree and winds up looking like window dressing. It’s a shame as <i>Tip Top</i> does take a genuinely different tack to much contemporary French cinema. Ultimately though the film is pretty bloodless, smothered by the quirks and peculiarities; by the time a lame joke about tourists being given an open-top bus tour of Villeneuve-d’Ascq, founded 1975, is dragged out over five minutes, you really have had enough.<br />
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/9tibYH3e9xc" width="560"></iframe>seanachiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15359354940953059605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30964029.post-87016149654479726642013-09-17T10:40:00.001+02:002013-09-17T10:59:45.495+02:00Les apaches & Grand Central<i>Les apaches</i> (Thierry de Peretti – France) 82 minutes<br />
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<i>Grand Central</i> (Rebecca Zlotowski – France/Austria) 95 minutes<br />
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Thierry de Peretti’s <i>Les apaches</i>, set in Corsica, using many non-professional local actors, has been praised in France for venturing beyond the usual tourist clichés about the island. That’s as may be though it is strange few of these people have pointed out that another cliché about Corsica that is every bit as potent is crime. And <i>Les apaches</i> is a film that, while it may only stumble into the crime genre, shows a society which is, well, imbued with dodginess. That is neither a fault, nor a disobliging observation – de Peretti, a native Corsican, knows his native island well, and one of the strengths of his debut film is the way it builds a tense, taut thriller from something unassuming.<br />
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The film begins, with a vague echo of Sophia Coppola’s <i>The Bling Ring</i>, as a quintet of teenagers party in the vacant Porto Vecchio holiday home of some rich Parisians, a home that is taken care of by the father of one of them, Aziz (Aziz El Hadachi). In a brilliantly filmed scene, the youngsters help themselves to the drinks cabinet, swim in the pool and then run off with a load of booty from the luxury home. The following day Aziz has a touch of remorse and decides to return the stuff, but he finds the Parisians have arrived. His father’s job is at risk so he comes clean and delivers the goods back to their owners. Missing though is a vintage rifle, which one of his friends, François-Jo (François-Joseph Cullioli) has secreted and intends to sell. He, in turn, is worried that Aziz might dob him off under pressure from his father’s boss (this being Corsica, the police are not invited to help). He gathers two of the others, Hamza (Hamza Mezziani) and Jo (Joseph Ebrard), to try and lean on Aziz, but their teenage inexperience shows and things take a messy turn.<br />
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<i>Les apaches</i> is a rare crime film that casts its drama in a behaviourist light – we see how unplanned, disorganised crime germinates from the littlest things and soon takes on a life of its own. Though slickly filmed as you might expect a thriller to be, there is this ‘inner compartment’ of a gauche teen comedy that renders the film all the more maddeningly horrific. All that unfolds need not happen and you feel like grabbing its young protagonists and giving them a good shake. But that in itself might be foolhardy. With very little means and a rather mundane premise, de Peretti has crafted one of the best French films of the year.<br />
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<i>Grand Central</i> has nothing to do with the New York railway station (‘central’ is the French for power station – film is set in a nuclear installation) but the allusion is deliberate. Rebecca Zlotowski’s second feature is brimming with references to American cinema and culture, some of which sit oddly within the narrative, rather like the global English, with words lifted from multiple registers, that is spoken by many French people. There is a trailer park, a rodeo bar and an air of 1970s blue collar Hollywood cinema, such as <i>The Deerhunter</i>, <i>Norma Rae</i> and, naturally, <i>Blue Collar</i>. While Zlotowski has a tendency to the overwrought (particularly her habit of punctuating the action with long sequences set to music that seems culled from different films) <i>Grand Central</i> is a decent effort at portraying the world of work, particularly in an environment (nuclear) one seldom sees onscreen.<br />
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Tahar Rahim plays Gary Manda, a young unskilled drifter, who comes to a nuclear power station to take up contract waste disposal work. He is taken under the wing of an existentialist foreman (Olivier Gourmet, who warns him ‘it’s a constant battle that you never shake off’) and a gregarious but menacing hard man, Toni (Dénis Ménochet – the French farmer who serves the glass of milk to Christophe Waltz in <i>Inglourious Basterds</i>). The work is well paid by industrial standards but is hazardous in the extreme, with the workers not afforded any of the security or benefits of permanent staff, and they are even forced to monitor their own radiation exposure levels, on pain of not being rehired.<br />
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Gary gets involved in a none-too-secret affair with Toni’s fiancée, Karole (Léa Seydoux, once again surprisingly convincing as a proletarian after Ursula Meier’s <i>Sister</i>), which risks causing some trouble within the plant, which already has an alarmingly high rate of industrial accidents. Though both Rahim and Seydoux are excellent, as ever, their relationship is one of the least convincing things about the film, seemingly tagged on to give the film wider audience appeal. Where <i>Grand Central</i> does excel is in the scenes set in the power plant, each of which are tinged with impending doom. Though the film is by no means predictable, it is still rather low on surprises. Nonetheless, <i>Grand Central</i> is worth a watch, especially for those who rarely get a glimpse of the less bourgeois end of French cinema.<br />
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/X13RRf_NM58" width="560"></iframe>seanachiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15359354940953059605noreply@blogger.com0