Scarecrow

This would have been a very different film had it starred, as originally intended, Bill Cosby and Jack Lemmon; as it is, up-and-coming Al Pacino and Gene Hackman give performances that are amongst the best of their careers, and it remains a mystery why the film has remained so long under the radar. The answer is largely because, despite winning the Palme d’Or, it was cold-shouldered by Warner’s a week into its theatrical release, in favor of The Exorcist publicity. Perhaps too, because it is about a pair of bums, with no real story aside from the picaresque of meanderings and passing encounters; but it also charts the growth of a male friendship, in a beguilingly low-key fashion, and genuinely moving.

The opening scene is terrific, as grandpa-dressed Max (Hackman), stomps across a field, observed by kiddish Lion (Pacino), like a faun in the crook of a tree. Max glares at Lion as they wait on either side of the road, passed mostly only by tumbleweed, gingerly joshing one another, before an olive branch is extended, and silently accepted, as the sun goes gently down. A beautifully naturalistic scene at a diner counter has them get out just enough back story, and from then on they’re together, headed to Pittsburgh to start Max’s carwash, via a stop for Lion to see his son, who was born since he went to sea six years prior.

They are set up as an odd couple, in physical stature most obviously – Hackman, in his flat cap, steel-rimmed specs, and layers upon layers of clothes, towers over little Pacino, who’s all tousled hair, sneakers, and expressions of innocent friendliness. Lion is a joker, and Max is an ornery bastard, jailed for fighting, but unrepentent. By the end of the film, when he decides to handle things like Lion, diffusing a fight in a bar, and loving it, we feel for him; but we feel too for Lion and his ambiguous, downcast expression, perhaps now uncertain of himself as not the only scarecrow (his theory is that the crows are not frightened, but laughing). In fact, as Max seems to come back to life under the companionship of Lion, the latter’s lifeforce slowly, and almost literally, is sapped, and it would be heart-breaking bleak, if Max weren’t there for him, getting by for the both of them with brutish luck.

The film was shot more or less in sequence, crossing the country, and director Jerry Schatzberg several times stages scenes in bars, with non-professional background and bit parts. The authenticity is palpable, as is the downhome atmosphere and repartee as they stop over with an old flame in Denver (Schatzberg allowed his actors a certain amount of latitude with improvisation, and Hackman and Pacino tramped around California for a month before production). There was undisguised tension on Hackman's part, over the relationship formed between Pacino and Schatzberg on Panic In Needle Park (1971), photographer Schatzberg's directorial debut (in between the two films, Pacino shot The Godfather). Schatzberg also clashed with DP Vilmos Zsigmond, but between them they conjure a beautifully photographed string of mid-west wastelands.

This is a world with no hint of hippies or Vietnam. It is the world of little people, regular folk, an unhip point of view, where going to jail for a month is not much of a surprise or a hardship; they are too bogged down in struggling to get their own lives up and running to worry about the world at large. It seems like a small, unshowy, and inconsequential film, but the close attention in performance and direction to the dynamic between the two men, the shifting levels of need and love, and the space allowed for small, natural details to emerge, act like a gradually magnifying glass, until the ambiguity of the ending makes one realize how very much we want these two to succeed.

d Jerry Schatzberg p Robert M. Sherman sc Garry Michael White ph Vilmos Zsigmond ed Evan A. Lottman pd Albert Brenner m Fred Myrow cast Gene Hackman, Al Pacino, Dorothy Tristan, Ann Wedgeworth, Richard Lynch, Eileen Brennan, Penelope Allen, Richard Hackman
(1973, USA, 112m)

The Swimmer

The films of husband-and-wife team Frank and Eleanor Perry are amongst the most undervalued of the American semi-independent wave of the 70s. In titles like Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970) and Play It As It Lays (1972) they tackled a specifically contemporary sense of malaise and neurosis, on both coasts, in a way comparable really only to some of Woody Allen, with a slightly gauche self-seriousness in place of the comedy – just check that tagline.

Their best-known picture is The Swimmer, partly thanks to a fine performance from Burt Lancaster in nothing but a pair of swimming trunks throughout, and partly because it’s really rather odd. From the idyllic Connecticut woodland emerges a mysterious, near-naked figure, making his way to the poolside of a wealthy residence. He is Ned Merrill, an old pal of the couple at the pool, somehow a part of their complacent, martinis-at-lunchtime world, but somehow definitely not. All is cheerful and chummy, but something is wrong, a hint of parody in the banal dialogue, and gradually we will learn that Lancaster’s bright blue eyes twinkle less with optimism and idealism, than with something like desperate insanity.

Merrill gazes over the wooded valley and declares he will swim home, via the pools of his friends, stretched out between him and his home on the hill. Along the way, he urges various women to come with him, but he always ends up alone and shivering. Friendliness soon gives way to hostility as he is increasingly mistrust, ordered off property, and spurned at a grotesque, plastic pool party (at which no-one is swimming). We never learn where he has come from, quite how long he has been away, or what went wrong, but Merrill is revealed to be a very broken man, even before the bleak ending (a tad over-directed, but effectively chilling).

The film’s strangeness also stems from its being a remarkably bold and singular experiment in allegory, occasionally over-emphatic (particularly Marv Hamlisch’s overbearing score), but open-ended enough to get under the skin. Merrill begins as a force of nature – he relishes the pools in which his friends won’t set foot; “Live a little” he says, but they won’t. He runs with horses, and joyfully takes their jumps; but he limps through the second half of the film after a bum landing, and when he urges a little boy to be “captain of your soul”, we very shortly are reminded that delusions can be dangerous.
Merrill’s state of idealism is detached from reality; his madness is that he prefers it that way. His last stop is at a public pool, a horrible, writhing mass of flesh in water, all too real, where he’s forced to show his feet for inspection like in jail, and the truths of his own home are finally aired. They don’t sink in, however – his escape from the prison of reality is total, until he finally reaches home – the real world is ghastly, but cannot in the end be denied. If Merrill’s journey along the river of pools is something like the journey of life, we may be accompanied along some of the way, but will always end alone. The tragedy is in the broken beauty of Merrill’s inchoate ideal, versus the only visible alternative, of shallow complacence: self-deception as the only way to cope.

As a footnote, there was a background of tension during the production, particularly between Frank Perry and Lancaster. Perry left , and much of the film was not in fact directed by him. Even with Perry still on board, Lancaster directed Joan Rivers closely in her film debut as girl-at-party, and her report that Lancaster was determined to be the good guy, in opposition to Perry's conception, suggests that the frightful air of self-delusion was less planned, than a product of these conflicting views. Later on, Sidney Pollack was brought in, directing the scene with Janice Rule, as an ex-lover, which has a noticeable air of ease and naturalness that the rest of Perry's work (here and elsewhere) largely lacks (not necessarily to its detriment). Perry had shot it with original actress Barbara Loden, auteur-star of the magnificent Wanda (1970), but her performance was deemed too far to overshadow Lancaster's, so she got the chop. This would be precious footage to see.



d Frank Perry p Roger Lewis, Frank Perry sc Eleanor Perry ph David L. Quaid ed Sidney Katz, Carl Lerner, Pat Somerset ad Peter Dohanos m Marvin Hamlisch cast Burt Lancaster, Janet Landgard, Janice Rule, Tony Bickley, Marge Champion, Bill Fiore, John Garfield Jr., Kim Hunter, Diane Muldaur
(1966, rel.1968, USA, 95m)

La traversée de Paris

Beloved in France but little known elsewhere, La traversée de Paris holds the distinction of being the one film by Claude Autant-Lara deemed acceptable by young François Truffaut, in his campaign against the prevailing cinèma du qualité of 1950s France.

One reason for the exception is that it has a charming, easy humanism. Known also as Four Bags Full, and A Pig Across Paris, there’s little actual plot, but some great noirish night-time street scenes, and much comedy of frustration. It is also fantastically French, full of funny-looking older men, talking fast and gutturally, gesticulating, and exhibiting the fondly characteristic venality of the French working classes: the squealing of the slaughtered pig is covered by accordion music and, the deed done, glasses of calvo are naturally handed round.

We are in occupied Paris, and that pig is worth a lot. Amateur black-marketeer Marcel Martin must carry it in four suitcases across the night-shrouded city. His partner is a no-show, so he enlists flaneur Jean Gabin, primarily to prevent a suspected liaison with his own wife. Bourvil won best actor at Cannes, partly for his finely-pitched performance of a little man trying to convince even himself he is a big one, whilst also trying to maintain a self-respectable measure of integrity; and partly for standing up to Gabin, who is on terrific, unchained form. More frequently the embodiment of ultimate masculine stoicism and world-weariness, he plays here a more free and anarchic figure. It turns out his Grandgil is an artist (not a frightfully good one, it must be said, but gaining some renown), out on the hunt for experience and amusement, observing (along with Autant-Lara) the variety of ways in which his compatriots react to and deal with the privations and moral compromises of the Occupation. He himself represents the spirit of free will that can never be quashed.

He is also lucky enough to be able to sweet-talk his way out of imprisonment, since the German officer admires his work. The German presence is felt in the film only at the end; the focus is more on how these people react to adverse circumstances, and rub along together, rather than on the specificity of those circumstances. Much of the film is content to meander along with the stream of dialogue and bickering between Gabin and Bourvil, as they make their way across town, but it does find room for such grandstanding scenes as Gabin’s escalation of his extortionate terms to the increasingly cringing butcher (breakout role for Louis de Funès); or the strikingly photographed conclusion to their journey. Mostly, however, it is a film which encourages us to enjoy the company of these flawed, rascally, or irascible people, and gently reminds us that we’re all in this together.


d Claude Autant-Lara p Henri Deutschmeister sc Jean Aurenche, Pierre Bost ph Jacques Natteau ed Madeleine Gug pd Max Douy m René Cloërec cast Jean Gabin, Bourvil, Jeanette Batti, Georgette Anys, Robert Arnoux, Jean Dunot, Louis de Funès
(1956, Fr, 80m, b/w)

The Narrow Margin

Cheap, tough, and drenched in shadows, this was the sort of thing that the RKO technicians could knock out in a couple of weeks with no trouble at all, but is raised by particularly tight direction from Richard Fleischer, including terrific use of confined spaces, windows, and yes, lots of shadows (but also, some nice harsh sunlight); and by lived-in performances from never-quite-made-it players, Charles McGraw and Marie Windsor.

Both tough as nails, but in a bitter, seen-it-all, disappointed way, they spit out the crackerjack dialogue (by Earl Felton, fresh off the double whammy of Jane Russell vehicles, The Las Vegas Story and His Kind of Woman), less with knowing relish than a weary sardonicism. He’s a cop and she’s a broad, widow of a mobster, being escorted cross-country to the DA in LA. There’s no love lost between them, but McGraw’s got other things on his mind, between the recent demise of his partner, the lurking gunman and his oily compadre also aboard the train, and the temptation to throw it all in. There’s also the demure young mother whom he meets repeatedly in the dining car, who may or may not be a welcome decoy.

This is not one of those noirs with strong echoes of the post-war malaise, the human condition, or the blurred lines between law and crime, although the second is implied and the third flirted with. There is some play with people not appearing what they seem, though more in the service of suspense than philosophy. Instead, it is a taut exercise in wringing as much tension and excitement out of a simple set-up, the cramped carriages, and the miniscule budget as possible. As such, it is wholly successful, pitting the lone protector against the syndicate, backed up by a colorful supporting cast. Incorporating a couple of effective twists, it is also snappy, atmospheric, and full of exchanges like. “You make me sick to my stomach.” “Well use your own sink.”

d Richard Fleischer p Stanley Rubin sc Earl Felton ph George E. Diskant ed Robert Swink ad Albert S. d'Agostino, Jack Okey cast Charles McGraw, Marie Windsor, Jacqueline White, Godon Gebart, Queenie Leonard, David Clarke, Peter Virgo, Don Beddoe, Paul Maxey, Harry Harvey
(1952, USA, 71m, b/w)

Love Crime

Ludivine Sagnier was at the LA Film Festival last year to introduce this, which was rather a glamorous surprise in the Regal 6. Crime d’amour was the final film from veteran director Alain Corneau, co-starring Kristin Scott-Thomas with Sagnier in a tale of corporate back-biting, unruly passions, ambition, and obsession/compulsion.

The opening scene is almost the best thing about the film, as Sagnier’s Isabelle sits with her boss Christine, in the latter’s luxe-to-a-tee living room. They are working casually after hours, drinking wine, getting to know one another a little more. Unexpected sexual nuances and surprising gestures deliciously spice the action. But it begins with the punchline of a story, as if warning the viewer that the film’s satisfactions will not necessarily come with much back-up.

The plot’s the thing, and to reveal too much would be pointless. It plays out neatly enough, setting up an antagonism, allowing the viewer to see that something is afoot in the preparation of a crime, and then dissecting the aftermath as the police work to accuse, and then clear the perpetrator. We are half let into a secret whose revelation becomes increasingly superfluous, but it is all put together with high efficiency – the equivalent of that living room, or perhaps the shiny offices of the unspecified company where the two women run the show. Their sequestered, tunnel-vision world is well evoked, in the skyscraper cockpit offices and tactically-timed meetings. But all they are doing is working on “projects” and other vague jargon; the English dialogue of their American colleagues is semi-parodic.

Scott Thomas is thorny, malevolent, and superb, but possessed, perhaps, of a desperate vulnerability. Sagnier runs a gamut of personalities and fully suggests the slippery, driven identity beneath, without ever really revealing it (rightly), and so gets away with a very actress-y job. Given everyone’s duplicitousness, it’s hard to know how far to trust the lesbian subtext, but it’s not even that important. In a sense, Corneau has made an archetype of a film, a classy French thriller with psychological mechanisms and a bitter ending. It is handsomely-mounted, but its complexity gradually drifts further and further away from ingenious, albeit to the strains of a very nice Pharaoh Sanders score.

d Alain Corneau p Saïd Ben Saïd, Alexander Emmert sc Alain Corneau, Natalie Carter ph Yves Angelo ed Thierry Derocles pd Katia Wyszkop m Pharaoh Sanders cast Ludivine Sagnier, Kristen Scott-Thomas, Patrick Mille, Guillaume Marquet, Gérald Laroche, Julien Rochefort, Olivier Rabourdin, Marie Guillard
(2010, Fr, 106m)

Vincere

Marco Bellocchio burst onto the international scene in 1965 with Fists in the Pocket aged 26, but his profile has remained relatively low since then. However, in competition at Cannes 2009, Vincere was widely hailed as a masterful epic of twentieth-century Italy; the epic politico-historical nature is presented more by implication than representation, however, as it tells the story of Mussolini’s secret first wife and son, and of her lifelong incarceration in a couple of nun-run lunatic asylums, ignored, forgotten and deliberately erased from history.

Totally anchoring the film is a fine performance by Giovanna Mezzogiorno as Lady Ida Dalser, although she’s given precious little to do but suffer with desperate dignity, clinging to the truth that is constantly denied her, a sense of innate resilience ever-present in her eyes even as her circumstances become more and more pathetic. In fact, the start of the film looks as though it will follow Mussolini himself; somewhat disorienting editing shifts us between 1907 and 1914 as he dares God to strike him dead, desperately rails against mediocrity (Napoleon was “only” a general) and blithely takes the proceeds from Ida’s selling of her furniture and possessions to fund his “Il popolo d’Italia” newspaper before switching from pacifist-liberal to fascist wannabe-dictator. Vitality and audience interest leave the film along with him, somewhere before halfway through, as Ida’s story is consistently stagnated by stillborn attempts to persuade her gaolers of the truth, and to communicate with her son, who also ends up in a lunatic asylum, dead at 26. Filippo Timi plays father and son in such style that one regrets a missed opportunity – despite his head’s not being nearly fat enough for Mussolini padre, his grotesque and abandoned impersonation (as the son) of his father’s newsreel appearance hints at the compelling character study that might have been.

The use of newsreel footage is the other striking element of the film; from the semi-abstract credit sequence, a montage of distorted naval cannons, existing footage is seamlessly integrated into the narrative, either to illustrate Mussolini’s thoughts and dreams, or as real-life sources of headlines and information covering the Sarajevo incident, the papal coronation of Pius XII, and Mussolini’s rise to power. The deft melding of different sources not only compensates for some oddly shaky cutting elsewhere, but also serves to keep in mind the wider context of the story, as Mussolini’s ruthless rise to power develops directly from his early, heartless transgression ("vincere" means “to win”), which in light of the fascist nuns who guard Ida, comes to seem more and more like a metaphor for what he did to the country. But technical facility and a certain amount of visual beauty – Ida scaling the two-storey barred windows to scatter letters in the moonlit snow is stunning – cannot make up for the dead air of imprisonment that overwhelms the film.

d Mario Bellocchio p Mario Gianani sc Mario Bellocchio, Daniella Ceselli ph Daniele Cipri ed Francesca Calvelli pd Marco Dentici m Carlo Crivelli cast Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Filippo Timi, Fausto Russo Alesi, Michaela Cescon, Pier Georgio Bellocchio, Corrado Invernizzi, Paolo Pierobon, Bruno Cariello, Francesca Picozza
(2009, It/Fr, 128m, col & b/w)

Domaine

It all sounds pretty French: teenage boy falls in love with his older aunt, attractive, smart, and been around the block a few times, as incarnated to perfection by Béatrice Dalle. The expected dynamic is subverted, however, even obliquely in the opening scene, and the well-worn elements of such a relationship are treated as though anew, with little interest in misplaced teenage priapism.

It’s established swiftly that Nadia’s milieu is one of sophisticated, intellectual bohemianism. She is a rather tortured mathematics professor; Pierre is not yet old enough to buy cigarettes. More teasingly established, although he dotes on her as a willing peon, he may not be quite the typical moony teenage boy, with a sexual interest directed elsewhere than his aunt.

Not French but Austrian, in fact, writer/director Patric Chiha’s primary motivation was to film La Dalle. The film is less a young man’s rite of passage than the exposure of cracks in a tough, hurting, older woman. The role is one of those magnificently intense, suffering, emotional ones that conjure the spectres of Davis and Crawford. Dalle is predictably terrific, with her aged, goblin, jolie-laideur, and that exquisitely French sense of noble, justified world-weariness.

It’s quite forgivable, therefore, to hope for a Dalle explosion – it’s part of her star appeal – but Chiha’s tone is set by the slightly melancholy, night-time riverside campfire. Expression of emotion is subtle and deliberate, the film’s rhythm an almost narcotized blur. Episodes repeat themselves in a steady accretion of character, as Pierre and Nadia walk around Paris a lot. For all the frequent moments of apparent inaction, however, the characters are never doing nothing. Both Dalle and Isaïe Sultan amply inhabit these moments when Chiha allows them (not so) simply to be.

An outburst of some kind is missed, then, but Chiha’s constraint is appropriate to the metaphysical straitjacket this fiercely intelligent woman feels herself to be in, and to her somewhat mute nephew. A deliberate deceleration of pace is carried over even into the black-hole nightclub we repeatedly revisit, where the broiling sea of dancers is mesmerically slowed-down. The pain of the film’s emotional revelations and disappointments is never absent, however, most clearly expressed in the muted desperation of Nadia’s fellow residents at an Alpine sanatorium.

Nadia’s relationship with Pierre is therefore made obscure and complex, shot through with each of their own selfish needs. Furthermore, she professes a fundamental mistrust of words, and her sometimes-contorted forms of communication are symptomatic of a turning-in on oneself, a somewhat frightened self-isolation. Pierre meanwhile becomes his own man as it were, taking center stage in his life and in the nightclub, in a sequence that drifts charmingly away from reality. Other sequences are piqued by the strange wanderings of background extras, and a dark fairytale notion of being lost in the woods builds as the film’s central metaphor. Chiha is unafraid to sink his actors into a soft, dusky murk of underlighting, and the steady understatement builds to a climax of unexpected, sinister cruelty, and literal obscurity. Quiet, careful, and rather beguiling.

d/sc Patric Chiha p Charlotte Vincent ph Pascal Poucet ed Karina Ressler pd Maria Gruber cast Béatrice Dalle, Isaïe Sultan, Alain Libolt, Raphaël Bouvet, Sylvia Rohrer, Udo Samel, Tatiana Vialle, Bernd Birkhahn
(2009, Fr/Aus, 110m)

Viva Riva!

The troubled political history of The Democratic Republic of Congo has consistently obstructed homegrown film production, either through colonialism or civil war. Belgian and French productions have shot there (most notably La vie est belle, 1997) but there has never been a truly homegrown production until now. Viva Riva! is the first feature by Djo Munga, who learned his craft in Brussels, but is Congo-born and bred, and has made a very creditable success of his ambition to produce a properly Congolese feature that stands up comfortably to good-natured action thrillers from anywhere else in the world.

After ten years in Angola, good-time gangster Riva returns to fuel-strapped Kinshasa with a lorryload of gas, stolen from an Angolese crime lord now hot on his trail. Intent on living the high-life, against all advice Riva sets his sights on Nora, the fiery moll of local gangster boss Azor. Helped by a female army commandante whose sister they hold hostage, the Angolese beat a violent trail towards Riva, whilst he skips around the attentions of Azor’s goons. As they draw closer, the body-count rises.

There is an undoubted ring of authenticity to the bustling, noisy crowds and the crumbling buildings, only enhanced by a fine soundtrack of local music, modern and classic. One of Munga's aims is to show life in Kinshahsa as it really is, and the opening sequence is a very neat introduction to the seething humanity, the traffic, the makeshift solutions, and the constant hustling, with money as both primary goal and foundation of society. We see inside a thumping club, apparently little different from any other in the world, but with that distinctive tinkling guitar gliding over the beats; more distinctive are some fine firelit drum dancing, and a strange brothel where the women wear traditional masks and chalky body paint, cavorting in pairs as a third throws shapes amidst billowing veils. I’m not sure how true to life that might be, but it makes for a splendidly trippy mood. Good use is made of distinctive locations, from Riva’s higgledy-piggledy apartment complex to Azor’s rather moldy mansion, and there’s a terrific gun chase in the brick-walled maze of a roofless building. The Angolans supply a derogatory external perspective (albeit from a long-antagonistic neighbour state) but Munga himself is happy to show the electricity outages and conditions that look like poverty in a city where the police hold only precarious sway: it’s basically a free-for-all.

Part of the film’s success in portraying life in the capital comes from its tapestry of characters. Even the goons get little moments, and tangential figures like the street kid whom Riva befriends and the priest who wants to buy the gas are given space to register; Azor’s sexual peccadilloes are gradually drawn out; and a little rubber-ball lesbian hooker keeps turning up in dayglo colors and good hats. Allowing so many characters their own lines of action creates a web of motivation that is handled with skill, and Munga manoeuvers them neatly from one situation to the next; another plus is that if someone needs to get Riva out of trouble, there’s always a stray character who can be set up to do the job.

The film allows room for some of Riva’s family problems as well as a surrogate mother at the whorehouse, and his playful pursuit of Nora provides some steamy sex scenes, including a well-executed encounter through a bathroom window. But the film keeps up a good smart pace, driven by the Angolans’ quest; they are also helpful – explicitly! – in dispensing with characters that are no longer useful, and as their trail gets bloodier we can start to see why Riva is so cheerful – life in Kinshasa does indeed seem good compared to what we can only imagine he experienced on his rise through the Angolan criminal ranks. His carefree attitude is somewhat contagious, pretty everyone dresses sharp, the music’s great, and the editing is snappy without being too flashy. None of the characters is shown in an entirely negative light: Azor’s little Caesar is more blustering than threatening, and even the nasty Angolans are frequently played for laughs. It’s a good time.

For all that the film’s various strands are woven neatly together, however, a few elements go astray. The relationship between Nora and Azor is fleshed out to be more than arbitrary but tantalisingly less than satisfactory. For something like the same reason, and despite a spirited performance from Manie Malone, her motivational flipflops only just hold water; likewise her abrupt exit from the film. There is a ring of archetype about Nora as there is about all of the characters, which is not necessarily overcome by letting the performers shine. Excursions into Riva’s psyche are similarly suggestive rather than revealing, and his final cackling moments in the film have a Cagneyish psychosis that would have been interesting a little earlier. Most awkward, however, is the commandante, who is afforded a convenient ambivalence of motivation by her sister’s abduction, and who survives several episodes which should rightly have seen her dead, most ludicrously at the climax.

But none of this matters too much, for this is really a gangster fairy-tale set against a real-life backdrop, both executed to a high standard. The socio-political commentary is not intended to be searching, but does appear to be honestly representative. The action is handled better than efficiently; likewise the network of motivation, character and plot. No allowances need be made for Congo’s non-existent film industry: Munga has made a world-class movie, notches above many others of the type, full of detail, and allowing room for a good range of charismatic performances from a mixed of cast of professionals and first-timers. Enjoyable and engaging.

d/sc Djo Tunda Wa Munga p Boris van Gils, Michael Goldberg, Djo Tunda Wa Munga ph Antoine Roch ed Yves Langlois, Pascal Latil pd Philippe Van Herwijnen m Cyril Latef, Louis Vyncke, Congopunq cast Patsha Bay Mukuna, Manie Malone, Hoji Fortuna, Alex Herbo, Malene Longange, Diplome Amekindra, Angelique Mbumba
(2010, Con/Fra/Bel, 98m)

Applaus

A treat, if not quite a splendid one, for fans of the magnificent Paprika Steen, this tells the story of successful Danish actress and recovering alcoholic Thea as she tries to return to the lives of her two young sons, whilst playing Martha onstage in Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? Steen is magnificent, a wreck, hanging on with hairspray, mascara and cigarettes. She’s the absolute centre of the film’s attention – not many actors could so resiliently shoulder as many unflattering close-ups as she – and she is better than her material.

Direction is largely in a detached observational mode, using underplayed action to imply emotional heft, but rarely trusting to the effectiveness of a long take. Steen and the juddery camera recall the heady days of Dogma, which taught if nothing else the superfluity of most movie music; pleasant enough as its sparse use is here, it’s needed solely to stretch out dead-space montages. There’s little that feels risky: Steen’s bravery is a given, but it’s barely stretched. This is the sort of film about which one feels let down because the potential – and ambition – is great, but the result is so sketchy. Jesper Tøffner’s camerawork does have its moments, with some striking, almost monochrome compositions (and a particularly effective focus pull); the script, however, is as reticent as the direction, its emotional meat confined largely to frequent recursions to the Albee play (Steen’s acclaimed 2008 performance in Copenhagen). As the film progresses, however, these excerpts slide from window of suggestion into Thea’s past life, to merely facile scene transitions, with no exploration of the parallels and forces between the character and the actress. Playing real-life in a quieter mode simply makes it appear less interesting.

The title implies rather more focus on the specific psychological priorities of the performing artist than is even considered, a few throwaway comments aside, and the strangeness of Thea’s encounter with a barfly, and later neurotic love-making (sort of), remain awkward rather than awkwardly revealing. The question of whether or not Thea has changed to the extent of being able competently to look after her children is entirely neutered – it is less important whether she has or not, than whether others think she has or not; the fatal flaw, however, is that so intently focused as it is on Thea, the film gives itself no room to breathe life into anyone else (the paper-thin role of her ex-husband benefits greatly from the characterful face of Michael Falch) and despite Steen’s best efforts, Thea remains basically a stock character. Makes one long to see all of her Martha.

d Martin Zandvliet p Mikael Chr. Rieks sc Martin Zandvliet, Anders Frithiof August ph Jesper Tøffner ed Per Sandholt pd Rasmus Cold m Sune Martin cast Paprika Steen, Michael Falch, Sara-Marie Maltha, Shanti Roney, Otto Leonardo Steen Rieks, Noel Koch-Søfeldt, Malou Reymann, Uffe Rørbæk Madsen
(2009, Den, 85m)

Café noir (Kape neuwareu)

Jung Sung-il’s staggering debut is filled with long takes, usually defiantly devoid of action, thought-out to the minutest degree (he’s a film critic), and runs over three hours. Even in the emptiest-seeming shots, however, there’s something that nags at the interest, a suspicion that Jung will come up with something really arresting, and that happens, as it turns out, in the quietest moments: perseverance and attention are rewarded by a rich and deceptively detailed tapestry of a film.

Jung is unabashed in his admiration for and appreciation of his sources: the film takes the form of a double adaptation, prefaced by a title “Essentials of World Literature for Boys and Girls”, and an ironical neon fast food blessing, before it launches into a loose adaptation of Goethe’s Young Werther. It’s Christmas Eve in Soeul, a chilly emotional (and implied political) climate, and Young-Soo (Shin Ha-kyun of Thirst and Sympathy for Mr Vengeance) is a music teacher having an affair with the mother of one of his students, who declares mantra-like “we can’t go on like this.”

Ever so slowly, he fails to kill her husband and fails to win her back, retreating to the purgatory of the subway before launching himself from a ferry. However that’s not the end of him; a subaqueous L’Atalante vision in a wedding dress informs him he can expect nothing but torment from love and (following the perfect halfway placement of the credits as he wanders through a bookstore and peruses the two source novels) he emerges to become the protagonist of Dostoyevsky’s White Nights. He meets a young woman awaiting the return of her lover and she tells him the story of how they parted a year previously. He is meant to be lending a brotherly ear, but naturally, over the course of four nights’ waiting, he falls in love, only to see his passion dashed once again.

It’s a wonderful story, and an audacious choice for adaptation given that it has previously been handled (in neither instance quite successfully) by both Visconti and Bresson (Ophuls’ Werther is a damp squib). Jung doesn’t quite conjure it either, the true anguish of the conclusion dimmed by our having been told so repeatedly of the impermanence and unreliability of love, that the outcome seems more resignedly inevitable than heart-breakingly tragic.

This pessimism is most explicit in the film’s treatment of love, but takes in both religion (God is cruel), from the three wise men who sit outside a whorehouse to the school girl’s passion play without a resurrection (to allow those who believe and those who do not to decide on their own ending), to a fascination with the fabric of the city itself. The film functions as a portrait of the metropolis, with long takes of modern facades and lengthy road journeys illustrating the empty modernity of contemporary Korean life. The director’s note for the press release, in the form of a poem, ends “The movie’s ‘dead time’ is the real time of Korea, the time in which our despair dwells”. With such an aesthetic, conjuring an atmosphere of ersatz soullessness risks being self-defeating, but equally there are moments here that reach for the sublime, and some come close. An impromptu dance sequence makes up for in intensity what it lacks in dynamism or originality; and the long (never easy) backstory of White Nights is delivered in one long (and certainly not easy) almost unbroken take by Jung Yu-mi. But it is one of those scenes, I suspect, where you must understand the inflections and nuances of Korean considerably better than I do to judge its effectiveness. Others do not work, most frequently because of the accompanying music – or more properly, arrangements, since we are talking here of Bach, Donizetti and others – that falls short of the intended transcendence, or because of the aforementioned soullessness. In addition, much of the effectiveness of this sort of slow cinema lies in the quality of the image; the visual aesthetic is closely controlled, but despite some elegantly gliding camerawork, the compositions are less often arresting than merely interesting; it’s also worth adding that the perennially-hyped Red camera shows itself to be, without the most careful handling, still prone to the nasty hard edges and blown-out highlights endemic to digital video.

Jung was introduced at the festival screening I saw (LA, 2010, in absentia) as a filmmaker with a lot to say. That is not quite true: what he has to say is that love sucks and is quite a lot like religion, and that this may be reflective of, or even caused by, the empty artificiality of modern Korea. But he has a wealth of interesting ways in which to say it and boundless ambition; it’s a bold – and wonderful – risk he takes in making a film such as this, as his first or any other. Whilst self-indulgence hovers close at hand, it should nonetheless prove to be one for the ages: a career to watch has begun.

d/sc Jung Sung-il p Kim Doo-Heon ph Kim Jun-young ed Mun In-dae pd Jung Hye-young cast Shin Ha-kyun, Jung In-sung, Jeong Yu-mi, Kim Hye-na, Moon Jung-hee, Yozoh
(2009, SKor, 197m, col & b/w)

La caída (The Fall)

Once upon a time, Argentinian Leopoldo Torre Nilsson was a staple on the international festival circuit, a well-respected director of psychological melodramas and hothouse atmosphere; to some eyes he was a little too obvious, respectable and over-exposed (David Thomson’s eyes to be exact, and so not entirely accurate), but since the mid-seventies his profile has inexplicably plummeted, and today not a single title in his good-sized filmography is easy to see outside of rare festival retrospectives, like the one in LA a couple of years ago.

As he hit his stride at the end of the fifties, Nilsson was most frequently collaborating with his novelist/screenwriter wife Beatriz Guido and actress Elsa Daniel, and for much of his career he was most interested in the minds of women. Daniel plays the lead here, as beautiful and elegant literature student Albertina, young and provincial but with strong core of independence. She takes a room in a Buenos Aires boarding house otherwise occupied by a bedbound mother and four uncannily self-sufficient children, along with a locked door to the room of their mysterious and absent uncle, Lucas.

Nilsson’s canted angles and looming close-ups courtesy of DP Alberto Etchebehere, and Juan Carlos Paz’s modernist orchestral score lay on the unease (sometimes a bit thickly), and as the silent mother eerily forewarns via her chalk board, the children are indeed mean little liars. Even if their signature meal of tiny roasted birds is deliciously unnerving, they’re not greatly threatening, for the most part more annoying than to be feared; the eldest wants to boss Albertina around like the man of the house, as does the delightfully self-important young lawyer Indarreguis whom she starts to see, whose railing against the frivolity of modern life is amusingly backed up by the hellish orgy of a jazz club (an old order is certainly passing).

The fall of the title is that subjugation to which Albertina will not bow, accepting Indarreguis as her sovereign master. Nor will she bow to Lucas when he finally appears, seducing her with his well-traveled world-weariness (his bedroom is full of the magical artefacts of père Jules’ cabin in L’Atalante), and a line about seeing her in every port, every woman. It’s not clear how much of a line it actually is – he appears to be sincere – but Albertina is still having none of it, preferring her independence to being told what to do, where to live, what books to buy.

If the film never quite gels and Albertina’s character never quite come into focus – although a modern woman in many ways, she shows herself to be still partly at least an old fashioned Argentinian bourgeoise in her shock at the children’s half-clad bathing and sacrilegious communing – it’s still hard not to warm to a movie in which a bookstore copy of The Magic Mountain prompts a flashback to the heroine’s time of reading it; and if the children don’t seem as sinister as one might expect, it is apparent in the final moments that we should perhaps have had more sympathy for them.

d/p Leopoldo Torre Nilsson sc Beatriz Guido, Leopoldo Torre Nilsson ph Alberto Etchebehere ed
Jorge Gárate pd Emilio Rodríguez Mentasti, Juan José Saavedra m Juan Carlos Paz cast Elsa Daniel, Duilio Marzio, Lautaro Murúa, Lydia Lamaison, Hebe Marbec, Oscar Orlegui, Carlos López Monet, Mariela Reyes, Pinky
(1959, Arg, 84m, b/w)

Wake In Fright

 

Ted Kotcheff’s Australian psychodrama was almost a lost film. He tells the story of no prints, the lost negative, and a last minute discovery in a due to be destroyed storage unit; after two years’ searching and a frame-by-frame restoration it not only looks splendid but also reveals itself to be a film well worth saving.

It tells of school teacher John Grant (Gary Bond) stopping overnight in a remote but rowdy outback town on his way home to Sydney for the holidays. He’s initially contemptuous of the locals and their bluff, beery ways, and rather piqued at finding himself the intelligent outsider. One has some sympathy with his reaction – even if the men of the town are presented as uniformly honest, friendly and hospitable, it’s still the sort of place you can rape a man’s mother, but commit a worse crime by refusing a drink with him. And this is the cause of Grant’s problems – a beer-fueled night and he’s out of cash and stranded, and things are only going to get worse.

His Virgil through this hellish three dark nights of the soul is alcoholic doctor Donald Pleasance, on fine form with quasi-philosophical ramblings and trademark eye-rolling. There’s a dead-faced temptress to leaven all the hyper-masculine rowdiness, but the inevitable drunken homo-eroticism is the last straw for Grant. The through-line of his insecure masculinity is kept low-key, and it’s actually better for the film that he’s a rather unlikable prig.

Along with the oppressive physicality of the outback and its people – all dirt, sweat, and beer – the film has a striking quasi-ethnographic feel, particularly in the crowded backroom coin toss game which Grant initially dismisses as childish, before being caught up in the excitement; a strange “lest we forget” interlude in a midnight bar; and a horrible nighttime ’roo hunt. There’s not much actual fright in it, though plenty that’s frightful, and it looks very ’70s and Australian nowadays, but remains not only a spot-on portrait of a spiraling Under The Volcano-type lost weekend that handles its serious themes with restraint, and casts an admirably nonjudgmental eye on a remote and semi-barbarous way of life. Kotcheff also tells the story of an Australian screening where one audience member stood up, pointed at the screen, and protested “That’s not us”, to which another voice piped up “Sit down, mate, that is us”.

d Ted Kotchoff p George Willoughby sc Evan Jones ph Brian West ed Anthony Buckley pd Dennis Gentle m John Scott cast Gary Bond, Donald Pleasance, Chips Rafferty, Sylvia Kay, Jack Thompson, Peter Whittle, Al Thomas, John Meillon, John Armstrong, Slim DeGrey
(1971, Oz/US, 114m)

Stella

A rather nice, if cosy, trip back to 1970s’ Paris: Stella is eleven years old and starting a new term at a new, posh school. How she got there we do not know – her parents run a café and boarding house for welfare cases and cheerful lowlifes – and she is out of her depth socially and academically: she has no friends and no interest in or understanding of her schoolwork, though she can beat the café patrons at cards and knows all about football. Gradually, however, friendship grows with a round little redhead, Gladys, top of the class, and Stella finds she enjoys reading, devours Balzac, and is rather touchingly moved by Duras.

Her struggles are muted (even if a final one is rather serious) and the most pressing obstacle to overcome is passing the school year so as not to repeat. But Stella floats through it all with a dreamy air, and the downplayed drama matches her mien; her voiceover, observations and occasional daydreams are deftly handled and often rather amusing, and the flowering of a first crush is neatly conveyed in a single shot as she walks behind the object of her affection.

The film is basically autobiographical, written and directed by Sylvie Verheyde (and nicely scored by Nousdeuxlabande along with some great late 70s French pop), and whilst it does not amount to a great deal, it wins on the skill and restraint of the direction, and a charmingly unostentatious central performance from Léora Barbara, onscreen for almost the entire running time and effortlessly carrying the film (it also features, in a disappointingly small role, one of the final performances from Guillaume Depardieu who was shaping up to be a greater actor than his father before his premature but perhaps inevitable demise).

d/sc Sylvie Verheyde p Bruno Berthemy ph Nicolas Gaurin ed Christel Dewynter cast Léora Barbara, Mélissa Rodriguès, Laëtitia Guerard, Karole Rocher, Benjamin Biolay, Guillaume Depardieu
(2008, Fr, 103m)

The White Ribbon (Das weiße Band - eine deutsche Kindergeschichte)

In a north German village in the final days before World War I, a series of mysterious acts of violence unsettle the inhabitants: the doctor’s horse is felled by a tripwire, the Baron’s son is found suspended and roundly caned, and worse. From the austere and silent opening credits, this is a self-evidently serious film. It’s shot in textured black and brightest white, with a deliberately mundane look that is for the most part successfully unseductive. One can only assume it is a specific aesthetic decision, because the control of pacing, framing (in particular), lighting, focus even, is so tightly deliberate. In terms of pure mise en scène the film rarely puts a foot in the wrong direction.

Not to say that the film is all doom and gloom. There is a genuinely sweet romance between the school teacher and the baroness’s nanny Eva, and the scene where her father unwittingly interrogates them into an engagement is very funny. But the best scene in the film is a quiet breakfast conversation between the doctor’s young son and his 14 year-old sister (Roxane Duran) as he questions her about death and she answers thoughtfully and honestly. The boy is good, but Duran is outstanding.

It is the school teacher telling us the story who serves to put a curious spin on the air of menace and unease in the village. We are told of these things by the teacher, but for the most part rarely actually see them in progress. More attention is paid to the effect on a farming family of an explicable accident and a confessed-to crop-destroying misdemeanour. It’s as though the characters we actually see on screen are being made to close their eyes to what’s going on around them. In the end, when the school teacher professes his belief that the children (led by creepy Rhoda Penmark-like Klara) are responsible, eyes are more explicitly, threateningly, closed.



This is to reinforce the voiceover claim in the opening moments that the story “could clarify something about what happened in our country”. The children will of course grow into the generation that fully embraced National Socialism in the 1930s, and the petri dish of their childhood is depicted as sternly, unbendingly, and hypocritically authoritarian. The baron is almost a cartoon feudal lord, contemptuous of his workforce, of grudging largesse at harvest-time, and a tyrant in his home; the doctor shows himself to be inhumanly cruel; the steward administers a particularly vicious beating to his son (also off-screen, but less pointedly so); and the pastor revels in the repeated discipline and humiliation of his children. As the baroness puts it, the village is a place of “malice, envy, apathy and brutality.” Most of it is confined to the home, and this is a place where in discussion of culpability for the accident at the mill, a son can respond to his father’s “how do you know they’re guilty?” with “how do you know they’re innocent?” And, wouldn’t you know it, the white ribbon of the title turns out to be an armband that the pastor’ son is forced to wear as a momento symbol of innocence and purity. Thud me with irony, Michael.

We never learn who commits the unsettling crimes. The school teacher’s suggestion (though not in the voiceover) that the children are responsible is entirely believable; the nature of the unsolved acts has more the air of childish prank than adult viciousness and we are sure of the perpetrator of only one violent, albeit private, crime, and it is a child. But that act is in direct response to unfair punishment, and the final crime scene contains a note concerning punishment for sins passed down through the generations, which while tying the children to their parents’ cruelty, feels hardly the work of a child. But if not the children then who? It might perhaps be a disgruntled farmer lashing out at the capitalist oppressors, but that seems unlikely given the final crime and the banality of the cabbage-cutting episode. The gossips’ explanation, as related by the voiceover, that the doctor and the midwife are responsible is similarly unconvincing, though their fate at the end is tantalisingly uncertain. Or perhaps some unwell unknown is marking his mark on the world – who can say where and in whom evil will take root?



And this ambiguity is a big problem. There’s no reason to provide an explicit answer of course, but the air of unease is neither unsettling enough nor properly earned to carry the inconclusive ending. An instructive comparison would be with The Turn of the Screw or even the strange goings-on of Wisconsin Death Trip, where the shadow of the maleficent supernatural hangs over matters and evade explanation. In this instance Haneke wants us to believe in the children’s culpability, in order to foretell future history, refusing to be explicit for the sake of a not-quite-successfully eerie atmosphere, or perhaps more simply, to keep his cards haughtily to himself and pretend he’s posing questions rather than answers. What we are left with is the finely nuanced and masterfully constructed portrait of a place of oppression and violence, where the children who will grow up to perpetuate that on a massive scale may or may not have started young, is designed solely to prod the audience towards horror. There’s a reason why film-making 101 warns against ambiguity for its own sake: at best it’s self-defeating, and at worst, contemptuous of the audience. But that is Haneke’s stock in trade, the king of having his cake and eating it. His film may provide plenty of food for thought, but it is far more self-servingly provocative and feels far less honest than the gentler and humbler Heimat. One can only dream of what the greatest chronicler of twentieth-century Germany, Fassbinder, might have made of his plans to lay into the same questions.

d/sc Michael Haneke p Stefan Arndt, Veit Heiduschka, Michael Katz ph Christian Berger ed Monika Willi pd Christoph Kanter cast  Christian Freidel, Leonie Benesch, Ulrich Tukur, Ursina Lardi, Fion Mutert, Michael Kranz, Burghart Klaußner, Rainer Bock, Roxane Duran, Susanne Lothar, Leonard Proxauf
(2009, Germ/Aus/Fr/It, 144m, b/w)

Went The Day Well?

A rousing WWII propaganda/up-bucking piece from Ealing, this is an unjustly obscure title by an unjustly obscure director – Alberto Cavalcanti, who would have run the MOI’s film unit had he not been a gay Brazilian – that far transcends its duty as a lesson on vigilance. In fact, it bears comparison with the Archers’ A Canterbury Tale for its evocation of something intangibly, inherently English in the countryside, but it’s considerably more exciting.

We are introduced by the church warder of a sleepy English village to a gravestone marked with German names, a result of the “Battle of Brawley Inn”. British soldiers arrive to be billeted in the village, and are swiftly revealed to be Nazis in disguise, sent ahead of a planned invasion. The villagers resist. Although designed as a warning to be vigilant for spies, fifth columnists and undercover Jerries, there is no labouring of the propagandist elements here. Instead, it is a very tight thriller, elevated by finely sketched characterisations, and a true sense of something fundamentally decent being violated. We may laugh today at the clipped accents and manners of the various village types, and it’s partly the fact that the Germans don’t display those good manners that leads to their being discovered; but the careful, efficient acting and the film’s construction and direction easily override anything old-fashionedly off-putting – Graham Greene's hand in the original story no doubt helps) . Unity of time ramps up the tension (Sunday morning arrives perfectly in the middle of a scene). Unity of place likewise: we are introduced to parts of the village and to its occupants with excellent efficiency, from the plucky poacher’s lad to the timid girl on the phone exchange. Each of their roles in the resistance grows organically out of their normal role in village life. Starting with a number of different strands and people concurrently, Cavalcanti ramps up the tension by flipping with tight control from one to another and then, by playing the undercover hand early on, allows us to fear immediately for the characters for whom we already feel concern.

The tension lets up for never a moment, from start to finish, be the lady of the manor discoursing over dinner with her disguised guests, or the good-hearted policeman being stalked in a rain-drenched cemetery by the insidious turncoat. Cavalcanti and DP Cooper use to great advantage the chiaroscuro of the church in which the villagers are held captive, and a thunderstorm is always a good idea. But aside from the film’s tense onward rush of events, its other great asset are the bursts of violence, startlingly realistic, implicitly explicit, sickeningly abrupt and often silent, and quite likely to dispense with sympathetic characters. The villagers are subjected to numerous strokes of believably bad luck in trying to get news out for help, but none of them is the sort to give up; spinsters and old shop-keepers will be roused to cunning and violent resistance in order to defend the decency of England (it’s the women who suss out the situation first, and they get to show their mettle just as much as the men). To be sure, there’s little humanity in the depiction of the Germans – a thoroughly rotten lot – and things get a bit visually muddled when the real Tommies turn up. But that’s nothing compared to the great economy of characterisation and “get on with it” attitude in the unsettlingly realistic face of sudden death, filmed with dynamic style and unflagging pace as a perfect evocation of the bucolic idyll of sleepy English country life. It is something of a masterpiece.

d Alberto Cavalcanti p Michael Balcon sc John Dighton, Diana Morgan, Angus MacPhail ph Wilkie Cooper ed Sidney Cole ad Thomas N. Morahan m William Walton cast Leslie Banks, C.V. France, Mervyn Johns, Valerie Taylor, Thora Hird, Basil Sidney, Elizabeth Allen, Marie Lohr, Harry Fowler, Norman Pierce, Frank Lawton, David Farrar
(1942, UK, 92m, b/w)

Chantal Akerman in the Seventies

Click to enlarge

From Film International, vol.10 nos 4-5 (2012)

Our Beloved Month Of August

I nearly missed the beginning of this film, for various reasons, and it would have been a shame not to see the charming opening, where a vixen prowls around a chicken coop, takes the plunge and comes up empty-handed (-pawed?). Perhaps this is a metaphor for the making of the film. Portuguese director Miguel Gomes and his crew traveled to the region of Arganil (a popular August holiday destination) to make a conventional narrative film with the local inhabitants. But a producer died, money dried up, and the movie as we have it opens as a documentary. And, it must be said, a pretty dull one. Much time on screen and soundtrack is given over to the village bands, proudly trotting out their MOR night after night, of a woeful genre in which Tony Maneiro and Julio Iglesias are acknowledged classics. Or else we are treated to interminable ramblings from various villagers and repeated visits to the drunken fool who likes to jump off the handsome stone bridge every carnival. The patchwork of episodes ranges from banal to irrelevant, sometimes needlessly repetitive (unless, perhaps again, as a vague metaphor for the film as a whole). More intriguingly, however, a couple of scenes near the start introduce us to the Gomes and his crew, as he sits with his producer and a ridiculously enormous script, discussing how none of it has been filmed and actors have not even been cast. A little later, two girls will approach the quoit-playing, asking to be cast, and after a while, seamlessly, we find that they have.

For at around the half-way mark, the film turns into a fiction. A roller-hockey boy to whom we’ve just been introduced plays Hélder, with his parents visiting his father’s brother, played by the producer, and his daughter Tânia, played by the fire warden Sónia. Hélder joins their band and eventually gets it on with his cousin. Meanwhile, Tânia’s mother has gone missing some time before, and there’s an increasing suggestion of incest in their reduced household (emphatically denied by heavy-handed shots of blood-stained sheets after the teens’ night of passion).

People and elements from the first half recur, and reality continues to intrude – a conversation is surreptitiously recorded between two of the (non-)actors, one of whom is anxious about last-minute line changes, the other of whom hums the song that will become the film’s theme tune. The camera style remains the same as in the documentary portion, bland and (in light of the emphasis on the ghastly music) perhaps deliberately rather ugly; one of the few attempts at something more takes place as the teens kiss for the first time on the bridge, all lens flare and the white light of burning passion, but even with the sound of the marching band behind them it fails to convey the implied exhilaration.

By the end, even some of the terrible songs are starting to sound good, although that’s partly thanks to Sónia’s rather nice untrained voice, and it’s easy to resent the meander we’ve taken to get to this point. The film represents a fantastically interesting concept, but the documentary elements are presented with such little panache, and the fictional narrative is so slight that it proves unrewarding in all except theory (exceptions being the strange personal insult song sung at a village feast, and the art-house low point of Hélder wanking over photos of his Tânia-doppelganger aunt).

The lackadaisical pace and focus could be defended as commitments to the rhythm and textures of real life, but at 2½ hours long it begs considerable indulgence; plenty of people have walked out of this movie, but it’s a shame to miss the final scene: Hélder’s taken the bus back home (thus eliminating the attractive possibility that we’ve been seeing the dramatised story of an old man who rambled for a while at the start) and we cut to the silence of the forest. A tripod stands in the grass; the soundman is peacefully at work in a glade. Gomes confronts him about mysterious noises on the soundtrack which were not present when they filmed the corresponding scenes. Vasco the sound guy explains he’s not like other people, and that if he can hear music playing in the forest he will record it because that is his reality. Meanwhile, the credits roll over shots of the crew, each with representative tools of their trades. It is quite charming, and displays a wit and sense of the magic of cinema all too subdued in the rest of the picture.

d Miguel Gomes p Sandro Aguilar, Thomas Ordonneau, Luís Urbano sc Miguel Gomes, Telmo Churro, Mariano Rocardo ph Rui Poças ed Telmo Churro, Miguel Gomes ad Bruno Duarte cast Sónia Bandeira, Fábio Oliveira, Joaquim Carvalho, Manuel Soares
(2008, Por/Fr, 147m)

J’ai tué ma mère

I Killed My Mother is the debut feature from 20 year-old Quebecois Xavier Dolan, Canadian TV child actor and now writer, director and star of a splash at Cannes (2009), a hit at Toronto, and poised at the start of what promises to be a fascinating and passionate career.

16 year-old Hubert Minel has in some ways the archetypal push-pull (mostly push) teenage relationship with his (single) mother, but it’s ramped up to a near-hysterical degree. Everything she does annoys him: she listens to a stupid radio station, she eats wrong, and if he’s selfish and childish it’s because she raised him poorly. Sometimes car-rides will descend into shouting matches, but sometimes she’ll weather Hubert’s indignation, calmly resigned. And it’s not all him; his mother can lose her temper too, invading his school class or petulantly spoiling an evening on which he has actually made an effort to be nice.

But they have their more tender moments as well, and Hubert’s confession that he is incapable of loving his mother but incapable also of not loving her reveals the crux of the matter; one of the film’s greatest achievements is in rendering this paradox perfectly believable, and in creating such an exaggerated relationship that nevertheless plays as perfectly normal for both protagonists. Perhaps because, by all accounts, Dolan’s relationship with his own mother is no less fraught. Much credit, therefore, to screen mother Anne Dorval, who is marvelous, funny and flawed, and more than holds her own against Dolan’s nakedly committed performance of self. Her role climaxes with a hilarious, applause-inducing telephone rant at the headmaster of the boarding school from which Hubert has fled, giving vent to years of the pent-up frustrations of difficult single-motherhood. Dorval is also the focus of the film’s other funniest scene, when she’s told unwittingly of her son’s homosexuality. Hubert’s boyfriend has little to do but provide contrast through his playful relationship with his light-hearted mother, and accompany Hubert in a terrific Quebecois punk-scored drip-painting-and-sex montage; similarly perfunctory is the foxy (female) teacher who takes Hubert in for a few days, but she does represent the only unconditionally supportive adult presence.

Mother aside, however, everyone’s bound to get sidelined because it’s Dolan’s movie through and through. Animated, thin-skinned, with pouting, expressive lips and a mop of curly hair over his right eye, he has the magnetic inward/outward charisma of an 80s indie pop star. He’s no less expressive behind the camera, sprinkling the film with stylistic touches including brief moments in Hubert’s imagination – his mother as Mary, weeping blood; a large window smashing in slo-mo; a borderline-successful music video-esque interlude with autumnal woods and wedding dress – and many of the scenes are introduced by a short, swift montage of objects, about to appear in the background. Most effective of all however are the short monochrome close-up monologues that intersperse the main narrative (and fold back into it in the end) in which Hubert philosophically picks at the problem of his relationship with his mother.

Often less successful, however, is the eccentric framing; characters are frequently placed as though just dipping into or slipping out of the corner or bottom of the frame. This is jarring in dialogue scenes, with heads pushed over to the “wrong” side of the screen (the lack of fundamental connection unnecessarily emphasised), but elsewhere does frequently make for some striking compositions. All told it is a remarkable and precocious achievement on Dolan’s part – invaluably assisted by Dorval – with writing and direction of complete assurance, and a tour de force central performance. But it is such a nakedly personal film that one wonders what he will/can do next,

d/p/sc Xavier  Dolan ph Stéphanie Anne Weber-Biron ed Hélène Girard ad Anette Belley m Nicholas Savard-L'Herbier cast Xavier Dolan, Anne Dorval, François Arnaud, Suzanne Clément, Patricia Tulasne, Niels Schneider, Monique Spaziani
(2009, Can, 96m)

Tabu

The rather lovely tone of Miguel Gomes’ Tabu is set from the beginning, in a poetic voiceover prologue about a widowered huntsman in Africa, accompanied by a beautiful, simple piano piece, all dripping with that peculiarly Portuguese saudade.

A title “Paradise Lost” takes us to modern-day Lisbon, where Pilar (Teresa Madruga), in her sixties, has a deadpan hilarious encounter in a railway station. She has a neighbor in her eighties, Aurora (Laura Soveral), who is a bit nutty (and ineffably stylish). She prays a lot, supports various humanitarian causes, and is constantly observed to be “kind” by various other people. Her relationship with Aurora and Aurora’s African nursemaid Santa (Isabel Cardosa) is nicely varied from the warmth to the prickliness of neighboring lives, and when the old lady is at death’s door, Pilar is asked to track down a Mr Ventura, known only from Aurora’s raving about her crocodile being in his house next door.

All this is shot in beautiful silvery black and white, but the photography really comes into its own (switching from 35mm to 16mm) in the second half of the film, as do the reverberations of the titles (F.W. Murnau’s dreamy 1931 silent). More than anything, however, the first half’s frequent recurrence of story-telling takes over. Like Gomes’ fascinating Our Beloved Month of August (2008), this is a film of two distinct halves, with a transition that is quicker than the eye. The switch here is an enchanting surprise, even if it is impossible to read or write about the film without reference to it.

We’re returned to Africa in the early ’60s, in the shadow of Mt Tabu, for a heated tale of passion in the tropics, familiar enough, but told here quite charmingly afresh. From the gentle, old-person pace of the first half, things pick up quite a bit, but Gomes imposes a different restraint: in an unusual and mostly successful move, we hear on the soundtrack the story being told in voiceover, and various diegetic sounds from footfall to wildlife, an airplane prop or a gunshot, but no dialogue. It’s a little disconcerting at first to see the lips move and nothing come out, as are certain “missing” sounds, like the splash of a swimming pool, but for the most part this works as a fascinating and beautiful conduit for the magic of silent cinema, cast in a new form, and a bittersweet lament for the inaccessibility of the past.

The other thing we hear is some marvelous native singing and, given Gomes’ fondness for amateur bands, the songs of the rather cool proto-rock and roll combo, playing Phil Spector songs in Portuguese, led by Ventura’s friend Mario, and featuring himself behind the kit. The guys are a great pair of rakish, adventurous young bucks, Ventura in particular (Carloto Cotta), with killer cheekbones, clear, bright eyes, and a dashing Errol Flynn moustache. It is as inevitable that he and the captivating Ana Moreira as young Aurora, the great white huntswoman, will get together, as it is that things won’t end well, but the moment of adultery comes suddenly and perfectly.

If elements of the first half feel a little irrelevant by the end, Pilar has at least provided an effective counterpoint of saintliness to the sin of the second half. The gentle tone of melancholic longing is consistent, however, the romantic mood epitomized by gorgeous net-draped interiors flooded with strong African sunlight, and swept along by the truly poetic writing of the voiceover: a magical, transportative film of deep feeling.

d Miguel Gomes p Luís Urbando, Sandro Aguilar sc Miguel Gomes, Mariano Ricardo ph Rui Poças ed Miguel Gomes, Telmo Churro pd Bruno Duarte cast Teresa Madruga, Laura Soveral, Ana Moreira, Carloto Cotta, Henrique Espírito Santo, Isabel Cardoso, Manuel Mesquita, Ivo Müller
(2012, Por/Ger/ Bra/ Fr, 118m, b/w)

Leviathan

As presented by the Sensory Ethnography Lab, this is a fantastic audio-visual experiment. The emphasis is on the sensory, so to get the other out of the way, it is filmed entirely on and around a commercial fishing vessel and yes, it’s a hard life for these fishermen, with much of their work machine-like in its mindless repetition, and mostly at night (happily the fish-gutting is filmed with some discretion; the removal of ray wings less so).

The film’s real power is purely aesthetic, however, and the men are treated more or less as one more component of this world comprised of water, wind, sea-life and machinery. Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel took a load of cheap digital cameras and suspended them off the boat, hoisted them in the air amidst the following gulls, stuck them on the fishermen’s helmets, and juddered them about handheld in a fashion perfectly mirrored by the perpetual motion of the undersea eddies; when the camera is still, movement is provided by the incessant roiling of the ocean; and even in one cherishable, long-held static shot of a fisherman trying in vain to stave off sleep before a banal television in the perfectly prosaic break room, the low-grade image makes the patches of color in a mayonnaise jar or on a packet of crackers convulse with pixels.

This is certainly a film that looks for beauty in the less-than-perfect image, and overwhelmingly it succeeds. The spell is rather weakened when one can actually tell what is going on, but when one cannot, or when nothing is actually happening but the ocean’s perpetual reconfiguring of itself, or the silvery dead fish eyes exert their surreal power, washing to and fro, it is mesmerizing. Crazy flashes of color and light gradually dance across the immense black screen for the opening, deep in the chain hold, looking like nothing so much as an abstract, hand-painted film; the ocean flings its near-microscopic flotsam in gorgeous unfocused aureoles of color; the camera is hurled into and out of the waves to reveal a dizzying tessellation of gulls; or the cast-off debris, entrails and blood stream past the submerged camera like a no-budget, real-world stargate.

The superlative sound design plays a great part in this, a bombardment of ocean, wind and machine noises. The implication of diegetic thrash metal for one shot is another spellbreaking diversion into ethnography, but subsequently echoed in the clanking of the machinery above decks. Elsewhere, winches sound like Persian chanting and one wonders at the extent of manipulation (also in a couple of places where the waves are disconcertingly visible but inaudible). A great deal throughout, and very skillfully, is the answer, and the tinny, underwater tinge of noise-reduction marries perfectly with the submerged image, but mostly one takes the soundtrack as apparently realistic camera-captured audio, with all the limitations that entails. The sonic realism allows us to visualize the chains we cannot make out on screen, and provides a thrilling sense of immediacy, as the cameras rise and fall beneath the waves.

There are many things formally fascinating about this film – the long opening sequence, for example, renders editing meaningless, as one may try in vain to spot the cuts between the abstract images or the constantly reconfigured camera view on deck – but it is at its most effective when the grotty digital image captures colors and dancing swathes of light above and below the ocean in ways that make them both recognizable and surreally decontextualised, and ends with the wonderfully simple but hypnotic device of upending a suspended camera, so that gulls fly upside down beneath white flashes of seafoam. The credits commemorate various ships lost in these waters off New Bedford, and the sense of the hard work being done in a world of violent motion and unemotional slaughter is ever present, but it plays second fiddle to the leviathan’s boiling cauldron of color, light and sound.

d/p/ph/ed Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Véréna Paravel post sound Ernst Karel, Jacob Tibicoff
(2012, USA/Fr/UK, 87m)

Caesar Must Die

This is apparently a small, simple film, with one straightforward aim: to remind the viewer that lifers in a maximum security prison in Rome, no matter their crimes, remain emotionally valid and susceptible human beings. Yet to achieve this, the veteran Taviani brothers take on one of the most nebulous issues of them all, the power of art, via that most enduring of artists, in the prison production of Julius Caesar.

The directors’ presence in the film is discreet to a fault, employing a stark black and white palette (digital, and frequently pixelated in the blacks, because it doesn’t matter) and a largely static camera, to focus attention fully on the inmate actors, their words, the words of Shakespeare, and the convergence of the same. Where their hand is wonderfully apparent, however, is in the imperceptible merging of documentary and fiction. The morphing of rehearsal into performance is a technique little used (I can think only of Welles’ Moby Dick Rehearsed and, sort of, Miguel Gomes’ Our Beloved Month Of August), but it is a powerful way to illustrate the twin phenomena of disbelief’s suspension and the magical way in which an actor comes to inhabit a role.

With the excuse that the stage is being rebuilt, the Tavianis have the play’s (real) director take rehearsals out into various spaces around the prison. The opening of the film is entirely authentic – the final scene of the play on stage (in color), followed by the (amusing) auditions six months earlier. Gradually, however, in bare rooms and the terrifically atmospheric courtyard, the rehearsals move away from the imagined stage for which they are being prepared, and take on the character of filmed drama, with the prisoners no longer recounting someone else’s words from centuries ago, but voicing their own concerns, intrigues, and longing for freedom.

The director Fabio has the prisoners speak in their regional dialects so that these words come naturally and freely. The line between Shakespeare and the prisoners’ own thoughts is breached by personal antagonism, or Brutus struggling to pronounce lines on tyranny that a friend once spoke to him. Caesar’s death takes place in the courtyard beneath watching and commenting guards, and cutaways to “non-acting” in-mates crying “Freedom”; on the eve of the Battle of Philippi, the costumed Brutus and Cassius are dislocated from the prison context in a low shot beneath a white sky, their discussion doubling for anticipation of the opening night, over a soundtrack of the ocean and seabirds. What is “real” is the emotion.

This slippage between reality and fiction – or rather, their merging – is beautifully and quite naturally achieved. Speaking lines about Rome, Cassius pauses to observe that Shakespeare writes about his hometown as though he knew it as it is today. It’s true that these men have little else to occupy them, to take them out of their surroundings, and we can fully empathize with Cassius’ plain assertion that through involvement in the theater programme, art has truly turned his cell into a prison. Ending title cards inform that Brutus (Salvatore Striano) was pardoned and now acts (in Gomorra, amongst others), and that a couple of his companions have written books about their experience with titles like Free Inside. The prisoners’ crimes and sentences are clearly presented at the start, but we can easily forget that these are hardened criminals, which is a fairly thorny issue, but quite overcome by the celebration of art’s power to move and redeem; they reflect that their scenes have been played many times before, and will be again, but here it is their truth, and their own connection with the power of Shakespeare’s words, both personal and universal. To observe how this gradually comes about is quietly very exciting.

d Paolo Taviani, Vittorio Taviani p Grazia Volpi sc Paolo Taviani, Vittorio Taviani, William Shakespeare ph Simone Zampagni ed Roberto Perpignani m Giuliano Taviani, Carmelo Travia cast Cosimo Rega, Salvatore Striano, Giovanni Arcuri, Antonio Frasca, Juan Dario Bonetti, Vincenzo Gallo, Rosario Majorano, Fabio Cavalli
(20120, It, 76m, col & b/w)

Like Someone In Love

Abbas Kiarostami has gone to Japan, and why not? Like Someone In Love is less obviously tricksy than his last, and his first outside of Iran, Certified Copy [2010]; and it reveals a little more of what was obvious all along – that Kiarostami’s interests lie in people, identity, and communication (between characters, and with the audience), rather than in cultural specificity. This is no more a film about Japan than the last was a film about Tuscany, or the others – really – are about Iran.

It’s a film about three people, in a (presumably) brief encounter. A young escort is sent to spend the night with an aged professor, and in the morning, as he drops her at college, her fiancé mistakes the old man for her grandfather. People have long, unhurried conversations, frequently in cars. They talk of important things like marriage, but Kiarostami has never been one to underline dialogue. Even in a language unknown to him, he once again conjures the textures and rhythms of everyday life, as conducted by at least moderately thoughtful people.

As the escort Akiko sits in the back of her cab near the start, she listens to her voicemail: seven messages. Most of them are from her grandmother. We feel as though we already have the picture, from Akiko’s comments about her grandmother coming to Tokyo, wanting to meet, the girl ignoring the calls. Yet by playing the messages out over a simple montage of Akiko’s largely impassive face, and her nighttime neon-street point of view, Kiarostami imposes the measured, real-time pace and duration that accumulates into a genuine empathy for all concerned, when Akiko has the cab driver circle the railway station and the small, waiting figure of her relative.

That she has him do it twice seems a bit unnecessary; as does the grandmother’s finding a phone-booth card advertising the good time that can be had from a girl who looks a lot like Akiko. This latter sets up a later confrontation however, and ushers in a theme that is present from the film’s first moments, that of misidentification. The first shot is of a buzzing bar, and we have no idea who is speaking, or whether she is telling the truth about her whereabouts and her companion. That mystery is cleared up, but few others will be. We assume, for example, that Akiko is an escort, but she seems more inclined to go to sleep than sleep with the professor, whilst he would rather they have supper together, and doesn’t seem at all bothered to turn out the bedroom light on her.

Earlier, they had discussed Akiko’s resemblance to both a painting and a photo in Professor Watanabe’s study. The ability to identify correctly is further undermined by the ease with which boyfriend Noriaki assumes the old man is Akiko’s grandfather on the following morning. Even the curtain-twitching neighbor makes the same mistake. The film’s title is a clear indication that appearances and assumptions should not necessarily be taken as more than that. Each of the characters (even the neighbor) appears to be like someone in love. Admittedly, Watanabe wins automatic sympathy by being a slightly rheumy, mole-eyed old man with a gentle, avuncular manner, but he seems taken with a Akiko in a way that could be infatuation, or an old man’s pleasure of pretending the same, in the company of erotic youth. Noriaki looks very like he’s in love with Akiko; at least to him, it seems as though she returns the sentiment, but their relationship is overwhelmed by his jealousy, and by her having to keep her occupation secret.

The information withheld, and the play of (mis)identification within the film could come off like a warning, or a lesson to be taught the audience by the film-maker of superior insight (à la smug, derisive Haneke). The incredibly controlled mise-en-scène and sly, deliberate manipulation indicate that Kiarostami enjoys wrong-footing us. But it is a playful wrong-footing, and even in the slightly infuriating Certified Copy, one feels that he enjoys partaking of it along with us – confusion, error and ignorance are a fundamental part of the human condition. The jolt of an ending plays like a cheap shock at first, and an easy way out, and leaves us wondering what exactly just happened, but it is a neat circling back to the unsurety of the first scene. The film is meant to achieve no greater thing than capture our attention with a little pocket of life, over a night and a morning, and to remind us in gentle fashion not to take appearances and our assumptions for granted.

d/sc Abbas Kiarostami p Marin Karmitz, Horikoshi Kenzo ph Yanagijima Katsumi ed Bahman Kiarostami pd Isomi Toshihiro cast Takanashi Rin, Okuno Tadashi, Kase Ryo, Denden, Suzuki Mihoko, Kubota Kaneko
(2012, Fr/Jap, 109m)