Director: Everardo Gout

Cast: Tenoch Huerta, Kristyan Ferrer, Carlos Bardem

133mins  Crime Thriller

Considering the vast display of passion and intensity within international football, it remains a relatively untouched territory in film.  Mexican director Everardo Valerio Gout has picked up on its dramatic potential in Days of Grace, telling the disturbing tale of corruption and fervour in a broken society, set across three World Cups, all split four years apart.

We begin with Lupe (Tenoch Huerta), a law enforcer threatening young children for falling into trouble, before heading off to visit his wife and new born baby of his own. Fast forward a few years and one of the youths, Doroteo (Kristyan Ferrer) grows up and has dreams of becoming a boxer before he is pushed into a life of crime, getting involved in the capture of an innocent victim (Carlos Bardem), who is kept hostage and tortured. We weave in and out of these protagonists lives. amongst others, across 12 fateful years.

Days of Grace is an ambitious and creative piece of filmmaking, yet Gout can be accused of attempting too much in what is a convoluted and frenetic picture that will entertain the viewer but may also dumfound. Intertwining between three separate time periods is somewhat overbearing, as the differences between each World Cup isn’t palpable enough, and can become perplexing to audiences. Despite the fact Gout interconnects freely and intelligently, it certainly makes the viewer work hard. In short, Days of Grace is a tough watch.

Using the World Cup as a backdrop has many emotional implications, and the three stories cleverly progress in tune with the tournament, so as we reach the latter stages of our tale, each World Cup also reaches its intense climax.

Gout ensures that the elation the football brings to the people works as a bittersweet emotion, counteracting against the bleak, mundanity of everyday life. It brings a perspective to proceedings as it shows how trivial the sport can in the grand scheme of things, while alternatively portraying how it can also prove to be a vital form of escapism. The realism of the piece in enhanced by the fact that many of us can remember where we were when Brazil won the 2002 World Cup, or when Zinedine Zidane was sent off for head-butting an opponent. These shared emotions allow us to experience a chilling relationship with the lead characters, and ensures that the bleak storyline has even greater impact.

Meanwhile Gout must be commended for his unique approach to filmmaking with handheld camera work and out of focus techniques used so that we feel connected to the principal roles. When the hostage is beaten up, we see his tormentors through blurred vision, immersing us in the tale, as we even take on a first person perspective at times, as he hauntingly narrates his plight.

Though the characters are not particularly likeable the performances, especially Huerta, are impressive and full marks for originality in both the concept and the cinematic style. However the final execution is underwhelming, and the film is needlessly long – it should have taken a pointer from its football match counterpart and remained around the 90 minute mark. SP

Director: Everardo Gout

Cast: Tenoch Huerta, Kristyan Ferrer, Carlos Bardem

133mins  Crime Thriller

Considering the vast display of passion and intensity within international football, it remains a relatively untouched territory in film.  Mexican director Everardo Valerio Gout has picked up on its dramatic potential in Days of Grace, telling the disturbing tale of corruption and fervour in a broken society, set across three World Cups, all split four years apart.

We begin with Lupe (Tenoch Huerta), a law enforcer threatening young children for falling into trouble, before heading off to visit his wife and new born baby of his own. Fast forward a few years and one of the youths, Doroteo (Kristyan Ferrer) grows up and has dreams of becoming a boxer before he is pushed into a life of crime, getting involved in the capture of an innocent victim (Carlos Bardem), who is kept hostage and tortured. We weave in and out of these protagonists lives. amongst others, across 12 fateful years.

Days of Grace is an ambitious and creative piece of filmmaking, yet Gout can be accused of attempting too much in what is a convoluted and frenetic picture that will entertain the viewer but may also dumfound. Intertwining between three separate time periods is somewhat overbearing, as the differences between each World Cup isn’t palpable enough, and can become perplexing to audiences. Despite the fact Gout interconnects freely and intelligently, it certainly makes the viewer work hard. In short, Days of Grace is a tough watch.

Using the World Cup as a backdrop has many emotional implications, and the three stories cleverly progress in tune with the tournament, so as we reach the latter stages of our tale, each World Cup also reaches its intense climax.

Gout ensures that the elation the football brings to the people works as a bittersweet emotion, counteracting against the bleak, mundanity of everyday life. It brings a perspective to proceedings as it shows how trivial the sport can in the grand scheme of things, while alternatively portraying how it can also prove to be a vital form of escapism. The realism of the piece in enhanced by the fact that many of us can remember where we were when Brazil won the 2002 World Cup, or when Zinedine Zidane was sent off for head-butting an opponent. These shared emotions allow us to experience a chilling relationship with the lead characters, and ensures that the bleak storyline has even greater impact. 

Meanwhile Gout must be commended for his unique approach to filmmaking with handheld camera work and out of focus techniques used so that we feel connected to the principal roles. When the hostage is beaten up, we see his tormentors through blurred vision, immersing us in the tale, as we even take on a first person perspective at times, as he hauntingly narrates his plight.

Though the characters are not particularly likeable the performances, especially Huerta, are impressive and full marks for originality in both the concept and the cinematic style. However the final execution is underwhelming, and the film is needlessly long – it should have taken a pointer from its football match counterpart and remained around the 90 minute mark. SP

Dirk Simon’s worthy and colourful documentary on the Chinese occupation of Tibet has been several years in the making and excites visually with its exultant time-lapse sequences and aerial photographer of this magnificent part of the World.  Simon offers up an impressive array of interviews with political activists, community leaders and luminaries such as the Dalai Lama to create an intelligent and thought-provoking piece of filmmaking and one that takes a pluralist view on the crisis with archive footage from both sides of the fence not just that of the Tibetan people, who appear engaging, inspiring and well-informed.

However, as is often the case with this type of documentary, Simon keeps re-enforcing the salient points of the debate over and over again, overstimulating the viewer with a plethora of facts accompanied by Philip Glass’s pounding and ubiquitous musical score (although well-composed) which ramps up and intensifies the emotional content leaving us with little space to process and consider the importance of his message.

In the hands of a documentary-maker such as Richard E Grant, there would have been time and space for contemplation. A more measured approach here and some judicious editing (at nearly two hours it’s overlong) would have made for a more engaging and effective experience.  That said, there are interludes, such as the audience with the Buddhist oracle and listening to the Dalai Lama’s pearls of wisdom, that offer truly riveting viewing. MT

Writer/Director: Sophie Lellouche

Director: Sofia Coppola                Writers: Sofia Coppola and Nancy Jo Sales

Cast: Emma Watson, Israel Broussard, Katie Chang, Claire Julien, Taissa Farmiga, Leslie Mann

90mins      US  Drama

Sofia Coppola’s latest outing is a frivolous affair and certainly her most amusing to-date. Young audiences will no doubt find its ‘celebrity’ subject matter entertaining and those fascinated by the vacuous ‘bling’ lifestyles of the minor stars in the Hollywood firmament should flock to this juicy social satire.

Based on a true story ‘The Bling Ring’ were a group of LA teens who purportedly managed to gain entrance to homes of the likes of Paris Hilton.  Gleaning information from the internet and Facebook as to stars’ whereabouts, they then plundered and pillaged their homes during absences taking handbags, jewellery, designer clothes, even make-up and went on the rampage often selling on the booty to local dealers.

 Texturally bland but very well-written and predictably glossy, the film epitomises the odious and seditious nature of high-end and luxury brands nailing with absolute perfection the behaviour, gestures, and parlance of these fame-obsessed youngsters, although  Coppola’s stance appears equivocal and non-judgemental towards these characters to the point of nausea.  Emma Watson is particularly good as the hard-edged and insensitive Nicki who believes she’s an “old soul” while totally buying into the culture of celebrity and fame.  Worth watching for its depressing and frightening depiction of American ‘youth’ which appears to verge on the sociopathic.  I blame their mothers.  A fun romp with sinister undertones. MT

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Dirs: Joao Pedro Rodriques and Joao Rui Guerra da Mata | Cast: Lydia Barbara, Joao Rui Guerra da Mata, Cindy Scrash, Joao Pedro Rodriques | Portugal/Macao – Drama

A bittersweet and wistful story with an experimental feel, set in the faded backwaters of Macao. Through glimpses of its past as a devout Catholic Portuguese colony and now a gambling island (surpassing Las Vegas), a mysterious and seedy tale of love, regret and intrigue emerges as Guera de Mata (who also co-directs) returns to the place where he grew up 30 years previously.

Rodriques and Guera de Mata handle the material skillfully, weaving lush visuals and atmospheric songs together to create a sensual cinematic experience. There are echoes of Almodovar and Miguel Gomes to this noirish semi-autobiographical drama told through a fictional tale of missed opportunity and paradise lost. The main character’s alter ego returns to rescue an elusive female friend Candy, haunted by an unsuitable and unsatisfactory lover through tropical, rain-washed streets and run-down rooftops. She pleads for his help on recorded phone messages but the two keep missing each other despite desperate attempts to connect. The piece has an elegiac quality that haunts and beguiles in equal certain leaving us to wonder, can we ever return to the past? MT

KICKSTARTER – here’s how the dream starts

As festival favourite Come As You Are is now on general release across the UK, we spoke to the leading trio of actors Robrecht Vanden Thoren, Gilles De Schrijver and Tom Audenaert, joined alongside the screenwriter Pierre De Clercq. With a premise consisting of three disabled gentlemen travelling across Europe to lose their virginity, there is always bound to be plenty to talk about.

Q: It must be pretty exciting for you all to be here in London promoting the movie?
PDC: For us it feels like the movie is coming home, because it started here with Asta Philpot, so that’s why we’re excited for its release here in the UK.

Q: In the film the characters are going on this journey together to experience new things. Do you feel almost as though you’re all doing that yourselves now as a group?
GDS: Yeah we have, we have. We’ve been travelling a lot together, doing some festivals, and I think is one of the last trips, but this is a journey that has been going on for almost two years now.

Q: When doing the festivals, is it interesting to see how different audiences react to this film worldwide?
PDC: It’s all been unanimously appreciated. The reception has been great. It’s had the largest Flemish audience ever in France.
GDS: It’s been good everywhere. We’ve had brilliant reactions everywhere.

Q: So how much research did you all have to do into playing disabled characters?
GDS: Well it mostly Robrecht, because he is the most inspired on Asta Philpot himself.
RVT: Yeah I did a lot of research, I talked to people.

Q: Did you feel at all nervous taking on these roles? Because if you get them even slightly wrong, people could get really offended.
GDS: Yeah. At the beginning all three of us were very, very nervous about doing it because if you hit this wrong, it’s really wrong, and people don’t forgive you that. As Robrecht was saying, we were constantly checking each other, saying, is this genuine? Do you believe this? We all had our different researches…
TA: Yeah I had a friend of mine who is partially blind so I talked to him a lot and practised with the stick. I talked to a lot of different people who were blind. Though mostly I looked at them, and how they moved around, how they follow you, things like that. In the beginning when I heard I had the role I thought, yes! It’s very interesting to play a role like this, but after a while I thought, oh my God, I have to play this well because if I do it badly, it could be the last job I ever do [Laughs]

Q: In that dream sequence when we see you all walking, that was the first time I realised you were you just acting, so that’s a good sign that you all got it spot on, anyway.
GDS: In Montreal the festival director wanted to take us out for dinner and they had been searching for all the places that had special entrances for our wheelchairs. Then after a while they thought maybe they should rewind the scene and they actually thought for a long time that it was CGI of us walking. That was a big compliment.
TA: In Cuba they were saying “Oh they’re so brave travelling the world”.

Q: Talking of approaching the characters delicately, that was really your job to begin with Pierre. Were you quite cautious about how to portray a story of three disabled guys on a journey to lose their virginity?
PDC: I didn’t actually. I approached it like any other script and wrote the characters like any other character – that is the biggest respect you can pay to handicapped characters, to treat them like anybody else. Like Philip, there are small, tiny bad sides inside him, and it’s the most honest way to portray them. When the producer came to me to write this screenplay it was such a gift to tell this story. It was easy to write, really easy to write. I know I shouldn’t say that because we’re supposed to suffer, but it was fun to write.

Q: Like you said, these characters aren’t always sympathetic and sometimes you just want to tell Philip to shut up…
GDS: He’s an asshole basically.
TA: That’s his biggest problem. Not his disability, his character!

Q: Is that something that attracted you to the role Robrecht?
RVT: We did a week’s rehearsals and we went over the script again and I remember being encouraged to make the conflicts as big as they could be. But then when we were shooting there were a couple of days when I only had scenes when I was a nightmare. I remember thinking that I had started to hate myself and I wondered if that was still good. Are the audience going to still like me? Because if they hate you they cut you off, and it’s important that they keep being emotionally involved, even if they sometimes don’t agree with the things you do. So yeah that was hard, at one point I didn’t think he was a nice guy. But after a while you start to see the good sides.
PDC: Like at the beginning when he is picking a fight with his mother just to make an excuse to be able to leave the next morning, and there are small touches, like when he quietly says to himself “Goodnight Mum”. These touches make you as a spectator forgive him, because you know he has a kind side behind his big mouth.
RVT: Also the way we shot the journey chronologically, he gets sweeter every day, so that’s a good thing.

Q: Was it quite a challenge for all of you as actors to balance both the comedy and dramatic aspects to this film?
GDS: I mean, you’re always acting one thing, so in that way it wasn’t harder than any other film. So in a way we were all happy and we really found each other on this project, because we tend to approach even the more serious aspects of life with a lot of humour and laughs. Tom we didn’t even know before starting the shoot but he quickly became one of our friends and we hit it off so well because we’re all in the same level at that point. There isn’t any subject that you can just approach dramatically, I don’t believe in that, and I don’t think any of us believe in that.

Q: You can get a sense that you are all quite close off-screen in the film, it must have been a really fun film to shoot, travelling around together.
GDS: It was great fun.
TA: Super fun.
RVT: The great thing also is that we started with the trip and like it was in the movie we had just started shooting so we were all pretty nervous. But it was okay to be nervous because the characters were nervous also. But we were on a trip and we got to know the crew because you stay at hotels, drink at the bar.
GDS: The fact it was a road movie made the whole crew get involved in this trip.
PDC: I wasn’t there, but I’ve heard the stories…
TA: It’s become a little bit of a legend in Belgium, because it was such great fun when we shot it.

Q: You all speak very good English, have any of you had any thoughts in moving to the US or over here to make a movie?
GDS: If the opportunity was there it would be stupid not to take it. But moving to the UK would be difficult. Our film industry has picked up a lot in the past 10 years in Belgium, so we can do really great work and we get really nice parts. It would stupid to give that up to move just to make movies with a little more budget or more exposure, I don’t think that is a goal for us.
TA: But if they ask you…
GDS: Well if they ask you, then why not. But we woldn’t move here to give up everything we have at home.
PDC: Especially as this film has travelled so well all over the world, we all put our heart in it and it’s so rewarding when a small movie like this travels around.

Q: Were you expecting it to take off like this, and be released in so many countries?
PDC: You never know.
GDS: You never know. But even if I had thought it would be a success, I didn’t ever think it would be this successful.
TA: Also because, apart from Gilles, we aren’t very famous in Belgium on the television or in film.
RVT: Though internationally that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t count.
TA: That is true, but after this showed in Canada, it had a big boost. If it had come out in Belgium without that, it may have not have had the same results.
GDS: It’s a chain reaction basically. If the press like it and the audience like it, then the dominoes start falling, and that’s what happened. But it’s a dream. A dream. We really put our heart in to it and it’s so nice it’s been so well-received?

Q: Would you say that Belgian cinema is booming at the moment? Because there have been some fantastic films to come out of there recently.
GDS: Completely. Five years ago there were like two movies being made a year. Now there are 10, or 12 easily.
PDC: They’re doing very well locally and also abroad, at more and more festivals.
GDS: Flemish cinema really finds its way to its viewers because some directors go international through the festivals are cult based, but then you see the box office in theatres and it’s not so great in our own country. But Flemish films really find their audience and it’s something to be proud of.

Q: So why do you think there has been this rise in Belgian cinema of late?
PDC: A good funding system, doing fiction for television and then films and people getting more and professional as a result, making for good actors.
GDS: It’s an economical thing. There is good funding and it’s a tax shelter.
PDC: During these times it’s one of the few sections that is still being given more and more money.
GDS: We haven’t really felt the recession.
TA: It’s still not enough.

Stefan Pape

COME AS YOU ARE (HASTA LA VISTA) IS SHOWING IN LONDON AT VUE CINEMAS FROM 7TH JUNE 2013

Director/Writer: Peter Von Bagh

Peter Von Bagh is a Finnish film historian and director of Helsinki, Forever (2008) which screened at the FIRST NORDIC FILM FESTIVAL in London last November 2012.

As a companion piece, his latest documentary Splinters offers an insight into the work of artist Johani Aho and his family.

Narrated by architect Eero Saarinen and Peter Von Bagh, it spans a century of creative output from his wife Venny Soldan-Brofeldt, sons Heikki Aho and Bjorn Soldan, covering their contribution to art in film, and daughter Claire Aho’s photographs.  With Martii Turunen’s original score it provides a fascinating and nostalgic backcloth to Finland’s contemporary art scene. MT

SPLINTERS IN SHOWING AT THE ICA ON 29TH MAY 2013

Director: Justin Zackham
Script: Justin Zackham, Jean-Stephane Bron
Producer: Anthony Katagas, Clay Pecorin, Richard Salvatore, Harry J Ufland, Justin Zackham
Cast: Amanda Seyfried, Robert de Niro, Katherine Heigl, Robin Williams, Susan Sarandon, Topher Grace, Ben Barnes, Diane Keaton, Marc Blucas, Kyle Bornheimer

US                          90mins                       2012               Rom Com

A remake of Jean-Stephane Bron 2006 title Mon Frere Se Marie (aka ‘My Brother Is Getting Married’) set in Switzerland, where an adopted Vietnamese son is getting married to a well-to-do Swiss girl and his birthmother is going to make the trip of a lifetime, not only for the wedding of her boy, but to meet the family she gave him up to, all those years ago.

Here relocated to America, the adoptee Alejandro (Barnes) is now Columbian(!?), went to Harvard and speaks five languages (one senses that the production bent over backwards to please the PC brigade). The problem is still the same though: the impending birthmother is a traditionalist and devout Catholic, so the American family needs to be on best behaviour and pretend they are whiter than white. Excuse the pun. This means that the adoptive parents (de Niro and Keaton) have to pretend they are once again husband and wife, much to the chagrin of de Niro’s long-term partner, Sarandon.

Ostensibly, a comedy of manners then, with the visitor not speaking a word of English, everyone on best behaviour and acres of banter and bad language (hilariously..) lost in translation. And this film does rely heavily on perceived shock factor, spilling expletives out like confetti, in place of much real wit or repartee.

Very much a calculated ensemble piece, everyone gets their fifteen minutes of sub plot, although surprisingly, the one to get the least footage is top-billed Seyfried herself. We have the sister (Heigl) going through her own relationship issues, the brother (Grace) still a virgin at 29 and the groom (Englishman Ben Barnes), trying to juggle his adoptive family, his bride, his brides family and his birthmother on the day before the nuptials.

When all is said and done, it is a better film than I was prepared for, going in, but this is not to say it’s a great film. I settled in prepared to be disappointed, but it did make me laugh a couple of times. It’s an idea with legs, that obviously did well enough in its original incarnation to spark interest and warrant a makeover Financially and the producers (all five of ‘em) saw it as a great opportunity to wedge it chock-full of faces, but they also know they aren’t going to the Oscars with it either.

Presumably, everyone involved saw the irreverence of the script, the size of the paycheck and called their agents back with one word on their collective lips: ‘Kerchingg’. Followed, on Final Day of Principal Photography, by ‘Thank you very much’.

It’s of mild interest though, how audiences will receive it. It’s dressed up for all the world as an inoffensive, summery Four Weddings type of gig, but the humour is a fair bit more base than that. Certainly de Niro won’t be saying ‘Cunt’ in the crop and chop TV version, you can be sure of that. How edgy. AT

Director: David Lynch

Cast: Gerard Way, John Taylor, Nick Rhodes, Roger Taylor, Simon Le Bon

112min  US     Musical Documentary

Billed as a documentary, David Lynch’s long-awaited and much anticipated musical outing turns out to be an onscreen live gig filmed at a recent concert of the band in the United States. Duran Duran are an English rock band that was formed in 1978 and went on to be one of the most successful bands of the eighties and a leading force in the MTV-driven “Second British Invasion” of the US, from whence this film comes.

Shot in black and white, superimposed images and pictures glide over the live footage in a surreal kaleidoscope of incongruous, shifting visuals in all colours of the rainbow lending a dynamic feel to the concert: cars race down freeways and into tunnels giving way to pop art pictures of naked women,  animals, weird graphics and the like. It all feels very upbeat and exciting as the band plays oldies and new material taking their creative output from its origins in the eighties right into the 21st century and beyond.

Simon Le Bon, ever the showman, introduces a variety of contemporary guest acts who are all introduced as “something very special”.  It’s a shame that his slightly laddish image detracts from the uber-stylish presentation of what is still a very impressive and avant-garde musical stage act with melodic, catchy tunes and well-written lyrics. Nick Rhodes is still prettily made-up with his blonde-tinted hair, and guitar geniuses Andrew and John Taylor strum away gleefully: they still wear it well – in black leather, of course.

During the gig, they are joined by (the very special…!.) music producer, DJ and musician, Mark Ronson who is attributed to have helped to upgrade the band’s image with his own entrepreneurial ‘je ne sais quoi’.  He plays the saxophone and sings.  Kelis and Beth Ditto (who?) are also ‘special’ guests joining the band on stage for more ‘special’ numbers and their own material.

It’s a highly enjoyable and watchable piece of filmmaking that will rouse seventies fans and is likely to attract newcomers from younger or even different audiences.  From standout hits: ‘Rio’, ‘Hungry Like The Wolf’ and ‘Say A Prayer’ Duran Duran still have what it takes when it comes to musical entertainment and have served their public well over the decades proving them to be ‘Notorious’ even now. MT

Paste the link to your browser for a watch: http://vevo.ly/i7erE6

DURAN DURAN: UNSTAGED PREMIERED AT CANNES FILM MARKET DURING THE 2013 FESTIVAL. ARCLIGHT HAVE ACQUIRED THE PICTURE AND ARE SEEKING UK DISTRIBUTION .

Director/Script: Nicolas Winding Refyn

Production Design: Beth Mickle, Cinematography: Larry Smith, Music: Cliff Martinez

Cast: Kristen Scott Thomas, Ryan Gosling, Vithaya Pansringarm, Rhatha Phongam, Gordon Brown, Tom Burke

90mins    Denmark/France

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For sheer cinematic brilliance and artistic style, Nicolas Winding Refyn’s Bangkok-set revenge tale really set the night on fire at Cannes and was far and away my favourite film of the festival, dividing critics and polarising opinion.  Some derided it for its cold brutality and lack of emotion but Heli was equally violent, gratuitously so, and won an award.  

In Only God Forgives there is plenty of controlled emotion, seething under the surface of Winding Refyn’s glittering jewel-box of tricks; from brooding resentment, latent anger, moody scorn to dysfunctional lust wrapped up in a pervasive sense of dread, all heightened by a dynamite score. The performances are stylised, mannered and supremely elegant: Ryan Gosling, who runs a Thai boxing club, very much serves the film rather than stars in it, wearing a sharp suit and the expression of a frightened rabbit as the submissively loyal son of Kristen Scott Thomas’s vampish mother and drug baroness, Crystal.  She’s a woman at the top of her game, her two sons are trophies she toys with dispassionately.

We first see her arriving in Bangkok to demand retribution for murder of her ‘first son’ Billy (Tom Burke) on the grounds of his raping and killing a local teenager. She opines: “I’m sure he had his reasons”.  In short, she is very much her own woman.  It’s a superbly entertaining performance and one which should have won her Best Actress in the festival. Sporting a long blond wig and killer heals, she is every bit as sexy, poised and alluring as any actress half her age.

Against advice, she hires a hit man to take out Chang (Pansringarm), the local police chief responsible for the killing of her son Billy. But the plan backfires and Chang turns the tables on Crystal and her agent (Gordon Brown) who is tortured and killed in possibly one of the most inventive and exquisitely painful deaths in cinema history, juxtaposed against a glimmering back-drop of a laquered night club interior.  Glamorous hostesses look on motionless and expressionless in compliance with their oriental culture of self control.

Only God Forgives glides gracefully along, each frame an expertly composed, perfectly balanced and glittering masterpiece. Punctuated by brusque episodes of savage violence, it epitomises a world of clandestine doings and shady characters suggested but not fully fleshed-out adding an exotic mystique to the piece rather than detracting from it, leaving room for the imagination to wander, to speculate and to dream.  It’s a world where evil meets evil and no one is up to any good.

Nicolas Winding Refyn’s points out “We must not forget that the second enemy of creativity, after having ‘good taste’ is being safe”.  This is not a safe film, it’s a daring, exciting and malevolent. Go see. MT

Olivier Assayas. French Director, Screenwriter and film critic.
Born 1955. Son of celebrated French filmmaker, Jacques Remy.

AT: Your father, he worked in television and film…

OA: He worked a long time in television, but alot of films. He assisted Pabst and Max Ophuls and moved to the US during the War directing.  Then had a very solid career as a screenwriter for the French and Italian industries in the Fifties and then, in the Sixties, he mostly did TV work.

AT: The Neo-Realists: was he at all influenced by that movement?

OA: I don’t know… these were things I could and should have discussed with him, but he died when I was fairly young: I was in my early twenties and he was… he grew up in Italy, in Milan and he was a militant anti-Fascist and was close to alot of people involved in Neo-Realism. He was perfectly bilingual and was writing in Italian and in French and he was writing alot of screenplays, working mostly with alot of writers, like (Cesare) Zavattini (Bicycle Thieves) and people like that who were involved in the history of Italian Neo-Realism, but he himself, to my knowledge, he didn’t write any kind of movie that had any kind of solid connection to the Neo-Realist movement. (But) he wrote for people like Alessandro Blasetti (1860) and Riccardo Freda (Giants Of Thessaly)… those people.

AT So, you obviously grew up steeped in film, in one way or another… and indeed, you worked with him when you first started out…

OA Yes, yes, I suppose it was the proximity of cinema, the fact that it was not something that was not part of a different world… it was not alien, that made me imagine that I could one day become a filmmaker.

AT You took a long time…

OA I took a path certainly very different from whatever my father would have imagined, in the sense that… my father did not encourage me to be a filmmaker at all… to make movies, quite the opposite in fact

AT Get a ‘proper’ job…

OA Yeah, and he said “if you want to work in movies then work your way up, you know, do a serious job in the industry and work your way up…” and I did not want… It was the Seventies and I did not want to do some boring factory job.

AT In terms of influences, you talk of Bresson more than Truffaut, is that correct?

OA …Both. Both. How shall I put it..? I worship Truffaut. I think Truffaut is really like an extraordinary filmmaker and an extraordinarily important filmmaker. To me, he is the true heir to Jean Renoir. He is a fascinating and a complex artist and I have always loved his movies; I have loved them as a child, as a teenager and as a grownup, I still love every single movie he has ever made. So, he’s for me, a very important figure and I suppose the ‘Model’ as a filmmaker- with the difference that he was never interested in making movies outside of France; he’s the epitome of a French director, whereas I have always been attracted by the notion of making cosmopolitan/international, or, should I say, trans-national filmmaking. But it was another era, another time.

But then…  I suppose that Bresson was essential to my desire to become a filmmaker, in the sense that it is the overwhelming beauty of his films that gave me a sense that movies were as important as any other art form. You see, the paradox is that I grew up with a family that is connected to cinema (although) my mother was a fashion designer, but my parents did not consider cinema as an art, at all. To them, art was painting, it was literature… and I wanted to be an artist and I suppose that it was (only) by watching the films of Bresson that gave me a sense that movies were as deep, as important, as profound as the greatest literature, as the greatest paintings. I realised then that there is no debate, it’s like, way, way up there and if movies have taken Bresson that far, then it’s worth trying. It’s worth devoting your life to trying…

AT How old were you when you came to that kind of conclusion?

OA I would say my early twenties.

AT And, when you are making a film, would you say you have a consciousness about how Bresson for instance, directed?

OA Do you know, the lessons of the great artists, is ‘Do Things Your Way’. Bresson made movies in a way completely different from anything anybody had done before and that is why he is Bresson and that is why he is a genius. The basic message is do things your own way. Invent your own method, invent your own style, your own path and try to go as far as you can on your own path.

Bresson is a very powerful influence, because he found one of the keys to beauty in film. So when I started making films, the presence of Bresson was there… this kind of intimidating presence of Bresson was always there… you can see it in my early films (but) at some point, you have to break from that and you start your own journey.

AT And (Filmmaker, French Marxist theorist and founder Letterist) Guy Debord… what does he bring to the table for you?

OA For me, Debord brings a lecture of Modern Society. Essential. Essential for me, because he saves me from the dogmatic (nature) of Leftism. Because I was a radical kid, you know, as all kids are, but even more so in the 1970’s.

But instead of being (completely) absorbed by Totalitarian thought, by the Stalinism of what alot of French Leftism was about, was reading Debord, because Debord was anti-Stalinism. He was a Radical, he had the vision, he had this antagonism of the materialism of modern culture. He antagonised the growing alienation of Western Societies and he used the early writings of Marx, of Hegel in ways that were the complete opposite of the dogmatic Communist work of the time and it came also with a quality and a beauty of writing that reminds you that ‘ideas’ and ‘style’ are one and the same thing. So, in that respect, Debord has been hugely influential to help me structure my reading of modern society and gradually bringing me to my reading of the Frankfurt School… Philosophy- Gunther and (Max) Horkheimer.

AT Which actually brings us very neatly on to Something In The Air- a film I liked very much, especially in terms of its lyricism and refusal to adhere to a hackneyed structure. How much difficulty did you have finding your lead, Metayer?

OA It was a long process. So much depends on it. When I started working on this film, I knew that the hardest part would be in finding the cast. Because I wanted, in that sense, kids that had the kind of ‘Bressonian’ internalisation (of the role) that I was looking for.
Because when I’m making a movie like Something In The Air, what I have in mind is that there are only two movies in French film history that deal genuinely with the Seventies, one is Le Diable Probablement (Robert Bresson, 1977) and the other is J’entends Plus la Guitar (1991) by Philippe Garrel. So, when I am making this film, it certainly takes place in a world not dissimilar to the world that Bresson’s film (inhabits). So basically, I think that when I am looking for someone who can represent me at that age, I am also ultimately looking for someone who is similar to Antoine Monnier (the lead in ‘Le Diable Probablement’.

AT Something I got from the film is that it is a film about growing up.. a film about maturing. That when one is young, there is just the black and the white, without any greys inbetween, but that as one matures, other things take on a greater importance…

OA Yes it is, of course, it is, but it’s also in a certain way about instinct. When you have a vocation as a painter or as a filmmaker, it’s something you have no control over, it’s just something that happens to you; that you have to do.  You are not sure why, you also have in the back of your mind that you might be wrong, you don’t know. Ultimately, it’s if you follow your path, what you are basically following is your instinct. That tells you ‘Go this way, you will understand later’ and you say ‘Ok, why not? I will try that’.

AT So, Gilles…

OA Gilles wants to become a painter… has this impulse to paint, because of this immediate (payback). I mean, at that age, you are not going to make movies, but you can pick up a pencil and obtain an immediate result. You have the pleasure of getting something out of your system. At that age, movies cannot give you that. So painting is very important to Gilles, but at some point, he realises I suppose like I did, though not exactly as I did… but he realises that there is one thing that is more important than what you do with paint, which is the human figure; which is the attraction of reality to the physicality of cinema.

So, if we want to describe in the shortest possible way what this film is about, then it is about this kid dripping ink on a piece of paper, who ends up understanding that movies is about the resurrection of his girlfriend and that it’s all about the human face. But he …arrives there… he feels his way there… he never really manages to rationalise his way there; following the current… and of course, when I was making the film, I thought this was the most challenging thing to do.

AT You also touch on unrequited love, where he is going after the unattainable…

OA Yes.. that’s the Racine triangle [laughter] it’s a tragedy! But then of course, as much as Christine is real, is tangible, is deeply rooted – she is as autobiographical as it gets in the film. Laure is real too in her own way, but she is also abstract… on two different levels. She is also his muse, she is also the embodiment of the times, she is also what Gilles is aiming at- she’s what connects him to art in a certain way.

AT What’s next for you?

OA I will be shooting this summer, a movie CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA with Juliette Binoche, very much centred on her based on her, as an actress, but also as a person.

AT I think we have to finish now. Thank you so much for your time.

OA Thank you very much.

Director: Barbara Kopple

Cast: Mariel Hemingway, Bobby Williams

105min     US Doc

Running from Crazy is a documentary seen through the eyes of Mariel Hemingway in an attempt to piece together clues as to why seven members of her legendary family have committed suicide.

The first thing that strikes you about this family is how perfectly photogenic and good-looking they all are with their long, lithe limbs and perfectly symmetrical features.  Mariel is now in her early fifties now but still has the distinctive voice and childlike vulnerability she exuded in Woody Allen’s Manhatten.  She has made friends with her ex-husband and the father to her two grown-up girls and is now appears settled with her business partner Bobby Williams, a fitness guru, in her Malibu ranch, spending the days jumping on a trampoline or attending functions for the many mental health charities she supports.  A telling outburst between them during a climbing expedition hits a raw nerve leaving Mariel in a hissy fit on the ground but this is left aside without comment: it speaks volumes.

Barbara Kopples’s documentary is quite a self-indulgent and dilatory affair allowing Mariel scope to talk endlessly about her lack of a ‘real’ childhood and feelings of hatred towards her sister Margaux who she calls ‘dumb’ and deeply resented. It can’t have been easy being the youngest of three spirited girls with an alcoholic and unhappily-married mother (to her father Jack) who suffered from terminal cancer and slept in her bed for the first years of her life.

From a voyeuristic point of view, the film has a passing appeal from those interested in the Hemingway family but it has its own split personality as a piece of serious filmmaking, falling between two stools of neither being a cogent study of the Hemingway family and their legacy of suicide and alcoholism nor a satisfactory study of coming to terms with mental health and depression for Mariel.

The archive footage of the family is fascinating and welcome, like flicking through the pages of an old ‘Hello’ magazine or ‘Town and Country’, but doesn’t every family have their secret hates and desires? Without allowing the other members to comment – only Muffet survives and appears to have mental issues of her own when we see her in a brief exchange – It’s a one-sided and inconclusive affair, particularly as Mariel claims her father never talked about her grandfather Ernest; far the most interesting and accomplished member of the clan.  Furthermore, she portrays her father as straightforward and down to earth, so the gene obviously missed a generation here but there’s no explanation or detail given here.

All in all then, Running From Crazy offers mild, passing interest but fails to tackle or dig deep into the real issues concerning the family or mental health, portraying Mariel as a decent and kind person but seemingly one with many personality conflicts of her own. MT

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Director/Script: Lake Bell

Cast: Lake Bell, Fred Melamed, Demetri Martin, Michaela Watkins, Ken Marino, Nick Offerman, Rob Corddry

90min     US Comedy

Lake Bell’s debut feature is a screwball comedy drama in which she also stars as a wannabe voice-over artist who has not yet found her groove. Suffocating under the enormous ego and physical hulk of her famous father Sam Sotto (an assured Fred Melamed) who rules their roost and occupies the stratosphere of the voiceover world, he has only one younger rival Gustav (Ken Marino) to threaten his dominion over the airwaves.

The film opens with a tribute to Don LaFontaine, the famous voice artist, and this is a story about fragile egos at the top and the competitive world of showbusiness.  Lake Bell, as Carol finds herself suddenly ousted from the family home to make room for her father’s doting younger girlfriend and into the flat of her married sister Dani, (Michaela Watkins) and her husband, Moe (Rob Corddry) who are experiencing their own problems.

In A World, has the comfortable feel of a TV soap such as ‘Rhoda’ or even ‘Caroline in the City’ with its New York Jewish humour and sharp and punchy script.  Lake Bell has perfect comic timing and an ability with accents which she trots out with a dead-pan expression as mimicking the people she meets during her day including a squeaky girl who turns out to be a lawyer. Dani plays the reliable older sister who is professional in her work, respectful and down to earth, but it’s clear that these two are resentful of their father and his girlfriend and this plays out in a well-considered and believable way.

A surprise cameo from Geena Davis injects a strong feminist message in the closing scenes and Eva Longoria appears briefly attempting a cockney voice. In A World is a fresh and informative bit of light-weight fun with strong performances and skilful direction. Lake Bell has considerable talent and a highly developed sense of the absurd: I’m looking forward to seeing what she does next. MT

Director/Writer: Francesca Gregorini

Cast: Alfred Molina, Jessica Biel, Kaya Scoledario, Jimmy Simpson, Aneurin Bevan

96min       US Drama

Probably my least favourite at Sundance London this year is the offbeat drama Emanuel and The Truth About Fishes which tackles themes of sadness and motherhood in an unsatisfactory resulting in a drama with no drama and a story of grief that fails to deliver on all levels.

As the story goes, Emanuel killed her mum.  During her birth, her mother was in the throes of dying and, accordingly, she becomes a living tribute to her untimely death. In the opening scene, we meet Emanuel fully grown-up: a spiky, ‘sorted’ singular teen, played by Kaya Scoledario.  But the family tragedy doesn’t seem to have had an overtly negative impact on her father, a considered and philosophical man, played here by Alfred Molina, who has subsequently formed a childless union with his winsomely insecure wife (Frances O’Connor). Emanuel rejects her motherly pretensions outright, so it’s an unhappy trio that lives in a wooden house in the suburbs of what could be Boston or, possibly, Toronto.  The weak link to the piece is next door neighbour Linda, played by a vapid and one-dimensional Jessica Biel, as a surgically enhanced yummy mummy,  who lives with her newborn daughter, Chloe.

This is Francesca Gregorini’s second feature following the pretentious but well-put together Tanner Hall. It doesn’t appear that she’s grasped the nettle of these delicate issues personally or had any dealings with them to produce a story that appears to trivialise the concepts and themes it aims to explore and engage with.

Although Emanuel forces her father to recount the intimate details of her traumatic birth over and over again, it’s axiomatic that Emanuel has absolutely no memory of her mother, and this is made patently clear by the circumstances of her loss.  And yet she fixates on Linda from the minute she sets eyes on her, offering to babysit and seemingly to bond with her despite Linda’s unappealing personality and attempts to alienate Emanuel with female guile and coyness making sure she has control over the everything concerning her baby girl.

And Linda is certainly no earth-mother: in some ways, she appears to compete with Emanuel on the female front: flirting with her co-worker (Jimmy Simpson) and occasionally being unpleasantly domineering; so there is no grounding or believability in their closeness from the start and neither is there any attempt to develop or examine the individual characters as their working relationship continues.

When Emanuel realises that baby Chloe is infact a doll, instead of reacting she buys into the conceit (to protect Linda?) and goes along with it seemingly unperturbed yet growing increasingly obsessed with the actual doll rather than attempting to engage privately with LInda whereas Linda appears undisturbed by the concept of anyone finding out about her deceit.  When Emanuel’s step-mum tries to befriend Linda by asking round for dinner, Emanuel becomes hostile and thwarts any attempt for them to get to know one another by gross machiavellian tactics involving a love interest she meets on the bus, in the shape of the promising Aneurin Bevan, whose role is never developed beyond kissing her and riding a bicycle.

Gregorini then introduces a fantasy element into this soulless, cold drama by tacking on a beautifully-rendered and surreal (CGI) water and fishes sequence, presumably aimed at exploring Emanuel’s psychological state, which feels out of place, absurd and bewildering.

None of the female characters here is remotely appealing which seems counterproductive in a story that’s all about us sympathising or emphathising with its very feminine and important issues.  Emanuel is rude and short-tempered even with her love good-looking lover, LInda is a bland cypher and the step-mum is a winsome and fractious shell of a woman. The only character with any perceived depth and who really elicits any sympathy is her bereaved father.

Emanuel makes off-putting viewing: I couldn’t wait for it to end but it left wondering what Gregorini had in mind for us with her next outing. MT

Director: Stu Zicherman

Writers: Ben Karlin, Stu Zicherman

Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Adam Scott, Jessica Alba, Jane Lynch, Richard Jenkins, Amy Poehler

90mins      US Comedy

Before we start, it is worth noting that A.C.O.D. stands for Adult Children of Divorce, as Stu Zicherman’s directorial debut – featuring at Sundance Film Festival London – delves into the life of a thirty-something still attempting to come to terms with his parent’s breakup when he was a child. Whether or not the viewer is an A.C.O.D. themselves, it bears little relevance, as a film that ultimately feels somewhat difficult to relate to, offering few laughs along the way.

Carter (Adam Scott) is the man in question, having dealt with the messy divorce between his parents Hugh (Richard Jenkins) and Melissa (Catherine O’Hara), following an aggressive and certainly somewhat memorable argument taking place on his ninth birthday – an argument that has ensured the pair have yet to reconnect ever since.

Carter has since discovered he was unknowingly a subject of a study by author Dr. Judith (Jane Lynch) about children who had lived through their parents divorce. Now, 15 years on, she plans on writing a follow-up piece, and when she gets back in touch with Carter, old memories and disturbing flashbacks are unwillingly brought back, all amidst the planning of Carter’s younger brother Trey’s (Clark Duke) wedding.

Presented as a comedy of sorts, A.C.O.D. is far more of a character study that one had initially envisaged and Carter is an intriguing role, as a multilayered man certainly suffering from the repercussions of a turbulent upbringing. It’s interesting how the audience have an ascendency over the role as while Carter is adamant that life is going well and he isn’t affected by his childhood, we can see the cracks appear in his demeanour, as a character who is fragile and troubled. That said, on the whole Carter is not a character who is particularly easy to relate to, which detracts from the emotional investment in this film. It’s certainly difficult to find sympathy for a man who has to decide between Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Jessica Alba too. Poor thing.

What also doesn’t help in this regard, is that Scott hasn’t quite got that charisma and amiability that is required of our leading man. There is no denying the talent the actor possesses, but he has proved to be more effective in the more villainous roles, as a performer who thrives when portraying imperfect bastards, such as the immensely annoying character in Step Brothers. He simply doesn’t provoke much empathy from the viewer. In the meantime, both Jenkins and O’Hara are brilliant as the superbly cast parents – with much of the film’s humour deriving from their offbeat relationship.

On the whole A.C.O.D. feels somewhat inconsequential and irrelevant – not fully reaching the desired conclusions that the first third of the movie had promised. As a film that is not particularly moving or poignant, and yet without the legs to be considered a comedy, it falls in between the two genres somewhat, as a middling production that is ultimately rather forgettable. SP

Directors:

Nacho Vigalondo                    (“A Is for Apocalypse”)
Adrián García Bogliano           (“B Is for Bigfoot”)
Ernesto Díaz Espinoza           (“C is for Cycle”)
Marcel Sarmiento                  (“D Is for Dogfight”)
Angela Bettis                          (“E is for Exterminate”)
Noboru Iguchi                          (“F is for Fart”)
Andrew Traucki                         (“G is for Gravity”)
Thomas Cappelen Malling               (“H is for Hyrdo-Electric Diffusion”)
Jorge Michel Grau                 (“I is for Ingrown”)
Yudai Yamaguchi                              (“J is for Jidai-geki”)
Anders Morgenthaler                       (“K is for Klutz”)
Timo Tjahjanto                                  (“L is for Libido”)
Ti West                                               (“M Is for Miscarriage”)
Banjong Pisanthanakun                   (“N is for Nuptials”)
Hélène Cattet                         (“O is for Orgasm”)
Bruno Forzani                                    (“O is for Orgasm”)
Simon Rumley                                   (“P Is for Pressure”)
Adam Wingard                                  (“Q Is for Quack”)
Srdjan Spasojevic                  (“R Is for Removed”)
Jake West                               (“S is for Speed”)
Lee Hardcastle                                   (“T Is for Toilet”)
Ben Wheatley                                    (“U Is for Unearthed”)
Kaare Andrews                                 (“V is for Vagitus”)
Jon Schnepp                          (“W is for WTF?”)
Xavier Gens                            (“X Is for XXL”)
Jason Eisener                         (“Y Is for Youngbuck”)
Yoshihiro Nishimura             (“Z is for Zetsumetsu”)

Producers: Julie Lind-Holm, Petter Lindblad

US NZ                        123mins                     2012               Horror

Do forgive me not listing the cast.

Twenty-six short films about death, in the Horror genre, by twenty-seven directors, stitched together into a two-hour film. The directors must have at least one death and open and close their piece with the colour red. Oh, yes and the only have a budget of $5,000 each with which t create their masterpieces.

The end result was always going to be horribly uneven, with a few interesting segments interred in a morass of the very bad, the weird, the perverted and the sick.

The concept behind A for Apocalypse was ok, but the execution pretty poor.

B was poor and C very poor.

D is for Dogfight, a well-made, imaginative short, although whether it’s truly Horror… but then, it certainly wasn’t the worst offender in terms of Genre..
E features a red-back spider, exacting revenge on a would-be assassin.
F is a real oddity- I’m not sure where to begin… a Japanese lesbian fart-fetish film, made by a sick man with a sense of humour all his own. I don’t really know what to say about F. Not a Horror film. Perhaps a bargain basement freebie on a fetish site on which you’ve lost your way.
G again, not a horror and certainly the cheapest film made. It’s about surfing and not a great deal else. It was quite pretty though.
H another odd fetish film of a British Bulldog falling for a stripper cat, which goes strangely sideways from a position that began some way out in leftfield to start with. Devoid of any horror element. What’s that fetish called where everyone has to dress up in a fur suit..? Goofy.. no.. Not dogging..
The feature for the letter I was inscrutable, but interesting. I’ve no idea what happened, but I enjoyed the ride. in comparison..
J is another Really strange offering from the Japanese. I mean- Really Strange. But still no wiser.
K is a total departure and our first animation. Again, in no stretch a Horror film, but a cartoon of a turd that refuses to go down the toilet without a fight.. Funny though and well drawn.
L is a very dark, twisted piece that was the first to make me squirm with genuine discomfort, but again, I would resist calling it Horror. Schlock  designed to repulse more accurate.
Ti West, director of ‘Cabin Fever 2’ gives us M. Another pretty cheap shot and not really horror at all. More simply ‘Gross’.
N was another amusing entry – and had me laughing by the blood spattered end.
O was never a Horror, but a wild visual exploration of what it might feel like to experience a (female) orgasm. At least the directors went to some trouble to communicate their idea here. Well shot.
P was one of the better-observed, really well acted and well thought out pieces. The protagonists life of prostitution could indeed have been regarded a Horror. A difficult film to see through to the end, but again, I would hesitate calling it Horror.
Lord preserve us from directors choosing to act, let alone be funny. That was the horror of Q. Shooting a duck (quack) is what it was about.
By now, one is only watching this DVD purely to get to the end, not for any merit or, Heaven forefend, any Horror. There has by now been several gallons of fake blood though, but as any Horror aficionado will attest, buckets of blood does not a Horror film make. Necessarily.
R may have had an interesting idea in there; a man whose skin appears to be made of 35mm film and he is kept, rather like a bear that is constantly let for its bile.
S a very basic metaphor on a subject covered innumerable times before, but featuring two buxom women and a sexy car to prevent us from thinking that we’ve been shortchanged again. Again, Horror-free.
T Lee Hardcastle’s very funny, twisted Claymation, about a boys terror of man-eating toilets. My favourite short from the whole anthology just for it’s imagination, craft and storytelling.
U was a well-made, elliptical short, but again falling short of Horror.
V more sci-fi than horror, but quite clever, a pretty good script and great production values.
W is another attempt by the filmmakers to get infront of the camera and be funny. A ridiculous short, made with really awful special effects that would shame a schoolboy with its amateurish stupidity. WTF indeed.
X was disturbing and one of the few that bothered to get into the mind of the protagonist and attempt to be something a little more considered. Here, a fat girl, picked on incessantly for her size by people in the street and preached at by advertising all around. One of the few highlights, it also probably had the most blood too, though I’m not going to rewind re-view and make sure on that point. If it’s all the same to you.
Y. What is there to say about Y, but why? A paedophile licking the sweat of young boys off a gym bench. Certainly horrific.

And finally, courtesy of Japan, the nadir that is  Z… So weird. So very weird. Alot of nakedness, giant, bladed penises, tiny real penises, vaginas spewing vegetables and, in place of blood and semen, rice. If you can make any more sense of that, well done. You win a free copy of the ‘ABC’s Of Death’ DVD.

To sum up, alot of sexual violence towards women, puerile humour, graphic, pointless violence, gore drugs, sex, poor acting, bad production values and a massive dose of the ridiculous. There are a few items of interest in there, but the rest of it isn’t worth wading through to find the gems in the blood.

The most surprising and disappointing aspect about this whole venture is that there are a fair few very well-respected filmmakers in here. I have to say in their defence, $5,000 is not really a budget at all, when considering making a short, let alone something with any kind of special effects, but then, presumably they could have just said no. There are a great many Horror films out there that you need to see before resorting to “The ABCs of Death”. Save your money. Please. AT

Director: Steve Hoover
Script: Phinehas Hodges, Steve Hoover, Tyson VanSkiver
Producer: Danny Yourd
Cast: Rocky Braat, Steve Hoover

US                                   92mins                                   2012               Doc

Disillusioned with his life, Rocky Braat stepped out of his mundane existence as a Graphic Design Grad and took himself off to India. He’d not had a happy upbringing, not knowing his father and with an abusive mother, he had been rescued at the age of three by his grandparents and college’d in Pittsburgh.

By his own reckoning, it was these circumstances that led to what happened next. Visiting Chennai, he stopped off at an AIDS orphanage, full of children deserted, for one reason or another by their parents, with AIDS and no one to look after them. Rocky was there primarily for selfish reasons. He figured he could empathise with their situation, have a good cathartic cry and then move on. He spent a month there and then continued on his planned trip, but within a couple of weeks he was heading back. He felt in his bones that he could make a real difference there, but at the same time sate his own need for love and affirmation.

Steve Hoover was his best friend at college. Unhappy with his friend’s desertion and massive change in direction, he was at first, an unwilling witness. But, after three years, faced with a resolute Rocky, he eventually made the trip back to India with him and met the kids. It was to have as profound an effect on him as it had on his buddy. This film, Blood Brother, is the result of that trip.

Without reading any of the other reviews that must already have been written about this film- Winner of the Grand Jury Prize AND the Audience Award at Sundance, I’m guessing I won’t be wrong in saying that all of the superlatives have already been used up. This is not only an excellent example of filmmaking, it also has that special factor of extraordinary content. A journey of self discovery, combatting fear, grasping a life opportunity, confronting issues, prejudices and ones own capabilities as to what is or isn’t possible, but more than anything, grasping the nettle of life and being rewarded for it.

There will always be detractors to any Westerner going to the Third World and ‘helping’ and the PC brigade can -and will no doubt- say whatever they wish. But there is absolutely no doubt that Rocky is giving everything of himself to this endeavour and that it is making a profound and direct difference to these people’s lives, as well as his own.

The film was financed using donations and everyone that worked on it did so for free, so every bean that the film goes on to make here on is being ploughed into Rocky’s mission with the orphanage and another like it, threatened with closure.

It really is an incredible story. Most people, with or without the DNA for their adulthood that Rocky was dealt, would be doing far less with their lives. 99.99% of the population. To have turned what was potentially so negative into something So positive is a tremendously life-affirming story in itself. If you see no other film this year, see this one. Humbling, moving cinema at it’s best. Please visit www.bloodbrotherfilm.com www.givethemlight.org AT

SUNDANCE LONDON FILM AND MUSIC FESTIVAL RUNS FROM 25-28 APRIL 2013 AT THE O2 ARENA, NORTH GREENWICH

Director:  Gordon Flemyng

Script:  Philip Mackie, Thomas Middleton (play)

Producer: Philip Mackie

Cast:  Gene Anderson, Michael Barrington, Michael Blackham, Michael Burchill, Martin Dobson, Clifford Evans, William Gaunt, Diana Rigg

UK                   ***                   73mins                               Tragicomedy

A Granada Production playing under the ‘Blood And Thunder’ Play of the Week, Mackie scribed a necessarily heavily cut and gently updated version of one of Middleton’s better-known tragicomedies, showing here as part of the BFI Classics on TV: Jacobean Tragedy on the Small Screen.

This was televisions early days, but no less edgy for it. The actors were pretty much running a theatrical performance to all intents and purposes. Filmed live, on one set with three cameras, there really is a sense that come what may, the show must go on, as there was no going back and doing it again.

Middleton’s original Jacobean play (@1621) comes not that long after Shakespeare and brings with it another sensibility. Although women still weren’t allowed on stage, certainly Middleton was exploring and expanding on the role women play in life and getting more into the psychology of the human condition than in Shakespeare’s day.

One of the casualties of making a shortened version for television is the chopping back of this exploration in going for the drama, although there is still a sense of it, the other casualty being the prominence of the church in the play as a whole. Bravely shot by Flemyng, he makes sure none of the actors dwell at all and races the piece along to its extremely (risible) melodramatic denouement.

In a nutshell then, this is a play concerning power, lechery and the giving in to the baser elements of ones passions. Said to be drawn from true happenings in the Medici family in 1580 Florence, the story centres around a Duke’s court, where the powerful, meddlesome widower Livia (Anderson) plays an easy and practiced game of chess with the pawns of her city, thinking nothing of hoodwinking a girl into giving herself to her own uncle and facilitating the rape of a married woman (Rigg) by the Duke (Evans) himself.

She quickly comes undone herself though, when she falls for the cuckolded husband in question (Gaunt); a man bought off and powerless to stop his ambitious wife’s public philandering. Of course, it all ends badly in this morality tale of the ages.

Shot in black and white, the tape in brief places is showing terrible wear and tear, but this does somehow add to the atmospherics of the piece. If you will forgive the antiquity and accept the super-stylisation of a theatrical, period tragicomic melodrama, in verse, made in the Sixties for television, then there is actually something to be gained from the wit and insight of the original playwright and thus, when all’s said and done, perhaps better seen as a play. AT

SCREENING AS PART OF JACOBEAN TRAGEDY ON THE SMALL SCREEN AT THE BFI DURING MARCH AND APRIL 2013

Director: Matteo Garrone

Cast: Aniello Arena, Paola Minaccioni, Loredana Simioli, Nando Paone.

Roman director, Matteo Garrone’s latest provides a rich contrast to his last outing, Gomorrah, in a similar way as pecorino does for pears.  After the acerbic and steely-lensed Gomorrah, Reality is a garishly-stylised, hard-edged fairytale comedy which muses on the relative merits of fame X-Factor-style in an upwardly-thrusting consumer-orientated, low-rent Napolitan backwater.

Reality taps into the Italian psyche: to the Italians how you look is imperative: and they literally wear their wealth on their backs.  No self-respecting man or women ever appears shabby or unfashionable; even the dustbin men look a million dollars. They spend more on labels and luxury goods than possibly any other European nation. ‘Fare bella figura’ literally means ‘putting your best out there’.

And so it’s easy to understand how a poor wheeler dealer and fishmonger (Aniello Arena, who’s currently serving a prison sentence for Mafia-related crimes.) could be persuaded by his aquisitive wife and kids to go for Big Brother (Grandi Fratelli) to achieve this aim.

The seemy side of life in Naples may be dilapidated and down at heel but it’s authentic and real and Garrone contrast this with the phoney world of reality TV.  Aniello Arena is in a class of his own in his portrayal of a man who becomes increasingly self-delusional and obsessive in his efforts to seek celebrity-status and leave his hard-grafting past behind him in his search for a happy ending. Be careful what you wish for. MT

Director/Writer:Terrence Malick

Director of Photography: Emmanuel Lubezki

Cast: Ben Affleck, Olga Kurylenko, Rachel McAdams, Javier Bardem, Tatiana Chiline

112min  *   Arthouse Drama US

Terrence Mallick is back after the polemical Tree of Life (2011) with another poetic poser on existence. This time the quest for love is occupying Mr Mallick’s mind: “What is the Love that Loves us?” is his opening salve in a peripatetic drama that starts in Paris with its protagonists Ben Affleck (Neil, an American) and Olga Kurylenko (Marina, a Ukrainian) in the flurry of a whirlwind love affair. Mont Saint-Michel in the rain, pillow-talk and breathless whispers in the rippling breeze as the camera trips and sweeps over coast and countryside in a swirl of time and place all fused into one. 

The action moves to Oklahoma for a homage to America is great. Not.  Sweeping images of corn fields, vast housing estates, cheerleaders and the disadvantaged. Our lovers rattle around in their vast new build while on the seedy side of town Javier Bardem’s honest priest Father Quintana has the hapless task of healing and helping the broken souls and bodies of those who have fallen by the roadside of the American dream. Bardem is convincing here as a troubled man of the cloth who is unconvinced of his own value to the community, who also seem to have tuned it to this diffidence Nevertheless, he ardently prays for guidance. Meanwhile our lovers are falling apart.

Oh I did try to like it but with no convincing storyline, no meaningful script, or dialogue and no real character development how can actors be expected to emote out of nowhere and engage our interest or sympathies.  How can we enjoy what feels like an empty, repetitive travelogue for a glossy magazine where plastic phrases are plucked out of the copy to excite us to read on: “You And Me” “Love makes us one” “You’ve brought me back to life” and all scored by a worthy soundtrack that somehow feels out of place and inappropriate and it’s Bach, Berlioz and Wagner we’re talking about here.

Ben Affleck makes a brave fist of Neil, haunting the breath-taking set-pieces like a cipher who can only smile, scowl and murmur platitudes. As Marina, Kurylenko twirls round and round endlessly, twittering mindlessly like a lustful 5-year-old looking for approval. Neither character appears to have any interests, real conversation, or even a worthwhile connection. In bed she asks him: “What Are You Afraid of?”: this is a phrase that speaks volumes yet no elaboration is given or scoped out and the question hangs in the air.  Exit Marina. In comes Rachel McAdam, a girl from Neil’s past who’s the same person as Marina only blonde, local and plump. No relationship, just more dissatisfied glances and increasingly desperate looks. And so it goes on.,

The highlight is the widescreen cinematography but even that starts to pale with the absence of a gripping narrative. To watch To The Wonder is to ride on a swirling merry-go-round that promises excitement but ultimately causes tedium and nausea until the desire to get off is so overwhelming you could scream.  Why is the talented, acclaimed filmmaker prone to making vacuous cinematic statements. MT

Director: So Yong Kim

Writer: So Yong Kim

Cinematography: Reed Morano

Cast: Paul Dano, Shaylena Mandigo, Claire Taylor, Jon Heder, Jena Malone

94mins  US Drama

Blue-washed icy landscapes of middle America are the backdrop to this gently bleak indie from Korean director So Yong Kim.  It centres on Paul Dano’s troubled and tentative rock musician, Joby, who is on a mission to forge meaningful links with his tiny daughter Ellen (Shaylena Mandigo) after the bitter breakdown his relationship with a coldly stoic Claire Taylor a her ma. With his boyish painted nails and tattoos, he’s hardly able to be responsible for himself let alone another human being but is desperately affected by fatherhood and painfully screwed up by love.  Jon Heder’s performance as his lawyer adds levity to the grim story marital break-down.

But the scenes with Ellen really bring this to life as a poignantly authentic study of a man in crisis and tenderly depict his feelings for his child.  MT

FOR ELLEN IS ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 15TH FEBRUARY 2013 IN CINEMAS

Director:                                 Roman Polanski

Producer:                               Thom Mount, Josh Kramer 

Script:                                     Ariel Dorfman, Raphael Iglesias

Cast:                                        Sigourney Weaver, Ben Kingsley, Stuart Wilson

US                                           **                     103mins         1994               Drama

Inbetween Bitter Moon, The Ninth Gate and The Pianist, the BFI Southbank Polanski retrospective continues apace with his interpretation of Ariel Dorfman’s 1991 play Death and the Maiden. A thinly veiled Chile is the setting for this three-hander, set on an unspecified windswept coast in South America during a storm. 

Weaver plays Paulina, a much-haunted survivor of regime torture and rape, now living with her long-suffering lawyer husband and the scars of her trauma. One night her spouse is given a lift home by a man whose voice she knows she recognises.

Actors often love stageplay adaptations, as it can offer up an opportunity to do what actors love; to act. Often they can come across as not much more than a filmed play, but sometimes they can really work, like The Philadelphia Story, or Ides Of March. Death and the Maiden took quite a bit of work to translate it from a word heavy play to a screenplay, but the adaptation works well enough.

The cast started with Sigourney Weaver, with the other two roles cast around her and her availability. Ben Kingsley gives one of his less lazy performances and there’s a rare opportunity for a relative unknown, Stuart Wilson, another British actor who went to LA and did good, more recognised for his appearances in The Mask of Zorro and Lethal Weapon 3.

The play was far more successful than the film version; the film was nominated for some very minor awards and won a Third Place gong for Weaver at Dallas Fort Worth Film Critics Association. The acting, although competent in the main, sometimes strays into feeling less than genuine. As a play, it needs to be heightened, but this can jar on film if not carefully managed.

It’s by no means an exceptional film. I recall seeing it when it first came out and there was no small amount of anticipation for it in the media, but this quickly evaporated, the film failing to retrieve its production budget and by some way. Its logical progression is perfectly cogent, everything makes sense, but the ending lacks the punch that you might expect it would pack with such an illustrious pedigree behind it and my mind wandered constantly throughout, as they went through the motions. 

Perhaps it’s that one is constantly aware that everyone is ‘acting’ so hard. Some of the dialogue rang untrue and I also didn’t for one moment consider Weaver, Anglo-Gujarat Kingsley, nor Wilson to be native to South America. There are no standout moments or indeed, performances, which makes me realise why I remembered so little about it from the first time I saw it. 

Interesting to revisit then, if only for the nineteen intervening years, but not one I would go out of my way to see again. The print needs a damn’ good clean too. AT

Director: Roman Polanski

Script: Roman Polanski, Gerard Brach, Robert Towne, Jeff Gross

Producer: Tim Hampton, Thom Mount
Cast: Harrison Ford, Betty Buckley, Emmanuelle Seigner,
Patrice Melennec, Yves Renier, John Mahoney, David Huddleston

US  115mins 1988 Thriller

Frantic is something of a curio. The studio demanded 15 minutes be cut from the original running length and the ending was also changed, but Polanski never really had much trouble persuading the stars to work with him, known as an auteur and actor-friendly director as he was. Indeed, Frantic was well received by the critics but, despite Harrison Ford, performed miserably at the box office, failing to recoup its production budget.

Some put this down to Polanski fleeing America ten years previously, having been found guilty of statutory rape. The silver lining for him in all this. however, was the finding of his new wife, Emmanuelle Seigner, here cast as Michelle, who went on to star in both Bitter Moon and The Ninth Gate, for Roman.

Ford stars as a successful doctor, Walker, in France with his wife to give a seminar. But on first arrival at their Paris hotel she steps out of their room for a moment never to return, and only Harrison grasps the seriousness of the situation having first tried to engage the hotel security, then the French Police and finally the American Embassy in his increasingly desperate efforts to find her.

Aside from a glaring plot hole from the start, the thriller unfolds pleasingly enough as Dr Walker becomes detective in a foreign country without a word of the lingo to help him, but thankfully plenty of French Francs to oil the wheels, and Seigner, his at-first unwilling accomplice thrown together as they are by their circumstance and need.

As with Polanski’s later outing, The Ghost, he channels Hitchcock in pursuit of the perfect thriller; an ordinary man spiralling out of his usual world of normality into one of deepening espionage where no one believes him and he’s forced to go it alone, here thrown into escalating crises and increasing tension as his fear for his beloved wife’s well-being drives him to ever more desperate measures.

Seigner is a welcome assistant in his search. An ex-model with bewitching beauty, they strike up an unlikely alliance taking turns to lead and be lead by the other; each having to trust a stranger in turn. It’s a thriller that works, although it has dated somewhat; things have certainly moved on in terms of audience expectation, speed and complexity, but Harrison has always done ‘harassed’ well and Seigner is gorgeous and kooky-French in equal measure.

It’s not a truly remarkable film and there are no memorable standout set pieces as you find in films like North By Northwest, for instance, but it’s also not a failure. It’s a well-crafted thriller with a strong score composed by Ennio Morricone and perhaps deserved to do better. Certainly, it’s worth another look. AT

FRANTIC IS SCREENING AS PART OF THE MAJOR POLANSKI RETROSPECTIVE AT THE BFI, SOUTHBANK DURING FEBRUARY 2013

Director: Howard Hawks, Arthur Rosson

Script: Borden Chase, Charles Schnee

Cast: John Wayne, Montgomery Clift, Walter Brennan, Joanne Dru, John Ireland.

133mins  US Drama

Actually shot in 1946, Red River infact wasn’t released for a couple of years and is notable for launching the career of Montgomery Clift. Hawks had a good eye for a star and, as a director overlooked for most of his career by the Motion Picture Academy but still managed to roll out hit after hit launching many a career including John Wayne and Carole Lombard.

To be fair, Howard Hawks IS Hollywood. His filmography is simply extraordinary, with a massive career, encompassing legendary titles such as Scarface, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Rio Bravo and El Dorado, Red River coming off the back of To Have And Have Not and The Big Sleep. I remain however, of the opinion that Red River is one of his more overrated films.

It’s perhaps difficult to watch a proper Western these days without the sensibility of hindsight and the 21st Century. A man, shooting his way into Texas, decides huge swathes of the land are his regardless of any that went before; Native American or Mexican and puts down a ranch to brand his cattle. And anyone elses.

For me, it’s not even hard to side with the ‘Indian’. But that isn’t the issue here. Red River is one of those standout Westerns held up as an example and certainly it is epic in scale. The cattle push centre piece across the wide open spaces of the Wild West are really impressive, driven on by a massive score by Dimitri Tiomkin and Hawks is never more surefooted than when commanding expansive shots of cowboys atop horses against a thousand head of cattle, with dust, mountains and a ‘Simpsons’ clouded sky as backdrop.

But here is where the fairy-tale ends. The characters are infact mere caricatures and the dialogue clunky. All the action is telegraphed and the ending, the final betrayal. It’s a story that promises a great deal, but whimpers at the finish which is tonally greatly out of keeping with the rest of the film.

It’s never worse than the two major scenes with women, it’s as if the writers were as uncomfortable writing for them as much as the director was to be around them; everyone much happier and relaxed when with a herd of beef…

So I’m left casting about a bit for the good in a film that is held up as ‘something’ and a great classic Western. It’s pretty morally bankrupt ‘how the west was won’ and, of course, history is always written by the victor. Hard also not to reflect on American foreign policy, for that matter, but that’s perhaps another conversation.

The interactions and comedy interludes are all contrived and unconvincing, the dialogue lumpy, even though it’s all hung together on the bones of a promising storyline; one that originated from a Saturday Evening Post article dating around 1865, although it’s anyone’s guess as to what that original story may have been.

Wayne plays Dunston, a man on a wagon train across the West, eyeing up the land and deciding to stay put in Texas, as the train pushes on for California. He adopts a boy called Matthew, played by Clift, and brings him up as his own on a very successful beef ranch.

Wayne does as Wayne does, wading through the film with his chin set, heading in one direction, come what may. Clift weaves a softer, more eloquent path and in the main they’re watchable enough, but by no means exceptional. This one ends up as some fairly frustrating hokum wrapped up as something good and eventually simply running long at two and a quarter hours. You’re there more for curiosity’s sake than entertainment. AT

RED RIVER IS SCREENING AT THE MONTGOMERY CLIFT RETROSPECTIVE AT THE BFI, SOUTHBANK, LONDON DURING FEBRUARY 2013

Director: Roman Polanski

Writers: Roman Polanski/Gerard Brach/John Brownjohn

Original Music: Philippe Sarde

Costume Designer: Anthony Powell

Cast: Nastassja Kinski, Peter Firth, Lee Lawson, Tony Church, Richard Pearson

186mins  Drama

One of the truest screen adaptations that Polanski undertook with his favourite scriptwriters John Brownjohn and Gérard Brach from the original novel by Thomas Hardy.  The West Country’s landscapes and climate, and in particular Dorset, are very much a character in Hardy’s novels influencing their protagonists’ behaviour and lifestyles, so it was rather a cavalier decision on Polanski’s part to set his film in Normandy, thus altering the essential feel of the terroir that permeates the original novel. However, this tale of a strong-willed girl from a poor background who becomes the object of affection for two men, had to be made in France as Polanski could have been extradited from England at the time, due to his ongoing legal issues in the US.

Nevertheless, the verdant beauty of the countryside recreated in Ghislain Cloquet and Geoffrey Unsworth’s lush visuals together with Philippe Sarde’s haunting soundtrack add sensual appeal and make this outing very much Polanski’s film about a young woman’s innocence tinged with melancholy rather than Hardy’s one of cruel fatalism. It’s possibly the only Polanski film that engages our sympathy for the doomed central character (of Tess), played with earthy subtlety by Nastassja Kinski, and her interminable misery grounded in an austere Victorian context occasionally launching into melodrama despite its delicate pastoral setting.

In some ways Tess is almost bleaker than Hardy’s version presenting the heroine as a figure of besieged femininity in the same way that Hitchcock did with Kim Novak in Vertigo (1958) or even Max Ophuls in Lola Montes (1955) or Madame De… (1953). The tragedy of Tess is that although she is an intelligent and thoughtful woman, she is fated to become only was she is perceived to be by men. MT

The film was dedicated “For Sharon” after the opening titles. Geoffrey Unsworth actually died of a heart attack during filming in 1978 and so Ghislain Cloquet took over and the feature took some ten months to complete.

TESS IS SCREENING AS PART OF A MAJOR ROMAN POLANSKI RETROSPECTIVE AT THE BFI, LONDON DURING JANUARY AND FEBRUARY 2013

Director: Fred Zinnemann

Script: Daniel Taradash

Producer: Buddy Adler

Cast: Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr, Donna Reed, Frank Sinatra, Philip Ober, Ernest Borgnine, Jack Warden

US  118mins 1953 Drama

Columbia Pictures goliath Harry Cohn invited Zinnemann into the office for a chat about directing the army epic, but Zinnemann successfully talked his way out of the job by insisting on Montgomery Clift for the role of Pvt Prewitt. No one told Cohn what to do. Surprisingly, he then got the call to say he was doing it. His other casting masterstroke was to put the clean, class act that was Deborah Kerr in to play a ‘scarlet woman’.

Frank Sinatra’s career also lay in the doldrums so he grabbed the opportunity to play Angelo Maggio – and for a very basic wage – supporting luminaries Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster. An astonishing cast. It proved an excellent decision, effectively re-launching his career.

Austrian filmmaker Alfred Zinnemann followed High Noon in 1952 with the massive success of From Here To Eternity the following year. Nominated for 12 Oscars, it garnered 8 although nominations for Clift and Lancaster went unrewarded and instead, Sinatra and Donna Reed took down Best Supporting Actors. Zinnemann had an amazing career with four Oscars for himself with highlights that included Oklahoma (1955); A Man For All Seasons (1966); The Sundowners (1960); and The Day Of The Jackal (1973).

Eternity was an interesting idea: A war film without the war.  Set in 1941 on the cusp of Pearl Harbour and America entering combat; soldiers were edgy, highly trained but with nowhere to put all that pent-up energy other than in on themselves.

Clift, a new arrival at Camp Schofield in Hawaii was hoping for a fresh start; to put behind him what went before. But his refusal to box competitively for his new Captain puts him straightaway at odds with a very unforgiving mechanism for unrelenting abuse. Outsiders never really work well in institutions like the army.

Lancaster is the war hero and sergeant witnessing the abuse but unable to do much about it, needing to keep his head down, falling as he does for the philandering Captain’s wife, Deborah Kerr. Cue famous scene on the beach. It’s easy to see why this film was up for a raft of Oscars and indeed, why it went on to win. Apart from the Best Supporting gongs, it also won Best Picture, Director, Cinematography, Editor, Sound and Screenplay; an astonishing haul for any film.

The dual plot is most excellently aided and abetted by a youthful and imposing Ernest Borgnine, Sinatra at his affable cheekiest and the very beautiful soft-hearted escort played by Donna Reed. It’s an unusual film, absent of patriotic tub-thumping and cliché endings and very much worth the viewing, if only to allay preconceptions about what it’s all about and enjoy a cracking story, well told. AT

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY IS SCREENING AS PART OF THE MONTGOMERY CLIFT RETROSPECTIVE AT THE BFI DURING FEBRUARY 2013

Directors: Christian Bonke and Andreas Koefoed

Cast: Vayacheslav ‘Slavic’ Kryklyvvy, Anna Melnikova

Denmark *** 80mins 2011 Denmark

Ballroom Dancer, at first glance, might appear to be a film about glamour, glitz and lycra à la Strictly Ballroom. Infact, it’s anything but.

Vyacheslav ‘Slavik’ Kryklyvvy was World Latin American Dance Champion, but had to retire due to injury. After extensive surgery and recuperation ten years later at the grand old age of 34, he decides along with his new partner Anna, to rescale the mountain and retake the title. His ex-partner meanwhile has continued life at the top unabated, with a new partner of her own, adding a certain spice to the mix.

Slavik and Anna are not only dance partners, but lovers too and the pressure on them both to succeed is immense. Anna is herself an amateur world champion, so great things are expected of this union. But the punishment that dancers have to put themselves through is both punitive and unremitting. They sacrifice everything to get to the top; there is no other life. For it all to be over so young is also incredibly harsh.

As with all documentaries, it is often impossible to know what one is going to end up with in terms of story or material. All a documentary maker can do is assess a given situation and decide whether they think there is enough promise there to make it worthwhile committing a huge amount of time and money pursuing any particular chosen strand, be it brown bears mating in Alaska, or a local politician juggling the power game. In the end, it comes down to whether one is ‘let in’ and trusted by the protagonists and also whether anything of merit then transpires in the wider world of their chosen subject.  

Directors Andreas Koefoed and Christian Bonke saw enough promise in this story to decide to document it, as Slavik cajoles aching bones back to peak fitness and then faces the circuit with Anna by his side. What may have come easy to him the first time isn’t quite so easy now. Maturity brings with it many things: hopefully insight but also the knowledge of fallibility, certainly old wounds and then a pressure to prove that we are not just a flash in the pan.

What follows is an unrelenting schedule of fitness, starvation, dance practice and competitions dotted across the world. There’s very little glamour and by God, you really have to want it. This becomes a film not so much about dancing as about people and partnerships.

But I was left wondering whether this story would have played out the way it did without the influence of the ever-present filmmakers; it’s a difficult thing to be witnessed, to be filmed at your most vulnerable and for a much of the film, I didn’t feel I was watching an uncensored reality on the part of the protagonists; not that I blame them for this, but if it had been me, I’m not sure I would have brought that additional pressure to bear too. Doing the Jive justice is surely more than enough to be getting on with. AT

BALLROOM  DANCER IS ON GENERAL RELEASE AT THE ICA, LONDON W1 FROM JANUARY 18TH 2013 AND AT THE DUKE OF YORK’S PICTUREHOUSE BRIGHTON ON 7TH FEBRUARY, THE IPSWICH FILM THEATRE ON 14-15TH FEBRUARY, AND THE RIVERSIDE STUDIOS ON 28TH MARCH 2013

httpv://dogwoof.com/films/ballroom-dancer

When Montgomery Clift (1920-1968) made his cinema debut in Red River (1948), he brought a new kind of masculinity to the screen. He had the looks to make any matinee idol jealous, yet he didn’t play up to a star persona, instead drawing on his theatrical background and method training to bring to life a fascinating range of characters, from a fortune-hunter in The Heiress (1949) and a conflicted social-climber in A Place in the Sun (1951) to a tragic, idealist GI in From Here to Eternity (1953) and a priest guarding the confession of a murderer in Hitchcock’s I Confess (1953). His, now infamous, car crash occurred during the filming of Raintree County (1956), and left him with severe facial injuries, but the psychological impact was greater. He was ever critical of his own performances, though to watch him in Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) or even The Misfits (1961) his talent was strikingly evident. He died at the age of 47, having earned four Oscar-nominations, but tormented by emotional demons of his own making. MT

DURING FEBRUARY 2013 THE BFI WILL BE CELEBRATING THE WORK OF THIS ICONIC ACTOR WITH A MAJOR RETROSPECTIVE

Director: John Luessenhop
Script: Adam Marcus, Debra Sullivan, Kirsten Elms, Stephen Susco
Producer: Carl Mazzocone Cast: Alexandra Daddario, Dan Yeager, Tania Raymonde, Trey Songz, Scott Eastwood, Shaun Sipos, Keram Malicki-Sanchez, James MacDonald, Thom Barry, Paul Rae

US    92mins   Horror

Texas Chainsaw 3D attempts to be a faithful sequel to the original groundbreaking low-budget vision of writer director Tobe Hooper. However his 1974 film was never designed to be a franchise, supporting innumerable sequels and, rather like Jaws, what was originally a truly great movie, eliciting real fear and entering the pantheon of legendary horror films, has here been subjected to that final insult, the lowest common denominator, to prise that last dollar from the death-grip of a very tired corpse: 3D.

As a reviewer, it’s always a warning sign when there are no press preview screenings. The unwritten gen being that producers know it stinks, so prefer launching it onto an unsuspecting public and gaining at least a good opening weekend, before poisonous word of mouth kills it deader than any mindless slasher killer could ever manage.

So, why is it bad? It’s remarkable, with so many writers that the story didn’t hold up from any angle. With good television drama one expects a pool of talent to make the storylines hold up under scrutiny but here, one suspects, it was a case of too many cooks in the kitchen. Huge… I mean HUGE plot holes, combined with a derivative storyline, cardboard and predictable characters and, topping it off, some very substandard acting.

Alexandra Daddario to be fair, is a super-hot lead, far too hot to be working the meat counter at a local supermarket for sure and the makers are banking on a pubescent male audience being sucked into that particular sexual vortex to the extent that they simply don’t care whether the rest of it makes any sense or not. Ironically interesting too though, that Americans don’t bat an eyelid at portraying ever more extraordinarily graphic scenes of violence against a human being, but remain so ridiculously terrified when it comes to sex. Indeed, sex is so promised, so pasted over the entirety of this film, yet it signally fails to deliver in a manner a ’70’s-made film never would.

If they had considered for a moment what makes all the seminal horror films work; the threat of violence and the bit that isn’t shown but is imagined by an audience, that is the most terrifying and therefore the most edifying part of a film. In the original, despite the title, only one person is cut up by a chainsaw and the only blood we see actually elicited by a chainsaw is upon Leatherface himself when he cuts his own leg. The genre is so massive now, so illustrious, with so many examples to draw from, one would think it might be something easier to get right. Sure, you are made to jump a few times by the unseen attack, coupled with an ear-splitting dollop of sound effects, but this, as we all seem to know, does not a horror film make.

Here we are served up a series of horror movie clichés and in horribly unimaginative fashion; the character arc of the lead makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, considering what you know of her by the end. The best bit is perhaps the montage of the 1974 original, concertinaed in to a few minutes at the outset. Dan Yeager then does his damnedest to reprise Gunnar Hansen’s brilliant, monsterful creation and the film attempts to turn the story on its head to wring a story out, but all of this is comprehensively sunk in the bloody mire they made of the script. Sense and logic left the building.

The soul, the art and the impact of the original is completely absent. Tobe Hooper needed to think very hard about just how he was going to get his opus past the censors. In many countries he failed in that endeavour; failed for 25 years in some cases. And isn’t that the greatest compliment; the mark of a true Horror Film? Something that has a genuine bite; that moves the genre forward and does so by using what it chooses to leave out. By conjuring up a sustained and escalating threat.

Blockbuster upon tent-pole blockbuster hitting our screens year upon year; CGI leaping forward as never before in its ability to depict the previously impossible with ever finer detail. A new reality. But, spinning breathless under the weight of all the technology now at our disposal, we have perhaps neglectfully left behind the art of filmmaking. ARajan

Director: Rene Clement

Cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Robert Ryan, Lea Massari, Aldo Ray, Tisa Farrow

135mins  Drama  French with subtitles

Based on the David Goodis novel “Black Friday”, this is a offbeat arthouse crime caper starring Jean-Louis Trintignant, who has recently triumphed again in Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012) some 40 years since he ‘trod the set’ so to speak of this unusual drama.  It also stars screen veterans Robert Ryan and Aldo Ray.

After an action-packed entree it morphs into a rather a slow-burning affair, lacking the very element that a crime drama needs: suspense.  However, the quality of the leads does make it a watchable experience despite a few potholes and the sublime photography remains in the memory after the credits have rolled.  Scored by a hypnotic soundtrack from Francis Lai, And Hope To Die has a lyrical quality that makes up for any shortcomings it has as a crime thriller. MT

NOW OUT ON DVD COURTESY OF STUDIOCANAL IN CELEBRATION OF THE CENTENARY OF RENE CLEMENT.

Director: Deepa Mehta      
Script: Salman Rushdie

Cast: Shabana Azmi, Anupam Kher, Ranvir Shorey, Vinay Pathak, Satya Bhabha, Shahana Goswami, Rajat Kapoor, Seema Biswas, Shriya Saran, Siddharth, Ronit Roy, Rahul Bose, Darsheel Safary, Kulbushan Kharbanda, Soha Ali Khan, Anita Majumdar, Zaib Shaikh, Anshikaa Shrivastava, Purav Bhandare, Samrat Chakrabarti, Rakhi Kumari, Dibyendu Bhattacharyya, Harish Khanna, Charles Dance

Canada/UK  137mins 2012 Drama

Spanning decades and generations, celebrated filmmaker Deepa Mehta’s highly anticipated adaptation of Midnight’s Children By Salman Rushdie.

Midnight’s Children follows the destinies of two children born at the stroke of midnight on August 15th, 1947, the very moment that India won its independence from Great Britain and a moment when children born on the cusp of this historic occasion are endowed with strange, magical abilities.

Rushdie is without doubt a quite brilliant writer: Satanic Verses; Haroun And The Sea Of Stories and this, winner not only of the Booker Prize, but the Booker of Bookers. At this juncture though, I would humbly submit that novel writing and screenplay writing are two very different skills and this film, running exceedingly long at well over two hours, falls down on not one but two crucial areas: the screenplay and the direction.

Ordinarily, a screenplay writer is suborned to adapt any given novel and for very good reason. Script writing is a mystical art, written to the beat of a different drum – that of a visual medium, not a literary one. So where one’s imagination can take flight when reading prose in a novel, something very different is required to pinpoint and then transpose what works into the visual feat that is film.

The novel is indeed a treat. Supremely imaginative, humorous, moving… the characters leap off the page. In comparison, the script is leaden and somewhere along the way managed to lose all of the humour that buoyed the novel so well.

Accordingly, the actors also never feel comfortable; a combination one suspects of the stilted dialogue which is at times painfully obvious and unnaturally over-descriptive. The direction seldom has the expanse of a film, nor any sense of authenticity. There’s simply not enough consideration made by the script for the ease with which a story can be told visually. The characters don’t live and breathe convincingly and so set-ups and reactions remain contrived.

Employing a scriptwriter also means that another approach is brought into the equation; one that is not married to either ideas or to sentiment, but can hopefully break a literary work dispassionately into its constituent parts and then begin the process of putting it all back together in a coherent visual fashion.

A tome so massive and spanning so much, not only in terms of chronology but also in terms of ideas, was always going to come unstuck when rammed into such a (comparatively) short running time. Imagine trying to do similar with ‘A Suitable Boy’.

Midnight’s Children might perhaps have really benefitted from being adapted into a TV series where the three generations, the full character arcs and the myriad plotlines could have been far better explored. It is interesting to note that this is Rushdie’s first foray into screenplay writing and his next venture Next People, is indeed a TV series.

On the plus side, there is a little of the ‘exotic’ beauty that one might hope for in a tale from the subcontinent: the colours, the cossies and the heat. But it certainly isn’t enough to rescue this ponderous and unconvincing adaptation from the DVD bargain bucket section of the supermarket in a few months time. An opportunity squandered then, but do, absolutely, read the book.
 AT

SHOWING AT CINEWORLD, CURZON, VUE, RITZY AND ODEON CINEMAS FROM 26TH DECEMBER 2013

Director: Bernard Rose

Cast: Danny Huston, Matthew Jacobs, Lisa Enos, Jo Farkas

84mins     US

‘Some roads aren’t meant to be travelled alone’

Nothing will prepare you for the outcome of this cracking thriller, an ingenious modern take on Tolstoy’s 1895 novella ‘Master and Man’.  Set in a wintry Colorado on the day after Christmas, it has plenty of themes to kick around in the snow: family breakdown, the global housing crash and the folly of social convention are but afew.  Director Bernard Rose sticks closely to the original work with the script, the dialogue being largely an improvised affair of natural banter from the leads who are in real life close buddies.

Essentially a two-hander, it stars Bernard Rose’s regular lead Danny Huston and newcomer Matthew Jacobs (who wrote the screenplay to Paper House), and completes the trilogy of his Tolstoy project along with The Kreuzer Sonata and Ivansxtc).

Huston gives a powerful performance as a debt-ridden property developer who sets out on a Boxing Day recky to make a killing in the holiday doldrums.  Matthew Jacobs is his klutzy hired chauffeur who is struggling with personal issues and the controls of his top of range Merc.

What starts as a road movie with comedy overtones soon becomes something surprisingly sinister.  These oddballs aren’t likeable or laudable but Rose makes them believable: Basil is a condescending workaholic neglectful of his wife and family, Nick is a reformed alcoholic who’s failed at driving and marriage, but who’s nobody’s fool in the long run. Their differing strengths and weaknesses are skillfully drawn and well played out in this shrewd and compelling adaptation. MT

BOXING DAY OPENS ON 21ST DECEMBER 2012 AT CURZON CINEMAS – CHECK OUR LISTINGS SECTION FOR EXACT TIMINGS.

Director:   Charles Crichton
Producer: E.V.H Emmett
Script:  Diana Morgan, E.V.H. Emmett, Alexander Mackendrick

Cast:Natasha Parry, Petual Clark, Diana Dors, Donald Houston, Bonar Colleano, Jane Hylton, Sydney Tafler

UK                   ****                 1950               80mins                       Drama

A post-war picture from the Ealing stables, this is a somewhat complicated film to judge without first considering the times in which this film was made. At the period of its release, critics judged it harshly, the resulting box office was poor and even the director didn’t think much of it.

Now, with a remastered DVD release of the film, a fresh appraisal is possible, bringing with it a clearer understanding of the politics and climate of the time. Very often films that are poorly received can be the victim more of circumstance than actually being substandard in themselves. We learn from the ‘Making Of’ extras on the DVD that when the film first came out, it was a very male dominated industry and indeed, time. This meant that the critics were all male, so a film centring on the lives of women was never going either to appeal, or be well received by them.

Secondly, Crichton, a very experienced director who shot Hue & Cry amongst others, had no enthusiasm to make it, but the studio made him. They weren’t about to let a woman direct a film, even though it was for the most part written by a woman, Diana Morgan. That other huge name of the time, Mackendrick was also inbetween projects, so was brought aboard to finesse but the original concept and driving force behind it was one of the studios top writers, Morgan.

So what we have now is quite a forward thinking, if not revolutionary piece; a post-war film which centres on what was important not to the men, not even to ‘society’, but to the working class women of the time; the tension between a life of married domesticity with its implicit respectability, against one of fun and desire centred around the glamour and excitement of the dance halls, so widespread in the 1940’s and 50’s.

If nothing else, Dance Hall is both a revealing and captivating document of the times, in terms of the social environment, but also dance, etiquette, dress, work and even home life. It opens on a noisy workshop filled wall-to-wall, row upon row with metal lathes, all of them operated by women. You might have to go all the way to India to find that now.

In summation, the film has dated, but dated well in these respects. Although too far ahead of its time, it is also melodramatic and it’s interesting to see how tastes have changed in the intervening time in terms of what was accepted as ‘good acting’. That’s not to say it is bad, it’s just very different and jars with today’s sensibilities. There are also some interesting turns by a great young cast, before they rose to fame: like Diana Dors and Petula Clark.

I would also wonder, despite the intervening 62 years, whether things have really changed that much. Young women after all are still at work whilst thinking only of the whistle at 5pm, when they can then clock-off, rush home, change into their glad-rags and go and shake their booty on a dancefloor. Then maybe, just maybe, have a drink at the bar with some young stallion, be he a player or a keeper…

As a drama of interest to me, I give it ***. As a document of the times *****. AT

DANCE HALL IS AT THE BFI, SOUTHBANK ON 16TH and 22nd DECEMBER 2012 OUT ON DVD FROM 21ST JANUARY 2013 COURTESY OF STUDIOCANAL. 

Quartet Conference Maggie Smith (MS), Dustin Hoffman (DH), Tom Courtenay (TC), Pauline Collins (PC), Billy Connolly (BC), Sheridan Smith (SS).

Tom and Dustin I want to talk to you about the origins of the movie because we are not just talking about Ronnie Harwood’s play but also about a documentary that I was fascinated to hear was one of the inspirations.

TC I have to keep reminding Dustin that this whole thing was my idea – it is not that he is resentful of me he is just forgetful. Seven or eight years ago, I asked Ronnie Harwood if he fancied the idea of making a screenplay of his play Quartet, I had seen it some years before I remembered how moving it was at the end. He was very excited and BBC Film commissioned a screenplay and nothing happened until Dustin came along.

DH I just wanted to back up what Tom and Albert Finney met Ron Harwood on The Dresser… that was how it started. The documentary- The Kiss… Do you mind if I take my coat off? I’m going through the menopause. [laughter] Just a few flashes. It’s a wonderful documentary and it’s called Tosca’s Kiss and er… Ronnie Harwood told me about it when I asked him what the genesis was and it was made in 1983 and Verdi, rich and successful, decided to build a mansion for himself and he stipulated that when he died, musicians and singers, because of course, he knew so many, playing at the Scala and many were, you know, poor… could stay there and you can find it, it’s called Tosca’s Kiss. And it’s about these retired opera singers living at a villa in Milan, which still exists.

And you gave this film to some of your cast to see first?

DH I told them all to see it and I think they all ignored me.

MS: Certainly not! It’s a very moving documentary and then this is terrific, ‘cos if Dustin is on this wavelength, then we should be safe.

Maggie Smith, first of all are you aware that there has been a sandwich named after you?

MS: Oh, God. Ham?! [Laughter] Where is this? In Venice.

Many sandwiches are named after famous actors and the vegetarian one is named ‘Maggie Smith’.

MS It’s a vegetarian one? Well, that’s kind of a relief, I suppose.

Haven’t you been resentful of the fact that you’ve been asked to play aging women all of the time? Even thirty-five years ago, California Suite comes to mind…

MS I’m just glad to get any role. The fact that they’re all Ninety is…. [laughter] It started because… it was Hook that started it.. I think it was Peggy Ashcroft couldn’t do it and somebody was asked ‘how old was I, and would I be able to do the part?’ and the person replied -92, Very quickly and so I’ve been stuck ever since, but I’m actually very grateful.

DH I’d like to throw in that… Maggie is being very modest here. But she has been offered quite a few younger parts turned down a film a month before, called My Week With Marilyn [laughter].

It’s a really charming film, but British and American sensibilities are very different and I wondered how the English actors working with an American director and how Dustin Hoffman found it working with our Grand British Thespians.?

PC- Dustin Hoffman is a dynamo and a darling and both of those things helped to make the atmosphere of this film. He’s one of the kindest and most inspiring directors that I’ve worked for, because he understand how actors work- because he is one. I found him really easy to…

we’ve heard stories that he gives directors a hard time. Is that true?

DH Yes. [laughter]

PC Well, maybe now he knows how it feels like. The culture thing… I would sometimes say to Dustin ‘ you don’t really know what we’re talking about, wouldn’t I?

DH Yes.

PC And he would say ‘tell, me tell me, tell me what I’m doing wrong’, so I loved the lack of hubris in the man. There was one thing he didn’t understand, I said ‘unlike Maggie, I’m always below stairs’, I explained to Dustin, when I tried to talk my way out of the part and he said after this, I wouldn’t be, thinking I was meaning below the title, which I have been many times, but I think we begin to understand each other a bit more now.

Billy `Connolly, because we haven’t heard from you..

BC I forget the question! [laughter]

What was he like as a director?

BC: A nightmare. [laughter] There were tantrums, long silences. Inappropriate touching. You know the kind of thing. It was excellent. I’ll tell you…

DH –In terms of the touching.. [laughter]

BC He’s an excellent toucher! The thing I like best about him. I don’t crave praise. I’ve had enough in my life to be getting along with, but it’s sometimes nice to be told you’re doing ok- and he’s very good at that.

PC Absolutely.

TC Can I do an impersonation when it was a good take? ‘ [American accent] Ah, Gorgeous- gorgeous fuckin’ take. That’s in the movie!’

BC -Nothing like me! Sheridan, we’ve not heard from you at all…. Your reactions to working with someone like Dustin Hoffman..?

SS Overwhelming. Just to be part of the film has been an absolute honour for me. I mean just to be on set with all of these amazing people, it was difficult not to curtsey every day… and I just was a sponge every day and tried to take it all in.

Why did you decide to take a chance as a director and what did you like the most about this story of opera artists?

DH Because a long time ago, I decided to direct and that was 40 years ago and sometimes it take s a long time to get around to doing something and that’s the truthful answer.

Billy Connolly, I was wondering whether you were looking forward to an old age, where you could say exactly what you wanted to say.

BC I’m there!

And also if you had said anything where you thought you were inappropriate.

BC I’ve been accused of being inappropriate from day one. And I think it’s one of the joys of getting older you can say exactly what you want to say as you please. There’s not much to add to that. I’ve pretty much said everything I’ve wanted to say all my life and it’s done me no harm at all. You know there’s something I really can’t stand, you know… it’s when somebody says ‘what do you think of so and so?’ and I say ‘oh, I think he’s an arsehole’ and they say ‘oh, come on, speak your mind’. You know, that shitty thing that people say. As if speaking your mind was actually something… weird… I think, if more people spoke their mind, we’d be in much better shape, so yeah, that kind of answers it, I think. I wasn’t just pretending to be old.

DH you know… we all know that these press conferences you take whatever’s said with a grain of salt, because whenever you ask an actor how they liked another actor- or the director and they just say- ‘…an asshole’. You don’t really hear that much. [beat] But it’s true! [laughter]

Sheridan, you’ve alluded to being thrown in the deep end here you said soaking these things up like a sponge. What did these people teach you on the set? What did you go away with?

DH Groping [laughter]

SS So much, the film is so special. All the cast is amazing retired opera singers and retired musicians and inbetween scenes they would come in and there’d be a great pianist and he’d just get on the piano… and the stories, there’ d be great stories that they told me… so I just had to pinch myself every day… it’s just been an incredible opportunity.

Dustin, you once said that filmmaking was some kind of magic. Did you feel the same way being a director? Getting everyone together, that it’s very special… do you feel that being a director?

DH well, this is the first time I’ve directed and I feel this again… we all felt it on this movie. Crew and cast. You’re never going to – no one in the middle of a movie says ‘this is going to be a great movie’, you know, Casablanca, they ended up with the B-list cast on that… so you know, you’re always in a tunnel, you know, you can’t see the end, but there’s something that took place on this movie where -once we had decided that we were going to use real people… real retired opera singers, real retired musicians- and some of these people- the phone hadn’t rung for them for 20-30-40 years- and they can deliver. The trumpet player Ronnie Hughes, he’s still got his chops still, today. But for some strange reason, the culture doesn’t call him, because he’s 83 years old and these people are in their 70’s and 80’s and 90’s and playing with such verve every day and we’d be doing these 10-12 hour days and they still could do it and that made it a really special occasion for us all to do; it wasn’t a Job for the crew after a couple of days, [the shoot had] another tone.

Can I ask Tom Courtenay, having been with the project- the film- for so long, how did it turn out? Did it come out the way you imagined it, all those years ago, having wanted to play Reggie for so long?

TC No well, it moved on, after so long… I mean Dustin asked [writer] Ronnie if he could make some changes and one of them, in the play, they had fallen out because Reggie was impotent and Dustin didn’t like that so he changed it, so… a big change for me and it was fun being the juvenile lead, actually [laughter] I never ever had so much make-up and Dustin was most particular [indicating his neck] ‘this line under here, cover with a scarf’. And I would check our Billy every morning to make sure that he had no… he couldn’t have the shading [under the chin] Dustin was determined that I look as handsome as possible and I am very grateful to him. Thank you very much Dustin. [laughter]

DH He is.

PC Handsome, or grateful?

DH Both! [laughter]

Earlier this year a film about ageing won the Cannes film festival. Recently we’ve had The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel with Dame Maggie being successful and now this. I wonder is there a new genre of films of older people’s experiences and Should there be many more films about this sort of subject matter?

MS I think -playing the usual age- I think it’s because a lot of grown ups would like films for grown ups and about grown ups. It seems to me there s a sort of change into what audiences want to see I can only hope that’s correct because there’s alot of people of my age around now. we kind of outnumber the others, so that’s why. I don’t think film s about elderly people have been made very much. I mean there have been I can think of Driving Miss Daisy and Cocoon and but they always seem to be very successful, so it’s a bit baffling as to why everybody has to be treated as if they were five years old. Was there much ad-libbing when it came to jokes and was there much corpsing during the takes?

MS yes..

PC there’s lots of ‘impro’ on the dialogue. Which I absolutely love and Dustin gives us free rein on that and I think it’s… I’ve learned so much on this because I came to film very late- not ‘til I was fifty. I’ve learned so much from this man and that what you start with this script and not every writer will want to hear this, but a script is a basis… it’s not the end and sometimes things will happen during the process which take you down a more exciting avenue and he always let us do that. I mean… didn’t he? Guys? [short silence] Nobody agrees with me… Billy- was it freewheeling, to some extent?

BC Yeah, it was openly encouraged and it was a very good idea. TC there was one time though, while we were waiting to go on and um.. Billy did it awfully well, but in his own words and Dustin would come round and say ‘Too lonnngggg Billy, Tooo lonnngggg.’ [laughter]

BC They took one of my best ad libs out. We were… talkin’ to the editor there and…

DH Let me just set it up for you Billy then you can say it. He’s upset. Reggie’s upset because they are doing his rap thing with the kids Jean is there watching he leaves and of course Wilf goes out and finds him out in the wilderness cos he knows he’s going to be put there. And Reggie is just standing there and in the script it just says that a young deer -a doe- is there and he’s looking at it, but we are a low budget movie and it didn’t look right, so we scrubbed it… but when we filmed it and it was there, Wilf comes up to Reggie and says-

BC Do you think it knows it’s delicious? [laughter]

DH It’s a good line! Dustin you had a quote a Billy Wilder quote that kind of fired you up… an inspirational quote… DH Yes, there were a few things that went into it you know, doing something -you are trying to be your audience at the same time. When you hear that it’s about retired opera singers ‘oh, maybe I’ll wait for it to come to DVD or something’ you’re not rushing off to see it. And I knew that we had a location and that was to keep an energy in it. In fact, I asked alot of the cast to look at His Girl Friday, a Howard Hawks film… Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, they talk over each other and there’s great energy and I wanted t have energy here. So, Billy Wilder… Volker Schlondorff got Wilder to agree to these kinds of conversations and he said to Billy Wilder, ‘what’s on your mind?’ And… I’m a fan of Billy Wilder and he said ‘if you’re going to try to tell the truth to the audience, you’d better be funny, or they’ll kill you.’ And I haven’t forgotten that.

Dustin, despite the films you’ve been in over the years,., this film feels very British.. .since it’s based on a British play and a British cast. Is that intentional?

DH well, no it… well, I had to. You know. I just finished a film called Last Chance Harvey, a few years ago and I became friends with (cinematographer) John… John de borman, is it?… De Gorman (oh, it starts!) [laughter] it’s amazing isn’t it? You gotta love getting old, don’t you? It just jumbles up the world in the most amazing way. And after the film, we would talk about shots and he would say ‘you should direct!’ Finola Dwyer the producer of a film he’d just done, called An Education had just sent him a script and they had a director- the director fell out- and he asked me to read it and I read it and I jumped in. Sometimes it just… you know… it turns out that way. .

Where was this film shot?

DH In Germany. [laughter] Just kidding. Was it Buckinghamshire?

TC Yes, it was.

DH …Buckinghamshire… it took an hour to get there every day. And Maggie, because she’s such a diva, made sure she lived in a house no more than ten minutes away [laughter]. MS I’m just trying to remember where I did stay….

Notoriously, people often have to turn up and do their stuff pretty immediately, often without knowing really whom they are working with. Was there any rehearsal time. Did you get a chance to bond on this movie before you actually started shooting?

DH Let me say, right at the beginning, I came on board this movie right after a director left and Tom Courtenay had talks with Ron Harwood about making the movie and Tom and Albert Finney had been friends since the start of their careers and had a 40-odd year friendship with each other and with Mr Harwood. So when I came on it Albert, Tom and Maggie were in the cast. And then Albert wasn’t up for it and had to withdraw. The stars, the only ones I cast, were Billy and Pauline and…

PC Thankyou!

DH …I was in Los Angeles working and alot of this took place on the telephone. I had met Maggie just once. I had come backstage, which I am usually loathe to do, as actors just want to get home, but after I saw Three Tall Women…

MS In which I was 93… [laughter] DH Yes! And I thought it was a great character job because usually she’s 28, and er… so we talked on the phone and introduced ourselves to each other… and because we should ask good actors whom they think is right for the part I said to her well, who do you think and Maggie immediately said Pauline Collins. Now I didn’t know Pauline Collins but I saw Shirley Valentine and then another film… what was it..? A Woody Allen film…

PC You’ll See A Tall Dark Stranger.

DH No…

PC You Will MEET A Tall Dark Stranger.

DH No, it wasn’t that.

PC Yes it was!

DH ok. Is that where you played a psychic?

PH Yes…! Oh, it was? Ok…. She was wonderful as the psychic in that, you must see her performance. So I said to her on the phone, ‘the dialogue in that seemed improvised’. She said ‘it was. Every word of it.’ I said ‘with Woody Allen?!’ She said ‘yes…he said- say whatever you want’.

PC He did…

DH and so that’s how I came into it… I ‘lucked out’, as they say in America. Does that answer the question? I forget the question too… I just have to tell you that we all loathe these press junkets and yet, when we get here, we LOVE them. We want it to go on all day. Except -and I haven’t asked all of them, but the first or second thing we realised when we sat down is ‘why the fuck wasn’t it a full house?! [laughter]

PC It’s a good house. Mr Hoffman, how did you find it moving from acting to directing and what did you draw on from working with other directors previously?

DH you know well, 45 odd years of doing it. So all of us we pile up the things we like about directors doing it, and the things we Don’t like about directors and sometimes we are very similar. And one thing you have to be aware of when you come on set and you see a director standing there and mouthing all the words while the scene is going on, it’s usually a Very Bad Sign… because it means the director has already shot the scene in his head, he knows exactly the rhythm and the nuances that he wants delivered in the line and usually those people don’t even like actors and they cant wait ‘til they get in the cutting room and they- directors- kind of break down into categories. Directors usually either like to be surprised, or some directors abhor to be surprised and actors learn that very early on. And as actors we all direct as we act, every one of us. You know, and we are like convicts you know, all talkin’ out of the side of our mouths, you know, to each other, saying ‘look out, here comes the screw’ And we’re like that during takes, actors, ‘what do you think- The director wanted me to do it really loud, but I think…’ ‘well don’t do it…’ ‘sshh!! Here comes the screw!’ [laughter] That’s what we do. And, you know why? You have to protect yourself. Everyone with half a brain who does movies year after year after year, learn they have to protect themselves because it’s a bastard art-form for us. We’re not allowed in the cutting room. That’s extraordinary. So, when the director is asking for certain colours, certain nuances and we feel that they’re phoney, but we do it because the director asks for it, that’s the one they pick in the cutting room I contend that when you se a movie with bad acting, don’t blame the actor. Blame those guys that sit in the cutting room, because they choose the take. On behalf of everyone here present thank you very much for being here with us and congratulations for a magnificent piece of work I guess my question is on behalf of all the young performers who have been inspired by the collection of your luminous works, is there any one particular piece of advice that you would offer them? Sheridan?

SS There was one moment I remember on set and I was so nervous and Dustin took me to one side and said the clothes are the character, but all you need to do is think about how amazing these actors are around you and that was really good advice for my character, thinking of them all as amazing opera singers, so that was really useful advice. Billy Connolly…

BC I’ve no idea. Get on with it. Learn your words and avoid the furniture. Tom…

TC Get Dustin to direct it… and this was Dustin’s key bit of advice he used to say ‘Do nothing, do nothing. In a movie, like this (frames his face with his hands) nothing is something…’ Maggie Smith…

MS try not to cry too much. [laughter] because it can be pretty heart-breaking. Pretty hard. Pauline Collins…

PC I have a couple of member of the family- young people who are in the profession and my advice to them always, whenever I see them, is wear more blusher. And it works. Thank you very much for attending and thank you very much, our guests. [Applause]

THIS WAS RECORDED DURING THE PRESS CONFERENCE FOR QUARTET (2012) ATH THE 56TH LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2012

Director/Writer Lisa Langseth
Producer: Helen Ahlsson
Cast: Alicia Vikander, Samuel Froler, Isabella Alveborg, Josephine Bauer, Doris Funcke, Ylva Gallon, Elisabeth Goransson, Kim Lantz

Sweden  97mins 2009 Drama

On the strength of a short film Godkand, Langseth got to make this, her first feature film Pure, which has already garnered some success in Scandinavia. Not to be confused with the 2009 climbing video Pure, the Finnish 2002 Pure (Koukusa), or Gilles McKinnon’s 2004 Pure, or indeed the titles of the same name from 2004 and 2005.

Langseth’s mines a similar vein to Andrea Arnold’s early work: Katarina, a working class girl with very little in terms of prospects, via Mozart, realises that there may be something more to life, if she can but loose those ties that bind.

Katarina is a troubled 20-year-old, already brushing society up the wrong way and having great difficulty finding some peace and a decent way to make a living; with mistakes she’s made in her past refusing to leave her alone. Her mother is more a hindrance than a help but she does at least have the love of a good man.

Playing the troubled young Katarina, is a spirited, engaging and very likeable Alicia Vikander, who certainly has her moments, aided and abetted by a fine supporting cast, who are excellent throughout. However, the storyline in summation feels insubstantial, a little over simplistic and the resolution, although thoroughly earned by the plot, still stretches believability in any real terms.

The opportunity has done no harm at all for Vikander who, as well as doing another film with Langseth, has also landed a Hollywood role with Julianne Moore and I do hope she can go from strength to strength. It will be very interesting to see Langseth’s next outing titled Hotell and see if she can make the step up from this promising, if somewhat light debut. AT

Director/Writer: Peter Von Bagh (2008)

74mins       Documentary Black/White with Subtitles

From a startling opening sequence of an ice-breaker entering the harbour to the sobering final moments of Wartime occupation, Peter Von Bagh, director of the famous Midnight Sun Film Festival, reveals a hundred years of Helsinki in this paean to his birthplace.

Darting backwards and forwards in time and place from 1907 with a modest population of 40,000, he shows us how the capital grew into a vibrant and exciting centre offering up its pleasures gladly and never taking itself too seriously, leaving you wanting more.  The abundant and endless creativity of its painters, architects, cinema directors (Ari Kaurismaki, Tapio Suominen) and musicians who built and shaped the city, some of whom are little known abroad, are showcased here via a montage of archive footage, photographs and paintings. Von Bagh and two female voices narrate to a light-hearted soundtrack featuring Finnish composer Henrik Otto Donner. A fascinating documentary that’s not to be missed at the Nordic Film Festival 2012. MT

Director; Colin Peter Netzer   Writer: Tudor Voican
Victor Rebengiuc, Camelia Zorlescu, Radu Beligan, Mircea Andreescu, Ion Lucian
103mins  Black Comedy Romanian with Subtitles

[youtube id=”NDw6CkmjCjg” width=”600″ height=”350″]

With Remembrance Day still fresh in the memory, Medal of Honour seems a good film choice for the Romanian Film Festival in London which opens on the 22nd November 2012.

Medal of Honour gives a valuable insight into Romania’s cultural heritage under Fascism and its post-Communist transition, it also showcases a subtlely nuanced turn from one of Romanian’s best known actors Victor Rebengiuc. Set in the wake of Ceausescu’s epic fall from grace after a repressive regime, Medal of Honour doesn’t take itself too seriously and Tudor Voican’s witty script makes it a comic success and an entertaining piece of cinema.

The story centres on Ion (Victor Rebengiuc) an ageing WW2 veteran living quietly with his wife Ninotchka, (a saturnine Camelia Zorlescu) in an apartment block somewhere near Bucharest.  The heating is dodgy and the plumbing would work better if Ion didn’t store his secret stash of liquor in the cistern.  So deprivation and frugality are the order of the day in this arthouse drama that benefits from Liviu Markghidan’s pristine visual treatment.  I

Ion still uses his army knife for cooking, and, given the chance, would use it to do away with his grumpy wife, who doesn’t seem to understand his need for intimacy. Romanians of this generation have known bad times and hardship is very much hard-wired into the psyche and treated with philosophical good humour and dogged determination and this is reflected in well-crafted characterisation and a strong support cast.

The unexpected arrival of a letter informing Ion that he is to be honoured with a gold medal for his wartime services is the trigger that sets him off on a nostalgia trip back to his glory days and feeling chipper he to sets off to share his wartime tales in the light of his newfound status but also trying to work out what he really did to earn the medal fifty years previously: was it defending the Germans or turning against them?

The Bureaucracy of Communism is still a thorn in the side of Romanians and runs like steel wire through their cinema up to the present day in features such as Aurora and the highly-acclaimed 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, long after the Iron Curtain has fallen.  Its presence is felt along with a sense of the absurd depicted here in comic scenes with the postmistress at the Ministry of Defence. But Medal of Honour isn’t just about a veteran and a gold Medal, it’s a portrait of family values and friendship that shines brightly through the murkiness of a tumultuous past. MT

Director: Radu Jude
Script: Radu Jude, Corina Sabau
Producer: Ada Solomon
Cast: Serban Pavlu, Sophia Nicolaescu, Gabriel Spahiu, Mihaela Sirbu, Tamara Buciuceanu-Botez, Stela Popescu, Alexandru Arsinel

Romania/Netherlands  107mins Black Comedy

This is the third feature film from Director/Writer Radu Jude, in this instance a film depicting the life of Marius, a dentist very much looking forward to spending time with his five year old daughter, having separated from his spouse and retaining only infrequent visiting rights.

Director Jude has tried to do a difficult thing here, marrying broad farce with some of the darker elements of familial dysfunction and, finally, it’s here that the film fails to hang together as a cohesive whole, although some aspects of both elements work very well; Serban is a fine actor, well cast for the role of the desperate Marius, but what really makes this film at all is the believability of the young Sofia, played sublimely by Sophia Nicolaescu.

The characters throughout are well depicted. We can see that each of them has a strong reason for the stance that they take as the story unfolds and all the actors are good, but what they are asked to do in terms of the tone of the piece proves to be the impossibility. The plausibility of their reactions to the escalating situation is stretched way beyond breaking point and we are left unconvinced, having first been sold a straight drama. And, because of this, the humour therefore doesn’t work either.

It didn’t help either when at one point in the rather cramped surroundings of the flat, the boom also dropped into shot. A noble failure then, albeit with much mitigating content and I wouldn’t preclude going to see Jude’s next outing. There’s definitely talent there. AT

Director: Pierre-Henry Salfati

Writer: Marianne Salfati

Featuring: Jane Birkin, Emilie de Preissac, Clement van den Bergh, Serge Gainsbourg

94mins    French with subtitles

Watching the opening sequence to this paean to a pop/rock god, it’s difficult to imagine what Jane Birkin, Juliette Greco and Brigitte Bardot saw in Serge Gainsbourg.  Circling the stage he presents as a raddled figure puffing on a cigarette as he mumbles the words to Javanaise Melody in his trademark gravelly voice, which accompanies the soundtrack of this latest biopic along with archive footage, anecdotes and musical recordings made during his lifetime until his death in 1991 at the age of 62.

But tracking back to 1968 and to ‘Je T’Aime, Moi Non Plus’, a hit that lasted as long in the charts and in the public memory as the orgasmic effect he evidently had on these sixties sex sirens, there must have been a potent quality to his unique brand of showmanship and romance.  But how do you capture this on film?  He was certainly a charismatic entertainer back then and a treasured public figure for French audiences and one whose charms were felt more keenly in France than on this side of the Channel, ardent fans apart. After Joann Sfar’s feisty 2010 feisty effort which conveyed that SGB had rather ran out of steam by the end of the sixties, did this latest offering get under the skin of a man who was both enigmatic and outrageous in equal measure?.

To a large degree, yes. Although in the smoke-filled haze of Gainsbourg’s career, it offers little in the way of biographical detail or straight narrative but what it does do is to capture the essence of this impenetrable singer who was both repulsive and compulsive and felt, in his own words, a constant struggle between the ‘man and the showman’ with the showman seemingly coming out on top.  And it’s strangely in the unsettled showman side of Gainsbourg that his unique talent seemed to reside. And so, Salfati somehow exposes this introspective man in a fascinating and moving way, offering insight and an entertaining watch for fans and general audiences alike. MT

GAINSBOURG BY GAINSBOURG: AN INTIMATE PORTRAIT IS SCREENING AS PART OF THE UK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL 2012 CURRENTLY IN ITS FINAL WEEK IN LONDON UK

Martin is desperate to move on with his death in this low-budget Britflic set in a grim Strathclyde.

Director: Zam Salim

Cast: Burn Gorman, Warren Brown, Kate O’Flynn, Jo Hartley, Iain De Caestecker

80mins **   UK

Adaptations from short films often lack the ballast to make satisfying features and this is very much the case with Up There.  Suitably set in a grim Strathclyde, it’s a morbidly downbeat affair in the same tone as The Office and well-cast with ashen-faced Burn Gorman as Martin, a likeable guy who’s discovered that being dead is not all it’s cracked up to be in the movies.

Having died in a car crash, he’s stuck in the afterlife waiting room trying to move on ‘up there’ and it’s not just a case of floating through walls or up stairwells.  To make things worse, he’s dogged by unsympathetic characters and a storyline that hasn’t the will to live either.  Although Up There gradually outstays its welcome it’s well-served by Salim’s quaintly amusing script and a great performance from Gorman who’s spot on and believable.  He has also appeared in The Hour on BBC2 and is a talent well worth watching. MT

Dir: Ken Russell | Cast:  Oliver Reed, Vanessa Redgrave, Dudley Sutton, Max Adrian, Gemma Jones, Murray Melvin, John Woodvine, Georgina Hale | 107min  UK/US       Drama

‘The Devils’ is based upon factual happenings in the plague-ridden French walled-city of Loudun, in 1634. Established heavily upon two main sources, John Whiting’s playThe Devils and Aldous Huxley, who exacted a huge amount of research for his book on the subject entitled The Devils Of Loudun. In it, Huxley describes the scenario as redolent of a ‘rape in a public lavatory’ and Russell very much took this as inspiration for his film design, as did the debutant film-score composer, Peter Maxwell Davies.

A happy chance meeting on a train between a friend and colleague of Russell’s and a young designer and artist called Derek Jarman, gave Jarman his first experience of set design and the film a quite brilliant set. Jarman later stated that his experiences with Russell were instrumental in shifting him across to being a filmmaker himself.

The amazing set was built on the backlot at Pinewood. Russell said of the design, ‘To anyone living in Loudun at the time, theirs would have felt to be a new city, a contemporary one and one of which they were proud. I didn’t want to film in an old, lichen and ivy covered relic that looked ancient. I wanted new. And I wanted it to look like the toilet described by Huxley’.

Russell, who wanted to make an unashamedly political film about religion and the state, was by this time no stranger to controversy with his 1969 Oscar winning Women In Love. Upon completing The Devils and knowing it was at best borderline, Russell showed it to a censor. Scenes were then cut to save the film from an all-out ban and to this day, these scenes remain cut. In the US, the film has only been seen in a select few festivals, despite being backed by Warners at the time of original release.

Many of the cast were at the height of their powers here and for me, this is perhaps Oliver Reed’s finest hour. As Russell said, the camera loves him. They had a discussion prior to filming, where they resolved that Reed had three possible levels of playing emotion. Prior to a take, Reed would call over ‘which level here, Ken?’ and Russell would say ‘2!’ (Or whichever he felt he needed). Originally it even contained a cameo from long-time Russell fan Spike Milligan, but his scene was reshot subsequently with Dudley Sutton. The film also provided a graceful cameo for Murray Melvin whose delicate features and luminous presence would keep him in work, albeit often in minor roles, for the remainder of his career until 2023. After his role her as Mignon he went on to collaborate with Ken Russel in The Boyfriend, Lisztomania, and star in big screen hits Barry Lyndon, The Krays and various TV outings, including the very first episode of The Avengers, winning a Best Actor Award at Cannes in 1962 for Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey

All the actors were aware that they were filming something remarkable, even at the time of shooting and there is something about brilliant films, however they are received at the time of their release, they remain evergreen; truth remains the truth and they therefore retain an extraordinary power that can span generations of filmgoers. It would seem politics has changed little since 1634, let alone 1971, or in 2023, for that matter. AT

MURRAY MELVIN | 1932-2023 

FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL UK 2012  2nd November – 2nd December 2012

The French Film Festival UK is a round Britain feast of the latest French and francophone film that’s now into its 20th Year.  You’ll find it in London at the CIne-Lumiere, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, Inverness, Aberdeen, Bristol and Kirkaldy.  The programme includes Canadian flics, Starbuck and Laurence Anyways. Bestiaire, an unusual documentary examining our relationship with the animal kingdom: Belgian director Joachim Lafosse’s Our Children starring Tahar Rahim and Emilie Duquenne; romcom Paris-Manhattan which is Sophie Lellouche’s directing debut and stars Alice Taglioni. It also gives you a chance to see special previews of films that will shortly be on general release in the UK such Headwinds, a family drama with Audrey Tatou and Benoit Magimel, You Will Be My Son, a glossy drama about the future of a St-Emilion vineyard, and Colonial dramas in the shape of Matthieu Kassovitz’s action-packed hard-hitter Rebellion and Almayer’s Folly, Belgian director Chantal Akerman’s dark and beguiling adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novel set in the Far East. MT.

Dir/Wri: Chantal Akerman | Cast: Stanislas Merhar, Marc Barbé, Aurora Marion, Zac Andrianasolo, Sakhna Oum | Drama, 127mins

An Asian crooner is murdered in a dodgy Cambodian nightclub in the opening sequence to this Far-Eastern tale loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s eponymous novel. A strange and sultry girl then takes centre stage to sing a solo slightly off-key. And that’s only the start of this hauntingly beguiling South Sea tale of intrigue centred on a merchant sailor (Stanislas Merher) and his fatherly ambition for his mixed-race daughter (Aurora Marion).

ALMAYER’S FOLLY is a fractured saga that winds its way backwards and forwards to a dark continent thousands of miles away in the psyche. Lulled by the birds, insects and echoes of an exotic soundtrack, stimulating and dreamlike but firmly rooted in a Colonial setting, its sumptuous visuals enchanting and hypnotising. Mesmerising performances from father and daughter really conjure up what Conrad originally had in mind when he wrote the story. Akerman has brought it all to life languidly and seductively in a fabulous slow-burner that sometimes lingers but always entrances like a languorous fevered dream. MT